What is your economic accelerator?

Just as a gas pedal allows your car to go faster, an "economic accelerator" allows you to get faster and sooner to your ideal financial situation (whether it's one million dollars in the bank, or a perpetual yearly cashflow of $50,000).

So what is YOUR economic accelerator?

In other words, if you wanted to make MORE money, what do you have to do? Some answers:

1. Work overtime
2. Get a second job
3. Beg a rich boyfriend or girlfriend for extra money every week ("I'm financially unhappy; don't you want to make me happy?")
4. Start a side business (but don't tell your boss)

All of the above assumes that you cannot make MORE money doing your current job. Indeed, for most jobs, it doesn't matter how hard you work, you still get the same yearly salary.

However, there ARE jobs where the more output you produce, the more money you make. For instance:

1. On-commission sales people
2. Business development directors
3. Account managers

These are the jobs where the economic accelerator is fairly easily identified. Income is a direct reflection of outcome, so the more (or better) your outcome produced for the employer, the greater your income.

If you find yourself in a job where there is no clear economic accelerator, you may be getting a bad deal. Of course, your fixed salary is an inherent and necessary feature of the capitalist system: it is by keeping labour costs fixed and low that capitalists (business owners) can make more and more money over time.

The reason the profit rate -- that is, the gap between your fixed salary and the increasing revenues of the business -- keeps growing is that the marketing, sales and production systems of a company keep getting better and better, therefore revenues keep increasing. However, your salary remains the same. Therefore, the poor (employees) stay poor while the rich (business owners) get richer and richer.

People who have basic knowledge of business, can immediately determine whether their job contains an economic accelerator.

One thing is for sure: people with business knowledge play the capitalist system well. This is why the odds of becoming a millionaire, if you own a small business, is 1,000 to 1 (of course, these odds keep improving as you become better and better at running your small biz).

People without business knowledge always end up being exploited. The only way they can get out of this vicious cycle of exploitation is to identify the economic accelerator in their job, floor that "gas pedal" in order to make as much money as possible, then launch a business of their own.

The simple truth, which few people will tell you and which few people will believe, even if they hear it, is that being an employee is the most difficult way to make a living and also the least profitable.

There are three other options, which I'll explore in greater detail later on: being a free agent, being a business owner, and being a professional investor.