Everette Taylor’s least-favorite trait in an employee is simple: a lack of self-awareness.

People without self-awareness tend to be “ego-driven” and less willing — or able — to work with other people, says Taylor, the CEO of crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. They’re prone to “thinking inwardly about what they would want and what they think is best when it comes to customers,” he tells CNBC Make It.

Self-aware employees are usually more open to ideas and pushback from their colleagues, Taylor says. The trait can help you bolster your communication, relationships, creativity and productivity, research shows.

But while 95% of people believe they’re self-aware, only 10% to 15% genuinely are, organizational psychology researcher and author Tasha Eurich found in 2018.

Taylor, 35, works on building his own self-awareness whenever possible, he says.

“I try to keep my ego at the door. I’m wrong all the time. I have an incredible team that’s super smart and will put me in my place, and I love that,” says Taylor.

Taylor, who’s been Kickstarter’s CEO since 2022, intentionally tailors job interview questions to focus on traits like self-awareness and ego control, he says. He asks about moments when the candidate got something wrong, or did something that failed.

His theory: No one has a perfect career, so someone who has difficulty discussing their faults may not know how to take accountability for their mistakes.

“You can really tell,” says Taylor. “The people that aren’t self-aware, they really struggle with this.”

Hiring managers commonly ask other questions to root out self-awareness, too. Ex-Google VP Claire Hughes Johnson asks candidates “how their colleagues would describe them. If they only say good things, I probe what constructive feedback they’ve received,” she wrote for Make It last year.

“Then I’ll say, ‘And what have you done to improve?’ to check their orientation towards learning and self-improvement, and to see whether they’ve taken that feedback to heart,” she continued.

Hughes Johnson listens closely for two words throughout any interviewee’s answers: Too many “I”s signify a lack of humility, and too many “we”s mean an inability to take credit appropriately.

To build your self-awareness, especially at work, consider asking your manager and colleagues directly about your strengths, neuroscientist and Columbia Business School instructor Juliette Han recommends. Which of your skills help the people around you the most? Which ones should you use more often?

“You can have all the technical skills and charisma in the world, but if you’re completely oblivious of yourself, how you come across and interact in the world, it’s a lot harder to build strong relationships, interact with your boss and co-workers and deepen the friendships you need to truly succeed,” Han told Make It last year.

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In 2017, Leena Pettigrew was gifted her first houseplant — a golden Pothos, notoriously easy to care for — and killed it.

Five years later, she tried again. She and her husband Marquise were redecorating their home in Houston, and they needed to fill its empty corners, she says. She drove to Lowes and bought a couple of succulents.

The hobby blossomed into an obsession, and then a side hustle: After her home became “overrun” with 8-feet-tall Monsteras, she looked for ways to sell her extra houseplants online. She found home décor marketplace website Palmstreet, and started auctioning off her plants on livestreams there last June, she says.

From July 2023 to July 2024, Pettigrew brought in nearly $148,600 in revenue, or an average of $12,380 per month, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. She stores up to 1,000 plants at a time in her garage, she says.

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Pettigrew, 44, works about 20 hours per week sourcing, selling and shipping the plants — in addition to her full-time I.T. job, where she makes roughly $90,000 a year, she says. She also is a paid consultant for Palmstreet, where she helps train new sellers.

The side hustle is profitable enough to replace Marquise’s former full-time income, they say. The couple now runs the Palmstreet side hustle together, along with five contract employees, from their garage-turned-greenhouse.

Here’s how Pettigrew built and maintains her lucrative side hustle:

To develop her green thumb, Pettigrew spent a lot of time on YouTube, she says: She and her husband would lay in bed on their phones, watching plant-care and bass-fishing videos, respectively, before going to sleep.

Selling her houseplants proved more of an administrative process, she says. As she unloaded her extras, finding local buyers on Facebook, she realized she enjoyed the interactions. But creating an actual business — sourcing and buying inventory, keeping organized track of each customer sale — took time and effort.

“I spent hours and hours tracking every purchase and expense in spreadsheets,” says Pettigrew.

At PlantCon Houston, a fair for houseplant enthusiasts, she met another seller who convinced her to try Palmstreet, which was called PlantStory at the time. The platform, which promised to take over much of Pettigrew’s administrative work, offered two options: a traditional online store and a livestreamed auction system, where she could sell plants on camera in real time.

Pettigrew listed a couple plants on her online store, but taking photos and writing descriptions for each one took time. She tried the livestream feature, and her on-camera presence felt awkward and stiff — until Marquise, who was arranging plants next to Pettigrew, started making jokes.

He made Pettigrew laugh, which made her appear more at home to the livestream’s 55 viewers, the couple says. That auction lasted about four hours, and sold 53 plants, according to a Palmstreet spokesperson.

Two months and several successful livestreams later, the couple sat down to develop a more comprehensive business plan, says Pettigrew.

Today, Pettigrew sells roughly 100 houseplants per livestream. With an established audience and reputation, she can sell larger, more expensive plants, she says: starting at $30, rather than her old starting price of $5. Her Monsteras go for upwards of $115 each.

The extra income allowed Marquise, who now occasionally hosts his own livestreams, to mostly step away from his full-time job: running an auto repair shop co-owned by the couple. He still works about six hours per week there, largely for friends and family who “coax” him to take their appointments, says Pettigrew.

Running the auto shop full-time was stressful, Marquise says. Employees were dependent on the couple for their livelihood, and customers were often unhappy — concerned about their car, the bill or when they could get back to work.

In contrast, managing contract workers for Pettigrew’s side hustle — she started hiring people this past spring — is a less stressful experience, she says. The workers only rely on them for part-time work, so the business’ success doesn’t feel life-and-death. The job is less labor intensive, and the customers are largely easier to work with, says Pettigrew.

Together, the couple has five streams of income: Pettigrew’s I.T. job, Palmstreet selling and consulting, the auto shop, and a virtual mechanic gig Marquise picked up with his spare time.

The money helps keep the auto shop open. It’s also recently funded a couple weekend trips around Texas to preserve their sanity, they say: When you both work from home, with your side hustle in your garage, it can be hard to unplug.

If the side hustle ever outpaces her full-time salary, Pettigrew wants to sell the auto shop, move to Florida, open her own greenhouse and hire enough staff for her and Marquise to only need part-time work. It could happen within the next year or two, she says.

They’d spend their remaining time on other passions, like volunteer preaching work, adds Pettigrew.

Clarification: This story has been updated to reflect that Pettigrew says her reputation on Palmstreet helps her sell more larger, expensive plants.

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Before he got married six years ago, Antonio, now 29, was responsible about managing debt. He used credit cards, but paid them off in full each month. 

After he and Emi, 32, got married, he bought her a $3,000 ring, which he says was the first purchase he knew he wouldn’t be able to pay off right away, he told self-made millionaire and money expert Ramit Sethi on a recent episode of his “I Will Teach You to be Rich” podcast. Their last names were not used.

When Sethi asked how long it took him to pay it off, “it snowballed,” Antonio said. “I couldn’t even tell you.”

From there, the couple fell into a vicious debt cycle, racking up thousands on credit cards, paying them off — often with tools like personal loans or other financing options — and then finding themselves back in debt shortly after. They once paid off $77,000 in credit card debt using Emi’s emergency savings.

“The feeling of bad never stopped,” Emi said of the debt cycle. “We never got past it, but I don’t think there has been a day since then that we haven’t talked about finances or stressed about finances or prayed. It’s been a snowball effect since.”

The couple had made huge strides in bettering their financial situation by the time they spoke with Sethi. They’d paid off their credit card debt, but still owed $60,000 in student loans and only had $1,500 in savings. 

Here’s how they wound up in a years-long battle with debt and how they plan to avoid more turmoil in the future.

Like many couples interviewed on Sethi’s podcast, Emi and Antonio have a problem talking about money. Antonio previously handled all the couple’s finances, including paying the bills and keeping an eye on the budget, while Emi said she had her “head in the sand.”

As a therapist herself, Emi has a deep understanding of psychology and how it translates to her behavior. “But when it comes to money, I do not know. I can’t self-analyze,” she said on the podcast. “I can’t figure out why my relationship with money is what it is. There’s a blind spot there.”

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Putting all the financial responsibility on Antonio exacerbated their problems because Emi would continue to spend money Antonio knew they didn’t have.

Speaking with Sethi helped Antonio open up about wanting her to be a partner in their finances. In response, Emi made a commitment to educating herself to feel more empowered about money so she can be a good teammate.

The couple admittedly has an overspending problem. But they aren’t splurging on travel or luxury cars. It’s smaller line items, like going out to eat and buying things for their young daughter, on top of high fixed costs that sent Emi and Antonio into the red.

Antonio said he struggles to say “no” when his family wants things or he wants to do things for them.

“Our track record speaks for itself,” he said. “For one reason or another, even [though] I was in charge of the finances … whether it be my overspending or not making enough, we still ended up in debt again and again and again.” 

Acknowledging all of this out loud helped the couple realize Antonio had a knowledge gap when it came to financial decisions that may not have been the best for their family, such as refinancing their home to pay off credit cards and auto debt. 

After trimming down their fixed costs to as low as they could realistically get, Sethi said their “easy options” are gone. But they both have the capacity to increase their incomes, which Sethi said should be their main objective to help pay down the rest of their debt and boost their savings.

Though they’ve made progress toward getting out of debt, Emi and Antonio fear they’ll fall back into their old ways, the way they have before. Their pattern of overspending has been and will be difficult to break because it’s been sneaky in the past, Sethi said.

“What I see is a series of mundane day-to-day decisions which people make because they’re easy and they don’t understand how to connect today’s decision to tomorrow’s consequence,” he said.

They can make a change, he added, “if the stakes are high enough.”

He asked the couple to consider their daughter and how she might react in a few years down the road if they don’t break their debt cycle. Emi said they would look unstable as a couple. ”‘My parents aren’t good with money,’” Antonio imagined their daughter would think.

“She’ll tell herself that she’s not good at it,” Emi said. “She’ll put her head in the sand. She’ll avoid it. And she’ll say, ‘That’s for my partner. That’s for my dad. That’s not for me.’ And I don’t want that for her.”

The couple left Sethi with plans to make some serious changes to tackle the rest of their student debt and boost their emergency savings. 

“No more avoiding,” Emi said.

Check out the full episode here.

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The cost of a college education — long touted as a requirement for a fulfilling, high-paying job — has soared over the last couple of decades, stoking skepticism among Gen Z about the true value of a four-year degree. 

As the youngest generation in the workforce debates the merits of a college education, more 20-somethings are gravitating to blue-collar careers. 

Salary increases and new technologies in fields from welding to manufacturing are helping blue-collar jobs shed the image of being dirty, menial work as a shortage of skilled tradespeople, brought on as older workers retire, creates opportunities for young adults.

Skilled trade professions including electricians, plumbers and mechanics are seeing a gradual uptick in the number of workers between the ages of 18 and 25 joining these fields, according to Gusto data exclusively shared with CNBC Make It. 

The security and prospect of steadily growing earnings offered by these jobs make them even more attractive to Gen Zers, who are starting their careers facing a much tougher job market than in recent years.

Many Gen Zers are finding fulfillment, stability, and, in many cases, financial security by getting into skilled trades.

When Crist Morillon was 16, she signed up for an auto shop class at her high school in Phoenix, Arizona thinking it’d be a fun elective — not the start to a career that, 10 years later, would help her buy her first home and achieve financial freedom.

Morillon, 27, says she “instantly fell in love” with working under the hood of different cars and the challenge of troubleshooting a new problem every day. 

Once Morillon graduated high school, she decided to skip college and pursue a full-time career as an automotive technician. 

“I didn’t want to spend another four years sitting behind a desk learning,” she says. “I knew I wanted to work with cars, and I didn’t need a bachelor’s degree to do that.” 

She enrolled in a one-year vocational school program at the Universal Technical Institute in Avondale, Arizona, where she received an associate occupational studies degree in automotive technologies. 

The associate’s degree program, which cost about $33,000, taught Morillon how to diagnose car issues, assemble and disassemble engines and repair brake systems, among other skills. 

Morillon was awarded a $15,000 scholarship to attend the program, so she spent about $18,000 to become a certified technician — less than a third of the average cost of getting a bachelor’s degree in the U.S. 

She graduated in 2017 and immediately landed a job as a service assistant at Tesla, which recruited students on campus. Within a year, she was promoted to service technician. 

Morillon worked at Tesla for about four years and in 2021 joined auto manufacturer Lucid Motors as a service technician, where she continues to work today. She earns about $78,000 a year.

While the average automotive technician earns about $57,000 a year, more experienced professionals can earn upwards of $100,000, according to ZipRecruiter data — an income bracket Morillon expects to hit by the time she turns 30.

Working in a skilled trade has helped her hit financial milestones sooner than her peers, including buying her first car and home at 24.

High housing costs and mortgage rates continue to push homeownership, which has long been a cornerstone of the American dream, out of reach for young adults.

It’s a dream Morillon says she “wouldn’t have been able to achieve” had she attended college and pursued a white-collar profession instead. 

“I would probably still be living at my parents’ house and paying off student loans,” she adds. “Instead, I’m able to financially support myself, my parents and my younger sister when they need it.”

She continues: “This is a career that can provide you with the kind of job security and stability that lasts a lifetime. The peace of mind that comes with that is priceless.” 

Some Gen Z entrepreneurs are finding success in launching trade businesses.

Chase Gallagher, 23, is the founder and CEO of CMG Landscaping in Uwchlan Township, Pennsylvania. His business broke $1 million in annual revenue last year.

He started mowing his neighbors’ lawns when he was 12 years old for $35 a pop — within four years, that after-school side hustle was netting him more than $50,000 a year.

The return on investment of a college degree seemed “smaller and smaller” as Gallagher approached high school graduation. 

“I would’ve had to pay for my education and lose four revenue-producing years … I didn’t see the benefit of spending money if I could be building up my business and wealth instead,” says Gallagher, who lives in the suburbs of Philadelphia. 

He adds: “One of the smartest decisions I ever made was not going to college and using that time to invest in my business instead.”

In 2018, Gallagher hired his first employees and rented a commercial space near his parents’ house for $300 a month to store his tools and pickup trucks. 

He moved out of his parents’ house when he was 19 and, after renting an apartment for a year, bought his first house with his earnings from CMG Landscaping.

Now, Gallagher’s landscaping business has nine employees, and does “everything from stormwater management and drainage work to pavers and lighting.” After deducting business expenses and taxes, Gallagher’s take-home pay is about $250,000 a year. 

Construction is facing a hiring crunch for skilled workers in the U.S. including carpenters and landscapers, giving young, ambitious people entering these fields, like Gallagher, a chance to fast-track their career growth and earning potential.

And trade businesses often have low start up costs, Gallagher points out, as you don’t need a physical storefront and can rent equipment. His first purchases for the landscaping business included a $2,400 lawn mower and a utility trailer that cost $700.

“I don’t believe I would have achieved the same level of financial security I have now if I decided to attend college when I was 18 instead,” says Gallagher, who notes that he has some friends who spent $200,000 on their college education and are now earning less than $50,000. 

“My head would’ve been spinning if that happened to me,” he says. 

Running a trade business isn’t without its challenges. Gallagher regularly works 80 hours a week, sometimes “closer to 100” during CMG Landscaping’s peak busy season between March and July. 

“There’s no such thing as work-life balance when you’re scaling a trade business,” says Gallagher. “But I’ve avoided burnout by hiring the right team and learning how to delegate responsibilities.” 

Ryan Daniels started working when he was 16 years old. 

He expects to be “semi-retired” before he turns 30, an accomplishment he credits to a skilled trade he learned as a teenager. 

The 22-year-old grew up in Wellington, Florida, a small city in a high-risk hurricane zone. After noticing how difficult it was for his parents and their friends to set up and clean their hurricane shutters, Daniels saw a business opportunity. 

He bought a used pressure washer on Facebook Marketplace for $200 and recruited one of his friends to drive around their neighborhood together, charging people $100 an hour to install or clean the debris off their hurricane shutters. 

What started as a “fun summer job” has since turned into RHI Pressure Washing, a full-fledged business of which Daniels is the founder and owner. 

In 2023, RHI Pressure Washing brought in about $250,000 in revenue, according to financial documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Daniels’ take-home pay was $79,000.

With the help of his parents, Daniels opened a Roth IRA and two brokerage accounts in high school, and split most of his earnings among the three. 

“I’ve had an eye on retirement since I was 17,” he jokes. At this point in his career, Daniels has about $400,000 saved toward retirement. 

Daniels didn’t intend to build a career in the skilled trades. 

He started classes at the University of Florida but left after his freshman year. 

“I never felt passionate about attending college, I just felt like I was going through the motions of what the adults in my life expected of me,” he recalls. “But once I got there, I figured out that I didn’t want to spend four years doing something that I wasn’t 100% committed to or believed in.” 

He left college and committed to scaling RHI Pressure Washing from a side hustle to a full-time business, hiring three employees and adding new services including roof and gutter cleaning. 

Right now, Daniels works 35 hours a week, but he’s planning to reduce his hours in the next few years and work part-time until he feels ready for full retirement.

Learning a trade can offer a quick path to careers with high earning potential and consistent demand — the financial stability and job security that merits can help you retire early, says Daniels.

Sure, Daniels says, there are some corporate jobs where early retirement is possible. But he’s quick to point out that blue-collar careers can also offer more predictable hours, a less competitive atmosphere and the satisfaction of working with your hands.

“I much prefer the physical exhaustion of manual labor over the mental toll of working long hours on a computer,” says Daniels. “I think more people are realizing you can be happy and successful in either path. Attending college and getting a job from there isn’t the right choice for everyone.”

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Success means never being satisfied, says Emery Wells, the CEO and co-founder of video collaboration software tool Frame.io.

Three years ago, Wells sold his business to Adobe for $1.275 billion, a culmination of seven years of hard work building and perfecting his software platform. Pulling off a billion-dollar exit can be life-changing, but Wells was soon back at work and thinking about what comes next, he says.

If anything, the sale made Wells think about “just how relative success is,” he tells CNBC Make It. And meeting other successful entrepreneurs led him to believe that he isn’t alone.

“I think one of the traits of highly successful people is really never being satisfied or never thinking you’re done,” Wells says.

You can always celebrate how far you’ve come. The most successful people also tend to seek out discomfort, like learning a difficult new skill to advance their career, and constantly hold themselves to high standards to strive for excellence, Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant wrote for Make It last year.

“Somehow, we have the ability [that] no matter what level of success you achieve, you’re always looking at the next thing that you can do,” says Wells.

As a teenager growing up in Miami, Wells dreamed of a career in the film industry. He skipped college and, at age 19, moved to New York to bartend while honing his filmmaking skills, with an eye on picking up freelance gigs as a video editor.

After years of struggling to pay his bills, a rash decision to buy a $17,500 digital camera paved the way for Wells to open a boutique video post-production business called Katabatic Digital. Owning the camera, an industry-changing piece of technology, gave Wells plenty of work: By 2014, Katabatic brought in more than $1 million in annual revenue from clients like Coca-Cola and Pfizer.

Wells could have continued with Katabatic, making a good living, for the rest of his career. Instead, he and Katabatic engineer John Traver started tinkering with software coding in their spare time — hoping to build a piece of software they could sell for big money, Wells says.

Their first real project together, a software platform for people to collaboratively give feedback on videos throughout the post-production process, was supposed to be a “smaller idea” for learning how to build and sell an app, says Wells. Afterwards, they’d “swing for the fences and do something really huge.”

The project became Frame.io, which grew bigger than they’d imagined, raising more than $80 million in funding before selling to Adobe for an eye-popping figure. Wells initially considered the deal life-changing, he says — until he realized that among other tech entrepreneurs who’d sold their companies for billions, his success was relatively small.

“I was like, ‘Well, I’m not actually successful in this group of people,’” says Wells. “That’s a wild thing … ‘Am I king of the world? Not at all.’”

Having sold a billion-dollar startup, Wells says he’s no longer “super motivated by trying to achieve some new financial level.” Rather, his current motivation — as CEO of a company now owned by Adobe — revolves more around his own creative desires, and his ability to influence and impact other people.

“I love building stuff. I love being creative. And I actually really love making software,” Wells says. “So there’s just an internal motivation to build something [and] then see people use it. Can I have more impact? Can I reach more people?”

In that sense, Wells is following in the footsteps of entrepreneurs like Richard Branson, who told Make It earlier this year that a person’s reputation should be defined by “what you create,” not their net worth. The self-made billionaire’s ventures have often led to financial success, but he was adamant that money was never his motivating goal.

“Paying the bills at the end of the year is important, but what entrepreneurs are doing all over the world today — and the only reason they’re succeeding — is that they’re making a difference in other people’s lives,” said Branson. “And that’s all that really matters.”

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