Are we over-selling success?

Does exclusive focus on rewards bring out the worst in us?


Every business opportunity sells one thing - the dream. Specifically, the rewards, the fruits of the effort.

Here's how they hook us: the persuaders parade out an unlikely person who went from food stamps to a mansion, in a short time. That's the proof that anyone can do it, even gasp, you.

However, the actions required - those skills you're required to perfect and perform to attain success - that's never part of what's sold.

Here's why that matters.

Most people (90%+) do not attain financial success (in any field, from acting to Internet marketing to MLM). And it is not because of lack of effort. Many success seekers are totally focused on doing whatever they're being told, to get the rewards they were sold.

After months of honest effort and thousands of dollars spent pursuing the rewards, (almost) no one gets even close to the rewards of the guru (has anyone of Frank Kern's [you name the top gun] students earned anything like he has?) But, because that (rare) success story is told over and over to inspire the seekers, many become very unhappy comparing their non-results to the guru's. And unhappy people do bad things.

Two extreme cases.

New York attorney Marc Dreier, 59
Mr. Dreier stole some $46 million from his client accounts over the last 7 years.

In his pre-sentencing letter to the judge, Mr. Dreier explained his actions so: his colleagues and clients were doing “better financially and seemingly enjoying more status,” and he felt “crushed by a sense of underachievement.”

“I can’t remember or imagine why I didn’t stop myself. It all seems so obviously deplorable now.

“I recall only that I was desperate for some measure of the success that I felt had eluded me,” he wrote, adding: “I lost my perspective and my moral grounding, and really, in a sense, I just lost my mind.” - Marc Dreier, a once high-flying New York lawyer speaking to the judge before beginning to serve a 20-year sentence for bilking investors out of $700 million.

George Sordini, 48
He murdered five innocent women and then killed himself.

Mr. Sordini was frustrated he could not achieve and acquire what he desired in his life - a relationship like other guys. Over the past few years, he got so worked up about it he shot and killed five women and injured ten more at a gym before shooting himself to death. Here's what he'd written online just went on his rampage:

"The biggest problem of all is not being able to achieve and acquire what I desire..." -George Sodini, murderer (From Ad Busters mag)

Exclusive focus on the fruits or results of your actions usually leads to bad things.

"She (or he) who is always brooding over results often loses nerve in the performance of his duty. He becomes impatient and then gives vent to anger and begins to do unworthy things: he jumps from action to action, never remaining faithful to any. She who broods over results...is always distracted, she says good-bye to all scruples, everything is right in her estimation, and she therefore resorts to means fair and foul to attain her end." - M Gandhi

Who here doesn't know this intimately?

Moral: Consider focusing on getting really really good at what you are doing first. Develop a phenomenally good skill set. Then let the rewards fall where they may. Brooding over your results compared to someone else - whose results are so atypical they have to put it in the disclaimer - leads right into doing bad things, a little at a time.

P.S. Gandhi made it a point NOT to take any rewards beyond the bare minimum to live, for the work he did to bring about the independence of India. It made him credible even to his political enemies. Notice his Armani suit there on the right. :)