One of the things I distinctly remember being taught at an Amway WWDB function was to "fake it till you make it". I suppose this was to give the impression of being successful. It was said that you are going to be successful so you may as well act the part in advance. I believe this is taught today as well. IBOs like to make an impression on prospects so the want to appear uber successful. I found it humorous when these same IBOs were seen driving into functions with clunkers of cars.
Faking it is also a part of why Amway IBOs wear suits. They want everyone to be under the impression that they are in a multi million dollar business. Guess what? WalMart is a multi billion dollar business but their employees don't wear suits! The suits, particularly in Hawaii where I live, were impractical. I recall a function in an auditorium in August with no air conditioning, 90 degree weather and a close to 100% humidity. Well, you can imagine what that function was like. We had to fake it to pretend we weren't dying of heat stroke.
What I find really interesting about this is that I honestly believe the biggest fakers are probably the diamonds. This past year, all over the country, there were WWDB functions called "Dream Night". A function with a sit down dinner where the diamonds and other Amway heroes show off slide shows of mansions, jets skis, sports cars, exclusive golf club memberships, fabulous vacations, and shopping sprees. I honestly believe that many of the diamonds are the biggest fakers out there. A diamond income, which seems big, and supplemented with tools income, most likely cannot sustain the lifestyles portrayed in these functions. Simple math bears it out.
A diamond income, even with tool income might be $250 or $300K gross. While that mey seem huge compared to a working stiff who earns %40K or $50K per year, keep in mind that a diamond business has many expenses. How much do you think it would cost a (diamond) family of four (4) to travel to say 5 or 6 functions, first class? How much of that income goes to taxes? I challenge IBOs to sit down and figure this out. After taxes, medical insurance and business expenses are taken into consideration, I would guess that a diamond lives at best, a middle class lifestyle. Amway advocates will argue that this is sans a 9-5 job, but an Amway business needs constant attention as IBOs up and quit every day. Some who do sign up never do a thing. Replacing IBOs is a neverending task. It is why you do not see or hear of any diamonds who "walked away" to collect residual income forever and ever.
Diamonds may talk about all the "freedom" they have but I also believe they are faking it also. They are simply working the night and graveyard shift because they are working to help their groups recruit people into Amway and since many people work 9-5, the diamonds end up working 7 (pm) to 3 (am). My former upline diamond claimed he worked to help people succeed, but looking back, I believe he was working the night shift, because he had to. He needed to work to maintain his group, lest he fall out of diamond qualification. I can imagine the stress and pressure a diamond might feel if one of his downline platinum legs are close to dropping out of qualification. A majority of a diamond's income is in an annual diamond bonus which they would not receive without qualifying. The stress but be just like a job!
Here's another take on fake it till you make it. Isn't this simply lying and hoping you will one day succeed?
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Couldn't agree more! There are traditional businesses opportunities out there that have way more u 'passive income potential'. I am such a business owner. I no longer have to ‘work in my business’. Yes I can walk away for 3-6 months and yes ‘$ keeps coming’. But I still work FT ‘on the business’ . My annual salary $100k by no means makes me a millionaire, but somehow AMWAY is full of them? The ridiculous hours I’ve spent over 10 yrs. I was obsessed for first 6-7yrs! I worked harder, longer , more weekends, birthdays, no sick days, xmas days than any av. employee. Before we go on, Id just like to reiterate the “10 YEARS”, which brings me to my major point. As I was approached yet again by a another ‘ENTHUSIAST’ (my sister)I thought I would take another look at this whole AMWAY thing…Am I missing something? Maybe I could make it work? I had by no means, any illusion that if I want to yield another 25-50k annually (to my existing passive income), that it would take me any less than 5 yrs. No illusions at all, in fact I expect it. I put in a tall order however as I don’t need/want another ‘job’. But, if anyone could do it, Itd be me right? (After all I’ve done it myself in my own business – and it was hard work!) I told my ‘Introducer person' that if Im going to join that I need to meet successful AMWAY operators who have results I currently have:- who have managed to turn Amway into a worthwhile cash cow/high tax bracket salary. They promised I would meet such pple and soon. Well I met such a person. This woman use to have a career doing what I do. When she told me that AMWAY replaced that career, I immediately thought “well you must have been crap” but I let her continue. She kept talking and talking until, it sounded like she was justifying something. I asked her “Hey congrats on your success! If u don’t mind, Im new to this AMWAY, May I ask? I need a succinct and specific answer from u so that I may ascertain whether AMWAY is for me and worth my time. Do u mind telling me how long you have been in AMWAY, summarising the effort in terms of hrs/ wk and yr by yr of what you have put in & then secondly your monetary profits (not revenue, but profit) that you have received from those efforts? Just a summary please”. She smiled and said “I need to go to X event” The conversation ended here and I respect that a person could have any reason not to answer me but I couldn’t but help to think that she was in slight denial or would be embarrassed to say her real results. I simply must end the story here. After 4-5 weeks, and much deliberation my wife and I (whom are both have our own home based business that we built from the ground up) decided Amway was not for us. We feel that we will be in a better position yrs down the track by concentrating on our own businesses. As for my sister, who has never had a business. I have told her to be extremely careful. I said if this makes you feel amazing, then keep doing it.. A part time job may not be passive but the income is GUARANTEED. IF 12-18months from now you don’t get compensated for your time, get out! Im sure many people there are delusional (don’t worry about that) In Fact, Im sure I was quite delusional until my business ‘had made it’. Just be CAREFUL PLAN, you could save all that extra $ from a Part time job, buy an extra house or you can even buy a self managed business that runs w/out u. Amway is only 1/ ten million ‘money making vehicles’ out there. I don’t agree with what AMWAY says about traditional business because I have countless friends who prove otherwise! And of course, ones that do not, but they wouldn't succeed in AMWAY either. AMWAY simply does not give you the full story. To anyone looking to do it, be crystal clear on what it is you want from Amway, and I caution you to actually stay clear of the WANNA -BE's! Find someone in Amway who has real success (outside of Amway) and has what you want and can give you a damn succinct and NO B***S*** answer to the time and effort you need to put in. Otherwise stay clear!
Thanks for your comments. When you ask a "successful" amway person, that's the canned answer. That you need to attend so and so function.
They won't give you a straight answer, which is a red flag in the business world.
That's because the diamond upline has to deal with uncontrollable factors such as controlling downlines.
People in Amway resist giving a straight and honest answer to questions, because being honest involves telling both the advantages and disadvantages of something. It involves discussing loss as well as profit, limitations as well as possibilities, pitfalls as well as opportunities. And quite frankly, for Amway freaks that is a buzzkill.
It's part if their whole "Don't say negative!" mentality.
Business cults like Amway thrive on the white-hot fire of enthusiasm and hyped-up craziness. Being calm, sober, rational, and cool-headed is absolutely poisonous to Amway thinking. If you ask them for a calm, sober, rational and cool-headed answer, they immediately write you off as a loser.
A great deal of the so-called "success" in Amway is DREAMING about being successful, and FANTASIZING about success. And nobody wants his dreams or fantasies punctured by sober facts.
Yes, I wrote an article about "avoiding negatve". The way Amway people do it, it's counterproductive. To have no negatives at all in your life is a bad thing, not good. It's just that Amway people are blinded by their Amway induced trance.
Any facts that are critical to "the business" and "the plan" are labeled as negative and the person preaching those facts are labeled as "dream stealers", "unchristian" and so on by a zealous and jealous IBO.
Food for thought. How can anyone steal a dream?
The term "dream stealers" are invented by those amway defenders because they believe that those kind of people that are critical of the business plan are waking up the minds of an IBO.
By waking "asleep" IBO's their dreams of unrealistic success will come to a halt.
The treatment of any rational criticism as "evil" or "hostile" is one of the telltale signs of a cult. Cults demand lockstep obedience in all matters. And complaints about "dream-stealing" can be understood as rage against anything that punctures the balloon of hope, even if the hope is purely chimerical.
I recall some of the less intelligent members of Amway showing up at this website to say the following: "How DARE you attack something that gives people HOPE?!?!"
What are they really saying? Well, it's this: "The important thing in Amway isn't financial success; the important thing is dreaming and hoping and wishing!"
If only they told that to their down-line IBOs at the recruitment session.
The real problem is that Amway doesn't represent hope. It represents false hope. Attending college holds far more hope for participants than Amway does.
Joe, I agree totally with you that Amway and its various leech subsystems only offer a false hope to people. But as a professor who teaches at a major research university here in New York, let me disabuse you of a few false ideas concerning a college education today.
First, in many cases such an education costs a fortune, and will leave a student in six-figure debt when he graduates. Already, unpaid student loans in this country are at the trillion-dollar level. At my university (which isn't abnormal) it costs $70,000 per year for an undergraduate to attend. When I was an undergraduate in 1964, it cost me about $2000 per year, and that was at an expensive private university.
Second, there is no longer the expectation (let alone the guarantee) that someone with a college diploma will find any sort of employment suitable to his training. When I was young, the papers were filled with want ads for "college graduates." But because so many more people go to college today, there are simply fewer jobs available for them all. In 1950 a college diploma might have actually meant something; today most employers know that it can be as meaningless as a high school diploma is.
Third--and this I can vouch for from my personal experience of nearly forty years in academia--much of what happens today in the college classroom is a joke. Left-wing and left-liberal faculty spend most of their time propagandizing students to follow a certain political and socio-cultural line rather than teaching them anything. This especially so in the humanities, and the humanities faculties still have immense influence in academia.
Fourth, not all college degrees carry the same value. An Ivy-League degree will open a lot of doors for you, but a degree from a small and obscure college will not. A potential employer may be impressed by a degree from Princeton or Yale; he won't be by a degree from Lostswamp Community College in Boca Raton.
Fifth, there is a pronounced anti-male bias in academia today, as more and more female faculty are hired and promoted, and more and more male students drop out. My classes were over ninety percent female last semester. If you are male (and particularly if you are a white male) your presence is not really wanted, neither as a student nor as a professor.
Does all this mean that it's not worth while attending college? No, because the people in charge of this country have made it basically a required credential for anyone who wants to have a white-collar job of any kind. So you need a diploma, just as you might need a union card in some jobs.
So sure, going to college is better than going into Amway. But let's not lie to ourselves about what is actually happening in higher education. College isn't the panacea that people thought it was fifty years ago. It's more of a protection racket for our governing elites.
I agree that college doesn't guarantee success for anyone, but finishing college proves a few things. That you had some perseverance to finish and that you were likely to have learned a few things.
I agree that the cost of many colleges are crazy, but there are affordable ways to navigate your way though, such as attending a junior college and then transferring to an affordable local college. There are ways to avoid major debt, and students should figure out ways to do that. And parents should not toss their retirement to fund a fancy four year degree for their kids either. A compromise can be made.
That said, you are far more likely to have greater earnings as a college grad than non college grads.
And Amway is far worse because you are likely to end up with a net loss, even more so if you're purchasing tools and functions.
I would like to add onto Joe's comment about circumventing the issues of debt with schooling.
1. I recently graduated school in 2015, and have no student debt, because the government assistance we have is absolutely ludicrous. I grew up in an upper middle class household, and did not have help from my folks to pay, because I was actually paid to go to school. As a declared independent, I was considered impoverished and was given a series of FEDERAL pell grants (The only people who don't qualify are people that have a good paying job already, or are dependent on parents that make a sizable income). My pell grants alone gave me more than tuition and books.
2. I will agree that bachelor's degrees are all too common at this point, and paying $70,000 a year to get one that is recognized the same as one from a school that costs less than $7,000 a year is ridiculous. I started off in a junior college, and eventually transferred to a state school. I have had no issues with my degree, and can say it has held more weight than most of the goofy private schools like ITT Tech and DeVry. For $70,000 a year, they should be guaranteeing me a $100,000 a year job, or they aren't worth my time.
Thanks for your valuable comments, Ben.
Even though that colleges don't guarantee success, you can still learn some valuable insights that are being taught. Those valuable insights that you learned will be helpful towards your future endeavors coupled with experience.
Those functions will not teach you any valuable insights that are future ready. They just go onstage to show off, brag and lie to their teeth.
Imagine going to your future employer with these kind of teaching!
Yes, some IBOs actually list WWDB or BWW teaching on their job applications as crazy as that sounds.
The larger point that I was trying to raise in my post of July 4 (3:18 PM) is that a college degree is today essentially a CREDENTIAL rather than a sign of achievement. Of course you can learn important things in college, and I would hope that everyone who attends does learn such things.
But my argument addressed a wider issue -- the way in which attendance at college has now become a requirement for practically every single job that exists, and is a sine qua non for any position of authority, responsibility, or even just white-collar status. This was never the case in the past, when many persons of high responsibility or authority were not college graduates, and things ran just fine.
Ask yourself the same question that we ask here about the "Tools" racket in Amway: Who profits from this situation? Who's getting rich by forcing every student in America to bankrupt himself by attending college, if he wants to have any chance at all in the upper-range job market?
Thanks! I certainly get your point. But my point is this. If you finish college, you are likely to have many opportunities open up for you. You may have to pay off college debt but a good job will eventually pay it off and more.
Completing an "Amway education" only puts you in debt and continues to make you deeper in debt unless you quit or unless you are one in tens of thousands who might break through and make it to one of the higher ranks such as diamond.
Anonymous,
I understand what you are saying, and appreciate your stance on education being a necessity rather than a privilege. My point was people can be smarter with their money when going for a bachelor's degree. To plunge yourself into thousands of dollars in debt for a degree that is ostensibly the same as most others is problematic, and people need to be taught accountability for those actions.
To me, it is the same as saying I need a vehicle for going 5 miles down a paved road and I want it to last 15 years (every new car can easily achieve this goal). I could get a reliable and affordable Honda, but I also can get lots of loans and get myself a Rolls Royce. Too many people aren't looking at school practically, and instead are taking a wild chance on these educations.
I can even take it a step further with an anecdotal story. My family is halved after an irreconcilable issue which left me on one side, and my sister on the other. My side makes much more money than hers, and yet I went to an in-state school, I don't have student loans, and my degree is credible. She, on the other hand, went to an out-of-state school, has a gigantic amount of student debt, and will be getting a degree that has no more merits than mine. I understand that getting a post baccalaureates degree is a different story, which is why I'm only sticking to this particular point (also it is the main source of student debt).
I do want to take this one step further and ask, why has our mindset changed back to the 50's with our goals? I remember growing up and watching older television shows with the father telling their son, "Do you want to know the meaning of life?", and the son replies "Yes", followed by the dad saying, "You grow up, you get a job, you raise a family, and then you die." and then the son's imagination and passion are instantly crushed...and you fast forward to him 30 years later as a store manager for a chain of a major corporation. People for a long time rebelled against this mentality, but it seems to be very prevalent today as people grow up, they go to college, they get thousands of dollars in debt, they work their entire lives paying it off, and then they die...
Ben thanks for sharing your thoughts on the matter. I agree with you.
Yes, I understand that it isn't essential to get a high-priced degree that will leave one in hopeless, unpayable debt. People go to Ivy League schools mostly for prestige reasons (and this will help somewhat in getting certain positions), but a degree from a less well known school will often be just as good in terms of what you actually learn. In fact, I know for sure that the teaching in some Ivy League schools like Harvard or Brown or Columbia is abysmally bad, and permeated with politically correct bullshit.
Our mindsets about how life should be lived have changed because it isn't the 1960s anymore. You can't be a self-absorbed hippie narcissist "tuning out" and then "turning on" and then "dropping out," as that asshole Timothy Leary preached. You can't dedicate your youth to drugs, sex, and rock 'n' roll. The middle class in America has shrunk; millions of jobs have been outsourced overseas; illegal aliens are competing with Americans for the few jobs left; wages are stagnant, or else eaten up by inflation; and globalist capitalism has gone utterly berserk in its greed for mega-profits and its contempt for anyone who actually works for a living. In a new world like that, people have to hustle. They can't sit around dreaming or philosophizing.
Let me tell you about my students: they are SCARED SHITLESS. They have none of the guarantees of money and comfort and leisure that were available to young people in the brain-dead 1960s. All they want from me is a good grade and a letter of recommendation.
But neither of you has answered my crucial question. Who profits from this new situation? Who gets rich from the terrible new reality that everybody must go to college, or else be stuck as a soda jerk or a waiter?
Today in New York City, you can't even become a policeman or a fireman without having a college degree. That is objectively insane.
""But neither of you has answered my crucial question. Who profits from this new situation?""
Why don't you tell us?
I'm not sure what this has to do with Amway IBOs faking success.
The issue came up because intelligent conversation often goes in unexpected directions. You were the one (at July 4, 12:38 PM) who brought up the subject of college. It annoys me when people speak of college as some kind of Holy Grail, when in fact these days it is basically no different from a Chicago protection-racket. And if Ben Dover can go off on tangents in his sometimes lengthy posts, why can't anyone else?
OK, I'll tell you who profits from the current set-up: the colleges themselves, which are now mega-corporations run by big businessmen, for no purpose other than profit. The professors are considered coolie labor, and the students are considered cattle. Vast sums of cash are flowing into these places from tuition fees, government grants, and philanthropic funding from stupid alumni.
Do you honestly think any of these places give a flying fuck about education or teaching or learning? LOL, as Anna Banana says. Most administrative staff (who now number over 60 percent of those employed in any school!) haven't the slightest interest in pedagogy or scholarship. They are only interested in their bloated paychecks.
Who else profits? Big Business. Corporations depend on the colleges to crank out plenty of docile and obedient middle-management types who have faithfully gone through four years of potty-training.
Who else profits? The technocratic masters, the Silicon-Valley scum who create endless new computer programs and systems and digitalized complexities that we don't need, but which can be sold at immense profit to the colleges and universities as "something new and exciting."
That's just for a start. Over and out.
I agree with your assessment. College is big business. About that there is no doubt. But A college degree is still a better option than an Amway business.
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