Hippie CEO Life #08 - Pay for Value, Not Time
June 3, 2022
“But You Did That in Thirty Seconds!!!”
There is a famous story about the artist Pablo Picasso, and i don’t know if it’s true or not but it does illustrate a very important point about how we tend to perceive value.
The story goes something like this…
There was a person eating in a restaurant who looked over and was surprised to see Pablo Picasso sitting at the table next to them. This person proceeded to ask Picasso to scribble something for them on a napkin and mentioned they would be happy to pay whatever he felt the drawing was worth. Picasso quickly obliged, handed the drawing over, and said, “That will be $10,000.”
The person was shocked, exclaiming, “But you did that in 30 seconds!”
To which Picasso replied, “No, it has taken me 40 years to do that.”
You are a solver of complex problems. You are an innovator. You are a prolific creator. The more experience and expertise you gain, the more your ability to create greater value in less time increases.
But in our current work culture, this is very, VERY problematic!
Our current culture of work, informed by highly-efficient factory work, tends to value time spent far more than any other measure of value. Just take a look around, how are you and your colleagues being judged on the value you provide to your employer? Is it any surprise that we wear a full calendar of meetings as a badge of honor? Are you shocked that the “worked all night and weekend” employee is seen as the hero?
Very few people slow down enough to ask the question, “Yeah but, what was solved? What was created” No, all we care about is “Well, how long did it take?”
When you take your car to a mechanic, do you want to pay them for how long it takes them to fix a problem or do you want to pay them for the value that is associated with fixing the problem? And on the flip side, if a highly experienced mechanic can fix the problem in 15 minutes, that takes an average mechanic 2 hours to fix, isn’t that better for everyone? And should that mechanic be compensated less because the job was completed in less time?
HOURS WORKED, while at some point in our history of work may have been an appropriate measure of value created, it no longer is a good measure for us today. And i would argue that not only is HOURS WORKED a horrible measure of productivity, it’s actually a metric that is primarily responsible for creating poor working conditions, low quality outputs, and high-rates of employee burnout.
You aren’t paying me for the 30 seconds it took me to do that job, you are paying me for the 40 years of experience that has allowed me to create a masterpiece in 30 seconds.
