Referring to yesterday's video, I'd like to talk about value - what it is, and how to create it.
Economic value, according to Wikipedia, is a measure of the benefit provided by a good or service to an economic agent. So if you're, say, an entrepreneur, and you produce a good or a service, if that good or service benefits, say, a customer, then it has value. And the more benefitial the good or service is, the more valuable it is. And the more valuable it is, the more you can charge for it.
But know this - you don't have to own a big company or even be an entrepreneur to produce economic value. You can do it as a private person. There are a number of ways to go about it.
- Find where there is chaos or disorder, and bring there order.
- Find something that is broken, and fix it.
- Find someone who needs an extra couple of hands, and offer them.
Examples of number 1 include not only regular cleaning and organizing and finding things but also taking a ball of thread and making a sweater out of it.
Number 2 seems quite straightforward - mend a broken object - but it could also mean listening to someone when they need someone to listen to; mending their mind. And it could also mean taking something that wasn't physically broken to begin with but you add features that make it a more valuable object, like customizing a leather jacket (and then possibly selling it).
Number three is quite interesting. Manpower is in itself quite valuable. For example, lifting a 2-ton timber beam simply cannot be done by one person alone (even with a crane it is close to impossible to get it to the right place without two more people at the beam ends) so by offering to help in a situation like this you provide immense value. You don't have to have a special education to do it.
This is, obviously, not an exhaustive list of ways you can create value, and I challenge you to come up with more ways, ways that take best use of your individual talents. It's quite amazing how valuable you can become by taking advantage of yourself.
RK
