After I got back from camping and rediscovered that tap water is a miracle (last week’s story), I did the other summer ritual, I cleared out the barn. Which is how I ended up with a perfectly good wooden cabinet, a bicycle, and a box of tools I was never going to use again, and how I ended up on Marktplaats.
I did the generous thing. Gratis af te halen. Free to collect, come and get it, no charge, my gift to a stranger.
What followed was a masterclass in human nature.
The first person messaged at eleven at night asking if I could deliver it for free, to a town forty minutes away. The second made an appointment for Saturday morning and simply did not show up, did not cancel, did not answer. The third haggled. I want to be clear about that. He haggled the price on a free cabinet, on the grounds that he could see a small scratch, and asked whether I could “do something about it”. The fourth wanted me to hold it for two weeks. None of them, not one, said thank you.
Out of curiosity, I relisted the bicycle for twenty euros. Sold in an hour to a polite man who arrived on time, tried to pay cash, and thanked me twice when I gave him the bike. Same bike. The only thing I changed was that I stopped giving it away.
Free is a price, and everyone can read it
There is a thing we believe when we give something away, which is that our intended generosity will be received as generosity. It will not! A price is not only how much money changes hands. That price is a signal, and the reader of that signal does the most natural thing in the world with it, they believe it.
Put a zero on something and you have not removed the price. You have set it. And you have told everyone who looks, that this thing is worth nothing, which means their time spent collecting it is the only thing of value in the transaction, which means you now owe them the delivery, the flexibility, the two-week hold, and the apology for the scratch.
Beggars can’t be choosers, the saying goes. On Marktplaats the beggars are the choosiest people alive. That is the whole mechanism of it. When the object costs nothing, the only leverage left in the deal is the taking of it, and they will try to spend that leverage without mercy.
This is where I stop talking about cabinets, because I have watched this exact dynamic play out in boardrooms, and it costs a great deal more than a bicycle.
The most expensive advice is the free kind
Here is a scene every internal architect knows in their bones.
You see the project heading for the rocks. You know the reason, because you have seen this specific wreck four times before. You wrote the emails and the memo, you gave the warning, clearly, early, for free, because it is your job and because you care. And it lands with a soft, damp thud and changes nothing. The project sails on and the rocks arrive on schedule.
Six months later the company hires a consultancy at a rate that makes your eyes water, and after three weeks and a slide deck they deliver, as their headline finding, your memo. Almost word for word, and this time the room nods. This time it is wisdom, this time somebody acts.
I have been on both sides of this. I have been the ignored internal voice, and later in my career I have been the expensive external one, saying things the client’s own people had been saying for a year, and being heard for the first time. It used to make me cynical. Now I think it is just the Marktplaats effect wearing a suit. (Except that I am not wearing a suite anymore)
Skin in the game, not eloquence
The uncomfortable truth is that the price was doing work I did not appreciate. It was not extracting money. It was manufacturing commitment.
When a client pays real money for advice, they have put skin in the game, and Taleb is right that this changes everything about how the advice is received. A paid engagement has a sunk cost pulling the client toward acting on it. A free warning has nothing pulling in any direction, so it drifts to the floor. The advice was identical, but the commitment was not. And it is the commitment, not the quality, that determines whether anyone does anything.
This is the part that should worry a CTO, because it means your best internal expertise, the people who actually know the skeletons in the closet, where the bodies are buried, are handing out their hardest-won judgment at a price that guarantees it gets ignored. And then you pay outside for the same judgment, dressed differently, and call the outsiders sharp. You are not buying better advice. You are buying commitment to advice you already owned.
Put a price on being heard
Make the recipient do something to receive the advice. Make them frame the question, in writing, before you answer it. Make them commit to a decision date in the same meeting. Make them own the risk on paper if they decline the recommendation, with their name on it. The moment the other party has spent something, attention, a signature, a public position, the advice stops being gratis af te halen and starts being a thing they came and got on purpose.
And be honest with yourself about your own habits, because I have been guilty of both ends of this. Giving advice away cheaply feels generous, it is often just the easy way to feel useful without the discomfort of making anyone commit.
The wooden cabinet is waiting for my brother in law, I am done with marktplaats. Although I have lots of dakpannen I need to get rid off…
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