Mountains of Arizona
Sunny 59 Degrees
3:52 p.m.
When you’re skilled at something, it’s pretty easy to think that’s the important part of the puzzle.
I thought this back in music school when I had pipe organ skillz 🙂
But if you look around, there are plenty of people with skills who aren’t exactly living on Easy Street.
Being talented or developing some sort of skill IS important, of course. But it’s pretty easy to take a really valuable skill and make it completely worthless.
There are actually TWO situations that can get you there. I’ve done both!
- If no one knows about what you do, you lose.
- If no one understands what you do, you lose.
If you’re in a situation where the only way you can SHOW people what you do is AFTER they hire you, that’s a pretty tough spot to be in.
Who would buy something if they only got to see it AFTER they paid for it?
But this is the situation that so many service providers (e.g. consultants!) are in.
“Hire me, then you’ll get to see what I can do!”
Nope.
And so the real work is taking your magic and discovering how to communicate it to the world.
How do you show them?
That question leads to even more questions. Like what exactly is it that they’re going to see?
And that leads you to start thinking about how you do what you do, why you do it, and all of the things that make it work the way it does.
You start dissecting your magic so that you can take all of the parts and figure out how to communicate how your “magic box” works to the rest of the planet.
You are basically articulating a framework to explain to the world the journey they go on when they work with you. Where do you start, where do you end up, what happens in the middle, what does it look like, what does it feel like?
When someone asks you what you charge, you can totally answer that question with “it depends.”
When someone asks you what you do, answering THAT with “it depends” just sends people running away.