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What is the best-paid job in the world?
If you're looking for clues to life's curious work-related conundrums, you may find the answers in Steve Coomber and Marc Woods' new book Where do all the paperclips go?
Extract taken from from Where do all the paperclips go?...and 127 other business and career conundrums by Steve Coomber and Marc Woods. Published by Capstone Publishing Ltd.
More money might not make you happier or healthier but, if your goal is to make a lot of money, you probably need to make your career choice fairly early on in life.
Top lawyers and medics earn good salaries. A QC might earn in excess of £1 million, as can partners of leading solicitors. In healthcare, some general practitioners might earn in excess of £250,000.
For the big money you should head for the City and the world of finance. Hedge funds are where the serious money is at the moment. In 2006, the three top hedge-fund earners each took home over $1 billion. The top 25 averaged $570 million.
The huge salaries for the top hedge-fund managers make earnings for sports stars and Hollywood film actors pale into insignificance. In the UK's Premier Football League, top earners might bring in £130,000 a week - not to be dismissed, but still some way behind the City's biggest earners. In the US, the highest paid NFL players earn around $20 million, although there is a salary cap in most US sports.
In Hollywood, top stars like Tom Cruise, Will Ferrell and Tom Hanks can earn around $20m but, if they can negotiate a points deal, taking some of the profits, they may earn much more. Marlon Brando was paid almost $3.4 million, plus points, for the 1978 film Superman and its sequel. He never appeared in the sequel, due to a dispute, and eventually earned $14 million for 12 shooting days and about 10 minutes screen-time.
There are other ways to strike it rich, although a regular salary might be out of the question. George Carmack and Skookum Jim struck gold in the Yukon Valley Alaska in 1896, sparking the Klondike goldrush. By the time the hundreds of thousands of prospectors had arrived, Carmack had already extracted over a ton of gold.
A discovery of a scarce natural resource, such as the gold in the Yukon, doesn't always yield such lucrative results, though. In 1893, an African worker at the Jagersfontein in South Africa was shovelling gravel onto a truck when he discovered a huge rough diamond. He hid the diamond, giving it directly to the mine manager.
The Excelsior diamond, at 995.2 metric carats, was one of the largest rough diamonds ever to have been discovered. The gem was eventually cut into 21 smaller stones, the largest of which reappeared on the market in 1996, when it was bought for $2,642,000. The worker was rewarded with £500 plus a horse, complete with saddle and bridle.
Extract taken from from Where do all the paperclips go?...and 127 other business and career conundrums by Steve Coomber and Marc Woods. Published by Capstone Publishing Ltd.
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