When your principal is still small, raise your salary first
Reading High-Salary Track
After reading investing books for a long time, you often hear one reminder: when your principal isn’t much yet, don’t rush to study overly complicated tactics.
Stock picking, asset allocation, leverage, options—sure, all of that can be worth learning. But when your principal is only a few hundred thousand, even with great returns, the number you multiply back may not change your life right away. By contrast, if your monthly paycheck is two or thirty thousand more, the money you can save feels much more tangible.
The Analects says: “The gentleman attends to the fundamentals; once the fundamentals are established, the Way arises.”
When it comes to building wealth, I think this “fundamental” can be read as active income.
A while ago, Yaru, a finance editor at Commonwealth Publishing, sent me High-Salary Track. She recommended it because I used to work in tech and might find it useful. I originally assumed it was a career how-to book—fix your resume, negotiate a raise, job-hop into tech. After finishing it, I found it goes straight at a more direct question: after a few years of work, why are you still not earning the income you want?
This is something many people don’t really want to admit.
Everyone wants to earn more, but often has no idea which direction to go. The knowledge and experience you build from school into working life may not be enough to support the life you imagine. Your salary is stuck in the middle, and the job isn’t so terrible that you can just walk away, so you stay. Year-end bonuses, raise announcements, promotion news—you wait for one of them each year, in rotation.
And Moboo says it plainly: some people aren’t lacking effort—they just started out standing in a position where high pay isn’t attainable.
How salaries are priced
There’s a line in the book I really like:
“Designing a compensation structure is drawing the blueprint of the workplace.”
How much salary a company posts for a role will, of course, reflect seniority, education, and interview performance. But it cares even more about something else: what problem can this person solve for the company? If something goes wrong, how big is the impact?
Some people keep operations running smoothly every day; some are responsible for whether a product makes money; some hold key clients, chip design, or a service that—if it goes down—will make the whole company break out in a cold sweat. Everyone is busy, yet the pay gap can be huge.
Moboo organizes a “salary analysis matrix by company type,” looking at work through two axes: the company’s own profitability, and an individual’s room and flexibility to negotiate.
Profit-sharing Taiwanese tech companies like TSMC and MediaTek have strong earning power and attractive bonuses; top-tier “star” American companies—NVIDIA, Google, Microsoft, Apple—offer not only base pay but also RSUs, signing bonuses, and performance bonuses. How far you can negotiate can be shockingly different. It’s all called “tech,” but the compensation worlds don’t necessarily connect.
Moboo then places the tech industry alongside Adam Smith’s conditions for high-paying work: work pressure, learning costs, responsibility and trust, probability of success and risk—almost all of it lines up.
Long hours, high pressure, high technical barriers. When something breaks, the consequences often far exceed the extra half-day of overtime (tech engineers will definitely feel this). Semiconductors, cloud, cybersecurity, financial services—many of these are hidden in places you don’t see in everyday life; when nothing goes wrong, people don’t particularly think about the engineers and teams behind them.
When something does go wrong, everyone will know.
Part of a high salary is paying for those invisible costs.
The second half of the book provides a very complete track-switching playbook: how to find openings, write a resume, prepare for interviews, negotiate after you get an offer, and then, after joining, how to fight for projects with more impact. Even if you don’t plan to move into tech, its reminders about resumes, interviews, compensation negotiation, and career leverage are still worth bringing back to your own job.
Salary negotiation starts before you get the offer. How you describe what you’ve done on your resume, how you make your capabilities visible in interviews, which company you choose to join—these gradually become the leverage you’ll have later when you negotiate.
“As long as there’s enough money” sounds comforting
The book discusses how modern poverty is defined. I paused at the third point—didn’t expect the third item to be this.
- A person’s income can only cover food expenses
- Disposable income is below 60% of the median
- Unable to maintain social connections
Poverty isn’t only about whether you can eat your fill; it also includes persistently low disposable income, and whether someone still has the ability to maintain social connections.
When friends ask you to go out to eat, you hesitate forever; you calculate how much to put in a wedding red envelope; your kid wants to learn an extracurricular skill, and you have to check this month’s bills first—when these pile up, the pressure doesn’t stay only in your bank account.
At this point, I thought of how many personal finance books say, “As long as you have enough money, that’s fine.” The phrase can be calming. But for someone whose sense of security in life hasn’t been established yet, hearing it might trigger another question: then what about the bills in front of me?
Food, clothing, housing, transportation, education, entertainment—what doesn’t cost money? Moboo says a high salary is one way to gain freedom in life, and I think that statement is fair. A high income doesn’t guarantee a good life; but having more options means many things don’t have to be endured through sheer grit.
This reminded me of the “freedom” mentioned in The Wealth Ladder that I flipped through recently. Convenience-store freedom, restaurant freedom, travel freedom, the freedom to live in different places—these sound like far-off terms, but they have very concrete forms in daily life. What High-Salary Track talks about is more like this: for people still on the first few rungs, how to first save a bit more room to choose.
The ticket to the high-salary track
When I read Moboo’s own story, a few questions still surfaced.
A mechanical engineering degree from Chiao Tung, studying at Carnegie Mellon, tuition that might exceed NT$1.2 million a year—those conditions aren’t easily available to everyone.
I don’t know how Moboo afforded it back then, and I can’t draw conclusions for him. But the entrances to the high-salary track have always been distributed very unevenly. Family resources, educational opportunities, geographic location, English ability, and whether you can withstand an employment gap during a career change all affect how many options someone has.
But that doesn’t invalidate the book’s advice. It reminds readers that when planning a career, you first have to see your own hand clearly. Some people can switch tracks directly; others need to first build skills, save an emergency fund, or spend time accumulating the conditions to “squat first, then jump.”
I’d recommend this book to people who’ve been in the workplace for a few years, feel stuck on income, or started investing only to realize their principal is growing slowly.
If you already have a clear career direction and don’t really plan to change industries, not every salary-negotiation tactic in the second half will be applicable. Still, it provides a compensation map—at minimum, it helps you understand where you’re standing right now.
The freedom of a bowl of braised pork rice
In the end, Moboo mentions a very interesting “braised pork rice theory.”
Skip one NT$5,000 dry-aged steak meal, and spend the same budget on braised pork rice—suddenly you can order abundantly from the whole menu. Braised pork rice, a braised egg, tofu puffs, sliced meats, side dishes—order one of everything you want, and you can casually say, “This table’s on me.”
Travel works the same way. Spend NT$200,000 on Europe and you may have to budget every detail; take the same amount to Japan or Korea, and hot spring hotels, wagyu barbecue, and transportation planning all become much more relaxed.
After your income increases, there’s no rule that you must upgrade your lifestyle into a more expensive version. Some people spend the money on travel; some buy time; some save and invest; some simply want to check prices one less time when friends invite them out to eat.
I’d rather see a high salary as a bit of backbone.
When the job isn’t a fit, you have the ability to leave. When you want to be with family, take a break, or live somewhere else, you don’t have to have every step pushed along by bills. These things can’t necessarily be solved by salary alone—but with a little more slack, you at least have a better chance to decide for yourself.