This one mindset shift will change the way you see earning money forever
Here's an important lesson I learned from two of my own mentors, Ron Gibori and Aaron Webber, which I would like to pass along to all of you:
When people think about their careers and how to earn a living for themselves, they tend to come at it from this perspective:
"What is that one thing I can do really, really well that people will pay me a lot of money for?"
From an early age, this is the mindset we are told is correct. We are instructed to choose a career path, a particular skill set, and then spend our entire lives mastering that one single skill set so that our value continues to increase. Over time, what people will pay for that skill set will go up, up, up, and hopefully, we finish at the top of the pyramid, earning a lot of money doing something we are very good at and that we also enjoy.
More From Inc.com: The Morning Rituals of Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Jeff Bezos
But this way of thinking is also how most people get stuck.
What a lot of people don't realize--and what is, I believe, the fundamental difference in true entrepreneurs--is that with this mindset, there is a ceiling. At some point down the line, one of two things happens that limits the growth of your own value:
Since you are the commodity--"you" being the one required to perform the requested skill--you are capped by the number of hours you can work in a day, week, month, year, etc. There are only 24 hours in a day.
Whatever your skill set, there is an inherent cap within the market for your services. At some point, people will no longer pay what you request. For example, you may be able to charge $100, $200, even $500 or $1,000 per hour for your particular skill set, but at some point, the market will not pay a cent more. You cannot charge $1,000,000 per hour, because the market refuses to pay that price for your particular service.
Now, this is not to say that you cannot become successful or wealthy trading "hours for dollars." In fact, this is the model almost all businesses are founded upon.
But this is not the model entrepreneurs and innovators themselves follow.
Their model is actually the complete opposite.
More From Inc.com: 8 Bad Communication Habits You Need to Break Immediately
Some 99.8% of people say to themselves, "What is the one skill set that I can master that a million people would want?"
The wildly successful entrepreneurs and innovators flip it. They say to themselves, "What is the thing a million people need, and what is the one thing I can create that will provide that to all of them?"
It is so simple, and yet the change in perspective is very, very difficult for most people.
When the masses think of scaling, they think in terms of doing what they do--and just doing it more.
When successful entrepreneurs think of scaling, they actually think of doing less. They ask themselves what a million, 5 million, a billion people all need, and then they work to create a single solution that can be used by all of them.
More From Inc.com: 8 Bad Habits That Destroy Your Creativity
In short: They create a marketplace.
When you create a marketplace, you are no longer trading hours for dollars. You are actually facilitating the trading of hours for dollars, and taking a percentage from each and every transaction.
That's the difference. Money, then, is not something you "earn." It is not a direct reward in exchange for hours "in." Money becomes solely a derivative equal to the value you are providing on a massive scale. This is what entrepreneurs mean when they talk about "providing value." This is not some buzzword phrase they enjoy just throwing around. They mean what they say.
True wealth is built through providing value that creates a marketplace, and extends beyond your own trading "hours for dollars."
Start thinking in that direction, and see what happens.
RELATED: 15 things to stop wasting your money on
More on Inc.com:
The Ultimate Guide to Creating an Instagram Profile Everyone Will Want to Follow
The Brilliant Thing Pokémon Go Can Teach Us About the Future of Augmented Reality
The 1 Painfully Obvious Reason Nobody Follows You on Social Media
