High-Salary Tracks: Choosing Matters More Than Effort! Career Switching and Salary Negotiation Strategies for Getting on the Right Path

After reading investing books for a long time, you often hear one reminder: when your principal isn’t big yet, don’t rush into studying overly complex strategies.
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Stock picking, asset allocation, leverage, options—of course you can study all of that. But if your principal is only a few hundred thousand, even with great performance, the number you multiply back to still won’t immediately change your life. By contrast, if your salary is up by twenty or thirty thousand a month, what you can save feels far more real.
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┃ The Analects says: “The gentleman attends to the root; when the root is established, the Way is born.”
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Applied to building wealth, I think this “root” can be understood as active income.
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A while ago, Yaru, a business/finance editor at Commonwealth Publishing, sent me High-Salary Tracks. She recommended that I—someone who used to work in tech—give it a read. After finishing it, I felt the book hit a very direct question: after working for a few years, why am I still not earning the income I want?
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Moboo wrote a line in the book that I really like:
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┃ “The design of the compensation structure is the blueprint of the workplace.”
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Even when everyone is working hard, salary gaps can sometimes be huge. What companies look at is what problems you can solve, how complex those problems are, how many people will be affected if something goes wrong, and whether the company itself can afford to pay higher compensation.
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A lot of personal finance books say “as long as you have enough, it’s fine.” It’s a comfortable line. But for people who haven’t yet built a sense of financial security, another question may still pop up: what about the bills right in front of me?
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┃ Food, clothing, housing, transportation, education, entertainment—which one doesn’t cost money?
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Near the end, there’s a really interesting “braised pork rice theory.” Skip one NT$5,000 dry-aged steak meal, and use the same money to eat braised pork rice instead—you can order a whole table’s worth of braised eggs, tofu, sliced side dishes, and small plates, and still say with flair: “This table’s on me.”
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Once your income increases, you don’t need to rush to upgrade your life into a more expensive version. It can give you a bit more room in the places you truly care about.
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I’m more willing to see a high salary as a kind of backbone. If a job doesn’t 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 be pushed forward by bills at every step.
No matter which track you’re on right now, I highly recommend this to everyone—you’ll definitely get something out of it.