It’s a fact. We’re using up resources faster than ever before, creating price and supply instability. But this only becomes a problem if you choose not to do anything about it. Businesses can work out how to deal with scarce resources if they choose to.

Asking questions like ‘how do we create the value our customers expect with 60, 70, 80, 90% fewer resources?’ will be a good start. A very hard question to answer I grant you, but not an impossible one.

People probably thought it was impossible to eradicate smallpox centuries ago. But we did it, worldwide. People probably thought it was impossible to make electricity from sunlight. But we made the first solar cell in 1883. Now we’ve made them spray on.

The point is we’re able to solve pretty much any challenge we choose to, if we put our minds to it. The problem is therefore scarcity of willingness, of motivation, of ambition. This is a problem, because you can’t just go outside and dig these things up. Unlike resources they are intangible, mysterious things.

OK, so how do you create them then?

You need a lot of things. But firstly you need people’s attention. Without that you can’t achieve anything of any significance.

We have 24 hours a day. Assuming we sleep for 8, that’s around 16 conscious hours.

16 hours.

That’s all the time we’ve got to eat, read the news, tweet, check our emails (this is not work), go to meetings (resulting in more work), do our work, check facebook (valued at $96bn because it’s got our attention), ride our bikes, have sex, have a laugh with our friends, spend time with our loved ones, play with our kids.

16 hours.

Resource scarcity isn’t a problem. Attention scarcity is.

How do you get attention then?

How do you earn your slice of the 16 hours?

Like the first question, this one is very difficult question to answer too. Difficult, but again not impossible.

The difficulty lies in us. Every time we try and get people’s attention, something’s changed. Us, them, or the context surrounding all of us.

This blog is packed full of ideas for how to capture people’s attention. And we’ve all managed at some point to capture and hold people’s attention, so we know what some of the answers are. There are lots and lots of them.

The starting point though is always to recognise you’ve got to earn attention.

Will what you’re doing be different, valuable, creative, attractive enough to earn your slice of those 16 hours?