Does it Take Luck to Be Successful?
I was speaking with someone the other day about joining my Lightyear Wireless business. As the conversation often does, it turned to questions about my success as in “how much do you make from this?”. I always refuse to answer that question directly for two reasons. 1) income claims are frowned upon and 2) my income varies from month to month. The way I answer that question is to say “I make a full time living from my home business” – which is a true statement.
He was one of those people who believes the 97/3 theory. That theory says that 97% of people to attempt a network marketing business fail at it, while only 3% actually succeed. I don’t really believe that statistic, but this person said “Oh you must be one of the lucky few who make money from this business”.
I assured him that luck had little or perhaps nothing to do with my success and bid him farewell. This turned out to be someone who didn’t really sound like he was ready for a home based business so I moved on. But I got to thinking about the luck thing later.
Imagine that? Some people think that you have to be “lucky” to be successful in network marketing! Oh, I guess there is potential luck involved. It would be ‘lucky’ if I happened to get a lead and signed up a person who turned out to be one of those ’super earners’. You know, one of those people who ends up building a team of 50,000 with me as the upline. That hasn’t happened yet but yet I still make a good income from network marketing. Perhaps it will happen and yes that would be lucky for me.
But an individual’s success in network marketing does not depend on ‘luck’ in the same sense as it does in pure ‘luck driven’ things like the lottery. In the lottery, your odds are in the 100 millions of winning and it depends almost entirely on luck – not just luck but ‘extreme luck’.
Network marketing on the other hand depends on persistence, attitude, perseverance, and many other attribute factors. And yes, a stroke of luck will certainly help but you don’t have to depend on it.