Admit It: You are Not a Creator

I was in my school Year 6, my teacher gave me a life lesson in disguise. He was just teaching boring economics and its rules.

“We can’t create anything, we can’t destroy anything. We can only change forms.” he said. I asked, “We can’t even destroy?”. He said, “Okay, how will you destroy this pen? Burn it, and it will turn into gases and ashes, but it will be there.”

It just made so much sense. Then I asked, when we create, what do we really add? He said “utility”. Buzzword aside, “utility” is everything.

The economics definition of utility is: well, screw it, you don’t give a shit. Just read “VALUE”.

Add “VALUE”, this is all you can do and that’s enough.

In other words, take something crap, add shit that matters and you get value.

This value is what people buy, this value expands our horizon.

To make it more complicated, a teacher was teaching crap theories. A student stacked his thoughts, added random shit. And now there is a valuable blog post.

That was too much.

So let’s talk wine. I don’t drink, but Stanford Graduate School of Business recruited 11 males who drank, to taste five wines.

Subjects found the wines tasted wildly different. The premium grade, more upmarket wines scored way better.

But the problem was, there were not five wines, there were only three. They were just packaged differently.

The first wine was in its real bottle with a price of $5. And was repeated again with a fake $45 price packaging. The second wine was packaged with its actual $90 price and was repeated by a fictitious $10 tag. And the third one was a distraction with its own packaging.

All 11 participants said they tasted five different wines. And the expensive ones tasted better.

So you know you can add value internally. Now you know you can add value externally. This is perceived value. And when you can top perceived value on tangible value, you’ve struck “diamond”, my friend.

So, you can’t create, you can’t destroy. But what you can do is form, shape and mould things. And when you stack them up, you can turn carbon into diamonds.