Attention is the new currency of our current time. Whoever gets your attention earns the most. Whether it’s through you buying their products, engaging with their content, or watching/reading sponsored posts they make.
People are getting rich off your attention. And so everyone is fighting to get a piece of it—as am I right now with this email you’re reading.
There’s no way around it. You could say it’s wrong, there’s definitely an argument to be made for it. But how are you going to spread your message? How are you going to make an impact and make positive changes in the world? Well, you need to capture attention to spread your message, right?
So everyone trying to make a change in the system has to abide by the rules of the system they’re trying to change. Which makes them quite the hypocrite.
But I’m not here to give you an existential crisis about the state of social media, the attention economy, and society as a whole.
No, I’m here to warn you. Everyone on social media is playing the same game. Everyone.
As with everything, there are evergreen strategies to get engagement and capture attention. One of those is to pick a fight. To choose an enemy and attack them. It can be anything: people, concepts, trends, ideas, beliefs, whatever you want. The more popular, the better. Controversy gets attention. Controversy sells.
So people are fighting all the time. Coffee, morning routines, cold outreach, 4am club, cold showers, cohorts, daily emails, meditation, tweet templates, platitudes, ‘authenticity’, storytelling, copywriting, 18-year-old life coaches, seriously the list goes on.
This is the cycle of social media: Something rises in popularity → A lot of people talk highly about it → It becomes hugely popular → people start attacking it for attention → attacking it becomes popular → the thing itself is unpopular again → people start defending it again because now that’s the ‘unpopular’ thing to do (which gets attention) → it becomes popular again. And the cycle repeats.
What I’m trying to say it that you’ll always have people hating everything on social media. You might say people just don’t ever agree on something. And sure that’s part of it.
But there’s more to it.
It literally pays to start new fights and pick new enemies.
What’s the way to get out of this mess? Building your own world. Doing your own thing.
The #1 worst mistake you can make is to listen to other people’s advice. Seriously.
Experiment with stuff you come across, get inspired by others, try stuff you think is cool, and stick with it.
Don’t let other people tell you what you can post and what you can’t. Don’t let other people tell you what’s going to make you successful and what won’t. And don’t let other people tell you how many emails you can send before people ‘get annoyed’ at you. Test it out and go see it for yourself.
If you think sending daily emails sounds stupid, boring, a waste of time, then don’t listen to me and do your own thing. But if you think sending daily emails to get paid sounds cool, exciting, and something you’d like to test out for yourself, then check out Email Valhalla here to learn more: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla