Network Marketing Quotes

Everything you want in life is a relationship away.

If you are on social media, and you are not learning, not laughing, not being inspired or not networking, then you are using it wrong.

No one else knows exactly what the future holds for you, no one else knows what obstacles you've overcome to be where you are, so don't expect others to feel as passionate about your dreams as you do.

I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives—those fountains of inconvenient feeling—and toward the frantic enticements of what our friends in the Greed Business call the Free Market. We’re hurtling through time and space and information faster and faster, seeking that network connection. But at the same time we’re falling away from our families and our neighbors and ourselves. We ego-surf and update our status and brush up on which celebrities are ruining themselves, and how. But the cure won’t stick.

5 Ways To Build Your Brand on Social Media: 1 Post content that add value 2 Spread positivity 3 Create steady stream of info 4 Make an impact 5 Be yourself

Tweet others the way you want to be tweeted.

Some people have a lot of time, but no money-- It's because they don't work hard enough. Some people have a lot of money, but no time-- It's because they don't work smart enough. The most successful people have both.

Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.

The internet and online communication is the window into your world - but real life, in person communication / connection is the door.

Freedom of Speech doesn't justify online bullying. Words have power, be careful how you use them.

Facing your fears and living a life that’s free is easy. Spending the rest of your days living half a life is hard.

What you post online speaks VOLUME about who you really are. POST with intention. REPOST with caution.

Networking isn't how many people you know, it's how many people know you.

Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at.

Financial capital - the wherewithal for mass marketing - has steadily replaced social capital - that is, grassroots citizen networks - as the coin of the realm.

You must accept a temporary loss of social esteem from ignorant people.

One of the most common causes of failure is the habit of quitting when overtaken by temporary defeat.

You have to understand you cannot have faith and fear at the same time; you can only have one or the other.

Don't promote negativity online and expect people to treat you with positivity in person.

INDECISION is the seedling of FEAR!

People are not interested in your product or your business; they are interested in solving their own problems.

In the six degrees of separation, not all degrees are equal.

We sometimes try to impress people we just met by not trying to impress them.

Network Marketing is taking a decision and sticking to it!

The greatest benefit isn’t getting what you want. The greatest benefit is what you’ll need to become in order to get what you want.

One married couple goes out to a restaurant twice a week for dinner. They spend $160 a month on eating out. They get fat. Another married couple invests $160 a month in their own network marketing business. They stay slim and healthy. In a few years they retire.

How can you squander even one more day not taking advantage of the greatest shifts of our generation? How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?” - Seth Godin, sethgodin.com

What’s the best home-based business opportunity in the world today? Without a doubt, it’s network marketing. Like it or hate it, network marketing has created more millionaires than any other industry in history. There’s just one problem — it can be hard if you’re not used to it!

People walk the paths of the gardens below, and the wind sings anthems in the hedges, and the big old cedars at the entrance to the maze creak. Marie-Laure imagines the electromagnetic waves traveling into and out of Michel’s machine, bending around them, just as Etienne used to describe, except now a thousand times more crisscross the air than when he lived - maybe a million times more. Torrents of text conversations, tides of cell conversations, of televisions programs, of e-mails, vast networks of fiber and wire interlaced above and beneath the city, passing through buildings, arcing between transmitters in Metro tunnels, between antennas atop buildings, from lampposts with cellular transmitters in them, commercials for Carrefour and Evian and prebaked toaster pastries flashing into space and back to earth again, I am going to be late and Maybe we should get reservations? and Pick up avocados and What did he say? and ten thousand I miss yous, fifty thousand I love yous, hate mail and appointment reminders and market updates, jewelry ads, coffee ads, furniture ads flying invisibly over the warrens of Paris, over the battlefields and tombs, over the Ardennes, over the Rhine, over Belgium and Denmark, over the scarred and ever-shifting landscape we call nations. And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it. Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.

You can tell the size of the man by the size of the problem that gets him down.

Everyone is business minded until it's time to be open minded about business.

If we all work together there is no telling how we can change the world through the impact of promoting positivity online.

The modern job market is like a game of musical chairs. You need to be the one with a chair when the music stops, or you're out of luck.

‎What color is a chameleon placed on a mirror? ... The chameleon responding to its own shifting image is an apt analog of the human world of fashion. Taken as a whole, what are fads but the response of a hive mind to its own reflection? In a 21st-century society wired into instantaneous networks, marketing is the mirror; the collective consumer is the chameleon.

More and more companies will choose to use Network Marketing because it fits the New Economy. They can provide all the corporate support and pay distributors on a purely performance basis to promote their products. It’s extremely efficient because in the New Economy, word-of-mouth advertising continues to work better than any other form of promotion. The company can just take the money they would have spent on advertising and promotion and pay it to their distributors to spread the word.

Affiliate Marketing Has Made Businesses Millions And Ordinary People Millionaires. Affiliate Marketing Mybe Your Next Best Career Move.

I just found out how we would never have to go to work again.

You are responsible for everything you TWEET and RETWEET.

your poverty is serving no one. If you’re a charitable person, you’d be a whole lot more charitable if you had lots of money.

1. 60 percent to existing customers 2. 30 percent to qualified prospects 3. 10 percent to the universe of people you’ve never met. (referring to how to allocate your marketing budget)

interviews showed me that successful people are playing an entirely different game. They don’t flood the job market with résumés, hoping that some employer will grace them with an interview. They network. They email a friend of a friend to make sure their name gets the look it deserves. They have their uncles call old college buddies. They have their school’s career service office set up interviews months in advance on their behalf. They have parents tell them how to dress, what to say, and whom to schmooze. That

Know your biggest WHY? Why do you joined network marketing business. Why do you want to change your life? It is your WHY that pushes you and edges you towards the crown of glory in the industry. Discover your why and get things done quickly,

The Scarlet Gang was, first and foremost, a network of gangsters, and there was seldom a time when gangsters weren’t heavily involved with the black market. If the Scarlets dominated Shanghai, it was hardly surprising that they dominated the black market, too—decided the comings and goings, decided the men who were allowed to thrive and the men who needed to drop dead.

When you were making excuses someone else was making enterprise.

The buyer is always tuned in to one radio station: WIIFM (What's In It For Me). The rest is filtered out as noise.

Stories connect us at a human level that factual statements and logical arguments can't possibly match.

I believe if you can succeed at network marketing, you can succeed at anything.

A fundamental approach to life transformation is using social media for therapy; it forces you to have an opinion, provides intellectual stimulation, increases awareness, boosts self-confidence, and offers the possibility of hope.

Paradoxically, then, network effects businesses must start with especially small markets. Facebook started with just Harvard students—Mark Zuckerberg’s first product was designed to get all his classmates signed up, not to attract all people of Earth. This is why successful network businesses rarely get started by MBA types: the initial markets are so small that they often don’t even appear to be business opportunities at

What happened at the end of our last story is something called misdirection. It's what happens when you are led to believe that something is true, but in reality it's not true at all. Misdirection happens a lot in real life- especially in politics, history, education, medicine, marketing, science, religion, and the Oprah Winfrey Network.

Networking is not a part-time or occasional exercise. Everywhere we go, we haven an opportunity to network with others.

Your audience is waiting for your stories. They have memory slots tailor-made to light up and remember you.

Success comes to people with leadership skills, a sound vision, enthusiasm, and the willingness to put forth the effort to build an organization and find others who will do the same.

Create a link through which you can market your dream products. Create a blog or a website of your own depending on what you want to be recognized for. Share your experiences through these media.

Remember, our goal is education and understanding. It’s not to win an argument. Our job is to help blind people see. When someone brings up a negative question or if they offer you an objection, all they are really doing is helping you to identify one of their blind spots.

If you succeed in this business, it’s going to be you who creates that success, not me. And, if you fail in this business, it’s going to be you who creates that failure, not me. You are going to be the difference between success or failure. I’m here to guide you every step of the way, but I can’t do it for you. I’m here to work with you, but not for you.

Successful people always have their next goal in mind.   Goals are dreams with deadlines.

Lou Holtz said it best: “In this world you’re either growing or you’re dying so get in motion and grow.

Model Successful Behavior Try to avoid reinventing the wheel when you get involved in this profession. The hard work has already been done.

You need to position yourself to your referral sources and your current clients as providing exceptional value and experiences in everything you do

Treat every connection, communication and collaboration as part of a continuous relationship.

Just get on with starting, the worst and the most surprising thing to ever expect is short term failure.

network effect really kicks in when a company controls 30 or 40 percent of a given market

Make use of your network, but don't make your network feel used.

If you want to make a big difference in this world, you must learn to prioritize and delegate efficiently. Not everything you can do is worth doing. Know this, enjoy peace!

Failure was a luxury we couldn't afford, all chained together as we were, our fates locked up tight. One box office flop from a female director and no one wanted "girl" movies, one stock market plunge from a company with a woman CEO and women couldn't lead, one false accusation and we were liars, all of us. Because when we failed it was because of our chromosomes, it wasn't because of a market dip or an ineffective advertising campaign or plain bad luck.

Why do we rely almost exclusively on markets and commercial firms to produce cars, steel, and wheat, but much less so for the most critical information our advanced societies depend on?

If automating everything makes people lazier and lazier, and laziness leads to stupidity, which it does for most people, judging by the current content circulating the social networks everywhere, except North Korea, where they don’t have any internet to speak of - at some point the Japanese robots, for which a market niche is currently being developed, with no concerns on how they should be designed to act in society or outside it - will have no choice, but to take everything over, to preserve us from ourselves…

The essential difference between rich societies and poor societies does not stem from any greater effort the former devote to work, nor even from any greater technological knowledge the former hold. Instead it arises mainly from the fact that rich nations possess a more extensive network of capital goods wisely invested from an entrepreneurial standpoint. These goods consists of machines, tools, computers, buildings, semi-manufactured goods, software, etc., and they exist due to prior savings of the nation's citizens. In other words, comparatively rich societies possess more wealth because they have more time accumulated in the form of capital goods, which places them closer in time to the achievement of much more valuable goals.

I believe the United States government is being systematically taken over by a revolutionary network. They call themselves Progressives, but we know they are really leftist radicals, dedicated to the demise of the free-market capitalist system. They have co-opted and bought off leaders of both the Republican and Democratic parties, established a dominant role in all three branches of government and thoroughly co-opted the mainstream media.

Google gets $59 billion, and you get free search and e-mail. A study published by the Wall Street Journal in advance of Facebook’s initial public offering estimated the value of each long-term Facebook user to be $80.95 to the company. Your friendships were worth sixty-two cents each and your profile page $1,800. A business Web page and its associated ad revenue were worth approximately $3.1 million to the social network. Viewed another way, Facebook’s billion-plus users, each dutifully typing in status updates, detailing his biography, and uploading photograph after photograph, have become the largest unpaid workforce in history. As a result of their free labor, Facebook has a market cap of $182 billion, and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has a personal net worth of $33 billion. What did you get out of the deal? As the computer scientist Jaron Lanier reminds us, a company such as Instagram—which Facebook bought in 2012—was not valued at $1 billion because its thirteen employees were so “extraordinary. Instead, its value comes from the millions of users who contribute to the network without being paid for it.” Its inventory is personal data—yours and mine—which it sells over and over again to parties unknown around the world. In short, you’re a cheap date.

In today’s hypercompetitive environment enabled by technology, ownership of infrastructure no longer provides a defensible advantage. Instead, flexibility provides the crucial competitive edge, competition is perpetual motion, and advantage is evanescent.

This sounds easy, but it’s difficult to do. All of us come into this business with the hope of recruiting some great people. It’s hard to disconnect from those expectations. But you need to remember, we’re not hunters. We’re not sharks. Our job is to educate people and help them understand what we have to offer. We act as consultants offering suggestions on how people can live a better life.

The most intelligent or brilliant of us all are not usually the most successful, financially or career wise. A lot depends on the ability of a person to break into circles, meet people, network and interact. A well marketed yam may sell better than a not-so-well marketed Jollof. Do not just stay in the library and read all the books there, lest you become publicly dusty like the books you read. Food for thought!

Every telecomm company is as big a corporate welfare bum as you could ask for. Try to imagine what it would cost at market rates to go around to every house in every town in every country and pay for the right to block traffic and dig up roads and erect poles and string wires and pierce every home with cabling. The regulatory fiat that allows these companies to get their networks up and running is worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars. If phone companies want to operate in the “free market,” then let them: the FCC could give them 60 days to get all their rotten copper out of our dirt, or we’ll buy it from them at the going scrappage rates. Then, let’s hold an auction for the right to be the next big telecomm company, on one condition: in exchange for using the public’s rights-of-way, you have to agree to connect us to the people we want to talk to, and vice-versa, as quickly and efficiently as you can.

niche information.” When I was a teenager, cable TV didn’t exist; the first TV program of any sort didn’t come to my city of Boston until 1948; and for years thereafter, we Americans got our news from just three big TV networks, three major weekly newsmagazines, and newspapers. Most Americans shared those same sources of information, none of which was clearly identified with conservative or liberal views, and none of which slanted its information heavily. Now, with the rise of cable TV, news websites, and Facebook, and with the decline of broad-market weekly print newsmagazines, Americans choose their source of information according to their pre-existing views.

Without an integrated formal property system, a modern market economy is inconceivable. Had the advanced nations of the West not integrated all representations into one standardized property system and made it accessible to all, they could not have specialized and divided labor to create the expanded market network and capital that have produced their present wealth. The inefficiencies of non-Western markets have a lot to do with the fragmentation of their property arrangements and the unavailability of standard representations.

The radical economist J K Gibson-Graham (two women writing under one name) portray our society as an iceberg, with competitive capitalist practices visible above the waterline and below all kinds of aid and cooperation by families, friends, neighbors, churches, cooperatives, volunteers, and voluntary organizations from softball leagues, to labor unions, along with activities outside the market, under the table, bartered labor and goods, ad more, a bustling network of uncommercial enterprise. Kropotkin's mutual-aid tribes, clans, and villages never went away entirely, even among us, here and now.

DB: There's a lot of talk about terrorism. In fact, it's become almost an obsession for the media in the United States. But it's a very narrow definition of terrorism. AR: Yes. It completely ignores the economic terrorism unleashed by neoliberalism, which devastates the lives of millions of people, depriving them of water, food, electricity. Denying them medicine. Denying them education. Terrorism is the logical extension of this business of the free market. Terrorism is the privatization of war. Terrorists are the free marketeers of war - people who believe that it isn't only the state that can wage war, but private parties as well. If you look at the logic underlying an act of terrorism and the logic underlying a retaliatory war against terrorism, they are the same. Both terrorists and governments make ordinary people pay for the actions of their governments. Osama bin Laden is making people pay for the actions of the US state, whether it's in Saudi Arabia, Palestine, or Afghanistan. The US government is making the people of Iraq pay for the actions of Saddam Hussein. The people of Afghanistan pay for the crimes of the Taliban. The logic is the same. Osama bin Laden and George Bush are both terrorists. They are both building international networks that perpetrate terror and devastate people's lives. Bush, with the Pentagon, the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank. Bin Laden with Al Qaeda.

The second reason that deep work is valuable is because the impacts of the digital network revolution cut both ways. If you can create something useful, its reachable audience (e.g., employers or customers) is essentially limitless—which greatly magnifies your reward. On the other hand, if what you’re producing is mediocre, then you’re in trouble, as it’s too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online. Whether you’re a computer programmer, writer, marketer, consultant, or entrepreneur, your situation has become similar to Jung trying to outwit Freud, or Jason Benn trying to hold his own in a hot start-up: To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing—a task that requires depth.

Most of the successful innovators and entrepreneurs in this book had one thing in common: they were product people. They cared about, and deeply understood, the engineering and design. They were not primarily marketers or salesmen or financial types; when such folks took over companies, it was often to the detriment of sustained innovation. “When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off,” Jobs said. Larry Page felt the same: “The best leaders are those with the deepest understanding of the engineering and product design.”34 Another lesson of the digital age is as old as Aristotle: “Man is a social animal.” What else could explain CB and ham radios or their successors, such as WhatsApp and Twitter? Almost every digital tool, whether designed for it or not, was commandeered by humans for a social purpose: to create communities, facilitate communication, collaborate on projects, and enable social networking. Even the personal computer, which was originally embraced as a tool for individual creativity, inevitably led to the rise of modems, online services, and eventually Facebook, Flickr, and Foursquare. Machines, by contrast, are not social animals. They don’t join Facebook of their own volition nor seek companionship for its own sake. When Alan Turing asserted that machines would someday behave like humans, his critics countered that they would never be able to show affection or crave intimacy. To indulge Turing, perhaps we could program a machine to feign affection and pretend to seek intimacy, just as humans sometimes do. But Turing, more than almost anyone, would probably know the difference. According to the second part of Aristotle’s quote, the nonsocial nature of computers suggests that they are “either a beast or a god.” Actually, they are neither. Despite all of the proclamations of artificial intelligence engineers and Internet sociologists, digital tools have no personalities, intentions, or desires. They are what we make of them.

When a customer clicks through the license conditions to play the game, they’re agreeing to add their phone as a node in a distributed server. More players equal more servers—not for themselves, I might add, we never run a server node for any given game on the same host as a client for that game, that would be asking for trouble—but at the back end, we’re in the processor arbitrage market. The game programmers’ biggest problems are maintaining causality and object coherency while minimizing network latency—sorry,

In books, coaching sessions, and networking events aimed at the white-collar unemployed, the seeker soon encounters ideologies that are explicitly hostile to any larger, social understanding of his or her situation. The most blatant of these, in my experience, was the EST-like, victim-blaming ideology represented by Patrick Knowles and the books he recommended to his boot-camp participants. Recall that at the boot camp, the timid suggestion that there might be an outer world defined by the market or ruled by CEOs was immediately rebuked; there was only us, the job seekers. It was we who had to change. In a milder form, the constant injunction to maintain a winning attitude carries the same message: look inward, not outward; the world is entirely what you will it to be.

The company that employed me strived only to serve up the cheapest fare that its customers would tolerate, churn it out as fast as possible, and charge as much as they could get away with. If it were possible to do so, the company would sell what all businesses of its kind dream about selling, creating that which all our efforts were tacitly supposed to achieve: the ultimate product – Nothing. And for this product they would command the ultimate price – Everything. This market strategy would then go on until one day, among the world-wide ruins of derelict factories and warehouses and office buildings, there stood only a single, shining, windowless structure with no entrance and no exit. Inside would be – will be – only a dense network of computers calculating profits. Outside will be tribes of savage vagrants with no comprehension of the nature or purpose of the shining, windowless structure. Perhaps they will worship it as a god. Perhaps they will try to destroy it, their primitive armory proving wholly ineffectual against the smooth and impervious walls of the structure, upon which not even a scratch can be inflicted.

Given that background, I was interested in what Steve Jobs might say about the future of Apple. His survival strategy for Apple, for all its skill and drama, was not going to propel Apple into the future. At that moment in time, Apple had less than 4 percent of the personal computer market. The de facto standard was Windows-Intel and there seemed to be no way for Apple to do more than just hang on to a tiny niche. In the summer of 1998, I got an opportunity to talk with Jobs again. I said, “Steve, this turnaround at Apple has been impressive. But everything we know about the PC business says that Apple cannot really push beyond a small niche position. The network effects are just too strong to upset the Wintel standard. So what are you trying to do in the longer term? What is the strategy?” He did not attack my argument. He didn’t agree with it, either. He just smiled and said, “I am going to wait for the next big thing.

The information superhighways will have the same effect as our present superhighways or motorways. They will cancel out the landscape, lay waste to the territory and abolish real distances. What is merely physical and geographical in the case of our motorways will assume its full dimensions in the electronic field with the abolition of mental distances and the absolute shrinkage of time. All short circuits (and the establishment of this planetary hyper-space is tantamount to one immense short circuit) produce electric shocks. What we see emerging here is no longer merely territorial desert, but social desert, employment desert, the body itself being laid waste by the very concentration of information. A kind of Big Crunch, contemporaneous with the Big Bang of the financial markets and the information networks. We are merely at the dawning of the process, but the waste and the wastelands are already growing much faster than the computerization process itself.

Complexity catastrophes help explain why bureaucracy seems to grow with the tenacity of weeds. Many companies go through bureaucracy-clearing exercises only to find it has sprung back a few years later. No one ever sits down to deliberately design a bureaucratic muddle. Instead, bureaucracy springs up as people just try to optimize their local patch of the network: finance is just trying to ensure that the numbers add up, legal wants to keep us out of jail, and marketing is trying to promote the brand. The problem isn't dumb people or evil intentions. Rather, network growth creates interdependencies, interdependencies create conflicting constraints, and conflicting constraints create slow decision making and, ultimately, bureaucratic gridlock.

With the invention of the city and its powerful combination of economies of scale coupled to innovation and wealth creation came the great divisions of society. Our present social network structures barely existed in their present form until urban communities evolved. Hunter-gatherers were significantly less hierarchical, more egalitarian and community oriented than we are. The struggle and tension between unbridled individual self-enhancement and the care and concern for the less fortunate has been a major thread running throughout human history, especially over the past two hundred years. Nevertheless, it seems that without the motive of self-interest our entrepreneurial free market economy would collapse. The system we have evolved critically relies on people continually wanting new cars and new cell phones, new widgets and gadgets, new clothes and new washing machines, new thrills, new entertainment, and pretty much new everything, even when they already have enough of “everything.” It may not be a pretty picture and it doesn’t work for everyone, but so far, it’s worked remarkably well for most of us, and apparently most of us seem to want it to continue. Whether it can is a topic I’ll return to in the last chapter.

With 21 million people following her on Facebook and 18 million on Twitter, pop singer Ariana Grande can’t personally chat with each of her loves, as she affectionately calls her fans. So she and others are spreading their messages through new-style social networks, via mobile apps that are more associated with private, intimate conversation, hoping that marketing in a cozier digital setting adds a breath of warmth and a dash of personality. It’s the Internet’s equivalent of mailing postcards rather than plastering a billboard. Grande could have shared on Twitter that her most embarrassing moment on stage was losing a shoe. The 21-year-old instead revealed the fact during a half-hour live text chat on Line, an app built for close friends to exchange instant messages. It’s expensive to advertise on Facebook and Twitter, and the volume of information being posted creates uncertainty over what people actually notice. Chat apps including Line, Kik, Snapchat, WeChat and Viber place marketing messages front and center. Most-used apps The apps threaten to siphon advertising dollars from the social media leaders, which are already starting to see chat apps overtake them as the most-used apps on smartphones, according to Forrester Research. Chat apps “demand attention,” said Rebecca Lieb, an analyst at consulting firm Altimeter Group.

With the explosion of technology over the last 15+ years, we are in the process of a complete paradigm shift in regards to how we communicate in our marketing, public relations and advertising. Social Media has forever changed the way businesses and customers communicate and the beauty of it is that, through your channels, you can reach your audience directly and at lightning speed. Social Media has also changed the way customers make their buying decisions. Pinterest, Google+, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, have made it easy to find and connect with others who share similar interests, to read product reviews and to connect with potential clients. Within these networks there is an amazing and wide open space for your unique voice to be heard. As the web interacts with us in more personal ways and with greater portability, there is no time better than the present to engage with and rally your community.

The real force that pushed history to breakneck velocity […] was not the share market. Share markets were simply not liquid enough to bankroll Edison-sized ambitions. At the turn of the 20th century […] neither the banks nor the share markets could raise the kind of money needed to build all those power stations, grids, factories and distribution networks. To get those vast projects off the ground, what was required was an equivalently-sized network of credit. Hand-in-hand, shareholding and technology led to the creation of shareholder-owned mega banks, willing to lend to the new mega firms by generating a new kind of mega debt. This took the form of vast overdraft facilities for the Thomas Edisons and the Henry Fords of the world. Of course, the money they were lent did not actually exist… yet. Rather, it was as if they were borrowing the future profits of their mega firms in order to fund those mega firms’ construction.

fad is a wave in the ocean, and a trend is the tide. A fad gets a lot of hype, and a trend gets very little. Like a wave, a fad is very visible, but it goes up and down in a big hurry. Like the tide, a trend is almost invisible, but it’s very powerful over the long term. A fad is a short-term phenomenon that might be profitable, but a fad doesn’t last long enough to do a company much good. Furthermore, a company often tends to gear up as if a fad were a trend. As a result, the company is often stuck with a lot of staff, expensive manufacturing facilities, and distribution networks. (A fashion, on the other hand, is a fad that repeats itself. Examples: short skirts for women and double-breasted suits for men. Halley’s Comet is a fashion because it comes back every 75 years or so.) When the fad disappears, a company often goes into a deep financial shock. What happened to Atari is typical in this respect. And look how Coleco Industries handled the Cabbage Patch Kids. Those homely dolls hit the market in 1983 and started to take off. Coleco’s strategy was to milk the kids for all they were worth. Hundreds of Cabbage Patch novelties flooded the toy stores. Pens, pencils, crayon boxes, games, clothing. Two years later, Coleco racked up sales of $776 million and profits of $83 million. Then the bottom dropped out of the Cabbage Patch Kids. By 1988 Coleco went into Chapter 11. Coleco died, but the kids live on. Acquired by Hasbro in 1989, the Cabbage Patch Kids are now being handled conservatively. Today they’re doing quite well.

The Ape Story. Start with a cage containing five apes. In the cage, hang a banana on a string and put stairs under it. Before long, an ape will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana. As soon as he touches the stairs, spray all of the apes with cold water. After a while, another ape makes an attempt with the same result - all the apes are sprayed with cold water. Turn off the cold water. Later, if another ape tries to climb the stairs, the other apes will try to prevent it, even though no water sprays them. Now, remove one ape from the cage and replace it with a new ape. The new ape sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his horror, all of the other apes attack him. After another attempt and attack, the ape knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be assaulted. Next, remove another of the original five apes and replace it with a new ape. The new ape goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous new ape takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm. Again, replace a third original ape with a new one. The new one makes it to the stairs and is attacked as well. Two of the four apes that beat him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs, or why they are participating in the beating of the newest ape. After replacing the fourth and fifth original apes, all of the original apes that were sprayed with cold water have been replaced. Nevertheless, no ape ever again approaches the stairs. Why not? "Because that's the way it's always been around here." Yes, our prospects sometimes use this same irrational thinking to reject an opportunity to change

What is a “pyramid?” I grew up in real estate my entire life. My father built one of the largest real estate brokerage companies on the East Coast in the 1970s, before selling it to Merrill Lynch. When my brother and I graduated from college, we both joined him in building a new real estate company. I went into sales and into opening a few offices, while my older brother went into management of the company. In sales, I was able to create a six-figure income. I worked 60+ hours a week in such pursuit. My brother worked hard too, but not in the same fashion. He focused on opening offices and recruiting others to become agents to sell houses for him. My brother never listed and sold a single house in his career, yet he out-earned me 10-to-1. He made millions because he earned a cut of every commission from all the houses his 1,000+ agents sold. He worked smarter, while I worked harder. I guess he was at the top of the “pyramid.” Is this legal? Should he be allowed to earn more than any of the agents who worked so hard selling homes? I imagine everyone will agree that being a real estate broker is totally legal. Those who are smart, willing to take the financial risk of overhead, and up for the challenge of recruiting good agents, are the ones who get to live a life benefitting from leveraged Income. So how is Network Marketing any different? I submit to you that I found it to be a step better. One day, a friend shared with me how he was earning the same income I was, but that he was doing so from home without the overhead, employees, insurance, stress, and being subject to market conditions. He was doing so in a network marketing business. At first I refuted him by denouncements that he was in a pyramid scheme. He asked me to explain why. I shared that he was earning money off the backs of others he recruited into his downline, not from his own efforts. He replied, “Do you mean like your family earns money off the backs of the real estate agents in your company?” I froze, and anyone who knows me knows how quick-witted I normally am. Then he said, “Who is working smarter, you or your dad and brother?” Now I was mad. Not at him, but at myself. That was my light bulb moment. I had been closed-minded and it was costing me. That was the birth of my enlightenment, and I began to enter and study this network marketing profession. Let me explain why I found it to be a step better. My research led me to learn why this business model made so much sense for a company that wanted a cost-effective way to bring a product to market. Instead of spending millions in traditional media ad buys, which has a declining effectiveness, companies are opting to employ the network marketing model. In doing so, the company only incurs marketing cost if and when a sale is made. They get an army of word-of-mouth salespeople using the most effective way of influencing buying decisions, who only get paid for performance. No salaries, only commissions. But what is also employed is a high sense of motivation, wherein these salespeople can be building a business of their own and not just be salespeople. If they choose to recruit others and teach them how to sell the product or service, they can earn override income just like the broker in a real estate company does. So now they see life through a different lens, as a business owner waking up each day excited about the future they are building for themselves. They are not salespeople; they are business owners.

Specialisation, accompanied by exchange, is the source of economic prosperity. Here, in my own words, is what a modern version of Smithism claims. First, the spontaneous and voluntary exchange of goods and services leads to a division of labour in which people specialise in what they are good at doing. Second, this in turn leads to gains from trade for each party to a transaction, because everybody is doing what he is most productive at and has the chance to learn, practise and even mechanise his chosen task. Individuals can thus use and improve their own tacit and local knowledge in a way that no expert or ruler could. Third, gains from trade encourage more specialisation, which encourages more trade, in a virtuous circle. The greater the specialisation among producers, the greater is the diversification of consumption: in moving away from self-sufficiency people get to produce fewer things, but to consume more. Fourth, specialisation inevitably incentivises innovation, which is also a collaborative process driven by the exchange and combination of ideas. Indeed, most innovation comes about through the recombination of existing ideas for how to make or organise things. The more people trade and the more they divide labour, the more they are working for each other. The more they work for each other, the higher their living standards. The consequence of the division of labour is an immense web of cooperation among strangers: it turns potential enemies into honorary friends. A woollen coat, worn by a day labourer, was (said Smith) ‘the produce of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser . . .’ In parting with money to buy a coat, the labourer was not reducing his wealth. Gains from trade are mutual; if they were not, people would not voluntarily engage in trade. The more open and free the market, the less opportunity there is for exploitation and predation, because the easier it is for consumers to boycott the predators and for competitors to whittle away their excess profits. In its ideal form, therefore, the free market is a device for creating networks of collaboration among people to raise each other’s living standards, a device for coordinating production and a device for communicating information about needs through the price mechanism. Also a device for encouraging innovation. It is the very opposite of the rampant and selfish individualism that so many churchmen and others seem to think it is. The market is a system of mass cooperation. You compete with rival producers, sure, but you cooperate with your customers, your suppliers and your colleagues. Commerce both needs and breeds trust.

Torrents of text conversations, tides of cell conversations, of television programs, of e-mail, vast networks of fiber and wire interlaced above and beneath the city, passing through buildings, arcing between transmitters in Metro tunnels, between antennas atop buildings, from lampposts with cellular transmitters in them, commercials for Carrefour and Evian and prebaked toaster pastries flashing into space and back to earth again, I’m going to be late and Maybe we should get reservations? and Pick up avocados and What did he say? and ten thousand I miss yous, fifty thousand I love yous, hate mail and appointment reminders and market updates, jewelry ads, coffee ads, furniture ads flying invisibly over the warrens of Paris, over the battlefields and tombs, over the Ardennes, over the Rhine, over Belgium and Denmark, over the scarred and ever-shifting landscapes we call nations. And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it. Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.

The reality is that Facebook has been so successful, it’s actually running out of humans on the planet. Ponder the numbers: there are about three billion people on the Internet, where the latter is broadly defined as any sort of networked data, texts, browser, social media, whatever. Of these people, six hundred million are Chinese, and therefore effectively unreachable by Facebook. In Russia, thanks to Vkontakte and other copycat social networks, Facebook’s share of the country’s ninety million Internet users is also small, though it may yet win that fight. That leaves about 2.35 billion people ripe for the Facebook plucking. While Facebook seems ubiquitous to the plugged-in, chattering classes, its usage is not universal among even entrenched Internet users. In the United States, for example, by far the company’s most established and sticky market, only three-quarters of Internet users are actively on FB. That ratio of FB to Internet user is worse in other countries, so even full FB saturation in a given market doesn’t imply total Facebook adoption. Let’s (very) optimistically assume full US-level penetration for any market. Without China and Russia, and taking a 25 percent haircut of people who’ll never join or stay (as is the case in the United States), that leaves around 1.8 billion potential Facebook users globally. That’s it. In the first quarter of 2015, Facebook announced it had 1.44 billion users. Based on its public 2014 numbers, FB is growing at around 13 percent a year, and that pace is slowing. Even assuming it maintains that growth into 2016, that means it’s got one year of user growth left in it, and then that’s it: Facebook has run out of humans on the Internet. The company can solve this by either making more humans (hard even for Facebook), or connecting what humans there are left on the planet. This is why Internet.org exists, a vaguely public-spirited, and somewhat controversial, campaign by Facebook to wire all of India with free Internet, with regions like Brazil and Africa soon to follow. In early 2014 Facebook acquired a British aerospace firm, Ascenta, which specialized in solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicles. Facebook plans on flying a Wi-Fi-enabled air force of such craft over the developing world, giving them Internet. Just picture ultralight carbon-fiber aircraft buzzing over African savannas constantly, while locals check their Facebook feeds as they watch over their herds.

If government had declined to build racially separate public housing in cities where segregation hadn’t previously taken root, and instead had scattered integrated developments throughout the community, those cities might have developed in a less racially toxic fashion, with fewer desperate ghettos and more diverse suburbs. If the federal government had not urged suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning laws, white flight would have been minimized because there would have been fewer racially exclusive suburbs to which frightened homeowners could flee. If the government had told developers that they could have FHA guarantees only if the homes they built were open to all, integrated working-class suburbs would likely have matured with both African Americans and whites sharing the benefits. If state courts had not blessed private discrimination by ordering the eviction of African American homeowners in neighborhoods where association rules and restrictive covenants barred their residence, middle-class African Americans would have been able gradually to integrate previously white communities as they developed the financial means to do so. If churches, universities, and hospitals had faced loss of tax-exempt status for their promotion of restrictive covenants, they most likely would have refrained from such activity. If police had arrested, rather than encouraged, leaders of mob violence when African Americans moved into previously white neighborhoods, racial transitions would have been smoother. If state real estate commissions had denied licenses to brokers who claimed an “ethical” obligation to impose segregation, those brokers might have guided the evolution of interracial neighborhoods. If school boards had not placed schools and drawn attendance boundaries to ensure the separation of black and white pupils, families might not have had to relocate to have access to education for their children. If federal and state highway planners had not used urban interstates to demolish African American neighborhoods and force their residents deeper into urban ghettos, black impoverishment would have lessened, and some displaced families might have accumulated the resources to improve their housing and its location. If government had given African Americans the same labor-market rights that other citizens enjoyed, African American working-class families would not have been trapped in lower-income minority communities, from lack of funds to live elsewhere. If the federal government had not exploited the racial boundaries it had created in metropolitan areas, by spending billions on tax breaks for single-family suburban homeowners, while failing to spend adequate funds on transportation networks that could bring African Americans to job opportunities, the inequality on which segregation feeds would have diminished. If federal programs were not, even to this day, reinforcing racial isolation by disproportionately directing low-income African Americans who receive housing assistance into the segregated neighborhoods that government had previously established, we might see many more inclusive communities. Undoing the effects of de jure segregation will be incomparably difficult. To make a start, we will first have to contemplate what we have collectively done and, on behalf of our government, accept responsibility.

In other words, money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind. But why does it succeed? Why should anyone be willing to exchange a fertile rice paddy for a handful of useless cowry shells? Why are you willing to flip hamburgers, sell health insurance or babysit three obnoxious brats when all you get for your exertions is a few pieces of coloured paper? People are willing to do such things when they trust the figments of their collective imagination. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted. When a wealthy farmer sold his possessions for a sack of cowry shells and travelled with them to another province, he trusted that upon reaching his destination other people would be willing to sell him rice, houses and fields in exchange for the shells. Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised. What created this trust was a very complex and long-term network of political, social and economic relations. Why do I believe in the cowry shell or gold coin or dollar bill? Because my neighbours believe in them. And my neighbours believe in them because I believe in them. And we all believe in them because our king believes in them and demands them in taxes, and because our priest believes in them and demands them in tithes. Take a dollar bill and look at it carefully. You will see that it is simply a colourful piece of paper with the signature of the US secretary of the treasury on one side, and the slogan ‘In God We Trust’ on the other. We accept the dollar in payment, because we trust in God and the US secretary of the treasury. The crucial role of trust explains why our financial systems are so tightly bound up with our political, social and ideological systems, why financial crises are often triggered by political developments, and why the stock market can rise or fall depending on the way traders feel on a particular morning.

There are hundreds of examples of highly functioning commons around the world today. Some have been around for centuries, others have risen in response to economic and environmental crises, and still others have been inspired by the distributive bias of digital networks. From the seed-sharing commons of India to the Potato Park of Peru, indigenous populations have been maintaining their lands and managing biodiversity through a highly articulated set of rules about sharing and preservation. From informal rationing of parking spaces in Boston to Richard Stallman’s General Public License (GPL) for software, new commons are serving to reinstate the value of land and labor, as well as the ability of people to manage them better than markets can. In the 1990s, Elinor Ostrom, the American political scientist most responsible for reviving serious thought about commoning, studied what specifically makes a commons successful. She concluded that a commons must have an evolving set of rules about access and usage and that it must have a way of punishing transgressions. It must also respect the particular character of the resource being managed and the people who have worked with that resource the longest. Managing a fixed supply of minerals is different from managing a replenishing supply of timber. Finally, size and place matter. It’s easier for a town to manage its water supply than for the planet to establish water-sharing rules.78 In short, a commons must be bound by people, place, and rules. Contrary to prevailing wisdom, it’s not an anything-goes race to the bottom. It is simply a recognition of boundaries and limits. It’s pooled, multifaceted investment in pursuit of sustainable production. It is also an affront to the limitless expansion sought by pure capital. If anything, the notion of a commons’ becoming “enclosed” by privatization is a misnomer: privatizing a commons breaks the boundaries that protected its land and labor from pure market forces. For instance, the open-source seed-sharing networks of India promote biodiversity and fertilizer-free practices among farmers who can’t afford Western pesticides.79 They have sustained themselves over many generations by developing and adhering to a complex set of rules about how seed species are preserved, as well as how to mix crops on soil to recycle its nutrients over centuries of growing. Today, they are in battle with corporations claiming patents on these heirloom seeds and indigenous plants. So it’s not the seed commons that have been enclosed by the market at all; rather, the many-generations-old boundaries have been penetrated and dissolved by disingenuously argued free-market principles.