When you ship something to another country, there are a lot of different issues that are transparent to you, but that someone has got to deal with. For example, did you know that customs has to review every single item that passes into or out of this country on a plane, train or ship? And did you know that, among the billions of items that are shipped into and out of the country every single day, roughly five percent of them must be randomly gone through, often by hand? This is a lot of work, and it requires special skills. While many people never really talk about it, having the necessary skills to facilitate international commerce is a very good way to have both a healthy paycheck and the opportunity to receive those paychecks for a long time to come.
Consider how much money is on the line here. Every day, all around the world, the are billions of items moving around. And every time an item passes into, out of, or even through a country, there is paper work which needs to be done. If you would like to test this out, just try building a personal aircraft and flying over a border- if you do not end up with a military plane “Escort,” you would either have to have some mad radar jamming capabilities, or be going into a country where nobody really cares enough to protect the place (not many countries are like that).
So when you consider what to do for a profession, you might very well consider learning more about international trade and customs. After all, the usual rule of life is that the more value you add to somebody else, the more value they are going to put into your compensation. And while you might not make your first billion this way, you can definitely make your first million over time. You can even change the world a bit.