Working Hard Won't Get You Rich.

A lot of people work hard. Farm hands work hard, house keepers work hard, coal miners work hard. Working hard does not guarantee wealth... but creating value does. Simply put, you create value when you have a skill set that few others possess, and you "sell" those skills. To take the concept further, you possess even more value, when you cannot be easily replaced by others who also possess your skill. When you think of life like this, you will begin to realize why "hard work" has nothing to do with creating value. Lets look at few examples.

Professionals such as attorneys, physicians etc. are generally high paid... for obvious reasons. However, if you look closer, you will see that even within each profession there are salary tiers. The highest paid physicians are the ones that occupy specialties that are not over saturated. As such a neurosurgeon, who in addition to regular medschool had to go through almost 10 years of additional training, gets paid higher than a family practitioner. Those extra 10 years have given the neurosurgeon a skill set that the vast majority of doctors do not have. That means value. Their knowledge base is rare and most important there is a demand for it. As such, they are highly valuable and get paid as such.

Next, lets look at the Kardashians.

Now I know what you're thinking. "What the hell kind of value do they provide!?" Well.. they provide value to advertisers. For some inexplicable reason, tens of millions of people tune into their tv show. Additionally, tens of millions of people follow them on social media. As such, if an advertiser advertises on their tv show, or pays them to make sponsored posts on instagram, their product can be seen by millions. This is value. The Kardashians don't create value for their viewers, they create value for their advertisers, and therefore they are well paid for it.

Another example... athletes. The top performers are paid big money for one reason... they put fans in the seats. LeBron fills arenas, Curry fills arenas, Kobe filled arenas, and as such their teams shell(ed) out more money for them than they did for other players. To the teams, more fans equals more money, and as such a valuable player to them is a player that earns them more money. Other players may work just as hard or even harder, but if fans don't come to the arena to see those players, they aren't value creators.

In one of my previous businesses, we had employees in our warehouse and we also had remote contractors that we employed to work on our website. Guess who got paid more. As much as we love the people we hired for our warehouse they were not paid a lot because they were "easily replaceable". Their role in our business was important, but because the role was easily teachable and we could train almost anyone to do it, the position was low paying. However, the contractors that worked on our website were paid extremely high hourly rates because they provided extreme value. Our online marketing contractor and our SEO consultant had specific skillsets, and it was extremely hard to find people who could do those jobs extremely well. Therefore, they created value... value that we paid a lot of money for.

Finally, I recently saw the movie "War Dogs". One of the main characters sunk his entire life savings into buying expensive bed sheets, but then soon realized nobody wanted them. He tried selling them to nursing homes and an administrator said "This sheet is like cashmere, and their skin is old and dry like a lizard. Would you wrap a lizard in cashmere? Then why would you expect me to". This is a classic mistake. He decided to start a business without assessing whether or not his potential clients needed him. Whether there was a problem he was solving. Whether he was creating value for his prospective clients. He tried to solve a problem that did not exist.

If you are currently planning a business, more than anything else, ask yourself "Am I creating value with this business". That means "Am I solving a problem?", "Is there a NEED to use my business?", "Am I performing a function that people will pay for", "Am I filling a gap that other businesses aren't". The most important thing for your business is to create value. Whether that means value to customers, value to advertisers or value to users, just create value for someone. The more value you create, the more money you make.