I go to work every day with two missions. Two! No. 1: how can I make my bosses more money? And No. 2: how can... — Stephen A. Smith

I go to work every day with two missions. Two! No. 1: how can I make my bosses more money? And No. 2: how can I get some of it?

Author: Stephen A. Smith

Insight: Most of us have been taught to feel guilty about wanting money from our work. There's this lingering cultural message that you should love your job so much that compensation barely matters, that asking for more is somehow greedy or ungrateful. Stephen A. Smith cuts through that nonsense with brutal honesty: making your employer money and getting paid well aren't opposing forces. They're connected. When you genuinely help your company succeed, you've earned the right to ask for your share of that success. The cleverness here is that he's not suggesting these goals are in conflict. He's saying they're the same mission viewed from different angles. If you show up thinking only about your paycheck, you'll probably coast. If you think only about serving the company, you might get exploited. But when you hold both ideas at once—I will make this place valuable AND I deserve to benefit from that value—you approach work differently. You negotiate better, you advocate for yourself, and paradoxically, you often perform better because you're not caught in that exhausting mental trap of false nobility. This matters more now when job loyalty has evaporated. Your employer will replace you if the economics work for them. So the question isn't whether your self-interest is legitimate. It's whether you're willing to be honest about it.