The Long Grind

After what felt like beating my head against the same spot on a wall over and over and over again, for a couple of years, mastery of detail finally began to sink in. Disciplining myself to dig into those details, which is never a small order for someone with a highly DRIVEN behavioral style like mine, served as the groundwork for the definiteness of plans we’d need to climb out of the trenches of scarcity. Creating a definite plan is one thing; executing that plan over a sustained period of time required every bit of discipline, work ethic, and consistency I had learned leading up to that point.

Before moving forward, I’ll share some personal information in a spirit of transparency. Cindy and I did indeed benefit greatly from career advancement opportunities through the first several years of our marriage. That said, all of mine were lateral in nature; none came with additional income. In fact, my total compensation dropped when I moved from operating a stamping press to rolling out the 5S initiative and then into behavior-based safety; in both of those roles, overtime was strictly prohibited and that had added quite a bit to my income prior to accepting the “promotion.” 

In Think and Grow Rich, Hill shares the story of an opportunity Andrew Carnegie offered him - an opportunity that came with no compensation whatsoever. The sixth leadership attribute he describes ties directly to that; “The Habit of Doing More Than Paid For.” He defined that by saying, “One of the penalties of leadership is the necessity of willingness, upon the part of the leader, to do more than he/she requires of their followers.” Through all those years of scarcity, I never had a title that came with authority but I was learning the importance of earning influence daily.

In their “Thought for the Day” posted on July 21, 2021, The Napoleon Hill Foundation shared the following:

Those who do more than they are paid for will sooner or later be willingly paid for more than they do.If you consistently do more than you are paid to do — whether you are a professional, an executive, an hourly worker, or an entrepreneur — you will eventually be compensated for far more than you do. If you give more and better service than those around you, customers will beat a path to your door, and your boss will consider you irreplaceable. With the dearth of outstanding service that exists in the world today, you can instantly differentiate yourself from the competition simply by providing good service.

Our definite plan wasn’t anything spectacular. In fact, it was very basic. Spend far less than we made, don’t charge anything, pay down as much debt as we possibly could, and look for every option we could find to make extra income. Fulfilling our existing personal and professional responsibilities left very limited options for generating that extra income. Never ones to throw in the towel, we grabbed onto the one thing we could find that provided a glimpse of opportunity and a perception of being able to squeeze it into our schedule: a multi-level marketing business.

I share those details for a few reasons; I’ll be referencing that business more moving forward and I’m intentionally not naming names. Folks seem to either love or hate them, there’s rarely any middle ground - and rightfully so. While we learned things that have served us well, we also experienced some of the most toxic people and situations we could have ever imagined (stay tuned for that because we definitely found the seeds to greater benefits through those miserable adversities). And while that eventually provided some of the income we so desperately needed, our decisions through that period of our lives were never based on what we hoped to get immediately.

With that perspective now in place, we’re ready to explore some of the toughest things Cindy and I have ever had to navigate. Before we do, know this: The true test of purpose isn’t surviving one bad month—it’s showing up with excellence when the grind lasts years. Consistency in scarcity builds the self-control that compounds into quiet influence. Doing more than required when no one is watching turns resource scarcity into a leadership proving ground. From the bottom of my heart, doing exactly that has opened the doors to greater benefits than we could have imagined. With this fresh in your mind, identify one area where you could quietly do more than expected over the next week or so. Track the impact on your sense of purpose!