Create Value

The moment you were born, society expected you to create value. Yet nobody ever clearly told you how to do that, or even what value actually is.

You went to school, and they expected you to create value, but they never explained what value meant.

Your boss and your clients expect value from you as well, but again, they don’t tell you what value is.

Bitcoin is worth almost $100,000, yet Warren Buffett considers it worthless. How is it possible that they don’t agree on the value of Bitcoin?

Value is a perceived capacity to satisfy a need, desire, or constraint for a specific observer in a specific context.

Value is in the eye of the beholder within a particular context. For example, if you give gold to your dog, he won’t care. To him, a bone is far more valuable than all the gold in the world.

There’s a saying: don’t give pearls to pigs. Pigs don’t care about pearls, they want food. That’s what’s valuable to them.

A book can be extremely valuable to a reader and completely worthless to a non-reader.

So how can you create value if you don’t even know what value really is?

Not everything in life has to be clearly defined. For example, if I asked you to define music, you probably wouldn’t be entirely sure. Yet that doesn’t stop you from creating music.

Most musicians don’t know exactly what music is, but they know they enjoy creating it and playing within it.

You go with the flow. You act in life according to how you feel and see what emerges.

This is the artist’s way: finding meaning in action, meaning in discovery, meaning in unveiling.

Then there is the marketing mindset. This approach focuses on finding what people want and giving it to them.

A marketer asks people what they want, what they find valuable, what they care about, and then tries to build it for them and sell it.

This is what startup founders often do. They research, build a minimum viable product, test it in the market, and see whether people actually want it. Through trial and error and constant feedback, they refine the product.

Society rewards value creators.

For example, imagine you have two new neighbors. One is highly productive, in just three months, he builds a new house. A house is something inherently valuable; since the beginning of time, people have needed shelter for safety and survival.

Your other neighbor is a monk who meditates all day long, sitting on his pillow, seemingly doing nothing. Since doing nothing appears to offer no value to society, you might start disliking this neighbor.

Whether you like it or not, people want something from you. They want you to satisfy their needs or desires, whether for money, safety, entertainment, sex, or anything else.

They expect you to serve some purpose, and this is what makes you valuable. The more people who expect something from you, the more valuable you become.

Monks and monk-like individuals represent an anomaly in the system. They demonstrate that survival is actually possible outside a framework that teaches you from birth that you must produce value in order to survive.

People love competitions because it’s always crystal clear who won. In contrast, you cannot easily judge monks against one another. Who is the better monk? Who meditates better? Who has achieved a deeper meditative state? It’s impossible to measure inner states.

This is why your idea only becomes valuable to society the moment you put it on paper and bring it into reality. That’s when others can actually judge your ideas.

Your story or book is only valuable when it’s written, when it’s materialized in real life. If the book remains inside your head, it’s absolutely valueless to society.