Cigarettes and Swans

As posted on yourstory.in

In my last post, I mused about who actually knows what something is worth? Beyond survival, ‘value’ is simply collective perception, a construct of our collective mind. So what do we mean when we talk of ‘value’? What is our mind ‘valuing’ and for what purpose? For an entrepreneur this is a fundamentally important question. On a very simple level you could claim to be creating value so long as someone sees it as valuable enough to pay money for it. However, there are people willing to pay money for all sorts of destructive things like drugs and cigarettes and exorbitant amounts of money for completely worthless things like crystal swans. Of course that is my value judgement I’m imposing on it. I have friends that would argue me down that the drugs help their creative process and the cigarette smoking calms them and helps them be more productive. And as for silly looking crystal swans – some people derive happiness from having them perched on a shelf in their house. However, on the other hand, if you ask a large room full of people to name products that are of fundamental value to society, they will disproportionately name a few – two wheelers, mobile phones and internet access are ones that come up frequently.