Success in network marketing is very often inversely proportional to the amount of creativity you put into it. The creative person comes up with all sorts of fancy ways to describe the products and the business opportunity. The creative person develops his or her own success system because the company-supported system isn't quite flashy enough. The creative person talks one-on-one to people and gives them all the specific details in one fell swoop. And in most cases, this is a recipe for disaster.
On the other hand, successful network marketers understand the concept of duplication. They know that, in order to build a large organization, whatever they do must be able to be duplicated by their downline . Successful network marketers are not innovative. They simple do it, over and over again. They're probably not as flashy as the "creative" distributor. They don't do as well in front of a group or in one-on-one meetings. The successful network marketers are often people who you would consider the least likely to succeed anywhere else. And their success is due, not to intelligence or creativity or innovation, but to persistence and to sticking with a duplicatible system.
This has been a problem for me, frankly. I am by nature a very creative person. It is something that I must do. I cannot not create. And I've recently come to realize that my urge to be creative, while it has given my life a dimension that I would not want to be without, has also held me back in many areas. In my marketing and publishing business, for example, I focus more on the creative side than on the business side. I'm more concerned that a piece of work be absolutely perfect than I am concerned about being paid for it. My drive to produce perfect creations eats up a lot of time that could be spent more productively. And in my network marketing business, I must constantly strive to keep my creativity at bay. Oh, I'm able to get a lot of people to use my products just by talking one-on-one with them. I'm full of all sorts of convincing information on why they should be using them. I certainly don't need the company's system to help me develop loyal retail customers. And I have a great retail business because of that. But the problem is, these customers can't duplicate what I'm doing. They can't see themselves becoming as fanatically informed about nutrition as I am. So they simply use the products but have trouble seeing themselves introducing them to others.
So, I'm learning to hold myself back. To use the system. It's hard for me to do, because I'm so committed to the products and knowledeable about them. There is a strong temptation to "hose people down" whenever I get the opportunity. But, the longer I do this business, the more I realize that it's in my best interest to keep my mouth shut and let the system do the talking.
One of the best ways to do this, I've found, is to channel my creative urges into other areas. I've discovered why people have hobbies -- to give their lives balance. I've recently been busy editing the video from my trip to the Virgin Islands together with my slides and putting it all to music. This is a completely unpaid activity which allows me to be as creative and as much of a perfectionist as I want to be. And it satisfies that urge to create, so that when I go to work doing my network marketing business, I can get by with being a little less creative.
There are many other creative outlets that one can develop. There's a very successful distributor with my company here in town who has a musical group that plays at local nightclubs and coffee houses. Their music is very good, and they put everything they've got into making it even better. And, of course, they don't make any money at it -- most of the time they play for free, just for the exposure. But money is not what they're after, anyway. The primary motivation is the desire to create beautiful music.
For the longest time, I was convinced that the way to be successful was to be creative in whatever I did. To find a way to do it better. Always looking for a new angle. But I'm just not so sure about that any more.
One big problem with being constantly creative is what's called "analysis paralysis." You're so busy thinking of new ways to do things, analyzing the situation, and figuring out how to get a leg up on everybody else, that you don't ever get anything done. Boy, have I ever been there and done that!
Keeping busy with creativity is so appealing because it doesn't invite immediate rejection. If we sit for four hours and cold call people on the phone, and they all say "I'm not interested", that's pretty depressing. If, on the other hand, we sit for four hours designing the very best custom database file to track our downline, that's fun and creative -- and there's no rejection. Problem is, there's no downline, either. You need to go through all those "not interested"s in order to find the truly interested people that will build your organization. Sitting behind your computer all day won't do it, no matter how many features you design into your database program.
Sure, there are people who make a lot of money from their creative efforts: musicians, actors, photographers, painters, and writers of screenplays, books and software, just to name a few. However, even in these highly creative fields, there is a lot of drudgery. Software writers must carefully test and debug their code. Photographers must pay close attention to exposure and lighting. Musicians must know how to read music and tune their instruments and play in key. In order to have the freedom to create, one must first practice discipline.
I remember when I earned to play the piano as a child. It seemed like the only thing I played for the first year or two were scales and finger exercises. I hated it. I'm thankful that I persisted, however, because eventually I got to the good stuff, the fun stuff, the creative stuff. Now I can sit down and play creations that come out of thin air, and they're in key and they sound fairly good, sometimes even inspired. Contrast this with my two year old daughter who has never had a music lesson. When she sits down to "play", she also can pull things out of thin air. Rarely, however, does she produce anything but noisy clashing.
Many people who get into network marketing are looking for freedom -- freedom from the drudgery of a boring job, freedom from being told what to do, freedom to do things their own way and in their own time. That's great. Network marketing can offer all those things and more. We must remember that there is a difference between freedom and anarchy. Freedom carries an enormous responsibility. In order to achieve freedom, we must be disciplined enough to handle it. Otherwise, we collapse into an un-focused lump of jelly. Freedom without discipline and direction is nothing.
We can be free from oppression, but we can never be free from responsibility. It is built into life and there's no getting around it. Whatever we do, we're responsible for. Our creative side needs to accept this.
What's that saying about 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration?
And when you look at it that way, then we can be creative as heck in network marketing. We can create, not new sales techniques, not new management methods, not new training audios, but dynamic, living creations that we call downlines. And just as the musician must follow a precise discipline in creating music, so must we as network marketers follow a discipline. That discipline is called the system. It is what enables us to create downlines because it is designed to foster duplication and exponential growth. Yes, every now and then a creative artist comes along who changes the rules. However, in order to change the rules, one must first know them and live by them and practice them, day in and day out.
To achieve true freedom, we must first learn to be disciplined. For network marketers, that means putting our creative urges into other pursuits and using the tried and true, duplicatible system for our business.
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