Attention is not the same as influence. They are different games with different rules.
Content marketing is how you play for attention. Your score is based on how many people you can reach.
Leadership is how you play for influence. Ten people or ten thousand — the score is how far they’ll follow you.
But it gets tricky when you scroll through LinkedIn or Forbes and read about what you need to do to succeed these days:
It may be the Harry Potter or FIFA World Cup or Bass Fishing editions, but they are all the same game of Monopoly:1 buy property, avoid jail, collect $200.
We even have the research to prove that—somewhere in the scattered pile of plastic pieces and fake money—there is something that creates trust, credibility, and demand2 for those who play their cards right.
Wait, what’s this chess piece doing in here?
In 2011, J.L. Collins started a blog as an archive of letters to his daughter Jess. She was just graduating from college and he wanted to help her make wise decisions with money. His goal was not to build an audience and he wasn’t a traditional expert.
Collins had a degree in English Literature—not finance or economics—but he had a lifetime of learning about money the hard way. His only goal was to lead one person, Jess, down a simpler path to financial independence than the one he had taken.
15 years later, he is now called the Godfather of FI. Those letters, collected as The Simple Path to Wealth, have sold over 400,000 copies.
Think, record, share.
If you want anyone to follow you, you have to speak to them. Publishing is a powerful way to do that.
But following someone means orienting your decisions around them, not just consuming what they make. It has nothing to do with audience size.
Optimize for attention, and that’s all you’ll get. Optimize for influence, and you will get transformation.
And transformation is hard to keep hidden.