13. The Law of Overcompensation

Under the Laws of Success

If you always do more than you are paid for, you will always be paid more than you are getting now.

To be a big success, you must always be looking for opportunities to go beyond the requirements of your job. Napoleon Hill, perhaps the foremost researcher on success in the first half of the twentieth century, concluded that one of the keys to great success in America was the willingness to "go the extra mile."

Because of this principle, your future is unlimited. There is no restriction on the extra things that you can do to add greater value to your work. You can go the extra mile in everything that you do, every day and in every way. You can always be looking for opportunities to exceed expectations.

Earl Nightingale advised that you should "Always do more than you’re paid for or you’ll never be paid much more than you’re getting now." The only way that you can reap more is by sowing more. The only way that you can be paid more is by adding greater value to your work and by achieving more and better results.

A young woman who was working as a secretary for a large company in Florida came to me recently at a seminar and told me her story. She said she had listened to one of my audio programs, and as a result, she had set a goal to increase her income by 50 percent. In her heart, however, she didn’t really believe it was possible because of the salary structure in her company.

Nonetheless, she began applying the Law of Overcompensation to her work. She started looking for ways to increase the value of her service to her boss, to do more than she was paid for. She applied the law to everything she did. She learned new skills on her own time. She began a little earlier and stayed a little later. She took on additional responsibilities and performed them to the best of her abilities.

She noticed the tasks that her boss didn’t like to do and that took up a good deal of his time, such as replying to routine correspondence. One day, she wrote replies to several letters for him and then took them to him to review. He was both amazed and delighted. He began giving her more and more of his routine work, all of which she did quickly and well.

To make a long story short, she told me that over the next year, her boss gradually raised her salary, in three stages, from $1,500 per month to $1,750, to $2,000, and eventually to $2,250 per month, a 50 percent increase. And he gave her these increases without her ever having asked for them!

What she did each day was to seek out ways to work harder and smarter and to serve her boss better. He increased her pay because he recognized how much she had increased her value to him.

The remarkable thing is this: She had worked to the age of twenty-five to get her salary up to $1,500 per month. In just six months, by applying these principles, she increased her salary by fifty percent. And these principles can work for you as well. It is simply a matter of applying these laws to your work every day.

How you can apply this law immediately:

1. Think about your work. Where and in what way could you work better, smarter, more efficiently? What could you delegate, outsource, simplify, or eliminate so that you can have more time to do the few things you do that are the most important?

2. Identify the areas of your work where you could go the extra mile, where you could do more than anyone else expects. Where and in what way could you work harder, in a more disciplined way, to achieve even more of the most important results of your job?

Go to your boss and ask him or her if there is any task that you could take off his or her hands. Look for ways to make your boss’s life easier, and your boss will find ways to make your life better as well.

Source: Brian Tracy, The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc, (San Francisco, 2000).