Chapter 4
The future of work

Change isn't just happening fast, it's skyrocketing. While we're constantly told that the pace of change is accelerating, it's hard for our brains to comprehend exponential change. The human mind is local and linear. Even when we are told a change is exponential, we are likely to underestimate its impact. Here's my favourite example: Imagine taking 32 linear steps forward. If you did this, you'd advance around 32 metres. If you took the same number of steps but doubled the length of each step, you'd circumnavigate the Earth 54 times (travelling 2.2 million kilometres).

The reason this is important is that most of the technologies we work with today are advancing exponentially. They double in power and/or efficiency every 18 to 24 months, and this influences the types of tools we use and the world we live in. In grade school maths, exponentials are often introduced as a fun mathematical curiosity. We trot out an example like the one above to show how quickly things expand, to marvel at it, and then we move past it. But it's actually among the most important mathematical principles of our time, because it impacts the technology we connect with and use every day, and how we earn our money. Rather than going through all the different technologies that follow this law of accelerating returns — smartphones, drones, driverless cars, network speed and data storage, to name a few — let me give you this instead: Imagine that every single thing that relies on digital technology will be twice as efficient and powerful in 18 months' time.

Think of the current voice-activated digital assistants such as Siri, Cortana, Alexa and Google Voice Search. Siri is now five years old and is, well, about as intelligent as a 10-year-old. But in five years from now Siri won't be a bit brighter — equivalent to, say, a 15-year-old (that's linear thinking). She'll be a genius who is smarter than every person in the world. She'll have a PhD in every subject, with the ability to understand everything humans know and more. This is the world we're living in, right now.

Your job is already gone

The future of work is not a job. It's arguable that the glory days of structured jobs are already behind us, and that in the future very few of us will have jobs as we know them today. In fact, your job is already gone — its time just hasn't elapsed yet. Humans have a funny way of inventing the future they imagine. We think of things, then subconsciously we find a way to make them happen. It's a bit like a form of collective sentience. If we think something will happen, we tend to move towards it. There are two main reasons why your job, and mine, are about to disappear: the first is artificial intelligence; the second is the move back to a world of independent workers — freelancers and entrepreneurs. So let's tackle the scariest of these first, AI.

Until now it has been mainly labourers and blue-collar workers who have been displaced by automation. But now, for the first time, white-collar workers and even management are facing displacement. Even those occupations with the highest qualifications and societal respect are not immune. Robots replacing surgeons — yep. Tricorders replacing doctors — done. Legal apps replacing lawyers — check. Just as we once delegated much of our physical heavy lifting to machines powered by fossil fuels, we will increasingly entrust our ‘smartness' to artificial intelligence. Jobs dominated by left-brain logic will be outsourced to AIs. If there is a cost advantage in using machinery, corporations and governments will take it.

It's easy to worry about the impact of AI on our economic futures. A recent report from the Committee for Economic Development of Australia⁸ estimates that 40 per cent of jobs that currently exist in Australia have a moderate to high likelihood of disappearing within the next 10 to 15 years due to technological advancements. These types of predictions are being replicated the world over, especially in developed nations whose labour forces tend to be service oriented. They are the research fear generator du jour, but they rarely mention why this is something we could choose to be positively excited about. Because maybe we can actually replace these obsolete jobs and do something better with our days. A 2016 World Economic Forum report on the future of jobs⁹ gives us a clue to this by forecasting that around 65 per cent of children starting primary school today will end up working in jobs that don't yet exist. As someone with children just entering primary school I couldn't be more delighted, because it means we might finally stop pushing kids prematurely down a narrow career path. It means we need to teach our kids the core skills of adaptability, flexibility and tackling people's and society's real problems, not simply training for jobs. But first we must face up to the reality that the world of work is going to change dramatically.

Yes, the robots will take your job, but there aren't that many bison hunters around anymore! All jobs are eventually displaced or changed by technology. Technology-driven unemployment has always been a fixture of the human experience. Look at the history of labour, which I like to sum up in just four words: spear, seed, spanner and silicon. At every stage of human evolution, new tools (automation, in a sense) have revolutionised the way we approach old tasks and introduced new tasks. Our challenge is to make the most of the tools we have. Hunters were judged on their success in bringing home food. Successful farmers made the best use of agricultural tools and methods to increase their yield. We will be judged by how well we work with the AIs. As they take over more and more of the tasks around us I'm certain there will be many jobs we won't miss at all. Fifty years from now some of these jobs will have come to be regarded as human rights violations. The dirty, the dangerous and the disrespected roles will be outsourced to ‘non-humans', and that will be good for humanity.

Technology has always been a net job creator. People worried what we'd do when we all left the farm, but we found an alternative, and it improved our living standards dramatically. The truth is, the media's main source of fuel is fear, and promoting the positive side of change doesn't generate the same level of interest that scare-mongering does. In evolutionary terms too, we are programmed to pay more attention to danger than to joy. Our current operating system — the Human OS — is more than 200 000 years old. It had to make sense of a complex and dangerous world, so it developed short cuts or biases for certain situations. The most common bias is towards prioritising potentially negative situations over positive ones. This kept us alive in the early days, just as today it keeps pessimistic news and clickbait alive. We can't help but pay attention, ‘just in case'.

Here, as a mind jam to counter the bad news, are some recently created jobs that no one is writing economic reports on:

UX Designer, App Developer, Drone Operator, Crowdfunding Advisor, Smartphone Game Developer, Blogger, Podcaster, Social Media Specialist, Wikipedia Moderator, Content Curator, Community Manager, Uber Driver, Airbnb Host, Web Videographer, YouTube Content Creator, eBook Publisher, Bitcoin Trader, Bitcoin Miner, Blockchain Specialist, E-Commerce Consultant, SEO Specialist, Genetics Counsellor, Sustainability Advisor, Citizen Journalist, MOOCs Tutor, Big Data Analyst, Cloud Services Specialist, Robot Ethicist, Privacy Consultant, IoT Privacy Specialist, Snapchat Marketing Agency, Virtual Reality Retailer.

This list is just a small sample set from my perspective, and there are a hundred variants to each of these. I'm sure your industry experience or worldview means you could expand the list vastly. There are just under 10 million app developers in the world today, with more than 800 000 more starting up every year. A job that didn't exist before the smartphone.

The crazy thing about these ‘new jobs' is they are all learnable, mostly for free. All you need is (1) the ability to read and (2) an internet connection. While some of them sound complex, I've specifically chosen activities that don't require exceptional mathematical ability or scientific knowledge, just the will to learn and put in the effort. And no, the government or your boss won't save you or pay you to learn any of them. No one can do your push-ups for you, but if you make the effort, the rewards are there. The new jobs, and more importantly the business opportunities around them, are there for the taking, and they'll often pay more than your old job did. One of my favourite facts is that UX designers earn as much as and sometimes more than software engineers.

A UX (User Experience) designer, as you'd expect, designs the end-to-end experience the user will have with a product or service. This often involves visual design for screen-based interactions. What's interesting is how in demand this type of work is and how easy (by which I mean ‘human') the learning process is. Most people, with a moderate amount of concentrated effort, can learn. But the cool thing is, the non-technical nature of this job that mostly lives within the tech industry means the barriers to entry are relatively low. The best UX designers I've met haven't been the best techs, but rather the most empathic. The technical side of the work can be learned in a reasonably short time, and the demand for candidates for this often high-paying gig is only going to increase, especially when companies work out the competitive advantage it offers.

The choice is really between wishing the world was like yesterday or taking advantage of the opportunities today. Exactly zero is the number of future-proof jobs out there. From bison hunter to binary coder, they all eventually succumb to human progress. Structural unemployment is a permanent fixture in the human experience, and our best bet is to embrace the flux it creates.

THE MOST VALUABLE THING WE CAN DO, THEN, IS HAVE A MALLEABLE MINDSET — TO PARTICIPATE IN THE REINVENTION OF OURSELVES, AS MUCH AS THE WORLD AROUND US, TO REMEMBER THAT WE ARE THE CHANGE WE SEE.

Yes, the pace of change is scary, but it's never been more possible to upskill, reskill or new-skill. So next time you read a report on the impending doom of your industry, job or financial future, just remember that it is your decision how it will affect you.

An independent future

Imagine for a second a company in the future with zero employees. You might think this isn't possible, and I agree. There will always be non-routine, disparately linked tasks that humans can do, should do and will want to do given that corporations are invented by human beings. But we also know that a goal of most companies is to reduce their employee costs. So here's what we will see much sooner than we might imagine: a company with many people working for it, but none of them as official company employees.

This pattern is already clearly being established. We are quickly moving from a world of access instead of ownership. Many call it the sharing economy, but more accurately it is the rental economy. Renting is cheaper than owning. Historically, the level of friction associated with renting has been too high on many things, including workers, but technology has a way of removing friction, of liquefying assets and increasing their visibility and availability. People are choosing to access things instead of owning them. They've realised that most things they own are used for only a tiny fraction of the time. Excluding a house in which to store our belongings and a fridge, our most used asset in life is our bed, and at best it enjoys a 50 per cent utilisation ratio. The second most expensive thing we buy, a car, has a utilisation ratio as low as 10 per cent. Access rather than ownership has been a broadly established principle for houses, cars, music, books — you name it. If it is cheaper to access something when we need it, with all the benefits of ownership, then the shift to that structure is inevitable. Now corporations access people on demand. Employees are entering the rental space. In the future we'll be projecteers working on a number of projects for ourselves and for other companies, renting our core competency to the market as and when it is needed.

In this freelance world, employers will be able to pay people more because of the project orientation. They are interested in the value of the outcome of the project, and can pay based on that without taking into account the associated costs of ‘owning' employees. They won't pay you during your downtime, and you won't waste your time because you'll be paid only on what you deliver. They don't have to invest in training (that's your job, but more on that in Part III, ‘Reinvention'), and they don't have to pay out superannuation or 401k, medical insurance, overtime, annual leave, public holidays or redundancy, and you'll still be better off for it. How? Because you'll earn twice the rate you do now in half the time. Enough to cover all of these costs independently. There'll be startups emerging that take over these administrative tasks for us, providing group discounts at the corporate rate for a world of independent workers. The new format invents even more opportunities for entrepreneurs and freelancers alike doing tasks that corporations once did. In this world we can all focus on what we're actually here to do and outsource the rest.

It's comforting to remember that professionals who have historically rented themselves out directly to customers have always earned more than the majority of employees. Doctors, physiotherapists, accountants, dentists, plumbers and the like have always had the advantage of independence on their side. But now, as the friction is removed, all kinds of work can be done for corporations without working for them. And here's some extra good news for those renting their time to a large number of customers: if you are snubbed by one, no big deal, you're still in business — which significantly reduces life risk.

There is a platform orientation occurring in business life, a layer of information being built on the concrete and steel of our physical world — a meta-structure, if you like. Increasingly, we'll be dancing on information stages provided by others. Let's look at some examples of how this is already happening today:

• Smartphone app stores provide a platform for app developers and entrepreneurs of every type to dance on.
• Uber and Lyft provide a business-generating tool for drivers (at least until they're replaced by driverless vehicles).
• WordPress provides a platform for citizen journalists and 24 per cent of all sites on the World Wide Web.
• Spotify provides a platform for musicians, and YouTube for anyone wanting to publish content in video format.
• PayPal, Square and Stripe provide world-class payment platforms for anyone needing to transfer money over the web.
• The blockchain database provides a platform for smart contracts without centralised authority.
• Co-working spaces provide space for mobile freelancers to work from anywhere in the world.
• Freelancing websites such as 99designs, upwork.com and freelancer.com provide marketplaces for people to find the skills they need.

This is a tiny sample, and just the start, but we can look overseas to developing markets to see how this will play out. Markets without a legacy infrastructure tend to embrace the shifts in work structure more quickly because they don't have a powerful incumbent system to circumvent. Many, for example, go straight to mobile and wireless and may never have owned a PC or plugged into the internet. They too are embracing global freelance opportunities to arbitrage the higher wage scale in developed markets. We'll have no choice but to follow their lead if we don't want to be disrupted by developing countries.

These platforms for freelancers and entrepreneurs are made possible by a few key technological factors. The cost of tools is rapidly falling. Office equipment, for example, used to be incredibly expensive: photocopiers, laser printers, telecommunications, teleconferencing all came at great cost. Now they are either cheap or, in the smartphone wifi era, simply redundant. You can connect wherever you go. Then there is the reduced friction of finding people, or projecteers, to do the work required. Anyone we need is just a few clicks away, their skills, reputation and network all open sourced on the web.

Another force that is contributing to the trend towards independent work is the frequency with which we move around today. When I first entered the workforce, it looked bad if you didn't stay with a company for at least five years. Now they wonder what's wrong with you if you're still in the same place for two years. Today career fluidity and mobility are respected.

FREELANCING IS THE PERFECT STEPPING STONE TO A WORLD WHERE INDEPENDENCE IS THE NEW NORMAL.

It's a radical shift from the halcyon era of lifetime employment after World War II.

In developed markets, the new world order of technology firms, including but not limited to Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook, are very different from the old order as represented by the likes of Exxon, Ford, General Motors and General Electric. The new firms have a far lower number of employees per dollar of revenue. In mid 2016 Facebook had 14 495 employees¹⁰ and a projected annual income of US$8.2 billion, or US$565 000 per employee. Let's compare this to the Ford Motor Company. Ford currently have 199 000 employees and an income of US$7.7 billion, equating to just US$39 000 per employee. The pattern is clear to see, and Facebook's numbers are probably understated given they are overinvesting in growth markets. In the past the company provided the income source for the community; now the company provides opportunities for the community to create income from it.

This shift isn't coming sometime in the future; it's already well underway, and will continue to strengthen because the incentives for all parties point clearly to it. We are going back to the way things were, but this time we'll be digital craftspeople, working in and around the corporations, which didn't exist before the industrial era. Our personal brands, market awareness and ability to assess the change in skill requirements will be key to our success. We'll need to be able to spot the changes and then adapt to them. I firmly believe there will never be a world without work, because humans invent things to do, but during this time of technological upheaval we will have to change our mindset on where value will be created.

The labour escalator

A simple economic fact is that if a person has $100 in their wallet, it will always be allocated. In 1996 $10 of that $100 might have gone into getting a film developed. Now it goes elsewhere, maybe towards the monthly fee of a smartphone. The allocations change, and so does the work around those expenditure allocations, but the money will always be spent, saved or invested. If you want to be future proof, it's important to pay close attention to what your friends are spending their time and money on. Economic shifts always happen on the street before they hit Wall Street. Spending patterns and how people reallocate their available funds tells us so much, it's worth paying attention to; it's always where tomorrow's opportunities lie.

We need to imagine that human labour is a bit like an escalator. Every new job, industry or type of work that arrives steps onto the labour escalator for a period of time. The job or type of work remains on the escalator until we find a more efficient way of getting that task done, then the escalator just stops. Some of these tasks have been on the escalator for a very long time — like cooking and medical advice. Some escalators don't take people forward for long at all — like telephone switchboard operator, toll booth collector, lift operator or typist. Some of these gigs had less than 50 years of escalator time.

Imagine all these escalators are lined up next to one another, but they are all moving at different speeds. Some look like they may stop pretty soon. Some you can ride all the way to the end of your career, an option that used to be well respected. Some escalators get smaller as time goes by, so fewer people can fit on them. These are the ones you want to jump off as soon as you can. Our task is to seek out and jump onto other escalators with better prospects. To do this we can't treat it simply as a ride and just stand there; we need to work while we are on it, walk forward, look around us, get ready to make the leap across to another one. In the long run, we have to try to take ownership of an escalator, not just take a ride on it. But most of all, we shouldn't whinge when the escalator stops; we should always be able to tell when it is coming to a stop, and it's our job to prepare for it and do something about it. We must be self-reliant.

The thing about these escalators is that they are our own invention. We invent the tasks that need to be done. And most things humans do today are quite unnecessary for sustaining human life in a pure physical sense. We should never underestimate human creative invention. It's not going to be as straightforward as a factory was. It's going to be an uncomfortable, bumpy transition. Many people will be displaced, emotionally devastated, and experience deep economic hardship. That's why I am writing this. Because I know that with the right knowledge, we can ride out these bumps and find a new ride when we need to.

Which brings us back to the number one problem with school. It doesn't prepare us for life. It teaches us how to hitch a ride on a certain escalator, but it never prepares us to jump from one to another.

The hierarchy of human needs revisited

Maslow's hierarchy of needs (see figure 4.1) is frequently referred to in management texts that seek to understand human motivation. It also offers a useful template to shed light on the technological and social evolution of the human collective. Let's revisit the hierarchy.

Maslow contended that we must meet our most basic needs before we can move up the hierarchy to address other needs. Unless our physical needs are met, we cannot hope to satisfy higher-level needs. If we look at the hierarchy from a structural and economic point of view, we can see that the jobs people do generally follow an upward trajectory. Once our physical and safety needs are met, we focus increasingly on inventing work that is more emotionally satisfying. The easiest tasks to automate are those occupying the lower levels of the hierarchy. During the industrial era, we substituted the efforts of our own muscles and of our draft animals with machines powered by fossil fuels, which is why we still measure engines by ‘horsepower'.

Senior school students were never judged on how well they could lift heavy things. The industrial age was about matching the new muscle of machines with left-brain logic. Which is why our schooling valued the classic logical subjects so highly.

Industrial theory was about using logic and machine technology to solve human problems lower down the hierarchy of our societal needs. Today we are applying the calculus of left-brain logic to the microchip. Silicon is now superseding our lower-order thinking. We don't have to memorise anything these days, and I personally think we are better off saving our mental RAM for more creative effort. When I say creative, don't think art; when I say art, don't think painting. Creativity is our ability to solve problems in new and interesting ways. Creativity is about improving outcomes by applying new methods, linking seemingly disparate elements through our personal and unique life experiences. If you are creative in any area, then in my book you're an artist. Artists invent new ideas and methods, and see things from new angles. They create new perspectives that allow us to reinvent things and achieve better outcomes. It's hard to create new value, and be seen as irreplaceable, if we merely implement and follow instructions. If we only follow rules that someone else has established, we should remember that those rules can readily be passed onto anyone they choose to replace us with, or they might as easily choose to put a machine where we once were. The more routine the task, the higher the risk. If it is merely functional, the cost-effectiveness argument will always win. But the future is still bright for less routine work.

It's time to become the artistic and creative person you were born as. It's time to find the creative spirit buried deep inside you, the one that was systematically suppressed over 12 years of schooling. Not only does the world need it, but it is quickly becoming an economic imperative. In a world where machines will blow our minds with their capabilities, the original ideas that will lift you up through the hierarchy of needs will also raise your potential economic value. The areas we were once told could never offer a living will be where the most profitable livings will take place. If there is one of you, you can bet there are thousands more who will appreciate your creative self in their ecosystem.

Many of us have postponed social, esteem and self-actualisation needs in order to meet our physical and safety needs, which are the bedrock of a civilised society. In the near future, however, the most valuable work we do will be work we want done by a human, even if a machine or robot could do it. Music, sport and entertainment provide many clues to our future. The fact that a human is creating it will be why we value it. We can listen to a recorded version of a song for free, but to see the artist perform the song live in concert offers a different kind of value; it's something that can't be substituted, and we'll pay a premium for the experience. Turning music from a noun into a verb changes the value for the listener dramatically. The human artistic hand and mind will command a premium in a world of physical abundance.

Ignore your weaknesses

No one is good at everything, but I believe that everyone can be exceptional, even a genius, at something. Here's a piece of advice we've been given our entire lives that is worth ignoring: ‘These are your development opportunities. You need to work on these weaknesses'. You've heard this before — in a school report, an end-of-year review, from someone who happened to control some part of your short-term future. Maybe you heard it after one of your work buddies was promoted. You need to focus on this, that and the other, so you'll become a more well-rounded engineer, accountant, salesperson, chef, student. Right?

Here's the thing: that advice is for them, not you. Just think about their perspective for a moment and it all starts to make sense. A company doesn't want employees who are great at some tasks and prone to mistakes in others. They want good, well-rounded employees who are reliable if average and can turn their hand to as many things as possible with little supervision. It makes the workplace more efficient, which makes it only rational given this entire system is based on efficiency. In any case, they have to tell you something to make sense of why Peter got that promotion. They can't just say they like him more, he looks the part or he went to the same school they did. The truth is we all have weaknesses, but some people's seem to be overlooked.

A teacher or school generally doesn't want students who excel at some things and flounder at others. They are assessed on the average aggregate performance of their classes, not on how many people discover their core competencies or their crazy natural advantage.

Strength-finding hacks

If you choose to tolerate your weaknesses, then it's worth having a clear idea of what your strengths are. Sometimes that's not as easy as it sounds, especially given that some of our core skills are not readily convertible into money. Well, that's what we were told. I used to love playing video games when I was a kid, and my mum would complain it could never lead to anything worthwhile. Yet the video game industry is expecting sales of more than US$100 billion this year, and professional video game players can now earn well over a million dollars a year by participating in e-sports where gamers play in front of live audiences. It appears that the limitations on how we earn our living are being reinvented.

If you're wondering what you want to do when you grow up (I still change my mind every few years!), here are some things to look for:

The grade 3 hack

Whatever you got in trouble for in grade 3 should form the basis of the work you do in grown-up land. Every report card I got gave me an ‘excellent' rating for ‘Oral Expression' while criticising me for ‘too many weaknesses'. I'd point to this Oral Expression thing and say, but hey I did well at that … and by the way, what does it mean? The response was always the same: it means you talk too much. For many years now that strength, so evident way back in grade school, has been a significant revenue earner for me. Maybe you got in trouble for drawing in your work book; maybe you would often daydream and lose focus; maybe you got the other kids all excited about something not on the agenda; or maybe you had a talent in the playground — organising or keeping the peace? Almost certainly there was something that shone through for you, and inside that thing is the gold of what you could be doing now.

The 10 per cent rule

Every job I ever had, from flipping hamburgers to selling toilet paper (yes, I did that once), had something I really liked about it, even if the overall gig was terrible. That 10 per cent of the task we really excel at, the 10 per cent that has others in the office coming up to us for help or asking about the tricks we use to get that bit done so well. If we can find a way to do only that task, all the time, then we'll earn more and be happier for it. You may be surprised by how viable it is to turn this into a reality. Because it's a strength, you do better, gain more respect and improve to a level that others just can't compete with.

Quit quickly

To find out what works for you, try as many things as possible as quickly as possible. We do this with startups, failing our way to success by trying as many things as we can as quickly and cheaply as possible. The cool thing about doing this for work is that someone is paying you to find out what you hate doing. The quicker you quit, the quicker you can test out the next idea. Sure, stay a season, see if the seeds germinate, but don't stay much longer if the ground isn't fertile for you.

Follow your effort

I'm passionate about lots of things I know I'm not great at. It doesn't stop me doing them, but I'm not foolish enough to take the follow-your-passion bait. Here's a better idea espoused by billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban: Follow your effort. Effort is a curious thing, because it tells the truth about combined talent and competence. Often it's a wonderful intersection of above-average potential with something that the market rewards. It's also worth looking back to see what we've done, to know what we ought to do.

It is often said that the best way to understand the future is to be a good historian, and this is good advice. It turns out, though, that this is a tip we can also implement in our own lives. Looking back at the footsteps we've left behind when we struggled and when we excelled may usefully inform us on what to do next.

Yes, we should try to improve. There's no doubt that we do need a portfolio of skills to navigate our world. But to focus on our weaknesses at the expense of becoming world class in areas in which we have natural talent is bordering on negligent. It's poor advice, which is very often given for the benefit of the giver, not the receiver. Working on weakness is the direct birth child of a world that has been pressuring us to conform for 200 years. If our most revered scientists and entrepreneurs had heeded this advice to work on their weaknesses instead of their gifts, we'd have been robbed of so many things we take for granted in our modern technological society. Anyone who ever achieved anything of note in this world did so through focusing on their strengths; we can always outsource our weaknesses. It's time we removed this trope from the economic game of life.

Economics is always major

As in all things, of course, there are exceptions to the rule. The one weakness we all must work on, if we have it, is economics.

IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT YOU MAJORED IN, ECONOMICS IS ALWAYS MAJOR.

Economics is major because it is the one tool of trade we all share regardless of how we generate our money. If we cannot manage our money and our personal financial situation, we'll be destined for unhappiness. The basic conditions of managing our physical requirements in life always centre on money. So this is the one skill we all have to work on, especially if it is a weakness. And it's actually not as hard to understand as it might seem. Making the effort to understand the ins and outs of money will reduce stress in your life more than you could ever imagine. Simple rules and tools that are never taught in school, even when you study finance, are key to managing your home and family effectively. It's interesting that the word economics derives from the ancient Greek word okionomia, broadly meaning ‘rules of the house' or ‘household management'.

Economics is the foundation of the modern world. Not knowing how the money system really works, at both a personal and a structural level, is a bit like rolling the dice without knowing the rules of the game. No one would be crazy enough to do that. Before you play any game for the first time you ask about the rules, yet in the all-important game of life we aren't taught the money rules, and sometimes we don't even ask. The rules that matter don't emanate from accounting or finance classes, either. You don't need to know about debits or credits and where they belong in the ledger.

When it comes to money, there are basic principles and practices that never change and always work. Whether you want to get rich or just stay on top of your finances, understanding these principles will stand you in good stead for the future. The next section of this book, Part II, ‘Revenue', is packed with life-changing financial hacks and insights.