I have never worked for minimum wage, even as a kid.

I have never worked for minimum wage, even as a kid.
I started earning my own money at 14, mowing lawns.
My parents had the good sense not to just give me what I wanted.
So I found other ways to get it.

People have been debating minimum wage my entire life.
Peers. Adults. Politicians. The same conversation, on loop, for decades.
Even as a kid, I had enough sense to opt out.

As a teenage, I remember hearing those conversations and thinking,
"That's not a battle worth fighting."

Back then I had a simple rule:
Never work for minimum wage.

Cutting grass. Wedding venue. Scrubbing dishes in the church kitchen. Any opportunity was fair game, but it had to clear one bar:
More than minimum wage.

That standard shifted my understanding.

To stick to it, I had to do the math.
When we do the math, we start to optimize.

By my senior year of high school, I was making roughly 3x minimum wage.
My classmates worked all Saturday for what I could earn in 2 hours.

These observations taught me more about leverage and psychology than I learned in a classroom.

Minimum wage isn't the issue.
The issue is what minimum wage represents.
It's the lowest value way to get paid: trading time for money.

There are three problems with trading time for money:

1. Time is too valuable.
Coming out ahead means trading up in value, not down.
Money can be replaced. Time cannot.

2. Time is limited.
There is only so much of it available to trade.

3. It's capped.
There is only so much people feel comfortable paying per hour.

So, back to minimum wage (and my homie Taylor Swift).
"Play stupid games, win stupid prizes."

If time based pay is the lowest leverage game, there are better ones to play.

Three better games:
• Performance. Get paid for outcomes, not hours.
• Value. Get paid for impact, not effort.
• Equity. Get paid for ownership, not activity.

Each one increases the leverage on our time.
And with more leverage comes upside. Optionality.
And eventually, freedom.

Not everyone can play these games on day one.
But we can choose which game we're training for.

And THAT choice matters more than the hourly rate ever will.