How to Earn More: One Rule of Focus That Changes Everything

AVAlexander Volchek

This lets you work through the difficulties created by your various inner states and truly help, first, yourself and, second, the company. When I speak this way, many people initially feel that this decision is very selfish. I have even recommended to some people that they start working four hours a day. In this situation, nine out of ten people are under the illusion that their work brings them some kind of development. They search endlessly. There are companies that simply need you to show up for work. Too many conflicts arise. Do you need to defend your interests against the other side, or not? Or does it make no difference? Work has to be interesting, pleasurable, joyful. It has to be harmonious, with a great boss and colleagues you like. I have to like the office, or I have to work remotely. There are a great many additional requirements. What difference does the kind of work make? Imagine that your aim in taking a job is exclusively to earn money. That sounds strange, because everyone will say, “But we take jobs to earn money.” Yet when you go on to question thousands of people, they all begin setting all sorts of additional expectations and tasks, without concentrating on the main task.

Why did I start making a video on this subject? There is someone close to me whom I have been telling for several years now, over a fairly long period, “Concentrate on the fact that you need a job only to earn money.” Each time, it brings up very particular emotions and a degree of disagreement in this person. They cannot focus on it and move through it because, again, so many other aspects matter to them emotionally. For example, how should you behave and communicate with your manager? Or with your direct reports? Or how do customers relate to the company’s product? Many people begin talking about the company’s mission, goals, values, and so on. They go into the details. What is the problem? When I say to focus on earning money, I am certainly not saying that you can do absolutely anything as long as it pays. The question is what actually comes first for you. That lets you, first of all, maximize the effectiveness of the time and other resources you invest and the tasks you complete in order to earn money.

Second, it helps you avoid losing focus because of inner psychological wounds, ancestral trauma, deep spiritual or karmic issues, and all sorts of other things. It keeps you from fixating on them and continually getting drawn into them. In most cases, someone works in marketing, as a sales manager, a marketing director, or a CEO. It is incredibly important to focus fundamentally and continually on the fact that your most important task is to earn money. Why? When they want to make money, many people set themselves a goal like this: “I want to earn money, but I also want work to be fun, or to put me in a good mood, or to enjoy it so much that I will not need a rest from it.” People want interesting work, and that interest creates a fundamental problem. When you need to make a decision at work, you automatically, subconsciously keep starting from the question, “Is this interesting or not? Does it feel right or wrong in terms of my inner state?” You do not focus on the simple point from the very beginning.

Your manager comes and asks you to do a project. Immediately, you look at it this way: “If I do this project, it will increase my income.” Or, “Doing this project will help me earn money overall.” Or, “If I do this project, my manager will be pleased, and as a result I will keep earning money.” Once you work through that, you automatically release yourself from the other things going around inside you, such as: “What if I disagree with my manager and state my position? They will not like it. And I do not really want to do this task. I think they just made it up.” You go off into all kinds of thinking instead of simply doing the task. This situation in which a person pursues interesting projects or interesting jobs is important to understand. The person begins engaging in what we might call self-development—though “development” is a very relative term here. Very relative. It is personal gain; it is ego. They focus exclusively on their personality rather than the fundamental goal for which they came to work: earning money, on the one hand. On the other, if someone can move easily through their mental and physical, emotional, inherited, and karmic barriers and causes, they have an opportunity to truly help the company.

When I speak this way, many people initially feel that this decision is very selfish. I have even recommended to some people that they start working four hours a day. They say, “What do you mean, four hours? Our workday is eight hours.” Start working as little as possible, concentrating on whether you can earn money. If you are a reasonable person who lives by the real truth of life and real values, you know you do not want to deceive anyone: your managers, your colleagues, yourself, or the world. You live according to the laws of the universe, want to benefit other people, and treat them humanely. When you remove the various problems rooted in your personality and focus on that single motive of earning money, it lets you truly examine whether the tasks you are going to do help the company or not. Are those tasks really needed by other people? You do not get drawn into pointless arguments and conflicts. Far too many conflicts arise.

I have many different projects and tasks, and I am involved in a great many businesses and a huge range of tasks with different people. When communicating and interacting with people, whatever situation arises—even the most difficult one—I always begin by returning to the main goal I have set myself. It might be earning money here and now. It might be selling a company at some point in the future. The goal can vary, but I always look at it. In paid employment, if a person is fundamentally and clearly focused on earning money, they begin looking more broadly: “How can I really earn money in this company? How can I really get a result here?” Let us be honest: if you are manipulative, want to get money for nothing, and are willing to deceive others, this approach helps a great deal too. Because when you are focused exclusively on that one area, you will never get into an argument with anyone. It is surprising, but you will not have a single quarrel. It is very easy to build a strategy for your behavior around one goal instead of forty, especially goals that operate automatically inside you without your recognizing them.

How does your physical body respond to that? How does your emotional state respond? How does your mood respond? What happens to the thoughts that arise within you when you focus on earning money? In most cases, earning money is still connected with the result you deliver. There are jobs where you really need to follow a particular arrangement. Some companies, for example, simply need you to come to work, and merely attending the office produces the financial result. But I want to tell you honestly: even if you arrive at that—

Even if you arrive at that understanding, here is what I suggest if you want to develop—truly develop—and scale yourself. Not grow by five, ten, or fifteen percent, but many times over, tens or hundreds of times, as a person, a personality, a spiritual being, a professional, a businessperson, a father, a husband, a mother, a brother, a sister, a child, a friend, or a partner. Develop the way of thinking that lets you be involved in many businesses or professions, or just one profession or one business, wherever you want to be. Focus on one very clear goal and continually make every decision through that goal. Try doing it for at least a week. If you do it for a month in absolutely every situation—again, if you want to develop—you will at some point realize that, imagine this, earning money requires you only to come to the office. You will understand and see that, without deceiving anyone or anything. You will be clearly conscious of it. At that point, a real understanding emerges of how to discuss the incentive system or bonuses with your manager.

Do you need to defend your interests against the other side, or not? Or does it make no difference? I have seen so many people argue, fight, quarrel, and defend their interests endlessly. Then they were offered another job and left. They did not even remember the old job. Why did they quarrel and fight? Why did they harm themselves, their surroundings, and the home they brought it all into, through the discussions and comparisons they continued after work? Why did they harm the workplace itself with their arguments and conflicts? I have been managing companies and different projects for more than fifteen years—actually, eighteen or nineteen now. Of course, I have observed an incredible number of people spending perhaps seventy percent of their communication and interaction on this. People are endlessly caught up in worries and discussions about things that, for them personally, have no significance. Again, this is very easy to understand. Think back to a job you had five years ago, one you left five years ago and no longer hear about. In most cases, you will not remember the details of the tasks you did or the conflicts that occurred.

Imagine your manager is speaking, presenting a new idea or some news. A strange feeling arises: you disagree with something. It may not concern you at all or have anything to do with you. You simply spend your energy on it. It is like watching political news and investing time in discussions, arguments, conflicts, and worries without really having any connection to it. You always need to establish why: why am I watching political news? Why am I reading professional literature? Why did I send my child to preschool? Why did I read this novel tonight? Why am I going to a particular meeting tomorrow? Why am I doing tasks at work? At work, it is incredibly important to carry out tasks focused on one goal. Again, this lets you work through the difficulties created by your various inner states and truly help, first, yourself and, second, the company. Often, people fixate on needing interesting conversations, a company with values, and a particular kind of relationship within the company. It matters what their manager is like. Their own interests and mood matter to them. For the most part, a person is focused exclusively on themselves.

Surprising as it may sound, for someone who lives by real values and truth, from freedom and love for another person, focusing on money this way makes it much easier to move through many barriers and, most importantly, interact with different people in life. Once you understand that much of the work you do does not affect what you earn—again, provided you are not paid simply for showing up for a set amount of time—nothing stops you from contributing something new to your own development and that of the people around you. You can truly develop professionally, instead of setting yourself an imagined requirement that work must bring you not only money but professional or personal development. Nine out of ten people in this situation are under the illusion that their work brings them some kind of development. They search endlessly. Of the people looking for interesting work, work that brings them a good mood or joy, nine out of ten search for years. It is surprising, but if you come to work only to earn money and simply understand consciously how to do that, at the very least an entire layer of negative feelings about unfulfilled expectations disappears.

You no longer have the question of whether your work is interesting. What difference does it make? Nor whether you are developing. What difference does it make? What matters is that some work does not bring development. If you are focused only on money, the fact that the job does not help you develop is not a problem. But if you are focused on both money and development, and the job does not bring development, you have a problem and a great deal of worry about it. This path is not a fixed course for the rest of your life or for decades of professional development. I talk a great deal about how your professional development will continue for decades ahead. There are many videos on my channel about this, and I discuss it extensively in my private V100 program. Tell me in the comments who is in my V100 program, who has watched other videos, and who has watched videos on this subject. What realizations and thoughts are coming to you about it? Remember to support the channel; it is very important and helpful. I have been making many different videos for a long time, and every comment and like helps the channel grow.

I keep talking about the decades of professional activity you still have ahead of you. Decades. Yet people do not even think about their professional life. Right now, they are thinking: “Do I like this colleague who brought in an idea, or do I think they stole it from me? Is my manager saying something worthwhile, or do I simply need their praise, and that is why I disagree? Someone swore at work, and it disgusts me and brings up all kinds of negative emotions, so I will not work.” Is that really a sound approach when you have signed an employment contract that says nothing about your emotional state? Notice that 99.9 percent of employment contracts make no mention of your mood, your interest, or your emotional state. They clearly specify goals, tasks, functions, legal details, compliance with the law, and your salary, but not your emotional state. That is a major problem. If that is an important criterion for you, you need to put it in the documents—at least in the documents. Or that interest needs to be protected by law.

I realized something interesting in the States. I live in California, in the United States, and here you can swear at a police officer. I have not done it and will not, but it is possible. In most states, the officer will not do anything to you. They cannot punish you for it. If your actions do not create a threat to other people’s lives or cause other incidents, court precedents make it very clear that police officers must be composed—much more composed—

Than ordinary citizens. They have to respond calmly to statements, including profanity. As someone born in Minsk who lived in Belarus for a considerable time and then spent twelve years in Moscow, I find that astonishing. Imagine: forty years—twenty-seven years in Minsk and twelve in Moscow, almost forty years. It is astonishing for me to hear. How can that be possible? That is the whole point: there is a law stating what you can and cannot do. There are written rules stating what you can and cannot do. These matters need to be clearly discussed and spelled out in your documents with employers, rather than simply being rhetoric from a CEO, company owners, the corporate brand, HR, or marketing, telling you that the company stands for values. Do you know how many companies around the world say that? But look at how they actually interact with people, especially companies employing hundreds of thousands: famous brands that everyone loves to cite for their wonderful corporate culture, beautiful offices and buildings, greenery, breakfasts, lunches and dinners, gyms, psychological support, and so much else.

Those companies treat most of their employees very much like slaves, I would say. Of course, they operate within the laws of the countries where they are located. They communicate values in particular settings, but when the situation changes, those people forget the values very quickly. The question is always what your true inner core is. There is a reason I told you that setting yourself the goal of earning money alone does not release you from responsibility for your actual actions, the real values and guiding principles you follow in life, or the laws of the universe by which you live. Watch the video on the laws of the universe.