Somebody Pays For The Pivot

I read a post a while back about software companies putting payments inside their products.

It was competent. Organized, accurate, market math all in the right places. And there was not one human being in it. Not a single line from a company that had actually gone through the transition. Nothing about what it cost them, what broke, who on the team quit over it, what they would tell somebody standing at the front of that decision right now.

So I supplied them. I sat there filling in the missing people from my own memory, from conversations I have had and a few I watched go sideways. By the time I got anything useful out of that post, I had done most of the work.

That is not a reading experience. That is a bill.

We have all had “know your audience” drilled into our brains since our first marketing job, so set that aside. This is narrower and more mechanical. Every piece of content either does the translation or hands it to the reader, and there is no third option. The reader pays in attention they never agreed to spend, which is why so much technically correct content leaves people tired instead of convinced.

I have sent that bill.

When I was job hunting I wrote a run of posts about a category of business I wanted to work inside. Confident stuff. What the space needed to understand about itself. Every one of them was the same posture underneath: pay attention, here’s what I want you to know. Look how smart I am!

I was not contributing. I was auditioning. Describing a room I had not been let into yet, in the vocabulary of that room, hoping somebody inside would hear the accent and open the door. Asking for attention on credit is a very particular kind of expensive… the reader feels the ask even when they cannot name it.

There are really only two things a piece of writing says underneath the words.

Pay attention, here’s what I want you to know. Or…
I have been paying attention, here’s what I can contribute.

You know which one you are holding by the second sentence. Not the headline. The headline is a costume. The second sentence is where the writer either stays with you or turns to face the crowd, and by then you already know whether you are being paid attention to or being called to pay attention.

The ones that land almost never open with knowledge. They open in tension, or in something the author got wrong, or in a thing that still is not resolved. That reads as vulnerability and gets filed under tone, but it is not tone..per se… It is evidence.

Tension is proof somebody stood where you are standing before they started talking. Stats can be gathered from a chair. Tension has to be survived.

Stay Positive & Read Your Own Second Sentence