THE RULES OF THE PASSION ECONOMY

RULE #1: PURSUE INTIMACY AT SCALE.

To thrive in the twenty-first century, combine the best of the nineteenth century with the best of the twentieth.

Identify the set of things that you love to do and that you do well. You don’t need to be the best in the world at something. People often succeed because they have a set of various skills that don’t normally go together.

It may be obvious, in an instant, what your particular passion and set of abilities are. Are you great at making vegan food for a crowd? Passionate about finding no-longer-manufactured auto parts? Love to take photos of homes? There is an infinite number of these passion + ability pursuits. You might need to take time and do some soul-searching and experimentation to identify yours. I didn’t learn about mine until I was in my thirties. That special set of skills may not be obvious or something that everyone around you sees. It can be something small—an odd interest or combination of interests, a little voice with a hunch that you can barely hear. The identification of your unique passion is the single most crucial and, often, the hardest part of embracing the Passion Economy. It might be something you make, it might be a kind of service you excel at, or it might be a way to further excel as an employee in a field in which you already work.

Match your passion to the people who most want it. When you have identified that specific passion and set of skills you can offer, you can easily find the people who most want it. They are already self-identified in groups. You may find them through trade magazines or trade groups, online message boards or Instagram accounts. I will give you lots of examples of people turning their passions into profitable businesses and employment. As you’ll see, you may need to get creative and experimental and be willing to reach out to a lot of people—who might, at first, seem uninterested in whatever it is you have to offer. But once you put your passions and abilities together with the right kind of customers, you’ll be amazed by how easy it can be to carve out a profitable niche in this economy.

Once you have those customers (or colleagues), the next step is to listen very closely to their feedback—as well as feedback from those who choose not to be your customers. We no longer live in a “one size fits all” economy. It’s imperative that you constantly hone your products and your skills in response to your customers’ needs.

Listening and matching are both closely related and also sometimes at odds. If you find yourself listening to customers who aren’t right for you and trying desperately to adjust your offering to fit their needs, you are wasting your time and skills. Instead, you should seek other customers, those who are far better matches and whose feedback will help move your business forward or strengthen it. On the other hand, you don’t want to spend all your time seeking a perfect customer match without realizing that it would be better to listen to the near matches, adjust your offering, and make the sale.

RULE #2: ONLY CREATE VALUE THAT CAN’T BE EASILY COPIED.

In the Passion Economy, you can capture value—sell and distribute things—on an unimaginable and unprecedented scale. It’s as simple as selling products on a website or using Twitter to get customers. But you should be careful not to produce value—create a thing that people want—at scale. Creating value at a large volume is something only huge companies can do profitably. They have factories that manufacture countless sneakers or candy bars, studios that produce music or movies, giant firms that consult all over the world. Your value should be created slowly and carefully. Absorbing the significance of this point can be hard. Only focusing your attention on those things that reach a relatively small and strongly opinionated customer base, things that are hard to do, will be worth your while. This is precisely why passion matters so much in this economy. Fortunately, our passions enable us to spend time doing things that we love but others would find hard, even maddening, to focus on. This is perhaps the single most counterintuitive idea in this book: in the current economy, you want to do the opposite of what in the past has usually been considered good business sense. The moment one of your products or services takes off and becomes widely copied, you should begin abandoning it and looking for the next thing.

The more stuff you make or the more clients you take on, the harder it is to maintain excellence and to adapt your products and services in a way that both you and your customers want. Leave scale for the mass market. The Passion Economy is about quality and the conversation you have with your clients.

RULE #3: THE PRICE YOU CHARGE SHOULD MATCH THE VALUE YOU PROVIDE.

Price should drive costs, not the other way around. It took me a long time to understand the significance of this rule. We are wired to think that price is connected to cost. You calculate the cost of the raw materials you use, the time it takes to produce a good or service, you add some amount for profit, and that’s your price. With intangibles, like our time, we look to competitors and charge around whatever it is they do.

This is precisely backward. Think of making a luxury car. You would prefer to have a sense of how much people would pay for a certain degree of luxury before you began choosing the materials to go into the vehicle. You determine the price point, and then you reverse engineer the vehicle in line with those costs that can justify the price. You include the smooth leather but recognize that hand-tooling might bump the car’s cost beyond your optimal price.

This is especially true for our time, though this fact seems particularly hard for people to understand. Think of your accountant. You would probably want that person to be extremely knowledgeable about aspects of tax law that apply to you. You might also hope that this person spends time being creative, thinking of new ways for businesspeople like you to thrive. Those things take time. Now, no accountant can charge people an hourly rate for the minutes he spends wandering through a park thinking creatively. But he can charge an amount, to the right mix of clients, that allows him to spend this time. Knowledge, creativity, time to think: these are the Corinthian leather of the services world. So, rather than complain that the hourly rate you charge doesn’t allow you to spend time improving your knowledge and creativity, charge more and earn that higher amount by spending your time appropriately.

Value is a conversation. In the iconic marketplace, described by Adam Smith in his 1776 book The Wealth of Nations, price is determined by fierce competition. Many producers are creating the same goods and many buyers are looking them over. No buyer or seller controls the process. The price is the result of all those people haggling.

You shouldn’t charge market prices. Market prices are based on the idea that whatever it is you are selling is a commodity that is no better and no worse than what everyone else is selling. Your products and, especially, your services should be unique—so special to your customers that there is no obvious reference point. You should spend time with your clients, pointing out how you are saving them money in other ways, helping them make more money, or making their lives considerably more enjoyable. The price you charge should be the opposite of a fixed amount on a price tag. It should come from frequent discussions with your client.

Passion pricing is a service. The very process of discussing pricing can often be a central part of the service you are providing. When talking with a client about how much value your product or service delivers—how much more money the client makes, how much cost they eliminate—you are helping that client better understand her own business and needs. This is true when an architect or a website designer helps a client understand the value of design choices. We all become better off when we have a richer understanding of the impact of our choices. Part of your expertise, part of what you uniquely know because you have spent so much time thinking about it, is the way your particular passion can add value to your customers’ lives. This value can be calculated in dollar terms or emotional benefit. And helping customers understand the value that your products and services provide is a real service in and of itself.

Pay attention to BATNA. Businesspeople sometimes use the phrase “best alternative to a negotiated agreement,” or BATNA, to understand the implications of not reaching a deal. This is helpful when setting prices. If you have a passion business and are fully in the Passion Economy, then you are offering something unique with no exact competitor. Still, no customer needs to go with you. They can go with someone else—someone, perhaps, not offering the full Passion Economy value but whose product or service is priced so much cheaper that it’s worth it. In setting prices, you should be ambitious, be confident, and, almost certainly, go far higher than you initially imagined possible. You must also pay attention to the alternatives. You should even ask people who don’t choose to use your products or services what they decided to use instead.

Charge a lot and then earn it. A good way to thrust your thinking toward the Passion Economy is to imagine doubling your prices, rates, or salary. This can feel shocking, obnoxious, but it forces you to start imagining what you would need to do—and who you would need to do it for—to deserve twice as much. In some cases, people can immediately double their rates without losing much business. In other cases, the thought experiment of imagining far higher prices helps a person realize that they are selling to the wrong customers. For still others, considering doubling their prices is a prod, prompting someone to realize that she needs to acquire more skills, more education, or a better mix of products.

Realize that your pay may come in things other than money. I know many journalists who could easily earn far more money doing public relations or some other job, but they choose to remain journalists because they love the work, the influence they have, the opportunity to uncover secrets. My parents are both in the arts, and they never made as much money as they might have had they pursued other careers, but they had wonderful, emotionally satisfying working lives, and they wouldn’t have exchanged them for money.

The price you charge should change constantly. Your skills, abilities, and passions shift. Your customers’ needs shift. The nature of the world changes. These are the things that affect price, and since they are constantly changing, you should change your prices with them. By continually evaluating price, you are also forced to examine the products and services you provide, the value they bring to the people who pay you for them, and the potential customers who might value them even more. Price is a simple number, but it tells you how well you are engaging the Passion Economy.

The price you quote shouldn’t change unless the services and products offered change. While your prices should adapt to changes in the value you create, when you quote a price to a customer, you should stick with it. This is more tactical than strategic. One helpful strategy is always to offer three tiers of pricing: a medium tier for the specific set of services the client requested at a price that feels right; a lower tier, which subtracts some of the services but has the advantage of a lower price; and a higher tier at a higher price for far more access. This frames the pricing conversation with your clients, showing them that if they want to pay less, they will get less in exchange.

There is a delicate balance in this process. An initial phase of open conversation makes the value of the relationship clear to the customer. Then comes the moment of price setting, in which the sophisticated pricer shows far less flexibility. In the initial “value conversation,” in which you talk with the person paying you, it makes sense to be open, fluid, and creative, exploring how different price levels will guide the relationship. The second and distinct “pricing conversation,” however, needs to be firmer, less flexible, even filled with some degree of tension and awkwardness. Even when pricing is rooted in value, it can still be a shock to a customer to face the specific numeric reality of the value they have just agreed on. If the pricing conversation isn’t a little bit tense and the price isn’t a bit shocking, you might be pricing too low, in order to avoid even a hint of conflict; you also might not, yet, fully understand or feel confident in the value you provide.

Salary is a price. If you have a job in a company, you are still charging a price; it’s called your salary. All of the pricing rules apply here, too. If you got a job that came with a set salary, then you are being treated as a commodity, equal in value to everyone else who might qualify for that job. Imagine demanding that your salary be doubled. How could you justify such an aggressive request? You probably can’t, because the company that would recognize that value would not be paying you your current salary. This means that you likely have to do two things: go to another company that recognizes your value and find ways to articulate your value more clearly.

The Passion Economy rules for businesses also apply to people with jobs. There are universal qualities that everyone recognizes as having value—being on time, getting along with your colleagues, doing assigned tasks promptly and thoroughly—but that will never differentiate you from your peers. It’s like making a perfectly serviceable but unexceptional loaf of bread. I would never suggest that you start showing up late, acting rudely, and failing in your assignments. Instead, you should identify your unique passions and skills, analyze the needs of others within the company and among your company’s customers, and pinpoint special projects that you, and you alone, can imagine and execute. Some corporate cultures don’t allow for such internal entrepreneurship, but most do, at least to some extent.

The price you charge should feel good to you. We are habituated to thinking of prices as an external fact, like the temperature, that we have little control over. That is because standardized pricing was a central component of standardizing everything in the twentieth-century scale economy. It would have been absurd in any business context to argue that a price is wrong because it just doesn’t feel good. In the Passion Economy, though, price is emotional. The entire point is to match your internal passions and skills with the specific needs and desires of a customer. The passion price is whatever you and a customer agree is right. Emotions are not soft, silly things that are irrelevant in the tough world of business. Emotions are the whole thing: if you are priced below what feels fair to you, you won’t be able to engage your full passion, and you will be letting your customer down. If the customer can’t pay the amount that feels good, then you have the wrong customer or you have the wrong product.

One surprising factor in emotion-based pricing is that prices can change based on your feelings. You might charge less for a project that is thrilling to do because you will learn a great deal from doing it. A year later, the same project is far less exciting because you have already learned everything you can from that activity. You might not want to do the project at any price, or you might want to increase the price dramatically. Similarly, your life might change. If you have kids who have grown up and no longer occupy as much time, you might want to lower your prices so that you have more work to do.

For some, the hardest thing about emotion-based pricing is that, at its best, it matches the feelings of a buyer and a seller. This might feel weak, to some. We have been trained to view pricing as a battle of wills, each side hoping to force the other to bend and the final price being some number that the buyer thinks is too high and the seller thinks is too low. Passion Economy deals are different. A price comes from extensive conversation, complete with real data about the work required of the seller and the benefits received by the buyer. If either side is unhappy, it means that either the conversations weren’t thorough enough or the match is not a good one.

Pricing low is not a strategy. One of the most common errors people make is finding out what the competition is charging and then pricing their own goods or services a bit lower. This is not a strategy; it is the abdication of strategy to the competition. It avoids asking the crucial Passion Economy question: What is the value I am creating that is beyond that of similar businesses or services, and who am I creating it for?

It is possible that after you properly assess your value for your customers, your prices will be lower than some of your competitors’. That is quite different from starting with an externally defined price.

Pricing is your value. Pricing is often an afterthought. A businessperson creates a product or service, looks at what her competitors are charging, and charges somewhere around the same amount. Instead, pricing should be at the very center of your business, your job, your way of understanding your role in the world. Pricing is your value, at least in commerce. (I don’t recommend coming up with prices for the time you spend with your children or spouse or friends.) You should get your full value, and you shouldn’t let others—your competitors, your customers, some set of rules you absorbed from society—determine your value. If you come to see that the price you currently feel you can charge is too low, that should tell you that you need to adjust. You need to find a different area of focus, acquire more skills, locate different customers. You might not control the price you can charge right now, but you can—and must—over the long term.

RULE #4: FEWER PASSIONATE CUSTOMERS ARE BETTER THAN A LOT OF INDIFFERENT ONES.

Value pricing requires selling to the right people. Saying good-bye is the hardest part. When switching to the Passion Economy approach, it is counterintuitive, yet essential, to stop working with many of your existing customers. If you haven’t applied the rules of the Passion Economy before, it is highly unlikely that most of your customers truly recognize your full value and are paying you the appropriate amount for it. There may be a few who do recognize your value and are paying the right amount; perhaps some others can be persuaded to switch to a passion-based relationship. But in almost all cases, the majority of clients are no longer appropriate and need to be gently handed over to some other professional. That is the only way to get to a point where the vast majority of your time is spent working on the things that add the most value for customers who most clearly recognize that value.

Don’t say good-bye too quickly. You can never have too narrow a niche, but you can rush to your niche too quickly. It is possible that the best audience for your business is left-handed chefs with a hunger for the perfect knife with which to cut an onion or some other very specific group. It will take time to find enough members of that group and persuade them that you and only you are right for the job. It can be tempting to wake up one day, realize that your customers aren’t the right fit, and tell them all to go away. But unless you have amassed a sizable war chest of excess cash, it is best to transition slowly and deliberately. Some firms create a new name and, for a while, essentially operate as two companies—a legacy firm for existing customers and a new one that works only with the targeted niche. At least once a year, go through your existing client base with your team. You should expect to find that about 10 percent of your clients are no longer appropriate for the firm. You can then gently explain that another firm will better serve them. Often, you will find that these clients cost you money. They are paying you, but when you add up all the time you spend servicing them—and not servicing more appropriate customers—you learn that some of your clients are hurting your business. When a customer doesn’t value what you are selling, she typically requires an enormous amount of time and effort precisely because there is a gap between her expectations and what you offer. It’s like taking a bunch of square pegs and having to saw them, sand them, and jiggle them to fit into a series of round holes.

The proper pace for eliminating customers depends on your financial condition, your transition plan, and other factors, including your comfort level with asking longtime clients to go away. Don’t move so fast that you end up bankrupt, but don’t move so slow that you get stuck spending your time serving people who don’t understand or don’t pay for your full value.

The best customers, eventually, are the ones who seek you out. When you have identified the proper niche and served clients in that niche well, you will eventually develop a reputation among your target customer base such that new clients reach out to you before you need to pursue them. The narrower your niche, the more likely you are to receive inbound interest rather than having to pursue an aggressive sales strategy.

Your passion, pricing, value, and target customers are all different views of the same thing. The essence of the Passion Economy is that a person’s particular set of passions and skills becomes a product or service that is matched to the pressing needs of a particular kind of customer at a particular time. This interaction creates real value for the customer that translates into a price that is sustainable for both the seller and the buyer. In short, all of these things are so tightly linked that they are best seen as different aspects of the same core thing. None of it works if any one element is off.

RULE #5: PASSION IS A STORY.

Whatever you’re selling, you’re selling a story, and it better be a true one. Value is not a physical thing: a lump of metal and plastic and glass. It is also not a period: the hours of effort that a professional puts in to achieve some task. Value is a subjective measurement of how some product or service makes a person’s life better. It is a story, and like all good stories, it has characters and a plot and a feeling of completion, and maybe a bit of drama. This can be true for even the most prosaic of purchases. Say you are frustrated with your soap, and you go online and find a new one that is highly rated, and it comes in the mail, and you love it—that is a story. It has a hero—you—facing an obstacle, taking action, fearing failure, then triumphing. Sure, it’s a story that nobody would sell to Hollywood as a movie. But it is more important than whatever combination of chemicals make up that bar of soap.

Always tell the truth. Forget morality for a moment; forget a desire to be a truthful person. Even if all you care about is profit at any cost, you still should never lie. The value-creation process requires an investment of effort and capital that generally pays off only over time. You need your customers to tell others about you. You need to hone your message. You can lie once to get a big deal, but you can’t build on that lie, and you can’t sustain that lie unless you lie all the time. You have to maintain the lie with every new interaction with every new customer. Your business, built on a lie, is less stable. The lie can be uncovered, and maintaining the lie requires extraneous effort that doesn’t increase your core value. In short, lying is bad for business.

You can and must tell your story, especially if you’re bad at telling stories. A truthful brand, built on passion and real value, tells a story even if the person who created it is shy and generally lousy at storytelling. I have often noted that awkward, earnest storytellers can be far more convincing than slick and polished ones. It can be worthwhile to hire professional marketers to help deliver the story and bring it to life in a way that lands for other people. But this won’t work if the story is fake or made up by some outsider. The visuals, the marketing materials, the company’s name are rooted in the essential truth of the passion and value of the product or service being sold.

The story is told in every detail of your business. When you have a passion business, you embed the vision into every aspect of the interaction with customers. This means that physical products are made of materials that reflect the passion and are designed in a way that supports the passion. Services are provided in ways that, similarly, express and reflect a company’s core passion and value.

I recently hired a lawyer who told me that he would not charge me by the hour but would, instead, agree to a fixed fee for the work we were going to do together. He explained that charging by the hour contradicted his core values of serving his clients; it would create an incentive for him to spend more time even if it wasn’t strictly necessary. Or, on the other hand, he might choose to rush some work to save me some money. He preferred not to think about time at all but, instead, to focus on providing me with the greatest service. I found this comforting.

RULE #6: TECHNOLOGY SHOULD ALWAYS SUPPORT YOUR BUSINESS, NOT DRIVE IT.

Using the right technology can be a boon to you in this economy. Thanks to the Internet, it is easier than ever to find well-matched customers all around the world, to stay in contact with them, and to more quickly design the products they want. Great software can help you better manage your business—assisting with everything from inventory to design to up-to-date customer profiles. If you focus solely on being cutting-edge, though, you risk letting the technology take over what should be very robust relationships with your customers, employees, and colleagues. In this age of technological advances and automation, personal relationships in business are more crucial than ever.

Do what technology and large industry cannot do—not the same thing, only slower. To succeed in the Passion Economy, one should not condemn large-scale business and technology or dismiss them as inferior. Instead, the successful passion-based business owner recognizes the tremendous power of larger firms and their tools of automation and avoids competing directly. If your core customer cannot easily distinguish your products or services from those of a larger competitor, you need to shift and offer something else. As we will see later in this book, no human accountant can compete by promising to be faster and cheaper than TurboTax; a small, American-based pencil manufacturer cannot outdo its rivals by selling huge volume at rock-bottom prices.

Technology is changing quickly, of course, and with increased adoption of artificial intelligence, automation will likely reach far more industries more quickly than we can imagine. This means that a passion-based businessperson needs to pay close attention to the tools available to their much larger competitors, aware that a product or service that was safe from competition yesterday may not be so safe tomorrow.

Technology-driven scale creates the space for businesses built on value and passion. Businesses built on great scale, by necessity, cannot richly engage narrow audiences. Sure, they can use computer programs to create personalized recommendations or to let customers design their own style of shoe or shirt. But that is not the same as personally guiding a customer to some option he could never have imagined himself, offering a service, rooted in passion, that satisfies needs the customer doesn’t know he has. It would be irrational for Amazon to employ a bunch of experts on historical dictionaries. But you can, if that’s your passion, and you can use Amazon to reach the people who most value them.

Technology tends toward bigness, so stay small. A central feature of this economy is that technology-driven innovation scales to unimaginable size. Create Facebook or Twitter or a new cell phone and, soon enough, everyone on earth has access to them. Unless you happen to have billions of dollars and a genius for cutting-edge technological innovation, don’t ever bother going big. There is safety in smallness. If you richly serve a small niche in a way that is hard to scale, no big company will ever think to go through the expense of identifying so small a market and serving your customers’ rather particular needs.

RULE #7: KNOW WHAT BUSINESS YOU’RE IN, AND IT’S PROBABLY NOT WHAT YOU THINK.

The core thing you are selling is the real value you can bring to a customer who craves your offering. Often, a value-delivery system is tied to a particular moment in history. Human beings have been eating bread for millennia, and we all value a fresh-baked loaf. It stops hunger, it provides the aesthetic experience of taste, and it offers a comfort deeply rooted in familial, cultural, and, sometimes, religious values. But the way bread is delivered has continually changed. If your passion is creating bread, you could open a bakery, mass-produce loaves and sell them through supermarkets, create a bread-making class, directly ship bread to customers, or offer home bread delivery. The value you create—that perfect loaf—is what shouldn’t change. The way you deliver it is secondary. Too often people focus on that secondary aspect. They’re in the bakery business, or they are a supermarket supplier. Don’t be locked into the secondary value-capture end of your business. Focus, instead, on the core value you create and be quite experimental and creative about how to capture that value.

My field, journalism, is going through a painful transition. We know that people truly value the ability to learn about what’s happening in the world and hear analyses of it. But many don’t particularly want that news to come in traditional packages, like newspapers. Figuring out how to get news to the public and—this part is more difficult—make money from doing so has become a serious challenge for the field.

We are going through a massive transformation of nearly every business because of the forces of globalization and automation. The basic packaging of medicine, finance, law, education, retail, travel, and countless other fields is changing. This is painful and disruptive and also offers enormous opportunity. If you can focus on the core value you add and not the package it comes in, you can create new packages, new types of businesses that will profit in new ways.

The ability to book flights and trips online vastly disrupted the travel agency business. Travel agencies shuttered their doors in droves. However, we’re now seeing new businesses where people are making their living by creating personalized travel experiences. There is such a saturation of booking websites, ratings websites, and travel blogs that travelers are looking, once again, to get help with planning a trip from individuals with real knowledge of the place they are going. The travel companies that employ these individuals may book flights, hotels, and car rentals, but that’s not their business. What they are selling is knowledge. They intimately know the particulars of a certain area and can steer customers toward all the best options, usually in a range of price points. They invest in their clients’ experiences in a way that giant travel websites and booking sites cannot. They are part of the Passion Economy.

Change your value capture constantly. Change your value creation slowly. In just the past decade, the ways products and services are sold have gone through multiple transformations. We went from physically purchasing things, even digital files, in physical stores, to getting so much online. We used to pay only with cash, check, or credit card; now there is an ever-increasing set of payment options, from Venmo to PayPal to Bitcoin to whatever has come out between when I’m typing this and you’re reading it. Value capture is just a tool, and you should use whichever tool is quickest and easiest. Value creation, though, is the core of your business. Treasure it, tend it, change it only quite slowly and deliberately.

RULE #8: NEVER BE IN THE COMMODITY BUSINESS, EVEN IF YOU SELL WHAT OTHER PEOPLE CONSIDER A COMMODITY.

A commodity is an undifferentiated product that is easily copied and replicated by others. Commodities are widgets. Generic soap is a commodity; so is the dry cleaner on your way to work and the barber down the block. Commodity businesses are price takers, meaning they get paid whatever the market price happens to be. The only way for them to be truly successful is with volume and an ability to produce more cheaply than anybody else. That’s why commodity businesses tend to be dominated by huge, global corporations that use automation and outsourcing to cut their costs to the bone.

Passion businesses never sell commodities. By definition, a passion business differentiates itself from others so that it can charge a unique price that represents its unique value.

But here’s the thing: there is no rigid line between commodity and passion. When the Apple iPod first came out it was dismissed, at least by some, as an overpriced commodity MP3 player. In any Sephora there are a ton of expensive shampoos and hand creams screaming “unique value” and charging a huge premium for it. But if you analyze the actual substance in any given container, it will most likely turn out to be nearly chemically identical to something selling at Walmart for $2.99 a bottle. Starbucks thrived because it was able to take a commodity product—coffee—and wrap it in an added-value experience of a pleasant shop and a lifestyle brand.

Workers in a twentieth-century business were, largely, commodities. They had a particular job with a title and job description that made clear that whoever happened to hold that position at any given time could be replaced by someone else who would, in an instant, have the same title and job description. It was too difficult for large firms to identify the unique capabilities and passions of each of its workers, so it was simpler to treat them as commodities. Today, it is far easier to identify the exact contribution of each worker. Online metrics and audience surveys can identify precisely how different workers perform, zeroing in on which ones are adding to the bottom line and which are offering minimal value.

Commodification is like gravity, always pulling at everyone, always trying to get each product and service and worker to fall to a common level. That is why Apple is constantly trying to launch new products and features, with Samsung and others continually nipping at its heels. In a value-added business, a passion business, you should always be asking yourself, Am I letting my business, or even myself as an employee, slip into the commodity trap? In the workplace, you can become a commodity by, say, working long hours without adding extra value to the job you are performing. Once you stop asking how you can set your business or products or even yourself apart from the commodity version, you have dropped out of the Passion Economy.

Written by Adam Davidson in "The Passion Economy -The New Rules for Thriving in the Twenty-First Century", Alfred A. Knopf (a division of Penguin Random House), New York, USA, 2020, excerpts chapter 2. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.