Pay Attention to What You Pay Attention To
Let's all set a high bar for our attention in 2025
Welcome to the Creativity Business, a newsletter about earning attention and differentiating yourself as a marketer or content creator. If you’re not a subscriber, sign up and get content & differentiation strategy delivered to your inbox every two weeks for free.
Happy 2025! I hope you all had a great holiday season and are excited about the year ahead.
I’m going to start 2025 by doing the opposite of what I normally do here.
Instead of writing about how to earn attention as a content creator or marketer, I’m kicking off the new year by exploring what it looks like to protect and curate our own attention as consumers and audience members.
I have a little mantra I like to keep top of mind that helps me focus on the things that really matter.
Pay Attention to What You Pay Attention To.
We are both cursed and fortunate to be living in these times. Cursed because there are so many ways our attention is manipulated and hijacked, but fortunate because there is an abundance of phenomenal and personalized ways to use our time.
Your Life is What You Pay Attention To
I included this quote from Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks in Earn It and I regularly revisit it because it rings so true:
“Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention… So when you pay attention to something you don’t specially value, it’s no exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life.”
How’s that for a wake-up call?
Being aware of how we spend our time and where we give our attention is an act of mindfulness. Sam Harris, one of my favourite thinkers, put out a very interesting message related to time and attention on his Waking Up app about the year ahead. He is going to live 2025 through the filter of assuming it will be his last year. (He has no actual health concerns—this is a thought exercise). Acting as if this will be your last year alive forces you to really think hard about how you’re going to spend your time. Are you going to doom scroll for three hours a day? Or are you going to spend more time with your family? Are you going to listen to crappy podcasts and watch mediocre movies and shows, or are you going to use that time to do something that is truly meaningful or purposeful?
This exercise is powerful because it delivers insights that are tough to swallow:
We don’t have infinite time here on Earth. Far from it.
We are likely spending huge chunks of our lives on things that, in hindsight, we might regret
We probably already know where we are making poor use of our time, and we probably know many better, more meaningful options for that time
For me, there are two necessary approaches to successfully managing our attention. First, we need to defend and protect it against unwanted intrusions. Second, we need to consciously curate what deserves our time and attention by setting a very high bar.
Look at Your Attention Data - Strengthen Your Defenses
What are some ways of making our good and bad attention choices more visible?
Use the screen time reports on your phone to see where you spend your time online. I am often flabbergasted to find out how many hours a day I am on my phone, how many times the phone gets picked up per day, and how many messages and notifications I get daily. It’s a real motivator to start culling and muting!
See if you have regular patterns or times of day where your attention slips and you let less than stellar things into your life. If I’m bored before bed, I too often end up on TikTok. And first thing in the morning, I too often check my email and get overloaded before I’m even out of bed.
Set timer limits on various apps to ensure you don’t slide into a multi-hour dopamine haze.
There are all sorts of browser plugins and apps to help you stay focused, block certain sites, block ads and pop-ups, and work in Pomodoro bursts to protect your attention against temptation and interruption. Forest is a particularly fun one if you’re curious about these.
At the end of spending time with something, ask yourself if it was “time well spent.” If you could go back in time and make the choice again, would you still make the same choice? This will identify what is worth it and what to avoid in the future.
For me, the worst example of this was the recent Jake Paul vs Mike Tyson boxing match. They did a brilliant job promoting it and hyping it up, but it ended up being one of the biggest wastes of time I’ve ever spent in front of a screen. If I could go back in time, I would never make the same choice to watch it again. It overpromised and dramatically underdelivered. Next time, I will think at least twice before buying into the hype of a sporting event like this.
Attention Journaling - Strengthen Your Curation
One other idea I’ve been playing around with for a while is keeping an Attention Journal. At the end of the day, you very briefly review where you spent your time and attention, noting particularly good uses of attention and particularly bad uses of attention.
The act of reflecting on how you use your time and attention improves your filters. You become more and more aware of both the strong and weak choices you make, and inevitably, the quality of your choices goes up over time.
I started writing the “What’s Earned My Attention Lately” section of this newsletter in January of 2023 and, oddly, I’m pretty sure it’s been more valuable for me than it has been for you (although I certainly do hope it’s valuable to you, too!). When I find something particularly interesting, creative, or engaging, I immediately add it to my list of recommendations for this newsletter. The very act of curating what I find worthy of attention has helped me set a higher and higher bar for what I consume.
If an Attention Journal sounds ridiculous and like a poor use of your time and attention, you could do something as simple as becoming more aware of what you decide to share with others. If you’re sending someone an article, a video, a podcast, a song, or anything else, your endorsement is a signal that it’s a solid use of time.
The Takeaway
It’s never been harder to avoid the distractions and interruptions that you don’t want and didn’t ask for, but it’s also never been a better time to find amazing and incredibly valuable content for whatever interests you. With the volume of options, we can and should be extremely discerning with where we use our most precious and limited resource.
Let’s do this! In 2025:
Don’t suffer through crap.
Don’t accept mediocrity.
Put up defences to keep unwanted messaging out of your life.
Life’s too short to give your attention away to everyone who wants it.
The Twist
I know that many of you who read this newsletter are content creators or marketers. If you’ve read this far, you now realize the challenge ahead of you in 2025. You have to produce amazing and incredibly valuable content if you want to get the time and attention of the people you are seeking to reach.
Let’s do this! In 2025:
Don’t produce crap.
Don’t deliver mediocrity.
Focus on earning attention instead of interrupting it, stealing it, hijacking it, grabbing it, or anything else that sounds gross 😜.
So set the bar high twice.
Once for yourself as a consumer and audience member.
Then set it high again as a marketer or content creator.
Cheers to a year ahead respecting our most precious resource and putting it to its best use!
Earn It Updates
New keynotes for 2025!
I’ve been working hard on new keynotes for 2025. Here’s what I’m going to be talking about it 2025:
Enter the Attention Fort
In the Attention Economy, consumer attention is under siege. We’ve built up Attention Forts to defend ourselves against the onslaught of messages and to protect our precious time and attention. As marketers, how can we get inside the walls of the Attention Fort? You’ll learn unconventional strategies that will get you invited into the Fort with open arms.
We Are All Creative
Creativity has never been more essential. In a world oversaturated with mediocre marketing and content, standing out requires more than effort—it demands creativity. But creativity isn’t a gift for the few; it’s a skill we all possess: accountants, lawyers, tradespeople, and everyone else. In this empowering keynote, you’ll unlock your creative potential with practical tools, transformative exercises, and fresh strategies to generate bold, innovative ideas that set you apart.
The Earn It 2025 World Tour
I’ve got a lot of travel coming up this winter. Come say hi if you’re at the events, or reach out if your company is interested in a workshop or talk while I’m in town.
Copenhagen (!) on January 7 at the Clever Content Conference talking about Attention Fort Strategy.
Australia (!) January 12-24. I’m going to be in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane.
Athens (!) March 9-11 at the Radiodays Europe Conference.
If your organization could benefit from one of my 2025 keynotes or a content strategy workshop, just reply back to this email, or reach out at steve.pratt@creativity-business.com.
What’s Earned My Attention Recently
The unique Timothee Chalamet press tour for A Complete Unknown continues in this epic interview with Nardwuar the Human Serviette. I don’t know what’s going on, but Nardwuar seems to be getting bigger and bigger and I’m here for it. So well deserved!
I am a comedy nerd and I love Anthony Jeselnik. He’s been doing standup for 20 years and recently put out a new special called “Bones and All” on Netflix that is top-notch. He is a true master of hopping back and forth over “the line.” Even though you know that every joke has a surprising turn, you can never figure it out in advance.
The Link In Bio newsletter from Rachel Karten has been one of my favourite reads of 2024. It’s one of the few newsletters that I pay for as a subscriber. If you’re a marketer or a social media manager, you’ll learn a lot and get introduced to a ton of creative and innovative leaders in the space.
Angus Tucker is one of the co-founders of the john st agency in Toronto, and he started writing a newsletter this fall. It’s full of good stories and smart advice for creatives and marketers.
Mark Armstrong recommended Matthew Dicks’ book Storyworthy on LinkedIn recently and I read it over the holidays and loved it. If you want to learn how to tell better stories from your life, this is a terrific and entertaining guide.
"The truth isn't the truth until people believe you, and they can't believe you if they don't know what you're saying, and they can't know what you're saying if they don't listen to you, and they won't listen to you if you're not interesting, and you won't be interesting unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly."
Luke Sullivan, Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This
Thank you to everyone who reached out about receiving a copy of Earn It as a holiday gift! It’s been a wonderful and surreal experience to see so many of you giving and getting the book, and I really hope you all enjoy it.
I wish you all the best in 2025!
Steve