Your Earning Ability

Capitalizing on Your Strengths (part 2) Most people in America start off with little more than their ability to work. More than 80 percent of the millionaires in America started with nothing. Most people have been broke, or nearly broke, several times during their young-adult years. But the ones who eventually get ahead are those who do certain things in certain ways, and those actions set them apart from the masses. Perhaps the most important thing they do, consciously or unconsciously, is to look at themselves strategically, thinking about how they can better use themselves in the marketplace, how they can best capitalize on their strengths and abilities to increase their returns to themselves and their families.

Your most valuable financial asset is your earning ability, your ability to earn money. Properly applied to the marketplace, it’s like a pump. By exploiting your earning ability, you can pump tens of thousands of dollars a year into your pocket. All your knowledge, education, skills and experience contribute toward your earning ability, your ability to get results for which someone will pay good money.

And your earning ability is like farmland. If you don’t take excellent care of it, if you don’t fertilize it and cultivate it and water it on a regular basis, it soon loses its ability to produce the kind of harvest that you desire. Successful men and women are those who are extremely aware of the importance and value of their earning ability, and they work every day to keep it growing and current with the demands of the marketplace.

One of the greatest responsibilities in life is to identify, develop and maintain an important marketable skill. It is to become very good at doing something for which there is a strong market demand.

In corporate strategy, we call this the development of a “competitive advantage.” For a company, a competitive advantage is defined as an area of excellence in producing a product or service that gives the company a distinct edge over its competition.

In capitalizing on your strengths, as the president of your own personal services corporation, you also must have a clear competitive advantage. You also must have an area of excellence. You must do something that makes you different from and better than your competitors. Your ability to identify and develop this competitive advantage is the most important thing you do in the world of work. It’s the key to maintaining your earning ability. It’s the foundation of your financial success. Without it, you’re simply a pawn in a rapidly changing environment. But with a distinct competitive advantage, based on your strengths and abilities, you can write your own ticket. You can take charge of your own life. You can always get a job. And the more distinct your competitive advantage, the more money you can earn and the more places in which you can earn it.