If your skills are not valued, don’t demand higher wages. Learn more valuable skills. — Alex Hormozi

If your skills are not valued, don’t demand higher wages. Learn more valuable skills.

Author: Alex Hormozi

Insight: There's a hard truth lurking in this advice that most people skip over: the job market doesn't care what you think you deserve. It cares what you can actually do that others need. When you hit a wage ceiling, your instinct is often to fight—to argue you've earned it, to point out your years of loyalty or effort. But that assumes the person paying you cares about either of those things. They don't, really. They care about what problems you solve. The non-obvious part is that this isn't actually cynical. It's liberating. Instead of getting stuck in resentment about being undervalued, you get to ask a better question: what would make me genuinely valuable? Not valuable to this specific employer who happens to underpay, but valuable in the marketplace. Sometimes that means learning new technical skills. Sometimes it means getting better at communication, or understanding business fundamentals, or knowing how to work with people nobody else can manage. The skill doesn't matter as much as the real demand for it. This reframes something we feel but rarely say out loud: your compensation reflects a negotiation between what you offer and what's available. If you feel stuck, you have one real lever. Not demanding respect you think you've earned, but becoming someone whose skills are genuinely hard to replace.