When you have a personality like mine, you tend to attract a certain type of person. The recruiter type. All for good reason too. After all, I'm a cheerleader, a moral booster and optimist.
Shortly after high school I was approached by a complete stranger who wanted me to sell ad space for those little papers they used to stick to the top of pizza boxes. He convinced me that I was going to be raking in the dough from town to town in no time. My parents were fuming but I was a hard headed know it all at 18. About a dozen or so retail office door to door visits shortly after sobered me up to the realities real quick and I never got a dime.
A few months later, my parents still on my case to get a job, I found myself in a hotel conference room before a sales pitch about the newest water filtration phenomenon that was about to 'revolutionize the marketplace'. You can bet your rear end they wanted me to sign up that night and that night only for this ground floor opportunity. I had no money for their stupid starter kit. The over zealous presenter who was jumping all over the place like he was completely coked up was the biggest turn off. There were people all around me like blood sucking vampires telling me how great this thing was. I'm sure they were planted there.
A few years later I was introduced to the world of Amway. No, I'm not pitching Amway anymore. I was in this business for about 5 years. I did little with it in regards to sales. I just got fed up with being a punching bag for society. There was a generation before me that had made a bad name for the company. I just wasn't mature enough to deal with that at 21 years old. Meanwhile, all of my friends were out living it up or going to college.
If my bubbly personality wasn't already enough to attract people, as soon as people knew I was an Amway distributor most either disowned me or wanted to pitch another MLM to me. It was always the same thing, "Just like Amway only better." They never were better, usually illegal and gone within a year. I heard it all, gold coins, wholesale memberships, discount vouchers, vitamins, and just flat out cash changing hands.
Later Amway started calling themselves Quixstar and IBO's which just made it feel like they were compromising to improve their public face. This only gave people more ammunition to throw at me. After all of that I just washed my hands of all MLMs. Amway is a great vehicle but I was not effective in it.
It is very important for me to stress how much wealth of information I got out of the Continuing Education portion of that business ran by Dexter Yager (I met him one on one my final year in the business. A story for another time.). The entire 5 years that I was in this business I devoured hundreds of hours of audio and video of success stories from millionaires and the top world motivational teachers. I read all of the book-of-the-months I could get my hands on. I attended scores and scores of weekend events, rallies, seminars and functions from Texas, Missouri, Florida, Oklahoma, you name it.
I have used just about every skill I learned in the Amway business and I continue to pass that hope on to others.
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