The Universal Law of Effection, is a core concept from MJ DeMarco’s book The Millionaire Fastlane

The more lives you affect in an entity you control, in scale and/or magnitude, the richer you will become.

Most people are taught to think about money in terms of effort, credentials, position, or even luck, as though income is mainly a private measure of how hard someone is working. In reality it often has far more to do with how many people your work can actually reach and what, exactly, it changes for them.

This is what makes the Law of Effection interesting to me. It pulls the conversation away from fantasy and back into consequence, back into usefulness, back into the real and sometimes uncomfortable question of whether what you are building is solving something that matters in a way people can feel.

What MJ DeMarco is really naming here is a relationship between value and reach, although I think people can be too quick to reduce that into money formulas and miss the deeper point.

Some work touches a small number of people but alters their circumstances in a substantial way, and some work reaches thousands or millions with a lighter individual impact, yet still produces enormous cumulative value.

Either way, the principle seems to rest on the same underlying truth, which is that wealth does not appear in a vacuum and it is not generated by wanting more for yourself. It grows in proportion to the extent that your work becomes relevant, usable, and significant in the lives of other people.

What makes this worth reflecting on from a business standpoint is that it forces a different kind of honesty. It asks whether you are merely working, or whether you are creating something with real effect, something that can move beyond your own hours, your own hands, and your own immediate circle.

That question can be sobering because it exposes how many people are trying to increase income without increasing either the scale of their contribution or the depth of the problem they solve.

Strategic Reflection Prompt

Where, in the way your work is currently structured, are you limiting how far it can reach or how deeply it can affect someone, and is that constraint coming from what you’ve chosen to solve, how you’ve chosen to deliver it, or how many people you’ve made it available to?

About Giselle

Some of the most costly decisions begin with a wrong read of the situation.

I’m Giselle Hudson, The Pre-Fixer™. I am asked to intervene when something important needs to be better understood before a consequential decision is made.

As The Pre-Fixer™, I act as a strategic thinking partner, working with leaders to examine what they are seeing, separate what they know from what they may be assuming, consider what else might explain the situation, and surface what may not yet be visible.

I don’t fix; I pre-fix. My work happens before the solution is chosen, helping leaders build the understanding from which better decisions can be made.

Through my daily Strategic Alignment Journal, I explore leadership, decision-making, business and the patterns that shape organizations, following the questions and observations that help us understand situations more clearly before deciding how to respond.

What are you trying to make sense of right now?