Hey, guys, welcome back to this episode of MLM Renegade. I’ve been thinking about this episode for a while. The topic that I want to talk about is discouragement. Let me take it back just a little bit with you. As you guys know, I started a new job. I’m really excited about it and things are going pretty well. I’m having some success, some early success anyway, hasn’t translated yet into dollars—it will—pipeline takes time to build and all that.
Yesterday, I had kind of a downer day. It was the first downer day that I’ve had at this new job. I talk to dentists all day long; that’s the day job. I’m selling medical devices to dentists, and I had a couple of them that I thought seemed like really good prospects. We had some good interaction. They one came back and was just like, “Hey, yeah JR, I’d really like to do this. It’s just not in the cards financially right now.” I was okay with that. I had a family tie to that particular doctor, and so he was good. I bet he ends up being a customer eventually.
But then the next guy, the last guy. I called and I got a hold of his assistant. Number one, bad news move is when you get the assistant, not the person you’re trying to get in. The assistant was just, well, let’s just say she was not very nice. All right. And she was just like, “We have zero interest in what you’re offering. I’m sorry that it was communicated to you differently,” which is like the most condescending way of rejecting somebody. And so it put me off a little bit and put me into a lousy mood.
I realized, and I’ve realized this before, this was just another opportunity for me to have the right outlook on life. What do I mean by that? We get to choose every single day how we feel. We get to choose how we react. Life is about 10% what happens to you and about 90% how you react to it. It’s amazing how well my life goes and how good things are when I just decide that it’s going to be good. Let me say that again. I just decide to have a good day. It doesn’t matter what happens to me, I just decide to make it that way. You have in your person, in your power, you have the opportunity, the ability to determine your outcomes.
It is amazing to me being in sales to a lot of times, sometimes I get lucky, and I am more than willing to admit that luck plays into it. Let me tell you this, my luck gets exponentially better when I have a positive attitude about something and I’m working my butt off. If I’m not working hard, if I’m not positive about things, I never get lucky. Never once do I ever get lucky if I’m not working hard and trying to be positive about all my interactions with people. As we think about discouragement, it happens to everybody. It happens in network marketing, it happens in regular everyday business, it happens in marriages and families all over the place.
We do a lot of baseball in our house. Our youngest is on a travel baseball squad. This past weekend, I got to spend some quality Max and dad time doing baseball. Baseball is the ultimate discouragement sport, and I’ve been trying to instill this in our nine-year-old. One of my favorite players of all time, and incidentally it’s become my son’s favorite player, is Ken Griffey Jr. I grew up in the ‘90s in Seattle, so it tracks pretty well that that he would be my favorite player, and the Mariners are my team. Well, Ken Griffey Jr. had also had another teammate Edgar Martinez. Ken Griffey Jr. and Edgar Martinez made up an incredible duo that took the team to the playoffs.
Here’s the thing. Edgar Martinez was recently the also elected to the Hall of Fame. Griffey was elected a couple of years ago and got into the Hall of Fame. In fact, Griffey at the time received the most votes ever for a player. Basically, there was three people. I’m going to go ahead and call them idiots that did not vote for him. Everybody else did. Now that was eclipse this past year when Mariano Rivera from the Yankees was elected unanimously. He’s the first and thus far only player to be elected unanimously to the Baseball Hall of Fame. I digress.
The point of the matter is, Ken Griffey Jr. had a lifetime batting average pretty close to 300; Edgar Martinez had a little lifetime batting average just over 300. These are great batting averages, but what does that mean? It means that they failed seven out of 10 times. 70% of the time they failed. I know they both had games where they went oh for, where they went oh for the game, whether it was 0-4, 0-5, 0-3, whatever it was. They did not register a hit in those games. They didn’t happen all that often for those two, but they happened. They struck out. Griffey had games where he struck out at every at bat. It didn’t happen often, but it happens. Griffey also had stretches where he hit the most home runs in consecutive games in Major League history. The guy is a Hall of Famer. He’s an incredible baseball player and he failed 70% of the time.
Our oldest child right now is a senior in high school, and failure for him is not an option. You can’t fail out of high school. He would graduate high school here in a couple of months. We’re excited for him and about that achievement for him. He’ll go on to greater things in life. Failure is one of those things like discouragement that we have to understand; that’s why I love baseball because it teaches this. It teaches, “Hey, look, you can fail 70% of the time and be one of the greatest of all time.” Well, guess what guys? In life, you can fail every single time until you don’t. You can fail 90% of the time, but as long as you fall down nine times but you get up 10, you are going to be successful.
I’ve taken a lot of time and a lot of effort to try to work on my own personal development to become a better human being. I’m going through a challenge right now with a friend of mine, and he’s got this 21-day challenge. In the first day, he asks this question: if you could wave a magic wand and fix the thing that would make it so your life were that much better, what would be we’d be waving the magic wand over? Now, that’s a really introspective question, now I get discouraged. I have lousy days. Some days I just need to pick myself up by my bootstraps and keep going and be happy and choose happiness and choose success over discouragement. If you get caught in that discouragement spiral, it is a downward spiral, and it can be hard to get out of.
There are biological and chemical reasons why sometimes we’re more discouraged than others. Depression is a very real thing. I have ultimate empathy and sympathy for people who suffer from that and from other mental illnesses. But here’s the thing, even those that I know who suffer from those issues, they have a choice. Does it make their choice harder? Absolutely, but it doesn’t take away their choice. Again, life is 90% what we react to, not what happens to us. If we’re willing to accept that idea, accept that whole philosophy that you have control over your own life, you become instantly powerful.
I’m a firm believer that God gave us inalienable rights and one of those rights was the right to freedom of choice. We have free agency. Adam fell, that men might be. That was a choice. I’m so glad he made that choice. We have this opportunity at free agency. We have an opportunity to fail and to get back up. We have an opportunity that we cannot pass up. We have to grab this whole idea by the horns. We have to take discouragement and just shake it. Just shake that discouragement so that nothing can get in our way, because ultimately, we are the ones who get into our own way.
My friend’s challenge asks, what’s the thing I can wave my magic wand over? I recognize what those things are and their close. I keep them close. They are what I might call a self-defeating behavior. I know that I have them, and I hate that I have them, but I’m working to get past them, that’s falling down. I still fall down, and I still get back up. If I can do that without getting discouraged, I’ve won the day.
Guys, as I wrap up today, I want to encourage you. I want you guys to know that I have your back. I am here to help you. Seriously, if I can help in any way, if I can answer a question on the podcast, if you have some content that you would like me to talk about, that’s why I am here. I want to deliver value without a price tag. I love being able to do this podcast because I get to do that. I get to help people understand. I recently had somebody reach out to me, that had listened to the podcast and had some other questions, a place where I could help them with things that I had learned. That, to me, is the ultimate payoff.
Guys, don’t get discouraged. Be happy. Make the choice today to be successful, and you will be successful. In one of our last episodes, Rob Sperry talked about the lag behind success and the work that goes into it. Let me tell you that lag is very real, but it does not mean that it doesn’t happen. Just because you can’t immediately see it does not mean that it is not coming.
We live in Utah. We’ve had a bunch of small earthquakes lately, and it reminds us await. We sit on a pretty major fault, and the quote unquote “big one” is coming. Guess what, guys? Your life is the big one. It is coming. Be prepared to take advantage of it and to live your life so fully that your dreams are going to be jealous.
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