Last week I was talking to Doug Milliken about how to improve our enterprise sales process. We sell to leaders at ecommerce firms, and he asked me something that stuck.

'Have you read The Go-Giver?'

I hadn't. We moved on, but he mentioned the book is about focusing on giving value, and how that, somehow, comes back to you.

That night I couldn't sleep, so I downloaded the audiobook and listened to the whole thing in one sitting (it's very short). The central premise is one of those ideas that sounds obvious right up until you realize you're not actually living it.

The book's argument, roughly, is that in business and in life, give more in value than you take in payment. Your influence comes from how consistently you put other people's interests first. And your income, over time, follows how many lives you touch and how deeply.

It's no wonder people like Taylor Swift or Novak Djokovic are among the highest paid in the world. They affect enormous numbers of people, profoundly. I watch Novak play and admire his discipline and mental strength - and it makes me better.

The same logic runs through the most compelling businesses I can think of. They give away far more value than they charge for. Your favorite razor, your go-to shampoo, the app you open ten times a day. You happily pay, because what you get back feels like more than what you handed over.

So here's the simple takeaway for today.

For ecommerce, we can talk about behavioral economics and pricing tests and free shipping thresholds all day. But underneath all of it sits a more basic question:

What is the real value your product creates in someone's life? And is your price still comfortably below that value?

If we get that right, the tactics have something to stand on. Get it wrong, and no amount of optimization can save us.