How To Increase Your Income Potential | 4 Ways

In this article today, we’re talking about your lifetime earning potential and how much you can actually make in a single lifetime, just by working an hourly wage, and ways on how you can increase your income potential. From the age of 0 to 18 you’re in school, and from 18 to 21 you’re in college. After that, you’re going to start your working life and start working for about 45 years.

What becomes out of these 45 years of work? How can we make the best use of our time to make the most amount?

Ways To Increase Your Income Potential

Get Educated (Not Just Schooling)

Firstly, how do we increase lifetime earning potential? One of the ways is to get more educated, whether that be a trade skill such as welding, carpentry, or maybe you’re a dental hygienist, or an air traffic controller, or perhaps getting a masters in a certain field. Having more education will increase your lifetime earning potential, for example, air traffic controllers with a two-year program will make on average a salary of over $124,000 a year, which is pretty great.

When it personally comes to education, I totally get it, some degrees don’t mean anything. I definitely understand that sometimes you can get extra education, and maybe not get the job that you might want.

However, what I’ve noticed is in most cases, employers love to see that you have education on your resume. I think the reason is not so much the education part, but the fact that you actually committed to a two or four-year institution, and you follow it all the way through shows me that as an employee, you’ll be reliable and you’ll be consistent and you’ll be there because you’ve done it before.

I think education is one of the ways that employers definitely ere-qualify you, just to make sure that you have what it takes to actually do the job and to do it reliably for a while.

Touching on this point, I think consistency is also something that can increase your lifetime earning potential. Just being consistent in the way that you educate yourself, or being consistent in the ways you pick up new skills can also increase your lifetime earning potential.

Learn To Deal With People

The second thing that I think everyone can do to increase their lifetime earning potential is to learn to deal with people and get management experience. I understand that some of you may be introverted, but one of the best ways to actually learn a lot and progress in your career is to manage tasks, manage people, and manage those priorities effectively.

Typically, if you’re really good at what you do, you can get some management experience just by asking your superior, or whoever you’re working for. Like “hey is there any opportunity for advancement, perhaps an opportunity to manage other people or to teach other people certain types of skills”.

My favorite point in this article is actually the training, teaching, and mentoring of others. If you’re at work and you have, for example, experience and you’re really good at customer support, you can train a new employee that doesn’t really know any of that, all the learning that you have. The reason is, that you could grow as a leader and a manager, and they can also grow in the organization as well.

In my experience, if you teach something, you really become the master of that domain. And being that teacher or that person that the organization looks up to, to actually teach and guide others, is going to be really valuable. They’re going to increase your lifetime earning potential by a lot.

Use Time Efficiently

The third thing that you can do to improve your lifetime earning potential, is to make more efficient use of your time either during work or outside of work. For example, while at work, try to ask questions and figure out what would it take to get better at your job, and actually move up to that next step. Perhaps, have a talk with your manager say “hey I want to make it to the next step, what does it take. what are the steps that I need to hit to get there”

Document these things together so that when you do eventually hit those steps, you are guaranteed that next level. Outside of work, you can build skills that’ll really help your professional career later such as learning the code, maybe you’re learning a new database system, maybe you’re just learning a new skill or a trade skill that can help you advance your career.

The deeper the domain expertise you have in something, the more likely you’re going to be paid a little bit more.

Scale And Leverage

The fourth tip I have for you guys to increase your lifetime earning potential is to find something with scale and leverage. The last thing you really want to be doing when you’re trying to hit it out of the park is to trade your time for money. If you really want to increase your lifetime, like top-end potential, you need to find something with scale and leverage.

What I mean by that is perhaps, you join a company and it has the potential to scale to like a 1 to 5 10 billion dollar valuation, and maybe you own a really small piece of that chunk. That’s going to pay you out a way higher return in the long run, than say working hourly for somebody making 20 bucks an hour.

You want to find things that can kind of pay you a percentage on a completed deal for example, or pay you a percentage on a liquidation event such as a start-up sale, or a startup acquisition.

I know I’m talking about this like it’s really easy to just make 200 bucks an hour, or find something that pays you by percentage. But you know the truth is, it’s really hard to be in the right place at the right time, and you have to have a lot of domain expertise in whatever you’re trying to get into.

Like if I were trying to do it myself, I try to become the best at one thing like let’s say digital marketing, or perhaps it’s the monetization of new users. I would try to be the best at that one thing and then find a group of people that I can work with, where I am known to be that guy.

I could also learn other skills, obviously on the way, but in order to get a position like that, you kind of have to get a little bit lucky, you have to know the right people, you have to be in that space already and just keep developing relationships. Point is, that the more relationships you have, the more opportunities are gonna come to you.

Hopefully, you’ll be known in your community as that guy or that woman, who can just really hit out a park with a certain skill.

So, guys, that’s the end of this article, I hope you enjoyed it so again, thank you guys for reading. Peace and Happy Hustling.

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