You Are What Your Bonus Check Says You Are
So what do you believe in so strongly that you would never compromise for it? When you have that belief in network marketing, you’ll have all the posture you’ll need to be successful.
You’ll never have to argue with anyone, you won’t be defensive on the business, and you’ll prospect with rock-solid confidence.
I’m free. Have been for years. And can’t tell you how many people that ridiculed me when I started the business are still trapped in the Matrix. They live their lives in indentured servitude. They’re worker drones in the collective.
Me? I’m free because I know what I know. And more importantly, it began when I knew what I knew.
I saw those circles and got it. Instantly. The logic was irrefutable. So I went after my dream.
Started and stopped. Faced challenge after challenge. Because doing the business exposed the weaknesses in my character and self-discipline. But the good news was, that could be fixed.
Just as it can for you…
Bill Parcells likes to say about football teams, “You are what your record says you are.” And that’s the truth. In everything. Especially and including network marketing…
Only here we could say, “You are what your bonus check says you are.”
Because we’re in a profession that truly pays us upon performance – what we are really worth. And the good news is, you can always give yourself a raise. By working on yourself.
So how are you doing on that? Please share your thoughts below. Then next post I’ll check in with a deeper look at how that plays out in this amazing profession of ours.
-RG
Dear Mr Gage,
I’m fallowing your blogs. Reading your books. Attending your live tele-seminars.
To my eyes this is by far your best post yet, as we can feel that this one is a special one to you.
Thank you very much for giving so much back to this wonderful profession.
Best regards from Belgium,
Hilli N.
It’s something I adore about MLM: “the business exposed the weaknesses in my character and self-discipline.”
Most places you can hide, avoid, go around it…. But in MLM it’s so glaring… and you have to deal with it to go to the next level.
If one’s success is measured in $$$$$ then this is absolutely true!
I think this is a cop out and a belief that will keep people back. Just as a football team’s record shows the result of their planning, practice, coaching and determination, our bonus checks show us the results of our self-development, self-discipline, work, etc.
It isn’t only about the money, but the money shows the results.
-RG
I must be the one you’re talking about, Randy. I haven’t seen a bonus check in years, I read your newsletters and am starting to pay attention. Equinox folded on me years ago and I have been in limbo ever since.
I understand what you are saying here Randy but I don’t agree with it completely.
I would say “Your Bonus Cheques Would Only Grow To The Level That You Grow”.
Even when you were banging your head against the wall and not making any breakthrough, Randy and earning those teeny weeny cheques, you kept at it until your cheques caught up with you. So while at the time you may have barely made $50 a month, you were not the same as that whinging, moaning neer do well in the same company as you who made $55.
That’s my tupence.
BTW, Thanks Randy for being a great mentor to the MLM industry .
I think if someone haven’t good income then he is definitely not a true professional. May be he is on the road to prosperity, but he is not a pro yet.
And is same time I can not tell you what if someone have big bonus check then he is definitely good leader and mlm pro. I know many people who work on “close” (unopen) markets, use unethics methods of work, or even make business with financial pyramid sphemes and in same time they have 10k+, 30k+ or even more USD per month. (I know one person who have 80k+ per month last year in this way – can you imagine how many people she bunko?)
So does this mark of true prosperity or professionalism? (as one my distriburor said: “Pimp gets more than his prostitute, but does it mark of his true prosperity?”)
And as we told in mathematics: big bonus check is “necessary but insufficient condition” to be a real mlm pro.
I am personally looking also on leader’s *lifestyle*. And if I see man or woman who are completely tired with this business but have good income… he is not a “role model” for me.
My apologies for poor English.
Yes good point. This holds true only for people in legitimate network marketing, not scams.
-RG
So very, very true. But unfortunately Alexander there will always be unethical people in any MLM business. You know the sort that go out of the way to hit on your customers and your areas where you do best. They will do well….for a while. The universe will soon sort them out in the end. So as long as you always are ethical in your everyday work, and believe in yourself and your team, you will always succeed in the end.
Chad Mackenzie UK
The first time I got it, when I saw a system that said, “This would work selling toothpicks.” I knew there was no turning back. For a long time there was no going forward either. Everyone has a different ‘gestation’ period. I forget that sometimes with new people or with people who have not had any success. Until you believe it you cannot see it. What builds belief? That is a conversation to have with others to find out. Most presentations are designed to cover most of what people are looking for. It is much easier if you actually know what is needed for ‘belief’ to kick in. You are much more likely to hit the target if you know what and where it is. Once belief takes hold, it is nearly impossible to not believe. Once you taste an increasing income, belief gives way to knowing it’s so.
I know you’re saying it for some shock value, but there are many people who believe their value as a human being is what their income says it is.
I feel really bad for those people. What an awful way to value yourself and others.
Haven’t you seen “It’s a wonderful life”?
However, if you mean that your value as a distributor to your company is measured in your bonus check, then I can agree with that. Just like any other commodity.
It’s more than that. See my reply to anonymous above.
-RG
“Just as a football team’s record shows the result of their planning, practice, coaching and determination”
AS a football team sure, but NOT as human beings….
“our bonus checks show us the results of our self-development, self-discipline, work, etc. ”
AS a network marketer…
Look, I get it that you’re very successful as a Network Marketer, so you see the world that way, but there are people out there who think that their worth is:
-directly tied to how many chicks they’ve slept with,
-or how their kids do on their math tests,
-or how big their boobs are,
-or whatever else outside of themselves.
As a spiritual seeker (by the way, I’ve been going to UOTB since I’ve been in Miami), I think you’d know that all of these determinations are a trap.
Do you really mean to add “or how big their bonus check is” to that list?
I would agree and add “as a network marketer,” but also note that the person you become determines what kind of network marketer you are.
-RG
Randy – this one really hit home. Posture is critical — I’ve gone from approaching to being approached. Early morning at Starbucks just yesterday, minding my own biz jotting a couple notes in my journal a pair of ladies sitting next to me asked what I did for a living. Now, a couple years ago, I’d mumble my full-time profession and fuddled my way through the Worre “If I…would you” and get it all wrong. I turned, smiled and said, “that is a wonderful question, I’m a founding partner in …”. Though I then asked what made them ask and one of the women said they noted the way I held myself and used a journal the few times they had seen me in the shop. Belief and conviction breeds posture. Well stated Randy, keep us engaged!
That was a wonderful picture you painted.
I know, I am still a little (too) small, as my bonus check tells me. But am working on it. Growing bigger as I am learning all the time.
Thank you Randy.
Kind regards
Stella
Randy,
Your bluntness is awesome. I have more half finished books laying around but after the Mastermind event I have finished 2 books and have IMPLEMENTED what I have learned. I listen to cd’s to and from work everyday over and over again. And yes I strongly believe that our bonus checks are tied to our “record”!
Paul
In general is true. “You are what your bonus check says you are.”
But , more exactly, and philosophically spoken is more correct to state: “Your cheque is what you have performed, not what YOU ARE, because what you are can’t be money, otherwise you could desappear instantly with your bank account in the next financial recession ;-)”.
We aren’t performance, WE DO performance,
To paraphrase:
If you want a professional-level compensation, develop the professional-level mindset. The bonus checks are one quick measure of your company’s assessment of your mindset…Because the thoughts that spurred the actions that generated the results all happened in the past, the money you receive now is generated by your PAST mindset. Keep building your mental skills, courage, and toughness, and the checks will increase, too. There is always a lag between the thoughts and the financial compensation.
The more people you serve and the more you “overdeliver”, the more your checks will increase, too. Professional MLMers serve huge teams of customers and distributors with a generous outlook.
Professional MLMers I admire also behave in integrity and enjoy long-term benefits of their disciplined right actions. The long-term effects expose the truth of one’s mindset.
And regardless of the numbers on your paycheck, your worth as a human being is irrefutably huge, beyond monetary compensation.
Professionals can separate their personal worth from the prospect’s business decisions.
Amateur or developing professionals tend to take the prospect’s reactions personally.
Ouch! But true. My check tells me I’m a ‘hobbyist’ when I really want this to be a main income stream. The truth is, I need to work a lot smarter, not harder. I need to bust through my ‘paper wall’ and conquer my silly fears (the phone!!). Baby steps, but onward!
As you say it is true with any profession – our records tell the truth. And this business certainly indicates to each and every one of us where we really are as professionals in the field.
I have worked in corporate MLM for 10 years and have seen the top distributors on stage saying their income when their income was no longer at that level. They suffered internally more than anyone can know as they knew they were not what they said they were in public. And some were in denial.
It doesn’t matter if they were nice, great people or great trainers. The bottom line is, they weren’t “walking the talk.” Perhaps at one point they were but they stopped growing when they started to get the checks. And the checks started to match their growth. Mark Hughes always said you need to put more “sweat on your forehead.”
Being a good person doesn’t mean we are instantly qualified as a successful network marketing professional, We grow as our check grows. It’s a hard truth and true indication of how well we are really doing in this business.
Being a distributor myself for 4 years now, I now know the true meaning of what you posted here today. We are what our records show and that true internal confidence comes from when you start reaping the results of your work.
While I understand that in NM, the more money you make, the more people you are helping, It is does not necessarily bring you sucess. As you are in Brazil, You can go see where 25% of the population lives in the favellas,I can see a religious person following his heart and teaching them how to read and make themselves better without making money.
Or a teacher who goes to teach in the Mississippi Delta region in the United States. She is breaks the cycle of poverty and neglect through education.
Or a doctor who saves a life by doing an operation and making money in a linear way.
In the West, we confuse success with making money.
If money was the stickyard by which you define success then we wouldn’t have Monet as a painter,Mozart as musician,Maya Angelo as a writer.
I guess Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King would be failures because they not become their millionaries of their time.
I think Monet, Mozart, Angelo, Lincoln and King all were great successes, because their body of work shows who they were/are.
-RG
Did their success reflect in their monthly cheque at that time though? (Not being tricky here – genuinely interested because I know many artists were only recognized hundreds of years after their death)
And the truth is they never “died”. They were just glitching in to THIS physical reality with parts of who they are, as we are all doing right here and now. And believe it or not, Monet and Mozart practiced A LOT before they became that good. A LOT! And some famous people are or were actually “manipulated” into position.
What really makes me happy first of all is when people are mentally and physically healthy, because from there everything is possible, whatever they choose to do and regardless of current bonus checks.
You Are What Your Bonus Check Says You Are.
It says I don’t know how to make money in NM. it says I have some limiting belifes I need to change before I can be succesful or make money in the industry.
It says the following:
1)I need to learn how to talk to people and invite.
2)I need to learn how to make good presentations
3)I need to learn the 4 levels of duplication
4)I need to learn how to counsel people when they hit an obstacle.
5)I need to learn about culture building.
It says what I was told 13 years ago about NM was lie. I was told that I need it to sponsor 4 people which I did, and my business would explode in a geometric mathetical projection.
It says I need to learn how to listen.
Randy:
Since You already climbed the mountain, I want to climb. Are there other skills I need to learn?
thanks
Sounds like you are on a good path to success now.
-RG
A friend told me… For a lot of people $ = success. True success is living life on your terms.
Success is equil to what you believe it to be.
Jamie
It’s not much fun to hear but of course it is true in terms of how much value you are moving through your MLM network.
On the other hand I know many people who have struggled terribly with MLM and then gone on to build their own big ‘bonus check’ in a different company or different business model so it’s not accurate in every way is it?
I do think in MLM we beat ourselves up way more than in other types of business because everything is so public and that can be tough.
The other thing about this which I find isn’t always completely spot on is that many of us have introduced many many first line people and not gone diamond yet whereas I know others who happened to sign up 1 person almost immediately who just got it and built the network and it wasn’t due to the sponsor’s ability at all.
Of course this represents again the value they have brought to the network but I think it’s fair to say that it is a numbers game and you just don’t know when you’re going to sign ‘the one’ up.
If that’s a cop out then feel free to tell me… I know you will!
I do think lots of people beat themselves up horrendously in MLM because they think it’s all about them when the reality is we find out that it actually depends alot upon which company, system, team, market you are in and WHEN you join. All that being said if you are lazy and don’t do the work then yep I say it’s obviously true.
Hi Randy and everybody else,
Perhaps you right Randy, but what most people forget is to thank the down line for it.
You can’t get rich in the business with out a great down line, network business is built together.
So, that’s why you have to be a good teacher and learn the down line an encourage them,
There are no obstacles to high; you just have to learn how to climb.
Check this video out
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyWURGNF-DY
True, but from what level are you looking at it… a small consistently growing check has as much success value! as an established static remuneration.
Randy,
I am just starting and my bonus check was a check to let me know that I can do make it biggggggggggger. and it will be just that.
Thank you!
Dear Randy,
Yes! I believed that your check represents how well and how far far have you gone to develop yourself as a LEADER! When you are new in the business, your focus is how to develop your skills on prospecting, presenting and closing. But when you have developed an organization, you are being paid on your leadership skills like inspiring your leaders, creating momentum, maintaining the duplication process, building depth and raising the bar of excellence in your group. Your check grows every single month for the next five years unlike people who are engage in scam who make big check on their first few months to lure their victims. Legitimate network builders goes for the long term residual income.
Felma
Thank you sir,
Today i got the lesson that paychecks does shows your work, professionalism nd your faith. Till now i was in illusion of patience..thanks a lot for this post.