Creating content that gets you the opportunities you want

And now, to get into the main part of the episode, which leads nicely on from this, something I think about a lot is how we keep optimizing our content for views and attention when actually I think we should be optimizing for opportunities.

So the time that real humans spend watching or reading or consuming our content with their real human eyes and brains [laughs] has unfortunately been reduced to digits in our insights tab, right? Like, that's very much the, the kind of content creation age that we're in.

But what those numbers don't tell you is the quality of that attention.

Did someone watch your reel with their eyes glazed over, thumb with, like, a mind of its own, and immediately forget what you've said as soon as they scroll to the next video, or did your words affect them in some way? Did they stop and think, "Oh, that's changed my perspective, actually," or, "Oh, I really needed that today"? Or did it prompt them to go and explore your other content, or even your offers and trying to work out how they can work with you? Or did they just keep watching 'cause the visual hook you used left an open loop there long enough that they had a brain itch that they had to scratch before scrolling on and, like, just forgetting everything you just said? Did the exact right people see your carousel, and did it put you on the radar of someone you didn't even expect that's brought you an exciting email into your inbox, or did you get 2,000 views from people who are never gonna buy from you? And it's become a little bit of a cliche at this point, but I would honestly rather have 1,000 people see my post and actually be impacted by it and take some sort of action from it than 100,000 people see it just because it hit the exact right combo of curiosity and stickiness.

And obviously, of course, the real holy grail is both.

How can we optimize for attention and impact, both in terms of saying something actually worth listening to and posting something that creates actual, real opportunities in our business? And I think there's a bit of a dance to be had here between complexity and simplicity.

So an idea needs to be complex enough that it's not just stating the obvious, but delivered simply enough that someone scrolling past would get it before automatically scrolling past in the first millisecond.

Because that's kind of what our ideas are up against now.

Our whole life's work, the thoughts, the philosophies that we've built careers around now have to be digested in less than a second or it's already too late.

And I think sometimes if you think about these things too much, it sets you into, like, a bit of a doom spiral, and this is why I talk so much about building a content world instead of optimizing the life out of every post, because it soothes these, I don't know, horrible existential thoughts, for me at least a bit, because those grabby, hooky, make-them-stop-in-the-first-second posts are really useful, but they're really only the gateway to the rest of your world.