The Most Successful Man I Ever Met Made Minimum Wage
Shortly after getting my first job at 18, I left home. I was only making £495 a month on a modern apprenticeship scheme, £226 of which paid the rent on a room in a shared house which just about fit a single bed, a chest of drawers, and a wardrobe.
Two of the guys living downstairs were drug dealers, one recently out of prison and there were multiple incidents between the girl who lived upstairs and her father who would come to the house screaming in the street.
Yeah, it was a strange time in my life.
A year later, I got offered a job earning about three times this amount, and unsurprisingly I was much better off! I moved out of the shared house and got my own home with its own garden, a nice kitchen, and a living room that didn’t house half-drank bottles of budget brand cider and other slightly more illegal substances.
In the space of a year, I went from earning very little and living in some less than desirable circumstances to earning (relatively!) a lot more and getting myself in a safer living situation. And yet somehow I was still unhappy. I realized that my job, though it paid a decent wage, was uninteresting to me.
Around the same time, there were a string of promotions within my team at work. I was newly in the role, so…
