You’ve read the headline before:

NINETY PERCENT OF ALL MLMers FAIL

Gasp! Horrors! On my! (Sounding like the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz.)

Oh come now… What’s the big deal? I’m sorry, but really: Why would this bother you?

Frankly, if only 90 percent of the people who try network marketing fail, that’s great! That would mean that somewhere between five and nine times more people are succeeding in this business than almost anywhere or at anything else.

Think about it:

How many who set out to win a gold metal in any of the 302 events in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing will lose? All but one in each event… (in raw numbers, thousands).

How many children, out of the 9,000,000-plus who entered this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee won?

How many golfers are there at the start of the PGA or The Masters? How many win?

How many ideas for a brand new consumer goods product fail and never make it to market?

Interesting Notes: Of those products that do make it through R&D and marketing to the manufacturing process and actually hit the shelves, 97 percent will be taken off, thrown away and no longer made in their very first year! How many of these 15,000-plus new products introduced each and every year will you try and buy?

And don’t think lack of money is the problem. Many of these marvelous ideas have literally hundreds of millions of dollars behind them when they crash and burn.

Ever heard of Ford’s Edsel?

How about Xerox or Exxon computers? (Did you know Xerox “invented” the mouse, desktop and icons? Still failed.)

Or, toy-giant Ideal, who back when I was 10 (in 1958) had the absurd bad taste to introduce a Christ-child doll at Christmas!

Or, Premiere “smokeless” cigarettes from R.J. Reynolds, who invested five years and hundreds of millions on its R&D.

Or, General Motors’ Chevrolet Nova, which didn’t do so well in Mexico where they planned to sell huge numbers, simply because in Spanish the word “nova,” means “won’t go”.

Or, chewable toothpaste…

Everywhere you look, there are lots of failures–lots!

And lots of things that eventually succeeded were failures at first.

Bizet’s universally beloved opera, Carmen, was an opening night flop.

The Celestine Prophecy, was a dust-covered paper-back for a year before becoming a runaway, hard cover best-seller.

As for products, there’s a veritable gold mine of failed-first, but-look-at-me-now success stories. In his delightful (especially if you enjoy irony) book, Getting It Right the Second Time, Michael Gersham tells the story of 49 initial product failures that are now some of marketing’s greatest success stories. For example:

Kleenex bombed at first. It was marketed by Kimberly-Clark after World War I. They were a newsprint/wrapping paper company with warehouses full of “Cellucotton”–a medical dressing replacement used during the war. Only when some smart chap in marketing discovered, “Hey, you can blow your nose on this stuff and then just throw it away…” did the product become successful.

Jell-O failed, too, at first. For years it was a “dog,” and the brand was sold for only $450.

Pepsi went bankrupt. So did Walt Disney–five times!

Look, the predominant physical force on Earth is gravity, and it’s always pulling us down. 95 percent of everybody everywhere doing anything aren’t really cutting it. They certainly are not “winning”. As already asked, so what’s the big deal?

Just What Is “Failure” Anyway?

Show it to me. Go ahead, show us “failure”.

Failure is a word, specifically a noun kind of word, which means it is referring to a person, place or thing (none of which a failure is), or a state.

Ahhh… the great state of failure (must be just east of New Jersey), based on the verb; to fail, which means: to fall short of success in something expected, attempted, desired…

And who, pray tell, is the God-like expert who decrees such a falling short of success has just taken place?

A one and only not-so-omnipotent–yet when it comes to failure, always omnipresent–being, that Master expector, attempter, and desirer… YOU!

You–and only you–create the state or quality of failure. And you create it just because you say so.

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True, there is a state of failure, but you are–at the very worst–only a tourist there on a brief visit. Heck, most times you’re just flying over or driving through. And you are the only authority on Earth who declares that you are or are not in failure. (Think about that… please.)

Failure and its inseparable partner success, are the proverbial two sides of the day-and-night like coin. Can’t have one without the other. Take away failure, no success either. And which one dominates at any given point in time does so simply because you say so.

Btw, ever hear Guy Kawsaki’s great line: “Failure is not an option. It’s a requirement!”

In Should You Quit Before You’re Fired? author Paul Zane Pilzer tells the story of a father secretly watching his little boy throwing a baseball up in the air with one hand, then swinging his bat to hit it as the ball fell back down. The youngster missed… missed again… and then missed the third time… spinning around and falling down on the ground while shouting, “Strike three. You’re out!”

The man rushed to help his son up, trying to hide the disappointment he felt at his son’s failure, only to have the boy say…

“So, what do you think? Not bad for a pitcher, huh, Dad?”

Failure and Success are states of mind

They exist only because you say so–either out loud or to your self.

And you can always choose what you say–either out loud or to your self.

“90 Percent of All Network Marketers Fail”.

Really… Okay, if you say so.