A couple years ago I read a rather depressing book called “Nickeled and Dimed.” In this book, the author sets aside her white collar credentials and gets a low-wage job (Wal-Mart, hotel maid, waitress etc.) in 3 different cities and attempts to survive.
She basically fails each time, and her book is an interesting but somewhat aimless gripe about how it’s impossible for anyone in America to get ahead.
Why? The answer is VERY interesting.
Back in 1800, American wages were 3X higher than Britain and just about everywhere else in the world.
Rodney Stark explains it like this: “In the 1820’s the federal government sold good land for $1.25 an acre while wages for skilled labor were $1.25 to $2.00 a day. It didn’t take long to save enough for a farm sufficiently large to raise cash crops yielding solid returns.”
In other words if people could go into farming fairly easily, you had to pay them well or you wouldn’t get any employees.
So how come US companies could afford to pay workers 3X as much as British companies?
Because US companies used technology to make their workers more productive. You can afford to pay people 3X as much if they produce 6X. And that’s exactly what was happening.
Last week in my Roundtable coaching group, we discussed how one of the members needs to do less of an activity that earns him $2,000 an hour and focus it on something even more productive. (He’s using technology rather effectively, I think.)
Sound outrageous? It’s not. Because it doesn’t matter whether you make ten bucks an hour or a thousand, there’s always a better use of your brains, your resources and your technology. The fact that some guy in China will work for five cents an hour is totally irrelevant. You’re in a game of working smarter, not harder.
Fact is, the government can try to raise the minimum wage or whatever they conjure up, but the ONLY thing that helps anybody is when we use our brains to get more from our time. In the 1800’s it was farms that provided people with an alternative to the Dilbert Cube, today it’s the Internet. And the smarter we work, the bigger a tip we can leave at the restaurant or at the hotel room. The more of us there are creating new products and selling more effectively, the more Wal-Mart has to pay the greeters. And that’s good for all of us.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it:
Don’t work harder. Work smarter. Do less of the low-value stuff (hire someone else to do that for you – they can use the work) and more of the high value stuff (marketing, advertising strategy, writing copy, finding out what your customers want) and you might someday find yourself figuring out how to do less of that $2000 an hour work.
Come to Chicago in April where some of my best and highest-earning students will roll up their sleeves and personally help you with your marketing, advertising strategy and copywriting – and help you find out even better what your customers want:
www.AdwordsSeminar.com/mastermind.htm
Perry Marshall