The Difference Between Skeptical People and Toxic Negative People

When one searches on the internet (through Google, Bing, or any other search engine), one often comes across MLM minded articles, and so many of them are touting "no negativity". In fact, heaps of articles are online about how to deal with negativity. Some may even quote 'studies' that claimed successful people avoid negative people. Some of the articles are actually relatively accurate, but many of them are just outrageously wrong.

One website used this definition:

Negative people are friends, family, strangers, associates, or prospects that talk badly, or in a non-positive way about your dreams, goals and how you plan on accomplishing them.

Why would people be positive about your dreams, goals, or potential accomplishments? Your friends and family will probably support you just because they know you. But why should ANYONE ELSE care? It would be up to you to convince them.

The same author went on to describe techniques on how to overcome the resistance of the prospect... Though prospect here means a potential recruit into the organization, not a prospect for a sale. But that's not the problem.

Another author claimed that negativity comes from lazy people who can't profit easily from MLM and create a rant blog about it, then went on to use "pyramid // pyramid scheme" obfuscation to deflect the criticism. It was a classic diversionary tactic.

Both suffer from a fundamental problem of lumping in all criticism, including skepticism, as "negativity".

And if you can't tell legitimate questions from insults, you can never improve your situation.



Q: How do you improve at ANYTHING?

A: You find a different way of doing things, that works better.

Q: But how do you find a different way?

A: By asking questions. How do I save money doing X? How do I improve efficiency doing Y? How can I do things faster? And so on and so forth.

Without asking any questions, you can never improve your process. You can only ape, clone, copy, and replicate.

You cannot look for flaws and fix them if you ask no questions.

You cannot improve if you ask no questions.

Get the idea?

So what questions will you ask? That is skepticism, not cynicism.

Negative toxic people simply tell you that you will fail. You'll go broke and die in a ditch. Whatever.

But skeptical people will ask you questions, like "Does the product really work? Can you actually make that many sales? Are you sure this isn't a pyramid scheme? You seem to do almost no work; isn't this a ponzi scheme?" And so on and so forth.

And how *would* you know without asking questions (and getting answers)?

If your uplines and fellow associates are simply deflecting your questions, what does that say about their mindset? Are they more interested in cloning instead of improving?

That is the difference between skepticism and cynicism / toxic negativity.

But you ask, what if I am successful? Doesn't that validate the system?

Nope. If you do end up more successful, it can be due to just random luck, instead of effort.  After all, if average revenue per MLM participant is less than 2000 dollars per year (not profit) then the vast majority of people were UNsuccessful, that your success is an OUTLIER, and obviously, there are plenty of hardworking folks who did not succeed. So, if you are all using the same system, what is the difference between you, and them, if you both worked hard? And why is the a narrative in MLM that "obviously" those who failed "obviously" did not work hard?  Why could it not be luck or even the system that caused the vast amount of failures?

Yet that is the sort of question MLMers do NOT want to ask. It's called luck blindness, a cognitive bias. People want to BELIEVE it is their skill or effort, not luck, that allowed them to succeed.

MLM is afraid of BOTH cynics... AND skeptics. It does NOT want people to ask questions of it. It wants to stay stagnant, only changing names to confuse.

And the victim of that confusion, is you, the prospect.

For further reading:

http://www.differencebetween.net/language/words-language/difference-between-cynicism-and-skepticism/

https://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2011/02/08/im-a-skeptic-not-a-cynic/