Credibility is the price of attention
It's getting easier and easier to produce mediocre information. Anyone can remix anyone's ideas and churn out garbage at a disturbing rate.
The only question on peoples minds anymore is 'why should I care'?
The price of entry is genuine human experience. You need a story about an actual, real-world experience that happened to a human being to establish why you are worth paying attention to.
In his course on how everyone can build a Twitter audience, Daniel Vassallo calls having a genuine experience to back your claims with, 'credibility'. I think it's a great word for what we're talking about here.
Daniel likes to talk about working for yourself, and the example he used for his credibility marker was an article on why he quit a $500K job at Amazon to work for hiself. Another examples was
Sahil Lavingia's, he likes to talk about startup culture and his pinned tweet is a post on how he failed to build a billion dollar company. A more relatable example was Simon Sarris and his post on building his home from scratch.
The point is that these people aren't paying lip service to the idea working for yourself, building startups and making homes. They went out and had real experiences about the thing they talk about. Having a story to share anchors their credibility and answers the fundamental question of why you should care.
Credibility is the price of attention.
The takeaway being that if you want attention online, you have to go out and do something interesting in your field, in real life, that deserves paying attention to.
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- The course on how everyone can build a Twitter audience https://dvassallo.gumroad.com/l/twitter-audience
- Daniel on quitting his job at Amazon https://dvassallo.medium.com/only-intrinsic-motivation-lasts-92c0497cf97c
- Sahil's story about Gumroad https://sahillavingia.com/reflecting
- Simon on building his home https://simonsarris.substack.com/p/designing-a-new-old-home-beginnings