Money Matter
Working Hard Won’t Make You Rich
Why working hard is not the right answer for those who are seeking better financial compensation.
If all you do in life is work really hard, you’re never going to get wealthy. Because it’s not enough that you work hard to make money to set some of it aside.
Ric Edelman, conversation with Business Insider.
Many of us are still brainwashed by the idea of “working hard” thinking that we can earn a lot of money and become rich pensioners. In fact, working hard doesn’t guarantee us becoming rich or truly reaching our financial goal.
We work hard, 9–6 and even manage to pull off an all-nighter to become our boss’ favourite and hoping that we’ll get a bonus or be promoted. We give everything and invest our time only for this job. We get home tired, not even wanting to connect with people who love us, but our earnings still aren’t enough to make us rich.
We work too hard and too long. We don’t invest enough in our self-development; not to mention our well-being too.
People who have high incomes are usually those who can create solutions and solve problems, not people who spend their time working long hours without clear objectives. Imagine we are on a mission to find a valuable relic in the unknown desert, and we don’t know which area to dig, so we just randomly dig for hours but end up finding no relic.
From the example above, no doubt that we work hard, but do we get the reward we think we deserve by not finding a relic at all despite the long hours we put in for it? What if we changed our plan by learning how to find a relic, spending more time studying the area, and maybe using the metal detector or creating one before we started the expedition? By doing so we can work efficiently and find the relic sooner.
It means that the more creative, resourceful, and knowledgeable we are, the more possible for us to earn more money for the solution we provide. We no longer have to work extra hours just for a basic and tedious job. By being more knowledgable, we can offer better value that won’t cost our time.
Doesn’t matter how hard we work for a job, we’ll be making an averagely equal salary with our co-worker, who is probably more chill and working less than us. There must be a limit on how much we can earn as a staff. It’s not like we get a raise every month; we have to wait for a year for it, and the raise itself won’t usually align with inflation.
Even when we think we get paid well for working hard enough, the salary isn’t equal to the fatigue, lack of sleep, and lots of stress that we experience. Those will hinder us from being creative, taking the right decisions, and being healthy. How can we afford to solve problems and offer value if we are not mentally and physically healthy?
It’s better for us to take some time for ourselves, doing what we like, learning something new, or opening a business. By having more free time, we can improve our skills, get fresh ideas, and eventually be a person who can offer value instead of time, and this will be much more rewarding because we will eventually find the balance in our life.
The important thing we need to do is take time to know what value we can bring to the table, and this can only be achieved by exploring our talents and brushing up on our skills. Always invest in ourselves so that we can offer better value and do more high impact tasks that give us better compensation as well.
Let’s work smarter, not harder.
“If I only had an hour to chop down a tree, I would spend the first 45 minutes sharpening my axe.”
Abraham Lincoln
