You'll never get rich working for someone else. You don't need to go to college to build wealth. Who comes up with this terrible advice? In fact, data shows that in the United States at least, people who have a college degree or above earn twice the amount of a high school graduate.
Six figure incomes might not be very common. However, there's a strong correlation of certain skills with six figure salaries. In fact, I've seen this with myself and within my student community. In this post, we are talking about the six things that are correlated with six figure incomes.
1. Investing in your education
Data shows that college educated people earn twice the amount than that of a high school graduate. However, I, not only mean the university degree. It's about your mindset of becoming this constant voracious learner. Being like a sponge, learning as much as you can from people around you, from books, from YouTube, from podcasts, from audiobooks.
In fact, Jim Ron famously said that, "Formal education will earn you a living, but self-education will earn you a fortune."
Invest time, energy, and money in your education, especially in the line of work that you are in. For example, if you work in technology, maybe you can invest in a course on artificial intelligence, or you can do something completely different, like get a degree to become a manager in that field or become an executive.
The question is, what are the skills that the senior leadership or the management has, that you can learn from books, from courses, from university degrees, or just the people around you. Invest in educating yourself to accrue that knowledge.
2. Improving your resilience
Many people don't realize that with a higher income comes a bigger problem, that you have been tasked by society to solve, and while you are solving that, you will need to be resilient to a lot of things. Studies have found that resilience and high income are strongly correlated.
However, I don't want to suggest that only high-income people are extremely resilient in life. It could really be that the resilience creates the high income. In fact, it has been found that a high income is very strongly correlated with practices of mindfulness and resilience.
3. Understanding your audience
As a business owner, you want to understand your customers. As an employee, you want to understand what your company wants, what your hiring manager wants, what your senior leaders want, what your team wants. If you are a YouTuber, you want to understand your audience.
So, investing time in understanding your audience and playing to your strengths to help them achieve their goals is what really makes the difference.
4. Effective communication
Now, it's one thing to understand your audience. It's a whole different thing to effectively communicate to that audience. So, you want to make sure that your message lands and the people who are receiving that message, actually, really understand what you are saying, where you are coming from and work with you to make that common objective possible.
For example, if you are interviewing for a job in the interview, come across as someone who really understands the problems that the company is going through and demonstrate how you as an employee will help that company solve that problem.
5. Improve your calm
It means that instead of reacting to something someone said, take a moment to stand back, reflect, and respond to the situation. For example, I have had people trolling me for the last few years on the internet, and I could very easily get angry and react.
However, what I choose to do, is take a step back and respond- get curious about the situation. What is it that they were missing at that point of time that made them pass hurtful comments? One of the most effective strategies that I've found to help me with this is a daily meditation practice.
Honestly, I cannot recommend meditation enough. I don't meditate in the day, but I have a ritual of meditating every single evening. If I miss my meditation one day, I can feel the difference in the quality of my mind.
So, I've been doing this for years and years. I have suggested my students to do this over the years, and funnily enough, the ones that actually have inculcated that practice have also somehow gotten really quickly to the six-figure income.
6. Embracing failure
I came across a person on LinkedIn the other day- she was saying that if they haven't failed at least 10 times in that day, they don't get bothered. I found that extremely insightful and also liberating because, actually quantifying the failures in the day made me feel so much better about the day as well.
But what does this mean in real life practically? What it means is that you are going for that job, that you are not 100% sure that you'll get. In fact, you are probably 50% sure that you'll get, but if you really want it, apply for it anyway. You build up that inner strength of applying for that job, going into that interview, learning something about yourself and the job. You may probably fail to crack it. But the actual application of the learnings that you took away from that failure is used in another job. Just like that, in a few months' time you can build your experience. I have seen my students do this over and over again and have fantastic results.
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