Vision of the End Result: The Crystal Ball Trick That Keeps a Team From Quitting Mid-Season
Somewhere around month four or five, the questions change. Nobody’s asking how to get started anymore. What you get instead is quieter: a text at eleven at night asking if this is actually going to work, a top earner in your organization who’s gone from posting every day to posting nothing, a huddle you call that nobody picks up for. Nothing dramatic happened. The business just hit its normal rough stretch, and you can feel part of the team start looking sideways at each other instead of at the goal.
As someone leading a team, you already know the feeling underneath that moment, and it isn’t your team’s confidence cracking first. It’s yours, and they can read it before you say a word.
This lesson comes from a session recorded for the Classic Masters Course, where a guest trainer named Aaron Raskin took the stage. Raskin had 21 years in network marketing by the time he picked up the mic, there with his wife and business partner Sophie. Between the two of them, they’d already built a team of over 10,000 people in a previous company and enrolled more than 1,500 into the one they were running that day. What he taught that afternoon wasn’t a script or a comp plan trick. It was how he and Sophie had kept teams together across two decades, long enough to see exactly what holds a growing group of people together and what quietly lets it come apart.
Why does it matter if you already know how the story ends?
Raskin opened with a picture. Say you own a crystal ball, and it’s already shown you that your team wins the World Series this year, seven games in. You’ve got somewhere to be that night, so you record the deciding game and watch it later, on your own schedule. Here’s the part that actually matters: you already know who wins. So what happens to the innings inside the game, the runs given up early, the best hitter getting hurt and pulled in the fourth?
And during the game, the seventh game of the World Series, that I know that the Yankees won, does it matter if they’re down in the first inning three runs to none? Well, no. Because I know they win the game. Does it matter if they’re up in the fourth inning by four runs and then their, you know, maybe their cleanup batter gets hit by a pitch and gets taken out of the game and he can’t play anymore? Doesn’t matter. Because I know that the end of the game, the Yankees win the game. And I know that the end result is that my team wins the World Series, that they’re the champions. So it doesn’t matter what goes on in the process. Whether you’re up, whether you’re down, there’s going to be good days, there’s going to be really good days, there’s going to be bad days, there’s going to be really bad days. But the key is to stay focused on the end game. And the end game in a team that grows to 100,000 members inside of 12 to 15 months is that you begin with the end in mind.
That’s the entire mechanic behind holding a team together through its worst stretch, and Raskin wasn’t describing a hypothetical team. He was describing one that had grown past 100,000 members inside its first year, where plenty of individual months looked shaky up close. You’re not managing a business where the outcome is genuinely in doubt and bracing for whichever way the game breaks. You’re leading people through a story you’ve already decided how it ends, and a bad week just becomes an inning, not a verdict.
Why do your prospects only ever see the business through your eyes?
Here’s the piece most leaders skip past. Your team, your prospects, and everyone still deciding whether to join you aren’t reading a spreadsheet. They’re reading you, and Raskin was direct about it: “they see the business through your eyes.” If you’re not sure you’re going to win, nobody watching you has a reason to be sure either, no matter how good the compensation plan looks on paper.
Underneath that is a fear most people never say out loud, the one Raskin named next: a lot of new distributors show up carrying a quiet dread that if they actually start winning at something nobody in their circle has pulled off, they’ll become the person who tried and fell short in front of everyone. That fear leaks straight into how they talk about the business, and their team catches it. Raskin’s point cuts the other way. The day you stop needing everyone around you to approve of how you show up in this business is the day you actually get free to run it. Personal freedom comes first. Whatever financial result follows is downstream of that, not a substitute for it.
What actually keeps a team from drifting apart between conversations?
Raskin’s next point undercuts the excuse most struggling leaders reach for first: a better funnel, a more responsive upline, a nicer team site. He said flatly that he doesn’t have a team site for his Empower Network business, not one. What he has instead is a system, on purpose, because he wants his team depending on the system and not on him personally. When he and Sophie disappear for a week, he doesn’t want anyone thinking the cat’s away.
He built the point around Joe Montana, the quarterback who used to jog in from the sideline down two touchdowns with two minutes on the clock, and the whole stadium, including the other team, already knew how the game was going to end. Montana’s actual skill in the huddle wasn’t the play he called. It was that every player left that huddle knowing exactly what to do the second the ball was snapped.
That’s the model for every conversation you have with a new member. You call to welcome them in, and instead of doing all the talking, you get more curious about them than you are interesting to them. That’s the huddle. And a huddle isn’t finished until both people know the next play.
- Hand off one task, then let them go run it. Don’t hover, don’t check in mid-play.
- When they call back, ask what they did and how the outcome actually turned out, not how they felt about it.
- Never end a conversation without both of you knowing exactly what happens before the next one.
This is also where the excuses get filtered out. Ask most people why a result didn’t happen and you’ll get some version of blame, shame, or a justification: the company didn’t support them, their sponsor never built them a team site, the market’s different where they live. None of that is where the actual lever sits. The lever sits in whether the huddle happened and whether the next play got run before you spoke again.
Why does the team that plays together actually stay together?
Raskin’s last point is the simplest one in the whole session, and it’s the one most new leaders skip because it doesn’t feel like real business activity. He and Sophie throw a team party at essentially every live event they run, real food, real music, no agenda beyond people enjoying each other’s company. As he told the room, “I have a theory that says the team that plays together stays together.”
It sounds like a throwaway line until you watch what it does. A downline that only ever talks about splits and rank advancement is a business relationship, and business relationships end the moment the numbers get hard. A downline that’s laughed together at three live events in a row is closer to family, and people are a lot slower to walk out on family over one bad month.
Raskin draws one more hard boundary worth sitting with, and it protects everything above it: he spends his time where it’s been earned, not simply where somebody needs him. A new member who shows up, runs the huddle, and reports back gets his attention. Someone who wants to be handheld without doing either of those things doesn’t, no matter how badly they say they need it. That single boundary is what keeps a leader’s calendar sane once a team crosses into the thousands, and it’s what keeps the system carrying the weight instead of the leader burning out under it.
Raskin closed his few minutes on that stage with the line the whole talk had been building toward: get the reason big enough, and the method stops being the hard part. Everything above is just what that method actually looks like once you commit to running it.
The full lesson goes considerably further than what’s above: how Raskin and Sophie structured their live events to keep new members plugged into training and into each other instead of into any one leader, and the longer breakdown of how a task-and-delegation system replaces the personal hand-holding most teams never outgrow. The complete video and transcript are part of the Classic Masters Course. The entire course, this lesson included, is available for $99 at the Classic Masters Course.
Get the course, run your next huddle like Raskin describes it, and watch how much less your team needs you to be everywhere at once.
Full lesson transcript
Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.
Aaron, come on up here. So what you just got was you got the total feminine, like, energy, and it, yeah, I mean, I'm not saying it's soft by any means, it's just, it's very feminine, like the, you know, it's not a masculine energy, it's not a, it's a, it's a kind of a, it's similar to the culture that we have here at Empower, but I mean, obviously, we have some masculine energy in there as well, but Aaron, completely different, right? Very masculine, different culture builder, what I wanted to do was bring him up and get, you know, a perspective from, from, from your experience for how many of our years, it was back since you've been, we're selling dog food to grandmas, I mean, I don't, whatever you're doing. Yeah, 21 years I've been doing this. Totally different perspective on culture, right, but I can, here's what I want you to try to pick up on.
It's what I want you to try to identify is not the differences, but the similarities. Give him a hand, guys. Aaron Raskin. Wow, pretty amazing, Tracy Walker. I, I, I can't tell you, I mean, I've, I've actually watched Tracy for a few years before we even got a chance to meet, and, yeah, she's just developed amazingly over the last, you know, two, three years watching her, and I was watching you when you were studying under Dagan, so kudos to both of you guys for just bringing it to this, to this event.
I'll just share quickly, because I just want to say, you know, I've been, you know, I've been watching you guys for a long time, and, you know, I've been watching you guys for a long time. I'll just say this quickly, because I know we don't have a whole lot of time, but I have enough time to share what's on my mind. You know, I, when we talk about duplication, I've been watching the Empower Network now for the last, you know, 10 months since it launched, and there's a lot of things that go on here inside this community that, you know, a lot of people don't realize that it's, in others it's not apparent to the naked eye. And I've always said that, you know, a great leader leads their followers, but it's vision that leads the leader. And so, I think that's really important.
And so, the strength of this community has started at the top, and the consciousness of what Dave and Dave bring to the table is that they had a very clear vision. Had you asked them 10 months ago if they would be building a team of over 100,000 people inside its first, you know, 12 to 15 months, they would have absolutely said yes. Now, I know they allude to the fact that they don't, they didn't expect it to grow this quickly, but the compounding effect that's taking place because of, you know, how they've been. And so, I think it's really important to be able to culturize the business, and I'll give you an example. Here's probably the simplest example.
Any sports fans in the room? By show of hands, sports fans? All right, well, what are some of your favorite teams out there? Four hands. Cowboys.
The Bears, the Cowboys. The Bears. The Broncos. The Broncos. Okay, I'm going to use my favorite team, of course, the Yankees.
Right? The most winning baseball team in sports history, right? They've won 27 World Series or whatever. That's once every four years since I was born. So, I've watched them play.
I've watched them play. I've watched them play. So, I've watched a lot of Yankee games, a lot of playoff games, a lot of World Series. And when we joke around in our house, we say, How do they call it the World Series when it's only the United States that they allow to play, right? It never made any sense, right?
So, let's just say the Yankees, right? Let's just say we're talking about the World Series, and I have crystal ball. And I know that the Yankees are going to win the World Series, because I have this crystal ball. And it's the seventh game of the World Series and, you know, final game and the winner's going to be decided. Yet I can't watch the game because I have another commitment, say I have something to do with our kids.
But I know that the Yankees won the World Series when I come home and I watch the game on, say, my DVR, right? I TiVo it or I record it, I watch it on a DVR. And during the game, the seventh game of the World Series, that I know that the Yankees won, does it matter if they're down in the first inning three runs to none? Well, no. Because I know they win the game.
Does it matter if they're up in the fourth inning by four runs and then their, you know, maybe their cleanup batter gets hit by a pitch and gets taken out of the game and he can't play anymore? Doesn't matter. Because I know that the end of the game, the Yankees win the game. And I know that the end result is that my team wins the World Series, that they're the champions. So it doesn't matter what goes on in the process.
Whether you're up, whether you're down, there's going to be good days, there's going to be really good days, there's going to be bad days, there's going to be really bad days. But the key is to stay focused on the end game. And the end game in a team that grows to 100,000 members inside of 12 to 15 months is that you begin with the end in mind. You see the end in your mind. You see the end in your mind.
You see the vision super clearly because your team, right? And it really starts at the prospect level. Your prospects, your leads, right? Your customers, your clients, your members, they see the business through your eyes. Did you all get that?
Right? They see it through your eyes. So if you're not sure if you're going to win, who would want to join you? And what happens is we get a lot of people that come to this business and they have a lot of fears, uncertainties. And they come with what's called lack consciousness or lack poverty consciousness.
And they're afraid that if they start winning, if they start becoming successful, somebody may not like them. They may become the laughing stock because they attempted something that nobody else has done before and they failed or they didn't succeed as quickly. And so I want to share with you the way to really lead a team is the day that you stop worrying whatever everybody else thinks of you and putting stock in their opinions of how you show up in your business and in your life is the day that you will set yourself free. And when you set yourself free here, the money has nowhere else to go but to you. In other words, you will become financially free after you become personally free.
And so you have to choose to make that decision now so that later you can experience the results of all that you're working toward. Everybody get that? Say aye. Cool. Does that make sense?
No, it doesn't make sense. It makes dollars. Lots and lots of dollars. So I wanted to share that perspective. Now, Sophie and I, we've been in part of another income stream.
We believe in multiple streams of income. Everybody, by a show of hands, multiple streams, right? All of you? All the smart people do that, right? So then it's like a 20-legged stool.
If one of the legs blows out, the stool is very, very... Solid? I don't know. Is that the best way to say that? So we want to make sure that we have lots and lots of stability around us.
And Sophie and I built a team in our last traditional network marketing company, over 10,000 people. And in the income stream that we're currently working with, it's a higher-priced product sale. So we make a much larger commission as we spoke about. And so it doesn't take as many members to make... A larger income.
And we've enrolled over 1,500 people into our current business. And the way we have always kept our team in communication with us is... And I have a theory that says the team that plays together stays together. The people that have the most fun... And this is why you see the culture inside of Empower.
We get together every couple of months, it seems like. And these guys are now doing more and more live events, connecting with people because when you go out and have a good time with people that you're doing business with, it's almost like it's a relationship, like a marriage, right? If you play together, you stay together. If you laugh together, you have this amazing connection. And so we've always had team parties.
That's one of the things we do. We always like to party. We have a team party at all the events. We make sure there's plenty of food, plenty of drink, plenty of entertainment, loud music, loud fun. We just have a great time.
And so we've always conditioned our team to prepare to be at the next live event so that we can get together and play together, which we know makes the team stay together. So that was just one thing I wanted to share, is that the team that plays together stays together. Now, when we talk about the members of our team, the individual members, one of the things that we've always done is we've set really clear guidelines and boundaries. In other words, nobody really deserves... You have to make your team deserve your time.
You work where you're deserved and not where you're needed. Okay? You work where you deserve, not where you're needed. And we play this game with our team called task and delegation. In other words, if you watch football, right, how many of you remember, say, Joe Montana?
You guys, if I could show of hands, Joe Montana, right, played in the 80s for the San Francisco 49ers. And, you know, the 49ers could be down by two touchdowns or 10 points with two minutes left in the game. And there was this guy, Joe Montana, who would run in from the sidelines. And as soon as he stepped foot on the field, everyone in that stadium, including the other team, knew that the 49ers were going to win the game. And they knew that the 49ers were going to win the game because Joe was in the game.
And so what he did is he raised everybody's level of awareness, and he raised everybody's level of consciousness, and he'd walk into the huddle, and his team just knew that he just had to call the play. And they became the most winning come-from-behind team in football history. And they won the most Super Bowls, when Joe was playing, of any other team because he knew how to conduct the huddle. And see, when you talk to your members, when you get on the phone with your brand new member, you call to welcome them to the business and introduce yourself and find out more about them than they find out about you, and you get more interested in them than trying to be interesting to them. See, that's your little huddle.
And when the huddle breaks, they know exactly how to conduct the huddle. They know exactly what they have to do before you meet again. And so it's a game of task and delegation. We delegate the responsibility for them to do a task, and when they complete the task, they can get back to you for the next huddle. And so it's a game of accountability, where we give people the responsibility to go build their business.
We give them the play. It's almost like when the huddle breaks, I tell this guy, hey, go out 10 yards and make a, you know, do a down and out, and you go over there, and you do a flag, and I'm going to throw the ball. See, everybody knows the play. When the ball is hiked, the linemen know how to block, the backs know how to run, the receivers know where to cut and twist and turn and go catch the ball. So when everybody knows what the next play is, and you never leave the huddle without knowing what you're supposed to do next, that's the key to the business.
That's the key to keeping people on point, on task, and then coming back with a result for you. And if they don't do it, and they call you, you ask them, say, how did I go? Tell them you what the results were. Tell me what you did, what was the action you took. How did the outcome pan out for you from our last conversation?
And when you get people accustomed to working with you this way, you again, only work with the small percentage of people. See, all of them could do it, but most of them won't because they're going to buy their own excuses. And they're going to start blaming, shaming, and justifying. Isn't this what we talk, we spoke about this yesterday, right? We talked about how most people are going to go out and make a big decision, but most people are People use blame, shame, or justify for everything that they don't do.
They make up an excuse, reason, whatever the case is. They have circumstances. They got conditions. And I've always learned that when you point one finger, you got three more pointing right back at you. So make sure before you start telling people or talking yourself into this lather that, wow, the system didn't work right.
Or there wasn't enough support. Or my sponsor wasn't as responsible as I would have liked them to be. They didn't have a team site. Do you know that I don't have a team site for Empower? But what I do have is a system.
Because I want my team to be system dependent. Because when Sophia and I are here on vacation for a week, I don't want my team thinking, well, the cat's away, the mice will play. And we haven't really kept too much in contact with anybody except through email. But I know that my team can plug in. And they can plug into the Empower Network training.
And they can plug into the other members that they're meeting at the live events. So we promote to get everybody together at the live events. We create that team synergy. And we promote people working together. And that's how we've kept our teams together over the years.
We've built pretty large teams in this industry. And I see what happens when people start collaborating and supporting each other. That's where two plus two turns into 15. You hear it from Tracy, Tony. All the leaders that have teams of people duplicating from Lawrence and Chris and Hockey and all these guys, Mike and Adam.
I can sit here and look at all the amazing leadership in this room and at this event. I can tell you that you guys are the future of not just the Empower Network. Because while the Empower Network has the ability to completely dominate our niche, you guys have the ability to dominate the Empower Network. How would that sound? Right on.
So guys, I have about one minute left. And so there's not a whole lot more I can share up here. But I just want to tell you, I've had probably two, three, four dozen conversations in the last 48 hours. And I learned from you just as much as you say that you learned from me. So I want to say thank you to you guys.
Because you really put a lot of thought into coming to this event and bringing your best attitude. You brought your best. You brought your best energy. And I just really want to say thank you to the guys and girls out there that I've been hearing from and listening from. Because it's the commitments that you're making right now.
How many of you have made a big commitment here this weekend? How many of you are committed to sticking through and sticking to it and overcoming everything to do what you came here for? High. Hands high. There you go.
I see every hand in the room up. And if you're watching this on video, you should. You should be raising your hand, too. Because, you know, I think the best way to sum this all up is that when your why is big enough, when your why is big enough, the how part will take care of itself. So that's all the time I have, guys.
Appreciate you guys listening today. Give him a hand. Stand up, guys. Aaron. I just want to join again, bro.
Thanks, man. Appreciate you.
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