For years, we’ve heard it taught that “your income will tend to equal the average of the income of your five closest friends.” Point being, if you want to raise your income level, hang out with people who are making some good money. I’ve also heard (and taught) the various corrolaries: Your mood will tend to reflect … Your level of happiness will tend to reflect … Your overall success will tend to reflect … all pointing to the same conclusion: choose your friends with care.

We wrote about this in The Slight Edge: Jeff calls it “The Law of Association”:

“Your level of health will tend to be about the average level of health of your five best friends. Your personal development will be at about the average level of personal development of your five best friends. Your relationships, financial health, attitudes, level of success in your career, and everything else about your life will tend to be very close to the average level of each of these conditions in your five closest friends and associates.” (The Slight Edge, from Chapter 9, “Mastering Yourself”)

Experience bears this out—but I’d never seen any actual scientific proof that this was so. At least, until this morning: the Law of Association now has an interesting tidbit of confirmation—from the New England Journal of Medicine, no less. As reported in The New York Times, a retrospective analysis of data from the famous 32-year Framingham Heart Study found that when “Obesity can spread from person to person, much like a virus.” When a subject’s friend became obese, even if living at a distance of hundreds of miles, the subject had a 57 percent greater chance of becoming obese him- or herself. And between “close mutual friends” the odds of the influence increased to 171 percent.

But not neighbors. And not even family members (at least, far less so). the influence, the study found, is passed specifically through friends. And check this out: “The same effect seemed to occur for weight loss, the investigators say.”

As the old knight said in Indiana Jones III, “Choose wisely.”

If you’ve read The Zen of MLM, then you’ve met my dad, the late Dr. Alfred Mann, noted Bach scholar and conductor. I wrote about him, and what I learned from him about leadership, in a Networking Times editorial called “True Leadership,” which you can also read here.

This past April he would have turned ninety; as it happens, one fine evening last September, he went to sleep and just never got around to getting up again the next day. He died as he lived, with grace and dignity. The Zen of my dad.

And now there’s going to be an amazing event to honor his life and career. The Eastman School of Music (in Rochester, New York), in conjunction with Publick Musick (a baroque ensemble organization also in Rochester), is sponsoring an annual event that premiers this coming November: the Alfred Mann Music Festival.

The event will focus on the two works with which he was most intimately involved throughout his long career: Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s Mass in B Minor. While I never did have the chance to perform the Messiah under his leadership, I did have the distinct honor and pleasure of playing in the orchestra for several of his B Minor Mass performances. Quiet, understated, gentle yet intensely accurate, his style was kanso itself. (If you’re not familiar with the term kanso, you haven’t read The Zen of MLM!)

I and a whole bunch of my family will be there this November for the festival. I hope some of you reading this can make it as well! (If you need advice on travel and accomodations, write me at jdm@johndavidmann.com.)

This is slightly off-topic for the Zen of MLM blog, but if you’re curious, pop over to my other blog — an online New York Times review of a recent best-selling business parable, Our Iceberg Is Melting, makes mention of my next book!

The American Declaration of Independence asserts that we are all created equal and endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, including Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

According to the late Elliot Jacques, a pioneering Canadian researcher in organizational development (perhaps best known for having coined the term mid-life crisis), we are also each endowed with a distinct, fixed capacity for complex thinking—what he termed cognitive complexity—and in this specific aspect we are perhaps not created all that equally.

I write about this in an editorial in the July issue of Networking Times, which just hit the stands (Barnes & Noble, etc.). (You can read the journal’s editorials for free on their web site, www.networkingtimes.com, just by registering.) Here’s an excerpt from that piece:

“According to Dr. Jacques, one’s innate capacity for cognitive complexity is revealed by how far into the future one can project. Most people, said the research, can envision up to two or three months ahead, beyond which the horizon of their imagination dims and fades. A smaller group falls out at one year, a still smaller group at two, then five . . . and only a tiny minority have the inborn capacity to picture a decade or more into the future. We have a term for that tiny minority: leaders.

The signers of the Declaration of Independence and Framers of the American Constitution clearly had the goods, in the cognitive complexity department. And chances are (since you’re reading this blog), so do you: having any level of keen interest in the entrepreneurial business of network marketing, it seems to me, takes a pretty decent dose of the capacity to project into the future.

Here’s the problem: you can’t do this one alone. You’ve got to bring others with you. Do they have the horizon of imagination as you? Often, not.

One of the most common prospecting pitches I’ve heard people teach in this business goes something like this: “If you could see what I see about this business, nothing would stop you from getting involved in it. . .”

All well and good . . . except for that pesky little word, if. Because in many cases, that other person doesn’t see what you see—and can’t.

Back to my article:

“The rewards ahead are stunning. But who can see that far down the road? You can. And they can see you. Others may not see the destination as clearly as you do—but they can see you. And seeing your belief, your firm grasp of where this is leading, is sometimes enough.”

Happy Fourth!

Okay, I’m going to resist the temptation of doing this more than once or twice. But a reader just wrote in with such nice comments about the book, I couldn’t quite resist dropping them in here. (Plus, I love any excuse to use the word “untrammeled,” which comes from Old French meaning not caught up in a thrice-meshed net.)

“I just flew a red-eye non-stop from Guadalajara to Louisville, equipped with two blow-up pillows to insure a restful trip of good quality sleep — but friends had given me a copy of The Zen of MLM. The more I read, the more my energy and mental alertness rose…

“John is a brilliant writer. He has an eloquent way of expressing his ideas, and his knowledge of this industry is astounding. John is truly a leader and teacher — two qualities that are hard to find in the same person.

“By the time we landed, I found myself disappointed that the 3 hours and 40 minutes had gone by so fast. I wished the flight was longer so I could continue reading.” — Steve LaFronza