Demonetization: How to Deal with the Threat to Your Business

In a presentation given in 2017, Peter Diamandis said that nearly everything in the world as we know it today will be demonetized down to its marginal cost.

• Energy
• Food
• Communication
• Education
• Healthcare
• Transportation
• Water
• Housing
• Entertainment
• Information
• Insurance
• Labor

These changes are visible already in some areas.

 

Transportation

Depending on where you live, Uber is lowering the marginal cost of transportation to the point that you may not need a car, and that will become the case more and more in the future. It doesn't mean that no one will own one. Instead, it means that the demand for them will decrease.

Electric cars are on course to replace gasoline-powered ones.

Several countries already are aiming to ban the sale of new cars that use gas or diesel. Norway by 2025; India by 2030; and Britain and France by 2040.

 

Housing

Air B 'n' B is lowering the marginal cost of housing.

Digital nomads, for instance, do all of their work online as well as their banking, but move from place to place at will. They may decide to live in Thailand for a few months, then fly to Bali, Europe or Central America during other times of the year. When you live like that, you don't need a permanent address anywhere. In 2016, one study estimated that 43% of Americans worked at least one day remotely.

For those who do want something that's more permanent, new options are appearing every day. The tiny house movement is one of them, and it's not just young people who live in them. According to one source, more than 40% of adults over the age of 50 live in them.

These options aren't for everyone, but before 2008, they didn't exist at all.

 

Communication

The smartphone has lowered the marginal cost of cameras, both still and video. Podcasts have obviated the radio, and Youtube, to name just one entertainment source, means that TV is pretty much obsolete.

 

Internet

The Internet has reduced the marginal cost of information to zero. There's more information online right now than you could consume in a lifetime, and whatever you don't want to search for can be stored in any of the numerous apps, including the complete works of the most prodigious authors.

 

What won't be demonetized?

At the end of the presentation, a member of the audience asked him what things wouldn't be demonetized, to which Diamandis said, "I don't know."

And that's really the purpose of this post.

The average entrepreneur is likely to worry about how to prevent demonetization from closing their business.

And that's the wrong question.

Diamandis says that the skills you need to develop today are curiosity, creativity, and the ability to ask great questions.

As Tony Robbins once said: If you want to get a better answer, then ask a better question.

 

Better question

What's a better question to ask than how you can prevent demonetization in your industry?

How about, "How can I benefit from it?" Or, "How can I help my customers to benefit from it?"

That's what you need to be thinking about.

Not how to prevent something from happening, but how to profit from it when it does.

And you could expand on that.

You could ask, "What can I do now to demonetize my industry and make my business more valuable to my customers?"

You see, the developers of the technology that will bring about all this change are looking for ways to improve everything. It's only those who are stuck in the status quo that will be left behind. Kodak made this mistake.

If you can anticipate how your industry will be affected before it happens, then you'll be among those who lead the charge.

Your customers are always looking for ways to lower their cost of living. That's so that they will have more left over to do the things that they want to do.

Anything that you can do to help them do that will make you more valuable to them.