The symbiotic success of direct selling & personal development
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Panning the bench during the Philadelphia Eagles vs. Green Bay Packers wildcard game this January, the camera keyed in on the unique sight of Eagle’s wide receiver A.J. Brown reading a book on the sidelines. Turns out, it’s something Brown’s been doing for a while, trying to find peace in the midst of chaos.
“This game is violent, and you need everything. I’m just trying to slow my brain down,” Brown told ESPN’s Sal Paolantonio about his mid-game read of Jim Murphy’s personal development book, Inner Excellence: Train Your Mind for Extraordinary Performance and the Best Possible Life.
Media and online questions came quick, but they didn’t deter Brown from continuing what he believes necessary to strengthen his game. He explained, “I’m proud of myself because I’m not changing who I am just because the world may say this is strange, it’s unorthodox. I’m…not afraid to push myself in areas or pick up a book because we’re playing this masculine football game…As men, we gotta be strong, tough guys. I don’t believe that. I can lift weights all day but that doesn’t do nothing for me if my mental is not correct.”
That quick-take footage went viral. It shot Inner Excellence to number one on Amazon’s bestseller list overnight. Criticism fell away, and Eagles fans posted thanks to Brown for opening their eyes to something new.
While the odds of rising to such status and prosperity were incalculably low, the Gilded Age prompted countless ordinary Americans to dream of more.
New Thought Philosophy
Today’s professional football has earmarks of rags-to-riches. Through hard work, determination and maybe a bit of luck, NFL players can achieve extraordinary success and often great wealth. It’s a fantastical picture of the American Dream manifesting for few but inspiring many—and an aspiration with origins in the Gilded Age.
Immigrants to America in the 1870s brought new ideas and mechanizations from Europe’s Industrial Revolution. Their contributions to our technical efficiency and productivity made the US the world leader in manufacturing by century’s end and ushered an era of opulence, excess and self-indulgence called the Gilded Age.
Palaces rose along Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue and housed society’s upper crust, the richest of self-made men like Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. We still marvel at examples of ostentatious, Gilded Age architecture, like the Biltmore Estate near Asheville, North Carolina and The Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island.
While the odds of rising to such status and prosperity were incalculably low, the Gilded Age prompted countless ordinary Americans to dream of more. And when the financial Panic of 1893—caused in part by high tariffs and decreasing international trade—crashed the Gilded Age, it ignited progressive reform characterized by common men believing they could improve their life conditions.
Key to improvement was education, and accessing books had become easier for people decades before. Perhaps, the founding of Southwest Advantage Books in 1855 fostered an audience of readers for the New Thought Movement. But it is sure that Southwest established the oldest entrepreneurial and direct selling program for college and university students in the world in 1868. They helped college graduates build business and character skills for life-long careers and continue that mission today.
By 1886, traveling book salesman David H. McConnell offered his female customers fragrance samples to boost book sales, inadvertently starting the California Perfume Company which later became Avon. Women loved the products, and he recruited ladies to sell door-to-door. Persis Foster Eames Albee became the first Avon Lady to come calling and the rest is direct selling history.
Educational access and women’s contributions outside the household are indicative of the reformative New Thought Philosophy, which helped people harness personal power through positive thinking, life skills and discipline. Boston University and Harvard graduate, Orison Swett Marden was a proponent of “right thinking.” Inspired by Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes and others’ writings, Marden surmised potential was man’s greatest untapped resource. In 1894 his best-selling book, Pushing to the Front, told stories of everyday people achieving extraordinary things under extreme difficulties.
By 1897, Marden created SUCCESS, the earliest personal development magazine, which showcased the achievements of men like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. Literary contributors included personal development founders like Napoleon Hill, Samuel Merwin and W. Clement Stone.
Prolific thinkers answered public demand for New Thought during the first 30 years of the 20th century. James Allen, As a Man Thinketh and The Epoch; Wallace Wattles, The Science of Getting Rich, on Audible today; George Clason, The Richest Man in Babylon; and Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, in print since 1924.
The paths of personal development and direct selling crossed publicly for, perhaps, the first time with Elbert Hubbard’s widely distributed essay, A Message to Garcia. The Larkin Soap Company salesman established door-to-door consumer sales in 1881 and installed sales premiums that grew from souvenir postcards and handkerchiefs to Morris Chairs and Chautauqua Desks that are highly collectible today.
It’s little wonder that the industrious Hubbard wrote and widely distributed an essay like Garcia, which contrasts the main character’s self-driven effort against “the imbecility of the average man—the inability or unwillingness to concentrate on a thing and do it.” Garcia simultaneously commiserated with company owners, who thought employees lazy, and taught employees to think differently.
Resilience and Visualization
The Great Depression brought individual frailty in an industrialized nation into sharp focus and established a lasting, symbiotic relationship between direct selling and personal development.
Frank Stanley Beveridge traveled door-to-door for years with Fuller Brush and was its director of sales. He and wife, Catherine, founded Stanley Home Products and pioneered home party direct selling during the depths of the Great Depression. Stanley’s novel, demonstration-focused sales methods valued social networks and instilled confidence in salespeople. The by-product was resilience for folks whose lives had been upended.
The more resilient we can be, the better we can overcome adversity, then through that positivity in our lives we are able to create connections, relationships. But we have to be that kind of person that people want to be in a relationship with or secure enough to be able to go out and do our jobs, especially in direct sales, to meet people, to make friends out of strangers. — Nancy Bogart / Founder & CEO of Jordan Essentials
New thoughts about life, potential and individual place in the world simmered, then boiled over in post-Depression America. Napoleon Hill spent two decades rubbing elbows with Edison, Bell, Henry Ford, King Gillette, Theodore Roosevelt, etc. Law of Success compiled secrets of America’s greatest achievers and set the stage for Hill’s arguably greatest book, Think and Grow Rich, whose publication ran parallel to Stanley’s direct selling foothold.
“What the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.” Like Marden before him, Hill recognized the mind (desire) and body (result) connection, a motivational principle reaching across generations and eras. Personal achievement’s 13 steps stressed optimistic autosuggestion to train the subconscious mind, something French psychologist Emile Coué conceptualized in 1920’s, Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion. It later influenced Norman Vincent Peale, Robert Shuler and W. Clement Stone, too.
Visualization, not education, Hill reckoned, was key to success. Everything begins with the thought process of seeing yourself succeed before it happens.
On the heels of Hill’s publication came Dale Carnegie. No kin to the Gilded Age steel magnate, this Missouri farm boy turned self-improvement writer/lecturer spent nearly 25 years crafting public speaking and interpersonal skill courses in New York before he wrote How to Win Friends and Influence People. His timeless tips and strategies became an overnight sensation for those desperately needing guidance and empowerment post-Depression. Self-improvement was the goal; the formula focused on a person’s ability to change their thinking to better communicate and lead. Countless professionals attended his business performance-based Dale Carnegie Training, and the book still influences leaders of all kinds.
Personal development helps you recognize and break free from negative patterns, like self-doubt or fear of rejections, that can keep you stuck. It shifts your mindset toward growth and positivity, giving you the tools to build meaningful connections and a sense of belonging. — Sarah Shadonix / Founder & CEO of Scout & Cellar
Purpose and Validation
People, pushed to the brink by World War II, craved belonging, community, purpose and understanding. In 1950 came Man’s Search for Meaning by Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, who described daily struggles of Nazi concentration camp life and its impact on prisoners’ mental states. Central to a person’s motivation, he deduced, is the desire to find meaning in life. The book raised the collective consciousness of America just as the joyous, optimistic and exuberant post-war 1950s cruised into focus.
Protestant preacher and author Norman Vincent Peale deeply cared about the pain, difficulty and struggle of human existence but scuttled his final draft of The Power of Positive Thinking to the trash bin. His wife, Ruth, rescued it and, perhaps, its 1952 release validated individual suffering and readers finally felt seen. He’d built an audience with his weekly radio show, The Art of Life, and now Peale encouraged readers to use positive thinking to recognize and work toward their hopes and ambitions.
Find, Develop, Multiply
At 29, Earl Nightingale, the would-be WGN Chicago radio announcer and writer of The Strangest Secret in 1957, got his hands on Think and Grow Rich. Hill’s idea that you become what you think about coalesced with his own research and everything clicked. Thoughts and habits control outcome; people can learn new things; Nightingale would teach them.
He recorded The Strangest Secret, the classic sales-motivation tool for his own Franklin Life Insurance Agency and in short order it outpaced his fulfillment capabilities. The Strangest Secret became the first spoken-word certified gold record and solidified Nightingale’s personal development legacy.
We all have a greatness inside us. Sometimes, all we need is someone to help us find it, develop it and multiply it. — Jeff Olson / Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Neora & author of The Slight Edge
Post-war 1950 saw the rise of direct selling companies like Tupperware, Jafra and Home Interiors, where Brownie Wise, Jan Day and Mary Crowley introduced personal development en masse to female audiences. Fueled by sales efforts of women who were looking to establish new and expanded roles for themselves in society, these direct selling companies shifted personal development from primarily a man’s growth opportunity to one that included everybody. Wise, Day and Crowley shaped the business model and enabled women to not only build social capital and break the isolation associated with being housewives and mothers but also earn economic capital that put food on their families’ tables.
And in 1959, Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos, ambitious Michigan entrepreneurs who partnered a decade earlier, founded Amway, a company that would go on to revolutionize the direct selling industry and remains a global powerhouse.
The ’60s were marked by volatility, turmoil, struggle, protests and even assassinations, then in 1969 Apollo astronauts landed on the moon. A new iteration of SUCCESS magazine, relaunched by W. Clement Stone a decade earlier, bore witness to it all. He remained publisher into the 1970s and released The Success System That Never Fails. Partnering with the magazine’s editor and author of The Greatest Salesman in the World, Og Mandino, as well as Paul J. Meyer, founder of the SUCCESS Motivation Institute, SUCCESS became a modern torchbearer for personal development and shined its light on the direct selling industry.
“Our job is to build people in this industry. That’s been happening since DeVos started Amway, since Mary Kay was around,” DSN Legend Rudy Revak said.
Mary Kay Ash experienced the symbiotic relationship of direct selling and personal development during her career with Stanley Home Products. When she founded Mary Kay Cosmetics in 1963, she aimed higher than just selling make-up.
“What was her goal? To teach ladies how to build a business. Mary Kay didn’t sell cosmetics. She sold the concept that they could build a business and become successful. She focused on helping them to develop, and her messages were always on personal development,” Revak explained.
Joe and Eunice Dudley, who got their start with Fuller Brush back in the 1950s, launched Dudley Beauty Corp in 1967. The Dudleys also followed a holistic approach to business building by helping women discover what was on the inside and pulling it to the outside through personal development.
The Era of Rohn
Personal development empowered vast audiences in the 1970s when Stone and SUCCESS launched Positive Mental Attitude rallies. Legacy gurus like Peale, Nightingale and Mandino shared the stage with newer voices: Denis Waitley, Art Linkletter, Paul Harvey, Zig Ziglar and rising star Jim Rohn.
Rohn started out as a human resources manager for Sears and in 1955 became a direct selling distributor. He built successful sales organizations and ran an expansion into Canada, but in the 1960s turned his sights to public lecturing and launched a new era of broadscale legitimacy for personal development.
For 45 years, Rohn asked four million people in 6,000 audiences, “What’s got you turned on? What’s got you up early? What’s got you eager to face the day? What’s got you inspired to learn the extra skill, put in the extra time, go the extra mile, learn how to work with people, guarantee your future?”
There were directives like: Work harder on yourself than you do on your job. Don’t wish for less problems, wish for more skills. And then there were the books and audios, over 25 of them, like The Power of Ambition, Take Charge of Your Life and The Day That Turns Your Life Around.
Over a decade after his death, Rohn’s speeches are free to watch on YouTube, Spotify and Instagram, offering new generations glimpses of a personal development legacy, whose disarming presentations distilled complex, personal characteristics and situations to drive home his points.
Rohn’s effectiveness, reach and influence are undeniable and can’t be underestimated. Names like Stephen Covey, Brian Tracy, Harvey Mackay and Les Brown, all authors whose books consistently appear on best-selling lists, came up under his tutelage.
“I first saw Jim speak when I was 17,” Tony Robbins wrote about his original teacher and mentor, Rohn. “He introduced me to a new way of thinking. He taught me that if you want anything to change, you must change. If you want things to get better, you’ve got to get better…Jim taught me that as soon as I committed myself to excellence, I would really have something to give others. And that’s a big part of what makes life meaningful for me.”
John C. Maxwell absorbed Rohn’s philosophy and for 40 years has connected people to the actionable steps they need to improve their lives through more than 100 books and his corporate lectures.
Every person has a longing to be significant; to make a contribution; to be a part of something noble and purposeful. — John C. Maxwell / #1 leadership expert & best-selling author
Parallel Evolution and Relevance
When eXp Realty CEO Glenn Sanford acquired SUCCESS Enterprises, it ensured the venerable brand would maintain its relevance as a trusted, curated space with high-quality, impactful content, including innovative coaching techniques that break through today’s digital noise and help people act purposefully in their own lives.
“From inception, eXp has valued personal development as a key underpinning of the success of real estate professionals,” Sanford explained.
“SUCCESS stands out through its timeless philosophy of holistic success—nurturing mind, body and spirit. Our brand’s authenticity, coupled with a unique blend of inspirational stories and practical advice, creates a distinctive content delivery style that resonates with diverse audiences from the new entrepreneur to the experienced business executive,” SUCCESS CEO Amy Somerville said.
Neora Founder Jeff Olson and Co-CEO Deborah Heisz created Live Happy in 2013 to bring positive psychology research into the light. Their print magazine, website and lifestyle store presented that science in engaging, consumer-friendly ways. The Live Happy Now podcast launched in 2015 and expanded in 2023.
It is now Live Happy’s primary messaging source, and offers two new podcasts, Happiness Unleashed and On a Positive Note. When loneliness emerged as a leading health issue, Live Happy offered perspective and solutions to tackle the problem, including a month-long happiness celebration in March.
Before Live Happy, however, Olson was a top, direct selling field distributor before founding The People’s Network and Neora with 13 years of top field leadership at PPLSI sandwiched in between. He is a driving force behind the belief that tools, systems and personal development is foundational to every sales organization. The Slight Edge lays out Olson’s philosophy that seemingly insignificant, daily decisions impact overall effectiveness and success in immeasurable ways.
“Mentoring is a lot like playing tennis,” Olson shared. “You can’t play unless there’s another good player on the other side of the net. When you find someone who’s receptive to learning, it’s exciting. You can’t teach all the answers, but you can teach them about mindset and philosophy. And that can help them navigate, solve problems and shorten their learning curve.”
I think one of the highest-value, under-promoted parts of what we do in this channel is give people access to mentors, to a peer group of positivity. It taught me the value and the impact of a mind shift, and how a single shift at the right time from the right person, in the right moment can radically change everything. — Blake Mallen / billion dollar brand builder & Shift podcast host
Direct selling continues to facilitate the disruptive shifts necessary for individual change and serves it up through thought-provoking teaching and opportunities like Patrick Bet-David offered in 2009, when he founded PHP Agency to empower families, build thriving communities and cultivate entrepreneurs to uphold capitalism and free enterprise.
Ed Mylett spent years in executive roles building direct selling company, World Financial Group and is now a fast-growing, social media business personality, who combines spirituality, faith and the inner workings of the mind as well as tactical thought and actions to help elite achievers max out their performance. As a top-ranked podcast host, two-time best-selling author, TV host and global speaker, Mylett believes where you are in life is the sum of the decisions you’ve made. “The instant you accept responsibility for everything in your life is the moment you acquire the power to change it,” Mylett said.
John Addison likes to say, “You’re either green and growing or ripe and rotten.” It’s that kind of attitude over 35 years that lifted him through Primerica’s ranks to Co-CEO, and later established him as a modern-day personal development lecture guru through speaking engagements and best-selling author. His new book, Turn Your Fear into Fuel, is hot off the presses.
“Being the kind of person others look up to and are glad to be around, the kind of person others will follow, isn’t something that happens to you. It’s something you decide, something you work on. It’s not a gift. It’s an ongoing project. And it’s more than worth the effort,” Addison shared. Because people don’t follow a leader’s words, “They follow your integrity, your spirit.”
If history has taught us anything, it’s that direct selling’s path runs parallel to personal development. Tactics, messaging and delivery evolve. Technology increases accessibility. Methodology, like gamified and virtual programming, modernizes. Messaging keys to new themes like emotional intelligence and mindfulness, but retrieves original edicts like resilience, purpose, connection and earning, too. And people change. Today, there’s high demand for proactive, relatable, goal-oriented, actionable and intentional personal development. If people don’t see how it applies to them, they are quick to move on.
Heisz explained this perfectly. “The reality is that a big part of personal development is not simply consuming and digesting the information, it is putting it into action. People still need to take that next step, whether it is reading ten pages of a good book a day, as suggested by Jeff Olson in The Slight Edge, or journaling about the good things that happened that day for three minutes a night to focus on building a more optimistic outlook. So, in that sense, personal development is still very much the same. No one can do it for you.”
From the March/April 2025 issue of Direct Selling News magazine.
