I was once a junior judge in a miniature painting competition, and one ruling stuck with me: it’s not about who put in the most effort in a competition entry, it’s about who produced the best result.
That seemed wrong. The point of the competition in question was to reward effort – so why aren’t we judging based on visible signs of effort?
At the time, I didn’t get the answer, it was all based on the intuition of the experienced head judge. Much later in life, I understood why he was right.
By awarding the best result, we WERE rewarding the most effort, but not the “local” effort made on the single miniature, the “global”, total, aggregate effort a contestant put into honing their craft during their life up until now.
It’s like a relay race, where the individual results of runners get added to each other, and just because a runner dominated one part of the race doesn’t necessarily mean their team is now winning.
You can produce great results with little effort now because of all of the “insight dividends” you got from the effort you made in the past.
So even if you now can produce the same results in half the time as many others can, you fully deserve to be paid more than them. You actually put more effort than them in total, just not on this particular project.
To inspire respect, showcase signs of your dedication to your craft, rather than one project. It works better.