Nikola Tesla once visited Henry Ford at his factory, which was having some kind of difficulty. Ford asked Tesla if he could help identify the problem area. Tesla walked up to a wall of boilerplate and made a small X in chalk on one of the plates. Ford was thrilled, and told him to send an invoice.

The bill arrived, for $10,000. Ford asked for a breakdown. Tesla sent another invoice, indicating a $1 charge for marking the wall with an X, and $9,999 for knowing where to put it.

It takes a lot of time and experience to know the ideas that should be executed (and how), and if you can be rewarded for that, then all the better. Knowing which ideas to execute, when is the key. Knowledge isn’t power, acting on that knowledge is. Similarly, ideas are worthless without execution. Action speaks louder always.

If someone is tempted to hire a freelancer at $5 for 6+ months (1000 hours), why not just pay someone more capable $5,000 to get it done in a month (160 hours) ?

The value of knowledge vs work equation is incomplete without consideration of the time. The time estimates works only when we know the values we are after.

Legends:
$5 = Worth of a Coffee cup. 
$5000 = Worth of a vacation to the Annapurna.