‘How did they develop all those ingenious psychological hooks anyway?

Another article from Perry Marshall:

Earlier I talked about the psychological hooks of the MLM collection of emotional “widgets.” I listed 15 – things
like the idea of passing a business on to your kids, getting respect from your wife, getting even with all those
people who said ‘no’.

Yeah, I listed 15 but there were hundreds. Just press “play” on one of those cassette tapes and out they come.
You’re laughing, you’re crying, you’re punching your fist through the ceiling, you’re imagining that it’s Free
Enterprise Day in Charlotte North Carolina and YOU are the man of the hour.

You’re standing there with your wife and she’s wearing a gorgeous evening gown and a diamond necklace and you’re
sporting a cool black tuxedo with a dark blue bow tie and a man you revere is giving you a bouquet of flowers.

Your peeps are moshing against the stage celebrating your success and you’re now holding the microphone in your hand and 45,000 cheering people are RIVETED by your story of failure, struggle, and eventual victory. They’re on the
edge of their seats, hanging on every word, they want to go to the bathroom but they can’t move, they hope to be like
YOU someday.

YOU are their hero.

YOU’re the alpha. You’re the prince and the princess. You’re the one everyone looks up to.

Who came up with this?

Well I’ll promise you one thing:

It sure wasn’t no committee sitting around a mahogany table in a conference room overlooking geese and ducks
and a corporate water fountain surrounded by flowers and shrubs manicured by illegal immigrants from Mexico hired
through a local landscaping company.

No… it was developed by thousands of renegades, criscrossing the backroads of America at night, dreaming
huge dreams, sifting through ideas like needles in haystacks, occasionally producing a winner. Sooner or later
the winning idea becomes known to everyone and then they go to work perfecting it.

Hundreds of thousands of people, thousands of leaders, then an elite dozen or two dozen meet together in private
resorts and decide what to accept, what to reject.

It’s a power mastermind. It produces gigantic results, forces that are far larger than any single man, woman or company.

(Seldom does anyone survive in business without some kind of mastermind, whether formal or informal. The very best
masterminds are by application or invitation only, they’re held behind closed doors, and most people don’t even know
they exist. They’re not supposed to.)

And while most people think that the “Fat Cats” of the world are jealously holding back some Big Secret, the truth
is, they’re perfectly eager to share the secrets IF the student is willing to pay the tuition and listen. All those
“Fat Cats” know that most people begin with eagerness but most get weary and stop listening just around the time the
latest episode of ‘Lost’ comes on TV.

A great mastermind gives you the seeing power of a thousand eyes and the hearing of a thousand ears. It’s one of the
secret leverage points of those who earn 7 figure incomes.

Masterminds are not unique to MLM’s. They function in every industry.

But I still have not explained the true reason for the power of a great mastermind.

In a truly great mastermind, everyone knows they can rely on the others in the group for information, for joint
ventures. For the most part, a handshake is sufficient to seal a huge deal.

Thus the transaction cost is effectively zero inside the group. It’s frictionless commerce.

That’s why it’s so powerful.

If the Mastermind has 10 members, in some ways it has 10 times the power of a single company, without everyone
having to form a company together.

I’ll explore this tomorrow in an installment called “A Pride of Lions vs. 4300 pounds of Jackals.”

Perry Marshall

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