How long?

Things authors, quilters, artists, and salespeople share in common…  In these pursuits, and others, time impacts value (one way or another)… one way or another: 

Good pitching will always stop good hitting and visa versa. 

Casey Stengel 

Take quilting.  My wife invests hours, no, tens of hours to design, cut, sew-and-prep each component, color-match threads, layout and pattern-match the pieces, sew them all together, cut, fit, and sew on the backing, square the whole thing, then cut, fold and sew on the border, and finally quilt the entire, end product. 

She makes gifts for family and friends.  Were she to sell her quilts as some quilters do, and include the dollar value for her talented time, her masterpieces would be priced at hundreds of dollars, maybe even thousands. 

It’s like that with artists, too.  Harry Beckwith, author of Selling the Invisible ©, offered this story about Pablo Picasso’s value of time: 

A woman was strolling along a street in Paris when she spotted Picasso sketching at a sidewalk café.  Not so thrilled that she could not be slightly presumptuous, the woman asked Picasso if he might sketch her and charge accordingly. 

Picasso obliged. In just minutes, there she was: an original Picasso.

"And what do I owe you?" she asked.

"Five thousand francs," he answered.

"But it only took you three minutes," she politely reminded him.

"No," Picasso said.  "It took me all my life." 

Speaking of authors.  My readers often ask me, “How long did it take to write your book?”  They’re surprised when I say I collected the quips and quotes over the course of 25 years.  It took me 3 years to add my short stories, finalize, and copyright the manuscript.  Then I waited another 10 years for self-publishing to become user-friendly enough to match my (lack of) skills. 

Truthfully though, when it comes to the value of “How Long?”, it doesn’t matter in many cases.  The market for a book like mine, offered by an independent author like me, is less than $20 per copy regardless of how many years it took me to complete. 

Then there’s the B2B sales profession.  Time is our nemesis.  Every rep who has gone through a forecast review with their manager knows this.  When faced with the, “How long has this deal been on your forecast?”, we cringe.  Time doesn’t increase the value of our deal.  Just the opposite.  Or, has been said by every sales manager everywhere: 

Time kills deals! 

Which, of course, leads to the salesperson’s (over) reaction: 

When in doubt – discount!           

Especially when we have forecasted the deal to close this month. 

GAP 

When life gets tough we could get a helmet… or… we could leverage the peace and share the power of a positive perspective.