Twenty-five years ago I had a tough choice to make. I was involved in two different network marketing companies. I had to decide which one to stick with and which one to let go of.

Company A had a full line of amazing products, first-class promotional material, blue chip production values. Some of the biggest names in network marketing were there. So were a few big-name Hollywood celebrities. This company was just about the most impressive, professional thing going.

Company B had a total of three products, a few mediocre brochures, and a single, somewhat embarrassing video. To call them a mom-and-pop operation was not a cliché, just accurate reporting. I went out to visit their headquarters; it turned out to be a little trailer in the middle of nowhere. They had a total of three employees: the mom, the pop, and a third person they’d hired to keep the files and answer the phones.

There it was: a choice. I couldn’t keep working them both. One had to go, and I would be staking my future on the other.

I chose Company B.

Why? To this day, I’m honestly not sure. It just resonated. Felt like the right thing to do.

So here’s what happened. . .

# # #

To read the rest of my latest Networking Times editorial, find out what the heck happened to both Company A and Company B (hint: one of them isn’t around anymore), and read the exciting story of how a business I started went bankrupt and ruined me (at least, for a while) and what that taught me (if anything), click here (no charge, but registration required).

I check my clock: a quarter to midnight. I look over all the machinery, webbed together by an elaborate spaghetti of cables, glance at the screen, take a breath, and hit the RETURN key.

Nothing to do now but go to sleep. I’ll see how it all comes out in the morning.

The year is 1995. A friend and I are working on a project to create our own set of training videotapes. A consulting gig has just earned me the whopping sum of $15,000, the entire amount which I have sunk into a truckload of new video equipment that should allow me to master and rough-edit our videotapes and then digitize the footage so I can run it through sophisticated video-editing software on my computer, a dauntingly huge task…

The world as we knew it in 1995 was not a digital world. Cell phones (those paltry few that existed) were all analog. Cameras (at least, consumer-affordable cameras) all shot on film. Ditto video cameras. Because of this, if you wanted to manipulate video in a software program, like Adobe Premier or CoSA’s After Effects (the holy grail of desktop video-editing), you first had to take your raw tape footage, which was all analog, and turn it into digital video, a process called rendering. Sort of like scanning a photograph—only way, way more data-intensive.

Which is exactly what I was doing that night in my home office–turned video-processing lab. My machines chewed on that data all night long, and when I got up for breakfast—mirabile dictu!—it had nearly finished rendering my footage.

How much footage? About thirty seconds’ worth.

And it had taken eight hours.

Hey, just two years earlier, rendering one scene of the T. Rex in Jurassic Park, one of the first tentpole movies to use dinosaur-sized digital effects, had taken Spielberg’s massive computers six hours per frame. And film uses twenty-four frames per second. (Render those numbers!)

With my $15,000 set-up, digitizing five minutes’ worth of my far more humble talking-head video would take me eighty hours, or ten full overnights.

You know how long it takes today to create five minutes of digital video? Five minutes. In other words, no time at all: it’s all already digital as you shoot. Total cost of the equipment needed? Hint: it’s less than $15,000. In fact, it costs zero: all the equipment you need is already built into your laptop—built into your phone.

Upon discovering the principle of leverage, Archimedes said, “Give me a place to stand, and I can move the world.” Digital video is one seriously big lever.

Go move the world.

# # #

This post appeared as the last-page editorial in this month’s edition of Networking Times.

This month’s Networking Times editorial was not written by me, for the simple reason that this issue was written entirely by women. (I did perform my usual editorial duties, but other than that, the content was entirely X-chromosomally-generated.)

So who did write it? My wife, Ana Gabriel Mann:

Twenty-two years ago, as I was about to give birth to my daughter, I shared with my closest woman friend my fears about the pending birth. I wondered aloud if I was “strong enough” to do it well. Without a moment’s hesitation she replied, “You’ll be fine—in fact, you’ll be great. And if you begin to lose your way, I’ll be there to remind you of who you are.”

I never forgot her words, “…to remind you of who you are,” and it was holding my daughter in my arms that sealed my decision to stay home and build a successful career from home.…

To read the complete editorial click here (no charge, but registration required).

(This month’s Networking Times editorial):

Eighteen years ago, in December 1993, I wrote a little editorial for Upline magazine to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the launch of the Apple Macintosh, a device that had transformed my life in ways strikingly similar to the way network marketing had done.

It was exactly ten years ago. They claimed it was going to change how we work, how we play, even how we think. Gone were the Greek-to-me “A>:” prompts, and in their place were a smiling face, little “icons” of familiar objects, and a thing they called a “mouse.” All you had to do, they said, was “point and click,” and it would let you draw, write, calculate—and create! It was, they said, the computer “for the rest of us.”

When I learned about the Mac and what it could do—and more importantly, what it would enable me to do—I was a struggling publisher of a small journal on health and the environment called Solstice. In those days, I printed out my articles in two-inch-wide columns of text, which I then cut up with a utility knife and laid out on paperboard with paper cement. This was 1986, when “cut and paste” and “desktop” were not metaphors but descriptions of what we physically did and where we physically did it.

It took months and a friend to cosign the bank note, but I managed to buy a Mac Plus and introduce myself to the wonders of page layout software…

To read the rest of this editorial, click here (no charge, but registration required).

(This month’s Networking Times editorial)

In Praise of the Network Marketing Middle Class:

In these stringent economic times, we often hear about the “disappearing middle class.” Let’s make sure we don’t let that happen in network marketing.

In fact, the network marketing middle class has actually been getting steadily stronger for years. And this is a good thing, because in network marketing, it is the middle class that makes the whole thing work.

There are three broad groups in network marketing.

At the topmost layer, there are those who earn a full-time income. Call it $100,000 annually and up. This group is a very tiny minority. If “making the big money” were the way we defined success in network marketing, then to be fair, we would have to say that most network marketers are not successful.

But that’s not how it is. Most people who are in network marketing will not be part of that topmost layer, and that’s okay with them. They cannot live purely off their MLM income, but they don’t have to in order to experience success.

Proof? Look at the bottom layer, those who earn little or nothing. This includes those who make just enough cash to pay for their monthly product usage. For many, that is success. They love their products, wouldn’t want to live without them. Being part of the program gives them a slight supplemental income stream that allows them to buy these products and break even.

Then there are the people in between, those who take their network marketing business seriously, work at it, and earn anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand a month. Not enough so they can turn their backs on any other income, but enough to make a significant difference in their household.

For me, these people are the engine that makes the whole thing go…

To read the rest of this editorial, click here (no charge, but registration required).

(This month’s Networking Times editorial—this one is a bit more esoteric than usual!)

All this reflection on Gen Y (and back through Gens X, W, V, U, T, S and the rest) has got me thinking about the passage of time—or rather, the passage of us.

I am coming to realize—not just to know intellectually, as insights from Einstein and Heisenberg and the other guys, but actually to perceive—that the passage of time is a trick of perspective, an illusion. Time is not a string strung between two tin cans, a mountain ridge across which we perilously creep. It is simply a shift in the relative ripeness of the idea you represent.

In actuality, we do not move away from point A and toward point B. It is more that points A and B slip in and out of us.

In youth everything has an urgency to it. As babies, we amplify that urgency to the point of hilarity: coo-giggle-cry-scream-sleep—comedy and tragedy, all in the span of ten minutes. As a teenager, it is hardly less intense. But with the ripening of age things gradually seem to feel less urgent. The tyranny of must-have-right-now eases off. Like glimpses of far-off galaxies, memory’s event horizon stretches out and out, and the illusion of time begins to hold less sway.

In fact, we simply are, and the we right this moment includes within it all that we ever have been and all that we ever will be.

My parents, both deceased, are alive right here and now; the follies of my youth (and oy, they are many) make me blush, laugh, and learn, all right now, because they are here right now. I look at my wife and see the adorable, precocious, vulnerable six-year-old perched just millimeters below the surface and often spilling out directly onto the surface.

This is hard to put into words. It is a visceral perception that we are not moving “through” time at all. The future is not something that is “going to happen,” it is simply another layer of the onion of our present existence, our existent presence.

I often forget this. The more the urgencies of the moment claim my attention, the more I am drawn back into that infant state: “I want my bottle, and I want it now—waaaaah!” . . .

To read the rest of this editorial (and find out what the heck the “event horizon of achievement” (or should that be “the event horizon of perception”?) has to do with building a business, click here (no charge, but registration required).

(This month’s Networking Times editorial:)

There is a little town, about a hundred miles north of Dallas, called Telephone, Texas. My friend Dan Burrus remembers visiting his grandparents on their farm there.

“It was one of those places,” says Dan, “that was so small you could put the Now Entering and Now Leaving signs on the same post.” (Shameless plug: Dan and I write about this in our book Flash Foresight, coming out this month.)

The town got its name in 1886 from its single telephone, which was located in Pete Hindman’s general store. By the time Dan was visiting as a young boy, most homes had desktop rotary phones — those heavy things made of hard, black Bakelite.

In the 1960s, the Princess phone, with its easy portability (and by the 70s, modular jacks), revolutionized the way we communicate nearly as radically as MySpace and then Facebook would forty years later. (In both cases, starting with teenage girls, and then filtering out to the rest of society. Hmm. Tech forecasters take note: Are teenage girls our technology bellwether?) Suddenly you could make calls from the bedroom. Suddenly anyone could talk … to anyone.

Why am I mentioning all this? Because the telephone was the first genuine social media. Not radio (one-way), not television (one-way), but the phone. In many ways, the 20th century was the century of the automobile. The personal car “changed forever the way we lived and thought, shopped and courted, made war and spread the peace,” as Dan and I say in the book.

But as much as the car changed our reality, the phone transformed it more profoundly still. With the car, we could move away. With the phone, we could move away—and still talk to each other.

Pocket-sized cell phones democratized communication even further. By the ’90s, anyone and everyone could talk from anywhere. And then we did this mind-blowingly ingenious thing: we married our phones to our computers.

It’s easy to think of the Internet as a big, global computer. More importantly, it’s a big, global telephone. What Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and all the rest have done is profoundly accelerated a direction that was already well underway a half-century ago: the ushering in of the Age of, perhaps not Aquarius, but Authenticity. . . . .

To read the rest of this editorial (and find out why the heck it’s called “Glassnost”), click here (no charge, but registration required).

Have you ever talked with a candidate for your networking business, only to have him or her come back and say, “I don’t know, is this one of those Ponzi schemes…?”

Have I got a reply for you.

“Not only is it not a Ponzi scheme, but my sponsor / my upline / a guy I know [this would be yours truly] is cited by Consumer Affairs as an expert in their article on how to avoid Ponzi schemes!”

Nice, huh? And true.

In a July 2010 Consumer Affairs article called “How to Avoid Ponzi Schemes,” by Jan Yager, Ph.D., my Secret Language of Money coauthor Dr. David Krueger and I are quoted as a source for the classic definition of Ponzi scheme:

“ You have certainly heard the term enough times, but exactly what is a Ponzi scheme? As David Krueger, M.D. points out in The Secret Language of Money (McGraw-Hill Books, 2009) (co-authored with John David Mann), it’s named after Charles Ponzi, an Italian who arrived in Boston in 1903 at the age of twenty-one, then moved to Montreal in 1907.

“He came up with the scheme that would make him infamous after serving time in prison for other financial mismanagement and after failing to make money legitimately. Ponzi’s scheme went like this: He would resell an International Reply Coupon (IRC) to buy stamps for a lot less money in the United States, selling the stamps at a profit. He then offered his investors — as Krueger points out, made up initially of ‘his network of friends and colleagues’ — with the offer of a 50 percent return on their investment within 45 days or 100 percent within 90 days.

“The scheme part is that Ponzi wasn’t really buying the coupons; he was using the money that newer investors gave him to pay dividends to the earlier investors. The scheme could continue working as long as investors kept reinvesting their profits; once investors requested a return of their investment and profits, the scheme could fall apart like a house of cards because there just weren’t any legitimate earnings to draw on.

“At the height of the scheme, Ponzi’s investors were putting $250,000 a day in his venture.That was a huge sum in those days; and within six months Ponzi had generated millions of dollars. But Ponzi’s scheme became public and he was sentenced to five years in prison for mail fraud. Eventually he was deported to Italy where he struggled to earn a living, finally moving to Brazil where he spent his last years in poverty, dying in a charity hospital.”

“So if anyone knows what a Ponzi scheme is, it’s my sponsor / upline / guy I know — and he wouldn’t go near one!”

So there!

I did something recently that made me nervous. I invited several people whom I respect highly to look at my opportunity.

“No big deal,” one might say, “who else would you approach?” The answer to that question, though, is exactly what happens in most network marketing invitations.

In the Harold Ramis film Multiplicity (1996), Doug Kinney, the Michael Keaton character, clones himself to make his life more manageable. And it works pretty well, until Doug Kinneys #2 and #3 figure out to clone themselves. Doug Kinney #4 is decidedly, well … not quite right. When Doug’s wife pours out her heart to #4, thinking she’s talking to her husband, and asks him searchingly, “What do you want?” the best he can come up with is, “I want pizza.”

“You know how, when you make a copy of a copy,” explains Doug Kinney #3, “and it’s not as sharp as the original?”

Yes, we know. Because we’ve seen it happen too often in network marketing, where it’s often termed sponsoring down. Here’s what sponsoring down looks like:

Looking for people who we think will say yes.

Looking for people who don’t make us nervous to approach.

Looking for people we feel confident we can coach.

Looking for people who have a lot of free time on their hands.

Looking for people who “need our product.”

Looking for people who “need the income.”

Looking for people who are sick, are broke, have lost hope, have no other serious prospects for getting their lives in order or digging out of a hole. In other words, looking for people we’re pretty sure will say yes because, hey, what else have they got going on?

It’s so easy to sponsor down because it’s non-threatening. But here’s what happens. Let’s say, on a scale of 1 to 10 of competence and general skill sets, you consider yourself a 7, and you go sponsor 6’s, 5’s and 4’s. They sponsor 5’s, 4’s and 3’s, who sponsor 4’s, 3’s and 2’s. You see where this is going. Soon, you’re asking someone a few levels deep in your organization about their why and hearing, “I want pizza.”

What to do?

Sponsor up. Get out your “chicken list.” Go invite people who are skilled, competent, successful, disciplined, motivated, forceful, ambitious, accomplished. Invite people who are so busy they don’t really have the time, but who know how to create the time—and even more importantly, how to productively use that time.

Sponsoring up is like marrying up (also a plan I recommend). It’s a statement of faith in your own future, a gesture of respect for the institution, and a sure path to creating something great.

Raise the bar. Build an organization of caliber.

This article originally appeared in the November/December 2010 issue of Networking Times.

(This month’s Networking Times editorial:)

We have a dog named Ben, although I sometimes think of him as Agent Smith because he so closely resembles a Secret Service agent in the way he shadows my wife, Ana. From room to room, household chore to teleconference, day or night—whatever task Ana is involved in, you will find Ben on the job, blending into the background, standing guard with unflagging vigilance.

Know how to spell devotion? D-o-g.

Wouldn’t dogs make great downlines? Once a dog has identified you as his leader, he’ll do anything you say. Got a new group volume target? Easy. Fetch, you say—and the whole downline dashes off across the field in dogged search of the stick you threw. Give a little acknowledgment, a little praise, a scratch behind the ears, and they’ll follow you anywhere.

Cats … not so much.

I grew up with a cat. She was devoted, too: would sleep on my bed, even lick my hair while I slept so that I would wake up spiky-haired, as if I’d time-traveled in my sleep and had precognitive 1961 visions of punk-rock hair styles. In this, she was somewhat doglike. But you could push her only so far.

Care for a cat and she will follow you, but only in the way of cats, which is to say, at a distance and on her own terms.

The truth of people is that they are neither dogs nor cats, but people. Still, Jung said we each embody both animus and anima. My observation: we also contain aniwoof and animeow.

Which brings us to leadership. . . .

To read the rest of this editorial, click here (no charge, but registration required).