December 17, 2020

Why isn’t air expensive?

You can’t live without air for more than a few minutes.

You CAN live your whole life without diamonds.

So why is air free and diamonds are expensive?

Economists will tell you that air (and water and other items that satisfy our basic physiological needs) is not expensive because of marginal utility blah blah blah...

But it’s simpler than that...

The reason that air isn’t expensive is that people don’t want air.

(Or maybe more accurately, people don’t want for air.)

Unless you’re an astronaut or a scuba diver, your constant underlying expectation is that air will be freely available to you.

Therefore it never occurs to you to want it.

And people don’t pay for stuff they don’t want, no matter how much they might need them.

Here’s the thing...

Make sure you’re selling stuff people want, not what (you think) they need.

Yours,

—J

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