Playing The Game
So I had a very interesting Uber ride in Detroit last week and I’ve been thinking about it so much that now I need to blog about it.
Side note: I’m not entirely sure why Uber drivers in Detroit/Michigan always want to have a chat with me. It’s either midwestern friendliness, suburbs vibes or the fact that I have a funny accent. But Uber drivers in Chicago are more than happy to ignore me and let me put my AirPods in.
Firstly, I was super excited for this uber ride because the app told me it was arriving in a Tesla Model 3. You don’t see many of those in Michigan (because i think it’s still not possible to directly buy one in the state due to dealership regulations [AKA the big 3 auto firms lobbying]). So I’m actually up for a chat in this situation and to talk about EV driving.
Turns out this lady driver was one of the top Uber drivers in Michigan because she drives 80 hours a week (!!!), and she actually leases the Tesla from Uber so that she can keep the mileage cost low and not put it on her personal car. Obviously this means she has to pay Uber a monthly fee to have this Tesla, and I can’t remember how much it was but it was pretty substantial.
And then this lady proceeded to basically tell me her life story as if I was her accountant. She told me how much she earns per year ($100k), her credit score (540, but she’s never missed a payment), the fact that she leases 2 cars on top of this tesla for work, and that she leases everything else including her furniture and her refrigerator, washer and dryer!
And this really got me thinking because despite me only being a couple of years into having a credit score in America, mine is decently higher than hers. And I don’t claim to be some sort of personal finance expert, but I think there’s a few fundamental things about finance which everybody should know and live their lives by. People should know how to play the game.
Because this lady earns really good money, $100k a year! Granted she works 80 hours a week, but that’s some serious hustle! And the thing about America is that if you earn that sort of money and spend/invest wisely, then there’s a decent chance you can get to retirement age and be a millionaire. That is literally the American dream. Get a good paying job, save a load of money and be able to live a super comfortable lifestyle as you get older.
Except if you have a low credit score and lease 3 vehicles as well as most of your belongings, then you’re never going to get there! You’re permanently going to be paying off bills and credit cards and basically living pay cheque to pay cheque.
And I haven’t ran the numbers on this, but I feel like if you get to earning $100k a year and invest wisely, maybe invest in a property or two and start generating some passive income, then you are going to become a very wealthy person.
So it just goes to show that much like revenue isn’t a good indicator for a company’s long term health, salary isn’t a good indicator for a person’s actual wealth. So much of it is knowing how to play the game.
This concept of “playing the game” can also be applied to career advancement. I work for a small company so I’ve been lucky to have a handful of promotions over the years, but chatting to people that work at larger companies your ability to get the next promotion often isn’t a function of how many hours you work, but how well you can play the game.
Large company politics often boil down to leverage, and in a world where attrition rates are up and the “great resignation” is happening, that means that the people that are staying in their jobs are growing in leverage as it is so much cheaper for a company to retain talent than it is to attract and train new talent.
This might be an exaggeration but i think the 80/20 principle might apply here. You’ll get 80% of your overall credit in the company for what probably made up 20% of the work you actually did. Playing the game means knowing which tasks and projects make up that 20% which will give you disproportionate reputation and really smashing those, and then knowing which tasks can be slow rolled because nobody cares about them. Then next time there’s a promotion review, you’ve got one glowing example to use.
In summary. Salary is not an indicator of long term wealth much like hour worked is not the key causal factor in career advancement. It often boils down to who can understand the rules of the game and then optimize how they play that game. Whether that’s personal finance or big company politics.
12th June 2022
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