A friend of mind pointed out the obvious today, and I have to have my say. 

Every network marketing blog on the planet talks about dreams, goals, action plans, daily method of operation.  And I will blog about those too.

But today, let me just echo my friend Theo Jansen at http://seaim.com/blog/   He has absolutely hit the nail on the head about imagination.

Let me explain my take on this.  I’m tempted to say “There are two kinds of people in the world:  those who feel free to use their imagination and those who don’t.”  Everyone has imagination.  It’s a God-given instinct.

Here’s how it works for me.  I have ideas all the time.  If I don’t pay attention to them, they go away.  If I pay attention, write them down, expand on them, they expand and develop in my mind. 

When I was a child, I daydreamed at school (and at home too) where I was penalized for it.  Fortunately for me, the penalties didn’t deter me from allowing my imagination to function.  Over the years, it has ebbed and flowed, but never disappeared entirely.

There are two kinds of imagination.  One leads to fun and profit, and the other leads to misery and paralysis.  Albert Einstein wrote, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”   Jane Austen wrote, “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.  I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can.”

Let’s follow their lead.  Here’s why:  those positive thoughts give your mind and body energy (chemically speaking).  That is the first reason why they are important.  The second reason follows the first:  positive thoughts lead to more positive thoughts.  This is the stuff dreams are built of.

So to boil it down, notice your thoughts.  Get the positive ones on paper.  Don’t censor them.  Reject the negative ones.  Follow up on the best ideas, and soon you will be having fun and making a profit!

Thanks to Theo, Albert and Jane, and to all those wonderful people who have gone before me.  I’m standing on their shoulders.

Well, relax.  You don’t have to.  I have found a marketing system that does it all.  I’m not saying sit on your courch and do nothing and this will make you a ton of money, although that will eventually happen.  What it will do is show you how to make that happen and teach you the steps in a very hands-on way.  Click here now: 

TryEdge.com/patbalvanz

I never understood people who wanted or decided to be hermits.  Every once in a while you read about a hermit who was horribly unbalanced—mentally ill maybe.  Ted Kaczinski comes to mind.  Of course there was Henry David Thoreau, who decided to live in a cabin in the woods by himself.  He wrote a lot. 

I don’t know about you, but I am totally unsuited for that kind of life.  I want relationship, relatedness, connection to other people.  And I believe this is normal. 

What does this have to do with business, you ask?  Here is the simple truth.  If you want to have a successful business, you need people—partners, mentors, suppliers, advisors, and customers, lots of customers.  No one told me this in my youth.   Not until I got into the networking business did anyone mention that relationships are crucial

It may seem too obvious to mention, but there are ramifications that aren’t apparent at first.  For example, I am learning to be nicer and pay more attention to people I don’t know—even other drivers.  I feel good about being at least tolerant of an inattentive or rude driver, even if he or she isn’t nice to me. 

So, partially, doing business is about feeling good about yourself, through relationship to others.  Am I making any sense here?  And why am I harping on this?  Because, friends, if you want to be more successful in the networking business, or any other business, you must learn to be more successful in relationships.  

That’s where mentors, trainers and teachers come in.  That’s why we ask you to start or continue a program of personal development.  That’s why we listen and learn from those who have gone before us, as well as our business partners and customers.  We value and add value to others.  

And the best part in network marketing is, you can earn while you learn.  I intend to keep on learning until the end.  How about you?

I’ve been working in various home based businesses since the 1970′s.  I’ve joined and left more companies than I can recall.   I classify them into two types:  First Generation and Second Generation. 

The first generation types are still around, and they do work for some people.  I’m not one of them.  The basic idea is that you recruit a lot of people to buy products and you get paid a small residual commission as long as your recruits (and their recruits, and their recruits, etc) continue to buy the products.  This process continues  for several “levels”.  Thus the phrase “Multilevel Marketing” or MLM for short.

The second generation companies that are starting to emerge have IMHO improved substantially on the concept.  For example, building a multi-company strategy; utilizing the internet (usually to a very great extent); actually lowering prices to offer true discounts; eliminating the hated cutoff of commissions based on quotas and levels, to name a few improvements. 

What I am saying is that, with the array of companies to choose from, you want to be aware of the evolution of the industry.  Now is a great time to be part of a networking company.  You can’t depend on a pension to be there for you; you certainly can’t depend on a company to take care of you from start to finish, even if you choose to stay with them for your entire career; and you can’t predict with any degree of accuracy what inflation and the vagaries of the market will do to your nestegg, if you even have one.

There’s a lot to learn, but you can learn on the job, so to speak.  There are a number of tools that will help you in your quest.  I’ll cover a few in my next post.

Until then, here’s to your success!

I could grow very philosophical about networking, the subject of this blog.  I believe the whole world is networked in a way.  We can’t live independently any more, if we ever could.  We need each other for actual survival, and for lots more reasons besides. 

Networking is supposed to be fun.  It is fun!  It’s also highly profitable.  Why?  Because all the money you will ever get will come from someone else.  So if you care about people, help them, cherish them, they will reciprocate.  That is human nature.

So you want to be rich?  Zig Ziglar said it first:  ”You can have everything in life that you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”  Notice he says “other people”.  And he says “help”.  That’s what we are here for, folks, to help other people.  It’s in every religion in the world.  I really don’t try to understand it.  I just know it’s true, it feels good, and incidentally, it pays off.

Stay tuned, folks.  We have a job to do, we can do it, and it is huge!

Thanks for checking out my blog.  I hope we become very good friends, maybe even business partners, over the next several weeks as you continue to read my posts.  Right now we are gearing up for some exciting announcements.  Meanwhile, when I find something useful, or free, or just something interesting, I will pass it along.  Stay tuned!