Once upon a time — true story, despite the fairy tale beginning — a friend  sent me a link about a company that makes excellent products and distributes them through network marketing, or mlm  as do many fine companies nowadays.  We’ve been friends for a while, so I’m sure he means well and only wants to save me from disappointment down the road.

There was a time when I would have reacted with an I’m-right-you’re-wrong attitude and called him a “dreamstealer,” parroting the old-school folk-wisdom of the network marketing-MLM culture.

But I’ve mellowed with age, so I gave it some honest thought.

He tells me he’d love to try the product but is definitely not looking for another income stream.  (What?  Is he independently wealthy already?)  Then he says he didn’t see a price anywhere on the site I sent him to, but he’s sure it’s way above his budget.

Uh… Lemmie get this straight.  Definitely not looking for another income stream, but product he’d love to try is way above his budget?  O-ka-a-ay….

Until now, I had no reason not to consider him a credible source of information.  Why wouldn’t I?  He’s highly educated.  But this little exchange has reminded me not to be intimidated just because a person has a bunch of letters behind his or her name.

Not that I think any less of him.  It’s just that I’ve stopped thinking less of myself.

Don’t get me wrong though.  I have nothing against higher education.  Many of my relatives have two or three sets of letters behind their names.  And we love each other dearly.  But that doesn’t stop us from pointing out perceived errors in judgment or teasing each other unmercifully about boneheaded statements — like the one my friend just made.

So now he’s more than a friend.  Now he’s moved up to that special niche in my heart reserved exclusively for boneheaded relatives.

Boneheaded relatives only have your best interests at heart and just don’t want to see you get hurt.  Ya gotta love ‘em for that.

But the part that irks me is that they’re thinking of you as a loser who’ll end up as an unfortunate MLM statistic instead of one of the winners who’ll come out on top.

Gee.  Thanks for the vote of confidence.

But since I’m open to receiving new information, and since the link came from a friend, I clicked on it and read the article all the way through.  It was very interesting, like the way articles in the National Enquirer are interesting, but you don’t know whether to believe them or not.

The guy who wrote it has a lot of letters behind his name.  He’d done quite a thorough research job, digging up all the bad news about the company he’d been in.

It would have been really convincing if he hadn’t ended the article by recommending that the reader forward the link to five people so they could each forward it to five people, and so on.

He’s using network marketing  andMLM to talk people out of doing network marketing and MLM.

Maybe I should look up his family tree.  I might discover he’s a long-lost boneheaded relative.

How to get over it when your boneheaded relatives (and others) try to talk you out of network marketing or MLM  “for your own good”?  Subscribe to “Your Daily Inspirational Quote,” and get some positive energy back into your life.

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