I just read a news article about a remote, poor, mountain village (Himachal Pradesh) in India where the brothers in a family traditionally marry one woman. Yes, you read that correctly. It’s a hard life and instead of splitting up their inherited plots of land, the brothers in a family marry one wife and live together. They setup arrangements for marital relations, basically take turns, and the parentage of individual children is not known or worried about.
To us, it may seem strange, even perverse or disgusting. To them, it’s normal and seems to work well.
There are a few things that jumped into my mind when I read this article as it related to Internet business. Ok, for those of you still snickering, there were a few more things that jumped into my mind, but we won’t go into those!
Conserving Resources
One of the draws of starting an Internet business is that it does not take a huge investment when compared to starting a traditional “brick and mortar” business. This allows you to conserve and preserve your resources, which is why the mountain people in the article resorted to this arrangement: instead of splitting up their plot of land as it passes from one generation to the next, they preserve their resources. If they didn’t do this, they would end up with a plot of land that is too small to live on and live off: livable and farmable land is limited because of the ruggedness of the mountainous area.
Multiplying Effort
One of the ways successful Internet business entrepreneurs get more accomplished than they can do alone is to sub-contract out the work. They do this by paying either individuals or companies to perform the work, or, some use intern programs where the interns do some work in exchange for learning how to build a business. The remote mountain people in the article practice polyandry, and while it seems strange to us, it builds a team that gets more done and accomplished than they would get accomplished if the brothers had each married a different wife and lived separately.
Perception is Reality
Here’s the biggie. This is why I like this example. How many of us can really imagine sharing our wife with our brothers? Tonight I sleep with her, tomorrow brother number 2 sleeps with her, and the next night brother number 3 sleeps with her. Rinse and repeat. Over and over. Pretty foreign to the normal mode of operation for most of us. But again, to them, it’s normal and their life, it’s their reality.
What’s your reality? You may want to be wealthy and successful in business, but if you’re not, then success is just as foreign to you as sharing your wife with your brothers (or being married to several brothers if you’re a woman).
If you truly want to change your reality, or your situation in life, it takes a huge effort. Not necessarily a huge physical effort, but a huge shift in mental perspective. If you’re not successful, then there are reasons you’re not successful. Internal reasons, not necessarily external reasons. Sure, there may be external influences, but successful people rise above external influences everyday. If you’re stuck it’s because you’re stuck in your reality. You have to move beyond it. To be successful you have to think differently than unsuccessful people and do things differently than unsuccessful people.
One of the biggest differences is that you have to take action, you have to do something different than what you’ve been doing. Most of the time, you have to try over and over and over and stick with it until you shift your reality from where you are to where you want to be. And remember this example of the remote mountain people. While you may think you understand the reality of being successful, if you’re not successful, it’s as foreign to you as being married to the same wife as your brother. You have to change your thinking first, then, and only then, will your reality will change.
Until next time,
Fred
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