How to make more money at your job

Learn the skills to complete tasks

from WinCustomize Forums

What determines how much money someone should be making? The easy answer is "market forces". But that's really a cop-out because it takes away control from the employee entirely.  People, especially those working in office environments, have significant impact on how much they make.

And it boils down to a relatively simple relationship. How much money the objective you are working on produces.

 

 

The higher the number A is, the more you make.  Where A is an objective. Some sort of task or project that generates income.

Of course, it's not normally quite like this. Usually the task involves more than just you.

The more people involved in A, the less you make per completed task. If having more people involved allows you to accomplish more tasks, then that's good. But that's not what happens to most people.  Most people simply cut themselves off from accomplishing more because they artificially pigeon-hole themselves into a specific set of tasks.

In the above example, task A may require some very disparate skills to complete. Skills that Sally and Bill have that you don't. So you "need" them to accomplish task A. The successful entrepreneur is the one who is able to learn lots of new skills in order to accomplish tasks without needing Sally and Bill.

What ultimately limits most successful entrepreneurs is that they don't learn how to manage people because they simply try to do it all themselves. The successful entrepreneur may still be a multi-millionaire so don't be too sorry for him or her. But they'd never hack it as a corporate executive in a Fortune 500 company.  That's because the task list is more like this:

That is, there are lots of tasks that need to get done. So entrepreneur with the ma/pa shop may only have a task or two that they work on in a given year. Having mastered the skills necessary to do the task largely alone, they take home the lion's share of the profits from that task. But the next step is the company which has several, dozens, hundreds, or thousands of tasks to complete.

But before we talk about that, let's review.  How much you make in a professional environment relies on how much the task you are working on is worth and how quickly you can get it done. The value of that task is split amongst the people you needed to accomplish that task.  You can make more by making sure the tasks you work on are valuable and by learning skills necessary to complete those tasks.

Not only must you learn those skills but you must take the initiative to demonstrate to others that you are capable of using those skills effective and efficiently.

But if you sit back and say "I don't know how to do X" where X is a skill necessary to complete a given task that you are part of accomplishing, then that's fine. But it means your value is diminished.

In my experience, what happens is that people who choose not to learn those new skills end up finishing their part of a given task and then move on to working on a different task (or just not working at all) that is worth vastly less than the primary task. 

So do yourself a favor -- learn as many of the skills as possible that are necessary to complete the tasks you are involved in.  Doing so will increase your value and hence how much you make.

In the next part, we'll talk about management.

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11,049 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from JoeUser Forums Top
In the end it is attitude and not just aptitude that gets one further. Many of us just do not want to walk the extra mile to learn something new or to do something that may not be on our task list as specified by our company or supervisor.

Interesting article. I'm looking forward to reading the next one.
Reply #2 from JoeUser Forums Top
To me it always comes back to what I heard Ted Nugent (of all people) say once. If you want to be successful in life, make yourself of use to society. Offer them something. Short of that, you're just proposing the idea that you are owed success just for existing. I wish I could find an exact quote.

Can there really be anything more "socialistic" really? That's what lefties don't really understand, I think. If they really want to make the world a better place, why promote the idea that you don't have to contribute meaningfully to be supported by society? Why champion people to the point that they believe they are owed success when they don't offer anything to society?

Great article, I look forward to the next one as well. Entitlement works on all levels, even the entrepreneurs you are talking about. So much in business is a sham. Buy these CDs, read this book, do the right thing, and you make money. It's about who you are, and not what you accomplish. It might work that way for some people, but overall it is sad.
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Reply #3 from JoeUser Forums Top

So do yourself a favor -- learn as many of the skills as possible that are necessary to complete the tasks you are involved in

Kind of funny, and not to detract from your point (which I DO agree with), but we have been told by the powers that be, to SPECIALIZE!  I figure I have 15 months left before I have enough time for retirement, so I am not listening to them.  I cannot stand to NOT know how the whole picture works.  I had one of my employees teach me how to terminate Cat5/5e and 6 cable just because I wanted to know the whole network, not just a small part of it.

And that makes me more marketable (of course my age works against me )

Reply #4 from JoeUser Forums Top

Next part is now up.

As for specializing: The term specialize is usually used for a very different purpose than what we are talking here.

In my example, I specialized in software development for PC on Microsoft Windows. That's pretty specialized. 

Outside of being a specialist in the medical field (and doctors with private practices are the quintisential entrepreneur profile), you don't see that much specialization in professional environments that also generate tons of money.

It's just about the value of the task you're doing.  If you are doing something by yourself that generates a million dollars, then you're going to have a million dollars.

If you could accomplish something largely by yourself that generates a billion dollars, then wow, that's great for you. Some people can do just that almost (entertainers and athletes come to mind even though you could also say they're part of a greater industry but they typically even see themselves as one-person entrepreneurs of some kind who just have massive value).

But when talking about the 99% of people who are in white collar professional environments (Who aren't unionized) then it's about how to accomplish the task as effectively as possible and to maek sure that task is worth your time.