Your greatest wealth-building asset may not be in your portfolio. It may be the skills, reputation, and paycheck you already have.
For years, I spent too much time looking for the investment that could change everything.
🚀 To the moon.
The next cryptocurrency.
The next stock.
The next opportunity that could turn a few thousand dollars into enough money to eliminate years of financial mistakes.
I’ve made money investing.
I’ve also lost money.
And one of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that there are two very different ways to use leverage in your life.
You can overleverage your finances, taking on debt and risk because you’re trying to accelerate your way toward wealth.
Or you can leverage yourself—your skills, reputation, career, relationships, experience, and ability to solve problems.
I’m learning that the second kind is considerably more powerful.
Your Paycheck Is Already a Wealth-Building Machine
One of Dave Ramsey’s ideas that resonates with me is that your income is your greatest wealth-building tool.
For a long time, I didn’t fully appreciate that.
I kept thinking:
“How can I make this money grow faster?”
A better question would have been:
“How can I make myself more valuable so that I earn more money in the first place?”
If you want a larger paycheck, don’t only search for the investment that might give you a 20% return.
Ask yourself what it would take to increase your value by 20%.
Broaden your skill set.
Volunteer for projects.
Solve problems nobody asked you to solve.
Learn the tools your organization needs.
Improve your communication.
Learn how to interview.
Get exposure to leadership.
Build relationships across your organization.
Become someone people think about when an opportunity appears.
That isn’t as exciting as watching an investment shoot up 50% overnight.
But unlike a speculative investment, the skills stay with you.
I Thought Management Was My Only Way Up
For years, I thought becoming a manager was the obvious next step.
Part of that was ambition.
But part of it was simply mathematics.
In my previous position, it could have taken roughly 7 years with just merrit increases to reach the level of compensation I ultimately reached with my promotion (3 grade levels).
But I pushed harder toward management when I reached the maximum pay on my hourly rate. From then on, I would only get a 3% or 4% lump sum from my base gross salary.
Then something happened that changed the way I thought about career growth.
I started becoming more valuable in ways that weren’t tied to just my current job title.
I improved my Excel skills.
I learned more about data.
I improved my interviewing skills.
I became more comfortable presenting my work.
Most importantly, I started looking at problems and asking:
“Can I build something that makes this easier?”
Eventually, the right opportunity appeared.
It wasn’t the management job I had originally imagined.
It was better suited to me.
I moved from Team Lead into an Operations Advisor position and had the opportunity to work closely with a Managing Director I’d already developed a strong working relationship with over several years.
The promotion increased my compensation substantially.
But that opportunity didn’t appear out of nowhere.
A lot of the groundwork had already been laid.
The Excel Project That Changed How I Saw My Own Value
One project in particular taught me what it means to create value beyond your job description.
Our operation needed better visibility into daily productivity.
There was already a concept being used elsewhere, but it relied heavily on manual processes and essentially created a daily snapshot.
I saw an opportunity to build something more useful.
So I took the basic concept and redesigned it.
Instead of employees simply completing something that was effectively handed in at the end of the day, I created a system using shared Excel files that allowed productivity to be monitored throughout the day.
Each employee had an individual file with appropriate access controls.
The employee could see their own information.
Their Team Lead and Manager could see the information necessary to coach and support them.
Coworkers didn’t need access to one another’s individual productivity.
The goal wasn’t to embarrass anyone.
The goal was visibility.
From a Spreadsheet to an Operational Tool
The system tracked more than a daily total.
We could look at things such as:
- How many shipments were being worked.
- How many were successfully keyed.
- How much time was passing between touches.
- Whether an employee had worked through the available queue.
- Whether an employee who hadn’t reached a numerical target had nevertheless spent the day making legitimate quality updates and contacts.
That last part became important.
Productivity isn’t always one number.
Someone could key fewer shipments but still have a successful day because they touched everything available to them and performed the necessary follow-up work.
Someone else might have low keying numbers and barely touched their workload.
That’s when a Team Lead could recognize that something needed attention.
The tool provided context.
Then I Learned Another Lesson: Trust, But Validate
As the project evolved, I realized something else.
Because employees manually entered information, we needed a way to ensure the information aligned with the company’s official production totals.
So the dashboard evolved again.
We could compare what was being reported against official totals and identify discrepancies rather than blindly trusting self-reported numbers.
I continued building.
Individual employee files rolled into Team Lead and management views.
Leaders could see their team’s performance without opening every employee file individually.
Connections could refresh when the workbook opened, manually when needed, or periodically throughout the day.
It wasn’t perfect.
It wasn’t directly integrated into our company’s production systems, so some manual updating remained.
But it solved the problem we actually had.
And it worked.
The Result Was Bigger Than Excel
The operation improved from being one of the lower-performing groups to becoming one of the strongest performers.
Was a spreadsheet solely responsible for that?
Of course not.
Employees did the work.
Team Leads coached.
Managers led.
Processes improved.
But the system gave leadership something extremely valuable:
Visibility
People could recognize problems sooner.
They could coach sooner.
They could understand what was happening during the day instead of discovering it afterward.
And I built that while still performing my normal responsibilities.
That’s when I started realizing that my value to an organization wasn’t limited to how well I completed the tasks assigned to me.
My value could also come from improving how the work itself gets done.
That realization changed my career.
Become Useful
There’s a phrase I keep coming back to:
Become useful.
Not busy.
Not visible just for the sake of being visible.
Useful.
Find something that wastes everyone’s time and improve it.
Find data nobody understands and make it understandable.
Find a repetitive process and automate part of it.
Find a problem leadership keeps discussing and help solve it.
You don’t need to walk into an executive’s office announcing how valuable you are.
Build things that make people ask:
“Who created this?”
That’s a different kind of career leverage.
I Became My Own Version of Dwight Schrute
I joke that working closely with the Managing Director eventually made me my own version of Dwight Schrute.
Assistant to the Regional Manager.
Except maybe this time it’s Advisor to the Managing Director.
All jokes aside, the relationship mattered.
I had already worked with him for years.
He knew my work.
I had credibility.
I had demonstrated that when I saw an operational problem, I didn’t simply complain about it.
I tried to solve it.
That reputation became an asset.
Relationships aren’t about sucking up to executives.
They’re about consistently producing work that makes people comfortable putting their name behind yours when an opportunity appears.
Then My Income Changed Faster Than I Thought Possible
The financial impact surprised me.
Moving from Team Lead into my advisor position came with roughly a 21% increase.
Then, in less than a year, my compensation increased by another 12% when the company increased operational efficiency and stayed competitive with pay amongst cost of living.
On top of that, my salaried position includes an annual incentive compensation opportunity, and I still have my normal merit cycle.
Compare that with where I had been.
As an hourly employee, a strong annual merit increase might have topped out around 4%.
There was one year when I worked approximately 840 hours of overtime.
Think about that.
That’s the equivalent of more than 20 additional 40-hour workweeks.
I worked that much partly because I needed the additional income.
Some of that money paid legitimate bills.
Some of it also funded bad habits, financial mistakes, scams, and lessons I hadn’t learned yet.
I was using more of my time to compensate for weaknesses in my finances.
Today I’m trying to do the opposite.
Salary Gave Me Freedom & Responsibility
Moving into a salaried professional role changed more than my paycheck.
It gave me more freedom.
But freedom comes with responsibility.
I’m not measuring my value by how many overtime hours I can accumulate anymore.
I’m being paid for judgment.
For analysis.
For solving problems.
For delivering results.
For being someone leadership can depend on.
That means I can’t become comfortable just because I received the promotion.
I need to continue being useful.
Continue learning.
Continue delivering strong performance.
Continue earning strong reviews.
Continue finding projects where my skills can improve the organization.
A salary isn’t permission to coast.
It’s an opportunity to increase the value of what an hour of my life is worth.
This Is the Kind of Leverage I Want Now
Financial leverage can magnify your gains.
It can also magnify your mistakes.
Borrowing money to invest can make a winning investment incredible.
It can also turn a normal market decline into a financial disaster.
High-interest debt does something similar.
It takes tomorrow’s income and gives someone else a claim on it today.
I’ve spent enough of my life overleveraged.
Loans.
Credit cards.
Payments.
Speculative investments.
Trying to accelerate everything.
Now I’m learning a different kind of leverage.
Leverage skills.
One Excel skill can improve dozens of future projects.
Leverage reputation.
One successful project can create opportunities years later.
Leverage relationships.
Years of good work can create trust that opens doors.
Leverage income.
Every raise gives you additional dollars that can eliminate debt, build savings, and eventually purchase assets.
Leverage time.
Invest consistently for decades instead of needing an investment to explode next month.
Those forms of leverage don’t come with a margin call.
Stop Looking for the Rocket
I understand the attraction.
🚀 This one’s going to the moon.
Maybe it will.
But I’ve spent enough time trying to find the rocket.
I’m more interested now in building the launchpad.
My career.
My emergency fund.
My retirement accounts.
My skills.
My reputation.
My side income.
My ability to live below my income.
My ability to eliminate debt and redirect those payments toward assets.
If one investment eventually takes off, great.
But I don’t want my financial future depending on it.
My New Definition of Next Level Living
When I started thinking about Next Level Living, I thought it would mostly be about improving different areas of life.
Technology.
Money.
Career.
Health.
Relationships.
Experiences.
But I’m beginning to understand what the phrase means to me on a deeper level.
Next Level Living isn’t about suddenly reaching the next level.
It’s about becoming the person capable of living there.
I spent years trying to increase my money faster.
Now I’m trying to increase my value.
I spent years trying to find investments that could change my circumstances.
Now I’m learning how to change my circumstances myself.
And perhaps that’s the greatest financial lesson I’ve learned:
Before you leverage your money trying to become wealthy, learn how to leverage your skills, your career, your reputation, your time, and your income.
The market may go up.
The market may go down.
The next cryptocurrency may go to the moon.
The next stock may crash.
But nobody can take away the skills I’ve learned, the experience I’ve earned, or the person I’ve become along the way.
For me, that’s the real meaning of Next Level Living.
Stop searching for the shortcut to the next level.
Become the person who belongs there.
