Last Updated on January 3, 2025
It’s often said that time is the only truly finite resource.
While this is true, attention is what defines the quality of your time.
James Clear once said, “Where you spend your attention is where you spend your life,” adding, “the more control you have over your attention, the more control you have over your future.”
Anyone who has ever attempted to meditate knows this is true (as well as how difficult it is to truly hone your attention). Attention shapes everything—your actions, your emotional state, your results, your future.
Here’s a quick thought experiment: Imagine you’ve carved out a precious 3-4 hours on a Friday afternoon to learn and grow in your craft. That time block is sacred, but how you use it is even more critical.
Here are your options:
- Scroll TikTok marketers or binge LinkedIn B2B hot takes (a flashy, dopamine saturated waste of time that feels productive).
- Read timeless classics like Ogilvy on Advertising or Scientific Advertising.
- Invest in reputable courses, like Sean Ellis’s simulation-based growth programs or Reforge’s advanced growth curriculum.
- Dive headfirst into a hands-on project, à la Ryan Law’s Python journey through Replit’s 100 days of code. (AKA, “You Can Just Do Things“)
Same time spent. Radically different outcomes.
Just consider for a few seconds your time spent on your phone versus your spectrum of satisfaction versus regret of that time spent. Most people would feel more satisfaction spending 3 hours learning a language than doom scrolling on social media (there has been an absolute abundance of research showing this).
The truth is, our attention is under siege from every angle. Every platform we engage with—social media, streaming services, even emails—is a digital casino, a gamified Skinner Box engineered to keep us scrolling, clicking, and drooling.
And don’t listen to the people who say that algorithms are a pure and objective approximation of user desires, a meritocratic way to deliver content to the right people.
Not long ago, Twitter decided I loved fight videos.
Why? I’d lingered on one in my feed, because, well, it’s a fight video and very hard to look away from. And the algorithm took it as a signal to bombard me with more. It wasn’t what I wanted—I hated the cortisol spike and the feeling of watching street fights—but it was hard to look away. Eventually, I had to manually hide them to reset the feed.
Algorithms optimize for attention, not satisfaction or intentionality. They assume that what holds your focus is what you value. It’s a flawed system, and one that marketers often mimic by chasing surface-level metrics (aka attention may be currency, but it doesn’t always translate to revenue).
Spotify taught me a similar lesson this year.
I’d become a passive listener, consuming background noise from algorithm-generated playlists. It felt hollow. And I’m a massive music fan who, at one point, was a music major, played in a band, and got a music-themed tattoo.
I had to “exit the matrix,” so I entirely stopped listening to “Made for You” algorithmic playlists and using Smart Shuffle. I literally only listen to full albums that I consciously choose or human curated playlists. And my love for music has returned.
So, let’s collectively wake up, lift our heads from our phones, pull our shoulders back, and take back some of that time and attention.
If you’re still in the office this week and reading this newsletter, I assume you’re a highly ambitious person, so here’s my advice on how to reallocate your attention next year:
- Talk to customers more than you think you should as well as peers outside your bubble. Do it in person if possible and leave your phone on Do Not Disturb mode.
- Learn from deep, credible sources—books, courses, or well-curated platforms—sources with high signal-to-noise ratio and credibility.
- Take action. You can just do things. Build and create beautiful stuff.
Attention Economy? How to Treat Your Customers Well
As marketers, we also have a responsibility: the quality of the attention we attract.
Yes, tautologically, you need attention to eventually acquire and retain customers (in the same way that, definitionally, you need brand awareness to lead to purchases, because someone unaware of you can’t purchase from you – duh).
Cheap tricks and shallow gimmicks don’t just hurt your audience—they dilute your brand.
Consider this example: A marketer posts a salacious anecdote on LinkedIn, engineered to provoke. When challenged, they admit the phrasing was bait.
This happened recently. I respect Adam Robinson and what he has built, but I saw a recent post (not linking – save your attention, please) that started like this: “18 months ago, I attended a birthday party for a founder who just raised $185M (at a $2B valuation) on the rooftop of the Four Seasons and was absolutely HUMILIATED by his incredibly attractive 28-year old blonde girlfriend:”
Predictably, a few people commented on his phrase “attractive 28-year old blonde girlfriend,” and why he used it or why it was relevant to the point, to which he responded, “I literally wrote it so that you would leave this comment.”
And it’s just…c’mon man. It’s like if I called out to you using an offensive nickname, which of course would get your attention, and when you responded with anger or offense, I just said “Ha! I knew it would get your attention.”
People don’t like to feel like they’ve been burnt or tricked.
Matt Stone of South Park recently criticized streaming platforms for distorting the art of television:
“I feel burned (by) the last couple TV shows that I’ve gotten into and I do feel like this has been a casualty or a problem with the streaming revolution is that, like, someone will say, ‘You gotta watch this show, you gotta watch The Mandalorian, you’ve gotta watch Battlestar Gallactica. And I’ll go on, and I’ll start watching it, and, goddamn, it’s great! And I’m like, I am missing something!
Then, you get into the second season, and there’s that episode that’s bullshit. And I feel so betrayed. I don’t have a rational (response). I’m not like, ‘Oh, well, you know what? The economics, they really tried.’ I don’t do that. I go, ‘Fuck you, you’re wasting my time.’
The business that the streaming revolution has created is screwing with people’s heads and destroying the art. As soon as I feel like you’re wasting my time, I feel completely betrayed. Because I fell in love with something, and now I know you’re screwing with me, and you’re screwing with my heart, and I have a short fuse, and that’s that. Shut the computer, and then I don’t watch TV for three more years.”
The same could be said for B2B marketing. It’s tempting to play to the algorithm, to churn out content designed to grab attention without delivering value. But this approach erodes trust and diminishes long-term impact.
As marketers, we have a responsibility to respect the attention we capture.
Like, of course you can scrape the page titles of a competitor and use AI to rewrite their content, scaling your content production to thousands of pages. You can probably get some attention. But you’re focusing on the exact wrong question.
The right question isn’t “Can I?” and it’s not even “Should I?” It’s “how can I solve unmet user needs in a unique way that maps to my product or solution?” and if you can answer that question, you’ve got the foundation of a revenue-generating organic growth program. That’s the common pattern between almost all the past newsletters I’ve written (which you can see in the archive here).
I’d love marketing leaders to focus less on first order effects, and more on 2nd and 3rd order effects, which ultimately boil down to how consumer attention is being reallocated due to technological and macro-economics changes.
This, to me, is the critical idea for 2025:
- First-order: AI facilitates content creation at scale and lower cost. I can now produce 1000 blog posts where previously I could produce 10. I can now write 10,000 emails where previously I could write 100.
- Second-order: So can everyone else. And they do. Saturation leads to dilution and the “law of shitty clickthroughs.”
- Third-order: Platforms and consumers both develop new filtering criteria for how to allocate their attention and “reward” information. Platforms do so for survival, else the tragedy of the commons destroys their value. Google will seek to identify hard to fake signals of quality, intent, and utility (which, I’ll emphasize, has nothing to do with whether AI was or wasn’t used in the creation of the content). Consumers due so because time is finite and they don’t like to feel burnt. Do you take clearly automated AI comments on LinkedIn seriously? Or do you disregard them immediately? Why?
This is where the future lies.
As a marketing leader, if you spend almost all of your time thinking about those filtering signals, you’ll likely set yourself up for a robust growth trajectory and you’ll probably also stumble into some innovative new practices.
If you focus on the first order effect, you’ll likely succumb to peaks and valleys of arbitrage windows, constantly chasing a short term loophole until it inevitably closes (and I have to clean up the chicken bones from the garbage disposal).
Consumers will seek tools, platforms, and methods to filter the signal from the noise. Marketing leaders who embrace this shift—by prioritizing hard-to-fake quality signals—will gain the edge.
Untapped Experiences and Watermelons on the Ground
An old manager of mine used to say, “it’s not even low hanging fruit, we literally have watermelons on the ground!”
AI and information overload aside, there are almost certainly opportunities right in front of you to maximize the utility and value of someone’s time.
For example, do you have a welcome email that is automatically sent to new product users or email newsletter subscribers? Is it amazing?
Do you have a Thank You page someone sees after downloading an asset or purchasing something? How much time and effort did you spend making it remarkable?
Or think about this: meetings suck. Or do they?
One specific surface area I’ve obsessed over is our client consulting call. I
remember in the past, when I was in-house, sitting through calls thinking that the agency was just wasting my time. I’d pop over to different tabs, completely tuned out. Can you just email me these updates? Literally just going over reports and project management timelines.
I want to create the exact opposite experience, an 11 star experience on every meeting.
I want clients not only to get value from every call we have, but I want them to look forward to the meeting, and actually, I want it to be their absolute favorite meeting they have. I want it to be so above and beyond in terms of information density and usefulness – and perhaps it is even fun – that in the event we have to reschedule it or cancel it, they feel disappointment.
The cascade effects from this single touchpoint are massive. Not only do we invert a commonly wasteful activity (a meeting), but meetings like this unlock deeper rapport and trust, tighter collaboration and faster feedback cycles, clearer communication, and ultimately better business outcomes.
If you’re going to ask for someone’s attention for 30 minutes every other week, why not make it an incredible experience?
Alright, I’ll step off the soap box now, but if you’ve read this far, I truly thank you for your attention and appreciate that you’ve read this or any of my newsletters.
Despite my moralistic tone in this piece, I’ve never been more optimistic about the future of marketing and growth and have a lot more ideas, experiments, and tactics to write about in the new year.
I’m going to leave you with a quote that I love from Herbert A. Simon:
“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
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