Why people stop caring

The trick that cut divorces by 25 percent (and saved my uncle's company)

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In 2018, Kentucky passed a shared custody law. Within 10 years, divorces dropped 25%. Women-initiated divorces dropped by half.
No counseling programs.

No awareness campaigns. Just one change to the financial incentives.

And the same principle saved my uncle's company.

THE KENTUCKY STORY:

Before 2016, Kentucky divorce law heavily favored one outcome — one party could gain significantly in assets and ongoing payments simply by initiating divorce.

The incentive structure made leaving more financially attractive than staying.

House Bill 528 changed that. It introduced a default 50/50 custody split and significantly reduced long-term alimony.

Suddenly, the financial calculus of divorce changed completely.

When leaving stops being profitable, people find reasons to stay and work things out.

This isn't a commentary on marriage or gender. It's a lesson in incentive design.

When you change what people gain or lose from a decision, you change the decision, or at least heavily affect it.

MY UNCLE'S COMPANY:

My uncle bought a struggling manufacturing company.

The previous owners had the classic structure — heavy executives with bonuses, workers with fixed salaries regardless of the outcome.

The executives were motivated. The workers weren't. Why would they be? Whether the company had a record quarter or a terrible one, their paycheck looked the same.

So he did one big thing. He introduced profit sharing across the entire company. Every employee, from the floor up, received a percentage of profits proportional to their role.

Within months, productivity increased dramatically. People started suggesting process improvements. Waste dropped. People stopped watching the clock.

Nothing else changed. Same people, same building, same equipment.
The only difference was that now everyone had skin in the game.

The company skyrocketed so much, that within 3 years it has grown 27 times. That's exponential level of expansion!

THE PRINCIPLE:

This is what behavioral economists call incentive alignment — when the goals of individuals match the goals of the system they're operating in.

Most organizations, relationships, and systems fail not because people are lazy or selfish — but because the incentives point in the wrong direction.

If your employee gains nothing from the company succeeding, why would they care if it does?

If your contractor gets paid the same whether the project takes 2 weeks or 6 months, why would they rush?

If leaving is more profitable than staying — in any context — people will eventually leave.

The question to ask about any system you're building is: what does each person gain from the outcome succeeding?

If the answer is "not much" — you've found your problem.

HOW TO APPLY THIS:

Three places to apply incentive alignment immediately:

Your team or contractors — move at least part of compensation to outcome-based.

Even a small profit share changes how people think about their work. They stop being executors and start being owners.

Your customers — structure your pricing so your gain is tied to their gain. Retainers that increase when results improve.

Success fees. Risk-sharing models. When your customer wins, you win — and they feel that alignment.

Your own habits — most productivity systems fail because the reward is too distant.

If the benefit of exercising today arrives in 6 months, your brain doesn't care.

Find ways to make the reward immediate — track streaks, celebrate small wins, create visible progress. Make today's action feel like today's gain.

THE AI ANGLE:

Can you apply this to AI? Partially.

AI doesn't have skin in the game by default — it produces output regardless of whether that output succeeds or fails in the real world.
But you can emulate incentive alignment in how you prompt and train it.

When you give AI a specific, narrow role — "you are a conversion copywriter whose success is measured by click-through rate" — you're essentially giving it a stake in the outcome.

The more specific the success criteria you embed in your prompt, the more aligned the output becomes.

The principle is the same: define what winning looks like, make it specific, and build the system around that definition.

Final words:

Kentucky didn't fix marriages with therapy.

My uncle didn't fix his company with team-building days.

They fixed the incentives.

Everything else followed.

What incentive in your life or business is pointing in the wrong direction right now?