All right, guys. I don’t know about you, but I love superhero movies: Avengers, Spider-Man, Ant-Man, Batman, Superman, whoever. We got Captain Marvel coming out in a little bit. I love superhero movies. In fact, I love watching some of the superhero series, too. Netflix had Daredevil and Punisher; those are fun to me. I want to get into what superheroes and network marketers have in common. I’ll tell you, it’s probably never more prevalent. There’s one particular superhero I think best personifies a network marketer, and that’s Spider-Man. You could do Ant-Man, as well, but I love Spider-Man.
Spider-Man started out. He was a nerdy kid. He liked science. He goes on a science trip or a trip to the museum or to a science lab–I don’t remember–It depends on which a movie you’re watching. He gets bit by some spider, which gives him superhuman powers. Now, he can use the webs and he slings all over the place. You’ve seen it. But it’s still Peter Parker, this nerdy kid who’s out there exercising these superhuman habits to fight crime. Well, network marketers can be a lot the same. We all have an origin story. We’ve got a background that makes us who we are. If Peter Parker wasn’t a nerd, he wouldn’t have gone to this scientific lab where the super spiders were. I use nerd in the highest sense of the word. Frankly, nerds rule the world. Let’s be honest. In fact, I tell my kids that every single day that nerds rule the world. Look at Bill Gates, right? Look at Steve Jobs. To a certain extent, they are nerds. I encourage that, because like I said, nerds rule the world.
Today, I want to talk a little bit about origin stories. Each of us needs to think about our origin story, as it relates to our business and as it relates to our life, because ultimately, we’re all going somewhere, and we’re all going somewhere different. With the origin story, I want to step back. I talked about this a little bit in the very first episode. Hopefully, I’ve gotten better over the last dozen or so episodes, but I’m going to continue to grow this thought process. I want to talk about my origin story. There are some important parts of the origin story.
First, I want to talk about where I came from. I grew up in Seattle. I’m the oldest of four kids. I’m the older brother, and that taught me a lot of things. It taught me to really care about my siblings, care about other people, but also, I’m a big tease. I like to rib people. I like to tease. That’s partly because that’s who I am. I created this podcast as an outlet, a creative outlet. It lets me share my thoughts. While I was in college, I blogged a little bit. I found that cathartic and therapeutic and a lot of ways, especially at that point in time. I was going through a divorce and some other things. It was a great way for me to get that out. I’ve actually rediscovered, recently, journaling. I’m trying to do that more, because it gives me that creative outlet and lets me get my thoughts outside of my own head.
I grew up in Seattle. When I was 17 years old, I had a friend, somebody we went to church with, who owned a sporting goods store. He invited me to come up to a tent sale that they were doing. It was a three-day tent sale–Friday, Saturday, Sunday–just north of Seattle at the Northgate Mall. I had never sold anything before. I like to talk to people. I like to engage, but I hadn’t sold anything. I went to this tent sale kind of naïve. Over the course of the next three days, I sold more than $30,000 in merchandise, bicycles and skates primarily. I figured out which products had a spiff on them–a spiff is a sales guy’s word for an extra bonus–and which products would move the fastest and which ones people liked. I got excited and I just kept moving and moving and moving. It was 12- and 14-hour days. I was on my feet. In fact, we were in a parking lot, essentially, underneath a tent. My feet were sore. My back a little sore. At the end of those three days, I had $1,000 to speak of. $1,000 for a 17-year-old kid is an enormous amount of money. That opened my eyes to what could happen in sales. I carried that forward. I did that. I worked I at the bookstore in college.
After I got back from South America for two years, I went to work for cell phone companies. I worked my way through college. I went to school full time, I worked full time, and I sold a whole lot of cell phones. In fact, this is where my work ethic kicked in pretty hard for me. I realized that, while I had co-workers who would go and take a half hour or an hour lunch, if I quickly went in the back room and ate something… I did a lot of TV dinners or microwave meals, like Michelina’s. I would not microwave those. I would come back and immediately get right back on the floor. I’d spend maybe five minutes for a lunch break, maybe five minutes. What I figured out though is that while they were gone at lunch, I could sell two or three more phones. If I had a quota of four or five in a day that I was trying to sell, because everybody was gone, I instantly had more opportunity.
I took advantage of that, and it worked. I got to go on a President’s Club trip with Sprint. We went to Cancun. It was amazing. I got recognized by the president of the company, and that was definitely an ego boost for me. I realized, if I’m wearing willing to work my butt off, I can do anything. I still believe that, and I still know that. One of those things that I realized that I was good at was interacting with people and working hard, but sometimes I’ve also figured out things that I’m not good at. I work to establish those.
One of my desires with the MLM Renegade podcast is to empower people who are in network marketing–whether it be working with my team or working with their own teams–empower them with the skills and the knowledge that they need to work harder and smarter. I don’t understand sometimes this thought, “Oh, work smarter, not harder.” Like why would you do that? We’re both like, if you can do both, you’re going to come out so far ahead.
This is the second or third time I’ve read this book: The 10x Rule by Grant Cardone. Read it. Awesome book. it’s one of the books I did not read last year. I had read it previously. I think I read it right towards the tail end of 2017, so it wasn’t in 2018 reading list. This year, it definitely is, and it is awesome. The whole idea behind The 10x Rule is that if you’re willing to do 10 times more than you were doing, you’re going to have 10 times the results. If you said, “Oh, I want to make 100 grand this year.” Why are you setting that goal? You’re going to undercut yourself. Maybe instead you want to make $1 million, and then, if you happen to only make 700 grand, oh my goodness, what a problem that is. That’s the goal, and the mission here. Those are my desires. That’s what I want to help with. That’s why I’m creating these courses around Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, using sales funnels, affiliate marketing. All of those things give us an opportunity to reach those goals.
When I first started in network marketing… I won’t go back to when I first started. The first time that I really started to see some success, I had a mentor who brought me in. I got introduced to him by a co-worker and we started working together. It was a bit of a flash in the pan. I achieved the first rank, but it wasn’t built on anything sustainable, so it fell flat. And then, ultimately, he ended up leaving the company that we were working with and going off and doing something else. He and I still talk fairly regularly, and I still consider him a good friend, but at that point in time, it didn’t work for us.
Now, fast forward a couple years. I had another friend. A guy who actually had been my manager when I worked for Sprint, so he knew some of my strengths. He got involved with one of his neighbors in a fairly new network marketing company. This is 2010. They had some experience. My friend Kirk was brought into the business by a couple of his neighbors. The husband-wife combo, the husband had a extensive background in search engine optimization. I had been working a little bit in this arena, as well, with SEO, so I was really excited about this. I’m like, “Oh my, goodness, people are searching for these products, and we’re going to be able to get them and funnel them to us. It’s going to help create our business. We’re going to be able to basically firewall ourselves with a baseline and have this great residual income coming in.”
The vision of it… I was excited about it, and the products were pretty decent. In fact, I still use some of those products today, even though I’m not involved with that company anymore. The thing that I realized is that there’s still a lot of work involved. There’s still hard work. I was going for the smarter and not the harder, and it became that it was a problem. It was this wall that I ran up against. At that point in time, I wasn’t ready to get past it. Fast forward probably five years, I’d left network marketing alone. My wife and I had sworn it off and it was, it was kind of a rough patch. I focused more on my sales career and did well.
We were able to achieve one of the goals, which was to have my wife quit her full-time job. She works one day a week now. She’s registered nurse. I need to have her on the podcast so that you guys can get to know her because she is a big a part of this, as I am. I may be the voice, but she is definitely a major driver for me. She was able to cut back to one day a week, which basically lets her keep her license and have some mental sanity from dealing with kids all week long. She got involved with the company we’re with currently and with one of the products, and she was excited about it. In fact, she didn’t want to get involved with the company. She started using the product and saw some phenomenal results, and then shared it on social media and sold some product; in fact, sold quite a bit of product, made a few hundred dollars in the course of like a day and a half. When she did that, some of the leaders who were in the group, if you will, above her said, ”Hey, you should try and do the business.” And she’s like, “Nah. Nah. Nah, I don’t want to do it.” They came back, they’re like, “No, really, you should do this now.” “Now, now. We’re not going to do it. My husband I swore this off, and we’re not going too.”
Then what happened is they had an event. I’m a firm believer in events. Go to your events. Our team has a major event going on this weekend I’m really excited for, because it is a shot in the arm for my belief. It’s a shot in the arm for helping me to re-center on my targets and my goals. Anyway, she got invited to this event and she, again, denied him. Then, the day before she came to me and said, “Hey, JR, I really think I want to go to this.” It cost 75 bucks or 100 bucks to go. She wasn’t quite sure how she felt about it, but she was at least inspired enough to give it a shot. I said, “Absolutely. Go. You should go and do that, because one, you’ll never know what happens if you don’t.”
She went to this two-day event and came home absolutely ablaze, on fire. She was so excited. Let me tell you, the epiphany that she and I had together with this was the use of social media. The world had changed over the previous five years. Suddenly, I could contact people all over the world. I could reach out to people who I had spoken with, who I knew and loved in Chile. I could talk to people in Spain and in England, Russia, and Africa, all over the world. Let alone here in the United States. That epiphany got me forward, and we created a plan.
We saw a vision. We went, and we worked. I cannot remember a time that we have worked harder than the latter half of 2017. It was awesome. We were trying to actually qualify for an incentive trip. The incentive trip was a once-in-a-lifetime vacation. It was all expenses were paid. Those sorts of things drive me. I love to travel. I really, really, really enjoy getting out and seeing other parts of the world. We have some goals now. I want to travel some more to South America as we’re building teams down there. Some of the parts of that world that are important to me. I love to travel.
Setting the sights on that goal was hugely important. We worked hard. We had ups and downs, and one of the conflicts that we ran into was our team was growing. We started to try and manage it a little bit too much, instead of focusing more on us. It was almost our downfall. In fact, it got to the point where it was the week between Christmas and New Year’s. We had quite a way to go to meet this goal. It was attainable, it was reachable, but man, it was going to be tough. That week between Christmas and New Year’s, I reached out to people.
Thankfully, we have an opportunity to do some humanitarian work through our company. It helps children in Africa with meals. We were able to get some credit for that work that we do towards this goal of going on this trip. I reached out to some people. I’m in the business world, who aren’t involved with network marketing but who I knew had great hearts, and that they were going to look to see this as an opportunity to help other kids. I reached out to them, and we were able to make enough of an impact there that on December 31st of 2017, about 1.5 hours before qualification ended on January 1st, we hit our goal. It was awesome, and we were excited. Honestly, I could hardly believe it. A few months later we were able to take that incredible trip, a trip for the ages, a trip of a lifetime, and it was awesome.
My origin story is continuing to develop. I’m not the same person today as when we started in the summer of 2017 with our network marketing business, and that’s a good thing. I’m not the same person today that I was when I was 17. I mean, it makes sense. I’m just about 40 years old. Hopefully, I’ve grown up a little bit since I was 17. In a lot of ways, I’m still the same goofy, sarcastic kid that I’ve always been. One of my goals, and I need to write this down because I haven’t written it down but it’s a goal in my heart, and it’s that I want to be a little bit less sarcastic, less snarky in 2019. Because one of the things that I’ve realized is that snark is really negative energy. I don’t need more negative energy in my life. There’s plenty of it. What I need is more positivity and more positive energy.
As I look back on the origin story, I may not be shooting spiderwebs from my wrists and swinging around downtown Manhattan, but it does give me the opportunity to look back and see how far I’ve come. When I climbed Mount Rainier, one of the coolest things was standing on the summit. I’ve got a picture of our boots next to the USGS spike that’s at the summit. It’s the official marker from the United States Geological Survey that says that this is 14,411 feet. When you look up from there, the day that we summitted was clear. Oh, it was amazing how clear it was that day. That day you could see all the way to the north to Mount Baker and to the south past Mount Hood. In fact, you could see the Puget Sound there in the Seattle area. There was a ferry boat crossing the Sound. As far as the eye can see has a new meaning to me now. That’s part of my backstory.
As far as the eye can see is different now, and my eyes can see a lot of different things. I’m excited about the direction that it’s going now. Life is a whole lot more about direction than it is velocity. Let me say that again. Life is more about the direction that you’re heading and less about the velocity at which you’re arriving there. I get impatient. We all get impatient. I’ve been doing this for a few years now and why haven’t I made it? Let’s analyze that again. I learned to ski, it took me years to learn to ski to get to the level that I am now, and the enjoyment level I am now. It took a lot of hard work to get to the summit. I graduated with a four-year degree. It took me longer than four years to get it, but I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics. With that, I spent four years putting in that work and the jobs that people wanted to give me were math, $30,000 to $40,000 a year or something like that. At that point in time, it was a disappointment. I had been working cell phones and been making really good money for a full-time student. I got into software and my vision started to rise. But even that software job, the On Target Earning, or OTE is what we call it, was like $80,000 a year. That’s a really good income. It took four years of work to get to that $80,000 a year mark. Now, $80,000 a year, if we’re keeping tabs that’s basically $7,000 a month before taxes.
Now, if I want to have a business that’s doing $10,000 or $15,000 or $25,000 or $50,000 or $100,000 dollars a month, it took me four-year degree to get to that $80,000 mark. How long should it take me to get to 10x that? How long should that be? We get impatient. Don’t lose patience. Realize this person you’re becoming along the way. With each step you are qualifying yourself to reach that ultimate goal. When you reach that next step, take look up and look for the next step. You don’t have to see the entire trail. When we climbed Mount Rainier, we could see the summit and we could see what was in front of us, but I couldn’t see how long it would take or how many crevasses I had to cross on a ladder that was going over 100-foot deep chasm. I couldn’t see those things. If you can take the next step that’s in front of you, and then take the one after that one step after another, you will get there.
Don’t be afraid to spend the time to achieve your goals. Don’t be afraid to be audacious about your goals. Look at your back story to see how far you’ve come, and realize that you, too, can be Spider-Man and one of your mentors can be Iron Man, and you can help save the world one day. I’m really excited about this. I cannot wait to see what the next 50 and 100 episodes of MLM Renegade come out. I know that the training that we’re producing is going to be life changing for you guys and it’s going to enable you to change the way that you view your business each and every day. Go out there and make the most of this day and every day. See you next time.
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