CashMoneyJesus

I think the greatest detriment to Quixtar is the fact that you HAVE to get your friends involved with you if you want to make money. At least according to the person who signed you up. There was a Quixtar frenzy at college when one guy got in the paper for making $90,000 as a sophomore. Pretty soon everyone was interested, but it became a popularity thing. Like the ‘who is in YOUR top 5′ commercials. And it hurt a lot of people because they got left out, left at the bottom, or couldn’t find anyone to sign up under them.

Luckily I had a real job at the time and wasn’t looking to make extra money. I bought that energy drink from a couple friends, but that was the extent of my involvement. One friend pretty much paid for law school with Quixtar, but he lost most of his friends who weren’t in his ‘top five.’ Everyone else quit after the first meeting when they brought in the big speaker to pump everyone up to go to the national convention and see more big speakers.

I got away unscathed, but I can see where you would be worried about Christianity associating with what can become greed. A friend at my church just started something, not sure if it’s Quixtar, but I hope that someone can reel him in before the craze starts again.

The idea of breaking off relationships with people that are negative isn’t Quixtar specific. Most books on success talk about the effects of negative versus positive people in your life. Negativity can be toxic if exposed for extreme periods of time. My father-in-law lives in a very small town that the majority of people are extremely negative. His blood pressure was high and his anxiety was also increasing. He and his wife went to visit friends in Florida (where they lived for 7 years…blood pressure & anxiety in check while there) for a month and his anxiety and blood pressure decreased dramatically. There is something to say about environment and negative people are part of that environment. I know I always feel better when I’m around friends that are positive versus those that are always complaining about one thing or another. I haven’t broken my relationships off with those that are negative BUT I do limit my time spent with them.

Quixtar is a great business. There are some organizations that don’t always do the right thing of course that is true of any business. Look at the reputation lawyers have but not all lawyers are scumbags. Leaders try to teach new IBO’s about the keys of success and one of those keys is limiting your exposure to negativity. The reason for limiting is simply because most people are not business owners but employees. They are going to have to change their mindset about being business owners instead of employees, they don’t need a negative friend to slow that process down any more. I don’t recommend completely cutting ties with negative friends, I still have them, but I do recommend limiting time with them and reading a lot of positive business books and listening to positive cd’s to combat the negativity you are around.

[...] CashMoneyJesus - And finally Eric trolling for a fight with his series of posts on Quixtar - also known as the propaganda that is the pyramid scheme. [...]

Steve,

Thanks for weighing in, and I have to say I greatly respect you for adding to the conversation and remaining polite… especially when I’m maligning something you seem to associate with. These traits are rarely seen on comment discussions of blog posts, particularly regarding controversial topics.

As for the negativity issue: you’re correct that it’s not Quixtar-specific. But Quixtar is the first business model I’ve seen where people take it to the extreme of ending friendships that are years old because a person isn’t down with the business. Though I agree it can’t be great for your health to be around solely negative people, there is a very large value in having people who disagree with what you’re doing (that doesn’t *necessarily* mean they’re negative people, even if it seems they’re negative to you because they disagree with something you’re for) and love you enough to let you know about it.

It’s somewhat similar to having people of varying belief systems as friends, be that within your own religion, or from a different religion, or from no religion at all. They challenge you, and force you to actually think about what you do and believe.

At the end of the day, I think the way people implement the Quixtar model of doing business is so varied that I’m sure I could cherry-pick horrendous examples of doing so, and that you could easily pull great and shining examples of how it’s done as well. Of course, I also believe that overall, the opportunity is not worth my own time and effort for the benefits I could reap from it. I challenge people reading to decide whether that is true for their own life, and its good to have your opinion added to mine to aid in that decision.

I had a friend step into the darkness that is Quixtar. He’s still there. I asked him one why he hadn’t come to see my daughter (who had been born 7 months earlier) and he told me that he had made a commitment not to do anything that doesn’t benefit his business, this included seeing my little girl. Funny thing is that I have a ton of connects with people and could have benefited his business, that is, if I didn’t think it was a cult, and I do, at least this particular branch.

I think what bothers me most about multilevel marketing stuff … I call them “pyramids” because that’s how I roll … old school … is that there is an inherent promise of overwhelming wealth. In my job search, I recently came across a mlm thing and checked it out. It was legit, and I’m sure that some people really made money at it.
It hailed itself as a Christian company and advertised it as a way to work from home and have more time for family, kids, and ministry. This is why I checked it out.
First of all, one of the subsequent pages of the website had a list of sucess stories where EVERYONE was standing next to their new car. Some were even in front of large homes. Is this what we, as Christians, should see as sucess? Based on their marketing, shouldn’t it have people making ends meet but leading people to Christ or giving to the poor or some other designation of sucess?
Second, after doing some research, you have to work your butt off to actually make money in the business. To make any money, you HAVE to recruit people under you, have a team, and manage that team. Because many of those people have other jobs, you then actually have LESS time to yourself and family and ministry.
It’s been my experience with most people who have their own “business” that they must work their tail off to even be moderately sucessful. They don’t have weekends “free” or even any “free time” because they are the employee and manager and marketer and … you could go on. This is many times a conscious choice and worth the extra hassle to have a certain amount of “freedom”.
For these mlm to market as they do … That is false advertising … lying … and one of the original ten commandments, if I remember correctly.
Its been my experience with people in mlm that this consumes their ENTIRE life, more than God ever did. They actually minister LESS and socialize LESS than they did before instead of seeing it as some sort of “freedom from the system”. This is a huge concern to me.
I know I’m coming in at the tail end of this, but there are my thoughts.

Peace.

a couple of thoughts here…

1. I was never taught to cut off any relationships that would not benefit my business. I was warned about spending all my time with people who were really negative towards what I was doing, but never told to not be friends with them anymore. In fact, it was pretty much said that you just stop talking about your business with those friends or family members since nothing positive would result.

2. Isn’t the idea of choosing to hang around people who have similar beliefs and values, as well as not hanging around people that only put you down something we are taught by our parents, and even churches? I know that one of the main topics of our youth group was making sure you had the sort of friends that would support you in living the kind of life you wanted to live. You should stop hanging around the people you used to do bad stuff with, and start hanging around people that would understand you. Not that you should cut off those relationships, but that it would not benefit you in anyway to continue to spend the same amount of time with them.

That makes what I heard from leaders something that was trustworthy. I heard it from my parents, I heard it from church leaders, and now I heard it from people who were trying to help my business grow. Made sense to me.

3. There will always be people who take every piece of advice to the extreme. The friend in question may not have even been told to cut off his relationships, but ended up doing that anyway. There were alway people in the youth group that did that - never spoke to their old friends again, etc. This is also why I believe it is so important to have those relationships, even if they aren’t THAT strong, with people who believe differently from you, or disagree with you on certain topics. They help keep you in check - they make you question your beliefs and motives. I believe it’s very healthy.

It makes me very sad to hear about those comments from your friend Adam. God designed us to be in relationship with others, and the fact that these “friends” have never, and may never, meet your daughter breaks my heart.