JUST AS MORE AND MORE BOOKS about Mastery get pushed onto shelves, more and more LinkedIn prophets and keynote speakers relate the apocryphal story of Picasso’s Napkin. It goes something like this:
A woman, strolling the streets of Paris, spotted Picasso sketching on a stack of napkins outside a café. She sensed this was a once-in-a-lifetime encounter and asked if he would create a sketch of her. He shrugged, sketched a quick portrait, and then said it would cost 5,000 francs (or some other absurd figure cited to emphasize the point).
“But it only took you a couple minutes,” the woman said.
“No,” Picasso said. “It took me my whole life.”
The tired takeaway these bloggers and speakers relate is that you shouldn’t charge for the time something takes—you should charge for your expertise.
This story has deep roots in fiction. At the very least, knowing what we know about Picasso, the actual version would have involved much more sexual aggression. But as airbrushed and worn thin from repetition as it might be, the myth breathes life into an audience who wants to believe they’re experts who have a right to charge more. These posts get claps because people like the idea. The sentiment was especially popular in the go-go days when interest rates were low and start-ups were kept afloat with a lot of free money.
In real life, however, there are very few violinists—aside from Joshua Bell and Hilary Hahn—who can tell the father of a bride their rendition of Pachelbel’s “Canon in D Major” is gonna run him $100,000 because they’ve been playing it since they were five. Even as ridiculous as the whole wedding-industry racket is, that’s not gonna fly.
The price tag—in the case of Picasso or Joshua Bell or Hilary Hahn—is not about the quality of the product or the level of expertise, but rather about their fame. In some ways, skill and expertise can help earn fame, but at a certain point the traits and the perception detach and become separate entities.
As an example of this is detachment, let me share how, in 2006, an auction house helped sell William Shatner’s kidney stone for $25,000. Perhaps I’m missing something, but a kidney stone has no functional value. Nor did it require skill or expertise on the part of William Shatner to produce. So what was really being purchased was this odd connection to a famous person. And in the years since 2006, the auctioning of random celebrity items has grown exponentially, with Freddie Mercury’s mustache comb going for almost $200,000 and Kurt Cobain’s cardigan sweater going for more than $300,000.
If Christies were to get ahold of Picasso’s Napkin, it would no doubt go for millions because of his fame and because it symbolizes a romantic belief. Never mind that hundreds of art students could re-create the image in the same amount of time it apparently took him to produce and most of the bidders would not be able to tell the copies from the original.
The tragic irony is that the people who would bid on Picasso’s Napkin at an auction are the same executives who made their money actively devaluing skill and replacing experienced employees with people they can exploit. That is, the only reason they could afford Picasso’s Napkin is because they made a fortune wiping their ass with Picasso’s Napkin all day, every day.