Truth Bomb Tuesday: We die when we stop allowing.
I want you to do a little exercise for me.
I want you to write me up an invoice for $0.01.
Yep. Just one cent. And make it out for all of 2020.
Now how do you justify that invoice?
What did you do that made my world better in 2020… by $0.01 worth?
It’s not a lot of money right. And it’s not hard to imagine how you might have created that much value for me.
Maybe you were a colourful part of the state I call home. Maybe you were a beautiful part of the society that I live in – dropping bombs of niceness and cheeriness that rippled right through the social fabric, until they washed up on my shores with one cents worth of value.
Maybe you contributed to civil society behind the scenes. Maybe you volunteered at a local charity. Maybe you were a rural firefighter. Maybe you made beautiful art. Maybe you just take the time to have a chat to the people in your neighbourhood.
Only you know the details, but I am confident that you make the world a better place for everyone, just by being here.
And if you had to put a price tag on it, 1c wouldn’t even come close, right?
The point is, it shouldn’t feel too hard to imagine that through the full course of 2020, you created a cent’s worth of value for me.
Now, if you can imagine that, imagine you sent me an invoice for 1c, and you sent every living person in the country the same invoice. You created as much value for them as you did for me, right?
Now what do you have?
Well, 25m invoices at 1c each is $250,000.
That’s not a bad annual salary.
How does it compare with your actual salary?
The reason why I’m taking you through this mental exercise is that one of the challenges we have is disentangling our sense of ‘value’ from our ‘market price’.
Your ‘market price’ is what you get paid in the labour market. It’s partly about the gold that you bring to what you do, but it’s also about how the economy works, and how your industry is going, and a whole bunch of things that you have no control over.
And the danger is that if we’ve been earning $70K a year for ten years, that’s what we think that we are ‘worth’.
And we’ll never been opening to receiving more money than that because we just won’t think that we’re ‘worth’ it.
We are.
As I’ve demonstrated, it’s very easy to make the case that you are worth at least $250K a year, if not more.
When you step back from the market you operate in, you should see that you bring a tonne of value to the world.
Heaps.
And there’s no reason at all that your take-home pay or take-home profits (as an investor for example) shouldn’t reflect that.
So step back, and allow yourself to dream into how valuable you actually are, and how humble what you’re asking from the world actually is.
And feel too how willing the world actually is to value you at your worth.
DB.