No Fair!... Or Is It? - The Physics of Compensation

No fair! If you’re a parent, you’ve heard this strident mantra, doubtless many times. Grown-ups say it, too, or think it anyway. No fair! is the universal human code for, “I don’t understand: why did things work out like this?!”

For example: Isn’t it unfair how much our society pays rock stars, sports stars and movie stars, while the unsung heroes and heroines of our world, the ordinary people, the school teachers and beat cops and farmers and firemen, are so grossly underpaid? When you think about it, it’s really downright criminal, isn’t it?

Or is it?

Compensation is like achievement: until you understand its governing laws, it seems… well, unfair. Most of us grew up with this often- unspoken, three-step rule for how to get things in life:

First, aspire to a worthy goal. Then, work hard. Meanwhile, be a good person.

The key to getting more of what you want, says this paradigm, is simply to pump up the volume: don’t just want something, want it real bad. Don’t just work towards it, work real hard. And while you’re doing all this, don’t just be good, try really hard to be a really good person It makes so much sense. Except for one thing: there is absolutely no evidence that it works!

Nonetheless, in stalwart, don’t-confuse-me-with-the-facts-ma’am manner, we keep following the formula anyway, because by gosh, it ought to work

But people don’t get what they want, says the Law of Achievement: they get what they expect.

The first time I heard this (it was Richard Brooke who had articulated it), I was electrified. Illumination! Here at last, something that had always seemed fundamentally unfair now made lucid, perfect sense. The world was not a capricious place: there actually was an orderly, consistent principle that could be understood and exercised. Einstein declared, “God does not play dice.” Evidently, neither does success.

Nor money. Bob Proctor talks about the “Law of Moral Compensation”: The amount of money you earn will always be in exact ratio to the need for what you do. Here is another way I have heard this expressed:

The size of your income will directly reflect the number of people on whose lives you have an impact.

Money is not a measure of your goodness or worthiness; it is a measure of your impact. It’s pure physics. Rock stars and sports stars and movie stars make such huge amounts of money not because society has a skewed values system, nor due to some inherently corrupt loading of the economic dice, but as a result of the simple fact that they have an impact on so many people’s lives That’s the power of network marketing: through leverage, you can have huge impact. The bigger the impact, the bigger the income.

And here’s the best part: the impact lasts long after you build the network. Residual impact equals residual income Reprinted by permission from The Zen of MLM, by John David Mann (www.zenofmlm.com)

John David Mann is one of the most recognizable and well-respected names in network marketing. As co-founder (with John Fogg) and senior editor of Upline®, Editor in Chief of Network Marketing Lifestyles and the current Editor in Chief of Networking Times, he has been keenly observing and insightfully commenting on the Network Marketing world for more than 15 years. And... John has been one of the top-earning distributors with the same networking company for nearly 20 years.

The Last Word is an i-book in process, an ongoing collection of short essays on the experience of network marketing. Each article is linked to an interactive forum for "reader comments" so now, you can have the last word. John says he may eventually ... finish... and publish this book (on, you know, paper). For now (and maybe forever), it exists as a living, growing conversation on the Internet. Just click the link to visit John's website: JohnDavidMann.com