Move Your Skill to the Scarce Market
The same skill pays multiples more where it's rare — think discontinuous jumps
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 89%
The biggest income gains come not from 20% raises but from discontinuous jumps — moving the same skill to a market where it's scarce. Bartlett's social-media skill sold dresses and iPhones for years; applied to biotech (where nobody understood Reddit or Twitter) it earned him ~$8M in options taking a company public. A Manchester designer of $50 nightclub flyers moved to Dubai luxury branding and earned ~$50k per project for the same work.
Origin
Bartlett shares it from writing his own book, and reinforces it with his biotech IPO options and his friend Anthony's move to Dubai.
Core principles
- 01Discontinuous jumps (5x, 10x) require something big to change, not incremental tweaks.
- 02A skill that's abundant in one industry can be rare and highly valued in another.
- 03Place your skill where it's scarce to capture outsized value.
- 04The human mind under-weights both compounding and market repositioning.
How to run it
- 1
Audit where your skill is abundant
Recognise where your skill is common and therefore cheaply priced.
- 2
Find the scarce market
Identify an industry or geography where the same skill is rare and highly valued.
Pro tip Adding a small domain layer (e.g. writing + biotech knowledge) can multiply your rate ~5x.
- 3
Make the discontinuous move
Reposition into that market rather than chasing 20% raises where you are.
Watch out Thinking only in increments ('$100 to $120') keeps you from the 5x and 10x jumps.
In the wild
Bartlett's social-media expertise, worth ordinary rates selling consumer goods, earned ~$8M in options taking a biotech public at a ~$3.2B valuation because it was rare there.
→ The same skill set was scarce in that market and therefore hugely valuable.
Designer Anthony moved from ~$50 Manchester nightclub flyers to Dubai luxury branding at ~$50k per project.
→ The identical design skill on the same software yielded tens of times more in a market that valued it.
Common mistakes
Thinking only in increments
Optimising for a 20% raise in the same market blinds you to the discontinuous jumps a market move offers.
Is it for you?
Best for
Skilled professionals and freelancers whose income has plateaued in a crowded field.
Not ideal for
People whose skill is genuinely location- or industry-bound with no scarce market to enter.
From the transcript
“they need to use, place their skill sets in the most lucrative market where it's scarce”
“most of us do not think in terms of discontinuous jumps”
From the episode
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