Unlocking Wealth: 5 High-Income Skills You Can Master

Okay, so over the last 12+ years, since I first became a student, I learned loads of high-income skills that have helped me personally make millions of dollars on the internet. While I was at University studying medicine, I started my own business helping people get into med school, and then I went on to start this publication, which led to me starting lots of other businesses. Now, I'm in the ridiculously privileged position to be making life-changing amounts of money every year, and I have quite a good understanding of what skills I would recommend to my former self if he wanted to make that sort of money at some point.

In this article, I want to break down over 4+ high-income skills with examples of other people who are literally doing this, that you can hopefully use to get inspired to learn one of them yourself and make some money, either while you're a student or further down the line.

The Philosophy of Making Money

Okay, so before we get into the specific skills, I want to zoom out a little bit and talk through how I would think about making money. What's the philosophy of actually making money if, for example, you're a student and you want to actually make money someday? So here's kind of how I think about it.

Let's say you are a student. This was, for example, me when I was a 19-year-old medical student. The thing is, it's sort of like in the world of capitalism that we live in today, everyone has above their head a personal stock price. This is essentially your worth to the market. I don't like the system any more than you do; I think this is a bad system. It's just unfortunately the world that we live in. And so if we want to thrive in the world that we live in, we want to appreciate that this is the thing: everyone that you meet has above them a personal stock price. It's like how every company has a particular value.

Now, back when I was a medical student, my personal stock price was zero. No one was going to hire me to do anything. In fact, maybe they would have done. Maybe, you know, when I was a medical student, I was able to earn £4.50 an hour by working at the local library. When I graduated medical school and started working as a doctor, suddenly my personal stock price became around about £14.50 per hour. That's how much doctors earn in the UK when you are just starting out. That's how much residents earn in the US when you're just starting out. This is the personal stock price.

Now, let's say if you're a student and you have high-income skills, essentially those skills are skills that increase your personal stock price. So let's say, you know, you might have a student next to you whose personal stock price is £50 an hour, or it might be £100 an hour, or it might even be £500 an hour, or it might be whatever. The thing is, this is how much that particular person can command in the marketplace of commerce.

You Are Already an Entrepreneur

Okay, so that's thing number one that we want to appreciate. Thing number two that we want to appreciate is that, you know, a lot of students... sometimes I'll give talks at universities and things, and you know, I'll put out a question to the audience and I'll kind of ask, "Who here wants to be an entrepreneur?" And depending on the crowd, like if I'm speaking to, I don't know, like finance and tech people, everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. If I'm speaking to medical students, almost no one puts their hand up in saying that they want to be an entrepreneur or they want to run their own business, which is totally fine because obviously medical students normally want to become doctors. That's not the same as running your own business.

But the thing that I would say is that everyone is already an entrepreneur. You already run your own business. Even me, back when I was a medical student and back when I was working full-time as a doctor, I was actually running my own business. It was just that my business was hired out to one employer, which was the National Health Service here in the UK, and the rate that I was charging my employer was £14.50 per hour. So it's like I've got one client in my business, that client is my employer, and the rate, the amount of money my business is worth, is £14.50 an hour.

And in a way, we are all entrepreneurs because we are all selling ourselves in some way to the market. You might not like to think of your job as selling yourself to the market, but in the unfortunate capitalist world that we live in, you are in fact selling yourself to the market. So you are already an entrepreneur, and you have a... your business, the business of you, has a stock price in the same way that Apple has a stock price. Apple is a business, it has a stock price. You as an individual are a business, and you also have a stock price.

So knowing that this is the state of the world that we live in, essentially how do you make that number go up? How do you increase your personal stock price? How do you get more leverage? How do you make it so that, you know, your one employer, your one client, isn't only paying you £14.50 an hour? What if this client decides to fire you? What if you get laid off from your job, as a lot of people did during the pandemic? Uh-oh, now your business has zero clients, and now you're not making any money. This is potentially bad because you've got bills and stuff to pay. What if the next job you could only get was maybe a similar price, £15 an hour? That's not a very good living that you can make.

Essentially, you're an entrepreneur, you have your own business, it's the business of you, and that business has a personal stock price. And the value of this essentially correlates with your skills. The more skills you have that are correlated with making money, the more your personal stock price is going to go up.

High-Income vs. Low-Income Skills

Now, there are a whole host of skills that will increase your worth to the marketplace, but there are also a whole host of skills that will not increase your worth to the marketplace. Again, for the record, I don't like the system any more than you do, but we're kind of stuck with it because it's the system that we have right now. And so we can kind of think of these skills as low-income skills and high-income skills.

So if, for example, you are in the UK, being a doctor is unfortunately a low-income skill, that's being a junior doctor, for example. If, however, you train for over a decade to become a neurosurgeon, being a neurosurgeon is a high-income skill, which in the UK would maybe make you, I don't know, £300k if you do private practice and maybe £100k if you don't do private practice. If you're in the US, that's worth over a million dollars a year. It's a very high-income skill. Neurosurgeon as a skill has a different value depending on which market you're in. In the US, which is a private healthcare system, it has got a way higher value than in the UK, which is a state-funded healthcare system. This is one example.

What else are skills? Well, you know, playing a guitar is unfortunately a low-income skill unless you are literally the best in the world. I mean, if you're the best in the world at anything, it sort of becomes a high-income skill, but you know, that's aside. But you know, being able to play the guitar is broadly a low-income skill. Being able to code an app is a very high-income skill. Being able to write an academic essay is unfortunately a low-income skill; it does not pay very much in terms of the marketplace that we currently live in. However, being able to write a sales page or a letter is a very high-income skill. This is called copywriting. This is if you were, for example, to take the skills of academic essay writing and apply them to persuasive writing. You know, the person who writes what's on the Apple iPad homepage that tries to convince people to buy an iPad, that person is paid a lot of money because that is a very high-income skill that translates to a lot of money in the marketplace.

At university, you learn a lot of low-income skills, unfortunately, and most university degrees and most school systems do not actually teach you high-income skills. A lot of high-income skills are things that don't sound particularly sexy and things that you often have to learn on your own.

The Importance of Your Client

Okay, so the final thing to keep in mind in this entire equation is that the value of a skill does somewhat depend on who is buying that skill. So for example, let's say you're just really, really, really good at the guitar. Now, the guitar is normally a low-income skill because normally the people who buy the skill of being really good at the guitar are parents who want their kid to learn the guitar. You could be a guitar teacher, and now your amazing guitar-playing skills are not worth very much because you're teaching guitar to kids, for example. Or you could be an amazing guitar player, and if the person buying that skill happens to be a music record company and they're giving you a record deal for being able to play fingerstyle guitar like an absolute legend, suddenly that skill has become a high-income skill.

We kind of want to keep in mind the fact that like, a lot of people try and make money from playing music, most people don't make very much money from doing it. So it's a lot harder to sell that skill to music record labels purely because of, you know, the laws of supply and demand. And so in that sense, playing the guitar is normally a low-income skill, but with a lot of luck and the right circumstances, and if you're absolutely freaking amazing, it can become a high-income skill. Those are not the sorts of skills I want to talk about in this article. I don't want to talk about skills that are only high-income if you get really lucky, because then you get rich, but you have to be really lucky. I want to talk about skills that are high-income that broadly will increase your personal stock price, your worth to the marketplace, without you having to be literally the best in the world at it and without you having to be super, super lucky or super, super well-connected.

Selling to Businesses vs. Consumers

Okay, final piece of the puzzle before we move on is this: it's really, really important to appreciate that there are two different types of businesses. You can sell to consumers (i.e., normal people) or you can sell to businesses. So for example, if we use the guitar teacher example again, you know, trying to teach guitar lessons to normal people is selling to consumers. But if, for example, trying to get a record deal with Sony is selling your skill to a business. Trying to be a writer where you say to your friends, "Hey, I'll write letters to your grandparents for you" or something dumb like that is trying to sell to consumers. Trying to be a writer but selling your writing services to businesses by saying you'll do copywriting for their social media, for their sales pages, that is selling to businesses.

And generally, we do not want to be trying to sell to consumers. A key takeaway is that it is so much easier to make money when you think about what skills you can sell to a business rather than what's the value of your skills to a normal person like you and your friends and stuff. So all of these high-income skills we're going to be talking about are going to be trying to sell to businesses because businesses have lots and lots of money to spend, and the way businesses value money is very, very different to how consumers value money.

Okay, so with all of that in mind, these are the several high-income skills we're going to be talking about. You might be like, "Oh, you know, design, I don't need to think about that." Like, throughout as I talk about these different high-income skills, I'm going to be sharing literal real-life examples of people who have made money using these skills. And so even if right now you might be thinking, "I suck at art, I'll never be a designer," or "I don't know, I hate the idea of learning to code," it's like, okay, but I would still recommend you read through the sections because by seeing the examples and seeing kind of how different people are actually making money, it just gives you a bit of a firmware update in your own mind. It helps you appreciate, "Oh, this is how you actually make money. This is how you increase your personal stock price."

1. Software Consulting for Businesses

Alright, so high-income skill number one is being a software consultant for businesses. Now, this sounds boring, but it's really not. This is super, super cool. Basically, businesses all use different software, and often businesses are run and manned by people who are way less tech-savvy than you are. As a student, you've grown up on the internet and you know how to use software, hopefully.

For example, you might be familiar with the app Notion. Numerous articles and tutorials exist about Notion. You might be using Notion at school, you might know people who use Notion. Notion is an app that a lot of students will use for their personal life, but actually, Notion is also an app that a lot of businesses, including mine, use to manage their business operations. And so if you can get good at using that software, you can become a consultant where you help businesses, you train them in how to use the software.

It sounds dumb. It sounds like, surely, like you figured out Notion on your own and you didn't need to hire an expert to teach you how to use Notion. Obviously, because you're a kid, and kids have more initiative than people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, who broadly are the people who are working and running businesses. It sounds dumb, but actually, businesses will hire a lot of consultants to teach them basic stuff that they could just teach themselves based on the internet. The reason they do that is because business owners don't have time.

I am now a business owner. I know how to learn stuff on the internet. I could teach myself any skill I want to because I've been doing this for like 15 years and I know how to use computers, and I could teach myself anything I want. But at this point in my life, it's just not worth my own time to teach myself the skill. I would gladly pay a significant hourly rate, say $500, to hire someone to teach the skill to me because my time is worth more than $500 an hour. And so you might think that businesses are being dumb, and some of them, it's like, yeah, they're not very tech-savvy and they just sort of want some handholding, and that's okay. But actually, it's worth appreciating that a business will pay to learn something that you as an individual can absolutely just teach yourself.

Let's take the example of a young professional, let's call her Molina. At 23, while she was at university, she was working as a Notion consultant for businesses. Her proposal to businesses looked something like this: she was working with clients in South America, and she charged rates like $300 for a 90-minute session or offered a package of four sessions for $800—a significant discount. That's a pretty high-income skill. That's more money than fully qualified trained consultants in the UK who are doctors with 15 years of experience. And she was doing this while still in university, around the age of 21-22.

The other thing that's interesting about this proposal is how it was structured. In her sample Notion setup, she included team spaces relevant to businesses, such as: - General - Engineering - Design - Product - Marketing - Operations - HR & Legal

I guarantee you, as a student, those are not the categories on your sidebar in your Notion page. It might be "Work" and "Home" and "Essays" and "Assignments." But a business has engineering, design, product, marketing, operations, HR, and legal. And the fact that she put those specific things in the sidebar of her little proposal means that she's really, really appealing to businesses. A normal person is not going to pay someone $800 for four sessions teaching them how to use Notion, but a business, I would pay that in an absolute heartbeat. I think it's an absolute steal.

It's worth pointing out here that she learned Notion not through formal classes, but by unsurprisingly watching online tutorials. You're a student, you know how to learn by watching stuff on the internet. She learned how to use Notion by watching a few tutorials, she made her own Notion workspace, she got familiar with using the software, and then realized, "Huh, I've got this skill of using this piece of software. I know businesses use this skill." Great. Anytime businesses do anything, you know you can charge them quite a lot of money for teaching them how to do the thing or helping them improve the way that they already do the thing.

Okay, so we've talked about Notion, but actually, there are numerous other software platforms that businesses use. Some of the software that we use is, for example, ConvertKit, HubSpot, we've dabbled with Asana, we use Help Scout, we use QuickBooks, we use Kajabi to host some of our courses, we use Webflow, we use Framer some of the time. There's so much software out there that businesses use. And if as a student, you can teach yourself to use that particular piece of software, you can then become a consultant for that software for businesses in your local area or businesses online.

And a lot of this software, to be honest, is probably not things you're going to need as a student. HubSpot is a CRM. As a student, you probably don't even know what CRM means. It's basically a massive database that businesses use to keep all of their contacts, and so they can figure out, "Okay, this person is at this company and we need to sell to them in this way." So like, you as an individual have no reason to learn how to use HubSpot. But if you do and you get good at it, because it's not hard and there's like loads of tutorials on the internet and stuff, you can then become a HubSpot consultant for businesses.

The other really nice thing about this, and which is why it's such a high-income skill, is that by doing consulting for businesses, you actually learn so much. You're basically creating your own business where you're doing consulting for other businesses. So you learn how to price your services, you learn how to sell them, you learn how to persuade someone over a Zoom call or over the phone or over an in-person meeting to part with their money to give you the services. You learn how to fulfill on that particular order. You learn the language of business, you learn how to speak to entrepreneurs, you learn how to speak in terms of return on investment. None of this is stuff that they will teach you at university. Even if you do an MBA, I have lots of friends who've done MBAs, they don't learn this stuff either. You only learn this stuff by doing it, which is why when you're a student and you try and become a software consultant for other businesses, I guarantee it will be one of the highest-income skills you could possibly learn.

2. Persuasive Writing (Copywriting)

Okay, high-income skill number two is copywriting. The difference between a good copywritten sales page and a bad copywritten sales page might just be a few percentage points of conversion.

So, okay, going to dive into another sort of business class here. Essentially, let's illustrate this with an example. Imagine a sales page for a product, say a course priced at $997. At the bottom of the website, there is a "Buy Now" button. Anytime someone goes through this page and clicks "Buy," the business is earning $997.

Now, let's say the conversion rate on the sales page is currently 0.5% or something like that. That means for every 200 people that visit, we get one sale. Great. So every time 200 people visit the thing, on average, 0.5% will convert, i.e., will buy the $997 product. So we make $997 for every 200 visitors we get on the website.

Now, there are some people who have a sales page where the conversion rate is 1%, or even 2%, or even, I've heard, people who have a 4% conversion rate. So what would it look like if we managed to increase our conversion rate from 0.5% to 2%? You know, what that would look like is for 200 people, we now get four sales. It doesn't seem like a lot, but now 200 people is making us nearly $4,000 rather than just under $1,000. There is a big difference between $1,000 and $4,000.

Now, in our case, for a business generating, say, a million dollars a year with a 0.5% conversion rate, if someone were to copywrite our landing page, our sales page, and if we were able to increase that conversion rate to just 2%, from 0.5% to 2%, instead of it being a $1 million a year business, it would be a $4 million a year business. And what is the difference between a 0.5% and a 2% conversion rate? It is copywriting.

If the sales page is a little bit more persuasive, it increases this conversion rate. And you don't have to increase this conversion rate by much to make a massive difference to the top and bottom line of a business, which is why copywriting is a very, very, very high-income skill. It's not that hard to learn. There are excellent books on the topic, such as Copywriting Secrets by Jim Edwards. There are loads of books about it, loads of online tutorials about it. There are also many online creators who share their copywriting expertise, where they'll literally show you their screen as they're writing an email that's making thousands of dollars, and it's just super cool to see the genuine behind-the-scenes of this sort of stuff.

But hopefully, you can appreciate with this example, if we were to hire a good copywriter, which we now have, we'd be able to add millions directly to the bottom line of our business. That is huge. Obviously, we wouldn't pay a copywriter $3 million, but like, if a copywriter could guarantee that increase for a 10% cut of the additional revenue, they would earn $300,000 from that single project, just by copywriting our sales page. It's a very, very, very high-income skill.

So copywriting is one high-income skill that you can use for writers. Another lucrative writing skill is ghostwriting. Experts in the field teach how to build a successful ghostwriting career, offering roadmaps for aspiring writers.

3. High-Value Design

Alright, high-income skill number three is to be a designer. Now, this could be a web designer or it could be a general graphic designer because again, we're thinking about selling to businesses. So what kind of design skills do businesses need? Your mind might come to, "Okay, well, they need a design for the website." Yeah, they do. And if they make apps, then they need some sort of designs for the apps. Yes, they do. But there's also loads more design assets that businesses need and pay for. For example, businesses pay for various design assets, including banners for their online profiles. If businesses post Instagram carousels, those are design assets. Businesses create ads that they put on billboards and on social media and stuff; those require design assets.

I know a lot of entrepreneurs, business owners at this point, and one of the common things we all lament is how hard it is to find good designers. A personal acquaintance who runs a startup was recently looking to hire a product designer for a salary approaching $400,000 a year, and still found it challenging to find the right talent. I was like, "Surely you can find someone for 400k," and he was like, "Yeah, no, it's still really hard finding good designers." I was like, "Huh, that's interesting." In their case, they were looking for a product designer, someone who could actually design the user interface and the user experience of a product. But even outside of that, like finding a really good designer is kind of hard to come by. And so it becomes a very high-value skill because design, in some capacity, is a skill that basically every business needs. And most businesses, if a business is like under about 20-30 people, they probably can't afford to have a full-time designer on the team. And so what they'll do is that they'll contract work out to freelance designers, and you could be one of those, even if you're a student.

Now, incidentally, and you might not know this, this is a skill I personally leveraged. While in medical school, my highest-paying work was as a freelance designer for various medical tech companies. There were these companies that wanted to design like medical tech products, and I knew how to do web design and product design, and I taught myself app design by watching some online tutorials about it. And so I was being paid £100 an hour to do freelance app design and web design for these med-tech companies. And I targeted med-tech companies because I was a medical student. So who do you think they'd want to work with more? Would they want to work with a random designer that doesn't know anything about medicine, or would they hire someone who's literally a medical student who understands medical stuff and is also a designer on the side? They'd probably go with the person who has a little bit of industry experience. And so it was fairly easy for me to get those gigs. Had I tried to email Apple and say, "Hey, let me be a designer for you guys," obviously they wouldn't even reply to me. But I wasn't trying to target the Apples of the world because that would just be dumb. I was reaching out to people I knew through my network and doctors in my hospital and stuff when I would find that they were working on some sort of med-tech product, which often, well, not often, but like quite a lot of them were.

Now, if you're looking for resources on how to learn design as a skill, you can find many resources online. For example, some full-time graphic designers share their entire journey and teach the skills they've acquired. If you're interested in that, if you feel like you have a reasonable aesthetic sense and you might want to learn how to use Figma and Canva and Photoshop and stuff, those are very, very high-income skills, provided you're selling them to the right business.

4. Website Construction

Alright, high-income skill number four is being a website builder. This didn't used to be a high-income skill. Years ago, when I first started dabbling with web design, being a web designer or a web developer was actually a fairly low-income skill. Probably I was targeting the wrong clients because, as I think about it, I was dumb and I was advertising myself on freelance websites, which means I was finding people and businesses who were trying to get people for like $5, $10. And so I was charging $5-$10 for website design. That's not how I would go about it if I was a little bit more intelligent.

Being a web designer, again, what does every business need? Every business needs a website. So it's similar to the graphic design stuff, but being a web designer and developer, if you can do both of those things, you are a bit of a unicorn, a bit of a diamond in the rough.

A friend, let's call him Henry, taught himself web design a couple of years ago in about six months and decided to go all-in on being a Webflow designer and a developer. Webflow is an app, an online software thing that lets you build websites. It's like way more involved than something like Squarespace, but there are loads of tutorials on how to use Webflow. Another example of a good tool is Framer. If you are a very good Framer designer, you can probably make loads of money.

So Henry taught himself web design by basically following online tutorials and tinkering around for about six months, and then he was able to charge thousands to tens of thousands of dollars to businesses to design websites for them. Henry is also very good. He designed a book launch website for which he was paid $15,000. Pretty high-income skill. For another sales page project, he earned $10,000.

Sounds like a lot, but for a business that's doing multiple seven figures a year in revenue and profit, an investment of $10,000 or $15,000 is a small price to pay for a high-quality website that can boost sales and conversions. If we can get extra sales of the book and it only costs 15 grand, it's like, "Wow, what a bargain." If we can boost our conversion rate for a sales page by just a few percentage points or whatever, or even a few decimals of a percentage point, 10 grand is absolutely nothing. This is the sort of mindset that businesses are in. Yes, if you target your local coffee shop that's making no money, it's a different sort of equation. But if you're targeting businesses in the $1 to $20 million annual revenue range, again, it might seem like a lot, but there are actually quite a lot of businesses that are in that category. If you target those sorts of businesses, then again, web design becomes a very high-income skill.

5. The Power of Coding

Alright, the fifth high-income skill that we're going to talk about is coding. If you're reading this and you're not a massive nerd, you might be thinking, "Ugh, coding, people have talked about it. I don't want to learn to code, it's hard, I'm not mathematically inclined." It's like, okay, but like, there are a lot of people who are not nerds who are good at coding. Coding is actually surprisingly accessible as a skill to learn. There are loads of completely free online tutorials that teach you the basics of learning how to code. The fact that you can use AI tools like GitHub Copilot and GPT and stuff to help you out while you're coding is also phenomenally game-changing.

Some US-based tech companies offer starting salaries for coders that can reach as high as $400,000, which is insane, depending on levels of experience and all that kind of stuff. Nearly everyone who learns to code and enters the field earns a six-figure salary relatively quickly because there's always a demand for good coders out there.

But you also don't have to use coding as a skill that you can sell to other businesses. You can use coding as a skill to create your own products as well. Now, the example I want to give here is a friend of mine, let's call him Sahel. Sahel learned how to code by essentially teaching himself, and he built a product which is like an AI tool that helps video editors. From essentially quitting his day job, within nine months, he was earning $35,000 a month from the software that he built himself.

It's hard to overstate just how amazing coding as a skill is because now, whenever you have an idea for anything that involves a computer or a phone or the internet, which is basically almost every sensible business idea these days, as soon as you have that idea, if you know how to code, you can see the process of what it would take to actually build it. And anyone can build any kind of app, any kind of website. You've got AI to help you, you can charge money for it. You could be a 13-year-old kid in Pakistan, you could learn how to code, you could build some sort of app, and if that app is good and you find a way to get leads and traffic to the app, you could literally make thousands, if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars a month by just the fact that you've built this tool which people enjoy using.

A great resource for inspiration is the Indie Hackers community, where individuals share stories of building profitable products from the ground up. It's insane, it's super inspiring, and the more of these stories you read and listen to, the more you realize, "Oh, actually, this is not so bad. I could probably teach myself this thing." And then you can start having ideas for different cool stuff that you can build.