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Of course, you can't look at career salary in isolation. You have to look at it in a wider context of career options. For example, there are some careers that can make you a lot of money but provide very little security. Sure, investors may make a lot of money, but they can also lose a huge amount of money. Unless you are reasonably sure that you have what it takes, you shouldn't let the career salary sway you. The same goes for professional sports players. You may laugh, but every year thousands of teens fall into a life of minimum wage slavery because they are so confident in their sports abilities that they are willing to give up on education. It is simply not worth it! Career salary isn't the only important consideration. Always have a backup plan.
That being said, career job salary – when balanced with job security, chance of success, and other factors – can be one of the prime motivating factors in choosing your job. As a career counselor, I always tell driven, upwardly mobile people to establish lists of the top average career salaries. After that, they should do some more research. They should look at those lists and determine what job they can do and what jobs they couldn't stand, look at job security, try to determine which ones are on the way up and which ones are on the way down, and see how many people are going in to each field. After all, once the field becomes overcrowded, the career salary goes down. That is what happened to computer science, and it could happen to any other booming field in the future.
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