Oh come now. "anyone" needn't mean 100%. I know we're all technical people around here, but in most industries (psychology, for example), 90% would certainly constitutes "anyone". I'll happily argue that while it won't work for some, those are the exceptions, the outliers.
Wow. I can honestly say that I agree with every one of your statements. Nicely observed.
But it changes nothing.
The reason that entrepreneurs and bosses and managers get paid more than they are worth (in terms of value) is purely because there are so few people willing to do that work (including getting there to do it). It's really that simple.
And the reason that they stay there, instead of going back to doing what they do best, is because they craft it that way.
Here's the irony: I can say that from personal experience. That's my rutt, as it were.
I was an entrepreneur. I failed a few times, I succeeded one big time. And now, I'm comfortable, great lifestyle, doing the work that I do as I've been doing it for a long time. I would love nothing more than to go back to the entrepreneurial spirit and fail a few more times before succeeding again. I live the new inventions spirit. But I won't dare give up my comfortable life as it is right now. Things are too easy.
So I've crafter the business, the services, the products, the clients, the relationships, the suppliers, and the technology, all to keep me stable in this current scenario. I'm stuck in this boss/manager/owner world, just like lower-ladder staff are the way that I've been describing herein. And certainly, my business could be way better if run by someone else. But it's not about my business. It's about my life. Right now, I'm very happy, and very comfortable. It's hard to give that up.
Okay; I can see how those would pull you out-of-the-norm. Glad to see that you're at least out-of-the-woods from it all. Here's hoping there were lots of someones in your life who were generous with their time and resources to help you through it.
Many good guesses. Some bang-on. I certainly lived with parents for a while, not 35, but a while. Did friends always pay me back? Certainly when it came to anything big they did. Obviously I've still got a few on-going, so let's hope they turn out well.
I have a small retirement savings in terms of investments, but I have a huge amount of equity in the house. Really, that's where my current retirement savings go, and that's where my savings can currently do the most good -- for me, I'm not an investment junkie. In ten-to-twenty years, when my mortgage is paid off, and I decide to sell this house, it'll be worth two-to-three million. My next house (out in the country is my plan) will be a quarter of that. So I'm expecting to have 1.5 million in excess equity in ten years; more in twenty. I'm 37 now, so that's pretty good for now. Add in my savings from here on, and I'll survive with more or less of my current lifestyle quite easily. Add my beloved's contributions, and we're set that much longer. Add inheritance, that next big business idea, the winning lottery ticket, the twenty that I found on the street last week, and the fifty that I found in that old leather jacket from highschool and I have nothing to worry about.
I also own (outright) the cars, the furniture, and everything else, with zero debt, aside from a reasonable mortgage. And I already have the family, including two pets. Add tickets to 20 theatrical shows every season, eight weeks of vacations planned for this year, a weekly housekeeper, a monthly lawn-care service, direct-from-the-farm foods year-round (seasonally of course), and a cheap sportscar, and I think most would be pretty happy with my life in this quite large house.
Sorry if that disappoints you. Of course I've been lucky. But you make it sound as though I haven't created that luck. No I (personally) haven't had any major health emergencies, besides some broken bones and allergies, but I've also played very safe and avoided a lot of low-risk-high-danger activities that most people do every day. Also, I have free health insurance.
Certainly not everyone can live with parents as long as I did, but I'm sure you had friends with whom you could have shared expenses in order to save your pennies. In those years, I saved about twenty grand in cash each year. I'd be in the same place today if I had saved only half as much (I'd have a slightly larger mortgage, and no granite countertops in the bathrooms).
If you're willing to sacrifice -- in my case, it was the freedom and independence of living alone, a university degree, selecting the right activities and the right friends -- you don't need to sacrifice for long.
On the other hand, if you want super freedom, and you want to do everything alone, and you don't want to take anything from anybody, then you're going to select the toughest roughest roads every time.
Either you save-up in-advance, or you borrow against your own future. Some people don't start a family until they have something saved -- personally, I had half of my first house in cash, in order to cover most of my mortgage. And then, when I wanted to change my lifestyle, I grew my mortgage as a bridge-loan. Earlier in my life, I borrowed money from friends and family when I wanted to grow my business by taking a risk on an iffy new client.
Nowadays, I pay it forward. I loan as much as 50% of my annual revenue to friends and family who need loans and can't get them from a bank. I basically extend my bank credit to them so they can bridge the gap between their present and future. And to be clear, I don't profit from it at all.
That's what believing in your friend means. It's seeing that they have the skill, and simply lack the opportunity to apply that skill. It's not a risk to me because I don't worry that they'll skip-town with the money, and I don't believe that they'll fail at applying their skill. The bank needs proof and profit because the bank is a business and a stranger. I'm neither to my friend. My friend has credit with me, by definition.
My father always said that you don't do anything by yourself in this world, and especially in business. You're always relying on someone. Some people think that they're independent when they borrow money from a bank, instead of from a friend. That makes zero sense. You're still dependent on the bank. You still haven't done it alone. Someone believed in you and someone helped you out. If you're going to be honest and pay it back anyway, better it be a friend, because then you can pay back the money, and the favour.
"smarter, worked harder, and was better at making decisions" has absolutely nothing to do with advancement. I don't know why you would think that it does. Those have everything to do with staying exactly where you are. You're good at it. Really good. So I want you to stay there and keep doing it. Why does that surprise you?
the amount you get paid for your work also has nothing to do with how smart/hard/better you are. you get paid purely based on how many other people can do the same thing. plain and simple. if anyone can be taught to do what you do, then you get paid less. Not because it's worth less, but simply because I can replace you with someone who'll take less. There's always someone with a lesser lifestyle than yours, and hence there's always someone to whom I can pay less.
So since advancement and pay have nothing to do with your skills, then what does?
Again, you need to be willing to risk, willing to pull the trigger, and willing to convince others to work for you. That means "previous business had failed" means willing to risk -- risk just means that you'll have multiple failures for every success. Otherwise, it's a guarantee, not a risk.
Willing to pull the trigger means cutting research and planning short, in favour of actual action, because you can never have enough information in-advance. Trial and error means trying even though you might be in error. Having all the information in-advance isn't trying, it's just plain following the recipe. And often is the case that you could try and fail six times in the same amount of time it would take you to finish your research. That's why it's often said that the more chances you take, the more luck you'll find.
You mock the elevator pitches, and schmoozing, but that's exactly the definition of convincing others to work for you. You need to command others to do favours for you. That's the elevator pitch. Getting someone who doesn't need you at all, to help you anyway.
So, if you aren't willing to fail, and you can't convince others to help you, and you won't risk everything you have on your own performance, then big surprise you won't advance.
You're asking others to advance you. That's not how advancement works. Advancement is something that you need to do to yourself.
No one cares about "increasing productivity" and "effective use of the American labor force". The reason coaches choose to punt on fourth down isn't because it's the right decision.
Here's your lesson in being the boss.
After you take all of those risks, and all of those failures, and all of those successful pitches, the rule as a business owner is don't screw it up, don't rock the boat, stop taking risks. Once you win at the roulette wheel, you don't keep playing until you lose. You walk away with your winnings.
The reason coaches punt on fourth down is because they won't be fired for doing so.
Bosses don't care about productivity. They care about avoiding risks. Current productivity and no risk will always beat out double productivity with increased risk, no matter how minor.
That's the truth about your boss. It's the truth about me. It's the reason I've never let my employees make things better in any way that risks a single client.
Here's a case in point. I run a web development company. I have a choice. I can have one platform run all clients, or I can duplicate the platform and codebase for each project of each client. The latter obviously means way more platform maintenance, bug fixes and upgrades, dozens of versions of the same platform all running at once, multiple levels of dependencies, and so much more code to maintain. The former would be way easier in every way. Except with one central codebase, one serious bug in one day can take down all projects and I could lose every client all at once in a single day. That would destroy my business, and my livlihood, from one mistake. So, instead, I have over 60 versions of the codebase to maintain. And it means that one b
Bullshit. There are SIX skillsets, any one of which can advance you. You need to refuse all six of them to hit that career plateau.
I was an awkward, highly technical, coludn't-talk-to-adults teenager. I got clients with one sentence and one sentence alone: "you won't pay until you're happy with it."
I built business solutions for small and mid-sized companies, for, at that time, anywhere between $100 and $10'000, and I'd often get $0 for months at a time as I developed, learned, tested, presented, adjusted, tweaked, changed, delivered, and launched a solution for a client. Only then would I be able to invoice the project, and wait for it to be paid.
And with no contract, and no P.O., and absolutely nothing written, every single client could walk away from me without paying at any time.
I guaranteed my effort, and I found the clients willing to take a chance on me, because they only chance they were taking was time. And I didn't win them all, far from it, but I made good money over-all.
There are commission-based jobs -- like sales and collections. There are service-based jobs like painting and handywork. There are programming jobs like websites and software. There are manufacturing jobs and design jobs and strategy jobs and research jobs.
If you're open to any type of job, I promise you have the skillset to make a business out of it that can support you and your family. You'll undoubtedly want to learn some very basic protections first, of course.
That's what most people don't know. There are protections out there for business relationships that go bad.
In my case, I could take down a web-site that I built that the client didn't pay for. So they'd get nothing if they paid nothing. SO they paid to keep what I'd already given them, if they were at all happy about it. And with no contract, I could unilaterally take down anything that I had built.
If you work on someone's house/property at all, you can easily get a lean on their house, which basically means they can't sell their house without paying you. That covers just about any service you could provide.
Collections agencies will enforce anything that looks like an invoice for work done in any industry. You'll get 90% of your bill if you were at all honest about your work.
Got a written agreement of any kind with a dollar and a date? Small claims court costs $500 or way less, and you'll get a judge to force your client to pay your bill, up to ten grand. If you did the work, you'll get it all, but even if you didn't finish the work, you'll almost surely get your hard expenses paid for.
Between insurance, and bank loans, and grants, and tax credits, you can orchestrate your business to protect you in so many many ways.
But, most importantly, if you're working for someone else in a service industry (e.g. plumber), they are likely billing out your services at three or four times what they pay you. That covers costs and equipment, sure, and sales and collections, of course, but it also covers supervision and handling and communicating with you and reviewing your work and fixing your mistakes. If you're willing to cover your own work, those last five elements come for free. Those are the big ones. So you really don't need anywhere near the amount of business that you get when you work for someone else. Think less than half -- because you're able to keep so much more of it.
Then add all of the obvious business write-offs, and the legitimate ones that your friends think are illegal only because they've never read their own tax code and so they pay what they've told to pay, and you'll realize that you can avoid paying 80% of the taxes that you're currently paying throughout your every-day life.
You need to take a lot of big risks to go-it-on-your-own, but it all comes back very quickly once you succeed at the first step. That first step takes two "business cycles", which is basically two years for most industries.
...because younger people are cheaper at any task that can be taught, tutorialized, trained, or proceduralized; they can also be automated.
If you want to make more money, your idea of "better" means nothing. You need to be your employer's idea of better. These days, and for most industries it's always been true, that means you need to make decisions out of experience, not work harder.
Making decisions out of experience is called management. Whether you're "managing" yourself, others, or the company as a whole, that's the value.
When it comes to just "doing the work", almost every business would rather it take six times as long, and cost half as much, than cost more and be done faster & better. Teenagers are cheap -- they don't have families and mortgages and cars and problems.
But hey, you know the rule, and for those who don't, I'll tell you now. It is this:
If you don't like the way the business is run, run your own.
So, if you don't like the "business structures dating back to the industrial revolution", as you say, then create your own business and run it however you like. Or pay someone to run it for you, your way.
But this garbage that you spew where you assume that models 100 years old are somehow less relevant because they are old, is just ignorant. You ignore the test-of-time in favour of informed-observation, but you don't consider past results as valued information in-and-of-themselves, and you think that your information isn't somehow flawed to begin with.
If you don't like it the way that it is, do it yourself any way that you like. You don't get to be upset by something that someone else did for themselves. You don't want to live that way, you can quit at any time.
Very true. Not everyone is capable of advancing. Not everyone is capable of learning something new. Not everyone is capable of being any more successful than they already are. But it's never (typically) about them being held back, it's about the risks that they aren't willing to take.
And if you own your own company, then you're likely very familiar with one of my philosophies: if a million people do it every day, then I'm able to learn it too. There are plenty of reasons to avoid learning something new, but that's always my choice, one way or the other.
I'm not capable of bungee jumping, and I'm probably too terrified to be *capable* of learning. But really, that's not the bungee's fault.
You find me a low-level worker, willing to go one month with zero pay, then two years before linearly making it back to the same pay-rate, and willing to lose it all if they truly screw up (they effectively need to guarantee their own performance), and willing to learn the new skillsets required of the new job responsibilities, and willing to fail, fall off the horse, then get back on and try again, who then didn't evenntually wind up advancing accordingly.
I've got plenty of examples, right in-front of me every day, of people who refused to guarantee their own work, refused to lose their current salary, refused to learn anything new, and/or got deterred by the first set-back.
...and that would be a reason to get stuck: not willing to learn a new skillset. So sorry that advancement requires something more/new.
and bullshit. I'm a technical person, I started my own company the moment I hated the way other companies did things. I dropped out of school, I worked hard, I experimented a lot, I failed my fair share, and now, 25 years later, I'm still going strong. I've chosen my lifestyle, and made it suit my personality and my goals. And because of that, no one in history has ever been any richer than I am right now.
How many lower-level workers are willing to spend the up-front costs and take the risks associated with moving up? I'll tell you how many -- all the ones that moved up, and none of the ones that didn't.
I've got many friends with the skills and abilities to easily either start they own business in their trade or move up in their existing industry, but don't.
Usually, they don't start their own business because they aren't willing to risk being unsuccessful. They won't take the initial pay-cut during the transition, because "what if they fail". They won't borrow the money (as an additional mortgage, for example), because they just don't believe in their own success.
Similarly, they won't apply for the "managers' job", or whatever the next step up is, because they don't know how to keep that job. They know how to work hard, and keep the low-level job, but they don't know what's involved in managing others, so they worry that they won't be able to be responsible for their subordinates, and hence will get fired.
In either scenario, they stick with their current job simply because they are afraid to take new risks.
They forget that a) they took an initial risk when they got their current job; b) that if the company isn't doing well, they'll get fired before their boss does, no matter how good they are at their boss; and c) you keep taking the same risk until you figure out how to make it work, or you're forever stuck where you are.
You don't get people to advance by showing them how to advance. You get people to advance by removing their fear of the unknown; then they'll advance all by themselves without any help from anyone.
we always had a social insurance, social security, or other unique ID that could have been used with open access to government databases. We could have had this at any time since the dawn of the internet. retail stores could have accepted any government id as contact information and/or payment for well-over a century.
credit cards, debit cards, bank information, drivers' licences, social insurance numbers, social security numbers, tax filings, incorporation documents -- any one of them could have been open-access for identification.
Wanna give your social security number to everyone? Want every retail store to have access to your complete set of co-ordinates?
my neighbours, three walls and three windows away, the contractor finishing my basement, the tvisions in the sportsbar. I'm not a hobbit on a mountain-top, I interact with people most of most days, and often never again.
And that would be the reason my father told me never to let one client dedicate more than 30% of my business. It's also why I told my father that reliable clients sometimes get heavy discounts, to offset the lack of sales/collection efforts, which keeps them from rolling their own.
It's been six weeks since the battery died. I used call-forwarding to forward my cell number to my ancient land-line. I pulled the old "cordless-not-to-be-confused-with-mobile" phones out of the garage. I haven't looked back.
An actual answering machine. Cool. No caller ID. $9.95/month.
I don't lose my phone around the house. I don't keep it in my pocket always. I don't see who's calling and wonder why before answering.
Do you know what happens when I leave the house? I'm actually alone! If I'm driving an hour away, I'm guaranteed to be alone for the entire hour!
In reality, I'll wind up with a cellphone for emergencies -- need to be able to survive car trouble. But I'm thinking I'll leave the cellphone with the car keys.
And here it is. I was hoping to find someone saying it.
Back when I was yay tall, I worked for a large web-development company. They'd spend six months to a year to draw-up a spec document that would take us three weeks to build. I quit when I found out that they spent $1.6 million dollars (this was in 1997) on the spec process alone.
Now I run my own small web development company, doing much larger things than they ever did (right from the start), and with good clients, time estimates are never more than order-of-magnitudes.
Similar to, but unlike the article, I've described programming as navigation -- walking through a small forest or through an office building. You can see the other side. You might have a compass or signs to guide you. But you need to step over the log and around the boulders, you need to say hi to the boss and wait for the elevator. You might trip over a tree root or stub your toe on a desk.
Predicting how long it'll take you to walk 100 yards through a single-floor office takes a lot more than just your walking speed, and the floor plan. It's a good bet that you'll be off by seconds at midnight, full minutes at 10am, as many as thirty minutes at 3pm, and you may be off by up to two hours if you're trying to cross at noon.
cutting a few facial hairs, just at a random time, in a random place, without a mirror. and scissors? run the risk of poking or snipping my skin or nostrils? no thanks.
contrast that with: in my bathroom, with a full mirror, and full lighting, and a pull-out with all of my facial grooming and hygene tools, including an electric shaver which is probably the best tool for a few stray facial hairs.
So, Uber, the most illegal company in the news this year, full of malware issues, HR issues, surveillance issues, gaming drivers, gaming passengers, stealing money from both, and are they even profitable yet?
social harmony comes from shared experiences, realizing that someone else's differences work just as well as your own. It doesn't come from academic learning about them from reading.
the spork is better in every way. it's a spoon. it's a fork. it takes up less space. it's not like you ever use a spoon and a fork at the same time.
still, no one wants a spork. a screwdriver could have a hammer on the other end. it doesn't. you don't want it to.
it's not about better. sometimes, it's just about the abstract concept of knowing what your tool is, and what it does. I can have two different tools for different things.
the all-too-common swiss army knife is completely useless. Have you ever actually seen any human being even try to use a swiss army knife? It's hillarious.
software features are the same way. it's 2017. do you think anyone uses office suite programs for anything more than they did thirty years ago? maybe 0.1% do. Maybe a whole 1% use pivot tables. Everyone else can write business reports and book reports and essays in wordperfect with plastic keyboard overlays. But now we have drop down menus, excuse me, ribbon bars, excuse me, drop down menus inside of ribbon bars! Even clippy couldn't have predicted that one.
Better, is often much more useless. It's like more storage-space in your car or in your house. There's a point at which you need an index to find your stuff. And that point is way sooner than people think. So your SUV, and your storage locker, and your attic, and your space bedroom, become piles of junk. That's not better.
software functions are the same way. I need to convert video basically between four different formats in 2017. And almost always between only two, now that flash is dead. But it's been ten years, and I still can't figure out how to get VLC to convert a video into anything usable. So I'm using a shitty shareware program that's far less capable, but doesn't give me the option of producing a 10x10 pixel, 6GB video, from a simple cell phone video. Asking me to select the bitrate in an age where internet speeds vary as much as they do is the all-time dumbest option. Nobody cares about the bitrate. Ask me to choose the filesize, which means way more. Or the general quality. Do you think I care about the pixel dimensions when the compression is horrible? High-res compression artifacts, yummy.
More software features is like a new employee. If you can't work with what you have, a new employee ain't gonna make the old ones any better.
What a concept. We've eighty-seven thousand versions of microsoft office later. Does anyone's book report need anything newer than wordperfect? And if you thought that was dating myself, wordstar? It's black text on white page. Textart became useless when tractor-feed paper was gone -- you can't do banners on pre-cut paper. Count the number of office workers who use anything more than bold, italics, underline, a bulleted list, and maybe a numbered list. Even pivot tables have been around for decades now.
You need the latest hardware to run the latest software. But you don't need the latest software to do the latest business -- because the latest business, most of the time, is nothing new.
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Oh come now. "anyone" needn't mean 100%. I know we're all technical people around here, but in most industries (psychology, for example), 90% would certainly constitutes "anyone". I'll happily argue that while it won't work for some, those are the exceptions, the outliers.
Wow. I can honestly say that I agree with every one of your statements. Nicely observed.
But it changes nothing.
The reason that entrepreneurs and bosses and managers get paid more than they are worth (in terms of value) is purely because there are so few people willing to do that work (including getting there to do it). It's really that simple.
And the reason that they stay there, instead of going back to doing what they do best, is because they craft it that way.
Here's the irony: I can say that from personal experience. That's my rutt, as it were.
I was an entrepreneur. I failed a few times, I succeeded one big time. And now, I'm comfortable, great lifestyle, doing the work that I do as I've been doing it for a long time. I would love nothing more than to go back to the entrepreneurial spirit and fail a few more times before succeeding again. I live the new inventions spirit. But I won't dare give up my comfortable life as it is right now. Things are too easy.
So I've crafter the business, the services, the products, the clients, the relationships, the suppliers, and the technology, all to keep me stable in this current scenario. I'm stuck in this boss/manager/owner world, just like lower-ladder staff are the way that I've been describing herein. And certainly, my business could be way better if run by someone else. But it's not about my business. It's about my life. Right now, I'm very happy, and very comfortable. It's hard to give that up.
Now, how's that for irony?
Okay; I can see how those would pull you out-of-the-norm. Glad to see that you're at least out-of-the-woods from it all. Here's hoping there were lots of someones in your life who were generous with their time and resources to help you through it.
Many good guesses. Some bang-on. I certainly lived with parents for a while, not 35, but a while. Did friends always pay me back? Certainly when it came to anything big they did. Obviously I've still got a few on-going, so let's hope they turn out well.
I have a small retirement savings in terms of investments, but I have a huge amount of equity in the house. Really, that's where my current retirement savings go, and that's where my savings can currently do the most good -- for me, I'm not an investment junkie. In ten-to-twenty years, when my mortgage is paid off, and I decide to sell this house, it'll be worth two-to-three million. My next house (out in the country is my plan) will be a quarter of that. So I'm expecting to have 1.5 million in excess equity in ten years; more in twenty. I'm 37 now, so that's pretty good for now. Add in my savings from here on, and I'll survive with more or less of my current lifestyle quite easily. Add my beloved's contributions, and we're set that much longer. Add inheritance, that next big business idea, the winning lottery ticket, the twenty that I found on the street last week, and the fifty that I found in that old leather jacket from highschool and I have nothing to worry about.
I also own (outright) the cars, the furniture, and everything else, with zero debt, aside from a reasonable mortgage. And I already have the family, including two pets. Add tickets to 20 theatrical shows every season, eight weeks of vacations planned for this year, a weekly housekeeper, a monthly lawn-care service, direct-from-the-farm foods year-round (seasonally of course), and a cheap sportscar, and I think most would be pretty happy with my life in this quite large house.
Sorry if that disappoints you. Of course I've been lucky. But you make it sound as though I haven't created that luck. No I (personally) haven't had any major health emergencies, besides some broken bones and allergies, but I've also played very safe and avoided a lot of low-risk-high-danger activities that most people do every day. Also, I have free health insurance.
Certainly not everyone can live with parents as long as I did, but I'm sure you had friends with whom you could have shared expenses in order to save your pennies. In those years, I saved about twenty grand in cash each year. I'd be in the same place today if I had saved only half as much (I'd have a slightly larger mortgage, and no granite countertops in the bathrooms).
If you're willing to sacrifice -- in my case, it was the freedom and independence of living alone, a university degree, selecting the right activities and the right friends -- you don't need to sacrifice for long.
On the other hand, if you want super freedom, and you want to do everything alone, and you don't want to take anything from anybody, then you're going to select the toughest roughest roads every time.
Either you save-up in-advance, or you borrow against your own future. Some people don't start a family until they have something saved -- personally, I had half of my first house in cash, in order to cover most of my mortgage. And then, when I wanted to change my lifestyle, I grew my mortgage as a bridge-loan. Earlier in my life, I borrowed money from friends and family when I wanted to grow my business by taking a risk on an iffy new client.
Nowadays, I pay it forward. I loan as much as 50% of my annual revenue to friends and family who need loans and can't get them from a bank. I basically extend my bank credit to them so they can bridge the gap between their present and future. And to be clear, I don't profit from it at all.
That's what believing in your friend means. It's seeing that they have the skill, and simply lack the opportunity to apply that skill. It's not a risk to me because I don't worry that they'll skip-town with the money, and I don't believe that they'll fail at applying their skill. The bank needs proof and profit because the bank is a business and a stranger. I'm neither to my friend. My friend has credit with me, by definition.
My father always said that you don't do anything by yourself in this world, and especially in business. You're always relying on someone. Some people think that they're independent when they borrow money from a bank, instead of from a friend. That makes zero sense. You're still dependent on the bank. You still haven't done it alone. Someone believed in you and someone helped you out. If you're going to be honest and pay it back anyway, better it be a friend, because then you can pay back the money, and the favour.
"smarter, worked harder, and was better at making decisions" has absolutely nothing to do with advancement. I don't know why you would think that it does. Those have everything to do with staying exactly where you are. You're good at it. Really good. So I want you to stay there and keep doing it. Why does that surprise you?
the amount you get paid for your work also has nothing to do with how smart/hard/better you are. you get paid purely based on how many other people can do the same thing. plain and simple. if anyone can be taught to do what you do, then you get paid less. Not because it's worth less, but simply because I can replace you with someone who'll take less. There's always someone with a lesser lifestyle than yours, and hence there's always someone to whom I can pay less.
So since advancement and pay have nothing to do with your skills, then what does?
Again, you need to be willing to risk, willing to pull the trigger, and willing to convince others to work for you. That means "previous business had failed" means willing to risk -- risk just means that you'll have multiple failures for every success. Otherwise, it's a guarantee, not a risk.
Willing to pull the trigger means cutting research and planning short, in favour of actual action, because you can never have enough information in-advance. Trial and error means trying even though you might be in error. Having all the information in-advance isn't trying, it's just plain following the recipe. And often is the case that you could try and fail six times in the same amount of time it would take you to finish your research. That's why it's often said that the more chances you take, the more luck you'll find.
You mock the elevator pitches, and schmoozing, but that's exactly the definition of convincing others to work for you. You need to command others to do favours for you. That's the elevator pitch. Getting someone who doesn't need you at all, to help you anyway.
So, if you aren't willing to fail, and you can't convince others to help you, and you won't risk everything you have on your own performance, then big surprise you won't advance.
You're asking others to advance you. That's not how advancement works. Advancement is something that you need to do to yourself.
No one cares about "increasing productivity" and "effective use of the American labor force". The reason coaches choose to punt on fourth down isn't because it's the right decision.
Here's your lesson in being the boss.
After you take all of those risks, and all of those failures, and all of those successful pitches, the rule as a business owner is don't screw it up, don't rock the boat, stop taking risks. Once you win at the roulette wheel, you don't keep playing until you lose. You walk away with your winnings.
The reason coaches punt on fourth down is because they won't be fired for doing so.
Bosses don't care about productivity. They care about avoiding risks. Current productivity and no risk will always beat out double productivity with increased risk, no matter how minor.
That's the truth about your boss. It's the truth about me. It's the reason I've never let my employees make things better in any way that risks a single client.
Here's a case in point. I run a web development company. I have a choice. I can have one platform run all clients, or I can duplicate the platform and codebase for each project of each client. The latter obviously means way more platform maintenance, bug fixes and upgrades, dozens of versions of the same platform all running at once, multiple levels of dependencies, and so much more code to maintain. The former would be way easier in every way. Except with one central codebase, one serious bug in one day can take down all projects and I could lose every client all at once in a single day. That would destroy my business, and my livlihood, from one mistake. So, instead, I have over 60 versions of the codebase to maintain. And it means that one b
Bullshit. There are SIX skillsets, any one of which can advance you. You need to refuse all six of them to hit that career plateau.
I was an awkward, highly technical, coludn't-talk-to-adults teenager. I got clients with one sentence and one sentence alone: "you won't pay until you're happy with it."
I built business solutions for small and mid-sized companies, for, at that time, anywhere between $100 and $10'000, and I'd often get $0 for months at a time as I developed, learned, tested, presented, adjusted, tweaked, changed, delivered, and launched a solution for a client. Only then would I be able to invoice the project, and wait for it to be paid.
And with no contract, and no P.O., and absolutely nothing written, every single client could walk away from me without paying at any time.
I guaranteed my effort, and I found the clients willing to take a chance on me, because they only chance they were taking was time. And I didn't win them all, far from it, but I made good money over-all.
There are commission-based jobs -- like sales and collections. There are service-based jobs like painting and handywork. There are programming jobs like websites and software. There are manufacturing jobs and design jobs and strategy jobs and research jobs.
If you're open to any type of job, I promise you have the skillset to make a business out of it that can support you and your family. You'll undoubtedly want to learn some very basic protections first, of course.
That's what most people don't know. There are protections out there for business relationships that go bad.
In my case, I could take down a web-site that I built that the client didn't pay for. So they'd get nothing if they paid nothing. SO they paid to keep what I'd already given them, if they were at all happy about it. And with no contract, I could unilaterally take down anything that I had built.
If you work on someone's house/property at all, you can easily get a lean on their house, which basically means they can't sell their house without paying you. That covers just about any service you could provide.
Collections agencies will enforce anything that looks like an invoice for work done in any industry. You'll get 90% of your bill if you were at all honest about your work.
Got a written agreement of any kind with a dollar and a date? Small claims court costs $500 or way less, and you'll get a judge to force your client to pay your bill, up to ten grand. If you did the work, you'll get it all, but even if you didn't finish the work, you'll almost surely get your hard expenses paid for.
Between insurance, and bank loans, and grants, and tax credits, you can orchestrate your business to protect you in so many many ways.
But, most importantly, if you're working for someone else in a service industry (e.g. plumber), they are likely billing out your services at three or four times what they pay you. That covers costs and equipment, sure, and sales and collections, of course, but it also covers supervision and handling and communicating with you and reviewing your work and fixing your mistakes. If you're willing to cover your own work, those last five elements come for free. Those are the big ones. So you really don't need anywhere near the amount of business that you get when you work for someone else. Think less than half -- because you're able to keep so much more of it.
Then add all of the obvious business write-offs, and the legitimate ones that your friends think are illegal only because they've never read their own tax code and so they pay what they've told to pay, and you'll realize that you can avoid paying 80% of the taxes that you're currently paying throughout your every-day life.
You need to take a lot of big risks to go-it-on-your-own, but it all comes back very quickly once you succeed at the first step. That first step takes two "business cycles", which is basically two years for most industries.
...because younger people are cheaper at any task that can be taught, tutorialized, trained, or proceduralized; they can also be automated.
If you want to make more money, your idea of "better" means nothing. You need to be your employer's idea of better. These days, and for most industries it's always been true, that means you need to make decisions out of experience, not work harder.
Making decisions out of experience is called management. Whether you're "managing" yourself, others, or the company as a whole, that's the value.
When it comes to just "doing the work", almost every business would rather it take six times as long, and cost half as much, than cost more and be done faster & better. Teenagers are cheap -- they don't have families and mortgages and cars and problems.
But hey, you know the rule, and for those who don't, I'll tell you now. It is this:
If you don't like the way the business is run, run your own.
So, if you don't like the "business structures dating back to the industrial revolution", as you say, then create your own business and run it however you like. Or pay someone to run it for you, your way.
But this garbage that you spew where you assume that models 100 years old are somehow less relevant because they are old, is just ignorant. You ignore the test-of-time in favour of informed-observation, but you don't consider past results as valued information in-and-of-themselves, and you think that your information isn't somehow flawed to begin with.
If you don't like it the way that it is, do it yourself any way that you like. You don't get to be upset by something that someone else did for themselves. You don't want to live that way, you can quit at any time.
Very true. Not everyone is capable of advancing. Not everyone is capable of learning something new. Not everyone is capable of being any more successful than they already are. But it's never (typically) about them being held back, it's about the risks that they aren't willing to take.
And if you own your own company, then you're likely very familiar with one of my philosophies: if a million people do it every day, then I'm able to learn it too. There are plenty of reasons to avoid learning something new, but that's always my choice, one way or the other.
I'm not capable of bungee jumping, and I'm probably too terrified to be *capable* of learning. But really, that's not the bungee's fault.
You find me a low-level worker,
willing to go one month with zero pay,
then two years before linearly making it back to the same pay-rate,
and willing to lose it all if they truly screw up (they effectively need to guarantee their own performance),
and willing to learn the new skillsets required of the new job responsibilities,
and willing to fail, fall off the horse, then get back on and try again,
who then didn't evenntually wind up advancing accordingly.
I've got plenty of examples, right in-front of me every day, of people who
refused to guarantee their own work,
refused to lose their current salary,
refused to learn anything new,
and/or got deterred by the first set-back.
...and that would be a reason to get stuck: not willing to learn a new skillset. So sorry that advancement requires something more/new.
and bullshit. I'm a technical person, I started my own company the moment I hated the way other companies did things. I dropped out of school, I worked hard, I experimented a lot, I failed my fair share, and now, 25 years later, I'm still going strong. I've chosen my lifestyle, and made it suit my personality and my goals. And because of that, no one in history has ever been any richer than I am right now.
How many lower-level workers are willing to spend the up-front costs and take the risks associated with moving up? I'll tell you how many -- all the ones that moved up, and none of the ones that didn't.
I've got many friends with the skills and abilities to easily either start they own business in their trade or move up in their existing industry, but don't.
Usually, they don't start their own business because they aren't willing to risk being unsuccessful. They won't take the initial pay-cut during the transition, because "what if they fail". They won't borrow the money (as an additional mortgage, for example), because they just don't believe in their own success.
Similarly, they won't apply for the "managers' job", or whatever the next step up is, because they don't know how to keep that job. They know how to work hard, and keep the low-level job, but they don't know what's involved in managing others, so they worry that they won't be able to be responsible for their subordinates, and hence will get fired.
In either scenario, they stick with their current job simply because they are afraid to take new risks.
They forget that a) they took an initial risk when they got their current job; b) that if the company isn't doing well, they'll get fired before their boss does, no matter how good they are at their boss; and c) you keep taking the same risk until you figure out how to make it work, or you're forever stuck where you are.
You don't get people to advance by showing them how to advance. You get people to advance by removing their fear of the unknown; then they'll advance all by themselves without any help from anyone.
Good luck.
we always had a social insurance, social security, or other unique ID that could have been used with open access to government databases. We could have had this at any time since the dawn of the internet. retail stores could have accepted any government id as contact information and/or payment for well-over a century.
credit cards, debit cards, bank information, drivers' licences, social insurance numbers, social security numbers, tax filings, incorporation documents -- any one of them could have been open-access for identification.
Wanna give your social security number to everyone? Want every retail store to have access to your complete set of co-ordinates?
I didn't think so.
my neighbours, three walls and three windows away, the contractor finishing my basement, the tvisions in the sportsbar. I'm not a hobbit on a mountain-top, I interact with people most of most days, and often never again.
And that would be the reason my father told me never to let one client dedicate more than 30% of my business. It's also why I told my father that reliable clients sometimes get heavy discounts, to offset the lack of sales/collection efforts, which keeps them from rolling their own.
It's been six weeks since the battery died. I used call-forwarding to forward my cell number to my ancient land-line. I pulled the old "cordless-not-to-be-confused-with-mobile" phones out of the garage. I haven't looked back.
An actual answering machine. Cool. No caller ID. $9.95/month.
I don't lose my phone around the house. I don't keep it in my pocket always. I don't see who's calling and wonder why before answering.
Do you know what happens when I leave the house? I'm actually alone! If I'm driving an hour away, I'm guaranteed to be alone for the entire hour!
In reality, I'll wind up with a cellphone for emergencies -- need to be able to survive car trouble. But I'm thinking I'll leave the cellphone with the car keys.
And here it is. I was hoping to find someone saying it.
Back when I was yay tall, I worked for a large web-development company. They'd spend six months to a year to draw-up a spec document that would take us three weeks to build. I quit when I found out that they spent $1.6 million dollars (this was in 1997) on the spec process alone.
Now I run my own small web development company, doing much larger things than they ever did (right from the start), and with good clients, time estimates are never more than order-of-magnitudes.
Similar to, but unlike the article, I've described programming as navigation -- walking through a small forest or through an office building. You can see the other side. You might have a compass or signs to guide you. But you need to step over the log and around the boulders, you need to say hi to the boss and wait for the elevator. You might trip over a tree root or stub your toe on a desk.
Predicting how long it'll take you to walk 100 yards through a single-floor office takes a lot more than just your walking speed, and the floor plan. It's a good bet that you'll be off by seconds at midnight, full minutes at 10am, as many as thirty minutes at 3pm, and you may be off by up to two hours if you're trying to cross at noon.
cutting a few facial hairs, just at a random time, in a random place, without a mirror. and scissors? run the risk of poking or snipping my skin or nostrils? no thanks.
contrast that with: in my bathroom, with a full mirror, and full lighting, and a pull-out with all of my facial grooming and hygene tools, including an electric shaver which is probably the best tool for a few stray facial hairs.
So, Uber, the most illegal company in the news this year, full of malware issues, HR issues, surveillance issues, gaming drivers, gaming passengers, stealing money from both, and are they even profitable yet?
Yeah, let's partner with them. Great idea.
social harmony comes from shared experiences, realizing that someone else's differences work just as well as your own. It doesn't come from academic learning about them from reading.
Way to give concrete examples.
I do think that was my point you're making. Thanks for the help.
wow, way to miss the point. I was arguing for your side.
the spork is better in every way. it's a spoon. it's a fork. it takes up less space. it's not like you ever use a spoon and a fork at the same time.
still, no one wants a spork.
a screwdriver could have a hammer on the other end. it doesn't. you don't want it to.
it's not about better. sometimes, it's just about the abstract concept of knowing what your tool is, and what it does. I can have two different tools for different things.
the all-too-common swiss army knife is completely useless. Have you ever actually seen any human being even try to use a swiss army knife? It's hillarious.
software features are the same way. it's 2017. do you think anyone uses office suite programs for anything more than they did thirty years ago? maybe 0.1% do. Maybe a whole 1% use pivot tables. Everyone else can write business reports and book reports and essays in wordperfect with plastic keyboard overlays. But now we have drop down menus, excuse me, ribbon bars, excuse me, drop down menus inside of ribbon bars! Even clippy couldn't have predicted that one.
Better, is often much more useless. It's like more storage-space in your car or in your house. There's a point at which you need an index to find your stuff. And that point is way sooner than people think. So your SUV, and your storage locker, and your attic, and your space bedroom, become piles of junk. That's not better.
software functions are the same way. I need to convert video basically between four different formats in 2017. And almost always between only two, now that flash is dead. But it's been ten years, and I still can't figure out how to get VLC to convert a video into anything usable. So I'm using a shitty shareware program that's far less capable, but doesn't give me the option of producing a 10x10 pixel, 6GB video, from a simple cell phone video. Asking me to select the bitrate in an age where internet speeds vary as much as they do is the all-time dumbest option. Nobody cares about the bitrate. Ask me to choose the filesize, which means way more. Or the general quality. Do you think I care about the pixel dimensions when the compression is horrible? High-res compression artifacts, yummy.
More software features is like a new employee. If you can't work with what you have, a new employee ain't gonna make the old ones any better.
What a concept. We've eighty-seven thousand versions of microsoft office later. Does anyone's book report need anything newer than wordperfect? And if you thought that was dating myself, wordstar? It's black text on white page. Textart became useless when tractor-feed paper was gone -- you can't do banners on pre-cut paper. Count the number of office workers who use anything more than bold, italics, underline, a bulleted list, and maybe a numbered list. Even pivot tables have been around for decades now.
You need the latest hardware to run the latest software. But you don't need the latest software to do the latest business -- because the latest business, most of the time, is nothing new.