If you want to build a business on your expertise—specialized knowledge—one early key is to break out of the idea that your effort should be directly correlated with your income. Here’s a good, perhaps fictional, example that starts off with a woman asking Picasso to make a sketch for her:
Picasso complied and then said, “That will be $10,000.”
“But you did that in thirty seconds,” the astonished woman replied.
“No,” Picasso said. “It has taken me forty years to do that.”
A more technical example: when a massive new generator at Ford’s River Rouge plant broke down, the local engineers had no idea how to fix it. They consulted electrical engineer Charles Proteus Steinmetz for help (source):
For two straight days and nights he listened to the generator and made countless computations. Then he asked for a ladder, a measuring tape and a piece of chalk. He laboriously ascended the ladder, made careful measurements and put a chalk mark on the side of the generator. He descended and told his skeptical audience to remove a plate from the side of the generator and take out 16 windings from the field coil at that location.
The corrections were made and the generator then functioned perfectly. Subsequently Ford received a bill for $10,000 signed by Steinmetz for G.E. Ford returned the bill acknowledging the good job done by Steinmetz but respectfully requesting an itemized statement. Steinmetz replied as follows:
Making chalk mark on generator $1.
Knowing where to make mark $9,999.
Total due $10,000.
There are a lot of other variations of this story, known as the boilermaker story.