Chapter 5

A Goal Bigger Than Winning

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I spent that night in a guest room on the second floor above the Greatest Networker’s office-study. It was quite late when we’d finished talking, and since he’d asked me to attend a training he was giving early the next morning, he invited me to stay the night. I hadn’t brought a change of clothes, a razor or anything and was feeling a little awkward about that and told him so. He told me not to be concerned. He’d take care of it.

“Set your alarm so we can have breakfast together at seven. Be comfortable. Good night,” he said as he left.

As I was about to get myself ready for bed, I realized with a start that I hadn’t called my wife! By now it was well after 1:00 – she would be asleep. I felt a twinge of guilt at waking her up – but I knew it was better to wake her than have her worry.

I found a phone and called Kathy to let her know I wouldn’t be home until the next day – that I was going to be an overnight guest of the Greatest Networker in the World!

I got her sleepy voice on the phone, and started to apologize right away. She stopped me – she hadn’t worried, she said; she knew I was alright. In fact, she was very curious to know what had happened so far – which both pleased me and surprised me a little – and as sleepy as I was, I couldn’t stop myself from recounting all my experiences of the past seven or eight hours in great detail. She was fascinated, and said she was very happy for me.

We hadn’t talked like this in a long, long time.

Interesting . . . I thought, as I hung up the phone – that was a great connection for Alaska. Perhaps my wife wasn’t the one of us who’d been so distant recently.

Now, thinking back over our call and all the things I’d said to her, I lay awake in my bed, reliving the day’s events one more time. I finally drifted off during a scene in “The True Story of His Incredible Life,” sitting in a front-row seat (not my “comfort zone” in the back!) of that movie theater. It was the scene where I was standing on stage in front of a whole room full of people . . . .

I woke up feeling more alert and happy than I’d been in years – first thing – very first thing. It was 5:30 when I looked at the clock!

The room was chilly. The window had been open all night, and from the sound of it, the birds were having an opportunity meeting in the trees right outside the cottage.

I wrapped up in a robe I found in the closet and shivered happily as my feet tap-danced across the cold wood between the carpets that covered the floor. I opened the French doors, walked out onto the deck – and stopped dead in my tracks.

There, perched on the railing in front of me, were two huge and breathtakingly beautiful peacocks!

I’d never seen one so close up before, even in the zoo. The smaller of the two was almost pure white and didn’t have much of a tail. But the big one (I guessed it to be a male) had tailfeathers that must have been six or seven feet long – at least! It was like the train of an ornate Chinese Imperial costume following and flowing out behind him.

The birds were far less startled by me than I was by them. They sat calmly on the wooden porch railing, moving their heads from side to side and tilting them, as if taking pictures of me from a variety of different angles. I felt a bit intimidated by them and slowly turned to withdraw back inside, when I heard a heavy thunk, followed by a rustling sound.

I turned back again to see the big male – with full feathers spread out in a wide fan – doing a kind of fast back-and-forth two-step while “rattling his tail” at me. It was incredible.

I have no intimate knowledge of the habits and ways of peacocks. I wasn’t sure whether he intended to attack me – or attempt to mate with me – or what. So, I chose to quickly acknowledge the animal verbally for having a magnificent bunch of feathers and backed promptly inside.

Just amazing.

I showered quickly and, wrapped again in my robe, went down the stairs.

There was a fire in the fireplace! On the couch was a bundle of clothes tied with a bright red yarn with a note on top. It said:

Good morning. Here are some clothes and sneakers for you. Hope they fit. Dial 22 from any phone if you desire anything. See you at 7:00.

Sneakers? For a training session?

I untied the clothes, which turned out to be a brightly colored warm-up/jogging suit with a white Ralph Lauren polo shirt and gray rag-wool socks. This was going to be a unique meeting, I thought.

I dressed, made the bed, and came back downstairs where I rearranged the fire and added another couple of logs. I settled into the couch nearest the fireplace after finding a little book on Peafowl: Breeding and Management. At seven sharp, he walked through the door carrying a large tray.

“Good day . . . good day. How are you?”

“Superb,” I replied. “How are you?”

“Wonderful,” he said. “Have you met Black and Mrs. Peal?” he asked, pointing to the Peafowl . . . book next to me on the couch.

“The peacocks?” I questioned – and then answered, “Yes, a Black Shoulder male and female – peacock and peahen. How old are they? I know he’s at least five or so by the length of his tail.”

“You are quite the quick study,” he said. “Black is 15 years old. My guess on Mrs. Peal is, oh, perhaps two or three years younger. From your reading you know they can live upwards of 25 years and more.”

“I’ve never been that close to one before. ‘Beautiful’ isn’t grand enough to describe them.”

“Yes,” he said, taking a deep and obviously satisfying breath. “They are magnificent creatures. Walking flower gardens. Just being around them is a constant reminder for me of the awesome possibility of beauty in our lives – and of my relationship with that creation.

“Here’s an animal,” he went on, “that is simply being beautiful. They don’t have to do anything. They are beauty. And what’s more,” he added, with a distinct twinkle in his eyes, “it’s great fun being a person who ‘has’ peacocks.” He made a motion towards the tray he’d set down in front of us. “Let’s eat breakfast.”

He uncovered a marvelous breakfast of fresh fruit, French toast and coffee for me. He simply had tea.

“You’re not eating?” I asked after a rich, juicy taste of a kind of melon I didn’t recognize.

“No,” he said, “I rarely take breakfast. It slows me down. I have a couple of food supplements and one or two-too-many cups of tea. Sometimes, the family enjoys a big breakfast together, like on Sunday mornings, and I like that, too. But I don’t usually eat breakfast, or lunch for that matter.”

“Well,” I inquired, “tell me about this training session.”

He walked into his office and returned quickly with a small paperback book and tossed it to me. I caught it, turned it over and read the title out loud: Coaching Kids To Play Baseball and Softball.

“There are a number of fine books on how to do Network Marketing and training,” he told me. “This is one of the best.”

“Coaching Kids . . . ?” I asked, and I guess I clearly conveyed my disbelief.

“Yes,” he replied. “Coaching Kids . . . .”

“When I was first learning how to do this business,” he told me, “there weren’t all the books and tapes we have today explaining how to do Network Marketing successfully. The only thing I knew was where not to look.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Network Marketing is a whole different paradigm of . . . – Do you know what a ‘paradigm’ is?”

“20 cents?” I quipped, and he paused, stared blankly at me for the briefest moment, and then exploded with deep-down, booming laughter.

“Great . . . that’s great!” he exclaimed after he regained his breath. “Pair o’ dimes . . . 20 cents. Exactly! You know how we say, ‘Here’s my two cents,’ when we’re giving someone our opinion or point of view? A paradigm is just that – a point of view, a way we see things.

“The paradigm of Network Marketing,” he continued, as he stood up and walked around the couch and the room, “is so fundamentally different and distinct from all other paradigms of business, that it requires a pretty complete shift from the way we normally view business to appreciate and understand it.

“For example, in our industry, every single company, no matter how different its products and services are from any other’s, competes directly with every other Network Marketing company in attracting people to their business opportunity. That kind of competition from every angle doesn’t exist anywhere else – in any other industry. Do you see that?”

“Yes, I do,” I said, nodding in agreement and following him with my eyes and ears as he paced round the room.

“Now, given that unique competitive environment, there is the tendency for individual distributors to offer their opportunity as the best. That’s natural, but how they do that is critical.

“Sadly, most of them only think to accomplish creating the perception of ‘best’ based on their old paradigm values – being the best by putting down the competition. ‘My dog’s better than your dog.’

“That may be fine – when it’s Ford versus GM,” he continued, “or when multi-million-dollar fights for market share are being waged over the TV in the beer battles or cola wars. But when Network Marketing distributors put down other companies, they’re also putting down the industry as a whole.

“What happens then – and remember, we are the ‘word-of-mouth’ business – is that there’s this growing communication out there in the world about how bad this company is, and that company is, and this other company is.

“You want to hear an amazing statistic?” he asked.

I nodded yes.

“For every positive piece of word-of-mouth consumers pass around, there are 11 negative comments being shuttled about. Just think about that for a moment: for every positive thing that’s said about you, your company or product, there are 11 negative things being said. Geometric progression works! – for us and against us, too. Soon, those 11 negatives become 22, then 44, and all the way up into the hundreds of thousands, as one person shares how bad Network Marketing is with another, and they tell five, and they tell five, etcetera.

“Do you see where I’m going with all of this?” he asked.

I did, and it was beginning to make me uncomfortable.

I remembered all the times I had told some prospect why he or she didn’t want to get involved with this other company or that one . . . that my company was really the only good Network Marketing company, the only one doing it right.

It had never occurred to me that this person might be thinking, “Why would I want to be involved in an industry where every company but one markets mediocre products, has an unfair compensation plan and treats their people poorly?!”

In fact, I was now beginning to feel a good-sized chunk of regret for all that negative talk I’d put out into the world.

“I see you know what I’m talking about,” he said, obviously noticing my somber expression. “We all – every single Networking distributor – have the responsibility to ‘sell’ our industry itself, as well as our individual products and opportunity.

“Do you think it’s the media who’s responsible for the bad press about Network Marketing?” he asked.

“I did until this morning. Now, I think we are, all of us – I am,” I answered ruefully.

“Yup,” he said. “We are. Each one of us.

“Network Marketing is the ultimate in freedom,” he continued, “the freest of all free enterprise. That’s the front side. The back – the other side of the coin – is responsibility.

“Network Marketing is truly the responsibility business. We get paid for taking responsibility. The more of it we take on, the more we get paid. That’s what the word ‘sponsor’ means – being responsible for the people you bring into the business.

“When you are responsible for an organization of thousands of people, you earn a lot of money. Which is great. That’s as it should be.

“Now here’s something interesting.” He stopped pacing, sat back down directly across from me and leaned forward.

“Right now, you are concerned with your survival in this business, with your responsibility for creating your own success – true?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Okay. Now, what would be different if you were concerned about the success of the entire industry? If that were your responsibility?”

“Oh, wow . . . ” I said, looking up at the ceiling. I brought my eyes back down and said, “Well, I probably wouldn’t spend as much time focused on myself, that’s for sure.”

“What would you spend your time focused on?” he asked.

“Making sure people knew the good news about Network Marketing and thought really well of us. Getting the word out. Helping people understand how great this is. Getting rid of abuses in the industry – you know, front-loading and crazy earnings claims. Things like that,” I said.

“Would you be at all concerned about whether somebody said ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to trying your products or joining your opportunity?”

“No. I wouldn’t.”

“And would that allow you to approach building your business differently than the way you’ve been doing it?”

“Yeah. It really would,” I said. Boy, this was interesting! I actually experienced what people mean when they talk about seeing the light. I’d just seen it.

“I got it!” I exclaimed. “By taking my focus and attention off myself, and putting it on something bigger, much bigger, the problems I now think are big get smaller – immediately. They seem so simple now. I don’t care about them anymore.”

“Bingo!” he said. “Success Secret Number Thirty-Six Revealed . . . ” and he laughed. “Have a goal bigger than you are. The bigger the better. That way, you don’t have time to sweat the small stuff. And the bigger your goal, the more everything else becomes small stuff . . .”

He brought his hands together and touched the tips of his fingers to his lips thoughtfully, taking a long breath and letting it out.

“Boy, I really got off into that one.” He sat back into the couch and took a long taste of his tea. “Do you remember where we were before I got started on all of that?

“– Oh, I know,” he said, interrupting himself. “You asked about the book Coaching Kids . . . and how come I recommended it as a good book on Network Marketing. Isn’t it nice to have a memory?” He seemed amused by his own question, which was clearly rhetorical.

“Early on,” he said, “I began to look for the knowledge in places outside of traditional or conventional business, because I knew how unique Network Marketing really was. I was searching for some specific new material about how to teach and train my Network. That’s how I discovered what kids’ sports had to teach us about building a Networking business.

“Here,” he said, gesturing for me to hand him the Coaching . . . book, which was in front of me on the table. “Let me read you something.”

I handed him the book, and he turned a couple of pages and began reading aloud.

We believe that the objects of youth sports on all levels are fun, learning, individual development, and winning – in that order.

We make no secret of our feeling that the most important part of your job as coach is to make sure your squad has fun; the second most important part is to teach them all you can; the third, to make sure they develop as individuals and members of a team; and fourth, to win when you can.

We’re not suggesting that you overlook the importance of succeeding and winning – the coach who forgets to encourage the kids to strive as hard as they can to win is cheating his team. But learning to enjoy the game is more important.

He put the book down and set his eyes on mine in that intense way of his.

“That’s a perfect description of the role of the Sponsor in Network Marketing,” he said. “It’s another example of how different this business is from conventional enterprises.

“Number one – to coach your people to have fun. Number two – to teach them the skills they need to succeed. Three – to help them develop and grow, first as individuals, then as members of a team. And number four – to win . . . when you can.

“And I promise you,” he said earnestly, “if you do one, two and three, then you will always win – always.”

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Click here to read: Chapter 6: Teaching Kids Teaching