"A Tale of Two Industries," by Paul Zane Pilzer, Success From Home Magazine, July 2006.

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More on
The Next Millionaires:

 "Two Industries Creating The Next Millionaires," by Paul Zane Pilzer, Your Business Magazine, November 2006.

"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.

A Holy Mission
     Since I first began closely studying the wellness industry, I’ve grown quite passionate about it. It has become something of a mission for me—and I’ve observed that it is a powerful mission for most network marketers who represent a wellness line of products or services. The great religions of the world became great partly by addressing the secular needs of their adherents. Indeed, the founding documents of most religions demonstrate that God wants us to be well—Deuteronomy contains expansive portions on diet, and gluttony was one of the original seven deadly sins. Yet today, the crying secular need of learning how to live a wellness lifestyle of diet and exercise is ignored by most religions and religious organizations. But they are not ignored by the network marketing community—indeed, recognizing and serving this global need is at the very heart of the network marketing model.
     Make no mistake: There is a crisis, a trend of epidemic proportions opposite to wellness—a crisis of overweight, obesity and the so-called “lifestyle diseases.” Right now, network marketing is the only force I see that has the potential to effect the huge change that’s so badly needed. And when you go out into the world to help improve people’s personal and economic wellness, you are adding value to society and contributing to the betterment of the world. That, to me, is serving God: doing the best job you can at serving more of God’s children.
     Given the confluence of these two trends, wellness and network marketing, I cannot think of any other time in history when the opportunity to serve this greater cause has been more abundantly available, not only to a few, but to millions.

The Next Trillion-Dollar Industry
     Ten or 15 years ago, it would have been tough to go into the wellness industry. Why? Because there was no such thing as the wellness industry. What happened? Aging has always

been a part of life; it’s not as if there were a sudden spontaneous “need” for a wellness industry. The wellness business appeared in the last decade because of new technology. As my theory of economic alchemy explains, an advance in technology often creates new demand, by creating new opportunities and options that didn’t previously exist. Wellness is a perfect case in point.
     Today we spend $24 billion annually in fitness club memberships. A generation ago, whoever heard of joining a fitness club? In 1975, jogging was regarded as a “craze,” a fringe thing, like the hula hoop, that would go away quietly if we just gave it time. The idea that an entire nation would consider running as a normal, everyday activity would have been seen as lunacy. To this $24 billion you can add another $12 billion paid to personal trainers. Personal trainers?! Twenty years ago, nobody would have believed it. A top-paid athlete, sure, but everyday people actually paying someone to show them how to step on and off a machine, just to stay fit? Who would pay for such a thing? We would: $12 billion worth.
     And this is only the beginning. Most people still either don’t even know that wellness products exist, or don’t believe such products actually work—until they or someone close to them has their first wellness experience. Then they become voracious consumers and new adapters of wellness products and services. At the rate it’s going, I project that by the end of this decade, just as the PC industry did 10 years ago, the wellness industry will exceed $1 trillion.

Network Marketing: The Ideal Wellness Medium
      One reason wellness and network marketing are such natural sister industries is that wellness is rich in the kinds of new technology that are best learned person-to-person. In fact, in many cases, there is no other way for people to learn about these new options.
     If you go to a conventional weight-loss clinic, they are focused on marketing their processed food products to you—they don’t give you lessons in wellness. The information just isn’t out there; almost all of the research in the medical business is on sickness. Where does the consumer turn? The only way to learn about wellness is through someone close to you who has had a wellness experience. You see your college roommate and go, “My God, John, you look great! You look so healthy—what did you do?” You bump into a wellness experience and start to find out that there is a whole wellness industry out there, with all sorts of new products and services.
     Correct information about diet, nutrition, vitamins, minerals, and supplements is almost all contrary to what we’ve heard from our medical community; for many, it runs counter to how we were brought up. There’s so much inaccurate information out there, people have become conditioned to it. When they first hear new, good information, naturally they’re going to be skeptical. The only way they will actually change their paradigm or start to learn new information is person to person—because they’re actively engaged in a conversation. This doesn’t happen overnight. It may take three, four, five or six conversations with different people before you actually change your mind. That’s why wellness, which is so clearly paradigm-changing information for so many people, really works best in a one-to-one interactive environment—like network marketing.

This article is adapted in part from Paul Zane Pilzer’s new book, The Next Millionaires, which focuses on the central role of direct selling in the years ahead.
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