What are you spending your attention on?

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As Seth Godin pointed out in a recent podcast titled “What you pay for”, he says there is a reason it’s called “paying attention”. Throughout your day, you are selling your attention for something in return such as information, entertainment, or status.

The challenge we’re facing is that humans only have so much attention that they can sell each day. It replenishes the next day, but you never build up an extra amount to have on hand.

Because it has a ceiling, the value of your attention is going up, and companies are willing to pay more for it and organizations are racing to get more of it for themselves. This is why things like the Facebook algorithm are always being tweaked; they’ll do whatever they can to hold your attention just a little bit longer so they can sell more of that attention to the highest bidder.

Product –> Attention

They say that if you’re not paying for a product (like Facebook) then you are the product. The truth is actually a bit deeper than that; Facebook doesn’t want you, necessarily, they just want your attention.

At the end of the day, selling your attention can be a good thing. You’re selling some right now in reading this post, and I sold some to listen to Seth’s podcast. Last week I sold some attention at a few shows on Broadway. All were likely good uses of it.

Selling your attention is fine, but it’s good to be intentional about where it goes.

Fix your weaknesses or enhance your superpowers?

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When you decide that there is something you’d like to better at doing, there are two possible reasons:

  1. It’s a weakness of yours that you want to improve.
  2. It’s already a strength of yours, but now you want to take it further.

Finding the balance can be tricky. If you’re a baseball player who is a good hitter but a poor fielder, which one should you work more on? Should you try to become an excellent hitter, or work to make your fielding less of a liability for the team?

The answer is likely “both”, but your daily efforts will lean one way or another.

Personally, I’m more of a “fix a weakness that I want to improve” kind of person. This is why I have things like Anki to help fill in my knowledge gaps. I try to play both sides a little bit, but I generally focus more on shoring up my weaknesses.

Gary Vaynerchuk seems to disagree. In his book “Twelve and a Half“, Gary says:

But I don’t overstress this point, because most people work only on their weaknesses, not their superpowers. Yes, I want to level set my weaknesses, but I’m more interested in taking my strengths to the moon.

Gary’s case is interesting. Generally speaking, he’s done a great job of taking his “strengths to the moon”, but much of this book of his was about how he was fixing some of his shortcomings.

Strength or weakness?

Even then, perhaps it’s a matter of perspective. A big piece of this book was Gary’s work toward “kind candor“, which I can see both ways:

  1. This is Gary fixing a weakness of his (candor).
  2. This is Gary pushing forward a strength (leadership).

I view it more like the first one, though I suspect he sees it more like the second.

Either way, he’s pushing himself to improve, and regardless which basket those improvements fall into it’s a great journey to be taking.

Which direction do you tend to push more into?

Daily writing requires (reasonably) consistent routines

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One thing I learned from breaking my writing streak last week is just how fragile it can be. While I certainly believe that there is benefit to most people if they were to start blogging every day, I also recognize that for many people that’s an incredibly big thing to ask.

For those people, it’s not that they’re just busy, but that their schedule is uncontrollably inconsistent.

If you’re “too busy” to add something to your schedule, that really just means it’s not a priority for you. I’ve gone in-depth on this before, but busy vs priorities can be an interesting discussion. At the end of the day, most people have something soft in their schedule that could be replaced by writing and it would be an improvement. Once you get that cycle rolling, it can move along rather nicely.

Inconsistency is tough

The problem is for those with inconsistent schedules, particularly with young children — and I don’t have a good solution for that. My children are older now, so my schedule is fairly smooth, but even with batching some posts up in advance a short illness was enough to throw me off track. I can’t imagine trying to sustain daily writing with young children, varying work hours, a traveling spouse, or many other things that can change daily.

My routine is smoother than many, simply due to my stage in life, but even then a small bump was able to get me off-track. I’m going to try to keep a deeper cache of finished posts in front of me as a buffer, but really this has opened my eyes to how difficult this could be for someone in just a slightly different place in life.

You (yes, you) should likely be blogging every day as well, but I’ll offer a lot more grace depending on your situation and ability to have a consistent daily routine.

Post-COVID

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I made it most than two years without contracting COVID, thanks to a good degree of caution, mask-wearing, and vaccines, but it finally caught me last week and knocked me down. All in all it wasn’t too bad, but it was rough enough that I had to end my daily blogging streak at 620 days.

Today, it begins again.

To be honest, I’m rather frustrated that it ended. We had been on vacation the week before in NYC (which is where I picked up COVID), but I had worked very hard ahead of that trip to have enough content to make it through while traveling and keep thing humming along, which I did. Unfortunately, I was running low on content by the time I got home, and couldn’t catch up while sick. Once the streak was broken, I simply took the rest of the week to recover and to get this week off to a solid start.

I still believe in the same reasons for daily writing that I shared two years ago, so off we go!

Is it a journey or a destination?

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With many goals that people set, there is some ambiguity to whether the goal is a journey or a destination.

buy online buy online
  • As I continue to write daily in here, it’s a journey; there is no final goal to hit.
  • When we’re building a website for a client, there is a clear destination.

If it’s a journey, just keep rolling. If it’s a destination, then what’s next?

Organize your world’s information

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Part of Google’s original mission statement was to “organize the world’s information”. While they’re imperfect, I think they’ve done far more toward that goal than any other company in history. You can search for almost anything from “the world’s information” and they’ll find it for you.

While Google is great at organizing the world’s information, they’re less good at organizing your information.

Their personal tools, such as Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Drive, all have solid ways to search through your personal info. The problem is three-fold, though:

  1. Those are separate buckets, and you might not know where to start.
  2. The search features in those tools (particularly on Google Drive) are nowhere near as fast as a traditional Google Search.
  3. Much of your information isn’t in Google products. It could be in various Apple Tools, Evernote, Notion or even on paper. Being scattered can make it hard to find what you want.

This is a problem I’m constantly working on in my life, though I know it’s one that I will never fully solve. In my mind, though, the effort to continually improve it is worth it. Every day, I’m able to tighten things up just a tiny bit more and make it a little easier to find what I’m looking for.

Obsidian

My primary tool for that right now is Obsidian, though the exact tool you use isn’t the point of this post. As I pour more and more data into it, it becomes smarter about helping me find what I need.

The problem, of course, is that I still have a ton of information in various other products, and that’s not changing anytime soon.

My goal with Obsidian to be able to answer questions such as:

  • Who is that client we met with at the beginning of May?
  • Who said that great quote “xx”?
  • Why did I decide to start reading this book?
  • Who do I know that is an Enneagram 5?

Emails will still be in Gmail, photos in Google Photos, and long-form content in Google Drive. I hope some day one superapp can query all of them at once, though it seems unlikely. For now, if I can just get my core info into Obsidian, it’ll go a long way toward getting me quick answers about my world.

Know what to ignore

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We are faced with a problem that was unthinkable until just the past few decades — we have too much information at our fingertips.

Really, it’s not the issue of what’s at our fingertips but how much is being thrust at us. As I shared with my “Facebook still isn’t listening to you” post, each of us sees between 5,000 – 10,000 ads every day. Couple that with social media posts, news articles, podcasts, emails, text messages, etc, and it’s a unfathomable number.

At times, companies seemingly use this to their advantage to help bury otherwise useful information. In his book “Homo Deus“, author Yuval Noah Harari puts it this way:

“In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. […] In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore.”

Learning what to ignore is very powerful. Control the inputs in your life. Learn to say no when it’s appropriate.

We can’t control everything in our path, but we can work to carve a path that is much quieter, and it’s often in our best interest to do just that.

If you agree to a lower price, pretend you didn’t

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In many industries, including marketing, it’s fairly common to offer discounts or price breaks to help make a deal happen. There’s nothing wrong with that, certainly, but if you’re really giving a “deal”, then the value that you’re offering needs to stay the same.

For example, if you have a $1,000 project that you agree to sell for $750, the value of your work needs to remain at the $1,000 level. If you cheapen your work to compensate for the price, then you didn’t really give a deal — you just took $750 for $750 worth of work.

It’s a tricky thing to do, for sure. It’s easy to think “they didn’t pay as much, so I won’t work as hard”, but that’s being unfair about what you’re offering. That said, keeping your profit margin at a healthy level is important as well, which likely affects how often you are able to give away deals like this.

In his book “Twelve and a Half“, Gary Vaynerchuk even goes the other way. If you lower your price, you should raise the quality of what you deliver. He says:

“If you ask for $200 and agree to $100, think of it as $300.”

I’m not sure I completely agree with that, though I appreciate the sentiment. Really, in both cases you should think of it as $300 and work to deliver beyond expectations.

Your readers aren’t stupid

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When writing (or recording a video, or a podcast), there’s a fine balance between being informative and treating your readers like they’re dumb. This is something I struggle with a lot.

If I’m talking about something like my move to Obsidian, I try to balance the “here is what I’m doing with Obsidian” along with the “here is what Obsidian actually is”. This is where having content that is more focused can be helpful, as you’ll have a better feel for the education level of your audience on any given topic. Since I tend to bounce around across many different topics, I’m often not sure where that level is.

In her book “Everybody Writes“, Ann Hadley puts it this way:

“Assume the reader knows nothing. But don’t assume the reader is stupid.”

I’m confident that everyone reading this is intelligent. You, the one reading this sentence, could certainly teach me many things that I’m uneducated about. That’s not even a question. The question is more about your depth of knowledge on the particular topic that I’m writing about on any given day.

The challenge becomes the balance, and I don’t think there’s a good answer. I’ll continue to assume everyone reading this is smart, but I’ll also assume that I’m digging up some random concepts and tools that might be unfamiliar, and I’ll work to strike a nice balance.

If I ever miss the mark badly, please let me know.

First, go fail 49 times

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It’s surprising to me how often “fail more” can be a great way to help a person ultimately succeed.

Seth Godin says that if you’re struggling to come up with a good idea, to “show me all of your bad ideas first“.

I’ve even tried to “fail” on purpose at times; when trying to find a solution to a problem that continually escapes me, I’ll intentionally list a whole bunch of really bad solutions. Many times, one of those will trigger an idea that leads to the right path.

In his book “Twelve and a Half“, Gary Vaynerchuk offers similar advice. If you want to reach out to him for help, you had better have a lot of failure in your past. If you don’t, you’re not trying hard enough. Specifically, he says:

Dear artist, here’s my message back to you: DO NOT E-MAIL ME UNTIL YOUR 49TH PROJECT HAS FAILED. Don’t even consider it. Otherwise, you’ve completely missed the point of tenacity. You want to be a working artist and you gave up after one time? Let me get this straight: You want to spend your whole life drawing, painting, coloring, or doodling, and you gave up because nobody paid attention to your very first project? Get out of here.

Failure can be tough, and if you don’t learn from it then it can become rather worthless. Proper failure, and learning lessons along the way, are what can lead you to greatness.