Your fee is just the tip. The real money comes in another form.

Next time you close a deal, go ahead and mentally add another twenty grand to the invoice. That’s not a billing error. It’s the value of the expertise you’ve just “stolen” from your own project.

Every project leaves me with a new “artifact,” even if it’s the tenth supposedly identical job in a row. A logic pattern, a solution in code, a principle I didn’t know yesterday.

On my latest Odoo project, I could have just “set up email.” Instead, I disappeared down the rabbit hole of email routing for a few hours.

The result? The client got emails landing exactly where they should. I got a skill the next client will pay me twice as much for.

This works for any professional.

Even when projects look like carbon copies, there’s always a different architecture underneath. When you get paid to solve a problem, you’re also buying yourself time to learn. That’s how real expertise gets built.

Take Odoo. I consider myself pretty good at it. But that last project made me properly dig into how incoming emails get sorted. Before, I knew they “got through.” Now I know how to route them by recipient or content so the system doesn’t turn into a junk drawer.

That’s +1 skill in my inventory.

For the next client, it’s a ready-made, tested option. I’ve increased what I can earn by levelling up on the current project.

Look back far enough, and any professional is basically the sum of their experience and expertise.

Sounds pragmatic?

It is. We’re talking about work here, not a meditation retreat.

Think about how you play a game. You level up your character, collect XP, unlock new branches of the skill tree. At some point, it all clicks: your skills start boosting each other, and you’re cruising through the game in something close to god mode.

Life works much the same way. Build your knowledge, train your skills, collect that XP. If you’re just starting out, this is the best part: every new project feels like a 10× power-up.

It only gets more interesting from there.

These days, people love saying you only gain experience by making mistakes.

I disagree.

Experience comes from focused work and discipline. From staying with a piece of code until it’s elegant. From working through the logic of a CRM until it runs like clockwork.

Simple, obvious stuff. I know.

And yet, every day, I see people who just log the hours without ever understanding how the thing actually works.