"The Wellness Revolution", by Paul Zane Pilzer, Empower, December 2007.

More on
The Next Millionaires:

"Crisis or Opportunity - The 6 Myths and Realities of Economic Opportunity," by Paul Zane Pilzer, Your Business Magazine, October 2006.

"Crisis or Opportunity - The 6 Myths and Realities of Economic Opportunity," by Paul Zane Pilzer, Your Business Magazine, July 2006.

"Creating Fortunes in the New Economy," by Paul Zane Pilzer, Success From Home Magazine, September 2005.

"A Tale of Two Industries," by Paul Zane Pilzer, Success From Home Magazine, November 2005.

The Next Millionaires, by Paul Zane Pilzer, Direct Selling News Magazine, June 2005.

The Next Millionaires, by Paul Zane Pilzer, Success at Home Magazine, published March 2005.

A vast amount of wealth is being created over the next ten years. Here's why--and how you can be a part of it.

The Internet, television and magazines are all passive media. The only place where we actually learn something new, where we engage with new information to the extent that we may actually change our minds and try something new, is in a live, one-to-one conversation.

And that is what has given rise to the vehicle of distribution known as direct selling, or one-to-one marketing.

Direct selling has grown steadily over the past 20 years, increasing more than 91 percent in just the past 10 years. With over 13 million Americans and 53 million people worldwide involved, it is now a $100 billion global industry.

Yet as impressive as that is, it’s not hard to see why the real growth has barely begun.

For one thing, the demand is increasing exponentially. Because of the ever-accelerating pace of technological advancement, there is a growing flood of new products and services that desperately need their story told in the marketplace—stories that no amount of screaming TV ads or sprawling Internet pop-ups and banner ads can effectively tell.

Today, fewer than 1 percent of the population is involved in direct selling, yet people are pouring into the profession at the rate of 175,000 new people per week in the United States alone. According to Neil Offen, President of the Direct Selling Association, at the current rate of increase, some 200 million people will enter this industry over the next 10 years, effectively quadrupling its current population.

One-to-one marketing is already a force to be reckoned with—but there is an explosion ahead.

The Wellness Industry

A similar situation exists in a new health-related industry that has grown so quickly it already does more than one-third of a trillion dollars per year—and yet, relatively few people even recognize that it exists as an industry.

Wellness is not the same thing as health care. What we call the health care business is not really the health business, but the sickness business. Our medical industry today has very little, if anything, to do with health. The $2 trillion we spend on medical care, which represents one-sixth of the U.S. economy, is concerned with treating the symptoms of illness. It has very little to do with preventing illnesses or making people feel stronger or healthier.

Today, however, there’s a new industry that has nothing to do with sickness but is all about creating wellness. Wellness doesn’t treat people who are sick or address illness. Wellness is for people who are already well and who want to stay that way, slow down the aging process or keep from becoming customers of the sickness business.

Here is how I define wellness: Wellness is money you spend to make yourself feel healthier, even when you’re not “sick” by any standard medical terms.