The fundamental difference between poor people and rich people is that poor people believe that the harder they work the more money they will make, while the rich know that they have to rely on leverage to to make the big money. Leverage means either relying on others to do the work for you or earning interest on investments or earning commission.

1. Other people’s work: if you’re at the beginning of your career it will take you years to get to top managerial positions where you get to leverage off of other people’s work. Not to mention that not everybody is capable of getting to that level – you have to be the best of the best.
2. Investments: many makes money, so if you don’t already have a lot of it to invest it will take you years before you earn that kind of money on interest/dividends.
3. Commission: this leaves you with the last option; start selling IT solutions if that’s what turns you on. If you’re a passionate technologist, then your first obstacle will be suppressing and overcoming your passion for technology (or whatever else you love), meaning that you will have to prioritise money over everything else. It’s easier to do that if you’re not particularly good at what you you’re currently doing. That is typically why they say that to become a salesman you have to fail at everything else first. That’s not to say that sales isn’t interesting or challenging, it is, but you have to have a certain aptitude for it: you have to be a risk taker, good with people and an exceptional strategist to make the really big bucks i.e. that’s the difference between a guy selling sun glasses on the side of the road and a successful corporate salesman. Examples:
   1. Steve Jobs is a prime example of such a man that wasn’t that good as an engineer but he was a genius at sales and marketing. He managed to get others to build solutions for him and he would sell it on to the world.
   2. Ideally you should be both an exceptional engineer and salesman, but that’s very rare. Bill Gates is such an example and because of it he and Microsoft had an almost complete monopoly in the software industry, across the world, while he was in charge.
   3. Linus Torvalds on the other hand was the exact opposite of Steve Jobs; he’s probably the best coder that’s ever lived but he’s never cared about money and is not much of a people person, hence he has not made a fraction of the money that either Steve Jobs or Bill Gates made … but he’s made enough from what I’ve heard.
   4. Mark Zuckerberg is a bit of an anomaly which has made him a hero to pure technologists around the world: he’s an exceptional coder but not a salesman (if The Social Network movie is anything to go by). However he was at the right time at the right place, has a passion for connecting people and very smart to leverage off of exceptional salesman like Sean Parker, Peter Thiel etc. without letting them get the upper hand.

Moral of the story: get into sales if you want to make the big bucks, but if you love technology more than money you probably won’t make that much of it in your life … which isn’t necessarily a terrible thing as long as you enjoy what you’re doing.