Creating Your Own Scarcity
Being Valuable in Your Field
There’s a genius in everyone. There’s a genius in you.
Scarcity is known as a fundamental problem in economics. The more scarce the commodity, the higher its value. Although there are more advanced thoughts on this, and a few exceptions but… let’s keep it simple. Bottom line is, I can tell how valuable you are by how available you are.
Paul Samuelson (America’s first Nobel Prize winner for economics) in an attempt to solve this fundamental problem gives deep insights by proposing three questions.
What to produce?
How to produce?
For whom to produce?
When answered, these question seeks to solve the scarcity problem — the fact that there is limited scarce resources and unlimited human want (often regarded as insatiable).
The uncommon thought is that as much as these questions seek to solve scarcity, in some way, they create it!
Here’s what I’m saying, to increase your value, you have to be scarce, literarily create your own scarcity, and to do that you might want to answer Samuelson’s three scarcity questions. Maybe in another way and order…
What to produce?
It’s the clarity question! A question of your core skills, your chosen career path, your job, the value you chose to offer, the problem you are solving, what you want to be known for.
This is only a start because chances are there’s someone else on your career path. I design, for example, and there are millions of us on the planet! But it gets deeper…
For whom to produce?
The fundamental idea of scarcity is that you’re not available to everyone, hence, who’s your audience? Your scarcity should be designed to attract a set of people so who are they and where can you find them? What industry, financial status, or location?
How to produce?
This is the difference-maker. How scarce you are will be a function of how you do your thing. How you offer your service, the quality, your messaging, your packaging, your pricing, your colors, your values, your policies, etc.
This is where the work lies, and you have to choose to do the work. That’s where your difference is.
Your genius is on the extra mile, so is your scarcity and extreme value.
Not just that you do it better but you do it in a way no one else can. When people can’t think of a replacement for you, you are scarce. You are a genius.
Let’s close this,
Clarity, direction, quality, and difference creates scarcity, it brings out your genius.
I’ll write about genius tomorrow, I hope you read.
