The Power of Scarcity

Scarcity is not often viewed as something positive. When water is scarce, it's a drought. When time is scarce, it's often called stress.

That's one way to look at scarcity. The flip side is that you can arguably view it as a huge positive when the right things are scarce.

Reportedly, iPhones are going to be hard to come by when they launched. The same thing happened in other markets. Just look at toy crazes, like Tickle Me Elmo. When products are scarce, it drives demand.

Now think about media. If there's high interest, niche content that enough people desperately want, but is difficult to easily get anywhere else, it becomes scarce. This drives up the value of that site because your attention is scarce resource. It's simple supply and demand economics at work.

Lifehacker is scarcity at its best. There are tons of blogs that cover technology tricks and tips and techniques for being more productive. But Lifehacker aggregates the best content - and just the right amount of it - to make subscribing to others unnecessary.

Scarcity also works wonders in your career as well. Generalists are easy to find. Everyone wants the specialist - and the best in the world. This is something I learned from Seth Godin's terrific new book, The Dip. If you are positioned as a specialist and you possess a skill and track record for success, you're always going to be in demand.

Examples abound everywhere. Perhaps none more than in sports. A-Rod has had mixed success since joining the Yankees, but this year he may have found his scarcity niche. He's been consistently coming through in the clutch. If he can continue this, his value will increase (as if he need$ that).

The power of scarcity applies to companies, products, people, social networks and more. The formula is simple. Find a scarce niche (it needs to be something people want), build your expertise in this specialty, execute flawlessly and be willing to adapt if what you do becomes commodity.