Success means different things to different people.
For the purposes of this article, let us define success as the total income you generate per second of attention you pay to your employer and/or clients.
In this definition, total income includes your salary, your bonuses, your stock options, and even all the free goodies you get such as benefits and vacation. And total attention includes everything – from the time you spend commuting to the time you attend company parties to all your moments of getting work done.
As you’ll quickly see, this definition of success – total dollars earned per second of attention – is quite handy. In fact, it is crucial…
It gives us an objective unit of measure, using which, we can start comparing the results different students get, and analyze the effectiveness of their various strategies toward success.
After all there is a big difference between earning $30 per hour and $300 per hour – but you wouldn’t notice it if you simply compared the salaries of two professionals, where the former worked 8 hours per day and the latter worked 4 hours per week.
Make no mistake: dollars earned per second of attention always reveals the brutal truth about how successful one is…
When we take this approach, we also end up dispensing with all the coping mechanisms that many people utilize to hide their failures. This definition of success has no room for platitudes like “but I like my job” or “this is just a foot in the door job” or “I’m next in line for promotion”…
None of that matters. None of that is relevant.
In our approach, career success is all about total dollars earned per second of attention.
Achieving Career Success That Has Material Reality
It’s worth noting: The type of success we’re talking about is rare.
In fact, only a handful of people achieve it every year. Most people either sit in the sidelines hoping for their day to come… or worse… Instead of learning from failures and adjusting course, invent new and more ingenious ways of coping.
Of course, we are not interested in failures and their copes. We are only interested in those that succeed, so that we can help you replicate it.
So… Let’s cut to the chase…
How are you going to replicate a high dollar rate per second of your attention?
Here’s the “mathematical” formula that works – (i.e. lots of money for little attention):
Your Total Perceived Value x Opportunity Ecosystem = Big Income
In other words, your success depends on the total amount of value you are perceived to have, multiplied with the opportunities available to you.
The opportunities bit is obvious and intuitive: You aren’t going to be earning a 7 figure salary if you sit alone, out in the woods, without an internet connection, and spend your days talking to squirrels.
In order to succeed, you need to be connected to the opportunities around you. In the modern day this means, at the very least having a high-speed internet connection.
So… The opportunity ecosystem bit makes sense.
But what about Your Total Perceived Value? What exactly does that mean?..
Let’s write our formula in an expanded format to spell out exactly what Total Perceived Value is:
( ( Raw Talent + Hard Skills ) x Soft Skills ) x Opportunity Ecosystem = Success
And let’s unpack each of the terms:
1. Raw Talent: Raw talent is just that, your raw talent, innate ability, and inborn advantages. And it is quite important.
Sure… There are a number of incompetent executives and high-value professionals who occupy positions of success (roughly about 40%). But, the majority of successful people, and almost all of those with a track record of success (multiple positions of success) are generally talented at what they do.
That’s the harsh truth.
Furthermore, the correlation between IQ and income is indisputable. We can even see this in our natural appreciation of raw talent – as demonstrated by our fanatical interests in athleticism, the fine arts and music.
In other words, the love of raw talent is built into being human – and human social structures reflect that love by compensating raw talent with status and wealth.
This is why, a lot of employers, especially high-value employers, will instinctively say that they are “always looking for good talent” and are more than happy to “train them on the job even if they lack education”.
They do this, because they view talent as a form of treasure. Or perhaps, a commodity.
Either way: if you have raw talent, you are much more likely to be successful (i.e. earn a lot of money with lesser demands on your time). And you need to capitalize on it by making your raw talent visible (more on this on soft skills).
But if you don’t have that much raw talent… You need to compensate by developing hard skills that make up for your talent deficit.
2. Hard Skills: These are your real world job skills. They are the skills that let you do what you do for the employer. And they are the skills that employers pretend to pay you for.
I say pretend because, another harsh reality is that – people rarely get paid for their work. They get paid for “who they are” a lot more than “what they do”.
Regardless of this quirk of the market, hard skills are an important component of your Total Perceived Value. And they become essential, especially if you come from an unprivileged background (i.e. you don’t know anyone in the White House, and no one knows your last name).
As you might have noticed, Raw Talent and Hard Skills are added up in our formula. Meaning: they are interchangeable. If you are talented, you can wing it. But if you lack talent, you need practice. Both will work.
But… Both will only work, depending on your soft skills…
3. Soft Skills: Beyond the raw talent and the hard skills, the other crucial part of your total perceived value is your soft skills or what are also known as your career skills.
While raw talent enables you to do outstanding work or do work faster, and hard skills give you the expertise and knowledge to do the work, soft skills actually get you into positions where you can do the work.
This is why your soft skills are at least as important as your hard skills and raw talent combined.
And this is also why the formula above adds your hard skills and raw talent, but multiples your soft skills to generate your total perceived value.
In practice, what this means is: a talented person will get more out of developing soft skills than hard skills. Similarly, someone with great job skills will benefit more from developing soft skills than trying to acquire talent (which is a pipe dream).
Incidentally, the mechanics of this formula also reveal why so many incompetent executives make it to the top: They have barely any raw talent, and very few hard skills, but they can multiply the little they have by deploying spectacular soft skills that increase their total perceived value.
Remember this:
Everything we do in the world has to do with people.
Everything you want happens because of other people, and through the judgement and opinions of other people.
That’s not a conspiracy, that’s just how humans work. Which is precisely why developing soft skills must not only be an important, but a central and crucial part of your career development.
Yes.. It is a much higher priority than that masters degree.
And yes, you have to develop your soft skills, even if you’re not a “people person”.
In fact, you should especially develop soft skills if you’re not a people person!
4. Opportunity Ecosystem: Of course, we need to touch on the opportunity ecosystem more than just saying it’s intuitive.
You could have outstanding total perceived value and still fail at generating any degree of success, if you don’t apply yourself in an environment where there is likelihood for success.
For instance, you could be amazing at fixing mechanical things (raw talent), have a machinist degree and a decade of experience fixing small machines (hard skills), and be very charming and well connected (soft skills)… But… If you try to make it big fixing typewriters, you’re going to fail.
There isn’t sufficient demand for typewriter repair to make it worth your time. And when there isn’t sufficient demand, there isn’t much career opportunity.
In other words, even with all the advantages of the world, you still need to figure out how to apply your raw talent, hard skills and soft skills into an environment that is going to result in giving you the high-value career you deserve.
And that only happens when you follow a proven methodology that leads you to an opportunity ecosystem.
In the final analysis, the world is becoming ruthlessly competitive. With globalization accelerating and automation on the rise, professionals are becoming further and further atomized and dis-empowered. New graduates and early career professionals suffer the brunt of it today, but give it a couple of years, and pretty much the entire salaried class will be crushed under the silicone boot of this brave new world.
But its not all bad…
For those who align their future towards growth, there’s more opportunity than ever before. And if you want our kind of professional success (lots of money for little demand on your time), there hasn’t been a better time to be born.
You’re just going to need the right tools. That’s all.
With the right tools, success is higher and faster than you could imagine…