Work - its about creating your own value, making yourself irreplaceable with your unique talents.

When an employer employs someone, it always comes with a level of expectation. This expectation is usually reasonable, and proportional to the amount of money the employer is willing to pay. Typically, those who don't meet the expected levels of performance get fired, and those that do get hired. But usually it stops there - on the line between getting hired and not - and doesn't get any further. People slog years out at work simply "meeting expectations" see their jobs progress in bits and pieces, but never in bursts and leaps. The reason is precisely because they are only "meeting expectations". If you rewind to the beginning of the paragraph, you would remember that the initial expectations placed on any new found employee are "reasonable", which translates into "easily met", essentially making the person "easily replaceable" with the roughly the same pay, and not worth investing too much on.

If you were an employer an you wanted to hire someone, you would think: $2000 is a reasonable price to pay for someone who can do A,B,C,D,E for me, so I would want to hire a person who can do A,B,C,D,E for $2000. So when you do meet someone who meets those expectations, you happily pay $2000 to hire that person. But after the first year, the person is still doing the same things (A,B,C,D,E), there really isn't much incentive to increase your employee's pay, isn't it?

To be continued.