Never before have individuals and teams had the power to create so much value in short periods of time.
A beautiful example of this is early adaptors of Ethereum. Two years ago today, Ether (the Ethereum token) was $0.90/Ether today. It is $325/Ether today. If you bought $1000, you would have profited more than $350,000 in two years. And many people did.
In the past, it was old rich folks who had the capital and connections to make that much money in short periods of time. Now it is anyone who is smart and has an internet connection.
A sizeable number of nerdy teenagers have earned retirement level incomes over the course of a couple years from their interest in cryptocurrency.
But the opportunity to make a shitload of money extends much further than bets on cryptocurrencies. Entrepreneurial insight and hard work have allowed young entrepreneurs around the world to create generational wealth in short periods of time.
A recent example was the founding team of the social media app tbh, which Facebook acquired for somewhere under, but close to $100 Million. The founding team is joining Facebook and made professional athlete level incomes for the one year that they had been working on the app so far.
These stories are still rare and outliers, but they are becoming more and more common. And the publicized stories of new young deca-millionaires are the tip of an iceberg of wealth creation. For every one person who had millions off crypto investments, there are thousands more that made tens of thousands of dollars.
For every $50 or $100 million startup exit, there are thousands of entrepreneurial side-hustlers who are doubling their annual incomes in new and novel ways.
This is interesting and exciting, but what does it mean?
It means that we need to fundamentally change how we view creating a career and generating personal income.
In the past, you approached your career in a linear way. You would try and move up from role to role, gaining more status and more income as you go. The best predictor of how much money you would make next year was how much money you made last year.
The old pathway to making ten million dollars was a slow climb in annual income.
Now, the goal is to put yourself in a position where you gain the skills and connections to improve your chances of a massively positive outcome.
Instead of taking on promotions and roles at new companies because of the increase in annual income, you should view opportunities through the lens of how they relate to your chances of having a large positive outcome.
Through this new lens, your title, specific responsibilities, and income are much less important than the project you are working on, the people you are working with, and where you are doing that work (The community the work put’s you, which you may or may not physically be in).
The new path to making $10 million is likely working on a number of failed startups, investing effort and time in projects that may not work out, but leave you with skills and connections that eventually lead to you making $10M in one year.
In a world where the right people, willing to work hard on the right idea, can create massive amounts of wealth the thought of investing any significant time, energy, or anxiety about marginal increases in your salary is ridiculous.
Instead of worrying about getting a $5000 raise this year, make enough to support yourself, but focus on making $10 million ten years from now.
Leave a Reply