Law Three

Always Make Your Contribution Bigger Than Your Reward

Increased contribution to others is essential for lifetime growth. As you become more successful, numerous rewards will come your way: greater income, praise, recognition, reputation, status, capabilities, resources, and opportunities. These are all desirable things, but they can be growth stoppers. They may tempt you to become fixated on just the rewards, rather than focus on making still greater contributions. The one way to guarantee that rewards will continually increase is to not think too much about them. Instead, continue making an even more significant contribution—by helping others to eliminate their dangers, capture their opportunities, and maximize their strengths. Greater rewards will automatically result from this, and your future will continue to be filled with increasingly rewarding ways to contribute. Always focus on creating new kinds of value for larger numbers of people, and you will ensure that your contribution is always greater than your reward.

Making a contribution for its own sake solidifies and expands your relationship with the outside world. It is through this relationship that your continual growth will be funded and supported. If you’re not making a contribution to others, it’s easy to get caught up in your own thoughts and go around in circles. By focusing on contributing and letting the rewards take care of themselves, you anchor yourself in the real world. Through the insight and feedback you get from others, you grow your understanding of how to create greater and greater value.

Putting Value Creation First

One of the most striking things about Mary Anne Ehlert is that, even as a top agent at one of the biggest financial-services companies in the United States, she never paid attention to how much her commission would be on any product she sold. In fact, she set up her business in such a way that she wouldn’t know, so that the only factor influencing her decision about what to sell a client would be whether or not it was the best available product to meet that client’s needs.

When Lisa Pijuan-Nomura, an artist and successful arts programmer in Toronto, puts on a show, she never thinks about what the take at the door is going to be or how the event will pay for itself. She focuses all her attention on trying to put on the best show and trusts that if it’s good, people will come. And because she produces high quality consistently, people do come, and they tell others. She has never lost money on any show she’s produced.

The way in which Lisa and Mary Anne approach rewards is not a blind leap of faith; rather, it’s good business practice, and good practice in any area of life where you want to grow. When you focus on making a real contribution and allow your audience to decide how it will repay you, the rewards can often be greater than you might have imagined. Focusing on the rewards is a trap because it diverts your creative energy from what generates the rewards in the first place: the value that your audience gets from what you do.

It’s the Contribution That Makes Us Grow

Most of the time, the act of making a contribution itself will be a tremendous source of growth and will produce many unforeseen rewards. In 2003, Matthew Passmore was a corporate lawyer, miserable in what he describes as a very lucrative but soul-destroying career. At lunch, he would escape to the local bookstore to look at art magazines and dream. One day, the cover of arts and culture magazine Cabinet caught his eye with the message “Free Land Inside (not a joke).” He opened it to read a poignant and beautiful yet tongue-in-cheek piece about how the publishers had purchased a half-acre of scrub land in the desert of New Mexico, henceforth dubbed, “Cabinetlandia.” Though they were offering readers 99-year leases on magazine-sized plots (just big enough to stand on with two feet together) for a penny in a section called “Readerlandia,” Matt’s interest immediately went to “Artistlandia,” said to be reserved for future artists’ projects. Inspired, he wrote to the editors with what they later described as an “outlandish and extravagant scheme for building the Cabinet National Library” on the land. The editors were tickled and published his plans and drawings. A year later, much to their surprise, he drove out to the desert with three friends and they actually built it—the cabinet embedded in a curved wall of sandbags, earth and cement, housing every issue of Cabinet magazine, as well as a card catalog, a guest book, and a snack bar, which at the time consisted of a bottle of water, a pair of size 10 men’s work boots (for protection from scorpions and snakes) and two cans of beer. Though venturing out to a remote and desolate tract of New Mexico desert might not be most people’s idea of a holiday, for Matt and his friends, it was like a vacation—only better, because they had this fun, challenging, and possibly slightly crazy objective of realizing the vision of the library. He really wanted nothing out of it other than to do it and to contribute something to Cabinetlandia. The magazine published Matt’s account and photos of the installation, and later presented its story at the venerable Tate Modern gallery in London.

Cheeky and audacious as it was, for Matt, this project was the starting point of a career as a successful and sought after full-time artist operating on a global scale. The spirit of contribution has continued to be a major factor in driving his success. Rebar Art and Design Studio, which he formed with two other artists (including one who had helped build the library) became most famous for Park(ing), which involves turning a metered parking spot into a temporary public park (and paying ‘rent’ by feeding the meter, of course). It began in 2005 as a local guerilla art intervention in his home town of San Francisco, but as people expressed interest in doing it in other places, he and his partners decided to create a simple free how-to guide and let them do it themselves rather than charging a consulting fee. By making the model available through an open-source approach, Rebar allowed individuals and communities to make it their own and use the concept to draw attention to their particular needs and purposes. It took off like wildfire. In 2011, when Rebar stopped counting, the annual event called Park(ing) Day had been adopted in 162 cities in 35 countries. Nearly 1,000 parks sprung up on city streets for one day in September, surprising and delighting residents and passers-by and encouraging them to think differently about a plethora of local issues. With this success came interviews on the BBC, NPR, and other major media outlets around the world. Matt became a sought-after speaker, and Rebar’s reputation was established worldwide.

Yet he is quick to point out that none of that would have happened had they approached the project as a money-making or brand-building endeavor for Rebar as it began to take off. Artists need to make a living just like everyone else, yet they sensed that this idea needed to be presented in a pure spirit of curiosity and exploration, true to its roots, so that others could adopt and adapt it without reservation. As a result, they were able to seed a global movement that has become a vehicle for civic action, awareness raising, creativity, and fun in cities around the world.

Abundance Flows to Contributors

This brings up an interesting point: people want to align themselves with others who are making great contributions. On the other hand, people do not want to partner with, create with, or give more to those who are known for taking more than they give. In fact, the tendency is to want to balance the scales and take back from those people (or organizations). For this reason, choosing to take rather than to give, fueled by the attitude that “he who has the most wins” or by the desire to gain as much as possible, regardless of the cost to others, is a shortsighted way to live. Those who do this end up devoting a lot of energy and resources to their “defense budgets.” They try to protect what they’ve gained and envy others who have more, rather than living with a sense of abundance, trusting that they will always have what they need.

The No-Entitlement Attitude

In order to make your contribution bigger than your reward, you have to have what we call a No-Entitlement Attitude. This means you believe that you have to make some kind of valuable contribution to others before you deserve any reward. We talk about this with our entrepreneurial clients because it’s an attitude that all entrepreneurs must have. If they don’t succeed in offering something that others perceive as being valuable, they won’t stay in business for long. But everyone can benefit from having a No-Entitlement Attitude, not just people who run their own businesses, as Gaynor Rigby realized one day early in her career at The Strategic Coach.

Gaynor is a remarkably talented, capable, bright woman with a big heart and big dreams. She left England at 18 to come to America because she felt she could have a bigger future here. After being a nanny, first in Cincinnati and later in Toronto, she took a job at The Strategic Coach as a receptionist. The company was small then, and she had big ambitions. Reality was not living up to her expectations. She was in a bit of a funk about her life, not feeling that she was making the progress she should be, unhappy to have gained some weight, and, she admits, generally feeling sorry for herself. Why wasn’t the world cooperating and helping her to achieve her dreams? Could people not see what she had to offer?

Then one day, in a workshop, she heard Dan talk about the fact that entrepreneurs know they have to create value before they expect any reward, and suddenly it dawned on her: she had been waiting around for opportunity to come to her, when what she needed to do was to go out and proactively find ways to contribute. It was a life-altering realization.

Immediately, she began to apply her considerable resolve to transforming her life. She began to eat better and exercise. She started looking around the office for systems and structures that could be improved and began initiating these improvements herself, coming up with plans, running them by Babs and Dan, and getting the OK to go ahead and make changes.

Gaynor went on to become director of sales and marketing for Strategic Coach and eventually left to become CEO of her own company back in the UK. Initially building on things she learned as a nanny about how to motivate people, she grew into a highly talented and respected leader known for her ability to take on just about anything and get it done, and then delegate or systematize the maintenance and move on to the next thing. She’s happy with where her life is now and the fact that it’s been created entirely on her own terms. All the rewards she wanted, and a good many that she never expected, have come as by-products of her contributions. They’ve allowed her to see even bigger possibilities and to seek out ways in which she can use her talents to have even more rewarding growth experiences. And she’s the first to acknowledge that the day she decided to make her contribution bigger than her reward was the day she made this bigger and still-growing future possible.

Where Do I Start?

  Practice a No-Entitlement Attitude. When you believe that you need to create value first in order to receive any reward, you will automatically be more focused on contribution. Most of us are susceptible to thinking that we deserve things once in awhile. It’s a conditioned response that has been built into our thinking because there are so many messages around us reinforcing the idea that we are entitled to things. Often, these messages come from people or organizations that want to manipulate us in some way or co-opt us into their agendas. A No-Entitlement Attitude keeps you free of these other agendas and focused on your contribution.

  Look for ways to make a contribution. Be like Gaynor and get creative. See where there are unmet needs that you might be able to help with. Volunteer. Go above and beyond the call of duty. Do it for its own sake and for the sake of growth. Trust that rewards will come, and be sure to recognize them when they do, in the form of new opportunities, capabilities, confidence, or other benefits you may not be expecting. Paradoxically, even not receiving rewards can be quite beneficial as it can be a quick indicator that you’re working with the wrong audience or that you need to reassess what’s needed. Either can be the first step to finding a more promising path for growth if you use it as a learning opportunity (see Law 2). Entrepreneurs use this kind of feedback from the marketplace all the time to make strategic decisions.

  Beware of “reciprocity.” It may seem like it’s only fair to negotiate that for everything you give you get something in return. However, this often limits the growth potential in relationships by focusing the parties on “the deal” and who’s getting what or who’s getting more, rather than simply on contributing to one another. At Strategic Coach, though we’re very much a for-profit business, we don’t ask for or accept any financial remuneration from any of the companies we recommend, even when we bring them very significant amounts of business. This allows us to openly promote what we believe will help our clients with no question of ulterior motives and no messiness around tracking or payments or who’s getting the better side of the deal. Those we promote, in turn, are appreciative that we truly value what they’re offering and are open to working with us to make that experience as good as possible for us and our clients, so more value is created all around. The notion behind this is “when you succeed, we succeed” and the focus stays on the contribution on both sides, not the reward.