© Sameer Babbar

In this world, the super-smart people that have got a very high intellect are at a significant and obvious disadvantage when they try to sell intellect in exchange of money by selling it to others. Others who may not be as intelligent. The same can apply to groups of people, firms and even countries. The solution is to look beyond intellect. Ever faced the challenge?

As the distribution of intellect usually follows the Gaussian law, the intellectuals are at the top end of the Gaussian distribution.

Screen Shot 2021-03-31 at 9.28.20 am.png

Should this be the case, when you go out to sell the intellect, you are trying to appease the one who is somewhere in the middle of the Gaussian distribution, or maybe someone on the bottom end of the Gaussian distribution.

So super smart people, they have the intellect and the idea. But they’re trying to sell that idea to the people in the middle of the Gaussian and the bottom of the Gaussian distribution, who got no freaking clue.

So people in the middle of the distribution cannot appreciate the intellect at the top end of the spectrum. Selling pure intelligence has this major flaw, you just cannot sell intelligence like this and appropriate its full value.

By virtue of you being intelligent, you can eliminate yourself from the market because other people just don’t get you.

Have you have been a consultant trying to solve an obvious problem, or even tried to say no to a consultant. You would be able to relate to this. Perhaps you would have experienced that a brand name organisation tried to suck your brains out and sell a half baked solution.

Now with the 21st century, the intellect has now become very specialised, we are fighting this battle in many dimensions, domains and expertise areas.

What would be my advice be to a super-intelligent person who wanted to sell to 99% of their audience?

You cannot sell intellect, so you’ll have to sell something they need? You will hear the word value often, yes it has to be a commoditised intellect. You will need to package the problem that you solve with the solution. One way it is done is by telling you that you have a problem that you never knew you had before you were told. The more convincing you are, the easier it is to sell. Startups are told repeatedly to follow this paradigm.

Intellect is intangible, hard to buy, how can you quantify something you cannot measure. You will need to turn the intellect to build a product, a commodity or a bunch of commoditised bundles that are easily transactable. Something anyone can easily understand and use. Hourly fee, monthly fee, fee-based on outcome etc. For programming, it used to be measured as lines of code for debuggers it was a number of bugs resolved. It has its own challenges. Entrepreneurs focus on bundles of transactable value in their offerings.

Showcasing is another way it is addressed. CV is a common example where people showcase their projects.
But they only reflect what happened in past not what you are capable of doing in future so many knowledge workers do end up underselling themselves. Potential remains under-utilised. You can showcase customers who have already bought, demonstrate the solution. Give examples. Convince that you can make their problem go away.

Pigeonholing or providing boundaries around what you offer as a commodity and what you don’t for them to easily understand. It reduces the fuzziness in understanding. You have to be clear about what you are selling, who you are selling to and how you are selling ( by the hour, milestones, outcomes, classroom, one on one etc. ).

Tangibalising is an easy way to focus on what will they get. As an outcome. Will they start knowing more about a topic or their pain will reduce or go away. If you are selling say, coaching classes, training courses, you tell what you will cover and what will be the end tangible benefit only then it becomes easier to understand.

Herding, Birds of a feather flock together. It helps exchange ideas at similar levels and also helps as a defence mechanism against external attacks tracing the roots of the idea way back in history. You will need to start hanging out with the ones that you are targeting. Watch out for groupthink should you chose to do so. Billionaires do it, technocrats to it, lawyers do it … and the list is long. They hang out with the ones that are truly in the same category and the one’s they want to sell to. One heard you identify yourself with and the other is to be assumed by association.

So to transact you have to productise, commoditise a shallower version, a very targeted version, a version that solves a very specific targeted problem for a set of people in a niche. Something that you can show off without losing control on the intellectual property.

Play the long game. Some intellectual experts aim to create a brand with blogging, writing books, social media, think of this as a roar. Every time you hear the sound you can associate it with a lion. Whatever positioning that you create for yourself every time your target market hears this they associate it with you. It requires hard work and patience. Some of the knowledge firms have been around for a really long time.

For many companies or businesses, these associations have run many generations. As a startup, you will need to position yourself well from the very first day.

You go anywhere beyond the domain you have the same problem people won’t understand, or even if they understand they don’t appreciate it. Perhaps simplifying is another way of sharing the information. You may need to ensure a 12-year-old can understand what you are talking about.

It’s easier to sell one kg of potatoes than one hour of intellect. Put it very simply. So if you are if you have a supermarket, or if you’ve got a grocery store, it’s easier to sell one kg of potatoes, than one hour of intellect. So imagine, in a year you take a very super-intelligent person who’s unbranded, a commodity, like a potato, he doesn’t have a brand or organisational association and you have a sack of potatoes next to it, I say that you can get this, super-intelligent guys for 250 bucks an hour and this one kg potato bag for $2.50. People will find it easy to transact that because it’s very hard for them to measure the intellect in the head. Even if I drop the price for the time for this super-intelligent guy to $2.50 per hour there may not be many those who will be interested to even explore it further. Intellect by itself means nothing. Intellect by itself gives no benefit.

Let’s put Einstein there and then say Einstein is available to answer all your questions for one hour. You see the queue forming, you can then restrict the number of hours Einstein has got available the demand will go up. Intellect is now branded. You will find people willing to pay $250k for one hour of his time ( and perhaps much more to the guy who brought him back)

Hope this helps you in some ways in your life. If you have any questions comments or suggestions please reach out to me. Though as a passing note I will say that Duncan Kruger suggests that assuming that one is intelligent without any measure or evidence will also confirm the opposite. I have written on this topic at https://www.sameerbabbar.com/blog/2019/10/28/ignorance-is-bliss

Please do share how you are solving the problem in your start-up, business or industry.

Share the love, pass it around to someone who you think is intelligent and deserves to read this. If your key challenge is growth then subscribe to my posts or reach out to me.

If you are intelligent and you want to sell knowledge work, you may be in big trouble.

© Sameer Babbar