"Maybe they’ve never experienced anything better…"

Sunday is spiritual day.

I was telling my friend this AM about a story I’d just read. The writer related that in Iraq, most of the population gets 2-3 hours of electricity per day. The reason, he wrote, is that each time any one of oil pipelines there is repaired (or an electric grid) some competing political group (“insurgents”) would blow it up, stopping the flow of oil or electricity to large sections of the cities.

This has been an almost daily occurrence somewhere in Iraq for the past two years.

I wondered out loud why all the chiefs of the hundreds of little fiefdoms there just don’t get together and agree to stop blowing up each other’s oil lines and sabotaging each others’ power grids, because then they’d ALL benefit and get more power each day for their followers and tribes. Yes, their enemies would benefit, but so would they and their people. Everyone benefits versus everyone suffers.

Iraq has one of the largest known oil reserves in the world, and they can’t take advantage of it because they fight all the time.

“It’s the testosterone of war,” my friend replied. “That’s what drives it. The whole ‘we are better than you, our religion/our view/our belief etc., is better than yours,’ etc.”

Of course we all know that attitude of some people drives hatred and fighting here at home too.

But then she added, “And maybe they have never experienced having anything much better than what there is now, so they can’t imagine that picture. Maybe that’s why they keep fighting each other instead of cooperating – their life’s experience has not been much different.”

I was struck by that. “Maybe they can’t imagine cooperation leading to something better for everyone because they’ve never experienced that.”

Isn’t the same thing true for the network marketing companies? What’s the prevailing attitude we hear from the owners and the recruiters? “Mine is better than yours.” And the result?

Network marketers are often afraid to be around others because so many of them, given the chance, jump on each other with the “mine is better than yours and you should join mine, we rule, we are the future, our leaders are bigger than yours, blah blah blah…”

You know the original U.S. colonies had the same problem 200 years ago, but they got over it. The strength of the U.S. today is that each state is independent and different, but all 50 different states stand together, united, as one country.

Could we as network marketers rise to the occasion of being independent but united? Stop bashing other companies or reps. Stop the “mine is better than yours.” Promote our own with a “try it and see if it works for you” theme. And learn to describe that theme.

There is no “best for everyone” company or product. Would you do the business if you were forced into someone else’s “best” deal?

What if a few of us were to embody that value? Independent but united. Think it might spread?

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