​​🎧 Listen to the podcast version of this email here​.​​

There’s a fundamental difference between dogs and cats.

A dog will give you attention any time of the day. You walk in, it’s excited. It wants to play. It wants you to look at it. "Please love me!!"

A cat is very different.

A cat will let you know when it has time for you.

They can be social, playful, very affectionate even. You just have to work for it a lot more.

"Come on, hooman; earn your stripes."

There’s a reason people say:

See?

Online, your audience behaves a lot more like a cat than most people realise.

There was a time when attention came a lot easier.

I remember sending videos by email. Tiny, grainy clips you could barely see which you had to embed inside the email.

People would open them straight away.

It felt new and exciting. You didn’t have to try that hard. Curiosity did most of the work.

Fun fact: the first clip I ever sent around was a bit by comedian Russell Peters about why Indians and Chinese can’t do business together.

Random, brilliant and hilarious. People lapped it up and shared it everywhere because there simply wasn’t that much else.

Same with early YouTube. You’d watch a handful of videos and eventually hit that message telling you that you were all caught up.

You could actually run out of content!!

Can you believe it?

That world is gone.

Now there’s the infinite scroll.

You scroll and there’s more. You scroll again and there’s even more. It never ends.

You pick up your phone for a second while waiting for a bus, and before you know it you’re 30 or 40 minutes in, having watched tons of content.

And yet you don't even remember any of it.

Open another app, there’s more waiting.

Now add AI to that, and it’s just exploded again.

Now it's is not abundance; it is overkill.

What used to feel like a lot, now barely registers.

When everything is available, it all starts to blur together and that’s when your audience starts behaving like a cat.

You have to earn their attention.

This is where a lot of people get stuck, especially experienced professionals.

People who’ve spent years building their expertise know what they’re talking about. They’ve done the work, stood in front of rooms and held attention.

At some point, they were somebody somewhere.

But online, that resets very quickly.

Your experience still matters. Of course it does. It builds trust, credibility, depth.

We probably need more of that, not less. More sharing from real experience. More depth.

Just not at the beginning, cause no one knows who you are.

At the beginning, you’re just another piece of content in a feed full of options.

When you’re speaking in front of a group, people will sit there and listen.

Not always because it’s great, but because it would be rude to get up and walk out. Especially if you’re higher up the food chain.

Online, you can't keep 'em hostage like that. 😄

Teams call, YouTube, webinar, video, post, whatever it is. People can leave whenever they want.

One click and they're gone. Camera off. Mic off.

And they don’t even need an excuse.

There’s always something else. Another post. Another video. Another distraction sitting right there in front of them.

You’re competing with everything else on those screens.

Status won't help you either here: And your years of experience, your title, all of that won’t save you.

So stop thinking of your audience like a dog that's just super pumped to see you all the time.

They’re not coming to you, excited and ready.

Start thinking of them like a cat; you have to play a different game:

You have to be more creative and work harder to earn their attention.

Not impossible, just harder.

So how do you actually make it interesting for an audience that behaves like a cat? Let's get into that next time.

Make it a great day.

P.s. If you’ve ever opened your phone “for a second” and resurfaced 30 minutes later… you already know what you’re competing with.

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