“You want to know how to make a million dollars? First, find a job that pays a million dollars an hour. Then, work 1 hour.” – Steve Martin (from a Saturday Night Live routine)

You often wonder how supposedly smart people can make really dumb mistakes. I mean, how often have you questioned the intelligence and knowledge of people “at the top”, either in some business (like Enron), or government (pick one). And what’s even more mysterious is why these people rate such high salaries, when they seem to make the same kinds of stupid moves over and over.

Well, wonder no more! By merging common truisms with an engineering formula, you too can find the key to success. You just have to do the math.

To begin with, the first truism is that all people at the top have power. No doubt about it, they are indeed the movers and shakers of this world. All-righty then! Consider, if you will, this engineering expression for power:

POWER = WORK/TIME

Got it? OK, here are two more. Everyone knows that:

TIME = MONEY

KNOWLEDGE = POWER

Now, here’s the key to figuring this one out. You have to transform the formula above by substituting Money for Time and Knowledge for Power. Thus, you end up with this formula:

KNOWLEDGE = WORK/MONEY

Still with me so far? Great! What you want to do now is solve for Money. For those of you who are math-challenged, that means you need to get Money on one side of the equal sign, and everything else on the other side of the equal sign. In this expression, it’s mathematically easy – just have Money swap places with Knowledge, like this:

MONEY = WORK/KNOWLEDGE

Now the thing to remember with fractions is the larger the numerator (the one on top) and/or the smaller the denominator (the one on the bottom), then the greater the result (the number by itself on the other side of the equal sign). So what this means is that, for a given amount of Work (say, a 40-hour week), then as Knowledge gets smaller (less), then Money will get bigger (increase).

In other words (and this is critical), the less you know, the more you make!

You always thought the key to success was to increase your store of knowledge and make yourself more valuable. And on the face of it, there’s nothing wrong with being valuable. But as any auctioneer could tell you, the REAL value of an object is not what it’s worth, but what people will pay for it.

So you see? You’ve had it wrong all these years. As you can plainly see from the proof above, if you want to make a million dollars an hour, then the less you know the better.

Steve Martin was right!