The Law of Supply and Demand, and Why it Can Change Your Life
Pretty well the first thing you learn in Economics 101 is the Law of Supply and Demand. In really simple terms, it says that scarcity of a good or service drives up the price while an oversupply of the good or service will suppress the price. On the demand side, high demand drives up price, low demand suppresses it. Simple enough, right?
If you’re the supplier, you want to be in the place where you are the only one (a monopoly) or one of very few (an oligopoly). With a given number of consumers, you get to charge much more than if you were only one of a limitless number of suppliers. This explains why a hand-crafted violin from a renowned maker commands an astronomical price, but if you’re prepared to settle for a plastic knockoff pounded out in a mass production facility, you can have one for not much money.
So here’s the thing: do you want to be one of thousands of suppliers of a service, or do you want to be the only one? Do you want to be the “all things to all men”, or the sought-after provider of the hard-to-get one-of-a-kind? And assuming that you press the button which says “I want to be the provider of the hard-to-get one-of-a-kind”, how do you maximize the demand for your service so that your time and effort command the highest price?
The answers are complex and will require a whole book, which I promise I will finish. But in simple terms, the answer is something like this:
1. Focus your efforts on something that you do really well, something that you truly enjoy, something that others recognize as your hallmark activity.
2. Ensure that everything you do builds and enhances your reputation, and that your reputation spreads far and wide.
3. Your growing reputation will attract willing and eager clients who are prepared to pay you well for your unique services.
4. These people will bring you new, interesting, and exciting work which will provide you yet more opportunities to do what you were born and trained to do, and that will further burnish your reputation.
5. Because you are being well compensated to do work which energizes you and provides you with time you can spend on you, you have the time and freedom to publish and speak and volunteer and be interviewed and do all the things that enhance your reputation.
6. Bring around you assistants and associates and partners and systems and technology which enable you to do all of the foregoing without distraction or noise. For each of these, either they support your growing reputation and career, or you shouldn’t waste time on them.
Or you could just schlep through life…