There was a stretch of years where I thought I was an entrepreneur during the earlier stage of my life.
I had business cards.
I had a “team.” I had products to move and a compensation plan I could recite from memory. I went to the meetings. I made the calls. I sold to my uncles, my aunties, my siblings, my friends.
- Herbalife
- Amway
- Jeunesse
I rotated through them like I was leveling up. And some of them bought. So I told myself it was working. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to see the thing that should have been obvious from day one: I didn’t own any of it.
(Sorry for the trouble and thank you for the support you guys, I appreciate you then…and even now, looking back.)
Not the product.
Not the brand.
Not the system.
Not even the “network” I’d supposedly built.
If the company folded on a Tuesday — and these companies fold — everything I’d put in went with it. Poof, GONE. No asset. No residual. Nothing to sell, nothing to pass on, nothing that compounded. I had worked hard inside someone else’s machine, and the machine was never going to be mine.
That’s the part people in those programs don’t see until it’s too late: you can pour years into something and end up owning nothing.
I want to be precise about what the mistake was, because “MLM is a scam” is the lazy version and it misses the lesson. The mistake wasn’t that I wanted to make money. That was fine.
The mistake was that I was building on rented land.
I was renting my business existence from a company that could evict me at any time, on terms I didn’t set, selling things I didn’t make, to people I’d eventually run out of. I confused activity for ownership. I was busy. I was not building anything that was mine.
That experience cost me money and it cost me relationships. But it bought me one principle that has governed every real thing I’ve built since:
Own the asset. Don’t rent your existence.
Everything I do now is structured around that line.
When I write, I write here — on a site I own, on a domain I own, with an email list I own. Not on a platform that can change its rules overnight, throttle my reach, or vanish and take my audience with it. I’ve done the rented-land version of that too. I’m not doing it again.
When I build anything, I ask one question before almost any other: if the thing I’m depending on disappeared tomorrow, what would I still have? If the honest answer is “nothing,” then I’m renting — and I treat it accordingly. Useful, maybe. Never the foundation.
This is a stewardship question before it’s a business one. If the point of building is to hand something down, then I have to actually own the thing I’m handing down. You can’t pass on a seat in someone else’s machine.
You can only pass on what is yours.
I’m not angry at the younger version of me who sold antioxidants to his relatives. He was hungry and he didn’t have the manual. Most people don’t. That’s most of why I write this down.
But I’d tell him one thing, and I’ll tell you the same: being busy is not the same as building. Before you give years to something, find out whose name is on it. If it isn’t yours, know exactly what you’re holding — because the day it ends, you’ll be left with only what you actually own. Make sure that isn’t nothing.