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I used part of the stock to secure a home construction loan of about $2 million for a dream house I was building. As for the rest, I didn’t diversify because I knew the company was in great shape with a good product and an amazing sales force.

Then something out of my control happened. Overnight the stock went to $37 a share because a group of investors had targeted the company and shorted the stock. In other words, the lower the stock price went, the more money they would make.

I thought it was ridiculous because the company was doing great, so I bought some more shares at $37, using my existing shares as collateral, knowing the price would go back up. It went to $33. I bought more shares. It went to $27. I started getting margin calls, which meant if I didn’t send them money, they were going to start selling my shares to cover the losses. I didn’t have it to send.

The stock continued to go down. It went all the way to $10 a share and my $7.5 million was gone. Poof! All in less than 90 days. Now, the stock eventually came back and the company was taken private for $65 a share. But I wasn’t there to capitalize on it. I was wiped out.

Could I have been smarter? Sure. Did I make mistakes? Absolutely. But here’s the lesson: If you’re going to be an investor, you have to accept that things will be taken out of your control from time to time. And when that happens, it can be very expensive.

So, back to our Perfect Career List. Can being an investor deliver on that list? I don’t think so.

We’ve talked about blue-collar work, white-collar work, sales, traditional business ownership, and investing. And none of them can deliver on our Perfect Career List. So is the perfect career even possible? The answer is yes, but to get there you need to understand that everything is changing. The old models of compensation are dead or dying, and we are going through the biggest economic shift in any of our lifetimes.

The NEW Economy

The world as you know it has changed. For the people who don’t recognize that fact, it will be the worst of times. For the people who do, it will be the best of times.

Over the last 100 years, an interesting phenomenon occurred. The rise of the corporation became the standard in society. The safe and respected place for people to exist in the workplace was as an employee.

Step one:
Go to school to learn how to be an employee.

Step two:
Find a company that will employ you.

Step three:
Work for that company for 40 years.

Step four:
Retire.

In recent decades, the promise of being rewarded by the company for your loyalty and hard work has been exposed as a myth. People began to realize the loyalty they were giving to their company was not being given in return. So a different process evolved.

Step one:
Go to school to learn to be an employee.

Step two:
Find a company that will employ you.

Step three:
Switch companies for various political and economic reasons every three to five years over the course of your career.

Step four:
Find that you can’t retire comfortably after 40 years, so you keep working.

And now we are going through the biggest shift in any of our lifetimes. For a century, companies have paid people by the hour, by the week, or by the year. That’s changing on a global level.

The world is moving toward to a performance economy. And it’s already happening. Here’s what that means: In the future, you’re only going to be paid for performance. You won’t be paid for your time anymore. Servers in the food industry already live in this model. They get a very low hourly wage required by law and they make their living through tips, based on their performance.

If you can imagine the same model being applied to virtually every job in the world, you will see what is coming. The person cleaning the rooms in a hotel won’t be paid by the hour anymore. They’ll be paid per room.

For office workers, here’s an example.

A person has a $60,000 annual salary.

Step one:
The company will lower that salary to something like $50,000 because with today’s marketplace there are other people to take the job for a lower amount.

Step two:
They will reduce their “base” salary to something like $20,000 a year.

Step three:
They will tell that person that they can get an additional $30,000 over the year if they hit certain performance benchmarks on a monthly basis.

In other words, if they hit their numbers, they can make an additional $2,500 a month. Now the pressure is on, and the company is loving it. If you don’t hit your numbers they can save even more money. If you DO hit your numbers, guess what’s in your future? They are going to raise your requirements.

Unless you are extremely specialized, this will happen to you if it hasn’t already. Count on it. And it will happen in every single profession worldwide. The evolution has begun.

Why is this happening? One, it’s a better model for the company. They’ll get better results with less expense. Two, the New Economy needs fewer people, so the company has more people competing for fewer and fewer jobs.

Let me explain why the New Economy needs fewer people. The exponential rise of technology has changed everything. Over 100 years ago, 90% of the population worked in agriculture. Today, because of dramatic efficiencies, it’s less than 1%, and the farming jobs are gone.

Remember customer service call centers where you talked to people? Today, you talk to a machine and those jobs are gone. Remember when companies had a massive amount of salespeople? Now people order online and those sales jobs are gone. Remember Blockbuster video and all of its employees? Now people watch movies on their handheld or tablet devices, and those jobs are gone. I love books, but go to your local bookstore while you can. They will be history soon, and so will the jobs provided by those stores.

I could go on and on through virtually every work category in the world. Technology and efficiency are eliminating jobs every single day, and there is nothing we can do to stop it. In fact, it’s only going to accelerate. If you are sitting there waiting for the economy to bounce back and for jobs to return, don’t. They aren’t coming back.

Just like the children of farmers saw the handwriting on the wall and left farming for new vocations, the same thing is happening for people working in Old Economy jobs. To survive, they’ll need to open their eyes to this reality and find something new.

Network Marketing is BETTER

The best way I know to not only survive, but to thrive in the New Economy, is Network Marketing. There are important products and services in the world today that need to be promoted to the people who need them. Consumers still need to be educated.

Companies have choices. They can dive into the ever-fragmented world of advertising to get the word out, they can hire a large and expensive sales force to sell their products or services, or they can utilize Network Marketing to tell their story to the world.

More and more companies will choose to use Network Marketing because it fits the New Economy. They can provide all the corporate support and pay distributors on a purely performance basis to promote their products. It’s extremely efficient because in the New Economy, word-of-mouth advertising continues to work better than any other form of promotion. The company can just take the money they would have spent on advertising and promotion and pay it to their distributors to spread the word.

What that means for you as an entrepreneur is that you can receive all the benefits of traditional business ownership without the typical risks. And there will be no cap on your income, because Network Marketing companies WANT you to make as much as possible. If you’re going to be paid for performance anyway, why live with the cap?

The “Catch” To Network Marketing

This all sounds great and it is. But there is a catch that most people won’t tell you. Here it is:

You must accept a temporary loss of social esteem from ignorant people.

That means for a while, people still living in and trying to function in the old system will think less of you. They won’t understand. They’ll think you’re crazy for being involved in Network Marketing.

And actually, the word “accept” isn’t completely accurate. You need to do more than that. You need to embrace the temporary loss of social esteem from ignorant people. YOU are seeing the future before it becomes apparent to everyone else. YOU are the smart one. YOU are the person taking action to live a better life.

There is a reason why people will think less of you, and it’s not just because they are stuck in the old system. Let me see if I can help you better understand this, because if you decide to make Network Marketing your profession, it’s important to know.

Most people have either joined a Network Marketing company or know someone who has. This is what goes through the mind of virtually every person who decides to get involved. “Hmm, I can think of five or six people who might do this too! My sister would be great! My friend loves this kind of thing. I know this other person who could be amazing! Okay, I’ll join.”

In other words, they aren’t joining a profession. They’re just hoping to get lucky, sign up a few people to cover their own start-up costs, and sit back and wait for the money to roll in. The allure of being paid for someone else’s efforts is powerful, but often badly misunderstood.

They haven’t started a real business. They just purchased a glorified lottery ticket. Imagine a lottery ticket with six scratch-off spots. Those spots represent each of the people the new person thinks will certainly join. They approach those people and try to get them to join. And because of their lack of skill, most of them end up with nothing—just like the lottery ticket. This becomes just another lost opportunity, and since they have acted in unskilled ignorance, they may have damaged some friendships as well.

So they rip up the ticket, and instead of taking responsibility for not really starting their business, they blame Network Marketing and make sure to tell the world, “Look, I’ve been there. I’ve done it. I talked to every person I know, and Network Marketing just doesn’t work. Save your money.”

THAT’S what you’re dealing with if you choose this as a profession—the opinions of ignorant people who think they’ve done it right and it doesn’t work. If that’s going to be too hard to handle, then Network Marketing isn’t for you. But if you can embrace it, the world is yours.

The people who embrace this get paid BIG money. Companies will pay unlimited amounts to people who can help blind people see, who can educate the ignorant, and who can build a community of like-minded people.

Some people like to say, “Perception is reality.” I hate that saying. All great leaders in the world have ignored it for centuries. What if Nelson Mandela had said perception is reality? What if Martin Luther King Jr. had said perception is reality? What if Steve Jobs had said perception is reality? The great leaders of the world said, “Reality is reality, and I’m going to do everything possible to help people understand that fact.”

The truth is, Network Marketing isn’t perfect. It’s just BETTER. And that’s reality!

CHAPTER TWO

If You’re Going to be Involved in Network Marketing, Decide to be a Professional. Decide to Go Pro.

There are three categories of people in Network Marketing. I’ve seen all of them and I’ve been all of them. They are the Posers, the Amateurs, and the Professionals.

Posers

Posers treat this profession as a lottery ticket. They’re hoping to hit it big with as little effort as possible. When I first started out, I was a Poser, hoping to ride on my dad and his partner’s coattails. Luckily for me, I got some results and that kept me going, at least in the short-term. But I think you can agree with me that remaining in the Poser category is a bad idea. Within about 90 days I moved out of that category and became an Amateur.

Amateurs

Amateurs focus on different things. One of the things I continued to focus on as an amateur was luck. I was really hoping to get lucky and sign that monster distributor who was going to make me rich. We’ve all heard the stories of some person who had their lives completely changed by one sign-up. In reality, even if some of those stories are true, it really doesn’t serve our profession very well, because it makes people spend their time hoping for that big hit.