Get rich slow. Or go nowhere fast

You’ve seen the promises.

“An MLM millionaire in two years”

“100 days to Gold Distributor”

“$10,000 a month working part-time”

Do you believe them?

Many of these carrots are dangled by snake oil salesmen – people who see network marketers as suckers who’ll buy their “failsafe” get-rich-quick secrets because they are desperate to create better lives for themselves and their families.

These “failsafe” get-rich-quick programs don’t work, but the creators don’t care because there’s a constant stream of victims with their credit cards ready.

Even respected MLM companies make appealing promises like these. They tell new distributors they can attain Gold Agent or Star Ambassador level in 3 or 4 months. And maybe it’s possible to achieve this – but not for 99% of people getting into network marketing.

I have no doubt that the MLM companies making these promises believe they’ll incentivise new distributors this way. “Look how easy it is to earn a great income with us.”

The trouble is that in most cases such promises have the opposite effect to the one intended. How?

The promise of rapidly rising through the ranks is tantalising. When the new distributor fails to make any significant progress, he or she gets disheartened. “I must be no good at this.” “They told me it’d be easy. Maybe I’m just not cut out for network marketing.”

OK, it’s not entirely the fault of the MLM company that most fail to attain the rapid success promised. Sometimes, people want the promised results without putting in the massive energy required.

But the real issue is that these get-rich-quick promises defy accepted wisdom.

Experts agree that you need 10,000 hours experience to attain expertise. In anything.

Neurologist Daniel Levitin has done extensive research into the subject of expertise, studying people in all fields. He notes that this 10,000-hour rule holds true whether the study was conducted on classical composers, ice skaters, chess players, basket ballers, novelists or even criminals. “It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”

Even Mozart (regarded as a child prodigy) did not display true mastery until his 9^th Piano Concerto, written at the age of 21 – by which time Mozart had been composing for 10 years.

So, if you devote 1 hour a day, 7 days a week to your MLM business, you will take 27 years to get to the top.

If you work full time on your MLM business – say 40 hours a week – it will take 4.8 years. These are facts.

I don’t care what MLM company you’ve joined, I bet that the distributors at the very top have taken an average of 8 or 9 years to get there. When they stand up at company meetings to tell their inspiring stories, I bet they confess they struggled in the beginning. I have heard some famous leaders say they were lost for 3, 4 or even 5 years. They were working their hearts out and getting nowhere.

So what happened? When did they stop failing and start succeeding?

Their ‘luck’ started to change when they’d worked at network marketing long enough to gain expertise – when they started to approach the 10,000-hour mark.

My advice?

View network marketing as a great long-term career, not a get-rich-quick’ opportunity. The more hours you can afford to work at it, the better you’ll become and the faster you’ll start earning serious residual income.

It’s easy to look at the leaders in an MLM company with a bit of envy. “What a lifestyle she seems to have.” “Lucky guy.”

As Samuel Goldwyn said, “the harder I work, the luckier I get”.

To work out how long you’ll take to become an MLM expert, use the sliding hour/day/year calculator on the RYAC blog.)