Build more to Earn more.

Learn more to earn more does not work.

I hope 2022 brought good health and a lot of happiness with friends and family. Factors that are way more real and important than a professional career.

Of course, a great career contributes to health and happiness. Equally, a career, seemingly great, can interfere with your long-term health and happiness. Sometimes, you don’t even know when that is happening. Maybe, in a future post, we should examine signals that indicate whether your career, health and happiness are a wholesome package or not.

As we close the year, it may be a good time to reflect just on your career.

To do that, let me introduce the notion of Lifetime Value of your Career (LVC™).

You may not know this, but you can calculate your LVC as a real number. Subscribers to this newsletter will soon receive an exclusive link to do just that.

Lifetime Value of your Career (LVC)
If the only way you earn money is through being employed by a company, then you can earn for a finite period of your life. This period is generally referred to as your ‘career.’

The total amount of money you earn during your career is the Lifetime Value of your Career - LVC™.

Choices you make during this finite period determine how much total money you will earn during your career. The difference between smart and average choices can amount to a difference of millions of dollars.

Shocked? Yes. It is that significant.

Your LVC is a direct outcome of your value to the market. Many executives often think about how valuable they are to their company. This is an important point to think about. However, as you will discover in a later article, your value to your company is almost entirely determined by your value in the market.

So, what determines your value in the market?

It is simple. If there is competition in the market to access your talent, you value is high. Of course, the opposite is also true.

To stay or become more marketable, executives think they need to keep learning. Commonly, the path to learning is ‘individual development plans’ filled with courses, doing projects, coaching, mentoring, job-rotation or learning on the job itself. The belief that if you can learn more, you can earn more. As if, learning precedes earning.

Unfortunately, the reality is different.

The market does not pay for any of these learning efforts. Smart companies don’t hire a senior executive just because they did ten case studies in an expensive Ivy League Executive Education program. This is especially true in the current environment where the gap between development and application of technology is less than a year.

In the current market, if you can build, you are valuable. As a builder, you observe, educate yourself and apply – all in one single motion.

Can you do that? You are valuable.

To clarify, building is not just about building software or tech products. It is about building anything. For example, this article that you are reading: A sales value proposition: A compensation plan. Building is merging strategy and execution as an integrated, simultaneous effort. It is merging learning and application as an integrated, simultaneous effort.

In short, the time gap between learning and application, strategy and execution is now close to zero.

Traditional learning tactics are not holding ground in this market. ‘Case studies’ are one such example. By the time a case study is written and brought to class, the market and technology has changed so much that professors keep adding caveats in class. Pricing models, go-to-market ideas, HR analytics and everything else is evolving in real time. If you cannot bring change to what you do every day, the market does not value you high enough.

As you reflect on your career in 2023, maybe you can pivot from learning to building. Learning happens when you build. Build something new. Create something new.

The market does not have enough of builders and creators. If you are one, there will be competition to access your talent. That is when your market value will go up. When that happens, your company will pay you more even before you ask.

Happy Holidays and a very Happy 2023 to all builders and creators.

The next newsletter will hit your mailbox in 2023.