The #1 reason Robert Kiyosaki recommends network marketing is for its system of education. Important real life business subjects like developing an attitude of success, leadership skills, communication skills, people skills, just to name a few.
The one area we tend to forget or gloss over is personal development and developing the right attitude. So many of us get into a network marketing business and just expect it to happen. We forget that the leaders once sat in the chairs we are now sitting in. To get where they are now they had to undergo a change…personal change. They had to become the best person they could be. We go to a conference and get all fired up and come home and start telling anybody and everybody about our great opportunity. We forget that we don’t have the skill set that our leaders have. We get so focused on business development that we forget that to be successful at business on the right side of Kiyosaki’s quadrant we need to develop personally as well.
A mentor of mine said:“You can only grow professionally as much as you are willing to grow personally” -Jan Janzen
When I first got into network marketing I was shown a diagram:
A_______________B________C
A is where you start and C is when you have a successful business. The B can fall anywhere on that line. It could be 2 weeks, 2 months, 2 years or quite frankly never. The journey from A to B is the 6″ between your ears. Personal development skills are a big part of this equation. Some people come to this industry with these skills; most do not. These are not sales skills I’m talking about; in fact salespeople often do not do well whereas teachers shine. The beauty of this is these skills can be learned and are taught by many of the companies that Kiyosaki endorses. Read Cashflow Quadrant Chapter 4.
Kiyosaki also says that the only difference between the 95% and the 5% is the way they think. How do you make that transition from the left side of the quadrant to the right side of the quadrant. How do we change our thinking? Books, CDs, webinars. Think it’s expensive? Many of us, myself included went to university and didn’t care about how much the school made on us; we wanted the education. Yet time and time again I’ve been asked if the leaders are making money from the books and CDs. Quite frankly I didn’t care. If someone was going to teach me how to escape the rat race I was all ears. I subscribe to the J.Paul Getty philosophy of preferring to get paid 1% of 100 people’s efforts rather than get paid on 100% of my sole effort. We expect the professors to get how internet changed education a salary and we even buy books written by them; yet we are skeptical to learn from 5 figurers. Go figure.
It’s curious to me that we dish out thousands of dollars on university where there is absolutely no guarantee of success or of a job. Today young people graduating with degrees are thousands of dollars in debt. I heard some examples of Harvard grads being one hundred thousand dollars in debt! How many years will it take them to pay that off? How many years will it take just for them to break even? If this were a horse race and our children were out of the start gate after graduation how many of them wouldn’t be anywhere near the start line let alone in the race? Now don’t get me wrong here. I’m not saying a university education is not important, I’m just saying make sure you go for the right reasons. We see the rich send their children to university so we make the assumption that that is what we need to do to become rich. WRONG. The rich send their children to university for the education not to get a safe secure job. The rich also teach their children how to leverage themselves by owning a ‘B’ Quadrant business.(if you don’t know what a ‘B’ quadrant business is read p.4 of Cashflow Quadrant. Kiyosaki’s buckets of water story was a life changing Oprah light bulb moment for me.) University is just one component not the be all end all.For more of my thoughts on education you can read my hubpage on Thomas Friedman.