Recently, a friend texted me to gripe about the cost of a haircut. (I suspect I was the recipient of his texts less because of my fashion sense than the fact that I've cut my own hair1 for a few years now.)
"$60?!" he complained. "I could do it myself for half the price!"
And he's right about the numbers, really -- depending on equipment costs, he'd almost certainly be in the black after just a haircut or two.
But I wasn't the wholly sympathetic ear he was hoping for. Why? Because I wasn't sure he was looking at this whole situation right.
Consider the old man and his hammer:
A giant ship engine failed. The ship's owners tried one expert after another, but none of them could figure but how to fix the engine.
Then they brought in an old man who had been fixing ships since he was young. He carried a large bag of tools with him, and when he arrived, he immediately went to work. He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom.
Two of the ship's owners were there, watching this man, hoping he would know what to do. After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurched into life. He carefully put his hammer away. The engine was fixed!
A week later, the owners received a bill from the old man for ten thousand dollars.
"What?!" the owners exclaimed. "He hardly did anything!" So they wrote the old man a note saying, "Please send us an itemized bill."
The man sent a bill that read:
Tapping with a hammer: $2.00
Knowing where to tap: $9,998.00
As the old man and his hammer remind us, "Effort is important, but knowing where to make an effort makes all the difference."
Considering our haircut example, we can put it another way: There's a big difference between paying for labor and paying for expertise.
And this way goes beyond haircuts, too.
Looking for a logo for your new website? You can pick up some graphics on the cheap, or you can hire a designer for a fair bit more. The path you should choose ultimately depends on what you need: Do you merely want an image file that fits what you think you want, or do you want to hire experience and expertise that might suggest directions that would never have occurred to you?
Looking for a nice meal? You can go just about anywhere and order off a fixed menu, or you can opt for something like omakase -- essentially, trusting the chef's extensive experience to craft something just for you. Here, too, the "right" approach depends on what you're looking to hire: Labor (the manpower behind food prep) or expertise (the thinking behind real cuisine).
There's no right or wrong answer, perhaps -- but it does seem to me that there are right and wrong questions.
It is all too easy to confuse labor and expertise. But having blundered through my fair share of mangled, self-inflicted haircuts -- and wide-eyed, judiciously silent glances from the girlfriend -- take my advice: There is an ocean of difference between these things, and price is just one part of the comparison.
I'm just the right combination of frugal, balding, and "Screw it, who cares what I look like?" that this is the perfect solution for me. ↩︎
prguitarman
stormborns
dailybridgerton
annaxmalina
tangentwithtanner
gummygunk
