Their intrinsic value is not sufficient; for all do not bite at the kernel or look into the interior. Most go with the crowd, and go because they see others go. It is a great stroke of art to bring things into repute... Never call things easy or common: that makes them depreciated rather than made accessible.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Quality does not price itself. Buyers, employers, and audiences mostly cannot assess intrinsic value directly, so they read signals: what others say, what it costs, how it is framed, how the seller speaks about it. This is why the professional who describes his own work as "nothing much, took me an hour" is telling the truth and destroying his price at the same time. Never call things easy or common: the instruction is not to lie but to stop volunteering the discount. Describe what the work required, what it prevents, what it took years to learn. The unusual, said plainly, attracts attention; the routine, said plainly, gets routine prices.
Practice
- Stop discounting your own work in conversation: "took me an hour" hides twenty years of practice that made the hour possible.
- Frame by what it prevents or enables, not by effort: outcomes are the currency your buyer actually understands.
- Let others do the pricing where possible: testimonials, referrals, and visible demand set a price no self-description can (maxim 130 makes the work legible first).
Use this when
- Use this when you are underpaid relative to peers of equal skill; the gap is usually in signalling, not in ability.
- Use it launching anything new, when the audience has no way to judge quality and reads everything else instead.
Ignore this when
- Don't inflate what is genuinely ordinary; when the shell outruns the kernel, the correction is fast and public (maxim 175's solid man).
- Don't let pricing become the work; the signal must sit on something real, or you are simply selling the wrapper.
A picture of it
Two translators of the same language pair charged rates that differed by a factor of three. The cheaper one described her service as "quick translation, fast turnaround", and clients treated it as a commodity, negotiating on price every time. The other described the same work as contract translation for litigation, where an ambiguous phrase costs the client more than the fee, and named the years she had spent learning the legal vocabulary in both languages. Her clients did not negotiate. The work was nearly identical; only one of them had let the buyer see what was at stake.
Do not advertise your discounts. The buyer cannot see the kernel; the shell is doing the talking whether you like it or not.