A lot of problems can be solved with money, far more than people often want to believe. At the same time, the human mind isn’t naturally wired to handle money well, and all of history has been plagued with crooks who will take as much as they can get, either by force or through deception.
These days, inflation has gone insane, and many people (plausibly) suspect that the US government is lying about the sheer size of inflation. The cost of living is high, the cost of housing is even higher, and hardly anybody has any real reason to work for the minimum wage because it affords so little.
So the common question is…how does someone earn more money?
I don’t have strong opinions on this. I think it’s horrible when people say, “Work harder”, and I’d recommend people who say that to take a gander reading Elizabeth Anderson’s book “Hijacked”, which highlights the origins of this line of reasoning [and holy shit, you can actually blame the early Protestants for kicking that off…]. At the same time, far too many money-making schemes are very short-sighted. You can score $100 here or there doing this or the other thing, but what you really want is something that works in your favor permanently, and this is often ignored in the face of “I can earn some extra cash doing X”.
For me, this goes back to Jacob Fisker’s “tensegrity” in skills – basically, you can strategize skills to work together toward a goal, in a web-of-goals fashion. For me, while the whole tech industry has a lot of growth potential, it’s also somewhat fragile in that it regularly experiences massive layoffs, so while I am of course investing in my tech skills, I also invest in money-saving skills that help decrease my reliance on a paycheck, such as automotive work and, more recently, cutting my own hair, for which I’m finally developing some proficiency. However, “hard skills” are the hard bias of most INTJs, so it’s sometimes difficult to both not be a jerk about this as well as to think outside of this mindset.
This is why I believe that the subject of money is so important – it has such a huge effect on your life. But it’s hard because there’s all sorts of “money gurus” out there, promising you “sigma male” credentials if only you do this or that OBVIOUS strategy to prove your big brain so all the ladies will flock to you. When these gurus aren’t quite that obnoxious, they might try to sell you on the superiority of one investment or the other, tell you that X shitcoin is going to the moon and if you don’t buy it you’re missing out, or the apocalypse is coming so you’d better cash out your 401k and go all-in on gold, etc. And after all, you are smart, so don’t you want to be a winner, too? The world is full of terrible advice.
My parents started having trouble with money about the time I was in middle school and high school. It’s a long story, much of which will never be written online, but I’ll summarize a few things. They always meant well, they have always been good people, and I have always loved them, so it breaks my heart thinking back on things, the MLMs they got involved in, desperate to score a few extra dollars. I remember our whole family doing a paper “route” at an apartment complex on a few Saturdays; it ultimately paid very little, but my parents paid my sister and I our “fair share”, while they ate the cost of gas and all that. I’ve seen some Facebook friends participate in MLMs, and it makes me angry, because those MLMs are such obvious scams to anybody who understands money, but I also know it’s not always easy to see in the moment; my parents certainly didn’t. But how do you talk somebody down from that? Is it your business?
I’m generally inclined to emphasize the importance of skills. How much you can earn from any given skill depends greatly on the market demand for it, but you generally get to keep skills no matter what happens to a given money-making opportunity, which largely makes skills superior to one-off “deals”. Sure, you might get lucky and buy an antique book for $20 when you know you can sell it for $100, and I’m not one to scoff at $80, but a one-time score like that does very little for you in the long run. For an INTJ like me, investing in skills often means hard skills or certifications, but for other types, this could even mean soft skills, or pairing particular social skills with knowledge of a specific industry or niche. I think of that show American Pickers. Picking is an incredibly risky business, but the main show runners paired the hobby of extreme antique knowledge with incredible social skills to both meet sellers and score good deals, which carved out for them a profitable niche. Studying antiques for 4 years in school (or whatever…) simply will not have the same effect.
I think there’s some truth to saying that you have to give people a good reason to buy your services, but I also don’t want to be simplistic about this, as some enterprising individuals have often invented wholly new things that nobody knew they wanted until the product existed, such as dog and cat boarding, and dog washing stations, which weren’t really a thing until the 2010s, if memory serves me. But in general, I think the principle holds true, although it’s easier said than done.
You also have to consider the cost of entrance. I find it incredibly disingenuous when hustle bros tell you to buy investment properties, because it’s the “winner’s” path to easy income, “passive income baby!”. The only people I’ve known who could do this successfully had rather high incomes, and likely the only reason they recommend this sort of thing to others is because the risk of doing so is fairly low for them, but they aren’t conscientious enough to realize it’s likely a bad fit for others. You shouldn’t take financial advice from others willy-nilly, because their risk profile probably does not match yours. I’m a huge fan of index mutual funds, but they only have noticeable results if you can dump large sums of money into them, which means they are not great investments for a lot of people (even if they are fairly easy to start investing in) [IMO, having an adequate emergency fund and avoiding debt is almost always more important than investing, but plenty of smart people disagree with this].
I wish it were as easy as posting an article on “Top 10 Ways to Earn Extra Money!” but these lists are weak at best, and only one or two might even come close to matching your personality. Do I want to go door to door offering to mow lawns? Absolutely not. I’ve mowed a lawn 1.5 times in my life, and you absolutely do not want me mowing yours. Also, as an introvert, the thought of going door to door for anything is terrifying. A better thought is, “What skills, abilities, or interests do I have that might supply somebody’s wants or needs? What would it take to branch out from my current abilities to tap into more lucrative options?”
At the end of the day, it’s hard to know what one could do, and impossible to know precisely what one should do. We are all sandwiched between the general cost of living and the earning potential afforded to us by both current and potential markets. Somewhere between these two, we have to find a reasonable strategy for moving along. Sometimes a change comes with a risk, too: I don’t know for certain that I will even pass these final two certifications, but I like to think that I stand a really good chance, and there’s decent evidence to suggest this, too, but it’s still a risk, so pick your risks wisely.