Early Goal: Selling Time for Money

When you're a teacher and get off work, even if tutoring after hours was allowed back in the day, grinding through 996 wouldn't get you five times your salary.

Wanting to make quick money isn't just one person's idea—it's shared by quite a lot of people.

When a lot of people think that way, the bar gets raised. Take most well-off companies, for instance: even their front desk folks graduated from top-tier universities, and their admin staff hold master's degrees from prestigious programs. Those are the lowest credentials on the team; everyone else is coming off C9 league schools. That tells you something: this isn't an isolated mindset but a collective one.

Why do these people choose such companies instead of becoming teachers with winter and summer breaks? Do they enjoy suffering? Of course not. Everyone wants to make quick money, and everyone needs to build up that initial capital fast.

Later on, some bought multiple properties, some started companies, some went into investing—all of it requires capital. When you're young and broke, without selling your time, you really don't have many good options.

Those folks who worked themselves to the bone early on, trading time for money, didn't just chill out later. After transitioning from labor to capital, they doubled down, working even harder—not that "hardworking" even covers it; "fanatical" fits better.

Capital returns outpace labor returns by nature, and you're being this fanatical about it. You end up taking all the money—what are the rest of us supposed to do?

Think about it: when one group moves fast and stays fast, it's always another group moving slow and staying slow.

Take a job that could be split among three people, each earning one share. If you insist that one person do three people's work and take two shares, the result is inevitable: that one person completes their initial accumulation, becomes an employer, and the other two are left without work—or at least without high-paying work, forcing them into lower-paying industries, like operating excavators.

That floods low-wage sectors with labor supply, driving pay even lower and widening the income gap further.

So mandating no overtime is, at its core, protecting the less capable and the slower runners—and telling the highly capable to settle down and stop plotting class mobility by transitioning into capital ownership.

Everyone slows down, three people share the three jobs, each works forty hours a week, everyone makes money, the gap stays small, and everybody's happy.

Of course, ambitious young people aren't happy about it—their hunger gets in the way.