For years I had a colleague and friend speak to my introductory management classes about entrepreneurship. He would say, “people will pay you a little for pleasure, but they’ll pay you a lot to get rid of pain.”
You see, pleasure is great. We get the thrill, the rush. It’s fun and exhilarating. We smile, we laugh, we shout, we throw our arms up. But it’s fleeting. We actually remember pleasure less, and the memories are less intense over time. The opposite is true of pain. Research shows that people experience negative or painful emotions more intensely and remember them longer (as much as five times longer). Why? Evolution and fight or flight.
We’ve made much progress as a species, yes, but our brains are still pretty dumb. Most of our lives, if you really think about it, are still about reducing decisions to “do I eat this, or does this eat me?” On top of that, we’re still wired to remember the pain and risks of the “does this eat me” stuff as a (valuable) form of self-preservation.
Now, before you get depressed about how little we’ve evolved over the last few millennia, there is a major upside to this. One of my favorite quotes, by the great Jerry Seinfeld, says, “Innovation comes from asking ‘What am I really sick of?’”. Think about it: if something frustrates or annoys you enough, you’ll often take action to change it. Even better, there are probably others out there who are frustrated with the same things. If enough people are, and if you can convert your frustration into a viable, scalable solution, you’ll have a product (or service) and a market.
That was my friend’s point: people will spare no expense, including time and effort, to get rid of pain. So, does what you’re doing remove pain? If not, can you make adjustments to do so? And if you’re doing well, are you thinking about your customers’ pain points and how you can proactively remove them?
People buy aspirin always. They buy vitamins only occasionally and at unpredictable times. Sell aspirin.
-Colin Dowling
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