Leave Nothing To Chance

 

Believe in your capabilities and skills. Listen to this episode as your host John Solleder sits down for a conversation with Randy Gage about building your wealth and transformation. He shares his journey of being a teenage alcoholic and how those poor choices became his wake-up call. He then discusses the books that made an impact on his life and how he used his knowledge to transform. Plus, Randy takes us into his book, Radical Rebirth, where he shows the importance of personal growth and development as we build ourselves up to success. So reinvent, be the highest possible version of yourself, and tune into this conversation!

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Randy Gage “Radical Rebirth” By America’s Leading Thought Leader

It is beyond a privilege to have on the show a guy that when I say icon, I don’t use that word freely in our industry. He is an icon, legend, leader and legitimate genius. I have worked with him for a short time. I see the genius in this guy constantly. He is the author of fourteen books. He has been a top-rank distributor in several companies over the years. Randy Gage, welcome to the show. I don’t know how many other accolades I can give my friend. Thank you for being here, for being you and for your leadership now for over four decades in our great industry.

Thanks for having me on. It would be great to hang out and chop it up.

Let’s start at the beginning. A young Randy Gage is fifteen years old. I know you had an issue. I know that that issue changed your life for the better. Tell us about that a little bit.

I was a teenage alcoholic and drug addict. At fifteen, I was making slightly poorer choices than good ones. I ended up in jail for armed robbery and burglary. That was a real wake-up call.

Somebody came into your life that believed in you. I have heard you tell this story, but only you can tell this story. Somebody came and they said, “You’re better than this.”

I have my best buddy in school, David. He is dating a girl named Joy. Joy’s father is a teacher. His name is Baxter. Joy tells her father, “You’ve got to help Randy Gage. He is David’s best friend. He is in jail. He needs your help. Somebody has got to save him.” One day, I hear jingling. I look up and the cell door opens. They let in this blonde guy who I had never seen. It’s Baxter. His name is Baxter Richardson. He tells me, “You don’t belong in here. You’re capable of great things.”

I think, “Who is this clown? Does he have any idea who he is talking to?” I tell him that and he says, “I’m not buying that. I have talked to your teachers. I did my homework before I came in here. They tell me your reading comprehension is higher than college level. You skipped school for 3 or 4 weeks straight. They don’t see you. You showed up on a test and aced the test. You don’t belong here. You could do great things.”

I had already been in there probably a month staring at the cell walls and the ceiling all day, every day and rethinking my choices in life. I was desperate to believe what he said that I believed it and because I believed it. It was true. If I hadn’t believed it, it would have been a lie. There are some things in life that when you believe them, become true.

This is particularly true in the area of self-esteem, self-awareness and belief in your capacity to do things and the expectations we set for ourselves. As many years as you have been in the profession, the expectations we create for ourselves and that other people sometimes create for us can become a reality. That was the case for me.

I’m going to guess somewhere in those next few years that a young Randy Gage, searcher of information, as I know you are now and I’m sure you were then as a young guy. Somebody probably put a book in your hands. Maybe you tripped across it at the library or maybe your mom gave it to you. Who knows how you got it? There had to be a book that you probably read that that light-bulb moment came on and you said, “Somebody believes in me and now I have a little bit of direction.” Do you remember what that book was?

Develop the magic of thinking big and growing rich. Click To Tweet

I could put a couple up that possibility. The basement to that question is I never got a book like that until I became involved in network marketing because I didn’t know those books existed. I was a voracious reader as a kid. That’s what I believe saved my life because I was a voracious reader or had that curiosity. I would read Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Robert Ludlum novels and espionage thrillers, but that’s the only books I knew.

It was only when I got into network marketing that people were talking about As a Man Thinketh, The Magic of Thinking Big and Think and Grow Rich. They talked about these books with reverence. When you asked that question, the two that popped to the top of my mind would be As a Man Thinketh and Think and Grow Rich. Think and Grow Rich was such a crazy idea for me, the idea of being rich and that somebody was suggesting that I could be rich because my mother was a single mom. She raised three kids by herself, knocking on doors and selling Avon.

You could trace my family back to the mayflower. There was nobody who had money in my family. It was poor and poverty after poverty. Baxter had convinced me that I was capable of great things. When I got involved in network marketing, I bought into the dream and vision, but I wasn’t across the line that I would become rich. That book was instrumental for me. I read it every year, at least once for the next 15 or 20 years.

As a Man Thinketh is the book that I have gifted the most to people. Unfortunately, it’s a small book. It sells for $5. I wish it sold for $50,000 because if it did, people would read it with the respect that it deserves because it’s deep on many levels about the power of thought. There are many more in my list of greatest hits in terms of books. It would be a mile-long. The first 1 or 2 that changed my thinking would be those two.

Let’s say they knock on your door and they say, “Randy, you need a vacation. We are going to take you to a beautiful deserted island. We are going to give you all the healthy food you can eat and all the water you can drink, but you can only bring three books with you.” I’m going to guess that As a Man Thinketh and Think and Grow Rich would be two of them, but maybe there’s a third if you had to select. They say, “You can bring your Holy Bible as well, but you can only bring three non-religious books.”

The number one on the list would be Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand because that’s the most impactful book that I have read in my life. That’s a book that we read every year or two. That was a transformational book for me because it set me on the pathway of having a philosophy for living a philosophy for life, “How do you live your life? What are the principles you live by? What is your life about? What are you here meant to do?”

Even though it’s a novel, that always shocks people that a novel could have that effect. That’s what that book is about. She introduces the philosophy of objectivism in the book. My takeaway from that was, “I need to have a philosophy to guide my North Star philosophy to live with.” The second one I would take would be The Science of Mind by Ernest Holmes because that’s like Think and Grow Rich, As a Man Thinketh and all of those simpler books to the 100^th power. It’s at such a high level of that.

The third would be a book called Prosperity by Reverend Charles Fillmore, which most people won’t know that book or even reverend. He was the Cofounder of the Unity Church and Unity movement. It was published in 1936. It was written in that language of the day. It was stilted in that sense. I found it at a very difficult time in my life when things were blowing up for me and falling apart. That book put me on the pathway I have been on over the years of studying the principles of prosperity. If I got to be stuck with three books, those are the three I want.

What is amazing doing this show, as long as I have been doing it, is guys like us that love to read. It’s like, “Of all your friends, who do you bring? I will bring Bob, Mary and Sue,” but books, it’s like, “That’s a tougher choice.” Let’s talk about Randy, the author, because you have authored at least fourteen books. I know you’re always writing and working. I know every time we correspond, you’re in your office. It doesn’t matter if it’s 6:00 in the morning or 7:00 at night. It’s like, “Randy is working if I text you.” Talk about your books. What was the first one? I know you had a couple of New York Times Bestsellers.

The first 8 or 9 are terrible. The last 3 or 4 are brilliant. The first one I wrote was in 1991. It was called How to Build a Multi-Level Money Machine: The Science of Network Marketing. That book had at least 18 or 20 printings. It had 4 or 5 additions that sold millions of copies. It has been translated into more than twenty languages. At the time I wrote it, it was brilliant because nobody had written a book like that in the profession of network marketing.

 

There were a lot of hype books on Lambos, palm trees, stacks of cash and hype. There were a lot of books secretly designed to recruit people and build a following that you could steal people from other companies. There were a lot of books by consultants and outsiders who saw, “There’s a lucrative market here selling to all these evangelical MLM-ers. They are rabid readers and they buy products like crazy. Let me write a book for those people.”

Nobody in the profession who had real-world field experience, who have been in the living rooms 10,000 times, hotel rooms and all those places, know what it means to have five people in the living room with their arms and legs crossed. They are hanging out of their wallet for dear life and knowing what it means to have regulatory issues, negative publicity, leaders trying to steal your other leaders and crossline recruiting. Nobody wrote like, “Here’s a generic step-by-step on how to do the business.”

I was extremely proud of that book when I wrote it. I still would be now because, for the time, I remember it was 1991. When people tell me, “I got your book,” I’m like, “Please throw that book away. Get Direct Selling Success.” It’s the one I wrote in 2019. What happened was at the end of 2019, the publisher was saying, “It’s time to go back for another printing. Do you want to do a new edition of this?” I said, “Yes, we definitely need to update it.” I sat down to do it and kept hitting the wall like, “Write 2,000 words. Rewrite and can it.” I realized, “I need to start fresh. There’s so much that has changed in our profession.”

When I wrote this, the internet and social media didn’t exist. We didn’t even have fax machines. The regulatory environment and the reputation of the profession were different. I need to start from scratch and write this book as what I’m doing now because I was building in 50 different countries. I have a team of 200,000 people around the world. I was working with real-world everyday stuff. Why am I going to re-track or retread something from 1991? That would be the caveat for that. That first book was a huge success.

My next book was Why You’re Dumb, Sick and Broke…And How to Get Smart, Healthy and Rich! That one sold well. It was translated into 15 or 20 different languages. It’s still in print. People are still buying it. I wasn’t a very good writer back then. I didn’t have an editor. I look back on it now and I’m like, “I’m so embarrassed by that book.” It was the start of me being exposed to Ayn Rand and having a philosophy. That was the first book where I started to sketch out my philosophy for living.

I wrote a five-book series on prosperity. They are all short. One is 101 Keys to Your Prosperity, 37 Secrets About Prosperity and The 7 Spiritual Laws of Prosperity. I wrote all five of them in two weeks. I went down to Key West. I barricaded myself in and said, “If I write a chapter, I can go to the bathroom. If I write another chapter, I can eat lunch and go out on a jet ski.” I locked myself in there. They are the simple stuff of prosperity. I still like them. They are still in print. They still sell well around the world, but I don’t think I was that good of a writer then.

I wrote a book then for direct selling leaders. My real breakthrough was in 2012. I wrote a book called Risky is the New Safe. It was a book not for people in network marketing and who would already drink the Kool-Aid about prosperity. This was a big change for me because I was speaking to entrepreneurs in general. I wanted to talk about how people like Mark Cuban, Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey and brilliant entrepreneurs how they think, look around the corner and see the future.

I wrote this book in 2012 and talked about crazy ideas. There was this ride-share thing called Uber, Lyft and Sidecar that I was talking about. I was talking about this wacky idea called Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, sequencing the human genome and designer babies that you could go in. There will be a time where you will go in the office and it will be like going through a McDonald’s Drive-Thru. You say, “For our baby, we want the Maya Angelou poetry gene. We want the Patrick Mahomes quarterback gene. We want blue eyes and blonde hair.”

We are at that point already. They wouldn’t let you do that, but that technology is there. I talked about asteroid mining. I predicted Brexit. It’s all of this stuff of the future and saying, “Here’s the stuff we have to think about when we try to figure the future because the future is always here.” A futurist would tell you, “It’s not evenly distributed yet.” I was looking at what was going on with the blockchain and DNA.

You would appreciate this story. That book came about because I’m flying back from Thailand. I’m in the SFO airport lounge. There’s a couple there with a puppy and they take it out of the carrier. I love dogs, so I go over and say, “Can I play with the puppy?” The lady tells me, “Yes, he is a clone.” I laughed, “That’s a pretty funny joke.” She said, “That’s not a joke. He is a clone. We are bringing him home from South Korea. We cloned him.”

Mark Cuban, Richard Branson, and Oprah Winfrey are really brilliant entrepreneurs, and we are inspired by how they think, how they look around the corner and see the future. Click To Tweet

This puppy is licking my face and jumping all around. It’s the most beautiful and adorable puppy like you would find in the pound that you would rescue. I’m like, “There is no way in the world this puppy is cloned. I have heard about Dubai supposedly cloned a camel and people were looking at this. That’s like Petri dish stuff. That’s not real.” The couple happens to be on my flight. I don’t think they were a couple. They were the people bringing the dog to the couple who had got it. They were traveling together.

The plane lands in Miami and I get off the plane. I always sit in row 1 or 2. Usually, it’s row two because I like the legroom. I’m one of the first people off the plane. There are all these camera crews waiting. I’m like, “I had a good seminar.” They are waiting for this dog to come off the plane because they have all been alerted. I realized, “This dog is cloned.” That was the impetus for me writing this book, like, “I’m going to have to step up my game. There’s a level of thinking going on here that I’m not even close to accessing.”

I wrote the book. It becomes a New York Times Bestseller and Publishers Weekly Bestseller. USA Today calls it the number one money book. It’s a Wall Street Journal Top Ten. It hits every top ten list anywhere. I’m doing the radio and TV interviews. These people think I’m crazy. They are like, “It’s because I say in the book.” They asked questions like, “Do you believe you’re going to be able to take a vacation on the moon?” I’m like, “That’s the wrong question. The better question would be, who owns the moon?”

They are like, “What do you mean?” I’m like, “The US went there first. We put our flag there. Does that mean we own it? China or Russia went there. They knocked down our flag and put their flag. Does that mean they own it? How are we going to colonize the moon without all of this war and bloodshed that it took on this planet? Maybe that’s a better question.”

They are like, “Do you believe that people are going to be able to buy a house on the floor of the ocean and have octopi swimming by and a coral garden in front of them?” I’m like, “That’s the wrong question. The better question would be, what is the price of ocean floor real estate going to do to the price of oceanfront real estate? Those are the questions you should be thinking about.”

I remember Joe Vitale. I did his radio show. He started shrieking. He was like, “How do you think this way? I have never met anyone with that. How did this happen?” I was like, “Joe, the only thing I can figure out is one day, the aliens left me in a basket on my mother’s porch. I have been trying to fit in ever since. That’s all I could figure because I was always different.” That was in 2012.

The next big book breakthrough was called Mad Genius. To update it, now I’m looking at Elon Musk and people like this. How do you tap into your creative energy? It’s geared to entrepreneurs in the big space. That had been my focus for 8 or 9 years. I’m working with entrepreneurs, CEOs, founders and people like that. I’m looking at what is going on in the direct selling, leveraged sales and network marketing space. It’s all of the crap, scam books, seminars and workshops from people. They couldn’t spell MLM if you spotted them the M.

It’s all these outsiders and all the junk. They would be like, “I have some of those books sitting over.” They got a chapter on recruiting and it’s three pages. When I wrote Direct Selling Success, the chapter on recruiting was 5,000 words. That’s longer than those books are. That’s just on how to recruit neat people. I was at that point where I said, “I have got to update this.” I did that. I felt like I got to get back in the space and show people the real truth and the real world of how this business works instead of these crazy hype books that are all just hype.

I wrote a book called Defcon 1 for leaders who have an organization of at least 10,000 or 20,000 people. What happens if your CEO is a genius, but he or she is destroying the company? What happens when your top leader takes a deal and goes to another company? What happens if you get regulatory issues? The stuff nobody wants to talk about are the deep, dark and dirty secrets. I wrote that to get back in the space and bring people back to reality.

My last book is Radical Rebirth. That has nothing to do with direct selling. It’s about personal growth and development. I feel like that book ties together all of my early ones. That’s the book I couldn’t write when I wrote the Dumb, Sick and Broke book. I didn’t have those critical thinking and writing abilities. This now took what I wrote in The Prosperity Series and what I wrote in that book. It’s on how you recreate yourself if there are things in your life that aren’t working for you or there are things about yourself that you hate.

 

There are so many people who live in lives that they never chose. They are a dentist because their father and grandfather were dentists. They are in the military because seven generations of their family have served in the military since the Civil War. They never thought, “What is it that I’m here for? What is it do I want to do?” That book is a deep dive into mind viruses, subliminal programming, how we get manipulated and how you take your power back.

What is amazing about how you think is I sat in one fairly brief meeting with one of the guys you mentioned, Mark Cuban, way back here in Dallas years ago. The owner of the company that I was working with at that time sat with Mark. Mark played basketball at the YMCA here in Dallas with one of our distributors. Mark Cuban is not Mark Cuban, then. He is just the Mark Cuban kid from Pittsburgh. Dad drove a bus. He went to Indiana University. It’s either Indiana or 1 of the 2 in Indiana State.

Ironically, one of my good friends is Arlene Lowy. Her brother was his college roommate. It’s a non-related story. Long story short, this was in the early ‘90s. The company owner told Mark Cuban that the internet was a fad. Mark Cuban said, “You’re clueless.” The company owner went on to be very successful with his company, but Cuban folded up his stuff. He said, “That’s the end of this meeting,” and he left. He never saw him again. A few years later, he was on the cover of Forbes, Fortune and you name it. It’s the same guy.

The first company, the broadcast streaming one, he sold it for $4.3 billion.

I knew some local guys in our industry who had invested a little bit of money in there who did very well as a result. He bought the Dallas Mavericks and said, “I’m a basketball fan. Every rich guy needs a basketball team.” To your point, I saw that little bit of a glimpse into how he thought that day that he was a futurist. That’s what you laid out so well in that book all those years ago. It’s all coming true. What you’re saying about the ocean floor and the moon, who would even think of that? I wouldn’t think of that. It was like, “The ocean floor belongs to the first guy that gets there like a pioneer. What if there’s another guy behind him with a bow and arrow?”

When I did the media tour, these people wanted to commit me. They thought I was insane. In the book, I predicted Uber, Bitcoin, Brexit, genetic cloning, DNA sequencing, asteroid mining and all of these things. At that time, people stopped with, “This is crazy shit.” Now, if you read the book, you would be like, “He predicted that. That’s all so obvious. We have all that stuff.” They don’t realize, in 2012, that was heresy.

Let me ask you this about our industry because everything we are talking about here dovetails back to the direct selling world. There are a lot of people. I love the fact that you refer to this as your profession because this is a profession. The profession of direct selling is very much as a bit of profession as medicine, law or accounting. There are principles and if you follow them, you will succeed. If you don’t follow them, you probably won’t succeed. Let’s stay on that.

Let’s say that one of your neighbors there is talking amongst themselves. Let me give you an example or a role here, a 25-year-old son and a 60-year-old dad. The dad was in upper-level management with a local company there. He did pretty well. He was starting to look at retirement prior to what was going on. He was sitting pretty good financially. The son is college-educated. He is a good kid. He went to school and got good grades. He did the hard work. He started his career doing whatever. All of a sudden, you know what hits the fan.

They never would consider network marketing because they had a formal education. They say, “That’s what other people do. That’s what Uber drivers do on the side. We are not going to do that years ago.” All of a sudden, the years that have happened have happened. The dad says to the son and the son says to the dad, “That Randy guy that lives next door is in that network marketing stuff. I wouldn’t know what he does or how well he does, but why don’t we go and knock on his door?” They do.

You’re a nice guy. You say, “Come on in. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.” They say, “Randy, why network marketing?” You choose either one to start with the 60-year-old or the 25-year-old. Why now is our industry so much more attractive perhaps than it was years ago or at any point in these guys’ lives prior to knocking on your door?

The future is always here. A futurist would tell you it's just not evenly distributed yet. Click To Tweet

It’s not that leveraged sales are better now than it was years ago, although incrementally, it probably is. It’s that we are starting to see the real truth about the other ways you can make a living. When Toto went to that curtain and pulled it back, we saw the man behind Oz pulling the levers. In 2019, if you were a vice president for Disney running the Theme Park Division, you had one of the best jobs in the world. Six months later, you had the worst job in the world.

On December 23^rd, 2019, if you owned Carnival Cruise Lines or one of those cruise lines that Micky Arison near Miami owns, you were one of the wealthiest billionaires on Earth. You had one of the most lucrative businesses in the world. 4 or 5 months later, when every cruise ship in the world was either on a dry dock or roaming the seas desperately looking for a port that would let them enter and let the employees get off the ship, all of a sudden, that didn’t look so good.

Likewise, it’s the millions of people who work at the shopping malls, restaurants and retail shops. The employees at the theme parks, cruise ships and all of those places realized, “What I thought was a good and reliable job, a steady source of income, I realized Toto pulled back the curtain and it wasn’t what I thought it was.” That answers the issue of how it is now versus years from now. What I would tell the 25, 60, 80, 30 or 50-year-old is, “The model has changed.”

The whole premise of Risky is the New Safe book is that all the rules have changed. What used to be true is no longer true. The one constant that you see in both my Risky book and the Mad Genius book is that I showed the fascinating aspect that Uber could only work because somebody in the taxi industry started it.

Everybody in the taxi industry said, “That would never work. You need dispatchers. You’ve got to have a guy calling the cars and putting out the calls. What do you mean to build an app? The app would track where the cars go and which is the closest car. That would cost millions of dollars. Nobody could do that.” Travis Kalanick and those guys said, “We can do this on a worldwide basis. We can make it scale.”

Why could Amazon.com, which started as the world’s biggest bookstore, only be started by somebody who wasn’t in the bookstore business? It’s because everybody in the bookstore business said, “You have to have a brick-and-mortar store. Nobody is going to buy books online. They go to the local store. We have a little café. They can get a coffee and read their book. They are out shopping anyway.” Jeff Bezos said, “I think they will.”

Tony Hsieh said, “I’m going to sell shoes online.” Everybody in the world knows you can’t sell shoes online because you can’t try them on. What if they don’t fit? Because he wasn’t in the shoe business, he could say, “This is a logistical thing. I’m going to send them in a box. I’m going to have a pre-printed label. If they don’t fit, it’s free shipping. They pop it back to me. We will send it back with the next size 24 hours later. We will do whatever we have to do to make our customers happy. They will buy all their shoes from us for the rest of forever.”

Airbnb is not an Extended Stay company. Airbnb is the world’s biggest hotel chain. It’s just nobody in the hotel business was smart enough to figure that out because they have their mental models. I would tell all those looking at our profession that you have to change your mental model because the model of the corporate world and trading hours for money is broken. The model of, “Let’s go to college, take $80,000 worth of college loans, get out and go into the workforce,” is broken.

In the old model, you would say, “The secret is having more money. If I’m lucky enough to get born to multi-millionaire parents and they have enough money to stake me to start a company, I will be successful.” Money versus no money is an old model paradigm. “If I go to school, get an education, get a diploma, take on all that debt and go out in the corporate world, I will be a very attractive candidate. Somebody is going to hire me and give me a lucrative, rewarding career.” That was true in the ’80s and maybe the ’90s, but it’s not true now. The experience, that’s like, “If you have enough experience.”

Throw all those models away, whether it’s money, experience or education. In the new model, the difference between poverty and wealth is going to be leveraged versus not leveraged. If you study the greatest entrepreneurs in the world, which is what I have been doing since 2011 when I started writing the Risky book. Elon, Cuban, Branson and Oprah, it’s all of those people. Go back to Think and Grow Rich, Firestone, Carnegie, Ford, Edison and all of those people. How is wealth created? They all learned how to unleash the power of leverage.

 

If you’re JK Rowling and you can write the Harry Potter Series, you can become the wealthiest woman in Great Britain. If you can’t write the Harry Potter Series, then you’ve got an issue. If you’re Lady Gaga or Bruno Mars and you can create a song that gets downloaded five billion times, you can become wealthy because you’re going to practice leverage. If you don’t have the artistic gift of Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, Ed Sheeran, Ariana Grande or whoever, then what are you going to do?

That’s why I called it leveraged sales. I don’t even call it network marketing, direct selling, MLM or any of that stuff anymore. I believe the sexy part of what we have to offer is leveraged sales. People say, “I don’t like to sell.” If you could leverage sales, tell me you don’t sell. If you’re a parent and you’re trying to get your kid to eat broccoli, you become the best salesperson in the world. If you’re an alcoholic and you’re trying to hide your disease from all your friends, you become the most brilliant salesperson in the world. If you want somebody to marry you, you become a great salesperson.

We all know how to sell inherently. We just don’t want to go around with the briefcase, knocking on doors of strangers and selling Fuller Brush door-to-door, at least most of us. For the Fuller Brush people, maybe they love that. What we have are leveraged sales. We say, “If you conversationally market these products to your friends, neighbors, colleagues and relatives and you put the concept of leverage to work, now you escape trading hours for money.” That’s the thing that holds everybody back. You’re always going to hit the ceiling because there are not enough hours.

There are no amount of hours any human being could ever work in a regular job to equal the $4.3 billion that Mark Cuban cashed out with when he sold his company. There are no amount of hours you can work in any job that will get you the wealth of what Elon Musk, Bezos or Oprah has. Why? It’s because they practice leverage. I believe leveraged sales give the average everyday ordinary person, whether it’s a 25-year-old kid or his 60-year-old father, the chance to practice leverage like Oprah, Bezos, Branson, Cuban, Bill Gates and all those other people.

I always take notes when you talk. Words have power. A perfect example is I did an episode with my sister on communication. She spends a lot of time in Japan. I said, “The Japanese, to your point, are great marketers. How do you take cold, raw and dead fish wrapped in rice and sell it as that? You don’t. You come up with sushi and sell it in 100 countries at a premium.”

Let me ask you this, Randy. You have been successful as a distributor on top of being an author. What is the best way to get somebody off to that flying start? Let me give you a little framework on that. I remember early on in my career in 1983. I go to my first couple of meetings. I remember they had a video of this little girl in California who had been with the company that I had joined.

Her very first paycheck was $0.98. I don’t know about you, but even in 1983, I probably wouldn’t have even bothered going to the bank for $0.98. This girl went and cashed the check. She became an icon with that company and still is 40 years later. I remember that story and she made a tremendous point. The point was, “When I passed the check, it proved that the company was real because they paid me and they had a bank account.”

In her thinking, that was good enough to build a business she has and she continues to this day. To that point, it’s getting that person that confidence, whether that first check is $0.98, $98 or $9,800. How do you get them there in a fast and efficient way where their belief grows in the company and in themselves?

I will give you an abstract answer and a specific tool answer. The abstract answer is you will make or break your new distributors in the first two weeks. The first 48 hours are critical. If you can get them into action in the first 48 hours, it dissipates their fear. If you do not get them into action within 48 hours, you have an 80% chance that they are going to drop out because the procrastination will kick in, “What if I called this person? What if they say no?”

The philosophy and the actual practice you’ve got to create is to study, do and teach simultaneously. They need to do that all in their first two weeks because, inherently, the default setting knee-jerk reaction is they don’t want to do that. They are like, “I need to study this for 2 weeks, 2 years or 20 years. I can do it for two years and then I can teach it.” Those are the people that never get started because they never get any traction. They don’t have any customers and distributors because they are studying.

The difference between poverty and wealth is going to be leverage versus not leverage. Click To Tweet

They are reading all my books, watching all the videos online, scrolling the back office and watching videos on YouTube. They are becoming the preeminent expert in theories of how to do something if you ever get started. Whereas if they get a hotlist of candidates and you say, “I want you to schedule a grand opening for your business. I want you to call the ten people that love you the most. I want you to try and get them as customers,” they will get some customers right away.

If you get their first presentation scheduled within 48 hours, 3 or 4 days and you give them tools that help them invite in a compelling manner and get people in front of a presentation, nobody quits when they have distributors and customers under them who are active and their products are free. In other words, we have to get them to a tipping point. Ideally, we want to get them to a tipping point where their products, self-development costs and major events are covered.

Get them to an income as quickly as you can, where when you say, “We have the gold platinum weekend coming up at the end of December and you need to be there,” they can’t say, “I don’t have money for the ticket because the ticket is $195.” They are making $311 in their business in a month. You can say, “Don’t be trying to live out of your business after you have been in it for 3 days or 3 months. Everything you make in the first two years, you should be reinvesting back into the business. That’s why I want you to keep your job or other business and start this part-time with us for your leverage sales business.”

You have to get them to that tipping point where they will not backslide back. The first two weeks are important. I will say the tool. I wrote a book. This is another one of the books that I’m proud of that’s still relevant, sexy and working now called Making the First Circle Work. The first circle is the one we drew at Amway. We wrote you in the circle. There are legions of top leaders and companies that give that the first thing they sponsor somebody into the business of companies included in the distributor kit and top leaders who give it to every person they sponsor.

I introduced it at the Art Jonak Mastermind Event, whatever year the book came out. In the entire first printing, 20,000 books sold out in an hour because I had done a presentation on the book called Turning Hope Into Belief. That’s what the steps in the book are. Hope gets people into the business. Belief is what keeps them in the business. I went through this whole presentation and then I said, “I wrote this book.”

There were people from the Philippines who said, “I need 5,000 that I can take on the plane back with me. I need 1,000 that I can take back to the UK. I need 500 that I can send to my team in Oklahoma.” We didn’t know. It’s a new book. They published and started with 20,000 copies. They were gone in an hour. That’s a tool that speaks exactly to that issue that you raised, which is, “How do we get that into action? How do we get them from hope to belief as quickly as possible?”

Once they believe, they become different animals. That’s for sure.

They are not going to drop out because now, they are not hoping they are going to get the big bonus check, qualify for that free car or win that cruise in the Caribbean. They know that’s going to happen.

Let me ask you this, Randy. The discipline of a distributor has changed over the many years that you and I have been doing this. Cumulatively, we are over 80 years. Thank God we are not that old. We started young in grade school. Look at the discipline. I would love your opinion on this. It’s tougher now in certain respects for a distributor to be disciplined. Here’s what I mean by that.

When we started, we didn’t even have cell phones. We had landlines. The fax machine came out probably in the late ’80s. I remember when I got it. It was amazing. I was like, “How do I ever live without this thing?” I remember I got my first fax from a guy in the newspaper in Montreal. I was living in New York at that time.

 

I got the guy that he was interested and it became one of my top distributors. I was like, “How will I ever build a business without a fax machine?” All the other things have materialized. Now, we have all these crazy technologies, including what we are doing this interview on Zoom, which didn’t exist years ago. I know that’s a great thing, but it’s also a very distracting thing.

Your advice to somebody that’s in our business that is struggling with managing where they start their day in terms of, be it self-development, within their own respective company or their training system that’s very specific to their company and opportunity? How does that person eliminate all that noise and focus on the task at hand, which is building their business for them and their families? What is the best way to do that now?

I believe in starting your day with personal growth and self-development time. It’s reading one of the books like we have talked about or reading a positive show like this. It’s something that grows your mind, body and soul. That creates your mindset. I do 30 minutes a day of self-development. I don’t answer the phone and the door. I don’t leave the house until I have done my self-development because I’m not going to leave the house until I have my consciousness vibrating up here. When I go out in the world, I’m going to attract people and circumstances who are also vibrating at that level of consciousness.

When you call a candidate at 7:15 on Tuesday night and you say, “I have got a fifteen-minute video about how to create residual income. If I send it to you, would you watch it and call me right back?” Your chance of success if you did 30 minutes that morning twelve hours earlier is 60% greater, even though it’s twelve hours later because you’re a different person asking that question at 7:15 because you did 30 minutes of self-development that morning.

If you’re the person who woke up late, you hit the snooze bar five times. You jumped in the car. You bought breakfast in 7-Eleven, eating a burrito at the red light. You rushed into your office. Your boss was looking at you cross-eyed because you were six and a half minutes late again. Your whole day changed and that changed you. It changed your mindset. It changed the look in your eye, the energy in your body, the posture with which you’re holding yourself when you’re making that call and the mental posture of who you are when you say, “If I send you that video.”

I believe that this self-development sets the tone for the whole day. What do you do after that? I check all my emails. What is an email? Email is a to-do list of what everyone else wants you to do. If you start your day with a to-do list of what everyone else wants you to do, how are you going to accomplish what you want to do? If you get sucked into social media, you’re like, “I’m scrolling through Facebook because I’m prospecting for good candidates. Is that a dog on a surfboard? Is that a cat riding a vacuum cleaner? Is that a goat playing tennis?” You forget about it. The black hole is going to suck you down.

You’ve got to focus on a planner and schedule your time. If people tell you, “You can build this business in two hours a week,” they are lying. You can’t build a business in two hours a week because what if they sponsor somebody and they are a good player? They need more time from you. You can’t support them for two hours a week. What if you have two people? You need at least 10 or 12 hours a week. I like to say 10 to 15 hours a week is what it takes to do the business to start.

The only way that works is if you schedule out that time because if you don’t, it’s going to evaporate. If you don’t have 90 minutes to put in your calendar to call candidates, it’s going to evaporate. Something will come up. The filter and dryer need to be changed. You need to straighten out your stereo wires. You’ve got to soak your comb. There will be pressing emergencies that have to be done then.

The other thing is where we all have to have tough love as a sponsor with our people. We work with them and mindfully help them schedule their planner each week for a couple of weeks, especially when they first start. It’s on rainmaker activities. Maybe people in other countries, it’s a slang term. It brings the rain, meaning it produces sales.

Rainmaker activities are, “We are getting candidates in front of a presentation so they can become a customer or distributor. We are following up with people who have been in front of a presentation. We are servicing current customers.” Reading books and scrolling through the internet and dog videos are not rainmaker activities. Those are the things that if we work with our people on those areas, that’s where they are going to be productive and get results.

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There are two questions in one. You can answer it however you want to. Your dream board philosophy, because it’s a philosophy as well as an activity, I believe is brilliant. My only son turns eighteen on New Year’s Eve. I had him sit down and I said, “Fred, you’re going to be eighteen. You’re going to be a man legally. You can vote, pay taxes and join the military. For that matter, you can move out if you want to,” which he is not going to. He is still in high school.

I had him sit down and start his dream board. He started out. The first thing was a Lamborghini. He has got a Lamborghini. He is a car guy. He has other things on here because he has got some other goals in his life. He has got a lot of interest in things. Whatever age, whether you’re 18, 60 or 85 and you read this interview, what happens when that person’s mind starts to dream and let itself go? How all of a sudden, things start to happen that if they don’t do that activity, they are just a thought? How do they actualize it?

That’s the deep message in my last book, Radical Rebirth. It’s about how we get programmed in our subconscious mind. We are receiving thousands of mind viruses every day and 95% of them are negative. By a mind virus, it’s like a virus you would get in your computer on your hard drive. This is called a meme from the science of memetics.

When you say meme now, most people think it’s like a cute picture on Facebook or Instagram. The term comes from Sir Richard Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene. He was talking about the evolution of man. For a couple of million years, we evolved by DNA and biology. Why did giraffes get long necks? They reached up to get more leaves that they couldn’t reach. Over a period of thousands of years, they developed long necks. Why did birds develop eyes? Why did koalas develop ears?

We all started as primordial pond scum at the Big Bang 13.5 billion years ago or whatever you believe. Maybe it’s the Garden of Eden. It doesn’t matter to me what your personal beliefs are. Believe them, but we know humans and animals evolve. Richard was talking about how we are now evolving more from mind viruses than we are DNA from the social influences around us.

He suggested the term meme as an alternative to gene. This was in his book called The Selfish Gene, for somebody who wants to do the deep dive into this brilliant book. He equates memes with genes. A meme is a mind virus. If you have a little child who is six years old and they played the Baby Shark TV show, the Baby Shark theme is now in your ear. That’s an earworm. That’s a mind virus.

If you see Just Do It from Nike, that’s a mind virus. If you’re listening to Daddy Yankee’s Shaky Shaky song comes on the radio, that’s a mind virus. When Barack Obama said, “Yes, we can,” that’s a mind virus. Governments, religions, companies, marketers, social media, movements and all of these things are creating memes. With social media, the internet, podcasts and smartphones, you’re being programmed thousands of memes a day.

The vast majority of them are along the lines of, “Money is bad. Rich people are evil. It’s spiritual to be poor. To be successful in business, you have to be a bad parent. To be a successful company, you have to exploit your workers, pillage the environment and steal from shareholders.” There’s all this negative, dysfunctional and destructive programming. It infects your mind and you have to counter-program against that.

The book is I broke your life down into six major areas, money and success, work and career, health and wellness, marriage and relationships, God and religion, sex and sexuality. I said, “Let’s look at all the mind viruses in each of these areas.” Money is bad. Rich people are evil. Everybody knows all those bad mind viruses about money. They are still infected by them, but they at least know they exist.

What about marriage and relationships? If your mom and dad fought with each other or they were abusive or one cheated on the other, your core foundational belief about marriage and relationship was decided before you were 8 or 10 years old. You said, “Mom, I want that new video game.” She said, “We may not be rich. We may be poor, but we are good people. Money doesn’t grow on trees.” You’ve got a core belief about money.

 

If you’re like the average person in America, your parents are 20 pounds overweight. Your grandparents are 40 pounds overweight. Your parents take six prescription medicines a day. Your grandparents take twelve prescription medicines a day. They drink ten cans of diet soda. They eat nothing but cake, cookies, pasta and manufactured fake substances that we call food. That’s your core foundational belief about health and wellness.

In all of these six areas, I believe you’re programmed before you’re ten years old. What I’m doing in the book is saying, “You can change that. You can go back and see what that programming is.” To go back to your original question about the dream board, what are we doing with their dream board? We are counter-programming against all of that negative programming and all of those negative mind viruses.

We know that when your conscious mind, which says, “I want to be a millionaire,” meets your subconscious mind, which says, “Don’t you know millionaires are evil people?” The subconscious mind always wins because the conscious mind is the 5% of the iceberg above the water and the subconscious is the 95%. You all know that. Here’s a practical application of how it works.

When you create a dream board, even when you don’t look right at it, it’s programming an impression on your subconscious mind when it’s in your peripheral vision. The idea of a dream board is to put things on there of images, words, pictures, photos, graphs, charts or drawings. It doesn’t matter. There are no rules. It’s just you have to know what that image stands for you.

Fred wants a Lambo. He puts a hot yellow Lambo on his board. He knows exactly what that is, but he might have something else. Maybe he wants to find the perfect woman to get married to. He might put a photo of two wedding rings or a couple holding hands as long as it means something to him. You do images of things you want to do, have, and become.

Why did my book hit the New York Times Bestseller list? I will tell you the real reason. It’s because I cut out the New York Times Bestseller list from the newspaper. I whited it out, put my name there and put it on my dream board. That’s why it happened. Why did I get my first Viper? It’s because I had a Viper on my dream board. It can be things you want to do, have, and become. Don’t put it where other people are going to see it because they are going to ridicule, attack and question you. Most people have those mind viruses and they don’t even know it.

You want to put it somewhere where you’re going to see it every morning and every night before you go to bed. Hopefully, you walk by it a couple of times around the day. Every time, it’s an impression in your subconscious mind. I talked about this a lot in 3 or 4 of my books. I get letters, emails and texts from parents who have 8-year-olds and 9-year-olds doing their dream boards and 85-year-old people doing their first dream board for themselves. Nothing is more exciting to me than to get messages like those.

It’s inspirational and simple to do but do it. You have given that message to many people. We are passing it along because it’s critical. You mentioned Oprah, Mark Cuban, Richard Branson or any of the great contemporary thinkers or the ones way in the past. We go back to Lincoln, Washington or Aristotle. You can go back as far as you want to go back in time. I would believe every one of those people accomplished what they did because they saw themselves doing it.

They believed that they could do it. Whether they had a dream board or not, who knows? They had some version of it in their minds when they would never have accomplished what they accomplished. We have to get people, not just in our type of business but in general. Humanity across the world, all seven billion of us, are starting to think about it again. Your dream board concept is something that does that.

First of all, I want to thank you, my friend. You are amazing. You are a man amongst men in business. I have to say that to be able to write books and build downlines at the same time because I have done a little bit of the book writing. I have done it four times. “It’s halftime at the game. Let me go and run.”

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My son was playing a lot of hockey. I will be like, “Between periods, let me go and write down four sentences.” You can see if you make any sense after the game. I can’t even imagine how you have done what you have done. Is the best place for people to contact you still RandyGage.com? Is that the best place that people want to take a little bit more of a view into the Randy Gage world?

That’s my Starfleet command site. You will see my blog is on there. I have a podcast called the Power Prosperity Podcast. The links to all the platforms are there. I have a newsletter that comes out every Friday that I call Friday Philosophy. I’m not on social media. I have hundreds of thousands of followers across platform after platform. I shut them all down because I said, “I don’t want to play that game anymore. There’s too much partisan bickering and negative programming.” That’s the best decision I made in all of 2021 was I left social media. If you want to find me, it’s RandyGage.com.

Randy, I want to thank you. I want to wish you the best of everything this 2022 and in the years to come. You have been an inspiration. You have been a teacher and mentor to many people across the industry. It’s amazing when your name comes up. Nobody in the industry doesn’t know who Randy Gage is. It’s incredible. Continue the good work and good health in 2022, my friend.

Thanks, John. Same to you. Happy New Year to everybody reading. Go out and have an amazing 2022.

Impotant Links:

• Randy Gage
• Nancy Drew
• Hardy Boys
• As a Man Thinketh
• The Magic of Thinking Big
• Think and Grow Rich
• Atlas Shrugged
• The Science of Mind
• Prosperity
• How to Build a Multi-Level Money Machine: The Science of Network Marketing
• Direct Selling Success
• Why You’re Dumb, Sick and Broke…And How to Get Smart, Healthy and Rich!
• 101 Keys to Your Prosperity
• 37 Secrets About Prosperity
• The 7 Spiritual Laws of Prosperity
• Risky is the New Safe
• Mad Genius
• Defcon 1
• Radical Rebirth
• The Prosperity Series
• Amazon.com
• Harry Potter Series
• The Art of Communication with Keith Hooper and Dr. Nancie Celini – Previous episode
• Making the First Circle Work
• Art Jonak Mastermind Event
• The Selfish Gene
• Power Prosperity Podcast

About Randy Gage

Randy Gage is a thought-provoking critical thinker who will make you approach your business — and your life — in a whole new way. Randy is the author of 14 books translated into 25 languages, including his recent worldwide best seller, Radical Rebirth.

He has spoken to more than 2 million people across more than 50 countries and is a member of both the Speakers Hall of Fame and the Direct Selling Hall of Fame. When he is not prowling the podium or locked in his lonely writer’s garret, you’ll probably find him playing 3rd base for a softball team somewhere.