Valuable Work

“Which is worth more, Kind of Blue from Miles Davis, or the third Boston album? It depends on your taste. I hope we can agree, though, that the fact that Miles spent four days on his album and Tom spent eight years on his is irrelevant…Freelancers are close to their work, and it’s easy to tell ourselves that what we sell is our effort. That’s an error. There’s rarely a correlation between effort and value. Even if you charge by the hour, you’re not selling hours. You’re selling something clients can use. Clients will pay more for something useful than something that was difficult.” -Seth Godin

“It took me a few seconds to draw it, but it took me 34 years to learn how to draw it in a few seconds.” -Paula Scher, world class designer on being paid $1.4 million for the Citibank logo

Nobody cares how hard you worked. Everyone works hard. Or at least thinks they do (See various “#thegrind” memes on social media). Hard work is almost a commodity.

What isn’t a commodity, what people do care about and what they will pay you well for, is the value you create for them.

The amount of time or hard work it took to create that value is irrelevant.