We live in an attention economy. The scarcest resource is people’s attention as there is more competing for our finite attention than ever before.
So you’re trying to get attention for your business, for your cause, etc. you first need to embrace the fact that nobody inherently gives a shit.
Everybody is trying to get your audience’s attention. Every inch of your social media feed, every flat surface in public space, is now covered with ads or regular people screaming look at me!
And here’s the thing. We can only actually look at one thing at a time. Your eyes can dart around a room and give you the impression of looking all over at one, but it’s really a bunch of individual, zoomed in snapshots pieced together.
You can only do one thing at a time. Multi tasking is merely switching between a ton of singular tasks.
You can only listen to one thing at a time. And so on.
If you’re trying to make an impact in the world, you need to compete for attention, and you need to do that in the places people are looking.
But DO NOT EVER FEEL ENTITLED TO YOUR AUDIENCES ATTENTION. They owe you nothing.
If they for a moment, a minute, five minutes, decide to put their finite attention on you, see it as a transaction. They gave you something of value, now can you make that worthwhile? Can you inform, educate, entertain or inspire enough to make that a fair transaction for them? If so, they’ll be back.
