Useful VI: Work
We encourage kids early on, on the virtues of working hard, we don’t encourage them enough about getting paid. Getting paid well is signaling, signaling that valuable work has been done.
Elon Musk once said “you get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of the problems you’ve solved”, I agree and also note that you get paid in direct proportion to how many people can solve the same problem and the frequency with which the problem reoccurs.
Electrical and Mechanical Engineering Students can probably make electronic cars, a difficult problem but somewhat solveable compared to branding computer cars, marketing it and fighting off established, emerging competitors and technology trends. You’d also have to raise money every day from customers, investors and the public to continue and that’s why he’s paid well.
A clogged toilet is a difficult problem, it’s also a problem that happens once in a while and there is a number of people that can solve it thus the amount you get paid is much less than if you can write a computer program to add up two numbers.
Further reading
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mooreslaw.asp