What is actually scarce

A dentist in Dammam has two chairs. Patients are not her problem; the waiting list is long. What she cannot make more of is the hour a chair spends with someone in it.

So every useful decision she takes is a decision about chair time. Whether to book a long procedure on a Sunday morning or three short ones. Whether a hygienist could take the cleanings so the dentist only sits where she is needed. Whether a better scanner, which looks like an expense, is really a way of giving her back twenty minutes a day.

Across town, a man sells board games he imports in small batches, mostly to families who have bought from him before. His limit is nothing like chair time. He can find more stock and more help with packing without much trouble. What he cannot quickly replace is the trust of the few hundred households who open his messages and buy without asking twice.

His growth looks completely different. He protects that list. He sends less, and only when he has something those families will be glad to hear about. A new product earns its place by being worthy of the people who already believe her.

Neither of them is short of advice. Post more, hire more, open somewhere bigger, run a sale. Most of it is aimed at a resource they already have plenty of.

The useful exercise is quieter. Find the one thing at the centre of what you do that is valuable precisely because there is not much of it. Then let that thing decide. Ideas that spend it carelessly get turned down, and ideas that multiply what it is worth go to the front.

Most businesses are not stuck for effort. They are spending it on the part that was never in short supply.