Hey, guys, welcome. Excited to be here again with you today. Today, I want to talk about something that a lot of us struggle with, and that’s false beliefs that hold us back. I’ve got a personal example, a fun example for myself from this past weekend. I’ll take you back a year and a half, almost. In August of 2017, I was able to go up to Seattle, where I grew up, with my little brother. We went and played tourists in Seattle. We went up there and played tourists, specifically, to go see a Metallica concert. I’m a big Metallica fan. Some of them, maybe for some of you, that’s not your cup of tea. It’s definitely not my wife’s cup of tea. In fact, she got me the tickets for my birthday and said, “I love you. Go, but go with somebody else, please.” We made that happen with my brother, and it was a fantastic event.
Fast forward a few months and Metallica announced that they are coming to Salt Lake City where I currently live. And I said, “Oh man, I gotta go to that,” because it was such a good show. It was amazing. Then, I saw the price tag, and holy crap. Let’s talk about being really expensive. I had this false belief in my head that I wasn’t going to be able to make that happen because of the price tag. We’re talking $200, $300, $400, $500 for a single seat. It was insane. It was insane. I like things, and I like nice things, but I also like to get the best deal? And so, ultimately, I let it go and I put it to the back of my mind.
Well, then, fast forward to last weekend. I decided that I had some cash in my pocket–burning a hole in my pocket–that happens, for me. Does anybody else have that? Definitely, let me know, because cash burning a hole in your pocket… I can see the value and the vision of what it could be, I guess you could say. Anyway, a little cash burning a hole in my pocket. I said, “Hey, honey, do we have anything going on tomorrow night?” This was Thursday. She’s like, “No, the kids want to go to the see the school play.” I love the theater, but a school play is like putting a thousand needles in my eye. Please let me just gouge them out to avoid the pain. I wanted to avoid that. I will admit. And my wife was a total trooper. She said, “If you want to go to that concert and you can find a ticket, then go for it.”
Well, here, in the Salt Lake area, we have a great online marketplace, kind of an online classified ads, a system. It’s not craigslist. In fact, it’s way better than craigslist, but a, it’s called KSL, which also happens to be like the local radio and TV station. I go on ksl.com and I’m looking for tickets and I find a guy who had placed a ticket for sale three weeks before. I sent him a text and said, “Hey, you don’t still have a ticket for the concert, do you?” He gets back to me about 10 minutes later. He’s like, “Yeah, actually I do.” He hadn’t re-posted it, which was just amazing to me. I was actually able to get a ticket for under face value and able to go to my concert and now it was fantastic.
I sent out some pictures on my Facebook and Instagram, actually on our MLM Renegade Instagram. I posted a little bit, and I’ll actually post some more so you guys can go check that out. But I was literally eight to ten feet away from the microphone that they were singing into. Now, this was in the round and I had floor “seats.” I’m going to use air quotes for that, because there weren’t any seats. I was standing there, and my old bones are definitely starting to feel it. The doors opened at 6:00 p.m. I got there and Metallica didn’t go on until 9:00 p.m. They played until 11:30 p.m. By the end I was like, “Okay, I need some Ibuprofen and a nice long sleep.” But it was amazing! Epic, such a great show. If you like the genre and you like Metallica at all, go. Run–don’t walk–get there.
My self-limiting belief was that I couldn’t go because of price, because of cost. Guess what? I found a way around it and you can find a way around every self-limiting defeating belief that you have, too, and that is what I want to talk about today.
Let’s talk about some of the big ones for network marketing overall. How can I recruit without bugging my friends and family? I’m going to have to bother people. I don’t want to bother people. That’s going to be uncomfortable. That’s not going to be any fun. You’re right, it is uncomfortable, and it’s not any fun. But guess what? That doesn’t have to be the way. We have 21st-century tools that we can use to recruit people while we sleep. Business that gets done while you sleep is truly a business that can be a walkaway income, that can be residual income for life because it gets handled without your hands on the wheel. That is an incredible advantage that network marketing has overall. When we start to recruit people on autopilot and they start to come in by many different means and they start to reach out to us, now, all of a sudden, we’re in pole position–mixed metaphors here–to get what we need and to be the kind of leaders that we want to be.
The next thing that we want to talk about, again, friends and family. Are they going to know that you’re in a network marketing company? My goal is to not. Now, all my family does know right now, but I don’t want to have him talk about it. When Heather and I got started with our current network marketing company, I talked to all three of my siblings. I’m the oldest of four and we’re all within eight years, so my youngest sibling is 7.5 years younger than me and then I’ve got 3.5 and 2 years younger, as well. I called all of them because, why? Because I love my friends and family. Well, guess what, they said because they love me, but there was not a chance, in you know where, that they were going to join my network marketing company. It was disappointing. That was a gut punch.
My little brother, who’s two years younger than me, is one of my best friends on the planet. One of my best friends. And he said, “JR, I love you, but don’t ever talk to me about this again.” Wow! That’s… Now, first of all, word for the wise: When you say something that you mean, like “I love you,” don’t ever add a “but” to the end of it! When you add a “but” to a statement that negates everything that you said before. Now, I love my brother, and I will continue to love my brother, and I will love him even though he’s not going to join my network marketing company. My brother is Dr. McKee. He’s a chiropractor, lives down in the Dallas area, and I love him to death. He’s had his own failures in network marketing. And so, some of those limiting beliefs, those false beliefs, definitely afflict him regularly.
People all over network marketing are making money. That is the truth. In some of the podcast episodes that are to come and some of the interviews that I’m going to do with some people in the industry who’ve had runaway fantastic success, that is a truth that we can live with. Here’s the thing, the fallacy of the new opportunity, the ground level, the entry level opportunity is such a fallacy. It is such, it’s so overblown. So many times people get in, it’s like, “Hey, we get into the ground level. We can build it from the top.” Now, this fallacy comes in from the idea that people can only get big in network marketing if they start at the top.
That’s like saying that you can only make money if you’re the CEO right out of college. Some people do that. They start their own businesses. Most kids that I graduated college with came out and they got an entry-level position and something in their field. They continue to grind and to move up the ladder. Network marketing and life really track each other very well in that regard. You’re not going to start at the top. And most companies that are new and exciting and ground level, fail, like more than 95%; in fact, it’s probably closer to 98% of these companies fail within the first five years, and a huge chunk of them fail in the next five years. Most of the time what happens is they can’t handle their own growth: They start out. They shoot off like a shot. And, ultimately, what happens is they are unable to match their growth and they have to change the compensation plan. They have to do something and it ticks off your distributor group and things fall apart.
Jumping ship, generally speaking, will lead you nowhere. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t change for a new opportunity, but people who jump from opportunity to opportunity to opportunity, trying to get into the next big thing generally end up with nothing. They just can’t have success that way. And so, you need to be able to be focused on what you’re doing. Attach yourself with a company and with a partner who’s going to help you, who’s going to drive you along the way, who’s going to be there to back you up. Our network marketing company’s been around for quite some time. Again, I’m not going to tell you who it is. I’m not here to recruit you. I’m here to help you, inspire you, and to uplift you.
Now, the last piece here is I can’t have success. What a joke. Anybody can have success. All you have to do is be willing to do it. Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” And I’ve never felt that more than in network marketing. I have set some ridiculously high goals. I’m all about smart goal making. We talked about that you’re going to go in, and you have to set these goals that are going to drive you. The a in smart a lot of people say is achievable. No, for me, it’s action-oriented. I want to go in and I want to work hard and keep working hard even when it feels like a mountain is about to fall down on top of me. Because when I do that, when I’m pushing against that, when I’m battling through, I’m becoming stronger.
The challenge is the way, and when you can lean into that challenge… I read the book “The Dip” by Seth Godin and he talks about the learning curve. If you lean into that curve, you are going to come out a winner and come out on top. Don’t believe that you can’t have success. That is a self-defeating belief. Believe in yourself. Have faith. Like I said, I’m a faith-based person, and I have to believe that God wants something better for me and my family, that they want me to achieve, that they want me to grow to new heights, that they want me to become the best version of myself humanly possible.
There is a lot of human possibility that can be done, especially in network marketing. There were people that never thought the four-minute mile would be broken. Now, we’ve got people breaking it all over the place. I am not one of those people. I would like to break a ten-minute mile, to be perfectly frank, but there are people. One of the things that I like to do, I like to cycle. I have to ride my bicycle, and I don’t get out enough. I get tied up. I’m too busy, whatever. I don’t have a push and to get out there sometimes because I’m caught up in other things.
But one thing I did last Father’s Day was I wrote a Huntsman Cancer 140. It’s a 140-mile bike ride that we did for cancer awareness. My mother-in-law and my grandmother both sadly passed away from breast cancer, so this is something very near and dear to my heart and something that I ride for. I rode this in their honor. 140 miles in one day is a long time to be on a bicycle seat. You guys have sat on bicycle seats. Comfort is not the primary use for those. Through all of it, I was able to get there, and sometimes the best part about cycling is learning to suffer. I had some ailments that popped up about Mile 30 that I was like, “Oh, that’s going to be really uncomfortable for the next 110 miles,” and guess what? It was. But, what else? I got through it.
I can do hard things. If I can teach anybody anything, it is that I can do hard things. You can do hard things. It’s simply a matter of putting your mind to it, deciding that you will, and then going and doing it. You guys go out there and attack these self-limiting beliefs. Attack those things that are holding you back from your own personal greatness. Because when you do, you will find new heights that you didn’t even know existed. It’s like the clouds parting and you’re seeing the top of a 14,000-foot peak. When you do, your vision is elevated and you’re able to get new things. Go out there and attack.
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, tell me at JR@MLMRenegade.com.