By the Ocean
Clear 64 Degrees
7:33 a.m.
One reason you don’t do what everyone else is doing is because, the bigger the trend, the harder it is to get noticed. The more important reason is because you’re only here to do certain things in certain ways.
I don’t pay much attention to trends because I’m not even a real business person. I’m doing art over here and have spent 25 years figuring out how to make that pay well enough to buy steak and red wine. That means I’m not willing to do what it takes to make money. My work is figuring out how to make money doing what I like to do.
I guess you could say I’m in the art business. But that might be a stretch!
When it became clear to me that YouTube was the new TV, I knew that I could avoid it. I don’t do TV. I have no interest in it. And the numbers don’t make sense to me. Given that the human attention supply is finite, a billion TV stations coming online means it’s eventually not going to make sense for MOST of the people investing an enormous amount of time on there.
Plus, video is linear. It requires time to consume. IDEAS delivered in print collapse time. An enormous amount of value can be delivered in 10 seconds. Finally, that format artificially focuses the goal on keeping attention instead of what I care about: creating transformation.
So YouTube is fostering a culture of consumption. It demands a lot of its viewer…like all of the time they have! The other reason TV doesn’t make sense is because the people I work with don’t tend to have time for TV. TV doesn’t have a history of attracting the winners. We have decades of data that shows that. There’s a reason they call it the “Boob Tube.”
My choice has nothing to do with your choice. So if you love YouTube, go right ahead! Just remember you DO have a choice. Those choices are made in the context of your strategy for getting where you want to go. The clearer you get on those things, the more stuff you can ignore.
YouTube is crowded right now because a lot of people are willing to run a race without being clear about what prizes are being offered.
For almost everyone, this will probably end up being a bad deal.
Know who you are. Know what you’re about. Know what you want. Act accordingly.