The latest issue of Networking Times is now at the newsstands and up online — which means, so is my latest editorial.

It’s called, “Who Gets In: What If We Threw Out the Three Foot Rule and Started Holding a Higher Standard?” — and it reflects, aside from my own thoughts, two extraordinary conversations I had the privilege to hold a few months ago.

This autumn I spoke with Colleen Barrett, President Emeritus of Southwest Airlines and Tony Hsiseh (pronounced “Shay”), the CEO of Zappos, the billion-dollar online shoe retailer.

Having two conversations with the heads of two billion-dollar household-name brands in the course of 24 hours was a positively ethereal experience. And what they had to say had a fascinating and direct bearing on network marketing, and how we could be doing it a lot better.

Here’s an excerpt:

I recently had an opportunity to talk with the leaders of two extraordinary billion-dollar corporations, Zappos (Tony Hsieh) and Southwest Airlines (Colleen Barrett). Both are industry leaders flourishing during times when so many of their competitors are struggling, and both owe a great deal of their success to their unusual approach to creating a culture. When asked how they manage to promulgate and maintain that culture within their huge organizations, Hsieh and Barrett both had essentially the same answer:

“First, we figure out who we are. Then, we screen all our potential newcomers to make sure they fit that description.”

How simple! How obvious! How brilliant! But of course, we can’t do that in our network marketing organizations, can we? Because we don’t exactly interview people to see if we’re going to hire them, right? In fact, we pride ourselves on the fact that anyone can join our business, right? We don’t screen people out, we go to any lengths to get them in … right?

Or should we perhaps be rethinking every one of those assumptions?

To read my complete interviews with Colleen Barrett and Tony Hsieh, you have to be a paid subscriber, but with just registering on the site you can read the entire editorial here.

The new issue of Networking Times just went on sale and online—and this issue contains a special sneak preview of our companion volume to The Go-Giver.

For this year-end “Giving” issue, in place of my usual last-page editorial, we printed a piece coauthored by Bob Burg and myself entitled The Opposite of Dismal, which is adapted from our forthcoming book, Go-Givers Sell More, scheduled to launch on February 18.

Here is a portion:

To be successful in this business, it’s important to understand how giving works. The essence of it is this: the more you give, the more you have.

How can that possibly be true? It seems to fly in the face of logic. But it is logical—it just follows a different sort of logic from the one we’re used to, something like the difference between the classic physics of Newton and the strange world of quantum mechanics.

Newtonian physics has a 2 + 2 = 4 kind of logic: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Picture atoms, the ultimate building blocks of nature, as little billiard balls: inert bits of matter that move when you hit them in predictable, linear paths. Bank the 6 ball off the side, hit it into the corner pocket.

But as quantum physics discovered, atoms are not inert building blocks at all, but are themselves tiny universes each embodying unimaginably vast amounts of energy behaving in entirely unpredictable ways that seem to defy Newtonian logic.

Classic business operates by billiard-ball logic: action = reaction. You give me $100, and I’ll give you $100 worth of lumber. You loan me a grand, I pay you back a grand plus interest (friction). Classic physics says, when you give something away, you no longer have it: transactions deplete. Sell off your lumber, steel, oil, hours, effort, and it’s gone.

Economics is called the “dismal science” because it catalogs this ongoing process of depletion.

But managing relationships based on the billiard-ball logic of economics is not a very productive way to live. Good for keeping track of widgets, foot-pounds and minutes on the clock—but not of people and their interactions. We try it anyway: “I did the dishes last night, tonight it’s your turn.” And for a while, it seems to work—but never in the long term. The arithmetic invariably breaks down…

You can read the whole article here.

It’s September first — which means I’ve got a new editorial up at Networking Times.

This one is called, “Life Is Like a Box of Tofu.” Here’s how it starts:

“While at a party during the 1920s, the young F. Scott Fitzgerald observed a man named Leonard Zelig who had an uncanny ability to take on the demeanor and even physical appearance of those around him. Over the following two decades the chameleonesque man showed up again and again, fitting seamlessly into dozens of different social circles, from Nazi Germany to the White House, always blending in perfectly. Amazing …

“Except that none of it ever happened. The real Fitzgerald never saw or even heard of Leonard Zelig. Because like his heir apparent Forrest Gump, Zelig was a complete fiction.

“Zelig—Fitzgerald party, White House appearance and all—was invented by Woody Allen for his 1983 film of the same name. Gump, the creation of novelist/satirist Winston Groom, was brought to life on film in 1994 by Robert Zemeckis. And like the brilliantly clueless Chance the Gardener, created by novelist Jerzy Kosinksi, filmmaker Hal Ashby and actor Peter Sellers in Being There (1979), they are fascinating characters precisely because they are not really characters at all but take on whatever character others see in them.

“Something like money…”

You can read the whole piece here (no cost, but registration is required).

The bottom line of it is this:

Money, or the lack of it, does not decide who you are. You decide what money is. Life, as it turns out, is not a box of chocolates: you not only know whatcha gonna git, you determine it.

Happy Independence Day! The new issue of Networking Times is on the stands; here is my last-page editorial (which you can also find on the magazine’s site here).

Many years ago, I was teaching an adult class in macrobiotic philosophy. After class was over and the students picked themselves up and shambled off to their next class, one woman stayed behind. When the room was empty, she came up to me and said, “You’ve lost a child, haven’t you?”

I was stunned. She was right: I had lost my first son to an illness when he was not quite one year old. But how did she know?

My mind raced back over the previous ninety minutes. There was nothing we’d talked about in class that remotely related to the subjects of parenthood, bereavement, infant diseases, or anything else I could think of that would have conveyed even the slightest clues to that buried bit of personal information.

“I just knew,” she said, and I realized that, looking at her, I just knew too. How? I don’t know. But it showed.

Adversity changes you. It doesn’t simply add an experience to your memory banks, it engraves itself onto your being and alters forever who you are. This is true not only of death and bereavement, but also of such experiences as divorce, disappointment, loss of a friendship, discovery of one’s own deep error, reversal of fortunes, frustration of an ambition, failure or collapse of an enterprise.

Or (as John Castignini points out in this issue) having a prospect say “no,” or a key business partner say “I quit.”

I sometimes tell new distributors in this business that I won’t consider them truly in the business, genuinely committed and in for the long haul, until after they’ve had their first crushing disappointment. I sometimes cringe when I hear myself say it, because it sounds a bit brutal—but it’s the absolute truth.

About your business, and about your life.

Losing a child was an experience so terrible I would not wish it on anyone. Yet at the same time, now that it’s part of who I am, I can’t truly say I wish it gone, either. It certainly made me less cocky (at least a little) and more capable of empathizing with another’s pain. Loss and failure shape you; they carve furrows of compassion, understanding and generosity of spirit.

That was how the woman knew I’d lost a child: she recognized the impact of adversity because it resonated in her, the way a tuning fork hums when you play A on the piano.

Adversity can deepen character, but sometimes it simply damages character. Faced with difficulty that feels too great to bear, the human being has two choices: break, or bend. In the breaking, we simply become bitter; in the bending, we are humbled and stretched.

You have no choice but to suffer loss; it’s inevitable. To break, or to bend: there is the choice.

The new issue of Networking Times goes on sale tomorrow. (I didn’t post a note here about the March 1 issue, because I took that issue off from my editorial-writing duties.) Here is my editorial:

Gold and Twopence: Thoughts on the Network Marketing Dream

On January 24, 1848, a young carpenter named James Marshall discovered a bit of shiny yellow metal in Coloma, a sleepy little town in the center of what was about to become the state of California. Within a year some 300,000 men, women and children had poured into the territory in hopes of striking it rich. Only a tiny percentage did so (Marshall himself was forced off his land and died penniless), but the dream endured.

According to Texas A&M professor H.W. Brands, in his fascinating book The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream, the “California Dream” spread to the rest of the country and in time became the essence of the American Dream.

But that isn’t how things started. The original American Dream, says Brands, “was the dream of the Puritans, of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s [Almanack] … of men and women content to accumulate their modest fortunes a little at a time, year by year by year.”

While George Washington is revered as the “father of his country,” it’s Franklin who is most closely identified with the roots of the modern American character, a sober mix of practical values—thrift, hard work, self-discipline and a devotion to education—with an Enlightenment zeal for scientific innovation and categorical opposition to authoritarian rule.

All traits that have a mighty familiar ring to network marketers. And yet we too have our version of Gold Rush impulse.

This is the internal conflict bred into the American experience, and it is woven through the DNA of the network marketing dream. Franklin versus Marshall; hard work and a frugal appreciation of modest gains, versus the dream of instant wealth won by boldness, pluck and timing.

But wealth, as it turns out, is a highly malleable thing.

Franklin’s two Declaration of Independence colleagues, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both died on the same day (July 4, 1826, the Declaration’s fiftieth anniversary). Adams, a lawyer from a frugal New England farming family, never made much money; Jefferson, the plantation owner, was the picture of wealthy aristocracy. Yet on their deathbeds, Adams had managed to amass a net worth of about $100,000. Jefferson was $100,000 in debt.

One of Franklin’s most enduring sayings, usually misquoted these days as “A penny saved is a penny earned,” actually read, “A penny saved is twopence dear.” In other words, if you take some modest earnings and save the money instead of squandering it, you can double it; sort of a self-generated gold rush.

Perhaps the dream’s reality lies somewhere in between the nugget and the penny: there is a bit of gold in them thar hills—but it doesn’t have to take much to make you rich.

from Networking Times, “Elevating the Profession,” May/June 2009

Today the new year begins, and the new issue of Networking Times goes on sale, featuring my last-page editorial, “Love and Residual.”

But of course, you’ve already read it, or most of it — because it is an essay based squarely on a blog post I wrote right here back in September.

It’s worth hopping over to read the piece on the magazine’s site, because the article is a slightly longer and more carefully thought out version of this idea. But in case you don’t, I don’t want you to walk away empty-handed, so I figured the least I could do is share a picture of my two sons — after all, this is pretty much what the whole article is about anyway, right?

So, a quick story.

This past August I was getting dressed for my wedding, in a back room of the church. The photographer suggested we step outside in the back for a few quick outside shots. My sons, meanwhile, had traveled for hours — driving two hours from home (Charlottesville VA) to Dulles airport, flying to Hartford, surviving rental desk hassles (one son with credit card, other son old enough to drive, but neither one having both qualifications — I had to intervene by phone to get the agent to go ahead and give them the car) and driving another 90 minutes to the church.

As it happened, just as we were snapping our shot, a car pulled up, and these two handsome dudes stepped out.

So there you go: love and residual.

(click photo to enlarge)

Today the latest edition of Networking Times hit the stores shelves—and also went online here. Below is a teaser — the first one-third of my back-page editorial. You can read the entire editorial here at no charge (although you are required to become a site member by registering your name and email).

Who is a good candidate for joining you in this business?

We say, “someone who is a people-person.” Yet we’ve seen people who are bona fide people-people, yet don’t go far in this business. And people who have gone far in this business, yet who are not especially people-people.

We say, “Look for people who have influence in their community.” But the same caveat applies: that correlation often fails to hold.

We say, “Look for people with whom you share a common bond.” Hmm. I have close friends who are writers or cellists who are not interested in joining my business. My two brothers, ditto.

So when you go prospecting, who are you really looking for? I think you’re looking for someone who falls in love. How do you know? There are three signs to look for. . . .

(Just so you don’t writhe in suspense, the three factors are: that they see it, want it, and do it. Hit the link above to see how the rest of the piece works out.)

P.S. In case you’ve wondered, “Hey, how come that JDM never seems to blog here anymore? Doesn’t he care? Has he forgotten all about us faithful post-watchers?” the truth is this: I do care, and I haven’t forgotten, and it’s true, I’m blogging here only rarely.

Here’s why: between blogging as often as I can at my “main” blog, and blogging regularly over at the Go-Giver blog (where I take turns with Bob Burg), I’m usually right about at blog capacity.

So, other than posting notices like this about my latest editorial, most times I have the urge to blogify, it’ll be over there at the JDM blog — which you can subscribe to here if you like.

The other day, I got a check in the mail for $404.79. Before I tell you where it came from, I have to digress.

My dad was born in Germany, and emigrated to this country during the war. Before he left his homeland at the age of nineteen, he had published his first book in German: a translation of an eighteenth-century classic text of music composition that had been used by Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and scores of other illustrious others. The original text was in Latin; my dad’s translation was, of course, into German.

After arriving here, he was eventually drafted into the American army and shipped overseas, ending up back in Europe as a counterintelligence agent tasked with debriefing citizens. The war’s close found him in a town near the mountain whereupon sat the castle occupied by the legendary composer Richard Strauss (of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” fame) (you know, the dramatic music that plays when the apes discover the big thingamajig in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001”).

So my dad goes up the mountain to interrogate Strauss — and finds the old man teaching his own grandnephew composition, using (wait for it) my dad’s book.

After returning to the States, my dad eventually translated the book again, this time into English, and it was published here by W.W. Norton as The Study of Counterpoint. I learned composition from it when I was a teenager; it’s still used in schools today.

And by now, I’ll bet you’ve guessed how this ties back in. That $404.79 check came from W.W. Norton. It represents my portion of this royalty period’s proceeds from a book my dad started when he was a teenager in the 1930s and began translating into English before I was born.

After depositing that check, I went out with my son Chris and bought an LCD monitor has has been wanting. I’m sure my dad never imagined that his efforts at the age of nineteen would pay for his twenty-year-old grandson’s computer monitor — but they did.

Residual is like that. It defies the entropy of time. It lasts.

In a few days, the July issue of Networking Times will be up and viewable on their site, including an editorial I wrote inspired by a recent spring day’s walk.

Before I share that editorial, I want to point out that my fiancée Ana is protected 24/7 by her very own extremely discreet and well-hidden Secret Service agent. Can you spot him in this picture of her busy at work in her office? (His relevance to the matter at hand should become apparent within the first sentence of the piece.)

Our Favorite Whats
Noticing Those Experiences That Make It All Worthwhile

The other day I was out taking a walk with our dog, Ben. It was the sort of luxuriantly sensory, lavishly fecund spring days that makes you say, “Oh, right—this is why we live in New England!” The kind of day where the oxygen pours out of the trees around you, so palpable you could eat it with a spoon: air by Häagen-Dasz. Ben was going nuts, smelling every blade of grass, his body quivering as it tried to absorb the mob of scents crowding in on his little nose. And I was feeling pretty much the same way.

I heard myself mutter, “This is why I’m here.”

What exactly did I mean by that? That my life purpose is to take the dog for a walk?

We walked on, Ben wildly sniffing the dirt, and I pondering the meaning of life. (Each doing what he loves best.) What made this spring-day moment so noteworthy was that it felt so alive. It was like those flowers we always tell ourselves not to forget to stop to smell. There’s the loftiness of one’s life purpose, the thing mission statements and vision are all about. And then there are the flowers. (Or, if you’re Ben, the dirt.) For twenty years, I’ve been writing about the importance of knowing your compelling why. It occurs to me that it’s just as important to know your compelling what.

Just a few of my favorite whats:

Putting the finishing touches on a book I’ve been working on for months. Gazing, intimidated, at the blank page that signifies the start of the next one.

Discovering a breathtaking author I’ve never read before. (This month it’s Tony Horwitz; last month it was David McCullough.)

Time with my sweetheart, lying on our backs, talking and talking, about anything and everything.

Brahms and more Brahms.

And in networking? What is the best “air by Häagen-Dasz” moment one experiences in this business?

I was on the phone once with Brian Biro, who was interviewing the top leaders in our company to create a leadership profile. He asked what were my goals in the business. I didn’t have an answer. I’d had certain financial goals, but I’d already reached those. As I thought about it, a picture popped into mind: a birdcage door opening, its occupant bursting out into the open air and fluttering up and away into the sky.

Seeing people enter this business, I told Brian, caged in the various ways life can imprison, and then find their way to the point where the cage door opens … watching them enter the open air and fly high—that’s my what.

It also makes an excellent why.

I just had the singular opportunity to spend a half hour with the legendary bestselling author Marianne Williamson, interviewing her on her new book, The Age of Miracles: Embracing the New Midlife. What a gracious and delightful person she is — and wise.

In preparation for the interview, I read the book. Now I’m on a mission to persuade you to read it, too.

For one thing, it’s incredibly entertaining, and especially so if you are over 50. It’s also one of the most inspiring books I’ve read lately. And if you happen to be part of that baby boom age slice, this book will help create a continental shift in how you see your life — this is a promise.

The basic proposition of the book is that midlife, rather than being a crisis, can just as accessibly be a time of rebirth into a time of greater purpose and fulfillment. From the Introduction:

How would we live if we felt full permission from ourselves and others to give to life everything we’ve got? Would midlife be time to shut down, or time to finally get started? Would it be time to give up, or time to claim what we really want? . . .

At just about the time when the world seems about to literally blow up if some sane grown-up doesn’t come in here and do something quick, our generation is finally becoming sane grown-ups.

For the last few years, I’ve been saying, “It seems to me the first fifty years was for practice.” And I don’t mean it only as a joke. It’s delicious to read Marianne’s hilarious and touching meditation on that theme. Delicious, and empowering.

If you’re in network marketing, you’d be wise to give a copy of this book to each of your over-fifty leaders.

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