MLM's aren't necessarily gimmicks. They do make a lot of people a lot of money. Problem is, you have to be the personality which is totally fine with feeding bullshit to people below you and totally fine on brain washing the weak minded who are looking to get rich, quick.
I humored a friend who presented me with a MLM opportunity. My friend said he had a "mentor" that he wanted me to meet. So, I meet the mentor and the guy almost immediately starts making passively makes comments about the expensive cars he owns, how he works only 20 hours a week, how his significant other is retired, how he vacations all year, how he has developed a "LEGACY" and has "FINANCIAL FREEDOM!" all in 5 months of being "mentored" in this MLM. Then the mentor basically said it was a big deal that I was meeting him, and he starts name dropping other rich "mentors" who mentored him, and if I want to be successful I have to trust him entirely and work for his trust for months by going to meetings, blah blah. So, after about an hour of this my friend and this "mentor" invited me to an hour long presentation. I thought this was all very entertaining so I bit and said I would go.
I didn't hear anything about where or when this presentation was until the day of. I get a text with the address and I look at it thinking he sent me the wrong text because the address was my friends address. So I double checked with him and he confirmed that it was at his place.. Uhh, ok.
So I get there a bit early, go downstairs, and I see all of this product placement lined up around the room with about 10 other people already there. All of these people were wearing cheap suits, or cheap dress clothes and had that glazed look over their eyes, like they were just binge sniffing markers for hours. I go to sit down and find a little energy drink from a brand I had never heard of before waiting in my chair. So I put it on the ground and wait.
About 10 minutes later, the "mentor" comes down the stairs, (also wearing a cheap suit) and you could just tell he was in the fuckin zone. He glides across the room, and immediately jumps into the "What would you DO if you had a MILLION DOLLARS?" "what are your DREAMS?? WHAT is your LEGACY!?". And for every question he would ask, he would walk over to an energy drink on my friends shelf (which all had the labels conveniently facing towards us) grab it, open it, and just hold it for like 10 minutes while people answered. Sometimes he would drink out of it, sometimes he wouldn't. But he wouldn't put it down until he felt his questions were sufficiently answered. The sad part was, people were taking him seriously and were giving answers like
"I WOULD BUY A JET"
"I WOULD BUY A MONKEY"
"I WOULD GET A HOUSE WITH A.. WITH A.. SLIDE ON IT WHICH SLIDES DOWN INTO A WATERPARK ON MY LAWN"
"I WOULD SOLVE WORLD HUNGER"
Fuck, these people were stupid.
So after about 40 minutes of this rah rah BS, he finally starts explaining how it works for the next hour. And by explaining how it works, I mean he starts trying to indoctrinate everyone. He starts saying things like
"your friends and family will tell you this is a cult, or this is a pyramid scheme, or this is a scam. But they are all wrong. Forget everything you know about business. Forget everything you know about being successful and ignore everything your friends or family try to tell you"
"They say this is a pyramid scheme because only the people on the top make money. Well guess what. That's how ALL companies work! All companies are a pyramid scheme!"
"I was just like you folks, sitting there being very critical of this whole thing until I saw the light. I used to drink Coca-Cola a lot, and then one day I thought.. what if I stopped drinking Coke, and started drinking these Energy Drinks which I sold through MY BUSINESS. I would just be paying myself!!!.. And that's how successful minds think"
My favorite quote of his was when he said something along the lines of
"People will tell you that this is a cult. But a cult is a group of people who all think the same way. Do we all think the same way?" as he would look around the room and people would chuckle because they thought that it was such a stupid idea, because they are all unique individuals building a "LEGACY!" and that it totally isn't a cult, even though the mentor just spent the last hour trying to convince everyone to think the same way and listen only to him.
Finally, for the next 20 minutes he actually explains how MLM's work. Which basically works like this:
you open your own online business where your friends buy product through YOUR store where 33.33% of whatever they spend in your store GOES BACK TO THEM IN CASH!!! Then you get your friends to open up their own store for their friends and then their friends openuptheirstoresandthentheirfriendsiosaeaskjea.
He would never explain anything in detail though, he would always give very broad statements and kind of just gloss over the details.
At the end of the presentation, people were clapping and lining up to shake his hand, all excited and smiling thinking that they are that much closer to living the dream by only working "20 hours a week". It was a little disturbing, actually.
So I told my friend I was not interested and that was that. I started to follow his progress to see if he was going to "make it big one day". Basically, this guy has been trying to do this for over a year now and has not been getting anything from it financially. He has purchased a bunch of motivational material, a bunch of self-confidence books, and he goes down with his mentor almost every to some convention somewhere. He lives with his parents, and can't afford to purchase nice things for himself or even basic necessities.
And these people who tell you "3 hours a day" or "20 hours a week" are full of shit. They are constantly meeting with their downlines, and their downlines prospective downlines. They are always driving/flying/whatever to these "conventions" where they basically just feed you a bunch of BS. They look down on "9-5" jobs, when they are working sporadically throughout the day, or spending their whole weekends/nights/days going to conventions. They also encourage that when you are out, to strike up conversations with random people to see if they are interested in becoming FINANCIALLY FREE!!
So I guess the whole point of this story is, if you are someone who likes to constantly be fake all the time and likes to meet with random people all through out the day and are good at luring dumb people into being your downline, then MLM's are for you!
