Road to Financial Independence: Buyer mindset vs seller mindset

Someone with a buyer mindset will only look to purchase goods for personal use. Someone with a seller mindset, will look at other people's needs and wants, and attempt to sell the required goods and services to them.

Even someone who is a salaried employee can have a seller mindset, if they focus on how they can deliver value to their customer, which is the employer in their case. Mind you, all value is perceived value, so when I say, "deliver value", it means your employer should acknowledge that whatever you do for them, is valuable to them. They should perceive it as "value".

Most employees have the buyer mindset. They remain engaged in their employment focusing on what they get from the employer. It is completely fine to maximize your gains from your employer, but that is only half the game. In order to maximize the gains from your employer, it is necessary to make them feel that you are delivering value to them - this is the other aspect of the game.

A "seller mindset" employee will maximize returns by gaming the system - whether he actually does good work or not - his compensation from his employer will be based on what the employer believes is the employee's value.

This buyer vs seller mindset extends to any money-making activity outside of employment as well.

But here's the thing - even with a "seller mindset", most employees will never achieve enough money to hit financial independence. There are only a select few professions where employees can potentially earn enough to reach financial freedom. Software engineering is one such profession, and even there, not every employee earns enough to safely retire early. A software engineer is most likely to earn enough to retire provided he stays long enough in one of the Mag-5 (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft) or one of the Mag-5 adjacent (Nvidia, Netflix, etc.). Nvidia particularly stands out in recent times, for creating a few millionaires due to their stock price surge.

So, how to achieve financial independence, if that is not possible via the employment route?

We'll talk more about this here - https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/buyer-seller-mindsets-comprehensive-analysis-balaji-krishnamurty-nrrkc