How To Win The Big Game Of Attention

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Today you will read all kinds of advice from mentors, experts, bloggers, and friends sharing memes on social media.

“5 ways to do this” and “7 ways to succeed at that.” You are INSIDE a big game being played by everyone on the internet who is looking for attention. The only reason for anyone to write an article or record a video about how to do something is to get attention for themselves.

Sure, many of us write articles and tips because we want to help, but we can’t actually help or profit if no one SEES them. So absolutely everyone puts stuff up on the web to get attention – no matter the motive.

To understand how people truly get and control attention on the web, you have to step back.

Step outside the game and become a more objective player who can see all the other players and, finally, the way it all works.

When you’re inside the game and you seek out a piece of advice on a blog or video, you are a participant in someone else’s mini-game. They have a motive for attracting you to their content. What is it? How did they succeed in actually getting you to look and listen?

These aren’t questions that people who are fully immersed in the game ask themselves. Fish don’t think about water. They swim. A Leveragist needs to think about what you’re swimming in and how to manipulate the current in your favor.

The only way to do that is to first become aware of the water and currents. The digital ebb and flow of attention. You cannot simply play the game that other players are controlling.

Becoming truly whole as a marketer is only possible when you step outside the massive, global game of attention we are all playing and looking at it, in total, to figure out how it truly works.

It is hard for us to be on the inside (consumers consuming content) and at the same time trying to manipulate the currents of attention (marketing, thought leading, being and authority), but that is simply what we all must do in order to win the game.

The prize is the attention you need to attract to reach your goals. Attention is what we are all here for, whether for marketing something or anything else.

No one puts content the internet to hide it.

We publish content on the web for the express purpose of getting as much attention for it as possible.

How your content shows up on the web isn’t about search. It isn’t about social engagement. It’s about the degree to which you understand the Big Game of Attention and how to get it. Search and social are merely cogs in the bigger machine.

If you willfully give up your power and do whatever you’re told by other peoples’ content, you’re never going to really win the Game. You’re merely a pawn on someone else’s chess board.

So when someone posts another article about 7 ways to succeed (at something), see beyond the article. Take whatever information is useful to you, but see the bigger picture beyond the content itself.

Ask why you land on such pages. Why you seek them out. How the creator of it got you there in the first place. And, most importantly, what part of The Game are they playing and how can you learn from THAT to play the game better yourself.

You will soon find that it’s not the advice that the content says you should take to heart, but many times it’s how that content found you.

It’s about how it is successfully attracting people that has the most to teach you about progressing in your own journey in the attention game.

This is the way of the Leveragist. 

• We never take anything at face value on the web.
• We never simply consume information without thinking about the Big Game and the real reason that information exists in the first place.
• We look outside the stuff people share to understand the bigger leverage play behind it. “Why is this here, what are they doing to get attention with it, and how can I learn from that in addition to the information contained in the content itself?”

What will begin to happen is that you will see for the first time how the information age really works.

You will learn how people are winning the attention game by the way they are playing it. Leveragists aren’t consumers of content first. We are students of the attention game first.

Because, above all else, we want to win that game. We don’t want to just be a tiny part of the crowd of content consumers. It is our job to deeply understand what makes attention come and go and use that intel to attract our own crowd, using leverage to control the game.

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Get the book and become a Leveragist!

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