Chapter 2: Rich Man, Poor Man

The one was a software developer. No, I don’t think I’ll call him a software developer because this guy was a bit of a hack. I’m a software engineer and I know, and not to insult him, but I know that he was a hack in a sense, that he came up with an idea and he learned enough code to develop that idea and that’s about all he knew about software development.

Now this guy went on to sell that product he made and he became a multimillionaire. He started a business around it, he sold it, he became a multimillionaire, sold the business and became even wealthier.

On the other hand, I was speaking to a group of young people one time in in a conference, and I asked people to introduce themselves, to tell me what their professions were. The one young man stood up and introduced himself, saying, “I’m a photographer who is unemployed.”

Immediately I was taken aback by that. How could a person have such a valuable skill and still be unemployed? 

So I asked him, “why are you unemployed?”

He said, “well no one will give me a job.”

I asked him to show me some of his work. He pulled out his camera. Very smart camera, very smart equipment all around.

He showed me some of his work. And this guy was really good. He had studied at university photography, he had lots of practice, he had done lots of work

on his own. 

But here he was, unemployed. 

Do you see what I’m getting at here? One one hand, we have the amateur who became a millionaire through his skills; and on the other, we have the professional who is really good at what he does, but cannot get anywhere. 

What is wrong here? What is wrong with this picture? 

I mean the amateur didn’t even go to university, he didn’t study at any college. He just self-taught himself to code; while the professional with a degree in photography with all that experience, with all that equipment, couldn’t make a go of his life.

His lightbulb would not light up.

Now this goes back to what I mentioned in the previous section. You see, the amateur didn’t

just have those technical skills. He had a very limited set of technical skills. But behind that he had what I call the “hidden skills”.

He had those hidden skills that came to the fore and pushed up the technical skills and made a go of it, made a success of it, and that’s what enabled him to start that successful business.

The professional photographer, on the other hand, thinks just like millions of people around

the world, just like the man in the in the story about the light bulb.

He thinks that his light bulb is going to ignite magically on its own.

He thinks that his technical skills is what is going to get him that job. No, it’s the

hidden skills that are going to get him that job and he’s the kind of person who needs to work on those skills. He needs to work to develop those hidden skills before he can go and make a success of his career. 

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