If Something Sucks, Do It As A Career
Want to create value? Do the jobs no one else wants to do.
“If something sucks,” grandpa Paxton used to say, “do it as a career 'cause people will pay you to do it, 'cause they don’t wanna do it.”
Today, Matt Paxton is a “downsizing and cleaning expert”, speaker, author, and host on the Legacy List with Matt Paxton TV show. But, as Paxton recalls in an Art of Manliness interview, it all started with him embodying that advice.
I honestly just… I didn’t hate it [cleaning], so that’s why I kept doing it, and then when I cleared out those four houses, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I just kept cleaning [for] little old ladies at church. I’d clean their attics and their basements, and then I started helping them move out, and then I realized these hoarding houses, nobody wanted to touch them. And so, I could charge more.
Paxton took on cleaning the houses nobody wanted to clean, the hoarders’ houses. And in doing so, he got to set his price.
As Derek Sivers succinctly put it, money is a neutral indicator of value.
The fact that people were willing to pay Paxton for cleaning, and in fact paying him extra for the hoarding houses, means the job was intrinsically valuable.
Grandpa Paxton’s advice is as applicable to messy houses as to the world of ideas.
In every job, in every company, in every team, there are tasks and projects that need doing but no one wants to do. They are great opportunities for ambitious people who want to make themselves valuable and become linchpins.
More often than not, those jobs are also ripe for innovative solutions, new workflows, and automation. The SaaS world is filled with products that spun up from agencies noticing multiple clients having the same problem.
Problem solving leads to satisfaction. It doesn’t matter if the job is not sexy. Whether it’s cleaning houses or automating the dreaded weekly report, by doing what nobody else wants to do, and doing it well, you will become valuable in the marketplace.
What’s a job nobody wants to do in your team? What would happen if you picked it up and made it your mission to get it done?
Originally published on giolodi.com.