You’ve read the headline before:

NINETY PERCENT OF ALL MLMers FAIL

Gasp! Horrors! In Myself! (Sounds like the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz.)

Oh come on… what’s the problem? Sorry, but really: why would this bother you?

Frankly, if only 90 percent of people who try network marketing fail, that’s great! That would mean that between five and nine times more people are successful in this business than almost anywhere else or anything else.

Think about it:

How many of those who aim to win a gold medal in any of the 302 events at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games will lose? All but one in each event… (in raw numbers, thousands).

How many children out of the more than 9,000,000 who participated in this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee won?

How many golfers are there at the start of the PGA or The Masters? how many earn

How many ideas for a new consumer goods product fail and never make it to market?

Interesting Notes: Of those products that make it through R&D and marketing through the manufacturing process and onto the shelves, 97 percent will be withdrawn, scrapped, and no longer manufactured within their first year! How many of these more than 15,000 new products introduced each year will you try and buy?

And don’t think that lack of money is the problem. Many of these wonderful ideas have literally hundreds of millions of dollars behind them when they crash and burn.

Have you heard of Ford’s Edsel?

What about Xerox or Exxon computers? (Did you know that Xerox “invented” the mouse, desktop, and icons? It still failed.)

Or the toy giant Ideal, which when I was 10 years old (in 1958) had the absurd bad taste of presenting a doll of Christ at Christmas!

However, Premiere “smokeless” cigarettes from RJ Reynolds, who invested five years and hundreds of millions in their R&D.

Or, General Motors’ Chevrolet Nova, which didn’t do as well in Mexico where they planned to sell large numbers, simply because in Spanish the word “nova” means “won’t go.”

Gold, chewy toothpaste…

Everywhere you look, there are many failures, many!

And a lot of things that were ultimately successful were flops to begin with.

Bizet’s universally beloved opera Carmen was a flop on opening night.

The Celestine Prophecy, was a dust-covered paperback for a year before becoming a hardcover bestseller.

When it comes to products, there is a veritable gold mine of failed first success stories, but look at me now. In his charming (especially if you like irony) book, get it right the second time, Michael Gersham tells the story of 49 initial product failures that are now some of the biggest marketing success stories. For example:

Kleenex sprayed at first. It was marketed by Kimberly-Clark after World War I. They were a newsprint/wrapping paper company with warehouses full of “Cellucotton”, a medical bandage replacement used during the war. Only when some smart guy in marketing figured out, “Hey, you can blow your nose on this stuff and then throw it away…” did the product catch on.

Jell-O also flopped at first. For years he was a “dog” and the brand sold for only $450.

Pepsi went bankrupt. Walt Disney too, five times!

Look, the predominant physical force on Earth is gravity, and it’s always pulling us down. 95 percent of all people everywhere who do something are not doing it right. They are certainly not “winning”. As already asked, what is the problem?

What is “failure” anyway?

show me. Go ahead and show us the “flop.”

Failure is a word, specifically a type of noun word, which means it refers to a person, place, or thing (none of which is a failure), or a state.

Ahhh… the big state of failure (must be just east of New Jersey), based on the verb; fail, which means: not achieving success in something expected, tried, desired…

And who, please tell me, is the God-like expert who decrees that such a failure has just occurred?

A unique being and not so omnipotent, but when it comes to failure, always omnipresent, that expectant master, who tries and wants… YOU!

You, and only you, create the state or quality of failure. And you believe it just because you say so.

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True, there is a state of failure, but you are, at worst, just a tourist there on a short visit. Heck, most of the time you’re just flying or driving. And you are the only authority on Earth that declares that you are or are not in failure. (Think about that… please.)

Failure and its inseparable success are the proverbial two sides of day and night like a coin. You cannot have one without the other. Take away failure, neither does success. And which one dominates at a given moment does so simply because you say so.

By the way, have you ever heard Guy Kawsaki’s great line: “Failure is not an option. It’s a requirement!”

In Should you resign before you get fired? Author Paul Zane Pilzer tells the story of a father who secretly watches his young son throw a baseball into the air with one hand, then swing his bat to hit it as the ball falls back down. The youngster missed…missed again…and then missed a third time…spinning and falling to the ground as he yelled, “Strike three. You’re out!”

The man rushed to help his son up, trying to hide the disappointment he felt at his son’s failure, only for the boy to say…

“So what do you think? Not bad for a pitcher, huh, Dad?”

Failure and success are states of mind

They exist only because you say so, either out loud or to yourself.

And you can always choose what you say, whether it’s out loud or to yourself.

“90 percent of all network marketers fail.”

Really… Okay, if you say so.