Blog - David Helkowski

Attention is hard for everyone

 I recently watched a YouTube video by Asa Park about MrBeast. The video is focused on being very critical of him. I'm not a fan of MrBeast and do think he is strange, but I don't particularly think he is any ultimate evil. So I'm not endorsing the message of the critical video, but I did find it interesting.

The part of the video that I found interesting was the showing of the really old YouTube MrBeast videos from college. I had not seen those before. They are interesting to me because he went to extreme lengths to get attention on YouTube in order to get started.

He did a ton of ridiculous crap in order to get traction, such as repeating idiotic stuff or counting to absurdly high numbers.

He didn't make random videos and slowly gain traction like one would imagine. I don't believe the "he slowly formulated the perfect formula". He did surely get better and better at attracting attention, but in my view he did anything he possibly could to get that attention.

My takeaway from that is that getting attention is difficult for anyone. It isn't just MrBeast that makes me think this it is many things.

Even for famous people, what they say and do doesn't immediately by default garner a lot of attention. Some things may compound with their fame and get tons of attention, but many things may not.

This is striking to me because I've created a lot of content over the years and met with almost zero attention to 99.9% of it. That's a depressing thing to happen and messes with my motivation to keep doing it and keep trying. That in turn continues and removes a lot of my motivation to share things that by all rights should succeed and get attention, because I've moved to this point of believing that it doesn't matter what I do, no one will pay attention to any of it.

Thinking nobody will pay attention to what I do or so causes further trouble, because it has caused me to say and do things in a more forceful toxic way to attempt to get people to pay attention. A fair number of people over the years have pointed this out and told me to adjust the way I communicate because it is their opinion it is harming me and causing people to ignore my otherwise valuable content.

Their criticism is fair but I've always told them that I'm not going to change my method, because I share what I do because it is what I believe and I'm not going to tone down what I say and effectively hide what I believe. That is, I take their request as asking me to water down the blunt truth.

I hate to admit it, but there is a point for me to be more polite to others. I still refuse to not point out the truth where I see it, even what that truth is uncomfortable, but I do agree that I don't have to slam people over the head with it.

Essentially, my perspective has changed a bit in that my value is not in how forcefully I can communicate. I can surely communicate in a very forceful way. That much is obvious. But I don't need to. Sure, a lively reckless debate can and does attract attention, but that attention is short. It is not short attention that I want, it is long attention. One can draw repeating short attention by doing crazy shit, but then what? What is the end result then? Essentially if I keep going down that path I become like MrBeast, doing absolutely anything I can to hold peoples attention for a minute or two.

I don't want the end of the toxic path, and I don't even enjoy being toxic to anyone. It's stressful and makes me feel unhappy. I do enjoy pointing out the truth as I see it, but trying to force that truth on anyone is not something I enjoy.

I just have believed that if I ask or point things out calmly that people will ignore it. That remains true, but it misses that a segment of people will always ignore what is said. The people who will ignore calmly and deliberately shared truth, but would pay attention to a toxic variant of it? Those people? They are not those I should want or pursue attention from.

The people I want to be involved with are those who are calm, collected, and strive to do meaningful things in cooperation with anyone willing.

That path is difficult. Getting meaningful lasting attention from anyone is hard. It is hard for anyone. Sure, once you gain enough attention you can capitalize on that and expand it. I just have tried the blunt path long enough and I don't think it works well for those I want to reach.

The difficulty of a path has never been the deciding factor for me on whether I do something or not, so I am going to change tactics. Not because someone demanded me to do so. Not because I was wrong. Because the audience I want didn't match the method I was pursuing.

Getting meaningful attention is hard, but it is worthwhile.

Cheap attention can be gained by toxicity, but that's not meaningful and not worth pursuing.

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Tags: ai

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Tags: japan

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