“A man has only one escape from his old self:
to see a different self in the mirror of some woman’s eyes”
- Clare Boothe Luce 

Today, I want to share something deeply personal about a hard, yet beautiful lesson I learned as it relates to love and heartbreak.

But before I do, there’s something you have to understand about how I present myself online in my marketing — what you see and read here is the REAL me.

It’s not a caricature that we created and neither Raymond or I write behind a pen name. My real name is Fernando Ceballos and my friends really do call me “Ferny”.

Even Master Lee has taken to calling me “Ferny”, instead of “Mr. Ceballos”. It’s kinda cool, I must admit.

That being said, ever since leaving my corporate job 2 months ago, I’ve been reflecting quite a bit as to how I arrived at the place I’m at today.

I’m financially free, no longer deal with the famous L.A. traffic, I wake up and go to bed at whatever time I please and, truth be told, I’m very happy.

I have the best business partner a person can have in Raymond, who shows me he cares by kicking my ass when I need it and helping me become very rich. (I try to do my part as well.)

I’ve reflected quite a bit over the past week, and I was able to trace the source of this good fortune to one of the most painful and traumatic experiences of my life — a break up with a beautiful woman.

The Most Intense 4 Months of My Life

You see back in 2003/2004, about a year after graduating from MIT, returning to L.A. and entering the corporate world, I was miserable and lost.

I was making decent money, yet I still perpetually got myself into credit card debt and partied to numb the boring and disappointing experience of working in the Defense Industry.

And then while visiting Texas for my best friend’s wedding, I fell in love with an old college friend I got re-acquainted with during that weekend. The next 4 months was the most intense, passionate and torturous time of my life.

I was in L.A., she was in D.C. working within a very intense 2004 presidential campaign. Yet, I was committed to making it work and do whatever it took to being with her.

I was basically what one would call, “a love sick wuss”, willing to do anything for her and obscessed with talking to her everyday.

Like the old saying goes, “what goes up, must come down”. And as quickly as I fell head over heels in love, I came crashing down 100 times faster.

The pressures of the campaign, the distance, among other circumstances, caused her to abruptly end our realtionship. I was devastated.

I was 23 and had never before fallen that hard, that fast for someone.

Picking Up the Pieces

I spent the next 2 years picking myself off the ground, and trying to make sense of this very cruel life. I didn’t understand why I was so dependent on someone else to be happy.

Being nieve, I guess I assumed at the time that happiness is contigent on finding a mate with whom you can share a life with.

I wasn’t happy at my job, nor was I happy in L.A. at the time. I figured that since I was the happiest during this brief 4 month love affair, that must be where happiness lies.

About 2 years after the break up, a weird guy with a big head named Raymond invited me to his home to see “the plan”. (I had met Ray a year earlier at USC grad school, taking a class on Computer Systems Architecture — Yippie! )

On the night of “the plan”, life was breathed back into this lost soul’s body.

What I saw over the first month of being involved in network marketing, was hope that there may exist another way out of my unhappiness.

Initially, my interest in network marketing was the possibility of being able to leave my job and have the money to knock away the things I did not like about my life - one by one.

First my job.

Then I could leave L.A. and should the opportunity to find love again present itself, I wouldn’t have to deal with a long distance relationship.

I could simply get up and move. Simple right?

Deep Inner Game

Over the next year, I showed the plan and sponsored 17 people into my business, I was making some money, discovered the benefits of personal development and I read TONS of books on dating & relationships.

I was literally able to feel myself growing on the inside from all this. I grew more confident, learned quite a bit about people as a result of showing the plan and watching my downline (as if they were fish in a fish bowl) live the tough life of a network marketer.

I must say, even though it was frustrating watching my downline struggle, fail and eventually disappear, it was even more fascinating seeing it unravel — hearing their complaints, doubts, excuses, dealing with their negative friends/family and eventually giving up on their dreams.

To those that stuck around, I became a mentor and thanks to my obscessive study of marketing, business and personal development - I found myself in a solid footing to be that mentor.

I started finding purpose to my life in helping others better their lives.

My hope for financial freedom, became a certainty with only time keeping me from achieving it.

And most importantly, I discovered why it was I had fallen so hard and experienced so much pain back in 2004.

As I grew within myself, I was becoming happier and as a result, the pain of the heartbreak I felt in 2004 started to disappear.

Ambition and resolve, replaced my insecurities and sadness. And even my relationships - romantic, family and business - became more enjoyable and stable.

I started applying my leadership and new life skills to all aspects of my life.

As Mike Dillard would put it, I was becoming the “alpha”.

Why We Fall…

For the first time in my life, I was happy being alone. My dependency on others for a purpose driven life vanished.

It is entirely possible that none of my recent good fortune would have happened if I had not been forced to pick myself up from such a devastating heartbreak. I’m reminded of a quote from ‘Batman Begins’…

“Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.“

And that’s exactly it. The disappointments, heartbreaks and failures did not end once I found myself through my business… I simply learned how to recover quickly from them and continue moving forward.

So why is it that I am communicating this to you via a newsletter meant for network marketers. I’m sure you’d much rather learn about the latest in marketing, instead of my life’s drama.

Well, the truth is…

Your business will never grow if you don’t grow!

Your relationships won’t get better, until you become better!

Your financial situation won’t transform, until you do!

A few people over the course of building my business have accused me of being money hungry and greedy, because I wish to be wealthy. It’s an interesting statement when you think about it, because it’s usually the people who have the worst relationship with money that say that.

I recently attended a seminar where the instructor said, “Consider that the balance in your checking account is consistent with the character in your life.”

And I don’t mean this to be condescending, because some of the happiest people I’ve ever known were very poor, including my father. But they had a healthy relationship with money.

They weren’t in debt. They still managed to save for a rainy day. They can still buy presents for their kids on their birthday - albeit very modest ones — on top of being very happy.

I guess my point is, your relationship with your finances, your relationship with your girl friend, your relationship with your career, etc. is consistent with who you are and your maturity as a human being.

When you work on developing yourself — your finances, relationships and career become clearly measurable representations of who you are on the inside.

The Purpose of Pain

I don’t know what life holds for me in the future, but I do know one thing…

Pain and disappointments are not meant to destroy us, but are meant to guide us and let us know that something about who we are being at that moment needs to change.

And the level of pain, is representative of just how much you need to change and grow. If you are experiencing a lot of hurt in your life, business or relationships, look upon it as a blessing and learn to interpret that pain so you can begin to change what needs to change.

I wish I could tell you that the AMF course, could help you fix what’s going on inside you. If it did, we’d probably become very rich, very quickly like many of the self help gurus out there.

What it can help you with is in helping you mature and grow in developing and marketing your business. You may even be able to get away with only doing that and achieve financial freedom…

But be careful and make sure that your personal growth catches up with your finances. Otherwise, the opposite will happen and your finances, relationships and life will shrink back down to your true state as a person.

It’s no wonder that my business oscillated up and down for years, before becoming financially independent, alongside my friend and business partner Raymond.

Thinking back to 2003 and 2004, I’ve come a long way and it seems like an eternity since I cried myself to sleep for many of the nights during those years…

But I’m so grateful that it happened and wouldn’t dream of changing anything about those events. I simply hope that besides the marketing help you receive from us, that this letter has helped you discover something important about yourself.

Genuinely Yours,

Ferny Ceballos

How To Turn Mistakes Into Profits …

“If we got you a life vest, will you get in the water?”
- Milo to Ferny at Lake Austin         

Whew! What a week!?!

Ray and I got back on Tuesday, exhausted from an awesome weekend in Austin, TX. for the Traffic Formula LIVE workshop. It was so great to be in the same room with 100 of the most dedicated network marketers I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting.

MS TEAM: Mike Dillard, Justin Christianson, Ray Fong, Tim Erway, Ferny Ceballos, Craig Allen

It was even more gratifying hearing their positive responses, watching the the dozens of video testimonials they left us, sharing a few margaritas with them, taking pictures, signing autographs and having them walk out of that weekend with a completed lead generation system for their business.

When we said “hands-on”, we meant it!

But as great as the weekend was, not everything went according to plan (nothing every does!) and there were things that happened, which provided us with some very valuable “lessons learned”.

Ray, Ferny & Mike talking about Email Marketing

Oddly enough, one of the lessons we gave during the workshop was on “mistakes” and how to handle them when their occur in your email marketing.

So I’m going to give you that lesson and expand on it a little, based on our experiences during that weekend… which includes my Lake Travis WetBike incident…

Traffic Formula LIVE Exclusive - Lessons Learned

As you start growing your business, something is going to go wrong at some point and maybe make some silly mistakes. We are all human right?.

You’re going to:

• Forget to insert a link into your email
• Your formatting may get screwed up
• You may forget to activate your autoresponder
• You may accidentally mis-name the URL of a webpage which you gave out to thousands of people
• etc, etc.

Murphy’s law says that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong, so there are endless possibilities for mistakes and while you should always do your best to prevent them, if they do happen you can turn them to your advantage.

But first, you must acknowledge the mistake, correct it and make up for it by creating a lesson out of it or having some fun.

In the martial arts, soft-styles like Judo, Jiu-Jitsu, and Aikido are based on a system of techniques designed to use the momentum and aggression of your opponents to your advantage — in other words, using the situation to help you meet your objectives, instead of forcing things.

The same with life. “Jiu-Jitsu” your way through life - go with the flow and turn negatives into positives.

Or as Bruce Lee would say, “Be like whaataah”.

It’s much easier and more effective than resisting everything that doesn’t turn out the way you want it to.

Ok, so here are a few situations and how to make them better, starting with something that happened recently…

Oops #1 - “Where’s My Bootcamp?”

You may be one of the folks on this list who opted into the Attraction Marketing 10-Day Bootcamp, but never received what was promised…

Well, as I was auditing our autoresponder service yesterday, I noticed that our autoresponder sequence had been turned off in our icontact.com back-office. As a result, no new AMF bootcampers received their 10-day bootcamp. (Mistake acknowledged.)

Both Ray and I were mortified and immediately corrected the issue. (Mistake corrected.)

Now, here’s some advice for you to make sure this doesn’t happen to you:

• Subscribe to your own newsletters periodically to make sure your system is functioning the way it should.
• If you notice a dip in sales or inquiries from your subscribers, make sure people are getting your emails.
• If you are using iContact.com as your autoresponder, know that everytime you add a new email to your sequence, it’s going to pause your autoresponder and you’re going to need to re-enable it in the IContact.com back-office.

Moving on…

Oops #2 - China Outlawed Formatting

A few days ago, Ray had written up some awesome content and had sent it via email while he was traveling in China. Well, something weird happened in that when he hit the send button, it arrived in everyone’s inbox as a big glob of text, which was impossible to read.

Well, a couple of days later he wrote another piece on ‘beating up Chinese peddlers’, and I decided to have some fun with it.

So when I sent it the AMF list, I made up a story about the Chinese government having outlawed formatting, which is why the last message came out messed up and I had taken it upon myself to send the current one from AMERICA!

Along with the fact that it was about Ray punching a Chinese peddler, the message went over really well and even got a laughing response from Mike Dillard. (Yes, he does read our emails!)

Oops #3 - The WetBike Incident

Finally, you are really going to enjoy this one. It has nothing to do with marketing, but it is about me coming very close to being eaten up by the propeller of a large house boat.

After the event, the Magnetic Sponsoring team and a few friends went out on a day trip to Lake Travis and rented a house boat. We rode along the lake, then the house boat anchored and it was time for everyone to swim…. everyone except me that is.

You see, I’m not a very good swimmer at all and I haven’t been in a pool for about 4 years, so I probably wouldn’t do too well with my limited experience.

Well, after watching everyone else go down a water slide into Lake Travis I became a little envious and Mike’s friend, Milo, came up with the idea of putting a life jacket on me and having me jump in.

Seemed like a great idea and I agreed.

So we got the life jacket, I strapped it on and down I went on the water slide and into Lake Travis. It seemed to have worked great and I got to “swim” around and even took this cool picture of me and Ray in the water:

Well, you can say I got comfortable in the water pretty quickly and one of the other activities which was going on around us was the use of a Wet Bike by the Magnetic Sponsoring crew.

So when the opportunity presented itself, I hopped on the bike with someone else and off we went, racing around the lake at about 50 mph for about 20 minutes…. it was hella fun!

But then…. tragedy struck! Kinda…

We tipped over after hitting the wake of our own houseboat and into the water we went. The bike was upside down as well and we did manage to turn the bike over and the other person with me was able to get back on the Wet-Bike, but unfortanately I was not able to pull myself up.

Being stuck in the water quickly turned into a rescue operation, where I was being towed back to the boat by hanging on to the back of the WetBike.

As the boat and WetBike came closer together, I soon realized that I was in between the BIG house boat and the WetBike and my head was going to be crushed in between them.

As the boat and WetBike collided, I pushed myself under water, watched the two vessels bounce off each other, while I sucked in some tasty lake water. I came up after a few long seconds, coughed up some water and slowly pulled myself along the side of the boat.

I want to take this opportunity to thank Ray and Mike Dillard for pulling me out of the water and handing me a cold beer to calm my nerves.

Now what’s the moral of the story?

If you go swimming and riding on a JetBike out on a Lake, make sure you go with friends who have a vested financial interest in keeping you alive.

Mike even offered to buy me swimming lessons. (BTW Mike, when do they start?)

Anyway, going back to the whole ‘mistakes’ thing… know that whatever you do, it’s better to do something and learn from your mistakes, than to wait for everything to be perfect and never do it at all.

And for the record, I have no regrets about getting in the water. It was hella fun and I have some awesome friends looking out for me!

Oddly enough, in the Attraction Marketing Formula course, there’s an awesome chapter on how we turned our Martial Arts Master into a YouTube celebrity and got him over 500,000 video views in less than a year.

The exposure from the video marketing has transformed his business, but one of the most valuable parts of that chapter is what we would have done differently to have maximized our results — our lessons learned.

Learning from the mistakes of your mentors and leaders is some of the most valuable information you can gain and also spares you the grief, time and money of going through it yourself.

Then you can pass on that experience to others. The more you do and learn, the more wisdom you can offer others and the more people you will attract to your business.

To Falling Forward,

Ferny Ceballos

I just got back from Austin yesterday and I’m still recovering from the awesome weekend Ray and I had with Mike Dillard and 100 of his closest friends.

We’ve put together this short video, which I think you will really enjoy and give you a glimpse into the first and last Traffic Formula LIVE event…

Traffic Formula LIVE Party at Mike Dillard’s Place

I’m spending the day with family soaking everything in from this weekend. We’ll be putting out some good content for you soon.

In the meantime, enjoy hearing from Dennis Karganilla, Tim Erway and watch Mike “take a dive” at the end.

Traffic Formula LIVE - Party at Mike Dillard’s Place

Cheers!

Ferny & Raymond

P.S. If you wanna be in the know about future joint MS/AMF events, go to:
http://amf.magneticsponsoringonline.com

The Things You can Learn From Chinese Peddlers and What That Has to Do With Your Online MLM Leads

“Fake it till you make it.”
- Your Upline

From the Hotel Room of:
Raymond Fong; Shanghai, China.
June 3, 2008 -

Oh wow, if you haven’t ever visited Shanghai, you should definitely do yourself a favor and check it out some day.

The history and culture is extensive, the food amazing and a bit “different” at times (I just had a duck and a snapping turtle in the same sitting and washed both of them down with some local beer), and the way of the people quite intriguing.

Being in the land of shopping and bargaining and being the marketer that I am, you bet I am paying close attention to the sales tactics being demonstrated here at Yu Bazaar.

What I’ve discovered is that what works for Chinese peddlers selling Gucci knock-offs will not work for you as a network marketer.

Let’s examine.

The streets of Yu Bazaar are flanked by little stalls and holes-in-the-wall stores selling everything from purses, suits, children toys, to antiques. As my girlfriend and I were walking around, taking in the bustling streets, we were approached countless number of times by peddlers selling knock-offs.

The first time it happened my girlfriend yelped and almost punched the poor guy in the face. I can’t blame her. Heck, I was about to punch the guy in the face myself. You see, the guy crept up on us out of nowhere from behind.

As we were walking from one stall to another, he somehow managed to sneak up RIGHT behind us and said “watches, sunglasses, bags***” in his broken and heavily accented English (never mind that we were not in the market for watches, sunglasses, nor bags).

We were like, “Holy gazooks where’d this guy come from?“ He could’ve just as easily have said, “Give me your money – I am robbing you.“

The Mistakes That Almost Got Him a Bloody Nose

Now you see why he almost got socked in the face? These are just a few of the mistakes he made:

Eerily Similar Isn’t It?

You might laugh but sadly, that’s very close to the same approach some network marketers take when it comes to prospecting. They are sweating bullets when it comes time to prospect. They think that if they come unnoticed on their unsuspecting prospect, it’s a good thing.

WRONG.

If you sneak up on your prospect, right away you trip your prospect’s defense mechanism and all he/she can think about are to either punch you in the face and/or start running.

Either way it’s bad business

Of course, then we come to the question of whom they tend to prospect. Whom do they target? Everyone and anyone that breathes and moves. They think that they should prospect and sponsor everyone from their mother to their neighbor’s godson’s pet parrot.

As you may know from studying Attraction Marketing Formula, that’s a huge no-no. Why waste your time on the looky-loos? Why bother with the tire-kickers? Wouldn’t it be great if there’s a way to filter them all out before you waste one breath talking to them?

Gawd, imagine if some tourists at Yu Bazaar actually wore huge tags around their necks that said “looking for watches, sunglasses, and bags“. How much easier it would’ve been for our lil’ “ninja” friend eh? Unfortunately that’s not the case for him.

But There’s Hope…

However, for you as a network marketer, that’s totally possible and realistic with the approaches we share with you in Attraction Marketing Formula.

And what about the whole concept of posture?

Obviously our ninja friend had none as not only was he muttering but he also looked obviously nervous and out of place (duh, he was selling illegal knock-offs). Again, think about how some network marketers approach their prospects. Do they talk to them with complete confidence and total composure? Do they speak as if they are the ones with something of value to offer and are the ones doing their prospects a favor?

Odds are, no.

What tends to happen more often than not is that network marketers speak with hesitation and are just shy of begging their prospects to join them. Heck, the network marketers themselves have no idea what they got into – let alone trying to explain to their prospects what they would be getting into…

And people wonder why there is a stigma surround MLMs and how they are nothing but pyramid schemes.

Wouldn’t you also wonder the same thing if some dude pulled a ninja teleporting act right to the back of your head and start muttering something about “home business opportunity” and “getting rich“?

This is What You Need to Do

See, what you need to do is not only filter out your prospects but when you do find a real prospect you also need to show some posture. You need to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the opportunity to join you, your team, and the business opportunity you have to offer is of tremendous value; and you need to communicate this clearly.

(Better yet, let a MLM capture page do this for you online.)

I do have to admit, after we finally got use to the idea of having random people pop up behind us when we aren’t looking and muttering “watches, sunglasses, bags“, curiosity got the better of us and we went for a little walk…

But that’s a whole different story with entirely different lessons for another time.

For now, all I can say is that while these Chinese peddlers may not be able to benefit from Attraction Marketing Formula and learn how to harness the internet to enhance their businesses, there is absolutely nothing that stands between you and that knowledge.

It’s time you stop risking getting a bloody nose and two black eyes, it’s time you give your prospecting strategy and business an upgrade. Take it online and let Attraction Marketing Formula help you save time and make more money!

*** China is famous (or notorious depending on how you look at it) for selling famous brand knock-offs such as Chanel sunglasses, Rolex watches (we call them “Folexes”), Gucci purses, etc. ***

To Affinity and Beyond,

Raymond Fong