What you earn is your worth

Mar 27, 2017

What is that one thing your boss, customer, spouse, team would miss if you were gone?

 

By David Kajoba 

 

On February the 24th, I woke up to the news of Claudio Ranieri's sacking. If you are not a fan of the English football league, Ranieri led Leicester City (a club whose main objective was to avoid relegation) to a surprise English premier league trophy in 2016.

Among other individual accolades, he was named the 2016 Premier League Manager of The Season, and League Managers Association Manager of The Year. Awarded the Grand Officer of the Italian Order of Merit and the award of Best Italian Manager of the Year, he was also the 2016 Best FIFA Men's Coach of The Year.

Following his sacking, reactions from the football fraternity were nothing short of the obvious. One football expert after another came out to voice their disappointment towards the club owners for what they termed as ‘unfair treatment' to a man who had rewritten their club history.  

Sounds unfair, right? Well, if you ask me I would say life is fair. Life is fair enough that Ranieri's underdog team was crowned champions of English football due to their exceptional performance. Life was so fair that a manager with a record of being sacked in all his previous managerial jobs was actually awarded by FIFA as the best manager of the year due to his performance.

The only unfair thing would be rewarding an underperforming manager with a new contract. We tend to be quick to cry foul and talk of how unfair life is when things don't go our way but for some reason forget to talk about how fair life is when things go the way we anticipated.

Have you ever cared to realize that while you think that life has been fair to you, someone else thinks it has been unfair to them? Have you ever pondered about how many people applied for the same job, were shortlisted and took the same interview but never taken on? Do you realize that by applying for that position they believed they were as well suited for that job as you and therefore left off thinking that, the decision was unfair?

The lessons from Ranieri's plight should not be about how unfair life can be, but how important it is to keep at the top of your trade.  You are likely to blame external factors for your misfortunes yet the problem is you? It is difficult to swallow the sour pill that wherever you might find yourself today, you, at one moment in your life, made a decision to be there. Whereas past achievements are important, they cannot guarantee your stay in your current position.

The only problem with past achievements is that they are past. Yes it is important to have a past good record, but one ought to be mindful that the present record is even more important. Records are helpful as a measure of progress. 

We need them for comparison purposes. Organizations make use of their past financial records to assess their progress. This therefore means that past performances are important, but not as important as the present. No manager keeps an employee simply because the latter used to perform well at the job. Employers keep employees who are performing well not who used to! We do not live in the was, we live in the is i.e., we live in the present not the past. Little wonder, friends at times turn into foes and loved ones become undesirable.

If you therefore wish to make it in life, if by any chance you have a dream to succeed in any field; marriage, sports, games, business, employment, music, and suchlike, it is important that you maintain a certain degree of consistency. Make sure you remain relevant in the present. Work towards improving yourself in that trade. Focus on being the best you can be.

Make a commitment to keep bettering your previous performance. Keep breaking your own record. Invest time and resources in becoming a better you. Like Jim Rohn puts it: "Work harder on yourself than you do on your job". Your income is directly related to your philosophy not the economy and for things to change, YOU must change. You always earn what you are. 

There is a strong positive correlation between your earning and the level of difficulty in replacing you.  When they cannot replace you, they will do all it takes to keep you.  Do your work to the best of your ability such that neither the living, the dead nor the unborn can do it better. How hard would it be to replace you? What is that one thing your boss, customer, spouse, team would miss if you were gone? You have got to acquire the skills and mindset of the earner you would love to be.

 

The writer is a biblical theologian, motivational speaker and a life Coach based in Kampala.

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