Income works like gravity — getting off the ground is the hardest part. Why simple work always pays badly, and what to do about it.
The hardest money to earn is small money.
I remember hearing that line for the first time and thinking it was nonsense. As a teenager I was sure that big sums had to be far harder to earn than small ones.
Life showed me otherwise.
Income is a bit like gravity. Breaking away from the ground is brutally hard, but the further into space you go, the easier it gets. A rocket meets the most resistance during liftoff and burns 80% of its fuel covering the first few dozen kilometres.
Our work is exactly the same. Small money is hard to earn because it is paid for things a great many people already know how to do.
Let me say straight away: I have enormous respect for any kind of work, and I think anyone who supports themselves and their family through honest labour deserves respect.
But the open market is simple and logical. If you do work that isn’t complicated — cleaning, standing at a till, driving a minibus — you can be replaced by someone else fairly easily.
Digging a foundation pit with a shovel can be punishing work, but it will always pay the minimum. Because any healthy man can handle it. Replacing that digger, if it comes to that, is easy.
So any work that a large number of people can do will always be paid poorly.
I remember going out to the fields as a schoolboy, hoeing peppers all day for 15 hryvnia. Sometimes they’d shortchange us by 5, which felt substantial and deeply unfair.
Back then I thought earning big money had to be much harder than swinging a hoe all day. I was badly wrong.
The more you engage your head and the more complicated the things you learn, the more value you can bring to the market, the harder you are to replace, and the more you can ask for.
It was exactly when I started going through different training programmes and developing myself that my life — and my income — began to change for the better.
For a long time I’ve wanted to help people pick up profitable professions and skills that bring in a good income for a reasonable amount of effort. Now that’s possible at our school.
My first working years after school were spent as a labourer on construction sites, a bartender at a cinema, a sales assistant in a hardware store — a lot of hard work for minimum pay.
If training like that had crossed my path back then, my road to the first decent money would have been dozens of times shorter and simpler.
The best investment, as I see it, is the investment in your own head. Because your head makes every other decision in your life.
Better to make sure your brain holds the right knowledge and the right beliefs. They will determine your income and your stress level.
It’s hard to earn money with your hands and your time alone. When you work with your head, money stops being a big problem.