It wouldn’t be a healthy Friday without Cinco Bala. This week's top 5 lessons, hacks and quotes I’ve been pondering, applying and battling.
For those of you who are new, this is a concept I took from Tim Ferriss. (This is just focused on MLM and online marketing) If you don’t subscribe to his newsletter. You should do it.
Lesson in Network Marketing: Being Efficient Does Not Equal Effectiveness - My first network marketing team was incredibly gifted at everything they did. In fact, I owe a lot of my communication skills and leadership ability (still learning) to them.
However, one thing they NEVER did was question their methods. And they silenced anyone who did (me included). So even though no one could consistently recruit more than 1-2 personal reps per month, they were 100% intent on improving EFFICIENCY of their methods - cold contacting strangers better, sexier hotel meetings, longer conferences etc. Rather than put the method itself on the chopping block.
In my world, everything is on the chopping block. I don’t want to kill my business baby either. If one of my funnels stops working, I’ll be the first to admit that I hold on longer than I probably should. But if it loses me money for a couple months in a row, I’m moving on.
Doing the right thing incorrectly is FAR superior than doing the wrong thing incredibly well.
WHAT you do is more important than HOW you do it.
So, if you have doubts about old school MLM, don’t worry, I did too. That’s why Rebels was born.
It’s time to stop polishing the turd and step into the future. We didn’t reinvent the wheel. There was no more wheel. So we built a new one.
Bonus Lesson in Network Marketing - Go Where You’re Celebrated Not Tolerated: The title says it all. But there’s a lot more to it when you have to implement it. Watch this video now if you have a team or ever intend to have one.
Quote I Love: The Opposite of Happiness is Boredom.
A Weakness: Not Replacing My Time - We have an office. It’s for me. I have a hard time separating work from life. Ashley is more mature and more hot, so she can mentally separate and work from the house with no problem.
With an office it’s actually pigeon holed me a little bit into “office hours”. I generally get in around 10am and will leave between 4 and 6pm. While it is super useful in keeping me organized and separating work from other parts of life. It’s also contributed to lazy thinking like I described above.
Some tasks get pushed further and further back while the important ones are prioritized. I’m generally good at prioritize the big rocks. So while I adhere to the 80/20 principle fairly well, I have been neglecting “Parkinson’s Law” which states - the amount of time you spend on a task will swell to amount of time you have available for it.
Crap.
I know for a fact I work well under pressure. Time pressure that is. Yet, how is it that I spend the same 6-8 hours working each day? For a guy who regularly challenges the fragile social constructs that make no sense yet underpin our society, it doesn’t line up…
I realized I’ve fallen into the dreaded W4W syndrome, a term Tim Ferriss coined - “work for work.”
I can do everything I do for Rebels and our MLM team in probably 1/2 the time I use now. The problem?
I haven’t replaced my would be free time with other activities. So in order to keep excitement in my life (remember happiness EQUALS excitement, not sadness) I choose to work. If left to a empty room to meditate, I’ll get up after an hour with a raging desire to do something.
So, rather than letting the void be filled with more working to accumulate an ever increasing savings account, I realized I need to trust me more and Parkinson’s law more and start pursuing additional dreams that don’t just include padding the accounts.
Lesson in Online Marketing: Lack of Time is a Lack of Priorities - We could be a lot more “free” than we are. But in addition to running our MLM team itself, we also run this thing called Rebels - which serves people in almost every MLM company in existence.
In the past 6 months, I’ve found myself incredibly busy at times and I wonder - what the heck am I doing? Why am I so busy? After giving in to my human nature of chasing my tail for 12 hours, I will generally step back, let crap hit the fan and think.
More often than not, within a day or two of deep thought, I uncover the splinters, pull them out and live 10X happier.
Remember - busyness is not cool. It’s not sexy. And it doesn’t make you or I important. When someone tells me they’re busy, I respond with “I’m sorry to hear that.”
It’s not a badge of honor. In fact, it’s a window into our inability to prioritize and focus on what’s important. Another way of saying it is our busyness showcases our inability to THINK.
If you can’t focus on the right things in your marketing, you will die in the minutiae.
Talk soon,
Zach
