How To Guarantee Yourself A High Salary for 2021

All right, so today we're going to talk about how to guarantee yourself a high salary for 2021. So let's jump right into it. When we think about high salaries growing up, we think a high salary might be, you know, 6 figures, $100,000 a year. But when you think about it, if you have to provide for your family, uh, and let's say you have 2, 3, 4 kids or so, and then you have a lot of other expenses to pay for, very quickly that $100,000 becomes— it's not sustainable for your family, right? So you got to be thinking about How can I be making more than that? $200,000, $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 a year, right? So what I noticed over the years is that I remember when I was about 25 years old, I was doing freelance work, doing freelance marketing work on a site called Elance, which is now Upwork. And so by the way, you can go there to do freelance jobs if you want. But you know, at the time I was doing work for this one e-commerce store. I would do the work that was required of me, but I would always go above and beyond. So I would spot issues with their site. I was only responsible for doing a certain segment of work, but I actually went above and beyond and said, "Hey, by the way, you have some issues over here, here, and here. I'm gonna go ahead and solve those for you." Right? Imagine you put yourself in the shoes of the boss, and you got someone that's not only doing the work, but they're going above and beyond what you paid them, and that they're not only pointing out additional problems, but they're solving them for you. That it feels like relief, and it feels like oh, this person's it's relief, but they're also uncovering things that I was not aware of. They might be someone that's really gonna raise the bar for the company. So they looked at me. This guy that's doing contract work and they offered me, hey Eric, if you move to Philadelphia, I lived in LA, they're like, oh, you know what, we'll pay you $250,000, okay, as your salary and we'll give you 5% profit share if you move to Philadelphia. And I actually talked to the guy recently and he was, he's still, he's like, I'm still pretty unhappy that you didn't move over, you didn't come over for, you know, come over to my company. And I said, hey, you know, it's, it all worked out for all of us, right? The point is here, That I was just someone at the time, I was fired from my job previously. I was making $75,000 a year and I was fired because I was trying to start a company and the company found out about it. Point being here is once I went off on my own, I went above and beyond, right? And actually the day I was fired, let me tell you this by the way, I'm not saying to go get fired but those of you that kind of want to start your own thing on the side, I would highly recommend it because when I got fired, I was like, oh man, it's all on me now. And, you know, if I fail, it's all on me. Mm-hmm. And so the pressure was, at least from my perspective, was good because it forced me to go try new things. It forced me to fail to get to success. And that's how I eventually got to this offer, right? A couple years later, there would be people that would reach out to me that would offer even up to, you know, 7 figures in salary with like an 8-figure signing bonus, right? And so, you know, these are big numbers and I'm saying you can do the same thing as well because what's required of you, again, is You want to make sure that you are not only just pointing out the problem, but you are covering the solution as well. And then you're actually executing on the solution, right? People that just point out the problems, those are just people that complain, right? Those people aren't that helpful. As a matter of fact, that gives you more anxiety. If you just give me the solution, that's better. But as a boss, as the owner of the company, I'm like, you're still making me think about what I need to do. But if you're like, I'm going to volunteer to do it and I have the solutions, I'm going to hire who's needed. Those are the types of people that get paid the big bucks, right? Keith Rabois, former COO of Square, and then he also was at PayPal and a lot of big tech companies. He's a popular tech investor. He has said this: in a company, you're gonna have a lot of ammunition, but there's only gonna be a couple of bullets in the company. So let's say you have 5 barrels. So you have ammunition and you have 5 barrels, right? And so the barrels, those are the ones that are gonna come up with the solutions. They're gonna come up with the strategies and And those are the ones that are going to really move things and make things happen, right? Then you can put the ammunition through there, right? So it doesn't matter how much ammunition you have. If you don't have enough barrels in the company, things can't move forward. You know, again, putting yourself in the shoes of an owner right now, the owner is constantly thinking about, you know, how am I going to make payroll? Who do I need to hire? Who do I need to fire? Um, you know, what, uh, product lines do we need to be adding? How do I deal with the supplier issue? They're just dealing with a multitude of issues, right? If you can make their lives just that much easier, you're gonna be worth it, right? Because if I'm an owner, let's say I'm making, you know, $5 million a year in profit or something like that, and you bring me a solution and that's gonna bring us another $2 to $3 million a year, why would I not pay you $250,000, $300,000, $400,000 a year and give you a fat bonus? It just makes sense, right? But I'll tell you this, it's extremely hard to find people that are barrels. That's why Hiring is the toughest thing to do. I remember reading this book called Linchpin from Seth Godin, and it talks about becoming indispensable. So you don't want to just be the cog in the machine. You got to rise above and beyond, and that requires you to go above and beyond. And again, execute, present solutions, make things easier for your boss, and guaranteed you're gonna get a high salary and even go beyond that, right? Then we can talk about, you know, once you have a high salary, what do you do with that, right? How do you invest that money? How do you build equity for yourself, right? How do you build something that makes money while you sleep, right? So that's just the first step. Get yourself a high salary and then figure out what's the playbook after that. And I'm happy to talk about that in another video. Let me know in the comments if you want me to actually do that. That is it for today. I hope this is enough help for you to guide you in the right direction to get that high salary. Because look, if I can do it, you can do it as well. It's not that bad. Just got it. You just got to be better than the average person in your company. And I know you watching this right now, you're above average, right? So by the way, if you want to level up, check out a free chapter of my book called Leveling Up. Go to levelingup.com, and I've been working on that book for the last, last couple years or so, and it's basically on mastering playing and mastering the game of life. Alright, so check it out. Hope you enjoy it, and we'll catch you later.