Thank you Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell

Here, I want to thank Seth Godin, Gladwell, Guy Kawasaki, Hugh and many other avid bloggers for their hard work. I thank them not because what they say is necessarily right -in fact, often it is not the case. However, I thank them for showing me new things to ponder about and teaching me new thinking patterns. A few weeks ago, Seth Godin wrote a blog about the top-notch MBA programs. In that post, he enumerated certain points that have made these schools so popular and selective. One of those points was “scarcity” of these school’s graduates.

But what is human scarcity? How can someone, as an individual, become so scarce that even in these tough times he demands an overnight ten-percent raise, the employer complies with his request happily? What sorts of skills, talents, abilities or advantages have transformed an otherwise average person to a scarce resource? Does a scarce human have scarce talents or just have a rare combination of relatively common talents, skills or abilities?

By no means, I intend to answer these questions. Not because I am selfish and I want to keep the answers to myself to prevent you from becoming successful. I just simply don’t know the answers. But I know someone who might be able to shed some lights. He has accomplished a lot. He is known for finding controversial strong correlation among seemingly unrelated facts. He is loved equally as he is disliked. He is well-spoken, smart and entertaining and he makes weird hand gestures when talks. Malcolm Gladwell. In his recent book, outliers, he discussed why some people have succeeded and some have failed. I think scarcity and being scarce definitely fall into outlier category and he probably have something to say about it.

I would love to have a personal interview with him and asks those questions. But I can’t. So I am better off to go back what this blog is all about: Reputation management. What I wrote above was my entire thought process. Thinking about the scarcity talk initiated by Godin, my personal desire to be a scarce resource and ended with Gladwell’s obsession with outliers. Gladwell and Godin are “remarkable” – a term overly used by Godin – in explaining things you might already know. They do it in an entertaining, educational and even-if-you-know-it-you-still-enjoy-it way. That is their signature. They know how read the most boring ideas and research papers, package them, add a story line to them and present them. Try to recreate one of the best Godin’s presentations and see how bored your audience will become shortly. This is their scarcity. They have established a solid reputation based on this scarce ability. Yes, reputation is one of those scarce qualities. I don’t intend to discount their efforts and reduce them to just story tellers. But essentially what transforms them from good to remarkable and differentiates them from other good marketers and authors has a lot to do with their presentation and "gift wrapping" skills.

I feel I answered my initial question. To be scarce you don’t have to possess scarce skills. It will work but it is not a necessity. You can also become scarce by amateurishly pursuing different – preferably unrelated – things and combining them. Looking at an everyday fact of life with different view point can make you as scarce as a NASA scientist responsible for the next space mission. Thank you Godin and Gladwell. You are not always right. But you always give me new lenses to see things differently.


Reza Sabernia