Proving the Law
I have made several mentions of the Law of Sacrifice over this week, but thought it might be a good idea to make that a little clearer. See, there are actually several versions of the Law of Sacrifice and although the message differs the overall theme is the same. At its essence, the Law of Sacrifice says that to get something you perceive of greater value, you must give up something of lesser value. The Law is universal and there is no way around it.
Yet every day there are people who look at Get Rich Quick schemes and buy all kinds of pills and programs to lose weight without making any lifestyle changes at all.
People are always looking for ways to “break” the Law of Sacrifice.
But you can’t actually break a law and that’s the problem. You can only prove it. For example, if you jump off the top of a tall building you will prove the Law of Gravity, not break it. It is the same with the Law of Sacrifice. No matter what you do to get around or break the law, in the end you will simply prove it.
Making the Trade
Let’s say, for example, that you find a scheme for getting rich quickly using a program that requires no investment from you but requires that you get money from others that they will lose permanently. You get rich and they get poorer. Yeah, you got rich quick, just like the advertisement said and you didn’t have to put out any money so where’s the Law of Sacrifice in that? Well, you just traded in your moral and ethical standards and your self-esteem to get rich. In other words, you decided that getting rich had greater value than maintaining high morals and ethics and more important than your self-image. You decided that getting rich was more important than preserving you.
You must lose in order to gain and you must make that choice. If I choose to watch TV, or browse the Internet, or any number of other activities other than ones that support my business making money, then I have placed a higher value on those trivial things over the success of my business.
This decision is not always made consciously and other factors weigh in. A big one is RESISTANCE, the intangible beast inside of us that seeks to sabotage any attempts to change anything in our lives. For a good reference on that, I highly recommend you read Do The Work by Steven Pressfield ($5 as a Kindle Book). This manifesto talks all about how to overcome resistance. In addition to resistance, fear enters in as well as lethargy. The result is that while we still make the decision, we are not as conscious about why we make the decision, so changing it becomes very difficult. Once we become aware of why we make the wrong choices, we can better develop systems to help prevent us from doing it again and make better choices going forward.
But in the end, you are gonna have to lose to gain, proving the Law of Sacrifice once again.
Action Plan
- Identify at least one place in your life where the you are trying to avoid the Law of Sacrifice. Why? What trade off are you making? How can you make a better choice going forward?