Hyper-productivity – capitalism rewards excessive producers regardless of the actual product
Want to be successful? Start producing anything. Just get up right now and start making stuff: lampposts, firecrackers, TV shows, news articles, party hats etc. Quality doesn't matter, just flood the market with quantity until you develop such reputation that other businesses come cash in hand and ask you to make a deal with them. There's your fabled shortcut to success, it takes no brain at all except when it comes to putting a disclaimer on your product. Still here with me? Now that all the alphas are gone, let's discuss the nuances of this principle in peace.
Above-standard quality
Every profession has a certain golden standard that is tacitly accepted as fact even though nobody can explicitly define it. For example, retail stores might have "the customer is always right", which is there to tell employees that a customer has the right to complain, return goods with a valid receipt and so on. In medicine, the golden standard could be "primum nil nocere" (first, do no harm), meaning the medical professional should alleviate pain and problems, not cause them.
Now, here's the billion dollar question: can you improve on any given golden standard? Can you provide any input on any of these standards to improve them by even so much as 0.1%? It seems insignificant but medicine alone wastes billions and billions on things like patient care, so if you're able to stem the bleeding even by a drop, you'll have CEOs lining up with blank checks in hand to hear your bits of wisdom. The dumber your solution, the better because that means it's literally foolproof.
Stability under stress
As soon as you start off on any career path, you'll be beset by a constantly changing set of work requirements. Even if you do nothing more complex than just dig a hole, you'll eventually face a challenge – the ground is frozen solid, now what? It's typically the lack of leadership and clearly defined direction that causes people to give up, so the solution is to always take charge. Can you take control of the situation and produce a result that's at least up to the golden standard? How about this – you're such an expert at digging holes that you can do it without disturbing the nearby wilderness; all of a sudden, your skills are worth much more and you could conceivably land highly sensitive work in natural preserves. As stakes increase, so does the stress but if you can maintain the same level of quality then you can ask for a much greater pay.
Negotiating skills
At some point, stress gets to you and you just need a break but that doesn't mean you have to stop earning. Having negotiating skills means you can convince your clients to keep investing in you for a possibility of return at some point in the future even though you're not working right now. You want to see if people trust you because then you're no longer just a random employee that can be discarded but a valuable asset, one that mandates care and attention even when it's not producing immediate returns. The corollary to this is that you should have a ready explanation for any concern a client will raise and actually be the first to raise it.
Besides, some of the best writing projects I ever did were the ones where I got paid in advance; with my mind clear of worry, I could commit 100% to producing the best possible results. Here's another funny fact I noticed: a client that will pay you in advance will also pay you on time for work done, so be cheeky and see what happens when you ask for money in advance. Negotiating skills then become a lateral earning multiplier that you can hone to make more money without doing more workhours. Provide a well-reasoned explanation and just act like you do this all the time.
Logistics
Becoming an expert in any field means having specialized tools and actionable knowledge in using them. That's really all there is to it. For writing, it's having a typewriter, a set of calligraphy pens or just a computer that can run any word processing software. Whatever it is you're trying to make into your career, you need to have access to and expertise in using those specific tools to the point people will pay you for your results. To me, this is the single strongest argument against AI taking away jobs – anyone trying to suggest that a smart machine can have access to and knowledge of all specialized tools is either an idiot or has an ulterior agenda. Nobody's replacing honest, trustworthy experts who wield specialized tools anytime soon.
Once you've got all of these taken care of, you can start hyper-production. That's when you'll be making so much money you won't know what to do with it. My advice is to reinvest in your quality, stability under stress, negotiating skills and logistics. As an interesting aside, all mega-corporations reinvest almost all the profit, allowing them to avoid taxes and grow; no money is actually entering their vaults for the taxman to haul off, it's all being spun back into growth. Even alpha workers who rushed off at the start of this article will eventually come around to these principles on their own, so it'll all work out in the end.