Do you ever catch yourself stressing about what might happen? Perhaps a specific nightmarish scenario or maybe just a vague sense of dread about an uncertain future? Either way you don’t know what’s coming but you are feeling nervous.

This is worry and it will poison us. “Worry leads to fear, and fear is crippling.”

The catch is that all worry and fear are directed at the future. We don’t worry about what has already happened. We don’t fear our history. So when we get anxious about tomorrow it’s a focus on something that is unproven, there’s no guarantee that our fears will play out the way we imagine. An ancient proverb goes something like, “he who predicts the future, lies even if he tells the truth.”

What is the antidote to worry? Almost all the ancient wisdom seems to be in agreement, the response to fear and worry is something like faith. It is believing that things will work out. It is projecting our minds and imaginations to the place where we can see positive outcomes.

Can you hold on to their interest?

This change has been talked about on the fringes of marketing strategy for a little while. But in the last couple of weeks I have noticed it becoming a greater part of the mainstream conversation.

To that you might say, “Its just because your paying attention to it”. That may be true, as in the red car theory. When you start giving attention to something you begin to notice more of it. Meaning you may not have thought about or noticed a red car in a while, but if you think about it now, the next time you are looking at the street you will probably notice more red cars. So it could be that simple of an explanation for why I’m hearing more about Interest media as opposed to social media but I really think there’s more to it.

Social media means that the media you are consuming is produced by people you know or choose to connect to. This trend towards Interest media is what is sometimes called the TikTok-ification of internet content. The algorithm that TikTok pioneered would measure our engagement (time spent on a video/profile, if we like a video or comment etc.) and use that to rearrange the content that is presented to us on the “For You” page. So increasingly (since all the major platforms have reflected this development) what we are interested in, both consciously or subconsciously has become the pattern used to decide which new content will be shown to us.

For marketing and sales professionals this means a critical adjustment needs to be enacted. Content must be interesting. It must use tools that promote and support casual interest. I can’t worry about what this means or predict where it will go, but right now it only makes sense to make content that is interesting.

Doing it different

I have recently come across a podcast called Founders. The interesting thing here is the approach of the publisher. Its mostly audio focused. He doesn’t normally have any guests or sample media. The majority of the episodes are monologues of what the creator David has learned by reading about business founders. It’s really interesting and inspiring and worth a listen to at least two episodes. One of his regular ones and the episode I’m linking to hear David explain his process and motivation.

Find it on the Lucky Fox Spotify playlist

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