People will pay you wildly differing amounts for the same work. People will lie to you about what you have to do to get paid more. They may claim you are not g

People will pay you wildly differing amounts for the same work. People will lie to you about what you have to do to get paid more. They may claim you are not good enough to try to con both you as an individual and labor as a group into working for less. They can't hide from the invisible hand. Look out for phrases like "next year", "next quarter", "maybe", "if", or "try". These are synonyms for no and never. Those people are wasting your time, and no they aren't entitled to your time. Whatever you think someone is capable of paying it's usually more, but that is not the same as them being willing to pay. You need to learn the levers. You may need to maneuver into position years in advance. What you are doing now leads to what happens next which leads to what happens after. You need to create as much of your own luck as you can. Your time is valuable and irreplaceable so put in the effort to make sure you are using it as best you can. There is a middle ground being making a lot of money and doing unpleasant work and that middle ground is a lot of money and the more money you make the better the work tends to be with one exception being the startup greenfield project experience. One way to make a lot of money is as an owner/founder of something. Risk adjusted it's not all it's cracked up to be IMO. It's also the most work to start. It's a lifestyle choice as much as anything.