Tuesday, September 23, 2008

My encounter with MLM people

Recently I received a call from an acquaintance, saying that she had a business proposal to discuss with me. I was rather surprised as I did not know her very well, so I was quite curious about the business proposal that she mentioned. Over the phone, we arranged to meet up one day to talk about the proposal, as she claimed that it was difficult to elaborate over the phone.

However, on the actual day, I had another last-minute appointment and wasn’t able to meet up with her. So I sms her about it, and requested for more information to be sent to me via email. She was quite reluctant to email any info to me, and suggested to arrange for another meetup. I was rather busy if my company stuffs and told her that I would like to know more about the business before commiting time on it. So in the end she said that she would drop-by my office to discuss with me and pass me some materials.

At this point of time, I began to suspect that the business proposal was actually some MLM scheme. I do know that MLM people like to refer themselves as business man / woman, and like to claim that they are running a business when they are just sales people or recruiters. So I purposely left my office early and instructed the receptionist to collect the materials on my behalf.

Anyway, when I looked at the materials passed to me, its all about network marketing and how people have misconception about the business model. There wasn’t any information on the products or services offered by the company, as those stuffs seemed to be of a lower priority to them. It seemed to me that it doesn’t matter what they are selling (otherwise they would be promoting to me how good their products are). The only thing that matters is to get more downlines and train their downlines to get even more downlines. Products….who cares?

So in the end, I told her firmly that I wasn’t interested in MLM stuff because I was too tied up with my own company. I didn’t tell her that MLM’s model is against my business philosophy of focusing on offering the best products/services, as I can sensed from our conversation that she is being thoroughly brainwashed already.

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Monday, September 08, 2008

An interesting story

I have heard of this interesting story recently:

There are two brothers living in a condo unit at the 80th floor. One night when they were going back home, they found that the lift was under maintenance. The two brothers looked at each other and thought, “Well, guess we will need to slowly climb the stairs.”

So the two brothers started to climb the stairs with their backpacks. When they reached the 25th floor, they began to feel very tired and decided to put down their backpacks. They stored their backpacks in one corner and decided that they will come back and collect them once the lift service resumed.

So the two brothers continued to climb the stairs without their backpacks. The next few floors were much easier without the burden, but as time passed it became more and more difficult to climb even without the backpacks. When they were reaching the 40th floor, the two brothers started to blame each other for not noticing the life maintenance schedule. The squabble eventually ended when they reached the 60th floor, because they were both too tired to quarrel and decided to climb the rest of the stairs peacefully.

Finally, when the two brothers reached the 80th floor, they discovered something terrible: their door keys were left inside the backpacks at the 25th floor!

***Updated:***

The eighty-storey building symbolizes our entire life. Most of us begin our life with lots of enthusiasm, dreams and passions. However, when we start our working life at around mid 20s, the burdens of new commitments and social expectations begin to exert pressure onto our shoulders. Many of us decide to put aside our dreams in order to pursue other materialistic aspect of our life. We think that we would come back and pick up our dreams one day.

As we are reaching 40 years old, the burdens of life become more stressful. The uneasiness within our hearts is growing despite the fact that we are more well-off than before. Whether we have achieved those materialistic gains or not, many of us would inevitably start to question or even blame the society and people around us. But not many of us would have thought of picking up the dreams that we once thought we would pick up one day.

When time goes passed, we stops the questioning and blaming and begin to place our hopes on retirement. We decided that the most important thing is to enjoy a peaceful life after retirement. But when we are reaching the end of our life, many of us start to remember the dreams that we once had, but abandoned at the 25th floor. We had so many chances in life to pick up our dreams again, but it always seemed to be placed at the least priority. And some day, we might totally forgotten about it, only to remember when we are approaching the end of our life.

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