Basic Economics.

Supply vs demand? Opportunity cost? Scarcity? Let’s go even more basic.

The market is always right.

Regardless of how much effort you put in, the market ultimately decides if you will succeed. If a product is adopted successfully or not, if an advertisement works or not, if an idea spreads or not, it’s right.

It doesn’t matter whether we agree. The market doesn’t take our opinion into consideration (unless you have enormous influence). All we can do is adjust our approach and give the people what they want.

Yet, we can make the market work for us.

In a transactional world, where everything has a price, the only way we can get ahead is to create something remarkable.

It needs to be something different and worthy of attention (hence the remarkability), and it needs to be something that people (i.e. the market) needs. For this we need empathy.

Empathy allows us to shift our perspective to that of the people we want to serve (i.e. our niche in the market), and create something useful for them. This is an act of generosity in itself, but once we introduce it the world (i.e. the market), it will only succeed it the perceived value is greater than the cost (where the cost equals time, money, effort, attention).

It’s just basic economics.