Attention and Value

Yesterday I sent an email about how to build attention trust.

To summarize, attention costs something. The more times your audience walks away feeling like their attention was well spent, the more times they will return and for longer. This is how attention trust is built.

Here's the thing:

Attention is really no different from money.

That's to say that there is a relationship between the cost of one's attention and the value received.

Let me show you:

If I buy a burger that costs $20 and it tastes really bad, I walk away feeling disappointed.

Why? Because, as it turns out, the burger was worth less than the $20 I traded for it.

The same is true with our attention.

All things considered equal, if I give someone 10 minutes of my time and get 30 seconds of value, my time is wasted.

On the other hand, if I get 10 minutes of value in only 30 seconds, my time is valued. The value is greater than the attention spent.

My point is this:

The more expensive one's attention is to give, the more value you must deliver in order to offset the expense.

In other words, if you ask for more of your audience's time, you must deliver more value.

For this reason making, longer content is difficult.

People are much more forgiving if you deliver little value in little time.

Whereas if you deliver little value in a lot of time, they may not trust you with their attention again.

Truly,

Elijah

P.S. If for this same reason that I keep these emails short! I'm very careful to write a longer email because if it takes longer to read, it BETTER be worth more than the time it took to read it.