How to discover wealth by adding more value?

Many of us have the concept that everyone will get paid for how hard we work and how much time we put into the work. We always relate our monthly take home pay to 2 things, how much time we put in and how hard we work for our current job. Many people in my work place spend enormous time of their life in working hard and spend many hours in office discussing on issues, and moving from one meeting to another. To the extent that they take late dinner by staying beyond the office hour, sacrificing family time for work time because they only actually start their day when they finished discussion and meeting.

This is a very old school of thoughts, but a common sight.

In the fast changing world of today, the time you spend in the office has nothing to do with your performance on your job. It definitely does nothing to improve the money you will bring back home. We are living in a age of information technology, many people work from outside of the office, and getting higher pay than those who spend more time in the office. The old economy of working hard with blood and muscle is over due. That is the old economy of our grand fathers.

Recently I listened to an audio CD, The Art of Exceptional Living, by Jim Rohn and this is what he mentioned:

We get pay for bringing value to the market place.
It takes time to bring value to the market place,
but we don't get pay for time.
We get pay for the value you put into the time.

Isn't what he said make so much sense! A man said that he is paid $30 per hour! The statement is not really true by Jim's account that the man is paid for the value but not the time he put in. Is it possible to become twice as valuable and make twice as much money? Of course, the solution is to add more value to your work you are doing. So you can see how important for us to add more value to our work. So the question become: How can we improve the value we put into the market place?

The way to add more value to your work is to continue the learning process which everyone of us started when we arrived in this world. Sad to say that many of us have stopped this process when we have completed our traditional education system. I was once in the very same position as many of them. So it is important that we continue to learn and improve our skills and knowledge so that we can continue to add more value to the market place.

We need to understand that knowledge can be learnt at all stages of our life. What we have learnt from school were only the very fundamental skills. In fact, once we completed school, that is when the real education starts. School only provides us the fundamental skills to learn more. The actual education, is the education of life, which will never stop until we are 6 inches under the ground. We must train ourselves like a sponge, never stop absorbing knowledge as we move along. The greatest mistake anyone can make is to become complacent of what we have gained and known.

It is good that we work hard, but we need to work hard on the right thing by working smart. Prioritizing our work is one way of working smart. We must always focus on the 20% of the work which can bring us 80% of the results. Do not spend too much time on the other 80%. In fact, I spend very little time on the other 80% of the work as it does not give me any value. Spend your time wisely, as everyone of us have equaled number of hours in a day, which 1s 24 hours. How you spend your time to optimize your value added to the market place is one of the key to your success.

The other way of working smart is delegation. Deligate your work to more capable people who can be more effectively complete the tasks with better results in the shorter time than if you will to do it yourself. Each of us has our own strength, recognizing the strength of the people around you and utilizing their expertise to help you to complete the tasks. The truth is that each of us is genius of our own right. No one person can claim that he is a genius in everything. Therefore, we need to leverage on the the geniuses of others to create a successful life of our own. By doing so, you are also helping others to add more value to the market place. Hence, completing each task in a much shorter time than you doing it all by yourself.

What I have mentioned here are only 2 ways of adding value to our work. There are more ways and methods of adding more values to the market place. We can just start to work on the 2 ways I have mentioned, and get better on applying them as we work. In the process, we will experinced the increase of effeciency in our work and thus will find more values have been added. I personally experienced it, so I believed you will to.