10 Things I hate about network marketing

Last week when my roomie and I were in walmart, we ran into an Indian guy. We just picked up the conversation. After all he was sounding a very genuine person, working for a software company, had come with his wife who is also working for another software company. He took lot of interest in asking what we (roomie and I) are studying and about our research and that. We exchanged numbers so that we could be in touch. Just in a week's time he already called me once and my roomie twice asking if we would be interested in a business opportunity that might fetch a great money and if we will be available for a seminar in the next week with very limited seats to listen to a guy who had successfully made millions of dollars out of this business opportunity. I exclaimed, "Oh no. Not again!!". Yes, this is not the first time it is happening. It happened 2 months ago. It happened 6 months ago. It happend 15 months ago and so on.For the uninitiated, I am talking about the network marketing people here and the way they operate their business. Few years back I had attended one of their meeting due to consistent insistence of my friend and ever since I hated it. Every time I happened to meet and interact with the people into this network marketing my hatred towards NM only got worse. While the people into the NM are mostly common people, nice and capable, like you and me, it is the attitude with which the NM business is carried about that I hate. Thats why I thought of putting down ten reasons or things why I hate NM.
1. In the very first meeting they tell you that you do not have to do anything and earn a lot. Isnt it the wrong way to approach life? While you might hear people say that you should work smart and not hard, nobody ever can claim that you can achieve or get something without putting some work and is by any standards the wrong attitude towards life. They lost me right there.
2. They say you can retire at 30--Give me one good reason why I should retire at 30 even if it means that I can eat on a golden plate. It is the demands of the day at work, surprises that come with the turn of a new day, coming back home to play with your pet and the like that keeps me going. So why should I retire at 30. In any case, retirement is not in that you quit work. It is more of a mental thing for me. It should happen to your mind more naturally and as a logical succession to your immediate past than as a sudden jolt
3. They say you can send your kids to hawaii/disney land--If only they had said that you can send your kid to better schools.
4. They make you look at even your close friends as potential customers --which in turn leads to behavioral changes in you towards the friendship eventually resulting in losing the very friend.
5. They made me suspicious of new people that I happen to meet--I start to think of the new people I meet that they may be a part of the "net"work marketting in order to protect myself from falling in the net.
6. Money-centric :: While money is necessary to live life- it is not THE thing in life. I simply hate anything that is primarily money-centric. I do not have to justify that.
7. From my interactions with the people in NM, I observed that NM actually takes your attention off your mainstream bread-and-butter job. You work all your life hard and smart towards that mainstream job and NM seems to only make you get off the focus rather than playing a complementary role.
8. They over-sell the product --Imagine someone giving you a 10sized shoe if your feet is 8sized? Can you take that? While we can endlessly discuss on this issue, a simple example of this oversell is selling a very concentrated dishwasher soap which is overpriced but claimed to be very effective. Come on dude! if you use a concentrated soap ofcourse it is going to be effective but is it desired? is it good on your hands? There is a reason why commonly used product is made to a certain concentrataion. To top it all, they claim that their product is the best in the market.
9. Every network marketting person that I meet is secretive about what he/she does and try to lure people into it without giving out much informatioin. I have never seen anyone in NM that had called me so far for a meeting to tell me little more about it when I asked them. Why should you get someone into doing something with misinformation?
10. I don't have one..I will let you know when I get one. But, I believe 9 reasons are strong enough not to look for the 10th one.

Jog (Walk) of life

While I write this, I might sound like a little kid that talks all the time about the latest toy it picks up to play with. Jogging is the new toy (habit) that I picked up only recently for obvious reasons--keep fit. But, little did I realize, and it did not take me long to figure out, that jogging is more mental than physical, more than what I could fathom before I started. In fact after a point physical faculties of your body have a very little role to play. Sounding like a kid stops here. What I am trying to get at is an analogy between jogging and the way we live or the life itself. To put in the simplest possible manner, life is something that presents itself with lot of surprises (good and bad), hurdles (easy and difficult), relationships (simple to more complex) etc., and above all, some bigger purpose. Every one's life has got a bigger purpose whether you see it or not, whether you believe in it or not. A person managing an orphanage defines many people's lives. A normal living guy might have helped someone to study well and achieve success in life. That is the bigger purpose of their lives. But no matter what is the bigger purpose, as humans we live in details. We need our friends to notice and appreciate when we wear new shoes. We need our teacher to say "very good" when we score that few marks more than last exam. We want our pet to come running at us when we reach home. We live in details, whether we see bigger purpose of our life or not. It is those details that bring us to a particular moment, define our moments, determine what we are going to do tomorrow, determine whether to pursue a relationship or not etc. We live in details otherwise we go insane (or at least we are not prepared to handle anything that has no details). Let me explain a bit. We go to watch a movie. If, from the start to end the movie were to just go about its message for which it is meant, it would not last for more than few minutes. It is the details that keep us hooked to the movie. The message (read as bigger purpose) of the movie comes only in the end. We live in details. Hurdles. Very few hurdles in life demand our physical self to get over. Majority of them are to be tackled mentally. You walk out of the house set out to do something and someone says you look ugly. You perform a task and your boss says you did not do the way it is supposed to be done. These are little hurdles for example that make or break our confidence. Hardly anything physical about them. It needs your mind to come to tackle such situations. Success. To me, it should be like walking upstairs rather than climbing a steep cliff. Only then you will be able to celebrate your every step of success. Not only that your success step is stable than hanging on a cliff even if it is at a higher level, but also you get to spend time looking around what it is like to be at that level. It helps you to look back at the steps that helped you reach the step you are in, to help someone who might be immediately below you. Success should be a logical succession of your previous step. I am not saying that someone failed at one attempt will fail at the next attempt. I am just saying that your 1000th step should be preceded by 999th step or may be 990th step and not a jump from your 1st step.
Jogging to me has all the ingredients that I mentioned above. Every little nuances of life, I believe, is captured in the process of jogging. It is a more natural succession to what all we can do every day i.e. walking. However, from the time you get off the bed, a part of your mind starts competing with your goal. At every step of the run, at every turn of the lap, at every mile, it tells you to stop. Hope, discipline, determination is called for at every step, to succeed. We think that we all need some time alone every day. Swami Vivekananda strongly recommended that everyone spend some time alone in a day. However, the question is how well are we prepared to handle ourselves even if we get that time to spend time alone. I believe very few are that well prepared. We can spend endless hours with people around us even if do not talk to them, but find it difficult to spend time alone. Jogging brings you to that situation face to face. The bad guy in our mind competes with us, tells us to stop at every step of progress. But it (jogging) teaches you to tell that guy that "I am going to carry on". Believe me or not, he is going to compete at first, bear with you next, give in and finally become your friend and help you reach that bigger goal--keep fit.

ps. Philosophy aside. I suggest, the ones that are serious about jogging, to visit www.halhigdon.com (courtesy: Karthik Ramanathan). There are nice running schedules for runners of all levels.

Why blog

Even though I knew about web blogging long back and admired even many of my friends who blog and their blogs, I never myself able to come up with a convincing reason why one should blog. May be I found one now or may be not. People are so busy with their work these days that not many have time to listen to what you have to say exactly at the same time you have to say. A classic example is the way people in US say "whats up" or "how are you doing" when you pass by them. Though they greet you with these phrases, no body waits to listen to what you have to respond. I used to think this is unusual. May be not. Every one is busy. Every one is fighting a hard battle in their daily life. They have their own right not to listen to you. But, from the first person's view point, you feel like talking to someone, you feel like sharing your daily experiences ( so many interesting things that happen in everyone's life if not daily at least on a regular basis) . How to get around the problem of not having a listener. I think blogging gets around this problem. You can-- share/shout/laugh at/worry about--anything you feel like, whenever you feel like letting the listener (in this case the reader) the right to listen (read) your blog whenever she/he feels like or even exercise the right not to listen(read).
Let me start my journey into the blogging world, now that I found my own reason why to blog