Hello everyone, I am ICSteve. Today’s topic of discussion is what we did right on the path to promotion and salary increase. Today’s theme is about “gains”: when you go to work, are assigned a task, or participate in a project, one dimension of self-assessment is how much benefit you can gain, and this benefit is not just monetary. I divide gains into three aspects: one is hard gains, another is soft gains, and the third is time gains, and these three aspects are interchangeable.
Now let me share my understanding and experience.
Three Types of Gains
First, hard gains, which I refer to as tangible and easily monetized forms such as cash, stocks, or other assets like equity that can be realized.
Soft gains include a broader range, such as your social circle, the industry knowledge you gain, work experience, and so on.
Time gains are a broader generalization. Aside from the two aspects I mentioned above, one being hard gains and the other being soft gains, it includes anything else that requires extra time. For example, the time you spend commuting to and from work, which of course you can use to read books, listen to podcasts, etc. And then there are your other hobbies, such as skiing, racing, skydiving, horseback riding, hiking, and so on.
These three aspects are easily interchangeable; you can spend money to buy time, and soft skills can also be monetized. You can spend money to hire a housekeeper, save yourself the time of doing household chores, and use this time to engage in your hobbies. Soft gains, such as personal experience, personal history, and your understanding of the industry, as well as the continuous deepening of your personal industry literacy, will gradually increase your hard gains year by year.
Exercise the Theory
Okay, now let me do an exercise and expand on the specific manifestations of these three gains. First, take out a piece of blank paper or open a blank note document, with hard gains, soft gains, and hard gains horizontally, and your current job status and position vertically. You can add a line for your expectations or future growth, the gains you haven’t achieved in your current position but hope to achieve.
Hard gains are more tangible things that you can find written proof of, on your offer or on the results of your annual review. If you have other side businesses, that is the gain from your side business, not within the scope of your current job. Try to limit the range of items vertically to a particular job or activity. You can have an additional line called side business.
Simply put, hard gains include wage cash, then our stock bonuses, and other subsidies. Soft gains are many, like there’s a book that introduces soft skills, so what you care about, such as the compliance of the industry, some large companies will have more compliance, while small companies may not have such a regular compliance process. Sometimes small companies achieve the same results but may not do it as standardly, but big companies may do it more standardly. Large companies are more conservative about the industry’s foresight, while startup companies are a process of trial and error.
Then many small or startup companies may have more advanced things, but large companies are conservative, and the products made by large companies are also prepared for the next two or three years, or three or four years, it’s impossible to say that I make a product and release it this year, there is some groundwork for the future.
Soft skills also include speaking, social circles, etc., and possibly you want to touch on things up and down your job. Small companies may not be able to allow you to speak in front of 200 people, but large companies have this platform.
In small companies, you may do a lot of work, but after spreading it out, each detail has limited resources, in large companies, there are related departments where you can access different resources and find different people to understand deeper things. All these can be considered as some things under soft gains. Of course, what I’m saying here is not absolute, just that some things are easier to achieve in large companies.
In our era of highly developed technology, individual value is increasingly valued and respected. Then realizing personal value, work is one aspect, but more is to see how much time you can dispose of. So I treat time gains as one aspect.
When you have absolute wealth, time will be spent more on activities that reflect personal value, and things of personal interest. Now the form of society, each of us, has the ability, has the conditions to realize some personal values. The transformation of the three gains I talked about, means you can spend more time (gains) to acquire some personal skills, and personal value realization (soft gains), and then you can spend money (hard gains) to complete things you don’t want to spend time on.
For example, cleaning the house, some people like to make it a way of leisure healing, a relaxing labor. But if you think about hiring a house cleaning service, using hard gains to buy back your own time, and often professional tasks are best left to professionals. This way, you can do other things or simply get more rest.
If you’ve already listed the current work and the gains you expect, we can set a gain target. We can use this method to compare the benefits of several projects to see which one is most reasonable and acceptable to you, not necessarily maximizing gains, because some gains are not so simple to quantify.
Another example is the discussion of whether it’s better to go to a large company or a small company. Whichever decision you make, there are pros and cons. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each? How do you compare which one is more suitable for you? There is no right or wrong decision, only what is suitable. We can use the gains assessment table to compare this topic. Whether it’s a large company or a small company, at different career stages, such as just after graduation or having reached a certain level of management, each gain indicator is certainly different.
You might care more about soft gains early after graduation, hoping to improve your work experience, which will grow relatively quickly. Time gains, on the other hand, may not necessarily be the top priority. If you reach a certain age, there are more family matters, you also have some extra socializing and have children, and your soft skills may also have reached a certain stage.
So, each decision at each stage can be compared with a gains assessment. I think this method has played a significant role in my decision-making at various stages.
I can be very clear again about the logic behind my decision at the time, and the trade-offs recorded, to look at from time to time, or to correct a bit, to guide the next comparison.
Summary
To summarize, today I introduced a gains model that I often use to support some of my decisions, which mainly includes hard gains, soft gains, and time gains. Each gain can be positive or negative, and they can be converted to one another. Understanding each gain and its weight varies from person to person. Everyone’s heart weighs each gain and every specific project differently. Only by spreading them all out on the table, and then selecting the ones you care about the most, the ones that are most suitable for you, and then making your own decisions based on this, and recording the thought process in between, comparing, converting, and then obtaining your final decision basis, I hope this sharing will be helpful to everyone, thank you.
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