People who make a lot of money rarely succeed through hard work.

As the new year approaches, many people will be called to attend class reunions.

During the exchange of drinks, a few polite words and greetings, it seems that everyone I know is doing well:

I went to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen to work hard, and joined a big company, casually Get an annual salary of 20,000 to 300,000 yuan; those who are trying to start a business, the company has basically established a firm foothold, and they manage dozens of people; those who join the system, the remuneration is bottomless, and the rank is stable; even freelancing at home Yes, some have also become famous Internet celebrities. There are many photos of traveling abroad in their circle of friends...

With the same knowledge and experience, except for those with particularly powerful backgrounds, everyone else seems to have a similar starting point. .

Why is it that "someone else's classmates" have a prosperous life, make a lot of money and seem to be very relaxed, but they are exhausted every day and still receive a monthly salary?

This phenomenon may seem irrational, but it actually contains the laws of economic operation.

What you can sell determines how much you can earn; the scarcer the capital you have, the greater your value and the greater the return.

If you divide making money into three stages, you will find that the physical effort in these three stages decreases step by step, but the rewards may increase.

△

The first stage is to earn while standing, relying on selling your own physical labor.

When I was in school, I liked to go to a food stall and order a few skewers or a bowl of rice noodles. While waiting for the meal, I would chat with the stall owner and ask how the business was.

Surprisingly, the stall, which is almost a little prosperous, can sell nearly a thousand snacks a day. A simple calculation shows that even if each profit is only one yuan, the monthly gross profit of a stall can be 20,000 to 30,000 yuan.

Some time ago, a pancake lady with a monthly income of 30,000 yuan became popular on the Internet, which also confirmed that some small stall owners do have high incomes.

At that time, there were many jokes on the Internet, mocking themselves for quitting their jobs tomorrow and going out to sell pancakes. However, the number of breakfast stalls in Beijing did not increase significantly.

Because for people like Aunt Jianbing who make money standing up, every penny of their income is directly linked to their workload, and every day they stop working, they will run out of food. It seems that the accumulated income is quite high, but once divided by working hours, the rate of return is not as attractive as described.

The reason why people who make money while standing have low returns is because they have resources that many people have - physical strength and time.

If everyone has a resource, then each practitioner must face tens of thousands of competitors and have very limited bargaining power in the seller's market. Besides, there are only 24 hours in a day and only seven days in a week.

Some people are smart and realize that improving their work efficiency can make their time more valuable.

While taking care of their jobs, they continue to invest in education and training, acquire more irreplaceable work skills, gain stronger bargaining power, and increase work returns.

But such people are in the minority after all. Most people do not have such knowledge and can only increase their income by increasing their working hours; and when all time is used for work, it in turn squeezes the self. Room for improvement.

In 1998, American columnist Barbara Ehrenreich chose six different cities to work in in order to experience the lives of the lower class Americans.

In order to ensure that she could truly experience the life of the local people at the bottom, she decided not to use her knowledge, education and connections, cut off contacts with past friends, and started working with only $1,000 in savings.

Inspirational Chicken Soup likes to say that you are poor because you don’t work hard enough, but what is the real ending of this story?

Barbara changed six jobs, including retail, cleaning, and elderly services, but the ending was the same: she could not escape a life of poverty.

Because she had no money, she had to rent a remote house; because she lived far away, she had to spend a lot of time on meaningless commuting; because she spent a lot of time on the road, she had no time to accept it. Training to find a better job; in order to cope with the cost of living, she had to hold several odd jobs at the same time; because of the continuous work every day, the gentleness and patience of an intellectual gradually disappeared in her, and she had no energy to manage her appearance and emotions, until finally Become a rough, tired, slovenly loser.

Finally, Barbara returned to her circle of writers, and this experience was written into a documentary novel.

Of course, Barbara can jump out of the quagmire at any time, but the migrant workers who are actually in it can still avoid it even if they understand the current situation of life.

△

The second stage is to make money just sitting around, that is, making money by selling your own mental work.

To a certain extent, mental workers are also manual workers. They create value for consumers by selling their time and physical strength in exchange for bargaining power.

The reason why it is called sitting and making money is because some of the results of mental work can be copied in large quantities, indirectly extending the money-making time of the money-maker. You don’t have to work hard to increase your workload. You can sit down and take a rest.

For example, a very powerful teacher is often invited to give demonstration classes across the country. They all teach the same thing, but every time they go there is a group of new students, and the teacher has to repeat the same teaching content hundreds of times a year.

The teacher was tired from traveling for a long time and had no intention of preparing lessons. Finally, he decided to record a videotape of his lectures and sell them. He devoted himself to studying teaching and produced more high-quality courses. His reputation became more and more popular, and the videotapes sold more and more. The better come.

Nowadays, of course, we no longer use video tapes - the Internet provides a wider distribution channel for intellectual workers.

A graphic designer can spend twenty hours making a poster for Party A and get a sum of money. You can also use the same time to make a template and send it to a paid website, and each user will share the remuneration.

If the designer’s work is valuable enough, theoretically the return of the latter option is much higher than that of the former.

So under the best circumstances, you can make a lot of money just sitting.

Unfortunately, China's copyright protection is still at an awkward stage, resulting in pirated CDs and pirated books flying everywhere.

For example, "Splendid Weiyoung" was accused of plagiarizing more than 200 works. Volunteers spent three years just collecting evidence. In the end, only 11 plagiarized writers chose to come forward. .

Therefore, the current situation of most intellectual workers is to copy their results in large quantities and then invest the saved time in the next round of creation, because it is difficult for them to get the compensation they should have.

△

The third stage is to make money while lying down, relying on selling the scarce resources in hand.

At this stage, you can truly enter the ranks of "making money easily". Because for people who make money while lying down, their income basically has nothing to do with work intensity.

Two days ago, Evergrande’s personnel appointment notice with a monthly salary of 1.25 million hit the Internet: Ren Zeping, who had just resigned from Founder, joined Evergrande Group with an annual salary of 15 million.

However, annual salaries of tens of millions are not uncommon among senior executives in the real estate industry.

In 2013, Vanke offered Yu Liang, who was still the executive general manager at the time, an annual salary of 13.68 million yuan. Evergrande President Xia Haijun had an annual salary of 270 million yuan. The annual salary of senior executives such as Jinke and Gemdale also exceeded 7 million yuan. .

For companies at this price point, the focus is no longer on the executive's ability to perform a specific task, but on more macro things, such as the boss's ability to "organize the situation."

Some people think that "organization" is management. Like many skills, it is something that can be mastered through learning. This is just the most superficial layer.

In fact, in an industry with extremely high entry barriers like real estate, forming a bureau requires mobilizing resources from all parties, and those who control the resources naturally become the rule makers.

This is not difficult to explain. Many bosses who have worked hard from the bottom are born in sales. Because sales are the direct contact with customers, the first gate for business resources to flow from customers to the company is here.

According to the general company procedures, after receiving the sales order, the work is broken down and completed by other departments. In other words, a salesperson who has control over many business resources does not participate in any work of project execution, but can gather contacts and resources at the first gate and recruit a new team of people to start work.

And many business owners who start their own businesses do exactly this.

△

So, which resources are scarce? Let me tell you a story -

In the popular American TV series "Game of Thrones", there is a character named Varys.

Varys was a slave when he was young, but later became free but had nothing. He and his friend Illyrio made a living by stealing. At first, the two specialized in stealing nobles' jewelry and property and selling them in the market, but they soon discovered that it was very difficult to sell the stolen goods.

So the two began to conspire to divide the work, Varys was responsible for the theft, and Illyrio claimed to the nobles that he could find their lost jewels.

Later, Wallis stopped stealing by himself and turned to purchasing stolen goods from other thieves. Gradually, the "business" between the two improved. On one side, thieves from the entire city-state came to Varys to sell their stolen goods, and on the other hand, nobles from the entire city-state came to Illyrio to recover the stolen jewelry.

The two realized the high value and low risk of information, and made a lot of money from both ends. They used the money to teach slave children to read and sneak into the castles of nobles to peek at their letters. , and soon the two of them became the leading intelligence dealers in the entire continent.

The history of Wallis’ fortune just reflects the three scarce resources today: capital, information, and influence.

Capital is the most visible resource.

There is a game on Zhihu: Suppose there are 100 people and each one has 100 yuan. In each round of the game, each person takes out a dollar and gives it to another person randomly. Suppose you participate in the game at the age of 18 with an initial capital of 100 yuan, and play once a day until you retire at the age of 65. Such rules ensure that "the probability of obtaining wealth is random" as much as possible.

The game has been run 17,000 times, and under fair rules, the results are still cruel.

The rate of capital appreciation is greater than the rate of labor appreciation, which is both reasonable and unreasonable: you have worked hard for more than ten years, worked overtime until you were overworked, and finally managed to get a monthly salary of 50,000 yuan. You have the courage to go to the sales office twice a day, but the agent tells you that the price you are interested in has exceeded 50,000 yuan in one month.

Zhihu respondent Fei Shamao said in an article that Hong Kong people call buying a house "getting on the car", and the first real estate purchased by the working-class people is called "getting on the car", which is actually very vivid. ——A group of people are running after the car. As long as you can jump on the car, you can move faster than those chasing people outside even if you are sitting or lying down in the car.

Information is the most secret resource.

Last time I went to Guangzhou, I passed Shangxiajiu Street, and there were wholesale markets for all kinds of goods along the way.

My friend exaggeratedly told me that things here are very cheap. "In the early years, shrewd businessmen transported things from here to two streets away and could charge twice as much."

But what is valuable is not the transportation labor of the two streets, but the need to understand "which street lacks what", that is, to master the nodes of information exchange.

A friend is in the job search agency industry. He introduced that the business process of the job search agency is as follows: HR with recruitment targets pays a certain fee, and hands over the internal recommendation information and job requirements to the agency, and the agency pulls all the requests. A job search group for fresh graduates that provides paid referrals for job information to graduates who do not have direct connections with large companies.

In this process, the information asymmetry between the recruiter and the job seeker gives the job search agency an opportunity to develop. The routines of real estate agencies and marriage agencies are all the same.

Some people may ask, this kind of intermediary can’t make any money?

The survival situation of small intermediaries is indeed not good, but don’t forget that making money from information does not require capital investment in the strict sense, and it is an industry that is obviously increasing in scale.

The end of information trading is information monopoly. How much profit can the near-monopoly information industry bring? Just look at a certain search engine.

How to judge whether a piece of information is valuable? The simplest way is to see how many people know this information.

People who make big money rely on "asymmetric information". They dig out things that others don't know. When ordinary people start a business, most of them rely on "public information". Information that everyone knows is worthless.

Influence is the most resource that has no regard for origin.

At the beginning of the popularity of the Internet, many people believed that the information barriers between people would be broken down.

Some industries have even reached the edge: as long as you don’t go to particularly remote places, you no longer need a tour guide, you can just search for guides online.

But on the other hand, there are so many things online that I don’t know where to look. At this time, those who have the ability to attract everyone's attention have mastered the third core resource: influence.

In 2011, Nobel Prize winner in economics Herbert Simon also pointed out that in the next 30 years, whoever grasps the public's attention will grasp the future wealth.

Advertising is the earliest form of consciously earning influence. Now, Internet celebrities can receive tens of thousands of gifts by singing a song at home. This is also the value brought by attention.

△

So can poverty be changed? The answer is: yes.

But not only does it require more effort than ordinary people, but most importantly, it also requires more luck.

Many articles mention the thinking of the poor, such as saving money, fear of risks, short-sightedness, etc., but these are reasonable choices made under the established poverty situation.

Because I have no money and can’t afford to lose, I don’t dare to do things where I can’t see direct benefits, and I don’t dare to spend money on food to invest in myself.

In peaceful times, slow class mobility was the norm. In other words, class jump is like a relay race. If you want to get ahead faster than ordinary people, you must take a more dangerous shortcut.

You are likely to suffer more failures than the average person. But if you are ready to fail, I would like to give you two suggestions:

First, choose things to do that can expose you to core resources, or that you may master core resources in the future. Again, capital, information, attention, a lot can be obtained through connections. There is no need to save small money, but you need to be cautious in making big decisions, and spend the little money where you are most competitive.

Second, don’t wait for everything to be perfect before taking action. In the story of "The Great Gatsby", Gatsby rescued a drunken millionaire from a stormy sea and thus achieved success. If you have an opportunity, seize it first. Many times opportunities are just waiting for the "most suitable person", not the best person.

Finally, I will give you a picture, hoping that everyone can make their own life plans after seeing clearly the benefits and costs.