The Law of Increasing Returns

I listened to a phenomenal talk today by Elder Eyring from almost 35 years ago that he gave at BYU.  He spoke about what he called “the law of increasing returns.”  The law of decreasing returns is one where we would say that we get the most bang for the buck early on, and later our extra efforts provide little more return.  One example he gave was in studying for an exam; you get the most benefit early on, and there comes a point when more studying isn’t going to help—you simply need to take the test.  But in some aspects of our lives, it’s the early on efforts that often don’t yield immediate fruit and it takes great patience to continue.  The harvest only comes after much toil, just as for some crops they have a “late harvest” and don’t give their crop until the season is at the end.  He suggested that the world is moving away from the things that require great investment and delayed gratification, such as marriage, children, maintain virtue, etc.  He said, “There are spiritual crops that require months, years, and sometimes a lifetime of cultivation before the harvest. Among them are spiritual rewards you want most. That shouldn’t surprise you. Common sense tells you that what matters most won’t come easily.” 

Indeed it seems that it is in the most important things that we often have to wait the longest to “see with [our] eyes the things which [we have] beheld with an eye of faith” (Ether 12:19).  Having this vision of what can be is perhaps one of the most important factors for us to be able to persevere when it gets tough and there seems to be no harvest.  As we read in Proverbs, “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18).  If we can’t at least get a glimpse of the blessings that await those who persevere in righteousness, it can be hard to continue when we seem to have no success.  Elder Eyring put it this way: “Now, let me suggest how to keep your eye on the distant goal. What will a successful mission look like? How can I picture a great marriage? That’s hard to see before you get there. And it’s hard to persevere without some picture.”  It’s that picture of the future that we strive for.  We need the vision that with an eye of faith the Lord might grant us to help us stay true to our covenants.  Before Lehi started his arduous journey across desert and sea, the Lord first gave him “a vision, even that he saw the heavens open” (1 Nephi 1:8).  He gained such faith of the future from the Lord’s communications to him that he could declare to his wife when she was struggling to have confidence in their trek: “But behold, I have obtained a land of promise, in the which things I do rejoice” (1 Nephi 5:5).  This was when he was at the start of the trip, but he had enough confidence in the Lord’s revelations that he could declare that the land of promise thousands of miles away had already been obtained.

                The late harvest crop that can be one of the most difficult to continue to cultivate is our children and family.  Elder Eyring said, “Men and women working outside the home deal mostly with early crops and with the law of diminishing returns.  In the home, they spend far more on late crops and the law of increasing returns.”  That rings true to me—at work I get a paycheck regularly and can often see the fruit of my efforts that are largely in my own control.  But at home it is much harder to persevere when your time spent reading scriptures with your children or teaching them or disciplining them can seem to fall on such deaf (or defiant) ears.  The harvest we seek for our children is, in many ways, so far away that we can be tempted to wonder if the little things we fight to do with our children to help them feel the Holy Ghost are really worth it.  I guess what we need is a vision of our children’s future and what they can become.  We have to be able to see them for who they may one day be and not lose hope if they seem so far from that now.  It takes great faith and trust in the Lord to continue that cultivation in the trenches and believe that the distant harvest will indeed be worth all the pain and persevering.