Excerpts below:
Marketers like to work on the demand side—take what’s in demand, make it cheaper, run a lot of ads, make a profit. If you can increase demand for what you already make, a lot of problems take care of themselves. It’s the promise of the typical marketing organization: Give us money, and we’ll increase demand.
There’s an overlooked alternative, though. If you can offer a scarce and coveted good or service that others can’t, you win. What is both scarce and in demand? Things that are difficult: difficult to conceive, to convey, to make. Sometimes difficult even, at first, to sell—maybe an unpopular idea or a product that’s ahead of its time. In fact, just about the only thing that is not available in unlimited supply in an ever more efficient, connected world is the product of difficult work.
The only refuge from the race to the bottom? Difficult work. Your only alternative is to create something scarce, something valuable, something that people will pay more for.
What’s difficult? Creating beauty is difficult, whether it’s the tangible beauty of a brilliant innovation or the intangible essence of exceptional leadership. Beauty exists in an elegant and novel approach to a problem.
People who can do difficult work will always be in demand. And yet our default is to do the easy work, busywork, work that requires activity, not real effort or guts. That’s true of individuals, and it’s true of companies.No longer. The world will belong to those who create something scarce, not something cheap. The race to the top has just begun.
