Value is subjective, and people are willing to pay only for the part of your value that they can see. The bad news is, they probably can’t see much. The good news is, you are their most reliable source of information about your own craft.
If the price the client is willing to pay is significantly lower than your perception of the value you provide, you are bound to feel undervalued and underpaid. There are systems that make sure workers don’t get underpaid. Yes, many of them are obsolete, lagging, insufficient, biased, or misguided but they exist, or Read more…
The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay — Henry Ford, Founder, Ford Motor Company. Usually, when we want to explain the value of a service, we focus on the change it would bring to the client – return Read more…
Like any part of an author’s voice, artistic choices can be affected by strange and unexpected boundaries. When I was in high school, we always had the most “interesting” time debating the teacher why the authors of Russian classics like Dostoevsky or Tolstoy felt the need to use five pages just Read more…
What new and exotic variation of a known thing looks vaguely like a crown, and changes people’s lives? If this was the 17th century, the answer would be the pineapple. A single piece would cost a literal fortune just to rent out for a party, where it would just be Read more…
Compared to stone, water is amazingly flexible, and you can do many useful things with it, but you cannot build with it. For all of its amazing properties, its fluid nature works against you when you try to keep it in one place – it simply can’t form a solid Read more…
“Pricing is actually pretty simple… Customers will not pay literally a penny more than the true value of the product.” – Ron Johnson Thing is, the quote can be true – but only in a world where everybody understands everything, which is obviously not planet Earth. An expert’s value is directly proportional to Read more…
Once upon a time, a clever team of experts created a delicious but very special hamburger. It completely lacked conjugate linoleic acid, which they substituted with myofibrillar protein using truly ground-breaking science. But it was expensive to make, and hungry customers simply ignored all conveniently placed information about the dangers of Read more…
The doctor sat back. ‘Fairly straightforward,’ he said, thinking quickly. ‘A case of mortis portalis tackulatum with complications.’ ‘What’s that mean?’ said Chidder. ‘In layman’s terms,’ the doctor sniffed, ‘he’s as dead as a doornail.’ ‘What are the complications?’ The doctor looked shifty. ‘He’s still breathing,’ he said. ‘Look, his Read more…
How do you respond when someone asks you “what do you do?”. If you are like most people, you will answer with a noun: I’m a surgeon. I’m a translator. I’m a CPA. Of course, the noun you use is just a shortcut, a code word for many activities which you regularly do, Read more…
It’s always good to talk about important things. Let me tell you something about the qualities of my best friend: he has two ears, two eyes, and a nose. Are those important? Absolutely. Is mentioning this useful? Absolutely not. There’s a simple test for weeding out these kinds of statements, which often bloat pitches, copy, Read more…