A short talk by Ryan Daniel Moran arguing that compensation in the marketplace is determined by the perceived value one creates for others, not by time or effort. He emphasizes that value can be created quickly or over years and disputes the notion that high pay for executives is inherently unfair if it reflects greater value provided.
A lot of people think that you get paid for effort, effort that you put into something. I like a quote from Jim Rohn, who is a motivational speaker, who said, you are not paid in the marketplace for the time that you put in. Even though we often have this debate about should there be a minimum wage, how much should people make? You don't have actually. You don't actually get rewarded for time put into things. You get rewarded for the value that other people put on what you bring. Now, it takes time to create value, but there is no relationship between time and value. Value can be created in five minutes or five years.
Back in 2007, I was in college, and then Senator Barack Obama came to my hometown and he did a rally and he said something that made me want to throw up. Now, I like some of the things that Barack Obama did, and I don't like some of the things that Barack Obama did, but he said one thing that made me throw up, and it was that he said, I think it's a problem that CEOs and executives can make more money in five minutes than some people make in a year.
I don't have any problem with that because I also know that some people provide more value in five minutes than some people do in a year. Now, does that mean that everyone who gets paid a lot provides a lot of value? No. But the marketplace only rewards value. It doesn't reward time and effort.
You get paid. You get compensated for the value that you bring. So waiting for minimum wage to change is a strategy that you can use to get wealthier. Just a really bad strategy. In order to make more money, you can beg other people. That would be a strategy. It would just be a really bad strategy. But a lot faster and better strategy is for you to become more valuable, for you to learn a skill or my preference to create something of value. A product, a service, an idea. Those are the things that have no connection between time and value. Again, it will take time to create them, but when they are created, there is no relationship between the amount of money you receive and the time created. It's like when someone writes a song and you know, there's the. The. The lead singer of the band Lifehouse wrote their big hit Hanging By a Moment. He said it took him seven minutes to write that song. Now, he had to become good at writing songs, but that song continues to get played on the radio and send him checks every single year that are worth a lot of money because it continues to get played on the radio. But he doesn't spend any time writing that song anymore. When you create things that are other people think are valuable not what you think are valuable not what your parents think is value but what the marketplace what other people think is valuable that's when you get rich that's when you out earn all of your peers not when you work harder not when you put in more time but when what you create provides more value than everybody else and you deserve to keep that you deserve to get the fruits of your labor because other people decided that it was valuable it doesn't matter how you feel about it or what other people feel about it it matters what the people who paid valued and that's why pursuing wealth is an ethical thing because it means that in order to do it you have to give a lot of people what they perceive as valuable even if other people think it's silly other people are willing to pay for it they think it is valuable and that's how you get rid of.
