That Time I Joined an MLM (Book Excerpt)

Excerpt from What Works: A Comprehensive Framework to Change the Way We Approach Goal-Setting:

Shoot for the Moon

In my junior year of college, a library staff member recruited me as an independent consultant for a makeup and skincare company. I loved makeup, and I liked the idea of being in control of my income. Plus, I’d worked retail for years, so I figured I had some transferable skills. I paid for my starter kit, as well as some additional samples, and attended my first meeting. That first meeting was the pep rally I didn’t know I needed. The cheap hotel conference room shimmered with potential and positive energy. My confidence surged; I was going to make it.

My recruiter could tell I was ready to go all in. She invited me to be her guest at a bigger regional meeting in a bigger cheap hotel ballroom. While the first meeting was led by my recruiter’s recruiter, this second meeting was hosted by someone much farther up the line. And this gathering was special because there was a guest speaker. If memory serves me, the guest speaker was a power player in the company—a woman with the fancy car of a certain color, a massive downline, and plenty of material success. As a sheltered 20-year-old, I’d never heard motivational speaking outside of altar calls at Christian rock festivals. I was transfixed. This woman seemed to have the answer to all of life’s biggest questions! And she believed that each of us in attendance had what it took to make it big. I am easily swept up by that kind of energy and rhetoric—I suppose most people are. That’s why it works. And by “works,” I mean that it works to stir people up and make them more susceptible to risk-taking.

After the event, as we walked toward her car, I told my recruiter how excited I was by what I’d heard. I didn’t want to just sell makeup; I wanted to have it all. She reached into the trunk of her car and pulled out a cassette tape. “I think you’ll like this,” she said. It was a recording of a similar speaker, saying similar things—but now the motivation was on-demand. I’d play the tape over and over again. I learned that I’m the only one responsible for my success or failure. I learned that if I worked hard enough, I could get whatever I wanted. I learned the makeup company’s founder had herself said, “Shoot for the moon, and you’ll land among the stars.” I liked that, even if it was astronomically inaccurate. It wasn’t until at least a decade later that I learned the founder did not originate that phrase—she merely borrowed it from Norman Vincent Peale.

Like every multilevel marketing company, the company I signed up with has a clear way to ladder up in the organization. I liked that, too. Promotions weren’t up to chance—if I wanted to move up, the requirements were right there in black and white. Each rung in the beauty ladder also came with an external reward. The first was the honor of donning a red blazer at official events. When you wore the red blazer to an event, everyone knew what rank you were—how committed you were to success. I earned my red blazer quickly and set my sights on earning a sporty little car, just like my recruiter had recently earned. My success was short-lived, though. As a college student, I just didn’t know enough people to sell to or, more importantly, recruit. And as a painfully awkward and socially anxious person, I wasn’t equipped to network my way to knowing more people. I was queasy about the few women I had recruited. Even though I knew it was “up to them” to succeed, I felt responsible for them. I didn’t want them to have wasted their time or money because I had listened to some motivational tapes.

But sooner than later, I faced reality. I wasn’t cut out for this particular grift. My recruiter convinced me not to sell my product back to the company (she was already dangerously close to losing her new car, and if I’d officially quit, she’d be on the hook for a car payment). Boxes of lotions, lipsticks, foundations, and samples sat in the closet of my mom’s house for years after that. I didn’t throw them away until after I graduated, got married, had a baby, and separated, moving back in with my mom. For years, those boxes were visual reminders that I wasn’t good enough to succeed. Unknowingly, I carried that shame and doubt with me for years.

I’m not the first person to lose at the game of multilevel marketing (99 percent of people do). It’s easy to get sold on the energy, the community, the potential—enough so that you forget the impossible math of the MLM system standing in your way. When you inevitably quit, all of the programming that you gorged yourself on in the beginning turns on you. Now, you’re lazy; you’re not committed; you’ve lost faith. In many ways, a multilevel marketing scheme is a microcosm of what many of us experience every day in our culture at large. We learn the path and visualize our success. We devour the positive messages and seek the wisdom of mentors farther up the ladder. We work hard— and harder still. And when stress or burnout or the reality of an economy that only works for a few becomes too much to bear? We step back, knowing we weren’t good enough or strong enough. We didn’t want it bad enough. We didn’t think the right thoughts or manifest the right results. We blame ourselves because that’s what we’ve been taught to do.

The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne, debuted in 2006 and, since, has sold over 35 million copies. After Byrne appeared on Oprah—twice—the book and DVD flew off shelves. In fact, I remember just how fast it flew because I was managing a Borders Books and Music at the time. Case after case of the book appeared on our loading dock, and just as soon as we’d get the books out on the floor, they’d be gone again. I can also remember, early in the craze, hiding out in the backroom with a few co-workers to figure out what was going on with this book. What was all this fuss about? We suspected The Secret was no literary or philosophical masterpiece. I cracked open a copy and read out loud. We howled. Our suspicions were correct; The Secret was a great product but not a great idea. The Secret brought the Law of Attraction to the mass market. The Law of Attraction, according to Byrne and her ersatz academy of teachers, taught that you could have anything you wanted by thinking about and visualizing it intensely enough. And any hardship or negative experience was also the result of your own manifestation. Your pessimistic thoughts and fears created your undesirable reality.

The Secret was not—is not, as Byrne has continued to release books, films, and three apps—an isolated craze. It’s merely the slick repackaging of a message that’s been bubbling in the waters of American culture for 150 years called New Thought. Early proponents of New Thought believed in the power of the mind to heal the body. As historian Kate Bowler explains, “New Thought taught that the world should be reimagined as thought rather than substance. The spiritual world formed absolute reality, while the material world was the mind’s projection.” While New Thought’s adherents, like the teachers of The Secret, would point to “ancient wisdom” (both Western and Eastern religions, as well as indigenous traditions) as the source of their knowledge, it should be understood as a distinct, colonial, and capitalist phenomenon. New Thought didn’t stop at championing the “mind-cure” for disease or the divinity of the self as true self-actualization. By the early 20th century, New Thought became a more explicitly economic teaching, too. Bowler calls this new iteration an American gospel, “based on hard work, pragmatism, innovation, self-reliance and openness to risk.”?

One of the runaway bestsellers that preached this new gospel was Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking. Peale’s book is full of scriptural one-liners turned into positive affirmations, as well as “rags” to riches stories of men who were down on their luck and turned everything around once they discovered they could just think happy (and wealthy) thoughts. In the same vibrational wavelength of his pseudo-spiritual progeny, Peale writes, “The secret is to fill your mind with thoughts of faith, confidence, and security.” And while I was surprised to discover that Peale is slightly more generous to structural burdens than those that came later, his book also contains nuggets like this one: “It is appalling to realize the number of pathetic people who are hampered and made miserable by the malady popularly called the inferiority complex.” Or, “Disability, tension, and kindred troubles may result from a lack of inner harmony.” If this sounds all sounds familiar, it’s because it’s woven into the fabric of our economic, cultural, and political systems today. While Peale, Byrne, and other proponents of New Thought like to remind us that our negative thoughts create undesirable realities, they are actively creating a theory of self that puts the blame for suffering and adversity on us.

If I’m to be completely responsible for my own success or lack thereof, how I respond to failure will naturally be to condemn myself. And it was from that self-loathing that one early morning at the gym, I found myself googling, “Can I change my personality?” There was a not insignificant part of me that believed I could think my way to a personality more suited to success. That it was my own deficiency of character that had led to my mental anguish. With more than five years' distance from that morning, I can see how extreme and unreasonable that pervasive thought was. But I’ve learned since that it is simply the air we breathe in 21st-century America. It was certainly the air I was breathing at the gym—where the gospel of thinness hangs like a sweaty stench in that same air.?

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