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It’s not a silly thing to do

Business

So many options, so little time.

A friend asked if he should put his podcast on YouTube.

After all, that’s how many people are consuming this sort of content, it’s low cost. The comments and subscriptions offer interesting tools for engagement, and it could grow their base.

But just because something might be worth doing, that doesn’t mean you should.

More always comes with a cost.

If you can’t do it as well as the medium demands with the resources you have, you should either find more resources or take a pass. And if the not-silly thing you’re considering is going to add more metrics, not better ones, then walk away.

Annoyingly, yet productively, we keep coming back to, “who’s it for” and “what’s it for.”

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Attention is a luxury good

Business

Luxury goods are special: they are scarce and expensive, and they earn us status with some folks because it shows that we paid more than we needed to.

Luxury isn’t about quality, suitability or performance. Luxury isn’t a more accurate watch or a faster processor. Luxury is a marker that we can afford to do something others might consider wasteful.

A Birkin bag is a luxury good, and so is reading an entire non-fiction book, listening to a public radio broadcast or attending a concert when we could stay at home and listen for free.

By ‘wasting’ our attention on nuance, narrative, experiences and everything except the checkbox takeaway, we’re sending a message to ourselves and others. A message about allocating our time to something beyond optimized performance or survival.

If you’ve signed up to offer an attention-luxury good, you undermine it when you also try to make it quick and convenient.

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