Attention is the currency of the 21st century.
In the battle for customers, clout, and attention, I used to rely on the advice of “experts” whose methods promised miracles. “If you do this, then you’ll have thousands of people looking at your business in no time!”
But their advice rarely works. Not because it’s “bad” advice, but because it’s advice that worked for them in their unique situation - it’s never been tested in your situation.
Imagine if I was giving you advice on how to start and succeed in the toilet paper business - I built a toilet paper empire, and now I’m giving you my “playbook.” That all sounds fine and good… until you realize that I started my toilet paper business 1) in 2020 when the stuff was flying off the shelves, 2) with the support of all my friends and family, and 3) with a huge nest egg to fall back on if I failed.
You have none of those things. The context you’re operating in is completely different from mine, so naturally, the odds of you being successful by doing what I did are very, very low.
This is where the breakdown in the expert-student relationship began to break down for me.
So once I recognized why the advice of “experts” wasn’t making my business the incredible marketing success they promised, I started to look for advice in other ways…
First, I started to notice the things that weren’t said when “experts” gave their advice. For example, when someone was giving me advice on how to run Instagram ads in the way he’d built his business with, I noticed a few things that applied to his situation, but didn’t apply to mine:
He was advertising how to do advertising! He was selling shovels to the gold-diggers. The market for his expertise was massive compared to mine at the time (owners of B2B service businesses who wanted to grow their business through public speaking).
Also, his ads displayed astronomical ROI numbers as his hooks. I was not promising financial ROI, but rather, a skillset that could increase your resonance with your market.
Lastly, he insulted me and told me I was lazy when I questioned his methods. Big red flag.
Instead of following him, the best marketing and attention-getting training I’ve ever received (and continue to receive) comes from a simple, 9-word curriculum:
I pay attention to what I pay attention to.
If I pay attention to something, then I bet other people do too. So when an ad or a post or a speech gets my attention, or better yet, gets me to pull out my wallet and buy… I try to break it down:
Why did I just do that?
At what point in that process was I committed to taking action?
What influenced me?
Why am I interested in this?
By paying attention to what I pay attention to, I give myself a framework for earning the attention of others.
It seems that the amount of attention I can earn for my business is directly correlated to how much I pay attention to the world around me.
To get attention, pay it first.
❤️ Zac Garside
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