"How To Be One of The Next Millionaires," by Paul Zane Pilzer, Your Business Magazine, April 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.

Network Marketing and Wellness
     As I began exploring this fascinating new industry, I found myself asking a basic question: How are people learning about all these new approaches to their health and fitness?
     Certainly not through their doctors. Doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies are mostly part of the “sickness industry” because, until recently, most scientists and public policy leaders viewed wellness or preventive care as “quackery.”
     Today, numerous scientific studies have validated what a few million Americans seem to have known all along: There are hundreds or thousands of efficacious treatments to make people feel healthier, to slow the effects of aging, or to prevent diseases from developing in the first place. But until you first experience one of these treatments working for you or a member of your family, you are probably going to remain a skeptic and miss out on improving the quality of your life, and reducing your long-term health care costs.
     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 are conditioned to it. When they first hear new, good information, naturally they’re going to be skeptical.
The best 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.

Distribution in the New Economy
     In my 1990 book Unlimited Wealth, I wrote that the new wealth in that decade would be created mainly by people who distributed things, rather than by people who made things. The great fortunes of the 1990s would be made in distribution.
     But that opportunity has come and gone. The fortunes to be made today and in the years ahead will be made by those who are involved in teaching people about new products and services that they either didn’t know existed or didn’t know were now affordable. Intellectual distribution, as opposed to physical distribution, is where the greatest fortunes are being made today and will continue to be made for at least the next decade.
     Manufacturers today report that the greatest bottleneck they have is not in creating the next great new product; it’s how to reach people and teach them that these new products exist.
     People like to do things the old way. They fight change. In everything we do, from shopping and cooking to taking care of our health, we often have the nostalgic view that the good old days were better, that the good old ways are the best ways.

     But the “good old days” were times of manure in the streets and rampant diphtheria, of abject poverty and wretched living conditions. In the “good old days,” when you heard that three out of 10 children were going to get polio, you could only pray that it wouldn’t be your child, versus praying that we could cure polio.
     The truth is that the “good old days” were not so good. Nevertheless, people tend to cling to the known and resist the unknown. Consequently, when they watch television, read magazines or surf the Internet, they tend to look for things that reinforce what they already know. Most media, in other words, is essentially passive—not a place where people are going to learn a new way of doing something.

     So where will they learn? There is really only one place: from other people. The most effective way we have to teach people the new method is one-on-one, word-of mouth communication. This is why, even though we have sophisticated video-conferencing tools available, businesspeople will still fl y clear across the country to meet face-to-face when they have important issues to decide.
     The best opportunities are not to go work for some big company, but to go into business for yourself as an entrepreneur.

Network Marketing in the Years Ahead
     I have always been keenly interested in education; I taught college students for 20 years at New York University, and in the 1990s, I developed an educational software product line. One of the most exciting things I’m seeing about this new crop of 10 million millionaires is that they are more often teachers at heart, rather than conventional businesspeople. They are people who learn about a new product or new service and adopt it for themselves and their families—but they don’t stop there. They then go out and teach new people what they just learned.
     Network marketing is both the oldest method of sales communication and also the newest. And it’s the best method we have today to change someone’s paradigm and teach them about a new product or service—a new way of doing something that they wouldn’t have gotten by reading a magazine, surfing the Internet or watching television.
     Person-to-person, word-of-mouth communication represents the cutting edge of intellectual distribution. This is why we are seeing so many Fortune 500 companies jumping into the direct selling arena, and Wall Street investors such as Warren Buffet entering the business. Their engineers do a tremendous job designing and building the product, but then they have no way to tell the customer it’s really a different or better product, other than through one-to-one communication.
     Network marketing has grown steadily over the last 20 years, increasing 91 percent in just the last decade. With more than 13 million Americans and 53 million people worldwide involved, it is now a $100 billion global industry. Yet as impressive as this is, it’s not hard to see that the real growth in this business model has only just begun.
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