A long, long, LONG time ago, in my earliest years of adulthood (I’m an adult?), a family friend who also happened to be our local dry cleaner got my family involved in Amway. Now: I’m not here to debate the pros and many MANY cons of multi-level marketing. Anyone who has a bit of knowledge about Amway has strong feelings about it on one side or the other, but if you can get past those feelings and stay with the plot I’d appreciate it. The dry cleaners were the stereotypical “other side” of MLM…if you went into the dusty, shadowed back room of their shop with them, it proved that they sold the soap and the stain remover (actually really good stain remover) and the vitamins. But they made just as much if not more on the tapes.

So, so many tapes. Stacks of them, taking up multiple shelves along one wall, five deep in most cases. Hundreds of tapes.

Yes, cassette tapes. Shut up about my age. At least they weren’t 8-tracks.

In case you weren’t aware…one of the primary ways that many people higher in the distribution chain of many MLMs make their money isn’t through selling products, and it isn’t through getting other people to sell products for you. They make their money through the sale of training tools…books and audio lectures and videos that purport to teach new and existing distributors how to sell products better and find other people to sell products for them. Every month, we’d go pick up a book or two and 6-8 cassette tapes that held lectures and motivational talks from people who had made thousands of dollars in Amway and were more than willing to show you pictures of the motorhomes and houses and cars that proved that they did it. The books themselves were fantastic…it was my first contact in my relatively young life with Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie and Steven Covey. They exposed me to ideas that would influence my decision-making and goal-setting from those days to the present. And most of those tapes did actually try to do what they were claiming. They weren’t lying about that part, at least. I listened to many a speaker talk about quantity over quality…that you learned to make contacts by making contacts. That nothing could substitute for knocking on doors, talking to people, getting over your discomfort in being a salesperson, and doing it again and again. That sometimes you weren’t trying to convince a person’s analytical brain but their emotional brain. That you won the game by PLAYING the game long enough and not by magically having the DNA that destines you to greatness.

In fact, I even spend one kind-of-wasted weekend in a football stadium with around 25,000 other people at an Amway “convention” (which was in and of itself another product to be sold akin to books and cassettes). Person after person, both high in the Amway corporate ladder as well as those who had “reached Diamond” by signing up enough people and selling enough stuff, were given a microphone and allowed to encourage and coach us in front of a crowd that any tenured college professor would kill to entertain. And, at the end of the first day, Kool and the Gang performed! (Honestly this fact doesn’t have anything to do with my point but Kool and the Gang don’t need no reason. Get down on it.)

Now, I think I spoke about Amway to exactly one other person in my life. My interest in Amway waned like the experience of so many others, and thankfully I didn’t lose as much money as thousands of others have with either false visions or misleading promises of grandeur. But I don’t regret it because many of the lessons on those tapes still sit in my head and pop up when needed. And one of them came to mind when listening to a semi-recent podcast that computer-programmer-cum-productivity guru Cal Newport had when interviewing Essentialism author Greg McKeown. When asked how he does the sort of hard work entailed in writing and producing original work when under only self-imposed deadlines, he was reminded that sometimes you just have to “sit in the chair”…meaning that sometimes you have to just do whatever it is that you want to get better at doing.

And that was the real issue with the cassettes and the books and the “conventions”…they couldn’t ever replace the time spent talking to people and building relationships and going on sales calls and doing the things that resemble work. They provided a sort of quasi-work to people who needed to be doing significantly more real work…you could listen to tapes for five hours and feel like you were energized and immersed in a business that you weren’t actually doing during all of those hours. Not only was this feeling pointless, but it was also counterproductive…it didn’t make a dime’s worth of profit for those who weren’t actually selling anything. It also provided an income stream to supervisors who then didn’t have to encourage their underlings to actually sell products and would make them money regardless, which is why several organizations eventually lost lawsuits brought against them through the sales of these products, but again…that’s another story.

It’s so easy to take any hobby that you’d like to improve or a skill you’d like to have and spend all of your time reading about it or preparing it or thinking about it…and not actually DOING it. But eventually, for nearly everything, you need to sit in the chair. You need to actually do the things that you want to improve. Now this doesn’t mean that there’s no value in doing those things previously mentioned. There’s value in planning and studying and reading. But it cannot reach the same level as the competition itself. And this may not be a problem for you, or maybe it’s a different problem depending on what activity we’re talking about. I have zero fear in firing up my copy of Magic the Gathering: Arena and battling with literally any stupid deck idea that I have, and the winning or losing of it all doesn’t affect my self-confidence an ounce. But I will study chess forever and not play another real person and never think twice about it unless I make myself do it. The gym? I want to get in there and either make or miss reps. Talking to other strangers to try to make new friends? Please don’t make me. Can’t I read a book instead?

But all of those activities require some amount of pure practice. You have to get in there and actually do the work. Gather your data, make your plan, and then WORK your plan. Be willing to fail. Build that deck with the jank card that you love and sees zero play but actually PLAY it. Yes, you might lose. But you’ll be okay. You’ll either win or you’ll learn. Start that blog, but don’t spend all of your time thinking about marketing or formatting and spend zero time actually writing. Get in the game. Sit in the chair. Do the work.