How to make $1000/hr
My first job was at the age of 14. To be honest, I’m not even sure it was legal. I was a paperboy in the Bay Area. Our “boss” would pick us up at our school and drive us 30 minutes to a city where we were dropped off to go door-to-door selling newspaper subscriptions. I made $7. Not $7 per hour, but $7 per subscription sold. Most days, I’d spent 3 hours to sell 1-2 subscriptions. The average of that calculation is $3.65 per hour…and, in case you think I grew up in the stone age, 2 years later I made $18 per hour just doing temp clerical work.
Here’s a fun math hack. Do you want a quickhand to calculate annual salary to hourly rate? Divide the salary amount by 2 and take the first 2 numbers. $100,000 per year divided by 2 = $50,000. That’s $50 per hour roughly. It’s a bit of dirty math. Of course, if you make $1,000,000 per year then you need to keep the first 3 numbers. $1M a year = $500 per hour. So then, what’s the annual salary of $1,000 per hour? Go in reverse. Double it and add 3 zeroes. The final product is roughly $2,000,000 per year.
So how do you make $1,000 per hour? By staying in your lane. What?!
I’m unsure of the original source, but it’s the idea of assigning value to certain types of tasks. There are tasks for any business that you can pay someone $10 per hour to complete. Then, there are tasks that are worth $100 per hour. Generally speaking, most of the work you and I do could fall into this category. We all are or were practitioners at some point. A $100 per hour task is something we’re skilled at that generates income for the business.
The $1,000 per hour task: So what’s a $1,000 per hour task? There are business tasks that can help increase revenue by 10x. For a small business, a $1,000 per hour task might be forming strategic partnerships with other small businesses and creating a referral based system so you can add bonuses to offer your clients. This might lead to 10x more sales, thus increasing the value of a customer. This is a $1,000 per hour task that only you can build out. For larger organizations, it could be rethinking products, enhancing customer experience, or any other high level strategy that both moves the company forward and creates a multiplier effect. A new product we ideate could lead to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it only comes about when we allow ourselves to focus on $1,000 per hour tasks.
So, despite only making $3.65 per hour as a 14 year-old, the bossman took the other half of the commission, making $7 per subscription. Hence, by hiring 7 teenagers to do all the grunt work, he essentially made 7x the amount by driving a van for a few hours.
What will you do with $10 per hour tasks? How about $100 per hour tasks?
What is the $1,000 per hour work that only you can do?
Summary
Every task can fall into $10, $100, or $1000 values.
Decide the $1000 tasks that only you can do.
Decide what you will do with the $10 and $100 tasks.
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