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April 22, 2004
Amway inspires musician
By QBlog in
A Bard's Real World Blog is the online journal of Marc Gunn, a musician, poet, photographer and more. In the post titled Reminiscing my music business beginnings Gunn describes the scene where he receives his musical inspiration:
It was the Fall of 2002. I was living in an apartment on Riverside with my friend, Jason. My brother moved in with me. He was living on our couch while looking for a job in Austin. He'd hooked up with a high school buddy who was now an Amway distributor."The Seed Was Planted." I can't deny that there is something very inspirational about the Amway/Quixtar business. That was one of the things that appealed to my skeptic's mind. The mantra of "you CAN" demanded that IBOs focus on the positive instead of the negative. This very attitude seems to have inspired Gunn to pursue a career in music. I wonder if any other Musicians got their start in Amway? Say, wasn't Robert Smith (of The Cure) in Amway during the '70s?I remember sitting at our dinner table as they presented the case and asked, "What are your dreams? Big cars, a house, expensive stereo? Wouldn't it be cool if you could...?"
Somewhere in there they inspired me. Deep down inside I remember being a kid. My mom's old record player was playing, "I Gotta Know", the B-side of "Are You Lonesome Tonight" by Elvis Presley. I was pretending to be Elvis, singing my lungs out.
I was hooked. I signed up with Amway and started going to the conventions and spending too much money.
I bought my first electric guitar, an Elektra. I chatted with my friend Johannes in our United Campus Ministry organization at UT about jamming. Plugged in my guitar into that tiny Peavy amp. I had written a few songs over the previous two years of college. They were crap, but we enjoyed jamming to them as well. I was resolved to become a full-time musician.
A couple years later and too much money wasted, I finally left Amway, but the seed was planted.
Comments
One of the best concerts I have ever been to was The Cure in 1987, and one of the worst concerts I have ever been to was The Cure in 1998.
Maybe Amway was good for Smith...go the creative jiuces flowin'.
THEY CALL ME PASTABAGEL
Hi, sorry, it's me again. I just read this load of BS and I have to post a comment.
How empty does your life have to be for you to be "inspired" by dreams of "Big cars, a house, expensive stereo". Are you kidding me? Are we living in a rap video?
Yo, playa, what up? You wanna ball with the fancy cars and the big yards? You wanna ice your hos and get a platinum tooth cap? Damn, playa, all you gotta do is become a diamond distributor selling paper towels for $39.95...
I thought love and peace and butterflies and sunsets were supposed to be inspiring. But what do I know? My lifelong dream isn't to buy an $85 CD player.
I take that back, I guess a CD player is an unreachable goal, considering Amway probably sells it for $2500.
THEY CALL ME PASTABAGEL AND DON'T HATE THE PLAYA, BABY, HATE THE GAME.
ANYONE reading this:
Ask yourself?
Do you want what any of these broke guys that spent all their time complaining about Amway/Quixtar have?
NO.
exactly... be careful who you take advice from because a little over 99% of these "MLM survivors" just don't have what it takes to create any form of wealth PERIOD. ....and they compesate their own mediocrity by bringing other people down to their status.....
"BROKE LOSER"
including that rapper above.
how do I know they are losers?
they have spent days and weeks over 50hrs researching information (and only reporting the negative) without getting paid or improving the life of anyone including theirs.
When we read an e-mail from a person of such character as the pastabagel man, it totally supports your website as a site of integrity,and that we shuld believe the information posted. If you want to know about the Diamonds, Emeralds, or others, ask them, not people that have never been there. There are literally hundreds of Diamonds and thousands of Emeralds. So don't get the opinion of a few that have committed crimes and been terminated. Get the info from those that perspire and achieve and continue to achieve. Not from people that join, and think their IBO number is a lottery number, they never see the business as a business but rather as something they can do on the side and hope it works. And when they fail, they want to blame others so they can feel better about themselves.
If they ever owned a business, they would know that business takes time and lots of money to succeed.
Good luck on your job.
THEY CALL ME PASTABAGEL
Hi, it's me again!
As hilarious as the orginal post is, the comments that followed mine are even funnier. "All these broke guys"? You're talking about Amway's target audience.
I'm not an MLM survivor, because I have all of the pieces of my brain intact and never fell for the bogus pitches anyway. It's not that I don't want "Big cars, a house, expensive stereo" (that's a quote from the article remember), but didn't have to change my whole outlook on life just to get them.
But my original point was about how amway thinks of you, the prospective distributors. They think you are stupid. "Big cars?" Last time I checked, porsches and ferraris were relatively small cars. They say "big cars" because they know that for most of you, it's about showing off, not about being wealthy. "Expensive stereo"? Like a $300 ipod? What are they talking about? Do expensive stereos even exist? You can get a home theatre system for $499 at Circuit City. You can make that kind of money part-time at mcdonald's.
They still do this. Their promotional literature is filled with guys with action figure hair standing in front of really large houses, usually with some blond trophy wife. Amway is not about financial success, its about conspicuous consumption. And there isn't a single person who became rich by conspicuously consuming. (After they are rich is a different story).
You want to really get rich? Become a PastaBagel IBO. All you have to do is put on seminars where stupid people by tapes of you ranting for hours about "making it happen" and other meaningless glib phrases.
That's one way to get rich. There's also the porn industry. I hear a lot of people are going that way these days.
THEY CALL ME PASTABAGEL AND I CAN MAKE YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE IF YOU ATTEND MY SEMINAR "SECRETS OF A SUCCESSFUL AMWAY INDEPENDENT PORN AND EXPENSIVE STEREO DISTRIBUTORSHIP"
Great blog entry Q
Was Robert Smith involved?
Posted by: Poe | April 23, 2004 10:03 AM