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O U R T H G E N E R A T I O N T H I N K I N G The chart below traces a fairly typical career path in our society. Understanding this context — how and why it happens — highlights both the similarities and differences between Network Marketing and conventional businesses.
The continuum — the large red arrow reaching from bottom to top — represents the balanced path — the ideal. Like so many contexts, it’s a nice theory, but it rarely happens quite like this in real life.
Everything to the left of the continuum (red arrow) is bestowed or endowed on us at birth. We either have these things or we don’t. We can’t acquire them, so they can’t be bought, sold, learned, taught, loaned, borrowed or stolen.
Everything to the right of the continuum is acquired. We can obtain them, usually in exchange for something else of use to us.
Each of us has various resources which we use in our lives. Two key resources are leverage and mediums of exchange. Let’s consider them briefly.Leverage
Leverage is what we use to gain the maximum output from the minimum input. Each form of leverage reduces the effort needed to obtain a greater result.
As human beings, we have two forms of leverage: bestowed and acquired.
The bestowed forms are the ones we’re born with. Like all bestowed or endowed resources, they are not able to be learned or acquired. The three bestowed forms of leverage are gifts, talents and abilities.
The acquired forms are knowledge, attitudes and skills. These can be learned, so they can also be taught. They’re of immense benefit in Multi-Level Marketing because of this. They can be duplicated.
We use our leverage to increase the results possible from our other resources — especially our mediums of exchange.
The only use our mediums of exchange have is to enhance the benefits from all our other resources. If they’re unable to achieve that, they’re useless to us. Before we go any further, though, let’s spell out exactly what our resources are. Here they are (not in any order of priority or importance)…Your Resources
- Your body (physical health, the ability to operate in the physical world).
- Your mind (capture, storage, retrieval and correlation of information in order to solve problems — in other words, creativity).
- Your spirit or psyche (it doesn’t matter what you call this dimension of your persona. It exists separately from the mind as we’ve defined it above. This is where altruism, integrity, honour, intuition, self-esteem and other higher attributes are centred).
- Your relationships (the most important of all resources, because good relationships will offset any deficiencies in your other resources. This is where your emotional well-being is centred).
- Your possessions (which enhance your other resources).
- Your leverage (two forms — bestowed and acquired — as we’ve already discussed).
- Your mediums of exchange.
Mediums of Exchange
Just like leverage, there are two forms of mediums of exchange — bestowed and acquired.
The bestowed medium of exchange is time. It’s the only resource that all human beings have in common: that is, 24 hours every day. No more, no less. Sure, we all may have different totals of days in our lives, but on any given day we all have exactly the same number of hours, minutes and seconds.
The only benefit of time is to enhance our other resources. It allows us to use and enjoy our bodies, minds, spirits, relationships, possessions, leverage and money. Without time, none of these would have any real meaning.
The acquired medium of exchange is money.
Like time, its only real benefit is to enhance our other resources, and our enjoyment of the benefits they offer.
These mediums of exchange are freely interchangeable. They can be exchanged for each other. It’s the basis of almost all employment, in fact. We exchange our time for money and vice versa. In fact, we have an everyday saying: “Time is money.”
So let’s follow the classic “Career Path” and see where it leads us. Note that we begin at the bottom and rise upward. Notice that there are actually FOUR Generations through which we pass? FREEDOM is the Fourth Generation… the breakthrough.Dependence
We begin life totally dependent on other people for everything. We have no money or possessions of our own. Knowledge, attitudes and skills are virtually non-existent. We have gifts, talents and abilities, but they’re as yet unidentified and undeveloped. We also have plenty of time. Our other resources are all undeveloped.
During the first 20 years or so of our lives we use our abundance of time — and other peoples’ money (usually our parents’) — to acquire knowledge, attitudes and skills, and to identify and develop our gifts, talents and abilities. Stage 1 of the process is called learning. It takes many forms, from formal schooling to practical experience. This stage is represented by dotted line 1 on the chart.Independence
By the time we complete our education, whether it’s with a formal qualification such as a degree, diploma, trade certificate, apprenticeship or other career preparation, we’re usually in our late teens or early twenties. We now have the knowledge, attitudes and skills needed to be independent. We have strengths. We’ve enhanced all of these resources with our natural gifts, talents and abilities, too. And we’ve formed a network of relationships. This is often the time when we begin choosing our life-partners.
At this point, we’re way out in left field, at position A on the chart. We have all the time in the world, and plenty of resources (including leverage), but we have very little money. So we begin correcting this imbalance in our lives by trading our time and resources for money — usually by climbing onto the employment treadmill. We enter the Rat Race. We take a job, and enter stage 2 of the process… earning.
As we apply our training and resources, and acquire more specialised knowledge, attitudes and skills, we become more useful to our employers. As we prove our ability to master challenges, usually through delegated assignments, we increase our own control over the source of the money through promotion.
By the time we reach this point (B) the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme. We’re way out in right field. We now control the money, because we either own or manage the source of the money — the enterprise itself.
This is the classic business “Success Story.” Congratulations!
But is it true success? Let’s look at what’s really happened.
- You’re now working 80—100 hours a week. You have no time any more.
- Your physical health has deteriorated. You’re stressed. You drink and smoke too much, trying to relieve the tension. It doesn’t work (because you’re only dealing with the symptoms.) Your ulcer plays up continually. You have trouble sleeping. You succumb easily to any illness that comes along. You’re constantly irritable, frustrated and miserable. You’re about ready for a major mid-life crisis.
- Your memory begins to deteriorate, and your ability to think creatively is impaired. “Executive Burnout” is looming.
- Your business practices begin to nag at you. Your ethics and integrity are pretty thin, so your self-esteem (the direct effect of integrity) wanes dramatically. Doing the right things for the wrong reasons, or the wrong things for the right reasons — “the end justifies the means” — somehow doesn’t seem so clever any more. Besides, deceit requires a good memory, and yours is far from reliable, so you find yourself caught, more and more, in your own web of lies and half-truths.
- Your relationships, especially family relationships, are looking decidedly shaky. You may have already grown so far apart that the only common ground between you and your partner is the children — whom you really don’t know, either. At the office, your colleagues fear you or plot against you. Your competitors are ready to shaft you at any time, and there’s no-one you can really trust.
- You still have your possessions — unless they’ve been lost in a messy, traumatic divorce settlement. But they give you little joy.
- You still have leverage, although you may have abused your gifts, talents and abilities over the years, and your knowledge and skills have focused more and more on less and less as you become increasingly specialised in your roles. Your attitudes aren’t too healthy, either.
- But you do have money. Lots of it. Unless, like your possessions, you’ve lost most of it through marriage break-up.
The irony is, of course, that what we said at the start of this section still holds true:
“The only use our mediums of exchange have is to enhance the benefits from our other resources.”
The question is… what other resources?
You’ve lost or destroyed most of them in the single-minded pursuit of money — a mere medium of exchange! It’s the ultimate twist in the plot, because you lost the plot, long ago.
You’ve blown it. And this is what we all admire as “success”?
Scary, isn’t it?
Because it’s so familiar!
But all isn’t necessarily lost. If we can accept the reality of our situation, and accept responsibility for our own plight, such a positive attitude can help us retrieve some semblance of balance. We now enter stage 3 of the process… yearning.Interdependence
By wise use of our money and experience (our only real remaining resources), we can find and train people with the time, knowledge, attitudes, skills, gifts, talents and abilities — and the need for more money — to whom we can delegate some of our roles and responsibilities. When they prove their reliability, we can give them greater control over the enterprise, while still retaining ultimate control ourselves. These are people who are at position A on their own Career Paths (see diagram). If our attitude is right, and we’ve learned from our own disastrous experiences, we can install safeguards to prevent a repeat of our own follies in our key people.
By making them effectively independent operators, and allowing them to interact with ourselves and their colleagues in synergistic fashion, focusing them on solutions and creating results, we have achieved true interdependence.
When we function in this kind of relationship, based on personal integrity and mutual trust and respect, we achieve that fine balance where we have control over our time, our money, our relationships, our health and all other resources.
When we’ve achieved this degree of personal control and balance, we’re truly free.
Unfortunately, this rarely happens in the real world. Or else it happens so late in our lives that we’re left with few remaining days, poor physical health, and perhaps no partner with whom to enjoy it. (We call this stage the booby prize… burning and churning.)
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could achieve this kind of balance, this degree of control over all our resources (and our lives) much earlier? Without having to go through all the heartache and frustration of the traditional “Career Path”?Imagine what it would be like if we could sever all connection between our time and our money and complete the process in a fraction of the time.
The truth is… we can!
©1998 The Profit Clinic. All rights reserved. This page updated 1 October 2005.
