“I’m not paid what I’m worth”. Think again.

I just read this interesting post on HBR blogs, where the author makes the claim that we are often not aware of the ‘disruptive’ skillset that we already have, which we could/should be juicing to get paid more. While I agree largely to what she has to say, I think she misses out on one critical aspect – the happiness quotient.

Measuring by just our pay seems short sighted. We have to take into account the tax of lower satisfaction from a job that maybe pays much more but isn’t what we want to do. So maybe, when we feel, “I’m not paid what I’m worth”, the counterintuitive step that makes us happier could be getting paid even less but doing what we love.

Moreover, I don’t even think practicing our most disruptive skill will necessarily fetch more money. In business I do not find skill and profits to be proportional. Maybe the correlation is more in salaried professions, but I’d argue it is still nowhere close to being proportional.

As Paul Graham mentions

A great programmer might be ten or a hundred times as productive as an ordinary one, but he’ll consider himself lucky to get paid three times as much

So, aren’t we better off not measuring our worthiness by how much we earn (we’ll always fall short), but by how happy we are.