The Ripple Effects of Scarcity

Earlier I mentioned some of the changes I made to avoid being around booze for the first few years after making the decision to stop drinking. In complete transparency, some of those changes weren’t all that difficult since buying beer and going to concerts both require money. Our financial resources were so scarce at that point we couldn’t always cover all the necessities. One could easily argue that giving up drinking would have been much more difficult had I actually been able to afford it…

Having detailed the turmoil created by even a minor car issue and our monthly big night on the town (at the Ci Ci’s Pizza $3.99 buffet), you should have a clear picture for where we were. As those patterns continued - and compounded - the impact wasn’t limited to auto repairs and eating out; the ripple effects spilled over into so many more areas of our lives. Sooner or later, scarcity touches marriage, work, and self-worth.

My highly DRIVEN behavioral style has been a key part of my extreme work ethic for as long as I can remember, even though I didn’t understand it that way until about a decade ago. My “charge hell with a water pistol” approach has almost always provided me with the ability to fall asleep wherever and whenever I stopped moving - almost… The only time I can think of in my adult life where I’ve struggled sleeping was when we were fighting our way through the cascading effects of scarcity. It’s hard enough to show up and perform professionally when you’re dealing with personal challenges, but doing it consistently at a high level with very limited sleep (for weeks on end) is damn near impossible.

But owning our part makes little difference if that’s where we stop. The ninth leadership Napoleon Hill shared in Think and Grow Rich was “Mastery of Detail.” He explained it like this: “Successful leadership calls for mastery of the details of the leader’s position.” Seems simple enough on its face. When it comes to how our personal finances, like the scarcity I’ve been referencing here, impacts all other aspects of our lives, mastering the details of both the cause and the solution is crucial. We’ll dig into that next. Right now, think about one way a past resource struggle spilled into another area of your life. Honestly note your contribution and one leadership lesson it offered. As you do, I believe you’ll develop a fundamental understanding of how family and financial adversity tests self-control like no workplace challenge can. Owning the ripple effects builds the definiteness of plans that turns chaos into purpose!

Whether it was through 5S, Kaizen, or an ergonomics initiative, I was always tasked professionally with analyzing cycle times and overall productivity so I could make a strong case for how a suggested change would provide a measurable payback - and to detail how long that payback would take. Mapping out how ideal changes would take shape was one thing, but I also had to factor in delays that inevitably happened when the team members involved pushed back passively or flat-out refused to adopt the proposed changes.

In far too many cases, I’ve missed how the skills I developed in my job could apply in my personal life - often directly and immediately. This was definitely one of those cases. Had I applied the same thought process to uncover what was driving our scarcity, we likely wouldn’t have struggled through it for so long. And had I developed mastery of detail in our personal finances sooner, developing what Hill listed as his fifth leadership attribute would have been significantly easier. He described “Definiteness of Plans” by stating that “the successful leader must plan their work and work the plan. A leader who moves by guesswork, without practical, definite plans is comparable to a ship without a rudder. Sooner or later they will land on the rocks.” Our personal finances were definitely on those rocks!

Creating a definite plan was mandatory to have any hope of achieving the desired goal in a 5S, Kaizen, or ergonomics project. And even with an initial definite plan, you’d better have at least one alternative to fall back on. Unfortunately, I wasn’t following that same approach personally. Quite honestly, I can’t list many people I’ve ever known to apply the same methodology in their personal lives that they do routinely in their work. When we take the time to step back and truly reflect, it becomes clear that there’s no good reason for treating our personal and professional lives differently - at least when it comes from the lessons we can learn through adversity.

In so much of Think and Grow Rich, Hill provided examples of how successful leaders master details. Scarcity forces that mastery faster than any promotion ever could - turning survival math into purposeful leadership. Before I share how those lessons became thoroughly embedded over a period of years, I’ll challenge you to identify one small tracking habit that could reveal a hidden seed of purpose. Our seeds of equal or greater benefit hide in the details we’d often prefer to ignore; scarcity is the soil that forces us to look even harder for them.

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 overtime 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 MLMs, 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.