Paul Kemp

Born in 1948, I quickly learned the importance of health, nutrition, and self-employment as important parts of a dream lifestyle. I set out at a young age to find the answers to maintaining a youthful outlook by creating businesses that reflected my passions for health and the time-freedom to enjoy my life.

I grew up in Miami, Florida, and went to college in Tampa for 2.5 years before deciding that the best preparation for the future I wanted was out in the real world of experience. I did a lot of traveling all over the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Europe -- alternating between working my own home-based enterprises and a variety of jobs from farming to apple-picking to auto sales to pay my way.

It was only natural to gravitate toward network marketing of various superior nutritional supplements that couldn't be found on the retail market. Along my learning curve, I have been privileged to work with recognized leaders in the profession, such as Cindy Samuelson, Alan Pariser, Tom Chenault, and now Eric Caprarese.

For the past two years, I have been working on an informational natural health Web site (www.healthyplanetdiet), which is a great source of business contacts and new friends.

My next project will be building a global distribution network in the most distributor-friendly company I have found yet.

Don't get me wrong, in many ways it was a picture-perfect childhood, but my folks were very protective and controlling -- pushing me to study hard and become a doctor, lawyer, or perhaps a scientist.

Anyway, my father died when I was fifteen, and this gave me the opportunity to start living my own life. Ironically, my dad had always discouraged me from participation in sports and physical development -- he could barely walk a block at the time, thanks to smoking -- so when he died, I dropped playing trumpet in high school band and took up lifting weights to look good at the beach for the girls.

For a while I got on a career track I thought I would enjoy: working for the diplomatic service, perhaps doing a bit of espionage on the side. I had the language background needed, I had a lovely Cuban girlfriend, and I was ready for some international travel.

I should mention that Home Business was always appealing. My father ran a real estate brokerage out of our home toward the end of his life. He was on his own schedule, took me along to meet his clients. It also gave us an excuse to go fishing with his business clients, who had become friends -- and drive around the state of Florida, looking after some properties Dad had bought.

Mixing business and pleasure looked like a great way to live, but I still had to get through college and work my way up that federal corporate ladder. Boy, did I have a lot to learn!

I went to college in Tampa at University of South Florida. I studied political science, languages, and partying. I started to hear and read about a little problem our country was involved in over in Vietnam. It was 1967 by now. Returning GIs were coming back for their GI Bill education, telling us disturbing stories.

I read Dien Bien Phu, and The Quiet American by Graham Greene. I even read The Green Berets, which was a sanitized and glorified version of what was really going on then(...and now in other foreign wars.) I was beginning to have doubts about the morality of this glamorous career path I had chosen.

And then, along came Mary. One of my artsy girlfriends at school introduced me to Mary Jane and she opened my eyes to another view of reality that made a lot more sense than the conventional one of "Go to school, get a good job, put in your forty years, etc." You might say, I took the Red Pill.

I changed my major to English lit/creative writing. Started reading Kerouac, Aldous Huxley, and Alan Watts. Saw Jimi Hendrix, the Who, and Frank Zappa, Fleetwood Mac, and more at an outdoor concert one day; saw Simon & Garfunkel the next night. My lovely girlfriend and I drifted apart when the Diplomatic Service career fantasy dissolved.

To make a long story shorter: I have lived an exciting life and have learned many lessons about how to stay young at heart and healthy. The conventional life we are taught to live is a killer -- the standard American diet is a killer -- the careers my friends worked so hard to build inside academia and Corporate America ate up their health, screwed them over due to office politics, and finally killed them in return for all their good service. (My college roommate, for example was denied tenure and lost his job as a professor at our Alma Mater. He recently died in surgery, grossly overweight and with brain cancer.)

I've worked many jobs and started a number of small businesses. I've been a hippie farmer, an apple picker and pruner for commercial orchards, a landscape maintenance business owner with a crew of employees; I've been successful with real estate and landlording; I've been an economic development consultant to the U.S. Department of Commerce where I worked to turn a decaying logging town into a mountain biking Mecca attracting new residents and many of the top names in the outdoor adventure industry like Gary Fisher, Lance Armstrong, and many National and Olympic mtn. bike champs. (Google the Oakridge, OR Chamber of Commerce video!).

About twenty years ago, I fell in love with network marketing of nutritional products. I have progressed slowly, distracted by other business interests and my community development career described above. Along the way, I've worked with a few of the million dollar earners and learned from them. It is finally time to get serious about network marketing.

Learning from Magnetic Sponsoring has opened my eyes to what I was doing wrong, as I transitioned from my old conventional business ideas and adopted a new psychology of "pull marketing".

I have always been looking for freedom and good health, throughout my life. I love to write articles on health and business-related topics. My idea of a good time is spending the summer biking around Oregon, enjoying natural hot springs and quiet roads, then getting online in the evenings to promote my business.

This world needs what we have to offer. I've always enjoyed working with immigrants and residents of other countries, as they pursue that dream of freedom, health, and prosperity that America is, in many ways, a symbol of. One of my goals in network marketing is to build an international business to foster peace and free trade among nations. Another goal is to show folks how to easily lose weight and the pleasures of keeping it off through an athletic hobby.