Leave Nothing To Chance

 

Mindset is everything when you’re in network marketing. Arlene Lowy certainly didn’t get to become the Pycnogenol Queen by doubting every step along the way. In her almost 30 years in the industry, she has always believed that there are no forks in her road and has doggedly pursued her destined path. In this conversation with John Solleder, she shares how this heavy focus on mindset and overachieving has allowed her to build success for herself and others even while focusing on an ultra-specific product niche. She also shares how John’s books have helped achieve all this and ties that positive experience to the importance of mentoring and continuous learning in the industry.

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The Pycnogenol Queen, Arlene Lowy

We are here in the fourth episode of Leave Nothing To Chance. It is my honor to interview one of my very close friends for many years. We were children when we met.

It’s not long ago, but it’s like yesterday.

You’ve had a remarkable journey. I’ve known you and watched your son grow up and become very successful in his own right. I knew your mom and dad and your brothers a little bit. You come from such a successful line of people. I think our readers might be interested in some of the people that are in your bloodline or some of the people you were related to. Let’s start with your dad. I know what he did, of course.

My father was practicing medicine at 22 years of age. He skipped a year of medical school. He did his residency at the Mayo Clinic where he met my mother. My mother was a dietician coming out of Canada. The first day he met her, he said, “I’m going to marry this woman.” He ended up marrying my mother. She’s Canadian so I’m half Canuck and a lot of cousins and relatives up there. My father’s father was someone I never got to meet. He passed away Christmas morning. I was born Christmas morning. He died ten years before I was born and he also was a teacher. He was a professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh and wrote the medical textbook for Harvard and Yale. He invented so many things that if he worked not for a company, he would have been a trillionaire, not a billionaire. I’m serious.

There are so many things with bank vaults. I remember when my mother went to Alcatraz with my father. She turned to my father and said, “Was this what it was like when you were here with your father?” The policemen turned around and said, “What are you talking about? Was your father in Alcatraz?” It’s because he created the canister that you put tear gas in. It was one of his inventions. He did a lot with a bank vaults. He did a lot with Y aluminum cans that don’t corrode inside and why garbage cans don’t build mites.

Inside the University of Pittsburgh is the Lowy Room in Clapp Hall, which is the organic chemistry because he was a professor of Organic Chemistry. In Clapp Hall, there are fifteen of all these inventions on the wall. It was all done by my brother who was a photographer. There was this big production, and I was there for the induction of the whole thing. It was overwhelming not to know this man and what he did. My father told me that he was my grandfather’s student. He said, “Don’t tell anybody you’re my son.” My father was brilliant, off the charts.

I always enjoyed talking to him. We’d sit on the back porch there when I would visit you in Pittsburgh. We sit on the back porch, we’ll talk about philosophy, science, chemistry, religion and politics.

He’s very well-versed.

I certainly learned a lot by chatting with him.

He would have been great as a networker because he’s the type of guy who walked down the block and talked to every single person. He knew everybody and he was a very unique person.

Your son is doing well now. I know he’s living in Los Angeles. I know you’re watching your grandkids grow up long-distance right now. I know that’s certainly frustrating with the COVID and all that. Hopefully, that’ll be resolved soon. How is he doing? I haven’t talked to him lately, but I know he’s doing well.

There is no fork on the road. Click To Tweet

It’s interesting because he’s multifaceted. He’s such a business-mogul type person, but he also decided to go back to law school and get a law degree, which he did. He’s built the most amazing practice. He didn’t work for a company. He went into a boutique, ready to build his entire business by himself. For 2 to 3 years, he’s working major multimillion-dollar big cases. He’s been inducted to the Supreme Court for the Sixth Circuit or something like that. He’s doing major prosecution and he loves it. Once again, he did his acting in Stella Adler Conservatory and he went on to do movies. He was in some films in Hollywood, and he decided he’d rather own the film. That’s the business side. He decided, “I’m going to be an attorney.” I said, “Now you’re going back to college? Here we go again for another four years of that.”

He did that. During the process of even when he was in school, he didn’t finish. He didn’t finish undergrad. I don’t know if you know that. He went to a place and they said, “You didn’t finish undergrad.” He said, “Look what I’ve done.” He showed him the contracts he did in Hollywood, and the bottom line is they let him in. He decided to go to this place. What he did, he went and took homeschooling at Post University. He went to a university and did two years of undergrad while he did his first year of law school. This is 39 credits he was doing. He competed for the moot court at the university with 350 people and he came in the first place.

That’s what we talk about now about being a champion mindset. I love this Leave Nothing to Chance book. When I’m reading it, I’m reading my son. I’m reading my life and how I encouraged him to believe in himself and be that mindset of going full throttle. As I said, he’s my best student. He’s my best student in 35 years. That’s what I can say.

You have another family member who I didn’t know that well. I met him a few times. I’ll never forget when I met your brother and he said, “You live in Dallas. Do you know a guy named Mark Cuban?” I said, “Everybody does.” He said, “He owes me $20 because he was my college roommate.” I said, “The next time I’m at a Dallas Mavericks game, I’ll tap him on his shoulder.” Your brother is Eddie? I think it was.

Yes. I said to Eddie, “At this point, you better get some interest.”

Let’s talk about Leave Nothing to Chance, Arlene. There are fifteen principles in there. What would be your favorite one?

The mindset was my favorite. That’s something that I learned very early from my father. If I wanted something and I want to do something, there was the only right way to get there. That journey was to get to that level. In my life, it’s always been, if I’m going to do anything, I don’t do anything half rear end. Mindset, you have to work on it. You have to read enough books that start challenging you to focus a certain way. When you’re in this industry, you’re dealing with all types of people. You’re dealing with a lot of people that if you were hiring for a corporation, you would not hire them. They all come from the same place. We all start at the same place. We all have the ability to be anything we want to be. It’s believing in yourself.

When you think about something, I said I’m a high paid psychiatrist a lot of times. A lot of times when I’m working with people, I can hear this outer ear of this negative thought pattern that someone is saying, “You can’t.” I’m thinking everything I did in my life, “Yes, you can.” My son, very easily, I said to him, “There’s nothing you can achieve in your life. Some things that will take you longer, but the destination is very interesting because you learn a lot from it, which is focused on the result. Don’t forget who you are.” That’s another thing because I love the fact that you talked about first place. You said, “First place and no fork in the road.” There’s never been a fork in my road.

When you first met me, you saw my abilities was my mindset. You knew what I wanted to do. There was nothing that was going to veer me off the road. It’s still that way now. No matter what I say, I’m consistently consistent in everything I do. ABC, do it the same way. That takes a lot of training. That takes a lot of strength because you know what happens? You have so many detours that come into your life and so many things that can offset you to go another range. I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in, for example, if I have someone that has an interest in this business, I have to learn a lot about them before I’m even going to decide whether I want to develop them. I get to develop them with a lot of books.

My favorite books are the Kiyosaki books. I love him because of Rich Dad Poor Dad and learning about the four quadrants. Do I want to be a business owner? Do I want to be someone who wants to work for someone? That’s a different mentality. Someone has to drive my car. Someone has to park my car. I’m not interested in parking my car. My car parks itself. That’s what I’m interested in. Very early on, the first book I ever read was Think and Grow Rich. That’s the first book that I read with Napoleon Hill. Rich meant to me is how many people’s lives I could enrich to get to that journey because I’m more of a giver than a taker.

I get off in my life-changing someone’s life. When someone says to me, “I have a goal,” I map out that goal and I know exactly how I’m going to get there with that person. In my current business right now, I’ve created about 15, 16 millionaires. What’s interesting is every one of them was “blue-collar.” Someone who made $30,000 or $40,000 or $50,000 or $60,000 a year income. Watch this one. They all make that now a month. Cleaning houses for a living, people that took care of children, which is hard to do in school. People that were hairdressers where you cut hair and didn’t own a salon. They weren’t business owners. They weren’t people that made six figures. Sometimes these are harder people to develop this business, even though they have rolled up their sleeves and they know how hard they work to make six figures. It’s a different mindset in this business because you’re starting with all these different personalities and game plans.

 

It’s being able to focus and have that mindset to teach them to read the right things and to encourage them to learn how to have that mindset. They talk about Tony Robbins and I’ve always said, “Tony Robbins study people like you and I.” We seem to do everything the same way. There’s a journey that people have that are tremendously talented. I’m not Phi Beta Kappa, by the way. When I was in fourth grade, I couldn’t read. I had to be trained to read, Johnny. When I went for my Master’s degree at the University of Miami, I did it in learning disabilities and I was my teacher’s favorite. I got a 4.0, but you know what I learned? I learned that I had a learning disability and that was the problem of what I ever had.

You either are an auditory or a visual learner. It’s how you learn and it’s how you train someone. I don’t know if you’ve ever known that. If you are a person who reads books and that’s the way you learn, or you’re someone that listens to a presentation and absorbs more that way, that’s two different learning styles. As a result, when I found out what my deficit was, I made it not a deficit. This is important. When you’re looking at people and finding out what they’re good at, where my art form of this business is taking a team of people, the person who’s great in social networking, the person who’s good in different areas, and building a whole team. This person does this for the training, this one does this, and this one does Excel spreadsheets, and then I look great.

There are a lot of things I can’t do, but I don’t zone in on that. I zone on what I’m good at, and I zone in at what you’re good at. You build a character out of people. Your whole book is interesting. I picked your book up so many times and I start reading before I go to sleep, because that’s the only way that I can go to sleep later. There are so many times I’ve read it over and over the same chapter because with my learning disabilities, I have to concentrate and read multiple times to absorb the same information. That’s okay. I still get Leave Nothing to Chance. What can I say?

Early on, you were introduced to Think and Grow Rich. What were a couple of other books that you read along the way that affected you?

I have all your books. At the very beginning, people don’t realize something. I came into the network marketing business by pure accident. Someone put a box in the middle of the table. It was Herbalife. I had no idea what the heck it was. I went and said, “If I like the product, then I can share it with people.” If it works, I can share it because I’m not a con artist. If I believe in something, then I can formulate that. That’s how I was introduced to it. A month later, that person left and I went, “Now, how do you do the business?” My sponsor left, so to speak. In the meantime, years and years later, you and I met. I’m trying to figure out how we met. I think we met in a water filter company. Was it Clearbrook?

Clearbrook, yes.

That company went down and then you said to me, “We’re going to sell cookies.” I said, “Cookies?” You made me go to this company out of Canada and you taught me. I don’t remember a lot of things you tell me about myself because it’s so long ago. This is the only thing I have to tell you that’s different about the retention of things. I will say one thing that you honed-in on me, and you taught me more than anybody ever has taught me in this industry. When you say, what did I read? Anything that you told me to read. Anything you told me to read, anything you told me to do, you taught me. Tim Sales did a lot of stuff at the very beginning of learning the techniques of talking and calling people. It’s not recruiting people. It’s building relationships with people, all these combinations. It’s like I said, think about a book that you might’ve told me to read. I’m trying to think because I’ve read so many. You made me read books.

As a Man Thinketh by James Allen. That one was always a standard of mine. Later on, as we got into later years, anything James Collins wrote, Built to Last, for example. There are so many great examples of companies that were good versus the ones that were great. Why? From a network marketing standpoint, there wasn’t a lot of network marketing books. It was more things like How to Win Friends & Influence People or some of the standards that we were like, “Let’s at least refer to these things and read them because we’re trying to lead people.” We’re trying to lead people, we want to be able to give them as much information as we possibly can. One I probably shared with you early on was the first one I ever read, which was by Norman Vincent Peale about having a positive attitude.

You have to draw my memory because I know you had me reading books like crazy. I was reading and reading. By the way, I taught my son that. I remember I gave him all Donald Trump’s books and I said, “Now, watch the mindset of this man.” I’m not going to get into politics right now. The bottom line was here was a person who was very genuine-like caring that if you talked to him, he would sit there and listen. I’ve seen him on interviews. He also had this inner strength that he focused on his principles of where he was going and there was nothing. I’ve never seen anybody who can take a smack as hard as he can and not show he’s flinching. That’s one of the skills my son learned how to do because I gave him so many books. All these self-help books, all these things about focus, everything about mindset.

Here’s the other thing about your book. The other thing that drives me crazy, but it’s so important. I’ve been brought up this way, integrity. I’m going to tell you something. My father used to say something to me. He said, “You’re not a Smith. You’re a Lowy. Don’t forget it.” He did this to me all the time. He also did this other thing, “I’m from Missouri proven. I’d come home with a $50,000 monthly paycheck.” He’d say, “When are they going to take it away?” He had me in this driving thing that I got so aggravated one time that it was their anniversary. I gave him a $5,000 check from Missouri Express coming in FedEx. We had such a tough time taking it. I said, “Dad, enjoy yourself and take my mother on vacation and leave me alone.” That’s a great story.

Every book you’ve done, I don’t know if you realize what you’re doing. There’s such a succession of learning in each one of them. What I love is that you have all these people that you have had relationships with one way or another. You put them in this book and their stories. People have to read this because they will realize that they belong in the book. They can get in the book. There’s no achievement that anybody can’t instill. You’ll see people who will win the Olympics where they don’t have one leg. You’ll have someone like myself who can visually see that well, but I still can drive down the street and I don’t sit there and have some chauffeur take me because I’m going to get there.

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We’re not all fantastic at everything we do, but your God gave you a talent. You need to hone-in on it and make an imprint in your life. Make something special in your life. All the books that I’ve read in my life have given me the integrity to be who I am. I’m accountable for, I’m the best friend anybody ever had, and I’m also honest. We need a lot more honesty in this life right now that I’m not saying. I’ll give an example. These are little things. I got a bunch of products that came in and I noticed that I didn’t order those four things that are in the box. The average person would go, “I’ll keep it. They’ll never know about it,” because it was stuff that’s white list. It’s not that white.

What I did is I called the company and I said, “I have four boxes that came in this.” They said, “Really? Arlene, I think you’re one of the fewest people whoever called here and told us you have extra products.” I said, “I have to tell you one other thing. I bought toothpaste and I opened up the thing. This doesn’t weigh anything, and I noticed that the tube never got filled.” They said, “We’ll send you another two.” I said, “No, I’m going to send this back to you with the other boxes. I want you to see what happened in production.”

I would feel bad taking something I haven’t earned or haven’t paid for. I can’t steal people’s lives, dreams, and make them believe something that’s not going to happen if I don’t see the effort. That’s why when you sit there and you said, “What do you do when you first bring someone in the business?” You have to sit down and listen. God gave you two ears for a reason. You got to listen, and you got to take notes. You’re going to find out the journey that person wants. They might be 40 or 50 years of age, and they might be on a different playing field than a twenty-year-old.

Right now, we’re at a different time because of this COVID situation. We’ve got 20-year-olds, 25-year-olds who are getting into colleges. In some cases, maybe they didn’t go to college, but they’ve got all of these skills and they’re saying, “What’s the future?” You’ve got people, even in our age group, that maybe they had a career. Maybe they were in something and they did reasonably well at it. Now all of a sudden, because of this situation, their company or their business was gone, or the very least, they were downsized dramatically. They were not going to make the revenue that they once made, whether they’re a business owner or an employee. Whether it’s a 25-year-old or a 60-year-old, how do you get them started? How do you get them off to a flying start? What do you do to support them as long as they’re reaching you? What do you do to move them along?

First of all, there’s a double sword here that’s going on. Our industry is exploding right now, and the reason it’s exploding is everybody is home. You’re not trying to find people because they’ve been at work all day, and then they come home at 7:00 at night. They got to feed their family and they got to do their kids and everything else. Everybody is home. Your audience is much greater right now than you can find people. The second thing that’s happened is you can’t prejudge anybody’s life right now. Whether the person had a multimillion-dollar business or whatever their life was, it’s very different. What you need to do is open up the floodgates right now and allow everybody to evaluate your business because people are looking for another stream of income or they’re looking for a major income.

What do I do? It all depends on the person. If the person has been in a business for 20 or 30 years, I have to look at their mindset right now because they’re very fragile. What is a 50-year-old going to do, go back to college and get a degree right now? Our industry people can afford. That’s another thing. Our business is very affordable for people to come into. Those people that have been around for 40 or 50 years have a tremendous center of influence. What I do with people like that very simply is I sit down and I do a jogger. I do a jogger list of everybody they know. We start evaluating and breaking them down into certain categories. Maybe those are some people you want to sell a product to or someone you want to open the door to. I’m keeping everybody on the same playing field because I’m noticing how many people have lost their income. They don’t have any income coming in. If they’re waiting for stimulus checks, those aren’t going to come. I do a lot of analogy on something. I break it down.

Let’s talk about something a little bit different. You’re very mindset-oriented and focused. Of course, this is generic for people seeing this for industry people and even non-industry people for that matter. Probably some of the people we’re talking about that are taking a look and they’re going to trip over this as it is syndicated across the world on many different networks. People will be looking and saying, “Network marketing. Multi-level.” They’ll hear what we’re talking about. Are you happy to be in a company that I’m familiar with that you have a lot of different products without getting into the company itself?

You’ve taken one specific product that you’re known as the queen of marketing that product in your company. Not only in your company, but at other companies. Your name comes up and it’s like, “That’s the Pycnogenol queen.” A lot of the people reading this are in companies that have multiple SKUs of products. Do I sell this or do I sell that? Why did you pick that particular product out of all the products that your company has? As far as recruiting, how have you used that product as the catalyst to build a massive organization that you’ve built in the last almost 30 years?

The first thing is that when I came into the company, they only had one product line. Probably about eight months later, this product came out and I took a bottle and I tried it. I couldn’t believe how I felt. Very shortly after that, I went to my father, who is a Mayo Clinic physician. You can’t talk about nutrition. I said, “Dad, I like this product. It works like Motrin. It works as an anti-inflammatory. I’m seeing a differential.” He said, “Go off the product.” I went off the product. He made me do it six times. It drove me crazy because that’s the kind of guy he was. He wouldn’t bend.

Finally, I said to him, “I’d like you to take some patients that have arthritis, asthma, and allergies. I want you to sell every one of the four bottles.” Knowing in my head, because I’m great at marketing, that if they had the extra bottles on them, that their wife or husband would say to them, “What are you taking?” If someone felt better, before you know it, the husbands and wives would be on it. More importantly, my father was a diagnostician. He did a blood screen analysis before the person took the product. I said, “Dad, take the blood screen 30 days later, and let’s see what it looks like.” He couldn’t believe it. It was night and day. He could not believe what it was doing to the cellular structure of the body. The inflammatory end was changing and everything else. People were coming back from war beforehand.

At that point, I said, “I got to write the retail system for the company. I got to educate the consumer on this product because I don’t believe in selling anybody anything.” I remember years ago with you, we would have audiotapes. We would give someone audiotapes and say, “Listen to this. Listen to this.” Before you know it, we’d sell the product and sell the product. I still believe that. I created the OPC system, which was oligomeric proanthocyanidins. That’s what it is, Pycnogenol. What I did was I created a survey system. I still use that now, many years later. Someone asked me, “What do you do?” I wrote the program for the number one selling nutritional product in our company. What do you think they say? Let’s see if you know anything about it.

 

I’ll come to my survey because my father taught me you can’t see illness. You can’t see what’s wrong with people. If you look at me, you don’t know that I have vision issues because I’m not even wearing glasses. I’m not wearing contacts, but I have issues not until I tell you. You go into a doctor’s office. What happens? They tell you to fill this out. They want to know. I created a survey system. Now, we email it to people. We electronically do things. I can do webinars. I can do Zooms where I can have twenty people filling out the surveys, and we find out what’s physically challenging to someone. Do they have arthritis? Do they have lupus? Do they have Crohn’s? Do they have fibromyalgia?

I’m not diagnosing anything, but I know how it works with autoimmune. From that point, I give them the information and look at it and say, “I circled the challenge. You need to know and evaluate this product.” I give them a certain package with a video that shows medical issues and how this all works and it’s educating someone into the cell, making them decide they buy it themselves. When they decide to buy something, they stay on the product. If they get results, they buy. At this stage, I sell cases and cases of this product. The families that have been on this product for twenty years won’t go off of it. This product, I said, “No matter what this company came out with, there would never be a product that would sell this much.” We sold $4 million at wholesale a week of this one product.

This whole line was isotonic. This is the pH balance of your body. It’s the same thing as taking an IV, so the absorption is high on an empty stomach. People are getting the results because they’re getting the product. If you have products like that in your thing, you’ll get great absorption. The entire line expanded into Vitamins C and E. Everything from bromelain, you name it, in isotonic. We ended up with fourteen divisions of products. We are in multibillion-dollar industries of products that you would want, but I’m still the OPC fanatic. I love OPC. That’s what I sell the heck out of. When people say to me, “What do you do?”

I wrote the program for the number one selling nutritional product in our company. They asked me what it is. I said, “Let me see how much you know about it.” Why? I want to find out what’s challenging for you. Watch for this thing is what you taught me, then help them. I have a book on it that I gave them OPC. I educated them on the product that way. I gave them information. They studied it and then they understood why they’re taking it and why they want to take it. I probably retail every three months, $10,000 at retail without walking out of my house and without calling a person. How do you like that one?

It goes back to what we’re talking about, mindset and doing what you know. You know how to sell that particular product. You have to love that product and you happen to have personal results with that product. You’ve had great results with people with that particular product. What you’ve done is you’ve gone vertical. You vertically integrated that one product over and over again in so many different categories for people. You’ve built a dynamic business.

What’s great about it is the thing that people have to understand about this industry is you want preferred customers. You want customers. Why? Customers become the best business owners because they end up sharing the products, using the products, and expanding their distribution of getting more people on the products. Products have to move to the end consumer, by yourself taking it, and then a cross-section of other people. I don’t know about you, but I have found that I’m not as successful. Bring someone in because they want the business. They have an emotional tie to something that throws them in. I bring in more people that way who stay long-term.

What’s changed in multi-level is that there are many different product categories that are real now. You can’t build a business anymore by hyperbole. There’s too much information. When somebody picks up their phone and googles what you tell them, you darn well better be telling the truth because you can’t lie to them. Not that people lied in prior times in network marketing, but let’s face it. Everything was anecdotal. Now, prove it. If you’ll go back to what your father said about Missouri, that old statement about, “I’m from Missouri.” I think Harry Truman was the guy that created that. He was from Missouri.

Was that whole thing about, “You better prove it?” If you proved it, “Okay. Now you’ll get my money at least once. If it works, great. You’ll get my money continuously.” You’ve been a role model for that not only in your company but in the industry. Let’s talk about one other thing, Arlene. You were unique in the fact that you had worked for Sony Corporation way back. You were the first female sales rep. Was it in Pittsburgh or the whole US?

It was Pittsburgh and West Virginia. I got my Master’s in teaching. I didn’t last because I ended up working for socially maladjusted, and it didn’t work for me. About a year after I finished teaching, I was supposed to get married. I came back to Pittsburgh because I was in Miami. When I came back, I met someone and they were a sales rep. From that time, I ended up with an interview with Sony in Pittsburgh. That was the two-step market. I ended up doing extremely well. I was there for ten years. I’m telling you the truth of the matter. I would get in my car and I would drive.

I would go to areas that I can’t even believe that I would ever go into. It was backwoods of everything. I was fearless. I don’t know if I would do that now. I have to say that when I left the job, they never were able to replace me ever. Three different guys tried and tried. They said, “What does this woman do that everybody wants her back?” She was a “Jewish mother.” I made sure that I dotted my I’s and crossed my T’s. I was dependable and I was there. I’d follow through with any problems. I circumvented everything. That was integrity.

You were ahead of your time, though, to be working for a major Japanese manufacturer like that in the time frame that you did it too.

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It was all men and me. There was no doubt about it. Every time we had a competition, I’d go to meetings and everybody’s talking Japanese. It was interesting. I would laugh because they knew exactly what I was saying. I knew in Japan that the first language they all learn is English. They come over here and figure out everything that we’re doing. Now, it was incredible. When we had competitions, they said, “Don’t compete with her. She competes so hard against herself. She’ll win the television show. Whatever you’re doing, don’t even play.” That’s what happened. I ended up winning every single thing. Every time there was a competition, they said, ” give her the television or whatever.”

Seriously, if they asked me to do $1 million, I did $2 million. If they asked me to do $2 million, I did $3 million. Everything to me was always overachieving and always making it out. I ended up being number one in a bunch of companies because of that, no matter what I did, even in network marketing. I met that woman, Sandy Chambers. My brother met her by an ad in Toronto. I talked to her. I started a relationship with her and then I met you and everything else. We built 10,000, 15,000 people in Canada. I’m from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and she’s from Winnipeg, Manitoba, which was where my mother was from. That’s outrageous that she’s from exactly my mother’s hometown. We built huge.

Along those lines, I want our audience to realize something. People say, “What do I look for when I recruit somebody?” The first time that Arlene and I started to work together, I knew her background with Sony and she shared the numbers that she did. I knew being both a judoka, which in Japanese, it’s a term for somebody who plays judo. I knew the Japanese culture fairly well. I said, “This woman was in a major men’s company. A male-dominated company at that time.” I’m sure it’s probably changed now, but we’re talking 1980s when Arlene and I met and she worked with them from the ‘70s.

Arlene is a small girl physically. I said, “This little girl would be able to go into that male-dominated world and kicked butt the way she did, network marketing is going to be easy for her. She has to figure out how it works versus traditional sales and she’ll light it up.” Here we are now in 2021, you’re still lighting it up. That’s one of the things that I looked at. When we first met, you were sharing that with me. I didn’t understand the Sony culture, but I understood the Japanese culture. I was like, “If you could do that in that world, I know you’ll do very well.” By the way, that was only the Japanese companies. There were the American companies at that point too, where not a lot of females are sales reps.

You’ve always been somebody who’s broken that glass ceiling. You’ve done it in traditional sales with that company and with network marketing. In wrapping this up, what are your words of wisdom for somebody reading this? Let’s say that person is in network marketing, and maybe they haven’t put it all together yet the way that you have. They haven’t quite figured out that they want to dedicate themselves to the process of becoming successful. They want to do what you do. They want to go out. They want to build a major organization and want to have a great life. They want to travel. They want to go see the grandkids. They want to do all the great things that you get to do. What are your words to them?

My word to them is, first of all, you have the ability to achieve anything you want in your life. You have to decide if you want it. That’s the first thing. There’s something I want to say, and I’m trying to think how I want to say this. Ask me that question one more time. 

Most of the people who don’t see this are in the industry, but maybe they haven’t made it yet because they haven’t made that commitment to making it the way that you did. What is it that they got to figure out in their mindset to do that?

I’ll be honest with you. When I think about how I developed this business, think about this. I learned the first day, if you want to be good at something, find someone who already has tackled it. Find the person who already knows how to do it and let them start mentoring you into the system. Put yourself around the successful people in the unit. That’s important. You did that for me. If you think about it, you scold me from the very beginning. I didn’t have a teacher. I didn’t have someone. When I’m working with people, I say, “I have 35 years of experience in this industry. I already know how to do this. I’ve been in this company that I’m in right now for 26 years.” Do you want to work with someone now that you’re 50 years of age and you lost your business with someone who doesn’t know where they’re going, has no direction in this thing, or someone who has already walked the talk?

For all those people out there who are looking for this, the beauty of what you do in your own business is you go on these Zoom calls with 350 or 450 people. Gravitate to people that are all on the same path that is making success and be around that positive reinforcement all day long. Keep that positive, because I want to tell you something. I don’t have a negative outer ear. I don’t hear any of that. I have a focus on it. If I want to do something, there is nothing that can channel me out of that. That’s another thing you have to do. If this is the decision that you want something, you want to learn how to do this business, put yourself in the arena with people around you that are successful already in the endeavor you choose.

That’s what I would do because that’s the shortcut. Do you understand that if you did not school me that there’s no way in God’s heck there was anybody that I was working with at that company that knew as much as you did? I would have lost years in this business. I don’t care how successful I am. There are mindset techniques. There are the elementary things that you have. By the way, everyone should read your first couple of books that you wrote, the very first Moving Up. They should read all these books because every one of them is a learning process, but there’s a succession to it. Leave Nothing to Chance was a perfect title for the book.

You met Grace and Fred. That title came from a couple of their athletic woes and their disappointments because you learn as much from disappointment as you do from success. It came from that in me talking to them. We’ve got the Super Bowl. There’s a guy playing for Tampa Bay that we both know. His very first pro game, when Drew Bledsoe got hurt, I was at your house and I was watching the Patriots. I think they must’ve been playing the Steelers. I said, “Do you remember? Here’s this young kid from Michigan. He’s got a good arm. Let’s see if he lasts.” Here we are many years later that is, and he lasted.

If you look at Tom Brady, that man is a master in preparation. You look at Winston Churchill. When Winston Churchill would write a speech and he knew he had to prepare it to give to the English people, especially during wartime, he would go with that speech an hour a time each word to make sure that the word had the right inflection point. Whether you’re Tom Brady and you’re winning Super Bowls at 43 or playing in them at least, or you’re Winston Churchill when you’re leading a country through a catastrophic war, it’s preparation.

 

The Leave Nothing to Chance title came as a result of me telling my kids, “You guys are doing good, but you have to prepare a little better, a little bit more intense so that the coach or the judge, when they watch what you do, they go, ‘That kid is good. We want that kid.'” That’s where the title came from. I used it with them, but I’ve used it thousands of times in business over the last number of years to share with people. Arlene, if you go back to our relationship and friendship and business relationship over these 40 years, it was what I was telling you in the beginning. It was like, you were a single mom.

All of these skills, all of this education is a great family that you come from. What were you doing to get where you wanted to be at that next level? It was finding that thing to say, “What if you left nothing to chance and you did this and this and that?” There you are and here we are all these years late here. You’ve been in a success and a blessing, not only to your own family but to thousands and thousands of your distributors around the world, and here we are.

I want to share one thing that you were talking about Tom Brady. I want you to think about something, Johnny. Tom Brady goes and leaves the team that he’s been with forever and he goes to a whole new team. They’ve never won the Super Bowl. They’ve never won a division. Can you imagine this? Not only the skills he has, but you talked about the preparation skills we talked about. This is what I’m talking about. He went in there and he schooled all these people within this whole team. He has these guys. These people respect him so much, and he’s got this killer instinct in him. He challenged these people beyond any level they could have ever learned in their life.

You take Patrick Mahomes, I call him my homie. I love him. I’m in love with this kid. I think he’s incredible. He can do every facet of the entire business, but the two of them are icons. They’re in an element and they’re in a level where their teams have this appreciation and this respect. There’s this command that is so unique and very unusual. I don’t know that many people that could do what Tom Brady who went into a completely new team and new people and completely revamped them to be an all-star team.

It comes back to one word. It’s the word that’s used over and over again in any organization that succeeds and that’s leadership. Tom Brady knows how to lead human beings. He’s a heck of a quarterback. He’s still a great quarterback at 43 years old.

Mahomes has only been in the business a certain amount of time. It’s going to be interesting. I have no idea. It’s going to be one heck of a game, though.

If you look at that, whether it’s Tom Brady, Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan, or you go throughout history, be it in sports, in politics, in business, anybody who leads an organization figures out that it starts with them. They got to lead themselves. If you can’t lead yourself, you can’t lead other people. Lead themselves and then lead a small group of people and then a bigger group of people. That’s something that you have done tremendously now decades. I got nothing but respect for what you’ve done in your career.

Remember one thing, my Master’s is in teaching. I was a facilitator. Some of the best people to even pursue in this business are people who have organizational skills and patience. Teachers have organization and patience levels. They’re fantastic in this industry. I look for them. I had a great time.

We’re going to wrap up here. I’m with Arlene Lowy, the Pycnogenol queen. It’s funny I got a title for every one of these, but with you it’s easy. It’s the Pycnogenol queen. I don’t have to figure out what to call it, or the Queen of Pittsburgh. This has been a lot of fun, Arlene. I appreciate you doing it, my friend. For everybody else, we’ve got another great guest coming up next episode. That’ll be our friend, Dr. Tracey Jones from Tremendous books. A tremendous lady, a tremendous supporter of the network marketing industry, a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy, and also the daughter of the legendary Charlie “Tremendous” Jones. That’s going to be another great interview. Arlene, thanks so much.

I appreciate it. Take care. You look great, skinny.

I’m working at it.

You look like a whole different person to me. Take care.

Important Links:

• Leave Nothing to Chance
• Rich Dad Poor Dad
• Think and Grow Rich
• As a Man Thinketh
• Built to Last
• How to Win Friends and Influence People
• Moving Up
• Arlene Lowy – LinkedIn

About Arlene Lowy