From a trivial personal story of mine, I did a little bit reflection and connected the following random dots:
- Value based pricing
- The curse of knowledge
- Know your worth
The Story
Recently, I did a little DYI upgrade to my road bike rear cassette from 105 component to Ultegra component CS-R8000. The pretty trivial project only took me 20 min to complete. Nailed it? Far from it! I started my several weeks’ chase of the mysterious noise and jumping around cog #7, while all other cogs worked fine. I tried everything I found from relevant online forum discussions, but nothing helped. I spent a total of more than 3 hours at this point. I brought the bike to the local Gregg’s Cycle shop. It took the technician just 10 minutes to find the tiny mis-alignment of a couple cogs and fixed it right away. This story got me thinking about a few random but related things.
Value Based Pricing
In the context of marketing, 2 typical pricing models are value based pricing and cost based pricing. Business tends to go with cost based pricing because it’s more straight forward and the input is more readily available. However the risk is lost opportunity to capture the value generated by the business. Similar principle applies to individual’s career. In my story, the noisy and jumpy cog #7 that costed me several hours of frustration without a solution is well worth what I paid for the service in my opinion. Value based pricing in this case is way above the cost based calculation based on the technician’s 10 minutes labor.
The Curse of Knowledge
In the context of cognitive science, the curse of knowledge syndrome is pervasive. From the technician’s point of view this problem must be really trivial. However, he may not realize the curse of knowledge might have prevented him from having the accurate sense of the value of his work. I can’t tell for sure about the technician, but I have seen many examples at work, where brilliant engineers did awesome work, but they assume they are trivial, nothing special, and not worth mentioning.
Know Your Worth
Putting the above together and applying in career situation, we have the following takeaways:
- Think about your work in terms of its value and impact instead of the time you put in or the activities you perform.
- Fight the curse of knowledge by creating more awareness of yourself, others, and the environment.
- Reduce career blind spots by seeking feedbacks and getting mentors/managers who invest in growing you.