It wouldn't be a shock to anyone if I said that MLM companies have earned a less-than perfect reputation. It's more than simple to find all sorts of stories from people who have joined a company with the promises of making tons of money while working from home and getting to spend much more time with their family.

It wouldn’t be a shock to anyone if I said that MLM companies have earned a less-than perfect reputation. It’s more than simple to find all sorts of stories from people who have joined a company with the promises of making tons of money while working from home and getting to spend much more time with their family. – And those stories typically end with this: Their “business” crashed head first into the ground. They’ll shout to the heavens about the flawed system or the “scam” of MLM companies, saying all they’re full of is empty promises and false hope. They’ll tell you how they were shown all of these incredibly wealthy and successful people who made all sorts of money with their own business, and then speak of how their business couldn’t even get off the ground.

One question we must ask ourselves is this: Has network marketing and MLM fairly earned this reputation? Is it really the business of the scam artists, all who are eagerly waiting for anyone who will come in and join them, only to fail? No, and it’s irrational to think so. There is no argument in that the vast majority of people who start up their own home business quit at astoundingly common rates, but this doesn’t have to be the case. This statistic says nothing of the failures and downfalls of the MLM system, it merely reveals that almost everyone who starts up their own home business is not ready and capable to do so.

Why don’t we dig a little deeper, and apply some logic to the situation to see what is really going on? To do so, I’m first going to ask a question: If I took at random forty people who worked at average, normal day jobs and put them in charge of any kind of business that was their responsibility to run, do you think that business would immediately flourish? Of course not. The problem is they have what I like to call the “Follow the instructions” mindset, and most people have it. It has its own strengths – it creates very effective problem solvers, people who are able to, once given a direction or set end goal, find the most efficient way to achieve those ends. What it takes to start a business from the ground up, however, is an Entreprenuerial mindset, which is something completely different. In normal circumstance, people without an Entreprenuerial mindset don’t tend to actually start their own businesses – it requires far too much risk and capital to do so. What we see is the people who don’t immediately have what it takes are in a sense “weeded out,” whereas MLM is open to anyone at the cost of literally almost no capital whatsoever. We therefore see, in MLM, an increased amount of people trying to run a business who would not ordinarily have thought themselves capable.

Obviously, it isn’t terribly common for these people to excel at a completely different form of career. These people don’t tend to suddenly attain a pioneering mindset and just jump out of the gate forming a rapidly growing business. MLM requires a completely different mindset altogether, plain and simple. A person must be able to, when put in a situation where they have no specific goal or direction, derive their own goals and directions, and then go about solving the problem of how to follow through with them. The “follow the instruction” mindset is still important. When given a stretch of road to pave, they can figure out the best way to pave it, the right materials to use, the best path for it to take, and the most efficient way to go about the job. - An entrepreneur’s mindset enables a person to look at a plot of land and say “We need a road going through here.” You have no idea how many people I’ve seen who were bursting with excitement over their home business, willing to put forth whatever effort necessary, but because there was no one there to tell them where to start and how to get going, they actually ended up with very little work put into their businesses. A fault of MLM? No. - Simply an unfortunate case of the wrong mindset.

We’ve pointed out two vastly different mindsets and explained what each is best at. But what if you are one of those people used to working a 9 to 5, and very much part of the “Follow the Instructions” crowd? Is this an indication that you will fail miserably in MLM and network marketing? No! I’ve used the words “paradigm shift” and “mindset” for a reason. No one is born into this world with the knowledge of how to build a successful business, they very much have to learn it for themselves, condition their own mind to think that way. Fortunately, anyone can change their way of thinking. It’s a willingness and an ongoing effort to look at things differently. The most important thing though is that you have to do it yourself. It can be quite difficult, as it’s not something we humans are accustom or used to doing. We like the safety and comfort of what we’re used to, and we don’t accept change easily. It takes complete dedication and perseverance, but sticking with it will not only broaden your scope of things, but make you a much more successful business person.

Let’s talk about this mindset. I mentioned before persistence, and persistence is a key theme in the entrepreneurial mindset. It’s something that comes naturally to some people, and others struggle with it – but do you want to know the simplest way to build persistence? Faith. Belief. Let me give you an example: Picture yourself on one end of a football field, and covering that field are thousands of upside-down paper cups. It’s your job to overturn each cup, one by one, until you find the 2,000 dollars cash that’s under one of them. You go about your task, turning each cup over and looking under it. If the money was a long way away from you, you’d have a long way to go and a lot of cups to overturn. Now, what do each of those cups represent to you? When you turn one over to find it empty, do you consider it a failure? No. You consider it progress. Each empty cup is you overturn is one cup behind you and puts you one cup closer to the prize. When you’ve overturned 200 cups, you don’t spend your time lamenting over 200 wasted cups, 200 wasted opportunities – you’re building yourself up, because you are 200 cups closer than where you started. Why? Because you have faith that the money is out there – there’s not a question in your mind. You believe. This is a principle of entrepreneurialism I like to call it Progression. It’s the mindset of recognizing progress based on faith. When I got started marketing, it was my job to call hundreds of people at a time to market a product to them. As you can imagine, 99% of them turned me down. I may have gone fifty or a hundred calls without a sale. I was telling this to my grandmother, and she looked at me and said, “That’s disappointing, isn’t it?” I looked right back and said “Gosh no. I know that one person is out there, so this means I’m one hundred calls closer to them.” When you start your own business, things are going to happen slowly, and you’re going to have to be able to recognize the difference between failure and progression. Believe it or not, they appear to be very similar.

We’ve established that the driving force behind the Progression principle is faith. If I told you that there may or may not be money in one of those cups, turning over two thousand of them would probably be a little less exciting. Now, faith always comes from somewhere, so where is it that we derive our faith that we need to derive persistence and have a more constructive attitude for our business? The answer is education. Being informed. Starting and running a business requires that you make a lot of very crucial choices, and making the right choices for your business requires that you are informed and know what you’re doing. For MLM, make sure you’re educated on the company you want to work for. You need to know everything you can, because you’ve got to find the best opportunity you can. With a company that offers a good opportunity, not only will your business grow much faster, but you’ll believe in them more and have a higher level of faith in the company itself, helping you to maintain a positive, constructive attitude. Make sure you end up under a company you have a lot of trust and confidence in.

Now, lastly, there is something you need to avoid like the plague. This something is what I like to call the “Vacuum of Normalcy,” and it can severely limit how much you can do for your business. What is this concept? It’s a way of thinking that can also be referred to as “not thinking outside of the box.” It’s a self-handicapping attitude by which people ignore new ideas and concepts because they are new, strange, or unlike anything else they have ever seen. People will pass up wonderful opportunities simply because they are too comfortable doing things based on a safe, practiced pattern. Whenever something new comes up, you always have people who will get caught in the vacuum and let it pass them by. Think about the internet. When it first came into common use, it presented an unparalleled opportunity of growth, but most people failed to capitalize on it because it was unlike anything they were used to. Ever heard of Ebay? Someone, somewhere looked at the internet and wondered if they could apply it to auctioning, and I think it’s done fairly well. There are two reasons I use the word “vacuum” when I refer to this principle. First off, it creates a stale, stagnant environment in which new ideas aren’t allowed to grow and blossom. Secondly, it can be an overpowering mindset that is easy to get sucked in to, and it can be a very difficult thing to escape.

MLM is a truly wonderful thing, and it’s open to everyone who is willing and able to benefit from it. The problem is that people tend to overlook the part where you have to be able. Make no mistake – MLM is no free ride. It takes work, peristance, and dedication, and you have to be willing to change the way you look at things. But if you can, what awaits you is complete success. At least, I don’t know what else you call making a ton of money from your own home.