Why Jobs, School and ‘Traditional’ Business Will Keep You Broke

Practicality dictates that everyone's results will vary as we are all unique and different. Basically, it takes hard work to make a substantial income in this business, and some people will make no money at all. The earnings of an Empower Network affiliate will be 100% dependent upon their skills, work effort, commitment, leadership capabilities, and market conditions. Common sense would suggest that in most opportunities, one would find exceptional individuals performing well above average, while others perform under the average. Empower Network does not guarantee any level of income or your success.

To see our full income disclosure, please visit our website at www.empowernetwork.com forward slash income dot php. Okay, guys, here again, we did something that was super cool last weekend. I'm going to get started here in about 30 seconds. I think we need to get the energy up on the call a little bit. I just logged in and we had some, I think everybody's a little bit maybe, you know, full or whatever from Labor Day weekend.

If you're here in the States, it was a little bit of a full day weekend. It was a holiday weekend. It's obviously Monday today. But I want everybody to just make some noise, just plain and simple.

Get excited and make a little bit of noise and kind of get your energy up a little bit. I'm just coming back from a long vacation myself. I'll talk about that a little bit. I've got some powerful stuff for you tonight. I can't wait to share it with you here in just a second.

I'm going to unmute the line for about 30 seconds, and I just want you to go damn crazy for a second. Doesn't that just feel good? Didn't that just feel just good to be able to just scream and let loose there for a second? My name is Dave Sharp. I'm co-founder of Empower Network, and welcome to the call.

We do this call every single Monday night, 9 p.m. Eastern time. It's called the Empower Hour Call, and if this is your very first Empower Hour Call, I just want to take a minute here, just a quick second, and say welcome. Here's what I hope for you tonight. I hope that you don't hear the same old thing you've always heard.

Or I hope you don't take away from this call or hear anything about a two- to four-year plan or any of that horse crap that so many people have been hearing about in the industry for so long. Here's what I do hope that you hear. I hope that you hear something tonight that hits you right between the eyes and makes you want to decide to do something different inside of your life. I hope that you hear something tonight that makes you want to stop the bullshit inside of your life and stop moving forward and trying to get something done that is physically, mentally, and emotionally impossible and in most cases is just plain and simple going to keep you broke and miserable for the majority of your life.

I hope that you hear tonight something that moves you over the edge that gets you to decide to take action and join us and live the life of your dreams. Meet us on the beaches of the world. I'm going to get frank with you guys tonight. It's not going to be a long call, but it's going to be a short and powerful call. Again, I just got back from a vacation that I went down to one of the most just majestic beaches that I've ever been to.

It's actually close to my house. I live in Florida. Right? It's right in St. Petersburg, which is kind of outside of Tampa.

It's that little peninsula that pokes up off the west side of Florida. This weekend, I just wanted to get away. It was actually my girl's birthday. We went out and rented a beautiful suite out at this really cool hotel out on St. Pete Beach and kind of just did nothing for about three days.

I got to thinking about something that was kind of compelling this weekend. I was looking around at what a lot of people were doing to make money, and I thought about where I came from. For those of you who don't know who I am and where I came from, it was only a few short years ago. A lot of times, you'll be on a conference call. You'll be listening to somebody who had a job 50 years ago, who has been in the network marketing industry for 10 decades.

That would be a century. Yes, there are people in certain companies that they act like they're that old. They had a job 100 years ago, and they haven't recruited or sponsored or done any marketing in the last 50 years. They're talking about what they used to do and what you should be doing, but they haven't done it in a long time. They know that if you do it, that it will work for you, and you should go out and hammer the phones and get the white pages and do home and hotel meetings.

You should do three-way calls, and if you need them, then just call and leave a message, and they'll have their assistant get back to you. The difference that separates what I do and what a lot of what you've heard inside of the home-based business, quote-unquote, or network marketing industry, is that it was only a short couple of years ago that I was actually broke. I was not only broke, guys, but I was in a situation personally that I had hit an all-time low. I was somebody that left my parents' house when I was 13 years old. I had my daughter when I was 16, and I hit the streets.

I struggled with addiction and alcoholism over the next 10 years, and it took me a long time to find my bottom. I went in and out of treatment centers, in and out of different people's couches, until one day I found myself in a situation to where I needed to make a drastic change, and I did. Four and a half, almost five years later, I've stayed completely clean and sober. That came from a decision. I'll talk about that a little bit more throughout this call, but it didn't come instantly to where I got involved in marketing and found myself making thousands of dollars a day.

It was a while. I was broke for a long time. I was working on myself personally, trying to change my life, going through or coming out of some of the things that I just talked about, and I was actually on a construction site one day, and a guy came up to me who lived on the same street that we had done some work for. Me and my dad had a small construction company. It wasn't anything that was big.

We kind of just went from job to job and hustled up jobs, and this guy came up to me. His name was John, and he worked at one of the local power companies, and he was on his lunch break. He did the same thing every single day. He'd come home. He'd make a sandwich.

He'd have lunch. He'd sit there and watch Jerry Springer or whatever. I know because I did some work inside of his house, but he came up to us, and we were remodeling this bathroom, and he said, Dave, Dave, Dave, you've got to take a look at this opportunity that I'm doing, and I don't know if you've ever seen one of those people or maybe you've been one of those people yourself, but it was the best thing ever. It was the next billion-dollar company. It was a cell phone deal.

It was like the next, you know. I just had to get in. I had to take a look at it. I had to see it, and you've got to remember where my head was at. At that time, I had been clean and sober for about two years.

I was still kind of negative, and I was kind of inside of this mentality that society has really molds us, which is pretty pessimistic. It's pretty negative, pretty skeptical. There's kind of only one way to make money, which is trading time for money, and my dreams personally were to actually open up, go and get, you know, a construction. I don't know how I'm going to get my own license and go and open up my own construction company. That was all I knew at that time.

If I looked around at all of my friends, all of my family, the people that were successful in my eyes, and of course I had a kind of skewed vision or skewed perception of what success even was, so to me, I was really looking forward to going out there and going through a bunch of schooling and paying a bunch of money to get these different licenses, and I don't know how much you know about the construction industry, but essentially, the way it's set up is that you have to get a license similar to a real estate license and pay a bunch of money to go to a school. This is optional. You go to the school that teaches you how to just kind of find the answers in the book when you go and take the test, so it's not like there's any real education. There's all kinds of ways to get around the test. I know people who had their wives go and take the test for them because they were better at school. They were super ADD like I am, and you know, couldn't sit through school and, you know, retain anything from a boring teacher. That's nothing against school, it's just I know my strengths and weaknesses.

But I was on this construction site, and leveraging the idea of network marketing, the idea of, you know, all the different things that we talk about in this industry were so far from my mental grasp that I couldn't even fathom it. It just didn't even make sense to me, and plus I was super skeptical, negative. I say that because I want you to throughout this call identify and look around at some of the things that may be holding you back and some of the things that I went through, and as a result of me going through and actually identifying them, I was able to transform my life, and today, of course, I'll tell you about that here in a second. But it's much different, and it's not just me. I was actually looking through a lot of the people on our team in our company, and guys, I'll get to some of those numbers and statistics in a second. They will blow you away. Stay with me here with a story because there's some important stuff I want you to pick up, but I looked at what he was doing, and again, it just didn't make sense to me.

So it took five times. He kept coming back over and over again for about five days straight saying, Dave, and my dad's name is Gene, you've got to take a look at this. I promise you guys it's the best thing ever, it's just unbelievable, you'll be rich. It's all you're gonna do is get five people, get five people, get five people, and I'm telling you the product's like nothing you've ever seen before. I mean, it was a freaking cell phone for Christmas sakes, it was not a huge deal, but I mean this guy was stoked, right?

So I finally opened up my mind a little bit to be able to look at what John was doing, and I kind of thought, I was like, okay, I get it, right, doing something different. I had been exposed to network marketing a little bit before, a couple of years ago, and I was like, okay, there was a small opening that was made. I took the money that I made from that construction job and I walked three houses up, because remember their house was on the same street as the job I was working on, and I signed up for this network marketing company. I think I made a thousand dollars off of this job. I took 500 to sign up, it was like another 300 for the phone, I had 200 dollars left and I got started.

That was my reintroduction into network marketing, direct affiliate marketing, essentially kind of outside the box money making, okay, because traditionally, right, remember I kind of had a one-track mind, I hadn't had a whole lot of jobs, but the jobs that I had were all just basic regular. I worked in telemarketing places, I went through a couple of treatment centers, so when I was in drug treatment back in the day I worked at telemarketing places and things like that. And then I worked for Xerox, and I was the dude who went around to different businesses knocking on doors, handing out flyers, trying to get church pastors and different businesses to buy a Xerox machine. I sold a couple of them, it wasn't horrible, but that was my concept of making money, and then of course construction.

And I don't know if there's any construction workers on the call tonight, but I was not only, it was much more than trading time for money, guys. The way that I made money was physical manual labor. Yes, I enjoyed dealing with customers and selling jobs, I was getting good at it, but it involved a ridiculous amount of manual labor. So not only was it trading time for money, but it was dadgum hard, and I live in Florida, so it was hot. Okay, well I got involved in network marketing, and I found myself at that time I drove a 1994 F-150, gray, the thing had paint peeling off of the front hood. I mean seriously, I say this all the time but it's true, if I would go over 40 miles an hour on the highway, huge rust chips would fly off the hood, and you know, sometimes they'd fly into other people, I'd have to get off on the exit so somebody didn't chase me down. I didn't have the money to repair somebody's, you know, car from huge rust chips flying off of my hood. It was just my life.

So I got signs, I put them in my yard, I got magnets from VistaPrint because it was the only place that I could find to get free stuff, you know, free marketing, remember. This was my idea of marketing, guys. This was my idea of now doing business. I was taking the same concepts that I knew from working regular jobs and regular business and applying them now to network marketing, and it was frustrating.

I'd pull up to a light with a magnet on my car, and I'd be the last person anybody would want to call. I'd have the huge rust bucket truck. I actually had to pop the hood on my truck and start my truck with a screwdriver in the solenoid. Those of you who don't know much about trucks and cars, I don't really either, but I would have to start it with a screwdriver, and sparks would fly. It was embarrassing as hell.

It really was. Whenever I would go somewhere, I would have to park my truck. I wouldn't have to, but I would because I was so embarrassed, several parking lots over, and hoped that nobody would see me start my truck with a screwdriver and sparks flying all over the place. It was just my life. I was taking the same concepts and principles and applying them to my network marketing company that I had always understood business to be.

Then I was like, this sucks, and it's not working. I was still working construction at the time. I want you to imagine the two lives that I was living. I was living during the day and then at night, and then of course trying to harass my friends and family and chase people around and get people into my business. I was dragging people home in hotel meetings.

We talk about this a lot inside of Empower Network because we've done it. I did the three-way calls if I could get a hold of my upline leader, and it was just painful. It was miserable. I was driving around. I knew that there was something there because I was hungry, and I was open-minded, and I was developing a positive outlook.

I had a positive perspective in life, but overall, I was hating it. It was painful, so I said, there has got to be a better way. I got on somebody else's computer at that time. It was my girlfriend's, and I started to just kind of look through the internet. I started to opt into people's email list, and I started to kind of take a look at what they were doing, and what I saw was something fascinating.

What I saw was something magical. I saw this guy back before, before I even started on the internet, I realized that what I was doing to build a business and my understanding and perception of how to make money and how business was done was totally wrong. I want you to think about this. This weekend, it has not changed.

Things around me are still the same, but over the course of the last few years, I've developed this completely different perspective of how to make money. Back then, I started to see it a little bit. I was opting into people's email list, and they were taking information that they knew and packaging it in little e-books or video courses or whatever, and they were making it one time, and they were selling it over and over again.

There was no manufacturing. There was distribution, but it wasn't through trucks and warehouses and things of that nature. There was no manufacturing. There was no fulfillment centers. There was no huge overhead. It was people were doing 10 times the revenue and a massive more amount of profit than an average business did, and they had none of the headaches that a regular business has. And I said, you've got to be shitting me. That's what I said to myself because I saw it.

I realized that. I understood that. I saw it not immediately, but damn sure pretty quick. And I said, you have to be shitting me. I have got to be shitting me.

What does it take? I want you to think about this. I want you to look at my life and my example, okay? And the reason why I'm laying this out for you is because, A, there's a lot of people on this call tonight who are looking for their kind of, they're looking for what they're going to do with their lives. They're looking at wanting to be an entrepreneur or wanting to open up a business.

And then there's a lot of people who are on this call already. They're looking in Empower, and they're wondering if this is it. They're wondering what they need to do to break through. And I'm telling you that not only is this what you need to break through, what we're doing, but this is why. See, there's a difference between the dynamics and the mechanics of building a business.

What we've got is the mechanics. We've already done that for you here at Empower, and I'll explain why. But what I'm laying out and teaching you tonight is the dynamics of what we're doing. And why what we're doing is the easiest and smartest way. I say easy not because you don't have to do any work.

Don't get it misunderstood. It's easy because here's what I was going to do. I was going to go and spend $2,000 to get my contractor's license. And that actually, excuse me, let me back up.

That wasn't even to get my license. That was to go and take, go to school so they could show me where the answers were. Because that's just what we did. I'm just being honest, keeping it real. I don't really have time to bull crap around a lot tonight on this call.

I'm just calling it how it is, calling it spade to spade. You pay the money. They show you where the answers are in the book. You go and take the test and hope that you pass. And if you pass, it doesn't matter.

Now, they want you to have experience and put it down. But I'm telling you, I knew all kinds of guys who would fudge that stuff and have people just sign off on their thing and say that they had more experience than they did. It was a schemey little deal. It was like whatever. But that was what I would have had to do to become a general contractor.

You know, the guys who you contract out home work, kitchen renovations, bathroom renovations. So there's roughly $2,000, maybe $2,500 off the bat right off the rip. And then there was several months of going to school and waiting for the next test to take place. I probably, if I would have wanted to do it legitimately, would have had to have more experience to put down on my application for the state to say, yes, this guy's been doing it long enough that you can actually trust him to go into your house and remodel your bathroom. And if I was to pass the test and actually get my license, then I would have been back at square one, okay, to go out there and get business.

So I would have literally had to go out there and start hammering the phones. Probably if I had any marketing sense at all, I would have started doing some marketing. Because I didn't, I would have went out and I would have passed out business cards to friends and family members and tried to get people to let me tile their bathroom floors. And I would have literally, as a business owner, been trading time for money for probably the first several years until I really had a crew going.

Until I was leveraging multiple crews to be doing multiple jobs, while I was probably stuck in some office somewhere slaving over a pile of documents and selling the next job. Because once I stopped selling jobs, then I would have no more work for my crews. Therefore, I wouldn't have made any more money. Okay?

So it's a never-ending cycle of grinding, not only trading time for money, but also constantly selling, maybe going out there and doing manual labor, even after I had crews. Because I don't know if you have ever had any experience being a business owner, but nobody cares about your business like you care about your business. So you're out there on the job, you're doing things, you're going around, you're meeting and greeting. Guys, this is the life of a traditional business owner. I've got family members and uncles who own insurance agencies.

And real estate businesses and all of this different stuff. And guys, 99.9% of them as business owners work harder, not just a little bit, but two or three times harder than their actual employees. Okay? I don't know if you've ever talked to anybody who owns a business. The very first time that I ever really ran into a guy who is a real estate investor.

Now, real estate investors are a little bit different. They can kind of cash flow different properties. But they're usually looking for the next deal. But I have met a few real estate investors who have a pretty good life. Traditionally, guys, traditionally, average business owners, this is their life.

Now, let's not even go into talking about somebody who has a job to do. Because this person, and I really opened my eyes up to it this weekend as I was hanging out at this resort. And different people were serving me, bartenders. I was going to different restaurants. And, I mean, there was a lot of really.

There was a lot of really rich, snobby people that were around me. I would consider myself well off. But, I mean, I definitely still act like a homeless guy a lot. Because, you know, it's just who I am. You know, I remember where I came from.

I'm not walking around with my chin up in the air. I'm a pretty down-to-earth guy. And I'm pretty aware of what is going on around me. So, I saw a lot of snobby-ass people who were being super rude to servers and people who were working at the resort and different restaurants. And I was just thinking to myself.

You know, what a painful way to make money. What a painful way to support your family. Not that you're not doing what you have to do. And I commend you for that. But here's what I hear and here's what I was thinking about.

What if I never went out there? I didn't have anybody break this down for me. Remember when I was going on the internet and I was looking and searching for a way to not run around with signs on my truck and magnets on my truck and put signs in my car? That's when I really discovered that there was a different, better way to do it, okay? But imagine if I wouldn't have ever seen that.

I come into contact every single day with people who have all of these dreams. I come into contact with all these different people who have all of these ambitions to go back to school and, you know, go and get their degrees. And they're starting literally at square one. And the problem is, the problem is when people go back to school. Now, this is not dogging the education.

This is not dogging the education system. I'm just having a frank, just really open, honest conversation from my perspective. This is my opinion. And, guys, I've made millions of dollars on the internet, okay? So it's a decent perspective with lots of experience behind it, is that most of the time when somebody goes to college, right, they come out 40 to, it's usually about $40,000 every four years.

And that's actually a conservative guesstimate nowadays. You come out after four to eight years. And you've still got to go and get a job. And the majority of the time, right, because that's what you're going for, you're going to get a job, the majority of the time it's very difficult to get hired because you don't have any real work experience. So a lot of times people go with these huge ambitions and these huge dreams of going to school.

And I've heard so many people say to themselves, well, that's why I am going to school so I can get out and I can have a job that allows me to do the things that I want to do when I finally have that degree. And you know what? My brother, he's about four levels, maybe even higher than that. Last time he was three or four levels down from the CFO at Coca-Cola.

His name is Matt. He lived in Atlanta. Now he lives in London, and he works for Coke. And his perspective was, and this is not word for word, this is pretty much what he said in a nutshell.

He went to Florida State, got his master's degree, the CPA, so on and so forth. He said a degree is pretty much a piece of paper that kind of shows, this is all of my employers that I got up and I showed up to class on time for as long as my paper says that I went to school. And again, this is not dogging education. It's not dogging education itself.

It kind of is dogging the educational system. And yes, this is a little bit opinionated, but this is my perspective. Guys, I dropped out in ninth grade. I ran the streets for 10 years. I had my daughter when I was 16, and I struggled with addiction and alcoholism for 10 years before I finally got clean.

And I've been clean and sober for almost five years. And guys, last month I made probably twice as much money than a doctor does, a very high-paying doctor. So what's the moral of the story is that the way that we see business and we're taught to make money is so far off and completely skewed that if we were to take that route, it would literally take decades to make as much money. And guys, I saved up as much money as I spent this last weekend going on a little short three-day Labor Day vacation.

Guys, here's the solution, and I didn't realize this, but here's where we're at. We're in 2012. There's a lot of different things floating around out there to where you can get involved with lotions, potions, pills, technology, all of this different stuff. There's so many new companies that are popping up every single day, with the latest and greatest product and the best compensation plan.

They're going to be the next billion-dollar company. It's all this hoopla and hype, and the fact of the matter is, if you don't understand the dynamics behind how money is made, then you're always going to struggle with understanding what you need to be doing and understanding how it actually works. Mechanics are very simple. I'm going to teach you the mechanics here on the second part of this call. I'm going to teach you why you literally have to do the same thing building an online automated business as you do to go and build a brick-and-mortar business.

But I want you to really start to listen and understand the words that I'm speaking tonight, because if you understand the dynamics of business, if you understand the dynamics of making money, if you understand how it works, instead of always focusing on the small stuff and jumping from deal to deal, and chasing the dragon and having shiny ball syndrome and forgetting to take your ADD medicine. What time is it? Oh, baby, I forgot to take my ADD medicine today as well. I'm ADD like a monster.

But I'm telling you guys, here's the bottom line, is that what we figured out here and what people are actually doing as well here on our team and inside of Empower Network is they're taking the principles that we have, the principles that we figured out, and they're applying them to the whole thing. Even though I'm going to teach them to you tonight and I want you to understand them, they work whether you understand them or not. Let me say that again. They work whether you understand them or not.

So here's the hit. Let me get down for you a little bit of the mechanics of making money. I want you to understand this. The mechanics of making money are you have an offer, a price. You have a product, a service.

Usually it's either product or service oriented. And you set up shop. And let's talk about an offline business. You set up shop, whether it be an insurance agency. We can go with that for now.

And you go and you buy a brick-and-mortar business, which, by the way, friends, there's a lot of you on this call tonight who have brick-and-mortar businesses, who own companies, who that's been your business model for a long time. But I can tell you I would never do that. I would never set that up. I would never set that up nowadays in 2012 because you have your product. You have your service.

You usually go into debt setting up the business, right, just like I explained to you with my construction company. And then what do you do? The majority of business owners, especially traditional business owners, have no idea how to market, no clue whatsoever how to market. So what do they do? They do pretty much like all of my friends and the people that I know and see up and down every single street do, which is literally sit.

Sit there, guys. What you need to think about is sit there and wait for somebody to walk through the door. And in the meantime, somebody sitting at their desk playing on Facebook, they're filing their nails, they're playing on their phone, texting their boyfriend. You're sitting there pulling your hair out with anxiety, sweating, wondering when the next customer is going to come through.

Bills are, the electric bill is churning. Bills are piling up. You have no idea what's going to happen next. You have no projections.

Just, it's an unbelievably just painfully unpredictable situation to be in because business may be good this month, but you have no idea what's going to be, what's going to happen next month, right? I have so many people who own businesses like that. I'm telling you guys, it's a painful situation to be in. Here's what we did. It's 2012.

Here's what I discovered is that you can literally do all the business that you want automated online by creating the product one time and selling it over and over again. It's kind of like network marketing traditionally, right? But the only thing that it doesn't involve is shipping out some sort of a pill, whether it be some sort of a product, lotion, a potion, some sort of a pill. There's all kinds of different companies. We all know about them, right?

That's the traditional business model. Now, unfortunately, what I used to do when I was in a company that did that was I would have to go over and I would pick up the products. I was still running around. A lot of times the products weren't shipped to a company. Nowadays they are shipped to a company a little bit faster.

But I would go around. I would go and pick up my products. I would bring them back. I would deliver them. I would buy more than I needed.

So I had products on hand at all times. I literally was making money only when I moved a product and when I delivered something. The majority of the time it was face-to-face. I'm not saying that huge teams aren't built like this. But, guys, it's a slow, painful process.

The difference in what that is and what I figured out is that you can take information, something that you know, something that you are good at, something that you're an expert at, and package it and sell it online to the masses and literally have people buying it, whether you're sleeping, whether you're on vacation, regardless of what you're doing. And that's exactly what we did. But here's what most people have to do if they want to do that. They have to buy a website. They have to get a programmer to set it up.

They have to take whatever information that they have, and they have to shoot a video, right? And they have to then take that video and edit it and put it up on the website. And then they have to go out and they have to create sales processes and have designers build things. And they have to go through some sort of a strenuous and sometimes costly process.

to be able to get that up on the internet and start even getting in the position to make their first sale. And what we did, and I'm going through all of this to teach you and train you and get you to understand how far we've came and what literally is sitting there waiting for you if you focus, if you dedicate, if you take action for you, and you can actually earn all of the money off of product sales, okay, and run it just like a business. So you not only have the best of what is available out in the business world these days, but you can keep all the damn money, okay? That's what we've got in Empower Network.

So we've done that. We've taken the information of marketing education. We've taken the best of the best inside of the industry who have literally gone step by step. This is what you do. Point and click to not only build this business, but any business out there.

And here's what you do. One, two, three, go out, do it. Here's how you drive traffic so you don't have to sit around in an office and wait for somebody to walk through the door, but you can literally advertise and market, which is honestly really the majority of what you should be doing on a daily basis, and you don't have to sit around and wait for somebody to walk through the door. Guys, we've packaged all of that and built it around some of the best sales processes in the entire world, and we've created all of the best sales psychology.

We've posted it all in a really super user-friendly environment that you can interact and that you can download it, you can absorb it, you can market it, sell it, and you can train and build a culture around it. And guys, we've done all of that for you, and if you're listening to this call and you're not inside of Empower Network, for $25. Let me say that again. $25.

Do I need to go back and talk about what I may have had to do if I took the route of being a construction worker and opening my own construction company? Is that saying that's bad, dumb, silly? No, it's not. Business is business, guys.

And money into the bank account is always good money. But I'm telling you, if you've ever taken a look at cliches that have been around for decades and decades and wondered why they're still being said, there's a reason why. And working smart instead of hard is something that a lot of people don't understand. Guys, the reason, the reason.

Why we've had over 40,000 customers, and probably much more than that by now. I haven't checked the statistics in a little while to see exactly what they are, and I always like to under-quote instead of over-quote. But over 40,000 customers in over 140 countries, and helped people, average, normal people, guys. I want you to think about this.

Not gurus, not professionals, not, you know, just gangster, killer marketers, badasses that didn't make millions, not in sales, but in commissions, guys. It's because we understand the dynamics of making money in 2012. There is a difference.

There is a difference between making money in 1970 and making money in 2012. There is a difference in making money in the network marketing industry in 1995, and in 2012. We literally have people in all kinds of different countries, leaders in all kinds of different companies, who want to be around us, who are stopping doing what they're doing because they're fascinated by what we're doing, and just want to learn a little bit more. Just want to hang around because what we're doing is just cutting edge, for lack of better words.

So I ask you guys, honestly, on this call tonight, what are you looking for? What are you waiting for? Why are you not focused if you're not focused? What more do you need to see or do? What more evidence or proof do you need to appear inside of your life to make a decision, focus, and move forward?

Because I'm telling you, everything that you want or need is right here in front of you, and it's all you have to do is take action. I'm telling you, I've seen it all. I've done it all. I've seen so many different people in so many different countries around the world working so many different businesses, making money in so many different ways.

I've seen people making money illegally, right? I've seen people making money legally. I've seen people making money in traditional businesses. I've seen people making money on the internet. I've seen people making money in network marketing.

I've seen people making money in affiliate marketing. And I've made a lot of money in almost every single one of those categories, except I don't run any illegal businesses. But when I ran the streets, I damn sure got a glimpse into a lot of things that people are doing, and I'm telling you, I wouldn't trade any of it for what I do today. As a matter of fact, I won't ever earn money any other way than the way that I earn it today, besides investment. And that's passive income to where I'm buying something like a piece of real estate and letting it sit there and getting tenants and renters or maybe flipping a house or something like that.

But I will not go and build another traditional business. I will not go and build another traditional network marketing business. And the reason why is, is because A, I think you know why I won't build another traditional business. But as far as a traditional network marketing business, I just won't do it. What we're doing is not regular network marketing here at Empower Network.

So if you're looking for the next big MLM deal, this is not it. We have a multi-level, multi-tiered compensation. But we are the furthest damn thing from traditional network marketing because we're not telling people to run around and do home meetings. We're not telling people to do hotel meetings and cold call and drag their friends and family all over town to the next hot hotel meeting.

Guys, we understand the dynamics. The mechanics are taken care of for you, okay? The mechanics are very simple. And maybe you could even write this down and draw it on a piece of paper so you can see exactly how it's done. The mechanics of making money in 2012 and beyond are having an offer, okay?

And you can draw a box, and in the middle of it, you can put offer, okay? And then put an arrow that says sales page. And on that page, you usually have a letter or a video, okay? And then you write another arrow and product delivery, okay? That's usually where once somebody buys, they get the product.

And the only missing element to that, those were the things that I was talking about a second ago that you would have to, you know, usually have programmers and designers and get a website and do it. We've already done that. So the only missing key to that is go back over to the left before you put offer, okay? And put traffic. Traffic.

And traffic can come from so many different places. It's literally the only thing that you have to focus on here. And what is traffic? There are some people who are old school networkers and they're thinking, you know, traffic, okay, that means that, you know, I need to get out my contact list and call all of my friends and family. Guys, if that's what you need to do to get started for the first 30 to 60 days, get out your damn contact list and call your friends and family.

But as you're doing that, go through the 15K formula, okay? Go through the Costa Rica intensive and listen to a damn audio every day from the inner circle and let us teach you the dynamics and the mechanics of driving traffic because you can focus on the mechanics while learning the dynamics later. But learn from us as you're building your business the first 30 to 60 days, building momentum if you're just getting started or you would like to start over inside of your business, and learn from us, the people who have kind of uncovered and discovered how to make money in 2012 and beyond, learn from us so you never have to do anything that sucks or is painful to make money again. Does that mean it's going to be easy and you're not going to have to work?

Absolutely not. But what it does mean is that you can work smart instead of hard. And guys, I do not have to work hard. I do not mean saying some cliche or philosophy without giving some very solid concrete breakdown of what I mean by that.

And I've done that on this call tonight. The question is, what are you waiting for? Everything is there for you and you have the ability to start right now. And if you want to start over inside of your business, you can certainly do that. If you've sat around and you've caught yourself waiting for the secret to be exposed, or you've sat around waiting for somebody to come along and show you that something's better, or you think that you're missing a piece of the pie, the only thing that you're missing is a decision, and your dreams lie on the other side of that decision.

Do you realize that? Your dreams are on the other side of a decision. Guys, we've got literally hundreds of people just last month. Now I'm going to give the disclosure, okay? Because here at Empower Network, we actually publish average earnings of every single person in the world.

And I'm going to give you the disclosure, okay? Right at EmpowerNetwork.com forward slash income dot php. Again, EmpowerNetwork.com forward slash income dot php. Guys, I'm going to talk about some numbers here and I just want to be very up front that we publish, not just average earnings from three or four years ago or three or four months ago like most companies do because they're stale income disclosures.

They don't really want you to know what everybody's really earning, okay? We publish average earnings, we're transparent, and we're proud. We're actually proud of what people do here at Empower Network and we have no compunction about being absolutely authentic and transparent with everything. But I want you to think about this for a second. Of our top 100 people just last month, okay?

Just last month, from 8-1 to 8-31, the hundredth person, that means the person who earned the hundredth, they were number 100. Now personally I tried to figure some other people on the top earners list, they earn 3,400 dollars. So, we had at least 100 people earn 3,400 dollars. And guys, in our top 10, to think about this, we had one, two, three, four people at least at 50 thousand.

We had one person, Lawrence, at 41 thousand. Chris Campbell, Chris Jones, 35,000. John Rose, 34,000. This is from one month. Again, that's not a guarantee of anything. You don't have to worry about it.

Guys, this is what people are doing, and the majority of the time, these people are not setting up anything fancy. These numbers are not meant to just be compelling to you to take action. We've got people who you're going to see in San Diego who are brand new and never made any money before, and they're actually out there not only making money, and it's not just subsidizing their income, they're making enough money to be able to quit their job. They're making enough money to be able to do what I did when I first got started inside of my business six months into it, to where I actually said, I'm done working construction, and I'm going to go full-time. Guys, here's the thing that I want to leave you with on tonight's call, because this is a different perspective.

This is something I didn't realize for a long time about how to make money on the internet and how to make money in business, because I just didn't see it. Nobody showed it to me. I was looking at my options, and I didn't even see the money.

Guys, this is not a call about quitting your job. This is a call about living your dreams. This is a call about understanding how money is really made. This is a call about opening your eyes to where we're at inside of the economy. This is a call about hardening up.

This is not a call about the world is burning and ending, and it's about politics, and whoever is the next president is going to be the one who's going to save us all. Guys, it's about becoming an entrepreneur and creating your own economy, because when you create your own economy, nobody can tell you anything of what's going to happen next year, next month, or where you're going to be if you don't do something, because you've already created it yourself, and it doesn't matter. You're not relying on anybody, and you can take care of you and your family regardless of what happens around you. That's what this call is about. This call is about making the decision to lock arms with people who are working smart and not hard, but not smart in the typical sense of what most people explain it.

It's a call about working smart in the sense of being an intelligent entrepreneur and learning about and being honest with yourself about where we really are in life and in the world. That's what this call is about. This is a call about being honest about what's really being taught in college right now, and does it really apply to real-world circumstances? Do the professors who are teaching, and guys, believe me, this is my opinion and not even particularly the opinion of Empower Network, but damn it, I've got some opinions, and I've been some places, and I can show some people how to change their life if they'll take action, because we have helped in the last 10 months more people than any other company that I've seen personally on the ground level, average people who have made money before actually stand up, make a difference, and take back control of their life, start creating their own economy, and actually doing things inside of their business that make sense, are smart, and are not painful, because we've told people, do not do stupid stuff that is going to keep you broke. Stop it.

Assess yourself. Look at what you're doing, and ask yourself, honestly, are you doing any of these dumbass things that were applicable back in 1960, but are no longer applicable in 2012? Friends, this is a call about being honest, and not worrying about what other people think, but standing up and taking your life back and saying, hey, look, there's always going to be haters. There's always going to be people around me who are going to tell me that what I'm doing is stupid. There's always going to be people who think that they know how to make money.

They think they know how to save my family. They think they know how to put food in my child's mouth. The truth of the matter is, nobody gives a damn about that. Nobody gives a damn about putting food on your table as much as you do, so take control of your own economy and your business, and make the decision yourself.

Guys, if you focus, if you concentrate on the things that we've told you to concentrate on, which is driving traffic, and if you're a member of Empower Network, if you're one of our affiliates, that's the only thing that you really, really, really need to focus on, is driving traffic, and every single day focusing on the eight core steps and getting to the event, because if you focus on those things, friends, where you'll be in 60 to 90 days will be beyond your wildest dreams. Guys, I don't make income claims. I don't guarantee that anybody's going to earn anything, but I can guarantee if you will focus, if you will stay off Facebook, if you'll stay off Skype, if you'll stay off doing dumb things that do not make money, and focus on going out there and creating content and following the eight core steps, my friends, in 60 to 90 days, your life, your business will be beyond your wildest dreams, and I do guarantee that. It's a new plateau. It's a new awakening.

It's a new understanding of how simple, okay, and efficient our way of building a business actually is, and then you'll start to build the confidence in yourself that you really need to be able to build the business that you really deserve. I'm telling you guys, there's a lot of different levels and different things that change in your life and inside of your head and inside of your heart when you start to hit these different levels. I can remember the first time that I ever showed up as a leader on generating leads inside of this company. I hadn't even made a sale, folks. I hadn't even made a sale, but I got up just to do one last-minute check on the leaderboards in the email.

I don't know if you've ever done that before, but just before you're getting ready to go to bed, your husband or wife are in there, and they're in the bed, they're waiting on you. Maybe they got a little candle going or whatever. You're going to hang out and just have a nice romantic night or whatever, but what do you got to do?

You got to go out there and check your email one more time, don't you? You got to go log into your back office one more time and just see if anything happened, and that's exactly what I did. I went out there, and I saw that I was like number eight generating leads for the last week or month or whatever it was. I hadn't even made a deal. I was like, I'm going to do this.

I was in my underwear, and I ran around. I don't know if anybody's ever seen that movie Rudy before, but it's one of my favorite movies of all time. I don't know if you remember that scene when he's up, and Rudy goes, and they're like, Rudy, Rudy, Rudy, and he gets in the game, and he goes and sacks the guy, and the guy up, his friend up in the bleachers is like, who is the wild man now?

Well, that's what I was doing. I was running around my house and running around my backyard going, who is the wild man? I hadn't even made a sale, but you want to know what that did for me? That took me to that next level of confidence. That inspired me that day to keep fighting, to keep going, to keep building my business, and what I know today that I didn't know back then, but I was still doing it, and it worked whether I understood it or not, was today I focus on doing one thing that inspires me to get to the next day.

It's that one thing that pumps me up and empowers me to get to the next day, so I can find that one thing that pumps me up, inspires me, and empowers me to get to the next day, and that day, it was that, but when I saw my name there, and I saw those results, it didn't just get me to the next day. It built a belief system inside of me, and here's what most people experience and encounter for the majority of their life, is they beat themselves up so much that when it comes time to actually building a business, when it comes time to actually focusing on living your dreams, moving forward towards building the life that you really want and deserve, every time something goes wrong, it's like, I knew this wouldn't work. I knew Mary was right when she said that this was stupid, and I should just focus on my job, and get up every day, and make the donuts, and drive to work, and just kind of focus on being there on time. I knew that building a business, and actually working on it, and working towards my dreams was stupid.

You start this negative self-talk that is so self-defeating, and every time something goes wrong, and you talk to yourself like that, you reinforce that thinking, right? And it takes a little while to get out of that. It takes a little bit, a little awareness to understand and see that, and identify that. It takes something to kick, or somebody to say something, like me on this call tonight, to tell you, that what I did was, I took every single ounce of just negativity, low self-esteem, low self-confidence, every single thing that somebody had said something to me, every single time that somebody had said what I was doing was stupid, every single time somebody had put something that I was doing down, every single time a hater came up and had something stupid to say, came sideways out of their neck. Every single time somebody said that I was wasting my time, I took all of that and put it in the bank.

All of it, and I put it in the bank for a rainy day, a day that I would treat myself like shit, a day that I was talking down to myself, and whenever I needed to go, and I needed to make a withdrawal from the bank, I would go to the bank, and I would think about something that somebody said, and it would pump me up, and I would allow it to pump me up instead of get me down. I would take that energy, you've gone either way, positive or negative, and I'd say, David, don't you dare quit, don't you dare stop, and don't you dare give up. It was a simple, simple mindset change that I made that allowed me to keep fighting and keep going. Guys, now, a couple of years later, you're talking to a guy who's seen it all, who's done it all, or at least damn most of it, who's experienced all of it.

All of the pain, all of the hardship, all of the criticism, all of the haters, all of the people who all the time, guys, had something to say, and guess what? They're still hating, and they're still saying shit, but guess what? It comes with the territory, because if you want to be the boss, you damn sure better be willing to pay the cost, friend. This is the life of an entrepreneur. This is the life of somebody who's determined to make it happen.

This is the life of building a business. And friend, the times have changed. The landscape has changed, and it's anyone's game. Guys, it's an underdog's game these days, and I'm going to tell you who and what we are here at Empower Network, is we are the underdogs.

We're the people who weren't supposed to make it. We're the people who experience the pain, who have things going on in our life on a daily basis, and the odds are stacked against us. We're the people who everybody is waiting and watching and hoping that they'll fail, and we're the people that will not stop fighting, because we damn sure are going to get more in the bank than most people, and I ain't talking about money. I'm talking about what we've put in the bank for a rainy day as a reserve, and when we need to go in there and make a withdrawal, and we need to tell ourselves, damn it, don't you dare quit. Danny, don't you dare quit.

Amy, don't you dare quit. Daniel, don't you dare quit. Friends, if you focus, if you run with us, if you meet us in San Diego, I'm going to tell you that what you're going to experience is not going to allow you to look at life and business and earning money the same.

You will be unable to continue to view life in the same eyes that you used to, and unable and unwilling, absolutely unwilling to view life the way that everybody else does around you. You will begin to start to see things in a different perspective. You will begin to start seeing money with so much less resistance, earning it, getting it, making, attracting it to you. I promise you that, because you'll have this completely new perspective and this unreal, different, just way of seeing how everything works.

You'll see people around you that are no different than you, that are no better, no smarter. They're older, younger. They're of all ages. They're from all around the world, but they put their pants on the same exact way you do, and they're doing it. They're making it happen.

You'll look at yourself in the mirror, and you say, it is your time now. Make it happen. This comes with a decision to focus. This comes with a decision to eradicate the fear. You know what?

It's not going to take a day. Sometimes, you're going to have to walk through it. Sometimes, you're going to have uncomfortability, and you're going to have to walk through it. Sometimes, you're going to have to get comfortable getting uncomfortable. Sometimes, you're going to have to take what somebody says and smile and say, you're absolutely right, and walk away and say, what a dumbass.

I'll show him. Guys, sometimes, you have to just reach down inside of yourself, and find out what's really waiting down there for you to go down there and grab and pull up out of there, what's really waiting for you to go in there and uncage. You're going to have to go in there, and you're going to have to uncage your inner badass, and you're going to have to start walking and running and locking arms with people who have the same ideas and mindset that you are, and you're going to have to start wanting to get around people who are going to want to challenge you to think outside of the way that you've normally been thinking, not outside the box, to get rid of you. You're the damn box, because there is no box. You create your own lifestyle.

You are responsible for the outcomes, and when you realize that, and you embrace that, my friend, life opens up to you in a way that you absolutely never knew existed. Guys, I come from a place, realize this, that is just a place that I did not believe in myself. So, as I sit or stand in front of you tonight on this conference call, and hear these thoughts, these thoughts that at one time in life, I was fearful to share with you. At one time in life, I did not want you to know. At one time in life, if you would have told me that I'd be on a conference call sharing with well over a thousand people my most inner secrets and the things that go through my head and heart on a daily basis, I'd have called you a liar.

And friends, I'm telling you, not only today, right, do I know what financial freedom is. I'm running with one of the richest teams in the entire industry. I have people around me who can literally do whatever they want. They're retired from their jobs.

They understand what making money is all about, and they're doing a damn good job at it. I'm surrounded by some of the best leaders in the entire industry, and we're attracting people from all different companies and countries who want to run with us, and they're looking for the right leader to join. But also, friends, I know what internal freedom is. I know what mental and emotional freedom is. I know what it's like to be able to speak openly about what's really going on and share my story in hopes it inspires you to share your story because, friends, here's what I can tell you is somebody out there is waiting for you to button up your big girl or big boy panties, get out there, and tell them what's really going on, and invite them and command them to join you on your journey and not weenie or whisk you around and see if they might maybe want to possibly think about it.

Damn it, this is where I'm going, and join me or get out of the way. Friends, this is about movement. This is about culture. This is about going through trials and tribulations and realizing that every single thing that you go through is just the next step to condition you to go out there and take it to the next level and help more people. This is about really going out there and, damn, looking inside.

Instead of looking at everything around you as the reason why you are or aren't succeeding, did you notice how that can go both ways? But looking inside you and realize that no matter what's going on outside, whether it's a company compensation plan, products, job tips, dogs barking, dishes are dirty, it does not matter what obstacles are standing in front of your way, you have already inside of you what it takes to do big things in this world.

And I'm telling you, the only thing that is in your way is a decision. Focus, friends. Meet us in San Diego. Shake our hands.

Look at us in the eye. Let's walk in arms, freaking free, and fight the forces of evil. Guys, I'm gonna unmute the line, go crazy, scream. I'm pumped up. I love you guys. I'll see you in San Diego, and let's rock this thing. Guys, I love you. Peace.

Although you're listening to a private recording in a non-disclosure Empower Network customer training, the principles and strategies in this audio can be applied in any business. Although these techniques, philosophies, and strategies may have worked for others, no one can guarantee that they will work for you. We report real average earnings updated daily at empowernetwork.com forward slash income.php. The purchase of this or any other audio is not required to earn money in our affiliate compensation plan, and you can decide to not continue to buy these forever at any time. We hope, however, these ideas and strategies will assist you in building a profitable long-term business. Success takes hard work, determination, skill, and consistent effort. Please refer to our average earnings at empowernetwork.com forward slash income dot php.