I wrote this on my personal page but it's worth talking about here too.

What determines how much money someone should be making? The easy answer is "market forces". But that's really a cop-out because it takes away control from the employee entirely.  People, especially those working in office environments, have significant impact on how much they make.

And it boils down to a relatively simple relationship. How much money the objective you are working on produces.

The higher the number A is, the more you make.  Where A is an objective. Some sort of task or project that generates income.

Of course, it's not normally quite like this. Usually the task involves more than just you.

The more people involved in A, the less you make per completed task. If having more people involved allows you to accomplish more tasks, then that's good. But that's not what happens to most people.  Most people simply cut themselves off from accomplishing more because they artificially pigeon-hole themselves into a specific set of tasks.

In the above example, task A may require some very disparate skills to complete. Skills that Sally and Bill have that you don't. So you "need" them to accomplish task A. The successful entrepreneur is the one who is able to learn lots of new skills in order to accomplish tasks without needing Sally and Bill.

What ultimately limits most successful entrepreneurs is that they don't learn how to manage people because they simply try to do it all themselves. The successful entrepreneur may still be a multi-millionaire so don't be too sorry for him or her. But they'd never hack it as a corporate executive in a Fortune 500 company.  That's because the task list is more like this:

That is, there are lots of tasks that need to get done. So entrepreneur with the ma/pa shop may only have a task or two that they work on in a given year. Having mastered the skills necessary to do the task largely alone, they take home the lion's share of the profits from that task. But the next step is the company which has several, dozens, hundreds, or thousands of tasks to complete.

But before we talk about that, let's review.  How much you make in a professional environment relies on how much the task you are working on is worth and how quickly you can get it done. The value of that task is split amongst the people you needed to accomplish that task.  You can make more by making sure the tasks you work on are valuable and by learning skills necessary to complete those tasks.

Not only must you learn those skills but you must take the initiative to demonstrate to others that you are capable of using those skills effective and efficiently.

But if you sit back and say "I don't know how to do X" where X is a skill necessary to complete a given task that you are part of accomplishing, then that's fine. But it means your value is diminished.

In my experience, what happens is that people who choose not to learn those new skills end up finishing their part of a given task and then move on to working on a different task (or just not working at all) that is worth vastly less than the primary task. 

So do yourself a favor -- learn as many of the skills as possible that are necessary to complete the tasks you are involved in.  Doing so will increase your value and hence how much you make.

In the next part, we'll talk about management.