Justin Verrengia and his wife D are not your typical people. They are a dynamic couple who were living in Costa Rica. D was working at times as a Hooters girl (yes, there ARE Hooters establishments in Costa Rica) and Justin was working his network marketing businesses from there.
Justin Verrengia was grinding. What’s that? Grinding is when you work a typical network marketing gig in the typical way, which means face to face recruiting, parties, 3 way calls to help recruit your prospects’ leads. That sort of thing. It’s a grind because it’s hard work and it wears you down. I know something about this because my own brother works with a network marketing company for years now and he’s always having night and weekend meetings, and holiday meetings and calls, since the time when you have to do this stuff is when your leads and recruits are not at their 9-5 day jobs.
I listened to a talk that Justin Verrengia gave and he talked about how he and his wife couldn’t afford a $400/month rent and they moved to China to teach English, but while their lodging was paid for they would only make something like $16,000/year and they almost ended up stuck there. Honestly I am not clear on whether the China thing was before or after Costa Rica. That doesn’t matter though because this is one interesting dude.
When Justin Verrengia speaks, these days, he takes on the air of a top motivational speaker. Sometimes his wife, D, gives a sort of intro to his talks, with a mini talk of her own. Once he gets started, he gets into a rhythm. It’s like he’s channeling some other entity and going off on governments and other “evil” entities that he sees all around him. He seems to not be a fan of governments and large corporations, seeing them as evil forces that are bent on controlling people for their own dark agenda. Well, while I take slightly less of a stance than he does, I don’t think he’s far off. He does seem to be a fan of the more conspiratorial side of things, however.
Hey, that’s his right.
To each their own.
Live and let live.
So where did Justin Verrengia Come From?
If I didn’t know better I’d say from another dimension.
He’s a cat who marches to his own beat. Once time he was giving a talk over the Empower Network Monday night call and he was talking for a long time, and I think he was recovering from a cold or something. He paused at one point and excused himself, proclaiming that he had to stop and blow his nose because there was mucus dripping out or something.
…and then he puts down the phone and you can hear him blowing his nose!
I thought that was interesting because here is a guy who is not hung up on any of the “polite society and manners” type of things. This guy doesn’t conform to social norms or anything like that. I never knew that someone like him could be a successful network marketer, or would even be interested, since my idea of the hippie types are that they don’t care about money.
Now, Justin Verrengia will tell you that although he doesn’t love money for the sake of it, but that he recognizes that it’s a necessary evil and it is the means by which we barter for our needs, so I see him as a hippie who, despite his conspiratorial bent, is pretty well grounded in a certain practical reality.
If it seems that I am making fun of the guy, think again. I’m actually a big fan and would love to sit down and chat with the guy someday at an Empower Network event.
So, anyway, Justin Verrengia calls himself the “Hippie Jedi”, which to me means that he espouses both the hippie and Jedi outlook about life. To my knowledge he is not an actual practicing Jedi of faith, but that’s okay.
I am still trying to crack the Hippie Jedi code, wondering how this strange (in a good way) dude has risen to such prominence in the internet marketing world.
Justin Verrengia also earned another odd credit – he was rescued from drowning by co-founder of Empower Network, Dave Wood. What happened was that Dave Wood found out that Justin and D lived in Costa Rica, not that far from where he also lives. They got together and went swimming by some waterfall and in the part where the falls come down and cause a sort of disturbance, and it created a down current that trapped Justin and almost drowned him. Dave saw his distress and that he was just about ready to go down for the count and he saved him, almost getting caught up himself.
That’s a very cool story and these guys really must have bonded that day.
I think one of the most important takeaways from this whole story is that, look at this guy… he’s off the beaten path. He is into yoga, raw foods, meditation, and kung fu. The guy is a classic kung fu movie maven and I could actually see this guy in a comic book shop. I have no idea if he’s into comic books, but he’s cut from the same cloth as the comic book men.
Justin Verrengia, as offbeat and unusual and unconventional as he is, made a huge success in the internet marketing world. That should tell you that if this guy can do it, you can too. Now I am not saying that in a mean fashion, as if to say look at this weirdo and look how he succeeded you can too. What I mean is that this guy is so unconventional that you would NEVER think that he would be a success in a business type venture, but look at not only him but Dave Wood and Dave Sharpe as well… NONE of these guys are conventional business types. There are other leaders who weren’t conventional either. Tony Rush was, I think, a Walden Books manager or something like that.
So there you go, an introduction to Empower Network’s Hippie Jedi, Justin Verrengia. He’s a different sort of a successful guy, but that should give all of us hope for our own personal success potential..