The last couple of weeks have been crazy and this week is no exception. We’ve got Christmas meetings, rehearsals for the Story conference, and Dan Allender is speaking at an extracurricular event I’ve been coordinating. (Side note: I am a way better cheerleader and vision caster than I am a coordinator. Please remind me of that fact the next time I try to administrate.)
As I was contemplating the week ahead, I was reminded of some words Seth Godin spoke during his bus tour seminar I was able to sit in on last week thanks to Tim Schraeder.
“If it’s [your product, your art, your ___] easy, then it’s not scarce, and if it’s not scarce, it’s not valuable.”
Most of the things that are coming to fruition in the next few days are things I’ve never done before. I’ve never worked with 3D holograms. I’ve never really tried to re-imagine our 7,000 seat space. I’ve never arranged an event for someone a couple thousand miles away. In a word, they are “hard.” But just because they are hard, doesn’t guarantee success.
These events will add value because they were hard to pull off AND because they are scarce, meaning they will only happen a few times for a handful of people. Scarcity in this case is wonderful since it determines our success - a few people have an absolutely amazing experience that they will hopefully talk about. In this case scale and size don’t win. (Of course there are other times when the most amount of value comes because the most amount of people saw your work. But we’re not talking about that today.)
Another thing…
We often talk about success in terms of what amount of value these hard and scarce experiences add to our communities and our organizations, but we don’t always hear of the value it adds to the life of the creators.
To those of you who are doing hard/scarce things, I want to say this: could it be that the value you’re adding to your constituents is far outweighed by the value you’ve added to yourself? You see, knowing that you can do the hard/scarce thing once means that you can do it again. And doing the hard/scarce thing a few more times now means that you can repeat the transformational process both for your community and for yourself.
Keep in mind the scary thing about creating hard, scarce, valuable things is that doing so could make you absolutely invaluable. Creator beware.
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