The best wealth building tool a person has available to them is their personal income. The two biggest destroyers of the personal income is debt and indifference. There are plenty of articles about reducing who debt, but who could possibly be indifferent about how much money they are paid? Well, probably you are just like I was.
First of all think about how much work you actually get done in a work day. Now don’t count all the busy stuff that happens. You know the work you do when you have two hours to get a big presentation done and you pull out all the stops to knock it out and it turns out great even though you had four weeks to get it done. That moment of panic and productivity is the real work you produce. That is what you are actually getting paid for. You probably only do this 10 to 20% of all the time you are at work.
Now instead of worrying about if you’re getting a 2% raise or a 5% raise imagine leveraging efforts 3 or 4 times and selling yourself as someone who outshines everyone for a 80% to 100% raise. The general company culture has us nickel and diming ourselves. We have a rigid schedule that forces us at work 40 to 60 hours a work, but we only put a set amount of effort in no matter how long we are there.
Many new companies understand the production based compensation. This is scary to some who grew up in fixed income households, but it can be an opportunity if you always do more work than your cubicle neighbors. You could double your income for less time. Put that extra money into the stock market and you could become a millionaire in no time. Maybe take some of your down hours at work this week and think about it.