Two Years of My Life – Part 10: Drilling the mindset

How did I even stay in this place for two years?

Maybe some things that Director Rath taught to us might make more sense to you.

• “Remember that MLM is a way of life. You must live, and breathe MLM, in order to succeed in it. You must not let any opposition or criticism get in your way. There will definitely be people who are negative about it. George Bush won the presidential election with 51% of the vote (note: he did not, but this was used more as an anecdote than scientific evidence). This means that 49% of the people are against him. If you want to succeed in MLM, you have to be prepared to have 49% of the people against you.”
• “The mindset is the most important thing for you to succeed. Without the why, even if you have the how, you won’t be able to succeed. Like what T. Harv Eker says, without the toolbox, there is no use even if you have the tools.”
• “As long as you listen fully, and execute what the system states perfectly, you will succeed in this business. It doesn’t take intelligence. It takes conformity. That is why it is so much easier to succeed in this rather than a business somewhere else.”

Welcome to the mindset of multi-level marketing.

• You didn’t need to think in this business – in fact, MLMs would probably be the most realistic experiment of penalizing people who think. In a system where conformity is the norm and breaking away is a devilish act, people think they’re succeeding when they’re actually stagnating.
• You lie. A lot. And the worst part is, you start justifying to yourself. I know for myself I started to think like this:

I was part of a very special movement, a movement where everybody was working feverishly towards their goal; there was no one else who was willing to sacrifice all their leisure time to succeed. Yet, MLM is a much-maligned system that I was out to defend. I was like a warrior. And if a warrior has to lie about his “business” when it actually means MLM, so be it. And when I lie, I tell myself that I’m not really lying, but just phrasing things “in a different way”.

Reflecting on all this makes me feel thoroughly guilty about myself. I was part of a group of people who were working towards a goal – to make the person on top of the pyramid rich, but pretending that we were getting closer, every day, to becoming a millionaire.

Two Years of My Life – Part 9: The basics and the twists

The two weeks that passed from the moment I decided to join and the moment I was officially IN MLM are intensely private moments. In short, I raised a five-figure sum in Singaporean dollars, and became officially accepted in the hierarchy.

My rank – the Colleague rank – was just below the Manager, who was below the Director. Here was how the system worked:

You’ve raised a five-figure sum to become a Colleague. This may be the best choice you’ve ever made in your life. Now, what you have to do is to promote this business to people. Remember, you’re not trying to peddle products, you are looking for business partners. People willing to share in your vision for financial freedom.

Once you’ve got 5 business partners all registered as Colleagues under you, you will gain a 15% commission from them for joining, and you’ll be able to challenge for Managership.

If your network manages to grow by 10 Colleagues’ worth of initial investment, congratulations, you are now a Manager!

We will follow the 1-2-3 system – the first month, you look to get just one business partner. Once you have a Colleague in your network, you’ll have the confidence to have 2 more people under you. Then, you can build on that to have 3 more Colleagues in your subsequent month. Within 3 months, we expect you to challenge.

Remember, this is not a get-rich-quick scheme. We don’t expect you to make money within the first month. You need to put in effort if you want to succeed.

I think I understood all of that. I was eagerly anticipating my next move. I’d done up the name list of all the contacts that I had – which meant literally everybody that I knew, from girls I used to have crushes on, business partners, and aunts I only met once a year.

I’d even done up the work plan – who I planned to contact this month, and who I expected would join the business along with me. I was ready. Or, I thought I was.

The twist

My upline, Bee pulled me aside one day after meeting Director Rath.

“Do you want to succeed in this business?” I would soon realize that this is one of the questions used ad nauseam in MLM. Obviously, I said yes.

He asked me to drop all the commitments I had up till then, except the MLM.

“If you really want to succeed,” he said, “You need to be focused.” Right now, he said, I had way too many things on my plate to make it. The schedule currently read like this:

Mon	Tues	Wed	Thurs	Fri	Sat	Sun
7.30am-5.30pm: Work	7.30am-5.30pm: Work	7.30am-5.30pm: Work	7.30am-5.30pm: Work	7.30am-5.30pm: Work	10am – 7pm: Cashflow Workshop	1pm-10pm: Home Party*
7pm – 9.30pm: Japanese lessons	7pm – 9pm: Tuition	6pm – 11pm: Cashflow Workshop	7pm – 10pm: Opportunity and Product Presentation	7pm – 11pm: Discussion with Director Rath	8pm – 12am: Discussion with Director Rath

• Scouts: My longstanding commitment with the Boy Scout unit in my school would be one of the first things to go. This is one of the things that I regret immensely. I didn’t know the impact of what I did until I rejoined the unit last year. You just can’t leave the unit and expect the dynamics of the unit to remain the same. I think my good friend and fellow Scout leader Alaric has done an excellent job by staying, although I am struggling to make a comeback as a leader right now.
• Leadership workshops business: This is another commitment that I removed myself from with a lot of disappointment and regret. I believed a lot in improving the education of children, and while I wasn’t the best teacher, I was passionate about it and wanted to do my best in it. Unfortunately, I gave the wrong thing up – Kenny has taken some of my ideas and combined them with some of his own to create an influential presence in Singapore schools.
• Japanese lessons: I’d learnt Japanese before, and given it up in secondary school – hence I told myself this time that I wasn’t going to give up, ever. Weeks earlier, I even told a classmate who was planning to quit not to do so, because he would probably regret it later. Ironically, I ended up quitting earlier than him, citing other commitments.
• Scholarships. I told myself that I wouldn’t attempt to pursue other scholarships, that MLM was the best chance I had at making money and securing the financial freedom that I wanted. Because of this, I gave up on many of the opportunities that were offered to me.

I dropped all these commitments almost immediately after Bee told me to (on hindsight, it probably wasn’t him who wanted it – it was Director Rath, whom I’ll talk about in another post). It was a test of commitment, and I wasn’t going to let Director Rath down, whom I now trusted as a father figure, somebody who was truly successful. Nope, I was going to make it this time, and in my mind I told myself I was willing to go through everything just to succeed.

I was beginning to change.

Relationship talk shows: A new low

I’m not into talk shows that bring in ‘experts’ on relationships and attempt to solve, in front of hundreds of thousands of people in the audience, a “failing relationship”. But what I caught on TV this week in my school canteen, in my opinion, is a sign that such talk shows have really descended to a new low.

Let’s just say that I don’t exactly fancy Tyra’s talk shows. Fine, she looks decent, is eloquent enough to be her own host, though I don’t think the idea of putting one’s relationship in the hands (literally) of hundreds of people is a step in the right direction for her. In summary: A woman walks on stage, and Tyra beckons for her to sit down on her comfortable couch. She starts talking about how much she loves the guy, but there are some things that she’s not happy about and she doesn’t think that he’s the “right” person. She’s confused because she “loves the guy to death”, but she doesn’t know if carrying on in this relationship would be beneficial to both of them. She talks about the guy’s apparent weaknesses, and how she is not able to accommodate them. And all this, in front of the entire audience and the viewers on TV. And oh, she actually has a child with the guy.

The man then comes out, and Tyra asks the woman to face him and tell him, in the face, about all the things that she isn’t happy about. The man takes it in good humour for awhile, but how long he remains this way I do not know, because I have turned my attention away from the TV by then.

The audience then votes whether the couple should stay together or simply say goodbye.

Something wrong

If there is anything wrong with this scene, I would say the fabric of American society has degenerated into neediness (at best), and thoughtlessness (at worst). Sure, chase for your own ideals, look for the right person, but firstly accept responsibility for your actions. Think, for goodness sake, about what you have been doing. Do you think what you’re doing is the right thing, or not? Going on TV just to validate your actions in something that is supposed to be intensely individual and personal seems to me that people don’t really have a clear idea of their morals anymore. In fact, they are looking for the morals of “somebody else” – the audience in this case – to determine if their actions are right.

Part of it has to do with the rise of the self-help movement and how people have been attempting to justify to themselves that you need to “forgive yourself” for your actions, even if they are wrong. The disclaiming of responsibility sounds on the outset to be a good idea – less responsibility, less grief right? – but this seems to lead people into thinking that no, whatever I do isn’t really my fault, it’s really that the fabric of society is changing and I am merely reflecting society’s changes. So, really, whatever I do isn’t my fault, but the society’s.

And so what happens when you screw up? Ask society, of course. Or disclaim responsibility. Whatever works, it’s just not me that’s the problem.

The couple needs to realize – assuming that they haven’t already broken up – that there is something fundamentally wrong with their behaviour. They need to relearn what accommodation is, and change – not the other person, but themselves. Sure, he may not be Mr. Right, but can you truly live a fantasy? Do they really think love is about the ideal person? If they are, and they are stubborn enough to continue thinking this way, they will never believe that they are at fault, just that the other person didn’t quite turn out to be Mr. Right. The fantasy lives on, families continue to get broken.

And cut down on watching – or attending – talk shows where you surrender your responsibility to someone else.

Things to note when I start my business

After two years at SMU I realized one thing: sometimes, I regret that I didn’t make business my major, instead opting for the Invisible Hand and the social sciences. Taking some business courses at Emory has given me a sampler of what I’d really been missing.

I’ve decided to record some things that I MUST take note of when I decide to fulfill one of my biggest dreams: and that is to start my own business. Note: Most of these things are tidbits from things that I’ve read. They don’t exactly flow neatly into a story.

• Today: when hiring somebody, they must have a comprehensive set of personal characteristics referred to by Matsushita (now Panasonic) as the acronym Smile – Specialty, Management ability, International flexibility, Language facility, and Endeavour.

• Remember that in business, nothing is really ever that easy – but don’t lose your head and start thinking that it’s really that complicated. Create useful, viable systems, not complex ones. We are not academics: we shouldn’t search for the best theory, but really the best solution.

• The structure of a company is merely the body. You need the blood and life – the culture and the psychology of the company – to be in good health before it can be successful.

• 12.10am: we tend to assume that multinational firms have subsidiaries with limited capabilities. Today, however, things have changed dramatically. We should think of the world as an integrated, interdependent network.

• Essentially, all this means one thing: in business, it all depends. (Edited 3.32pm, Feb 17 2010)