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The Red Thread This Week:
"Price is what you pay. Value is what you get." — Warren Buffett
Last week our family was in Cooperstown, New York with our youngest.
If you don't know it, Cooperstown is a small place that holds a couple of big things: the Baseball Hall of Fame and a place called Dreams Park, where 12-year-olds from all over the country come to play baseball from June through August.
It's baseball summer camp turned all the way up. The kids live in bunkhouses together. They trade team pins with kids from other states. They play game after game on beautiful fields, visit the Hall of Fame, and hang out under fireworks at night.
At the end, every single player gets inducted into the American Youth Baseball Hall of Fame.
The whole thing is built, top to bottom, to become a memory a kid carries for the rest of his life.
We had a wonderful time. I'd do it again tomorrow.
But I'll be honest with you. Once you add up flights for a family of five, the tournament fees, the Airbnb, the food, the merch, all of it, we spent several thousand dollars on a week of youth baseball.
And the entire time we were there, happy and cheering for our son, I kept running the math.
What did we actually buy?
We didn't buy baseball. You can play baseball at the park down the street for free.
We bought a story. A once-in-a-lifetime, 12-year-old's adventure that my son will hopefully tell his own family about someday.
And that story was worth every penny. It just wasn't printed as a line-item anywhere on the final invoice.
So the Red Thread this week is about the invisible thing we’re often paying for. That gap between what something costs and what it's actually worth. And an idea from ad man Rory Sutherland, on why that gap could be a gift or a con.
~ Jaime
🔑 The Unlock
Parachutes and Handbags
Fun fact: plants don't respond to placebos.
Tell a fern its water was bottled in the Alps and it grows exactly the same. Tell a dog their food is homemade by “real dog lovers”, and it eats with exactly the same enthusiasm.
But people? We can't help ourselves.
Tell us the wine is expensive and it genuinely tastes better.
Tell us the pill is “Maximum Strength” and our headache genuinely fades.
We run on story, and these stories change our perception of the world around us. They change how wine tastes, how medicine works, how a week of expensive baseball feels.
Which means every price tag hides two kinds of value, and you can ask this question to tease them apart…
Does it still work if you take the story away?
Give a suffering malaria patient fake medicine and they’ll stay sick, because real malaria medicine works whether you believe in it or not. Call that function value. The parachute opens or it doesn't. How you feel about the parachute doesn’t matter.
Give someone a fake Birkin bag that they can't tell from a real one, and it delivers the same feeling as the real one. Call that story value. The primary value lives in the status-story wrapped around the handbag, not the actual leather.
One works in a lab. The other works in your head.
Neither one is fake. And neither one is (usually) a problem.
Here’s what this means for your work:
1. We buy story value
Cooperstown is a perfect example.
The whole place is sacred because baseball was born there, in 1839, when a young man named Abner Doubleday laid out the first diamond in a picturesque cow pasture.
Except he didn't.
In 1839 Doubleday was a first-year cadet at West Point, almost certainly never in Cooperstown, and he barely mentioned baseball in a lifetime of letters and diaries.
Baseball crept together slowly out of older games, from a lot of places, over a lot of years.
Cooperstown got the birth-place crown decades later on the word of one unreliable man. As the sport's own official historian John Thorn put it, Doubleday didn't invent baseball. Baseball invented him.
Sit with that one. The most sacred ground in American baseball is sacred because of a story that isn't true.
And yet it doesn’t make the place worth one dollar less. In fact, the story is most of what makes the Cooperstown baseball experience worthwhile.
This ability to assign real, meaningful value to the stories we absorb is a uniquely human thing and once you see it, you see it everywhere.
The $150 concert ticket isn’t for access to the live songs. You're paying in advance for the idea of the night, the memory, the room full of people who love what you love.
This isn’t a bad thing, just a reminder as you consider your own work. At some level, you're selling a story about what your work makes possible for the person on the other end.
Don’t discount or minimize that story, it’s often the value we’re paying for.
2. Audit your own work
Which part of what you sell is the parachute, the thing that simply has to function?
Which part is the handbag, the story your customer is paying for?
When we make things, we live deeply within the cost of it; the hours, the effort, the craft. So it’s easy to assume that's what our customers are paying for.
But the customer never sees any of that. They only see what the work makes possible for them. As the marketing adage goes, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”
And work that makes an impact is a blend of both function and story. Cooperstown had to deliver actual baseball with solid accommodations for players and families, AND the once-in-a-lifetime feeling on top of it.
Botch the must-have functions and no amount of story covers it. But at the same time, no matter how solid the must-have functions are, nobody flies a family across the country just for those pieces alone.
Get the balance wrong and you'll spend precious hours perfecting things your customer already considers good enough, while the story they're actually paying for is ignored.
3. Cheap stories are a gift. Expensive ones can hurt.
When a toddler skins her knee and mom or dad kisses it and she feels better, that's a cheap placebo. Pure story. And totally generous because it costs nothing, harms nothing, and helps her feel safe.
A story gets expensive the moment it starts taking something back. Money is the least of it. The expensive story takes your health, your attention, or your shot at the thing that would have actually worked.
Cooperstown cost real money and stayed a cheap, generous story. Nobody got hurt. Nothing important got shoved aside or compromised. We drove home with exactly what we drove up there for and then some.
The expensive version is the $800 bottle of colloidal silver that promises to fix what ails you, while replacing the doctor's visit that probably would.
💡 Mindset Shift
Price is math. Value is a story.
Every price tag has a story attached to it and what matters for your work is who the story is built to serve.
When we paid for Cooperstown, the story served our son and family. The people running it made good money, and we still walked away with more than we paid for.
That's a fair trade, and it's the kind of story worth buying and the kind worth selling.
The expensive placebo runs the other way. It's a story built to serve the seller, dressed up to look like it serves you.
The tell is always the same. When you can't quite say what you're getting, but the price keeps climbing or the sales pitch keeps getting louder, stop and ask who benefits.
Then turn the question on your own work, because you’re on both sides of it.
As a buyer: Is this story serving me, or the person selling it to me?
As a builder: Am I telling a story that transforms my customers, giving them more than they paid for? Or am I just pushing to recoup costs plus extra?
You get to decide.
🎲 Prompt Playground
The Value Audit
Use this to separate what your customers actually pay for from what you think they pay for.
Drop this prompt into your AI tool of choice:
You are a sharp brand and pricing strategist helping me understand the real value of my work.
My context:
What I make and who I serve: [describe it]
What I currently tell people they're paying for: [your pitch, your price justification]
What I suspect they're actually paying for underneath that: [your honest guess]
Help me evaluate:
Which parts of my work are "function value" (they have to work whether the customer believes or not), and which parts are "story value" (the worth lives in what it means to them)?
Where am I over-investing in polish nobody sees, and under-investing in the story people are actually buying?
Is the story I tell around my price built to serve my customer, or built to serve me? Be direct.
What is one way I could raise the value of my work this month without touching the price?
Be direct. No hype. Tell me what I need to hear.
Ask me one question at a time, in order, until you have enough to give me a real audit.
⚡ Before You Go
Here are other ways I can help:
🗓️ 1:1 call: Grab 15min on my calendar.
🚀 Speaking & workshops: Hit reply, let’s talk.
🤖 AI Prompt Library: 12 prompts to use AI as a strategic thinking partner for your next season of work.
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Thanks for spending time with Red Threads this week, I’m glad you’re here.
~ Jaime