"How to increase your income"

Start by understanding these three criteria

How much do you earn per hour? At this writing, many professional football players in America are earning over $800,000 per hour.

Their five-year contracts are for $20 million or more, or about $4 million each year for eighteen regular-season games, or $222,222 per game! Although each game lasts one hour, the actual playing-time per game is less than 15 minutes, and that means their hourly wage—for the time they’re entertaining the fans—is an astonishing $888,888!

Whether or not they or anyone else is really worth that much money is a matter of opinion. Astronomical contracts for professional athletes have been and will continue to be a topic of controversy.

But however paltry your income might seem in comparison to theirs, all income, in fact, is determined by three criteria:

• the need for what you do • your ability to do it • the difficulty of replacing you

In their case, what’s the need for what they do? Tremendous! Millions of fans pay to see football games. Radio and television networks pay the team owners millions of dollars for broadcasting rights. And advertisers pay over $1 million per minute for airtime in which to advertise their products.

How about their ability? Their record as college players was probably the best in history.

And the difficulty of replacing them? Very difficult! Each year, only a handful of college football players match their level of excellence.

Based on those three criteria, it appears that they are worth a lot of money, and so are other outstanding professionals—pilots of jumbo jet airplanes, for example.

There’s a huge need for what they do, because every day thousands of passengers board jumbo jets. The ability required to fly one takes many years to develop—a pilot must log thousands of hours of flight time and pass a battery of tests before he or she is allowed to sit in the captain’s seat. And as for the difficulty of replacing one of those pilots, well, at 35,000 feet above sea level, flying 600 miles per hour, with 490 passengers on board, it’s very difficult.

Now, consider the opposite extreme: a teenage boy or girl who mows lawns in the summer. There’s a need for what they do, because grass keeps growing. As for ability, not much is required, and, should it be necessary to replace them, just about any youngster would probably do.

So how about you? Are you satisfied with your income? If not, consider the three criteria by which your income is determined:

the need for what you do
your ability to do it
the difficulty of replacing you

Increase one or all three of those criteria, and your income will increase proportionately!

Here’s what you can do:

Evaluate the NEED for what you do. Is it increasing or decreasing? Look for opportunities to increase the demand, or move into other areas of activity within your company, organization, or industry. People skills, good communication, and leadership will always be in demand.
Start increasing your ABILITY to do what you do. Read books, listen to tapes or CDs, attend seminars, talk to experts in the field.
By doing something that others need and by getting very good at it, you’ll make yourself difficult to REPLACE. Then, watch your income soar!