“Everybody can be great because anybody can serve.”  Martin Luther King, Jr.
 
Who do you know that is a true servant?
 
Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, “If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all.” (Mark 9:35; NIV)
 
Earlier this month, I highlighted the book The Go-Giver: A Little Story About A Powerful Business Idea (see 2/4/08 DG). In that book are presented five rather unusual laws called “The Five Laws of Stratospheric Success.” For the next several DGs I am looking at each of those laws individually. Earlier this week, I highlighted the first law, the Law of Value.

Let’s look now at the second law, the Law of Compensation which states, “Your income is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them.” The Law of Value determines a person’s potential value while this second law determines how much you actually earn. Quoting from The Go-Giver, “Your compensation is directly proportional to how many lives you touch.”

This helps explain the troubling disparity between what good teachers, nurses, et al., earn when compared to athletes, rock stars, and the like. Again, “compensation is directly proportional to how many lives you touch.” That doesn’t mean that teachers and other dedicated people servants are worth less…just that they are compensated less simply because they touch relatively few lives in comparison to rock stars and other highly visible people. Kind of a hard pill to swallow, but I believe that if you will stop and reflect on it a bit, you’ll see that, like it or not, it seems to hold up in real life.

On the flip side, two very exciting realities emerge from The Law of Compensation. Again, quoting from The Go-Giver, “First, it means that you get to determine your level of compensation–it’s under your control. If you want more success, find a way to serve more people….It also means there are no limitations on what you can earn, because you can always find more people to serve.” Note especially the Martin Luther King, Jr. quote above. “Everybody can be great….” That includes you!

Find a way, or ways, to serve lots of people. Given the astounding rise in the number of millionaires in this country each succeeding year, people are demonstrating that there are a growing number of ways to “serve more people.” And no, most are not rock stars, nor highly visible. Indeed, we live in exciting times.

Prayer Power
Lord, open our minds to new and innovative ways to serve more and more people in ways that provide them value beyond what we ask.
 
Link of the Day 
The Go-Giver: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea
 
Blessings on you as you seek to find ways to extend the “reach” of your serving others.