Using Current Valid Guidance: Stop Running Advice From People Who Stopped Producing Years Ago
You picked up a script from somebody who did this business a long time ago. You practiced the lines until they felt automatic, used them exactly the way you were told, and it didn’t work. So you practiced harder, on the theory that the script was fine and you just weren’t delivering it right yet.
That’s not a discipline problem. It’s a sourcing problem. You’re running advice with an expiration date on it, from someone who may not have produced anything in years, and no amount of repetition fixes guidance that’s already gone stale.
As someone building this business right now, with your own bills and your own history of things that didn’t pan out, you already know what it feels like to do everything you were told and watch the result not show up anyway. Dave Wood built an entire session at a Classic Masters Course live event around that exact gap: guidance that’s current and proven, versus guidance that just sounds confident.
Why does most of the advice you’re following already have an expiration date?
Dave opens by telling the room he wants this to be the most honest training anybody there has sat through. Not because everything else in the industry is a scam, but because most training comes from people who did something impressive once, a long time ago, and have been coasting on the story since.
we’ve all been to trainings before. We’ve all been through things before where the guys who are teaching us, you know, they did something 30 years ago, you know, or five years ago, or eight years ago, and since then, they haven’t really produced anything, right?
That’s the actual problem with most of the guidance floating around this industry. It isn’t necessarily wrong on its face, it’s disconnected from the market you’re standing in right now. A script built for a phone-and-fax world doesn’t automatically survive contact with a market that runs on social feeds and inboxes. Guidance ages. The people teaching it don’t always notice, because they stopped testing it against reality the day they stopped needing to.
What happens when you copy a script instead of learning why it worked?
Dave’s own first exposure to network marketing training makes the point. Looking back, he calls it close to the worst training he ever received, not because the person delivering it was dishonest, but because it taught him to imitate a result instead of understand a mechanism.
As Dave Wood puts it in the Classic Masters Course, “Somebody just tells you to do something, you just go do it, and you just assume it’ll work because they said to do it, and they’re a rich person, you know what I’m saying? And so you go do exactly what they told you to do, and it doesn’t work, and you just keep doing it because they tell you it’ll work, and it’s like, maybe I need to practice the line more, and that’s the secret, you know what I mean?”
He’d get up in the morning, play recruiting audios while he got ready, and stand in front of the mirror rehearsing a line about a stranger named Lisa keeping her options open, copied off someone else’s tape without ever testing whether it fit how he actually talked to people. When it didn’t land, the training had already supplied the explanation: practice it more. That’s the trap. Bad guidance doesn’t just fail. It comes pre-loaded with a reason to blame yourself instead of the guidance.
Why does current, active proof matter more than decades of theory?
Contrast that with what Dave points to as the actual evidence behind the training happening in that room. Not a story from thirty years ago. Results from the months right before the event.
As Dave Wood puts it in the Classic Masters Course, “in the last 10 months, we have something like 51 six-figure earners here at Empower, right? In the last three years, I went from zero to where I am, right? In the last, you know, month, Justin Varengia. You know, went from $4,000 a month or something to $26,000, right?”
That single stretch, ten months, produced more new six-figure earners than most people see across a full career in old-school network marketing, and a teammate’s month-over-month jump is offered as the same kind of proof on a smaller scale. This is what current valid guidance looks like: proof generated by people producing this quarter, not a case study from a market that no longer exists.
What do you do with the pain left over from every attempt that didn’t work?
Old failures are the biggest reason people can’t apply even good, current guidance. Dave describes running into a guy named Scott at an event, several levels down in a large organization built around selling training tools rather than the actual product. Scott had built a team of about 1,500 people and had just hit a real personal best in his monthly tool income for the first time when his upline restructured the payout and quietly took a large piece of it away.
Scott had so much pain on his face telling that story that he couldn’t recruit anybody anymore. Not because the opportunity was bad. Because every conversation he started dragged the old wound back into the room with him, and it found its way into his tone whether he meant it to or not.
This is where the internal side of the block hides. Fail enough times, at high enough stakes, and something in you starts protecting other people from what you went through. Dave names the pattern directly: you get somebody interested, and part of you starts hoping they don’t actually get in, because if they do, you’re on the hook to teach them the same thing that just cost you so much. The self-doubt masquerades as concern for the prospect. It’s really unresolved pain wearing a disguise.
- You keep the old failure private, but it leaks into your tone on every new conversation anyway.
- You start hoping strong prospects walk away, because their success would mean facing the thing that broke you.
- None of it has anything to do with whether the current guidance in front of you actually works.
How do you know current guidance can actually work for you?
Dave’s answer isn’t a pep talk. It’s a mechanism: build your own reference experience, a piece of proof you witnessed firsthand, so you’re not running on faith alone. Early on, wandering around gas stations handing strangers a pitch about an internet business because a cassette tape told him to, he heard a speaker was coming through Tucson, reportedly one of the people behind that audio series. He drove down, sat through a talk that didn’t say much of anything new, and came away with something the cassette itself never gave him: a look at somebody who’d actually done it for over a decade, houses paid for outright, still going.
That one encounter is what Dave points to as the reason the setbacks afterward, and there were plenty, never fully knocked him out of the game. He knew the ceiling was real, because he’d personally stood in the room with somebody who’d hit it and stayed there for fifteen or twenty years. Belief without evidence is fragile. Belief backed by something you saw with your own eyes holds up under a bad month, a bad quarter, even a bad year.
Why doesn’t the same advice work the same way for everyone in the room?
The other place people get stuck is applying guidance that was never built for their situation. Dave describes fielding the same question, what did you do when you were new, from two people with two different constraints, and giving two different answers. One had nothing else to fall back on and no money to spend, so the instruction was blunt: make the free, time-intensive version work, because there’s nothing else for you to do. The other had money but only two hours a day. Dave’s answer there was just as direct: don’t run the broke person’s strategy, and don’t run his either. Go find somebody who built this business on two hours a day and copy that instead.
Same business, same comp plan, same product, and two genuinely different strategies, because the actual resource each person is short on is different. Current valid guidance isn’t just guidance that was proven recently. It’s guidance matched to the combination of time and money you’re actually working with today, not the combination you wish you had, or the one the person teaching you happened to have when they started.
Why can’t you skip straight to the results you’re watching other people get?
Dave frames this as a sequence of stages, not a single leap. Brand new with nothing in the bank is one stage. A handful of sales in is another. Full-time production is different again. He compares it to high school: most people skip nothing, a freshman before a sophomore, and forcing your way into the sophomore-level result while still running freshman-level activity is exactly how good, current guidance gets misapplied. The advice isn’t wrong. It’s pointed at the wrong stage of your business.
None of this works if you’re waiting for your circumstances to clear up first, whether that’s a skeptical spouse, a bank account still recovering from the last thing that didn’t pan out, or a schedule that’s already full. The decision to apply guidance that’s actually current, and match it honestly to where you are right now, has to get made regardless of what’s happening around you. That’s the lesson underneath the training: not more information, a decision to use the right information for the stage you’re actually in.
The full lesson goes considerably further than what’s above: Dave’s complete breakdown of each stage from brand new through full-time production, the extended stories from teammates sitting in that exact grinder stage at the time of the recording, and the live back-and-forth on matching strategy to your own time and money. The entire course, including this lesson and everything built on top of it, is available for $99 through the Classic Masters Course.
Get the course, watch the rest of this lesson, and figure out which stage you’re actually in before you borrow one more piece of advice built for a different one.
Full lesson transcript
Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.
Do this morning is talk about nothing for about two hours. Tony thought that was funny. Good morning. So what we're going to do this morning is we're going to jump right into things. And we've got a format, we've got a layout that we want to teach over the next two days to really give you guys what you came down here for.
We've got a lot of people who are going to be bringing up, whether that's just to pick their brain, whether that's to let them kind of go over the things that they do inside of their business. You know, that's the power of what we're doing here. So this morning, for the next couple of hours before lunch, we're going to go over the beginning stages. And you know, I'm going to share just a little bit in depth and kind of transparent about what I did to get started. We're going to bring up some people, we're going to kind of give you a little behind the scenes look at what it takes to go from whether you're brand new with no sales, no money in the bank account, or whether a lot of you who have made four or five or six sales. How many people here have made a couple of sales inside of their business? Just a couple?
How many people have made at least one since they've been with Empower? Okay. So the majority of the people, what I find when they come to an event is they're at that stage, which, you know, can be called the grinder stage, it can be called the newbie stage, it can be called the newcomer stage. And that's what we want to focus on a little bit this morning is we want to give you guys a little bit of insight into what we did when we first got started.
And then again, bring some people up who are in that phase right now, and really kind of let them give you an insight into what they're doing. And then of course, once you get that idea, and you see that clearly, because when you get there, when you see that, you're going to get a sense of what's going on. So if you have a couple of people that are doing the right thing, that's clear, because sometimes I think one of the biggest disconnects is that people look at somebody like Tony or Erin or Sophia or Tracy or Chuck or Carol or so many other people who are now getting big results and they say, well, they never went through that beginning stage. Dave, he just went from working at Greenpeace to making a couple hundred thousand dollars a month, and it didn't happen like that.
There was a process, there was a stage, if you will, that we've all gone through, and I think that if we can help you identify that this morning, and again, like I said on Thursday night, to help you guys embrace that a little bit more, then I think it's going to become clear where you're at, what you need to do, and help you be okay with the phases of this business, because it's just like anything, you have to go through a certain phase to get to the next phase. It's just like high school. I mean, some people skip grades, but the majority of the time, you have to be a freshman before you can become a sophomore. You got anything? Yeah, just...
Yeah. Just one thing I want to mention real quick. I know it's hot as hell in here right now, you know. They've been working on the air conditioning for a couple of hours, but until then, it's kind of like a sweat lodge, and pretty much turned up the heat, you know what I mean, and we may do a couple of stretches, but hopefully this will be fixed a little bit later today. So just guys, bear with us, I see everybody giving themselves the fan thing there, but what we want to do, and this is going to be a little bit unique, guys, is we want this to be the most honest training. This is the most honest training that anybody here has ever been through, right?
You know, we've all been to trainings before. We've all been through things before where the guys who are teaching us, you know, they did something 30 years ago, or five years ago, or eight years ago, and since then, they haven't really produced anything, right? And so the advice that you're hearing, I remember the advice that I heard when I first got into network marketing on actually how to do it. Now looking back, it's probably the worst training that I've ever heard in my life, you know what I mean? Yeah.
Now, you don't know what you don't know, you know what I'm saying? Like I didn't know that wandering around and hitting people up with a line was the worst way to meet people ever, you know, until years later, you know what I'm saying? Somebody just tells you to do something, you just go do it, and you just assume it'll work because they said to do it, and they're a rich person, you know what I'm saying? And so you go do exactly what they told you to do, and it doesn't work, and you just keep doing it because they tell you it'll work, and it's like, maybe I need to practice the line more, and that's the secret, you know what I mean? So I used to get up in the morning and have these audios playing.
You know what I mean? I'd sit in front of the mirror and just repeat these stupid lines, you know what I mean?
Hey, Lisa, you seem like a sharp person, you keep your options open, you know what I'm saying? It works. It works. I mean, everybody says, yeah, I'm keeping my options open. Well, here, give me your card. Well, I don't got one.
Well, as a matter of fact, I do. You know? I mean, it just, so because of that, a lot of us go through a period of pain, right? But here, we don't have that issue, right? And I want you guys to realize that.
All the success here in Empower Network is because of that. It comes from right now. You know what I mean? Everything. Everybody succeeding in this room is doing things right now.
It wasn't 40 years ago, they didn't wander around in gas stations hitting people up, passing out, you know, audios about how in the future we're going to start a business online. I mean, it was in the last 10 months. In the last three years, I went from zero to where I am, right? In the last, you know, month, Justin Varengia, who's the CEO of Empower Network, and I wouldn't be surprised if he went from $26,000 to $100,000 in the next two months, right? So, everything that we have happening right now is right now, which is unique, right, Tony?
Unique energy, right? So what I'm going to do is for the next couple of minutes, I want to talk about some of the barriers that we all experience, right? Or some of us experience to a greater extent than others because of maybe the pain in the past that prevents us from succeeding, right? And be honest about that stuff.
And this is stuff that I've seen, guys, I've had conversations through the, you know, one of the most useful things for us was hanging out the last day, you know, on the boats and just chatting with people, you know, talking anywhere from Aaron and Sophie and what they're doing and how they laugh at prospects who are skeptical, you know, to hang up the phone, you know, to somebody who's skeptical, and they're trying to figure out the secret of getting their first person, you know, and then you give them advice, you tell them what to do, you tell them what to think, and they argue, you know what I mean? You guys experienced this in the last day even, you know what I mean? Where somebody says, hey, let me ask you, Tony, about your opinion on what I should do when I'm new. And you say, well, this is what I think you should do. And they say, well, yeah, but.
You know what I'm saying? You know, somebody comes up to me and they say, you know, Dave, I need to get some traffic, and, you know, I'm really working, I've been working for a long time. And I say, well, do you have a budget? They say, no.
Well, I said, that limits it. You got two things you can do, essentially. Social media and SEO. Or you wander around Walmart. I mean, there's a third, cross off the Walmart, you got two.
And he's like, what about magazine ads? I was like, well, that's, you know, it might work for you if you had any money. You know what I'm saying? It limits it down to what you can do. Right?
And so, guys, first thing I want you to just get clear on is that if you resist what you need to do, why are you here? You know what I'm saying? So I want everybody here to be okay with what you need to do. Right now, for some of you, what you need to do is easier. And that's okay.
What I needed to do in the beginning was extraordinarily painful. Right? And that's okay. Because I had nothing else. You know what I'm saying?
I couldn't go and say, well, okay, it's time to go back to college, because, you know, I just thought it was bullshit for so long. I just wasn't going to do it. You know what I'm saying? I had nothing else to do. So I just had to make it work.
And when you make it work, and there's nothing else for you to do, it's time to stop making excuses for what needs to be done. Right? Is that fair? Everybody in here? All right.
So another person comes up to me and they say, okay, Dave, you know, what did you do when you were new? And I start talking to them and they say, well, but Dave, I only have two hours a day. Right? I said, well, do you have money then? They said, yeah.
I said, well, then don't talk to me. Talk to Lawrence. Right? Because if you've got two hours a day, right, your strategy is different than if you're full time and broke. Does that make sense?
It's the same phase of your business, but you got to be okay with where you're at and take action there. So what are some of the things that hold people back from just doing what they need to do? Here's the biggest one. The biggest one that I see people doing, and this is so common, it's unreal.
Almost everyone does it: they failed in the past. Right? They failed in the past, a lot of failure, a lot of rejection. They called the white pages for years. You know what I mean?
They're scarred. You know, they bought a course on cold calling realtors, and they almost have a heart attack every time they look at a phone book from then on. They wander around in Walmart for years. They built the downline and then their whole team jumped to a new deal. You know what I mean? They were in Amway, right?
Wander around, and they get a new person started and say, all right, here's some 10 videos. He's proud. He's like, yeah, I put my time in. I put my time in, and they get somebody started. They say, okay, here's 10 videos.
Let's drive around and hand them out to people you know. Right? And they did that for years. Right? I ran into a guy named Scott, who's friends with one of the biggest network marketers on the planet.
He was several levels down in his organization. And he had so much pain in his face when he was talking about something that happened. This is what happened to him. He was like, I'm going to tell you something. You know, a lot of you guys know that in a lot of network marketing, the real money is in the tools.
Right? Who here knows that? It was like, you know, I've got a downline of a thousand people and I make a hundred thousand a month. Well, yeah, selling tools, not from the downline. Right?
So this guy was in a tools organization. They had a comp plan on the tools. Right? He'd finally, they all do, you know, these older companies do. Had about 1,500 people in his team.
And his upline just said, sorry, instead of giving you 50 cents a tape, we're going to give you five. You know what I mean? But he had so much pain in his face talking about that. He just couldn't recruit anybody. You know what I'm saying?
He couldn't get anybody started. The past doesn't matter here. Right? You got to let go of it. Whatever it is.
I don't care if you guys were making a hundred thousand a month and you're at zero, and I don't care if you make a lot of money now, but it's just awful. You know what I mean? And that's another thing that happens to us all in it. You start succeeding and you're talking about the dream, talking about the dream, talking about the dream.
And then you get to the top and you find out that your five buddies who have been selling you on the dream for the last 10 years, apparently the dream means running around like a ragdoll and taking, you know, steroids and ADD drugs to stay alive. You know what I'm saying? They just don't live the dream. Right? And so sometimes that causes pain for people where they just turn off.
You know, what's another thing that happens? You failed for so long. You don't want people to get in. You know what I mean? You ever experienced that?
I've experienced it before, where I went through so much pain trying to get people into something. You know what I mean? And I failed so much that what you think is, who the hell could do this? Yeah. You know what I mean?
It doesn't matter if I could get them in. Who could possibly succeed at this? This is the worst thing ever. You know what I mean? And so you go up and you say something, you talk to somebody and you're like, hey, you know, that's kind of cool.
You know, don't get in. This is what you're saying. You're saying, please don't get in. You know, because then you have to do what I just did, and I'm broke and I live in my mom's basement now. You know what I mean?
See, if I had that when I started, it would have been failure from day one, because I was in a van and then in the basement at my parents', you know what I mean? People call me, they didn't know that. I didn't lie. If they asked, I told a couple people, you know. They say, hey, do you live in your mom's house?
Well, yeah, I'm not going to lie. And I mean, do you make a hundred thousand a month though? I don't. Right. Lying isn't the solution, but I was sitting there recruiting people all day.
You know what I mean? I don't care that I'm failing. I don't care about the past, but here's what happened to me. And I think this is a salvation behind it. I think that you guys got to realize this: I knew that this industry could work in a big way.
I knew it would. I knew that it could. I didn't know why it didn't work for me for a long time, but I knew it could work in a big way. And the reason I knew that is because I just met too many people at the top with good lifestyles who'd done it the right way.
I just met too many of them. You know, from the time I was in Arizona, where I was building Amway for three years, wandering around. Now I just wandered around hitting people up because this is what the audios told me to do, which is the stupidest thing in the world. Just retarded. You know, I'd go into Walmart and there'd be a guy sitting there and be like, hey, what's up?
You know what I'm saying? Just, it's just weird. You know, he knows what he's talking about because you listen to the same Prospecting for the 21st Century audio that I listened to, and probably walked around hitting people up and saying, you know, hey, you ever thought about starting an internet business? You know what I mean? So I'd gone through that, but you know, in the meantime, I'd also met people who had private jets. I remember living in Arizona, and I was struggling, not making any money at all, trying to recruit everybody.
Of course, my family and friends didn't pick up the phone by that time. And so I was out there trying to make new friends. Don't know if you've ever heard that saying, Dave, out there trying to make new friends. And so I was out there trying to make new friends in Phoenix, by, of course, wandering around, because where else would they be? And I sent people up, you know, wandering, wandering, wandering.
And this guy comes into town that I hear about, that he's one of the guys who started an internet company. He's like, hey, how are you doing? So I, you know, him and I, that's the kind of guy that I know. And so I went through that, I was just like, hey, how are you doing? And so, in the meantime, I'd also met people who had private jets.
And this guy comes into town that I hear about. He's one of the guys in one of the audios. And I was like, I've got to hear this guy. So I drove down to Tucson, Arizona, and hung out and listened to this guy talk about nothing for about three hours.
Right? Brought a prospect with me who was a drug dealer, because I heard that a drug dealer got rich in Amway and stopped taking drugs. So I hit somebody up on a street corner and say, hey, I know you're dealing crack, I got something that's also white, but you make a little bit more money on it. And then he came to this meeting, and he was actually scared by this Amway guy.
He was sitting there like this. This guy is talking. He's like, this guy is going to fucking take over the world. You know? First time he'd ever heard anybody, just staring at him, kind of screaming, talking about getting rich, selling soap.
And, you know, I was like this the whole time, but this guy was scared. But this guy comes down, and he says, all right, here's the deal. Next month I'm going to come back. And if you do a certain amount of work by then, you know, you can hang out with me until 2 in the morning.
Or, it was the pitch, something like that. I don't know if you guys have ever been sold like that. So he tells us, you know, come back and you can hang out next month. And it was like something ridiculously easy. You know, it was like get six people.
But if you get six people in Amway, you're like a god. You know what I'm saying? In a month. You know what I mean?
Six people, you are a god. They're like, oh, my gosh. You know, people surround you with tape recorders and say, how did you get those six people in? Kind of like they did Lawrence at the library.
At the last event. They were like, who the hell is that Asian guy out there robbing 200 people who are surrounding you? So, that was so funny. So we, I worked all month, right? And there were like 500 people who drove out to this meeting in Tucson.
They're like, we're going to do it. And then next month I came back and I had only gotten three, right? I was like, damn it. But I went back and, you know, he did the regular meeting. And he said, all right, here's the deal, if you got three, you can stay.
Now, there were two people that stayed. It was me and this guy that had been in for like 20 years, you know what I mean, that had already hit this rank or whatever. So I hung out with this guy until like 2 in the morning, listening to him talk about how he built his organization. But it was just a reference experience for me, where I knew it could work, you know what I mean?
Because this guy had a private jet. All his houses were paid for with cash. But he had been doing that for like 15 or 20 years, you know what I mean? Years and years and years of just, you know, living in these ridiculous houses, going on vacations every six weeks. So I knew it could work, you know what I'm saying?
So I didn't have a lot of the things some people have, where they wonder if it can work. And hopefully, if you guys are here, you believe that this can at least work the way that you believe that it could work, regardless of your past experience or your pain. And Dave, I think something that's also important, man, is believing that it can work regardless of what's going on around you. You know, because so many times, and I don't know how many people can relate to this, but there are people who can, and that's Dee and Justin, about relationships, right?
It's about going through and having certain things in your life, even going around maybe inside your home that you struggle with. And a lot of us were there. I don't know if you guys were, maybe you can talk about that if you want to. But, you know, I know that I certainly dealt with just having a goal and having a dream and wanting to do something, and then having all of these barriers, even sometimes inside of my home, that it felt like were trying to keep me, that were in me.
Right? Yeah. And that's kind of my way of achieving that. Right? So that doesn't, if we're going to decide to do this, we've got to decide to do it regardless of what's going on around us.
We have sometimes things, again, like I said, inside of our homes with relationships. Okay? Maybe somebody in here has a spouse that they're struggling with, and, you know, struggling with them kind of looking at it and saying, you know, when are you just going to stop doing this damn schemey stuff and focus on your job. Right?
Has anybody ever been, can anybody relate to that at all? I mean, Chris and Susan, you guys can, and now you're working together. Right? So, you know, the point is here that there's going to be all kinds of things standing in your way. And that doesn't mean that your wife or husband is in your way.
That just means that there's going to be a lot of things, a lot of barriers, a lot of things that come up, regardless of if they're what Dave was talking about or whether they're more personal things inside. If you want to do this, you've got to decide. You've got to say, regardless of what situations are happening internally or externally, if I've got a relationship, I'm going to decide to do this, because sometimes in life, that's what it takes.
Pretty much everyone, all the time, if you want to do something big, you've got to decide.
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