Hey, guys, welcome back. This one’s really near and dear to my heart because, as I’ve mentioned, I’m a career sales guy. I work a nine-to-five job, and that’s an important piece for me to take care of my family. I need that. My goal and my vision, ultimately, is to have my network marketing business, my MLM, be my primary source of income. That takes time to build. Anybody who tells you that this is a get rich quick, that it’s something like that, forget it. No, no way. Neither is any small business in general, a get rich quick scheme. You need to work and you need to work at it. And so, while I’m building my network marketing business, I’m also working my day job.
There are some things that you can do to make sure that you’re actually working in your network marketing business and not dabbling; ultimately, dabbling doesn’t do anything for you. I want to go over this. I’ve got a few steps about how to do this. There’s some things that you want to think about, too, as you go forward. The first, how bad do you want it? Anytime I hear that word, I hear Tim McGraw in my ears saying, “How bad do you want it?” I am not a country singer. In fact, I had a really don’t like a whole lot of country music, but I love Tim McGraw. My wife can tell you, we’ve been to see him a few times now. In fact, we drove to Vegas. We did all kinds of stuff to see Tim and faith, well worth it. Great concert. I talked about another concert in LA in my last podcast episode, but, ultimately, Tim’s worth it and he’s got the right idea.
How bad are you willing to work to get what you want? Business should not be a hobby. If you work your business like a hobby, it will pay you like a hobby. One of my hobbies, I love to ski. I love to ski with my family, but if I had to survive on what I can get paid–which is negative dollars because I purchase a season pass or purchase a day pass and it costs me money to ski–we’re going to be in big trouble. A lot of people will actually run their network marketing business in the same way. It’s like what? What are you doing? You buy product and you use product and say: Hey, this is wonderful. It’s great. Oh, I love it, blah blah, blah blah. And you don’t actually work the business. That is going to be a big, big problem. So if you work your business like a hobby, knock it off. If you have aspirations and you have dreams, of really making your network marketing business your actual business. The thing that’s going to help you pay your bills month in and month out and give you that personal freedom that we all strive for and that it can provide. Work your business like a business.
When I go to work, I work eight to six, roughly. I spend my day working. I do my job, and then when I come home, I have another job: I’m dad. I need to spend a couple of hours, at least, playing with my kids. My soon-to-be nine-year-old son is definitely a daddy’s boy. We spend a lot of time in the backyard throwing a baseball around, because he loves baseball. I will talk a lot about baseball, and I will make analogies about baseball and metaphors about baseball, because I love baseball, too. In fact, baseball could be considered the epicenter of my son’s universe. I loved that, because he loves something that I love. But here’s the thing: I need to spend time with him now. He goes to bed about 8:30 at night, so now I get home from work about 6:00, do dinner, do nighttime activities. I love reading to my son before bed; as he gets bigger, those times get shorter to ensure that we have those opportunities. I need to spend time doing that.
Now, I have an opportunity to work my business. When can I work my business? Well, it needs to be on the edges, but it needs to be planned. I need to work it from 8:30 p.m. to midnight or from 5:30 a.m. to 7:30 a.m.; those are typically the two times that I’m able to get work in. If I can schedule four or five hours a week in, I am treating my business like a business. Next thing you want to do is take note of your strengths and your weaknesses, because we all have them. Let’s be honest. A lot of times people focus on their weaknesses as reasons why I can’t. I can’t do this because this… I can’t do that because of this… Get over yourself. Don’t focus on your weaknesses. Focus on your strengths. Be honest with yourself. Recognize that, hey, I’m really not very good in that.
I’m a big believer in weak things becoming strong. I like to spend time working out and I was really proud of myself when I got to the point where I could bench press my weight. I’m a 6’1”, 200-pound guy bench my way. It felt pretty good. I felt good about myself, but it was definitely a weakness. I’ve got friends who will put up twice their weight. It’s insane, but that was a weakness that I wanted to work on. But, more than that, you want to amplify your strengths, turn up the volume, get loud. Get loud about your strengths, because those are the things that people will follow you for because they are their weaknesses, and we can all work together to lift each other up. The rising tide lifts all boats and that is not true anywhere more than in network marketing, because together we can definitely achieve more.
What makes you unique? That’s one of those strengths that you want to amplify. Maybe it’s a unique experience. I had the unique experience of climbing Mount Rainier. I’ve teased this a couple of times. I guess it’s time to tell the story. I grew up in the Seattle area where the mountain–that’s Mount Rainier–stares down at you all day long. I was able. Three years ago with my dad, he challenged me and said, “Hey, I’m going to go climb this with some young men,” some youth that he goes to church with. “You should come with me.” And I’m like, “Okay. Wait, 16/17-year-old boys are going to do this.” I’m like, “I got to go.” I grew up and that was something that I always wanted to do but never really had a lot of opportunity. My Dad wasn’t in mountain climbing when I was a kid, and then he got into it after I left home.
I planned. I worked on my cardio. Living at 4,500 feet in elevation, here, helped me because I was able to strengthen my lungs. I was able to go from weak to strong when it comes to my lungs, and we were able to get up to go climb this mountain. You come from sea level in Seattle and you drive up to the parking lot of the national park. It’s called Paradise, which is aptly named, frankly, and you could drive up to Paradise that’s at 5,500 feet of elevation and then you start hiking. The hike turns into a climb when you get to, what’s called, the Muir Snowfield. The Muir Snowfield is about 2,000 vertical feet and it goes up to the base camp, Camp Muir, at 10,000 feet. So just for our friends at home, we’re going from 5,500 to 10,000 feet. That is a 4,500-foot elevation climb. That’s a big deal.
We got there a little bit after lunch; in fact, we ate lunch, we set up our tent, and we went to bed. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. Why would you go to bed at two o’clock in the afternoon? Well, you want to attempt the summit most of the time during the dark because, especially in the summertime, this was the first couple of days of August when we did this, it gets hot. There are glaciers on Mount Rainier, and they open up crevasses, or giant cracks in the in the ice. In fact, some of these cracks were so wide and deep they actually set ladders across them so that you could walk across to get to the other side because the route that you needed to take to get to the top had to cross these. But here’s the incredible thing about these crevasses. They went from this white on snow, right to a very light blue to a medium blue to a nice royal blue, to a very dark blue, to a navy blue to black. And I never saw the bottom of this hole. It was a hundred-plus feet down. I never saw the bottom.
Those are the traps and those are the things that you can get stuck in if you’re not careful. We got in our tent and we slept, and we woke up at midnight and ate “breakfast.” I’m going to use that in air quotes because that’s essentially what it was. It was literally like scrambled eggs and ham and it was good. We got our packs on, and we put on our crampons, which are like two-inch metal spikes that go on the bottom of your boots. We had harnesses on, and we were all roped together, and we had headlamps on. It’s midnight and we set out across the glacier to start this climb. It was incredible. You have never seen more stars than I saw that night. It’s absolutely impossible. You could see so far, it was amazing. The weather was good, and we were able to climb up and about 1500 feet above Camp Muir is a place called the Disappointment Cleaver. A cleaver is a big rock that divides two glaciers. We had to scale the Disappointment Cleaver.
Now, imagine rock climbing with two-inch metal spikes on. In the dark, where they have little flags that are reflectors that are bouncing off the light from your headlamp, that’s how we had to navigate the Disappointment Cleaver. They call it that because it’s a false summit. There are many false summits in our business. Don’t get stuck on a false summit. The reason they called it the Disappointment Cleaver in the past is because people would get to the top of it and think they had sumawesome. mited the mountain; they get there and the clouds would clear, and they look up and go, oh no. About the top of the disappointment. Cleaver is about 12,500 feet, which is really high, but you’re still not there yet. And so we sat there. We were at the top of the Disappointment Cleaver just in time for sunrise. And what an incredible sunrise I was. I’ll have to share some pictures on the MLM Renegade, a Facebook group that you guys all need to join. Go on, join it. Search for MLM done different on Facebook, and you can find that.
We got to the top of the Disappointment Cleaver, and then we had to keep going and going and going. We actually ended up crossing, I think it was seven different crevasses on these ladders. And, literally, it is a metal ladder that they lash like a two-by-six piece of wood and put it across an anchor on both sides so that you can walk across. In fact, one of these things, it was kind of crazy, it was about a but a five-degree incline that it was going up and tilted just a bit to the right. It wasn’t exactly square that we were climbing up it. As you’re looking down and seeing that you can’t see the bottom of this hole, you want to be very, very careful.
Now we ended up getting to the summit about eight o’clock in the morning. We finally summitted. I took pictures. I’ve got a picture with me with my arms up in the air, with the ice ax over my head as a success. Mount Rainier is 14,411 feet. As far as the eye can see, that definition changed for me that day. I was able to see from Mount Rainier all the way to the north to Mount Baker all the way to the south pass to Mount Hood and towards Mount Bachelor. In the middle of the night, I can actually see the lights of a Yakima that were that were off to the east. From the summit, I saw a fairy boat crossing the Puget sound on its way to Seattle, a ferry boat. I’ve been on hundreds of ferry boats. I’ve experienced that. Never have I ever seen one from 14,000 feet. It was incredible.
Here’s the point of this long, drawn out story. I had to attack my weaknesses and my strengths equally in order to make that summit. It was mentally taxing. I was tired. Because by the time we got to the summit and then we came back down, that’s actually the most dangerous part because a lot of these ice when it gets in the heat can actually break off and fall. In fact, we could hear it falling all around us. It’d be crack crack, and you’d hear what sounded like a little miniature landslide. We’ve got down safely to Camp Muir, packed up the rest of our things, and finished the hike all the way to the car. By the time that we got home to my parents’ house, there in the Seattle area, it was midnight. I actually had to get up at 5:00 a.m. the next morning to catch my flight back to Salt Lake. I’d been up for 24 hours straight. But what an incredible experience that it was when you amplify your strengths and attack your weaknesses, you can do stuff like that.
That’s a unique experience that I have. That’s something that I can tell. That’s a story I’ve told over and over again. Storytelling is such a huge thing in any part of marketing. Too much in marketing do we focus on the selling and not enough on the storytelling. And when we can tell stories, that’s going to be a major help. Now, you’ve got industry know how. Maybe your particular product is the best in the industry at one particular thing. I’ve got friends who sell keto, diet supplements, and they’re the best in the world at what they do. We have others that are supplements, your vitamins or skincare or whatever, industry know how is something that you can be unique and share with relationships. Life is about relationships. Network marketing is about relationships. When you have those relationships and you put those things together, now you’re in a place where you can start to share and start to edify other people’s lives. And that’s really my favorite part about network marketing is that growing up. And having your own personal brand. MLM Renegade is part of my personal brand as part of what makes me who I am. There’s also other parts of that. I’m a dad. I love to cycle. I love to ski. And I’m a sales guy, I have been through so many different sales trainings. I can share a lot of that, and I’m happy to and excited to share some of those things, because I’ve learned things along the way.
Now, the last episode I talked a little bit about smart goals. I want to dive into that for just a minute. SMART is an acronym: Specific, Measurable, Action-Oriented, Relevant, and Timebound, SMART. Relevant and Timebound is a big piece. Is it actually something that’s going to get you to that pinnacle, to that place that you want to be? That’s a question to ask. Timebound, when? When are you going to do this? By when, are you going to make the top level of your commission structure? By when, are you going to ask that person to join you in your business? By when, are you going to have a system built that you can walk away from and the business still runs? Those are things that you want to think about in your smart goals and as you’re trying to walk away from your daily business from your day job, those are the things that you want to fit into those hours on the sandwich hours, as I’ll call them. As you’re trying to put together, when you can walk away from your day job.
Now, one big part of this is owning your time and not letting it own you. We do a lot of our business using social media. No, great surprise, right? 21st-century recruiting happens via social media and other avenues. But the first thing that we need to do with our time is be intentional. If I got on my computer at 8:30 p.m. and lollygagged and looked at Facebook and poked around, I would lose a lot of time. Now, I will admit one of my weaknesses is Twitter. I love watching Twitter for a newsfeed. It’s kind of like watching the news at night. This time of year, I’m getting a lot of baseball–there’s that sport again–baseball information. I’ll watch that, and I’ll crave that information, but I realized that can be a major time suck. That can be a major hole in my day that I have to be careful with. You have to own your time, and you have to be intentional about setting up your time and setting up your day for success. Because if you don’t do that, what’s going to happen? You’re going to treat it like a hobby. And if you treat it like a hobby, it’ll pay you like a hobby, just remember to keep first things first. I learned that from Stephen Covey in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. You want to go through and you want to set up what those priorities are and then lock in on them, and don’t let something that’s of lower priority or lower importance to you actually infiltrate and take over time that needs to be set aside for what you’re doing.
Last and certainly not least, have fun. What’s the point of doing all of this if you’re not having any fun, if you’re just working and you’re miserable doing it? Why on earth are you doing it? If you’re working your nine to five, be focused on why it is that you’re working that. I work my nine to five job and I work it with intention, so that I know that I can be free from the fears of not being able to make ends meet. That’s a big one for our family. I have gone through multiple job layoffs in my lifetime. It goes back to my childhood. My Dad was laid off from a job and went nine months without a job. At the Christmas season, he was laid off. And I’m going to talk about that here in the coming weeks with the Christmas holidays upon us. It’s very near and dear to my heart, and I get a little bit emotional with it, but have fun. Even when you’re working your day job, have fun with it, because doing something fun is way better than being miserable all the time. It’s a choice. We have a choice to be miserable or to be happy.
Crap happens. It happens to all of us. If we can choose to have a better attitude and a better vision for what we’re working towards, and this is just a minor stumbling block and leaning into those challenges, we’re going to get the reward in the end that we seek and that we deserve. We all deserve to have that ultimate reward and to have that freedom and that time freedom. I don’t know about you, but that’s why I do this. I love helping people, and I love helping my family and being with my family and so have fun with it, guys.
Hey, thanks for listening and please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. If you have any questions that you’d like to have answered on the show, email me at JR@MLMRenegade.com.