Increase Your Value
Host: Isaac Mashman · June 21, 2021 · Episode 64 · 12 minutes
Transcribed from the episode audio and edited to read cleanly: names and terms corrected, grammar fixed, filler words and false starts removed, punctuation added. Words in [brackets] could not be made out with certainty. Wording can differ slightly from what was said; the episode itself is the record.
Yo, what is going on, everybody? Isaac Mashman here, and welcome back to another episode of Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman, the show that is all about helping you become a more capable individual through sharing my experiences in business, life, and all things personal growth. Today I have, I would say, maybe [something] more so on the edge of a rant, but rather it's more so on the side of logic. I want to open up your eyes to something. Over the past couple of years, everybody has been talking a ton about raising the minimum wage, raising it from $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour, and to a certain degree a lot of people make a good point. The livable wage is relatively low based off of the living expenses of the world.
We have businesses, we have housing that is expensive, and the minimum wage has not been increased [while] the cost of living, due to inflation, has increased over the past 20 years, and that is an issue. But I am here to present maybe an alternative point of view, and that point of view is, although yes, that wage is relatively low, wouldn't it be better to increase the education of individuals so we can get higher paying jobs? That way we're not raising the actual minimum wage, but rather we're raising the work ethic. We are raising a person's value. See, everybody's in this attitude of victimhood. Everybody's thinking, oh, pity me, pity me, pity me, I need everything handed to me.
It's very unfortunate, because there are a ton of people who are capable, rather people who are perfectly okay, mentally stable, to go out into the workforce, apply themselves, get a job, and make something of their lives, yet they want the government to pay their bills.
They don't want to get up off of the couch. They would rather get paid $1,200 a month to sit down and play video games nonstop all day or do nothing with their lives. There's no better way of talking about that, because that is the truth. Now, there are people who are in unfortunate situations, who maybe are taking care of a loved one, and I'm not excluding any of these, and I'm not making excuses for anybody, because there are points in your life where unforeseen circumstances happen. You can only do so much, or you're in an area, in your hometown or wherever, that might not have as much opportunity as other places, and it would be difficult to leave. Now, then you get into this conversation of sacrifice and this conversation of, how bad do you want it?
So I'm not going to go into detail about that, because circumstances are obviously always going to be different. But what frustrates me are the people who are working the same job that they've been working at for 10 years, and they're like, I need more money, I need more money, I need more money, yet they're not raising their skill set. They're not learning new things. They're not improving themselves. So why do you think that your value, AKA your return, should be increased? It doesn't really make a lot of sense. I was scrolling through Twitter earlier today, and sometimes the news is just simply unavoidable. It is unavoidable especially when you go and scroll through Twitter. So I saw that Chipotle has raised its wages. I'm not sure to what dollar amount it raised its minimum or [base] wage, whatever.
And I've seen a lot of other companies start to do that. But what happened is their menu prices spiked by 4%. So that means that because they're making up for the compensation of the workers, now they're going to have to charge more money, which means that that is a direct effect of inflation. That is inflation. That is a perfect example. It's not so much that the dollar decreased in value, but it's more so that, okay, well, we're paying our person more, therefore we're going to be charging more. So I guess that is a direct example of inflation. That is literally the dollar losing its value, because more money is going out, and that means more money is going to be coming in without really an increased value to the market. I was reading through some of the replies, and I don't know why I was doing that.
I don't know why I do that to myself. But a lot of people were like, oh, the CEO gets paid $38 million a year, he gets paid 2,998 times more money than the person at the bottom of the totem pole at Chipotle makes. I'm like, why don't you spend the time that you just spent calculating that wage gap to apply yourself to an actual position or an actual job? Literally, that's the God honest truth. What a lot of people who aren't involved with business don't understand is that the person who's at the top of the business, or at the top of, quote, the food chain, the top of Chipotle, that CEO has a responsibility that has a direct reflection on everything else that goes below him. Every single employee is affected by the decisions that a CEO makes.
It's the same thing with the president. The presidential office is the number one highest tier office in the world, and everything that they do has direct reflection or effects on the economy, from the price of gas to what wars we get involved with, to what bills get passed, what legislative actions and motions move forward. That's the same thing within a company. It's like you have your own little country, which is a company. The company is a country, so on and so forth. The CEO has obligations that the person at the bottom could only dream of having to bear. It's not so much an obligation, but it's like a weight on their shoulders.
They say one thing wrong in the press, and next thing you know, the company stock completely drops. They have one thing come out, one false move, and they're screwed and they lose that position. They're replaced. The CEO has to manage the second level and the third tier, the advisors, and they have to show up to the board meetings. They have all of these other duties. So obviously, if their value, to get to that point and to get to that place in life, is that important, then wouldn't that person also be getting paid more? Wouldn't their compensation be higher than the person who has to learn a minimal skill, which is how to make burritos and how to make a Chipotle bowl?
I'm not saying this to discredit anybody's work or to be mean, but that's just the God honest truth. There's a reason why lawyers and doctors and neuroscientists get paid more money than other people in a similar field. This is a perfect example, actually. Neurosurgeons, and the people who do the anesthesia whenever you're going under, I cannot pronounce their actual technical name. I know what it is, but I can't pronounce it, so I'm not going to try to. But they get paid nearly double the amount of a normal doctor at times, depending on what institution you go to or what institution they work for, because their job is harder.
Their job requires more work. It requires more study, and their job is also more dangerous. They have a lot of weight and they have a lot of responsibility, to where if they give one dosage that's messed up, or they make one false move with that scalpel doing that brain surgery.
The person who's going under isn't waking back up, and they get paid more and they get compensated more. The direct value of what they serve to the marketplace is reflected in their monetary compensation. So if you're listening to this and you're one of those people who think that, oh, we need to go and get paid more money, I want you to think about this for a second and say, what can I do to increase my value? For the business owners who are maybe combating your pricing, and maybe you're thinking about lowering yourself to a different level and saying, okay, what I'm charging right now is too expensive.
Before you lower your pricing, why don't you start thinking about what can I do to increase my value to my client and to the marketplace, to myself and to the people who are a part of my team? What can I do to be the most valuable?
The most valuable player normally gets paid more than the other basketball players. We live in a competitive marketplace. We live in a capitalist marketplace, and capitalism is here to serve and it's here to employ. A lot of people think that trickle down economics doesn't work, but it does. But at the same time, there's a standard of compensation that occurs. There are definitely other structures that could be a little bit more effective. Our system is not perfect. Our democracy and our republic are not perfect. Our government is not perfect. Our economy is not perfect. The wage gap is, no, it's not perfect. There are things that could be done, but I think we should be focusing more on education and increasing our value versus increasing the actual wages, because then everything's going to lead to inflation, and then we're going to have even more people in poverty because the cost of living increased.
So the people who are working and living off of that $1,200 or $1,600 Social Security income or disability income or welfare or whatever it might be, are we going to be increasing how much money they're getting paid as well, to combat the inflation in the marketplace that's coming from the wages increasing? Chances are it's not going to happen immediately. So this is what would happen. Let's say the government steps in and [raises] the minimum wage [across the board]. One, you're going to have businesses go out of business, because they're not generating enough profit at the current moment to compensate their workers who are working at minimum wage or right above the minimum wage mark. Then from there, you're going to have all of these people who are living on a fixed income.
The only way that that's going to get increased is by going through additional legislation that could take three to six to 12 months, or maybe not even pass. Think about the past year. We've had over $3 trillion get pumped into the marketplace through the stimulus checks. I have to agree that it was necessary to a certain degree, because a lot of people were forced to close down because of COVID. I'm not going to get into my technical viewpoints here, but people were out of work. So what were they doing to survive? All the more reason for you to start a business and be self-sustainable. I think that that's the best blessing you can ever have.
But think about it. These people who are on a fixed income are going to be struggling more and more and more, because their income's staying the same as the rest of the economy increases and the value of the dollar decreases.
People think too much on emotion. A lot of this conversation has been emotionally driven, like, we need more money, we need more money, we need to be compensated better, but you don't understand the actual results or the consequences of your emotions. If you think about it from a logical standpoint, then you start focusing on solutions, and just wait, increasing the wage is not the only solution that exists. This is when you need to sit down and start brainstorming ideas. This is also when you need to start encouraging your local leaders and encouraging the people at a state level to think of different ideas and different ways to solve these issues. There's not just one answer to everything. There are multiple different answers, multiple solutions, all with different benefits, different results, different consequences.
Some are better, some are worse, some are more effective, and some are a little bit less effective. So guys, I just wanted to have this conversation with you to open up your eyes and to maybe address a couple of the things that you might be seeing, because things are deeper than the surface. It's not something that has just a surface level answer, because it goes far, far down, like a tree into the grass. The tree goes into the earth all the way down, and the strongest trees have the strongest root systems. So the most difficult problems oftentimes have the most steps. They have the most [depth] of issues.
We've seen that over the past 24 months. So without further ado, be on the lookout for a brand new interview coming this Friday, and every Monday you're going to be getting a monologue from me, addressing different issues, different topics, different things covering sales, personal branding, business, growth, team culture, all of these amazing, amazing things.
Until next time, much love.