Poverty Proof by Douglas Kruger

Author:Douglas Kruger
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781776094523
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Published: 2019-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

Remember that, as this starts to work, and more money comes in, you should then buy assets, and not liabilities. Combine ‘more money coming in’ with ‘I buy assets with my money’ and you will be unstoppable.

Regardless of what work you do, your mission should become to raise the value of that work. Raising your value means getting paid more.

Say you are a labourer, working on a construction site. You will likely earn a very small amount of money. But if you add the skills necessary, for example, to oversee other labourers, and you become a foreman, you will earn more. You show curiosity, you ask questions, you make it clear that you are willing to learn.

Depending on how much you learn about building, you could become an increasingly valuable foreman. Each new skill set that you add raises the value of your work, so that you can earn more money per hour.

A person who sweeps a pavement for an hour may earn a very small wage. A person who performs eye surgery for an hour will earn a very large wage. In that way, formal education raises the value of what you do. But formal education is only one option out of many.

Over the next few chapters, I will provide you with a variety of principles for raising your value. Not all of them will work in your scenario, but most will.

Here is an example of a mix of different ‘value-raising’ principles in action, using a hypothetical person. Janet does well at school and gets excellent marks. By doing so, she has already begun to raise her value. (I’d like you to note that you can do extremely poorly at school and raise your value in other ways, but we will get to that.) She then goes to university to study to become a doctor, which is her commitment to raising her value even further. While she’s there, she learns that it’s more lucrative to be a dentist, and that’s the path she opts to follow.

A few years down the line, with some experience under her belt, she discovers that the real money in dentistry is to be made in orthodontics, improving people’s smiles. So, she studies further and pursues that. She makes herself potentially more valuable.

She opens a practice and charges a high fee for her expertise, based on how valuable she has already made herself.

Then she notices that other practices are getting more customers than she is. She realises that she is still relatively unknown. So, she needs to learn some new things and take some new actions to market herself more effectively, to be seen more broadly as a great (‘valuable’) option in this particular arena. She does so, and thus increases her customer base.

Ten years down the line, she has learnt some fascinating lessons about her work, so she writes a book. The book itself brings in money for her. But more than that, as a result of the publication, her status has gone up. She is now perceived as an expert, which leads to interviews and requests to speak on panels.

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