IT WASN'T THE ELK'S FAULT - "Why we follow the system"

[Tomoe]

From the Desk of Russell Cooper...

During the 1970’s when I was at school, we often had snow in April, sometimes May. Now that’s not unusual if you live in Canada where it snows twenty-three hours a day. And back then, in the green fields of England, it wasn’t that strange either. It was just cold. Apparently, God was responsible for any weather changes and so were Allah and Buddha if you schooled in the middle-east or up Everest. But today, whenever it snows, rains, blows a hurricane, floods, or a volcano bursts, then it’s you and me. It’s our fault. It’s entirely our fault because we super-sized our order of McChips, flew in a 747, drove a car and left the hall-light on all night. In fact, our actions and meddling with the planet over the past thirty years has, so we’re told, created global warming and has set in motion climate change.

In Michael Crichton’s book State of Fear he unfolds the whole story how man meddled with nature and got it horribly wrong. You’ve just got to read it. I loved it, but many hated it. Not surprisingly, the story starts in America, in Wyoming, the home of Yellowstone Park in 1872. The big idea was to fence-off thousands of acres of lush greenery and leave everything to nature. Of course, God, Allah and Buddha all came too. The thinking was brilliant. To let animals, plants, flies, rivers and the weather do exactly what they all do best: to be driven by their own built-in genetic code. It’s called instinct, and it works rather well.

At the beginning, all was just dandy with the wilderness. But man, or to be more accurate, the ‘experts,’ couldn’t keep their meddling hands out of the honey pot. All they saw was dwindling numbers of cute cuddly Elks. There are two main problems being an Elk. Firstly, they are very tasty, so wolves liked eating them. Secondly, the Indians found that Elk skin made very nice shoes and coats. So the Elk was on its way out, or so it seemed to the sandal wearing experts. Something had to be done. And it was.

The ‘expert’ Wilderness Rangers bought some big guns and shot all the wolves. The Indians were banned from hunting Elk and everything else, so they had to shop for food at the local Seven-Eleven. Problem solved, overnight. The Elks lived. Fantastic! However, the number of Elks grew so fast that within eighteen months, they had eaten all the trees. That meant the beavers had no sticks to build their dams with so they went and lived somewhere else. Here in lies the problem. No beaver means no dams and therefore no irrigation, therefore no meadows and no flowers, no plants, no food, no small animals or big animals and ultimately, no wilderness.

Result: well, at best a desert, at worst, Disneyland!

Based on instinct, everything lives, everything works and everything gets along perfectly well. Sadly, man’s instinct is to interfere, meddle and take control. If only the experts had stayed away and let nature get on with being natural, then the Elk’s would have been carefully controlled and the beavers would have been happily beavering away building damns. The meadows would have harvested enough food to feed everyone inside planet-wilderness and it would have been around for us to enjoy today and for our children tomorrow.

But whenever you change one step or one segment of any working system, you’ll always be faced with turbulent results. However, if I had to play God between cuddly Elks and terrifying wolves, well trust me, I’d shoot the wolves too. But we must trust what’s already working. You see, for thousands of years, both wolves and Indians have been chasing Elks and turned them into either lunch or rather nice hat.

But there’s an even easier way of looking at what happens when you meddle with the system. And it doesn’t involve shooting anything. And it’s called chocolate cake. But for a moment you have to pretend you’ve never tasted chocolate cake before. Hard to imagine, I know.

In front of you are the ingredients, measurements and method to make the perfect cake. Enter man, instinctive interfering man coming to make a few changes and improvements. Without notice or warning, chocolate powder is substituted for chilli powder. It looks the same, it feels the same, and it cooks the same way. But what you’ve got is a chocolate nightmare.

The hidden problem is not the obvious one. You’ve never tasted chocolate cake before so you have no gauge or yardstick to check to see if your cake tastes as it should. Once you know how great chocolate cake tastes, then it seems weird why anyone would put chilli rather than chocolate into the mixture. But people do, everyday, and they wonder why things continually turn out badly.

For many years I added chilli powder into my business. I was just like the Wilderness Rangers shooting randomly at wolves. You see, I always felt compelled to change something, something critical within a system. And for many years I wondered why I made a total hash of most things. Strangely though, you don’t have to change everything to mess everything up. Nope. Just one small chilli for chocolate swap, or gun down a few wolves should do it every time.

There are a couple of human instinctual principles at work here, and mine are finely tuned! Oh yes, I’ve managed to snatch failure from the jaws of success many times. The first principle is one that men suffer from and it’s called, ‘let me fix it’. Women suffer from the second principle called, ‘if he’s fixed it, it must be wrong, so let me put it right’. In other words, we all want to improve it or make it better. We are desperate to leave our mark.

Of course, without these principles driving us forward, we wouldn’t have sky-scrapers, aeroplanes, ships, cars, the internet or onion rings. We are constantly improving and improving, changing and improving. And that’s a good thing. Change is good. It’s vital in fact.

Everything and everyone is programmed to meddle and interfere. My favourite example was from an early space mission in 1971. The fatal and often forgotten Apollo 12G295 mission was piloted by a maverick astronaut called Rock Martin-Thrustjaw. It’s a fact (ish). If I told you he was a chilli-powder wolf-shooter then you’ll get the message. He changed the guidance equipment just a fraction to what he thought was a better setting to land on the moon. Obviously, he knew more than all of Houston.

But instead of gently landing on the sea of tranquillity, he missed the moon by a margin of just 1%. Now, 1% is not much. Not much in everyday life when you are off to the shops, but when you’re flying at 28,000 mph, then you’ll miss your landing spot by the distance of London to Sydney. Pilot Thrustjaw flew right on by, no brakes, no turning back. With all the gravitational pull of a giant magnet, four years later he became the first astronaut to smash into Saturn. So not everything was lost from mission 12G295. Probably, you’re not that lucky.

You don’t have to be an astronaut or sharp-shooter to make foolish mistakes. You can be in Network Marketing too. Some time ago I was handed the actual advertisement that years earlier attracted the number one distributor. He went on to earn millions and so did his sponsor. The advertisement to me looked odd. It was out of shape and had a spelling mistake in the title. The guy who placed the ad originally received only one call so I thought he just got lucky! Surely I could improve on this, so I made a few changes to the copy and made it look much better. I corrected the spelling and added a few extra lines. It looked perfect. There was only one problem, it didn’t work. Yes, I had calls, but not from a would-be number one distributor; just a couple from the world of the hapless and hopeless.

What would’ve happened if I had kept the advertisement the same? Would lightening have struck twice? Would another top distributor have called and signed up? Well, now we’ll never know.

Also, I had the good fortune to see the complete system and all the materials compiled by a very successful distributor in America. She had developed a mail-order system that was working like a dream. She mailed a tatty-looking little paper booklet to thousands of people all over the country. In turn, the ones who were interested would purchase a package and follow a programme to ensure success. It was brilliant, successful, and she flew to the top of the compensation plan.

Not surprisingly, everyone else took that booklet and corrected the many spelling errors, improved the grammar, added photos, and made it look shiny and professional. One problem: they also removed the ‘magic and mystery’ of why it worked so well. You see, nobody ever bettered what she did. Nobody hit the gold seam the way she did. On reflection, I think each and every error in that system was intentional. She was very clever and became very rich.

Some years later during a training seminar, we were treated to an hour long power training from a top German distributor. He gave us all his best stuff. The local leaders pounced on it and went into mass production. Naturally, some small changes were made to make it look even better. The growing crowd was eager to get started. The system began with an attention-grabbing flyer. Perfect. The local leaders did everything brilliantly, apparently. Two long days were spent handing out twenty-thousand flyers at busy London train stations. The only downside to the joyful moment came when someone noticed the flyer contained no phone number or email address. Ah!

Today, things are very different. The temptation to change anything has been beaten out of me. The need to snatch failure from the jaws of success no longer fills me with excitement. I guess I’ve matured.

However, I still see the work of the Wilderness Ranger and astronaut Rock Martin-Thrustjaw all around me though. I witness new guys taking a multi-million dollar system, changing it, and within two days turning it into a failure centre. All our strength is needed to keep everything the same, no change, no interference and no meddling.

So, copy your upline, do what they do, stick like glue to what they do. If they go to meetings, you go to meetings. If they follow a system, then follow it to the letter. Don’t add chilli powder. Don’t fiddle with the guidance controls and don’t shoot any wolves. Just become a good student and learn what has to be done. Study the system that is in place and copy. Put your blinkers on and copy.

If you change one element of a successful system, then the whole system will fail in spectacular style. It hardly seems fair but those are the rules. Your upline knows best, and they want you to succeed.

Funnily enough, Yellowstone Park doesn’t have an Elk problem today. I think, sometime ago the Elks were driven away and can now be found chewing their way through the rain forests of Brazil. So maybe, after all, we are not to blame for global warming. Someone should get down there quickly and shoot some Elks. Fix this mess and save the planet!

Today, interestingly, my entire upline are bald-headed men. So in keeping with the rules of wealth and duplication, tonight, I’ll make the ultimate sacrifice. I’m shaving my wife’s head.

It’s going to be a great day,

Russell Cooper

[James Joly]

Russell

What you are trying to say is 'Go Back To Basics!'

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

The first thing to learn in any business is K.I.S.S!

Keep It Simple Stupid!

That does not mean don't ask questions. Ask lots of questions especially when trying to convert a prospect into a customer.

Don't shave any heads, just be yourself!