A Job Will Never Make You Rich

In a job you sell your time and your energy for money - you will never become rich this way because of the inherent restrictions the laws of nature and of physics place upon us all. Entrepreneurship (eg. business, ideation, innovation, etc.) has been one of the few consistent and reasonably moral paths to both moderate and extreme wealth since the industrial revolution. 

Of course, other paths such as crime and political corruption have always existed as paths to wealth for those who were willing to walk on them, but we are only concerned with paths that really add value to humanity and can at least be somewhat considered morally permissible. 

No matter how hard you work and no matter how many hours you work, you will be restricted to the number of hours in a day, in a week, in a month, and in a year. With a job, you are selling your time for money. Your time might be worth little or it might be extremely valuable given your human capital, but you still are selling this finite resource for money. 

The richest people in your towns and cities are generally not people who have jobs. Yes, someone in your city might earn $100,000 per year or maybe $250,000 per year working as a highly-paid individuals in a big corporation, but there are also plumbers, electricians, small accountants, small lawyers, dentists, doctors, programmers/coders, restaurant owners, website owners, that earn $500,000 or $1 million (or much more) per year through their entrepreneurial ability to use their human capital in a way that is not restricted by time. In effect, these entrepreneurs are able to expand the audience for whom they create value both in time and in scope - they can reach people even when they are not working (eg. website) and they can reach many more people (possibly millions) all by themselves. In this process, the create value for a lot of people and they are themselves able to extract a portion of that value as remuneration from themselves without having to rely on an intermediary in the form of an employer. ​

An Absurd Example of a Great Job to Bring the Point Home

There are 8760 hours in one year. Let's say you work like a crazy person and are able to work for 1/2 of that time. This means you work for 4380 hours in a year. 

That 4380, represents about 84 hours per week without taking a single week of vacation. Clearly, we have an unsustainable situation if the work you're doing is in any way physically or mentally rigorous. 

So, you -- a total workaholic per the above -- are making how much money? Well, that depends on your hourly wage. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the average private sector hourly wage in early 2017 is $26.19. But you're not an average person - you're making a lot more than average in our example. 

According to the BLS, the highest mean hourly in the US is for anesthesiologists who make about $130 per hour - this is even higher than surgeons, lawyers, doctors, and chief executives. But even then, let's say you make even more than that. 

Let's say you can make $500 per hour consistently for every one of your hours. This is a hard thing to do. Lots of people earn $500 per hour for ad-hoc work - think of a graphic designer who bills for two hours after spending two hours securing a client or a lawyer's billable hours that don't take into account time spent on client interaction or business management. Unlike most, you're able to get paid $500 per hour for your entire 84 working hours every single week of the year. 

So, per the above example, you'll make $42,000 per week

This comes out to $2.18 million per year

Clearly $2 million is a very large amount of money to be earning per year, but think of the fact that even with our truly absurd example where you're working like a machine and earning an extremely high hourly wage, you will still only earn about $20 million in 10 years or $100 million in 50 years. Yes, those are a large amount of money, but they are literally nothing when compared to what some top people in business and entrepreneurship make more than $100 million in a single year. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for example, has a current net worth that would equate to earning $4 million EVERY DAY OF HIS LIFE! 

Clearly, the gains Zuckerberg and other extremely rich individuals have earned are not based on income - it would be impossible to sell their time to earn such gains. Instead, they have earned money selling other things such-such as ideas that are not restricted the same way time is. The highest paid salaried people are always making less than the highest paid entrepreneurs because the world is created in such a way that time is restricted while ideas are not - with ideas you can be earning multiple streams of income every second of every day or you might have windfall gains by creating immense value for millions (or even billions of people). It's far more difficult to do this at a so-called job. 

The key takeaway here isn't that it's bad to have a job. The key takeaway should be that you have to lift your head up from the current place you’re at and see things in a broader, holistic, and realistic way. By understanding the inherent restriction, a job places on your ability to earn you might be better able to spot opportunities or even better understand the world. 

Entrepreneurship isn't for everyone - many people will do better at a good job in a good firm. Additionally, although the above discussion was about money, money is not the most important thing in work and shouldn't even be the reason anyone forgoes a job to start a business on their own. There must be something else besides money motivating you if you are to have a chance at being successful in any endeavor. 

The only thing we're trying to portray here is that business and entrepreneurship allows you to escape from the paradigm of selling your time for money - you can escape this paradigm and go beyond the limitations of time and space on value creation that a job places on you. ​

Caveats and Exceptions - There are Some Jobs That Will Make You Rich

As with almost anything that's generally true, there are some caveats and exceptions. Here, the main caveat is that there are in fact a handful of people in the world who do become truly wealthy through their jobs. These people include the likes of:

• athletic stars - LA Lakers star Kobe Bryant earned about $325 million through salaries alone over this storied basketball career
• highly-compensated CEOs - Google's CEO Sundar Pichai received almost $200 million in total compensation (comprised of a small portion of salary and a high portion of stock awards) in 2016

From Alphabet's 2016 SEC filing - notice Sundar Pichai's total compensation is almost $200 million for 2016

​Additionally, one might argue that in the above absurd example it was unfair to bring in the likes of Mark Zuckerberg - there are plenty of entrepreneurs who earn less and even more who fail and don't earn much at all. This is all true, but the point did do a comparison of high paid jobs vs highly paid entrepreneurs. In that comparison what we attempted to illustrate this that in entrepreneurship there is inherently little restrictions on earnings - earnings can be so great that they become absurd (eg. $4 million a day for every day of Zuckerberg's life) while job earnings are restricted simply by the laws of nature and the laws of physics. 

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