In a world where attention is the ultimate currency, do you know how to ensure you’re not overlooked?

Scott Adams has often said that attention is half of persuasion. It's self-evident once you hear that--how can you persuade anyone if they don't see or hear what you are saying?

Robert Greene, in his book The 48 Laws of Power, explores this idea in the chapter titled “Court Attention at All Costs.” Greene’s insights are not just about being noticed but about cultivating a presence that commands respect and intrigue. Let’s unpack this idea and explore how you can use it to your advantage on social media, and in personal and professional settings.

The Importance of Attention

Attention is power. Think of how Steve Jobs, known for his dramatic product unveilings, captured global attention. Would Apple have had its tremendous comeback story if Jobs was not able to capture attention? Of course not.

One of my mentors in management consulting was great at this--he would take contrary positions to what clients were saying, in the context of initial conversations where we were trying to sell a larger project to them. At first I wondered, why are you doing that, as sometimes his take wasn't even something I necessarily agreed with. I asked him about this and it suddenly made perfect sense: If we just agree with what they think they should do, why would they listen to us?

Another mentor also showed me the value of getting attention by disagreeing. We had worked at a client together that had an intentionally combative culture--they not only encouraged but required everyone to speak up when they disagreed with anything, and that included consultants like me. Every step of the way on that project, I had to debate all comers. The client would also ask us blunt questions like who on their staff we thought was not performing well--which is not something a consultant would ever comment on--and they required us to answer that!

This mentor of mine later left consulting for a highly paid executive job at a bank, and I chatted with him at a party given to see him off. He told me that the project we were on was how he got that job. He had gone directly from that combative client to this bank to meet with their CIO, and the CIO showed him an agenda for an offsite meeting he had put together and asked his opinion. He responded by tearing the CIO's agenda apart, telling him it was all BS and here was what he really should be doing instead. He told me--before working at this combative client, he NEVER would have done something like that. But the CIO's response was not to get angry, quite the contrary: He said wow, everyone else I showed this too just told me it was great, you're the only one who gave me honest feedback. And that experience later led directly to that CIO offering him a job.

When people forget you, they disregard your ideas, contributions, and presence. To stop being invisible, you need to make lasting impressions, and requires doing unexpected things.

This principle is not just about being loud or flamboyant or even disagreeable; it’s about being memorable. In a world saturated with information and distractions, carving out a distinct identity ensures you remain top of mind.

Strategies to Grab Attention

President-elect Donald Trump has appointed Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to spearhead a revolutionary new initiative aimed at streamlining federal operations

The newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) took to X on Thursday, launching a crowdsourcing campaign that invited platform users to identify wasteful regulations within the federal government.

https://x.com/DOGE/status/1867087144424182178

The initiative quickly captured public attention, amassing over 36 million views by Friday afternoon.

“DOGE is undergoing a serious analysis of wasteful and burdensome regulations, and is looking for public feedback!” the X now-viral X post began.

It then asked: “Which are the really bad ones?”

Musk, the owner of X, and Ramaswamy have been tasked with leading this temporary agency, which seeks to eliminate redundant and burdensome government regulations.

Their approach mirrors the fictional character Ron Swanson from NBC’s “Parks and Recreation,” whose zealous budget-cutting became a cultural touchstone for government skeptics.

The DOGE team requested specific feedback from the public, asking users to cite exact passages from the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) and detail their adverse consequences.

While enthusiasm ran high among participants, many failed to provide the requested technical details, however, instead offering broader critiques of government operations.

“Think BIG!” wrote one user, advocating for a complete overhaul of the administrative state and suggesting that major regulations should require Congressional approval.

Another participant targeted the Environmental Protection Agency, questioning its involvement in building regulations and suggesting potential conflicts of interest.

Some users did manage to fulfill the specific requirements, pointing to regulations in farming and security purchases that they believed warranted review.

One participant proposed a radical approach: eliminate everything and require advocates to justify the reinstatement of any regulation or agency.

“Cut everything,” the X user started. “If something needs to stay, that has to prove that it’s needed.”

Read more:

https://resistthemainstream.com/doges-elon-vivek-want-help-crafting-wasteful-government-regulations-heres-how-to-submit-your-ideas/

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A priest, a lumberjack and an entrepreneur walk into a bar. Which one is happiest?

It’s definitely not the bartender — she’s doing one of the jobs least likely to give you satisfaction in life.

How in the world do we know that? Well, a while back, when we looked at the happiest jobs — shout-out to forestry — we considered how happy folks felt while at work. Outdoor jobs look awesome by that metric, dangerous as they often are in the long run, but readers kept reminding us that there’s more to a fulfilling job than how happy you are while doing it.

We didn’t have a stellar way to measure other feelings about work, but we kept our eye on an often-overlooked federal data provider: AmeriCorps. The independent agency, which CEO Michael D. Smith described to us as “bite-sized” but “punching well above our weight,” funds the Civic Engagement and Volunteering Supplement, part of the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey.

True data aficionados may remember the CEV as the source we used to find that Boston and Philadelphia are among the nation’s friendliest cities (yes, we were stunned, too). In 2021 and again in 2023, the researchers behind the CEV asked if you agree or disagree with these four statements:

– I am proud to be working for my employer.

– My main satisfaction in life comes from work.

– My workplace contributes to the community.

– I contribute to the community through my work.

The two years of surveys give us enough responses to start doing some serious analysis — or, in the grand tradition of this column, some less-than-serious analysis.

The questions may sound subjective compared with the usual Census Bureau fare, but they’re the next big step in a slow-building but snowballing academic effort to better measure the non-pecuniary benefits we get from our jobs. As the luckiest Americans worry less about their basic needs, more of us are seeking jobs with a moral or social mission.

“As traditional third places where Americans engage with their community are waning,” said Smith, the AmeriCorps CEO, “it’s great to see that workplaces are creating a space where employees can put their values into action.”

For better or worse, this shift has blurred the boundary between professional and civic life.

“There is this expectation or this desire for people to find meaning in the work that they’re doing and feeling like it contributes to some greater good,” AmeriCorps research and evaluation director Mary Morris-Hyde told us. Americans are more and more interested in working “for a place that gives them time and respects and encourages and wants them to be good citizens in their community.”

And — as your local newspaper reporter or AmeriCorps staffer could probably tell you — having a job that allows you to fight the good fight while on the clock may be worth forgoing a better paycheck elsewhere. But who gets to do these jobs?

The basic demographic outlines are easy to draw. As a rule, you feel better about your job as you get older. Presumably, it’s some mix of people who love their work delaying retirement, people job-hopping until they find meaningful employment, and people learning to love whatever hand they’ve been dealt.

Most measures of satisfaction also rise with education, often quite sharply. Someone with a graduate degree is twice as likely as a high school dropout to strongly agree their workplace contributes to the community. There’s one exception: More-educated folks are actually a bit less likely to strongly agree that work is their main satisfaction in life.

But demographics aren’t the main event. As you probably guessed, much of our job satisfaction depends not on who we are, but on what job we’re doing. In that, we see a separation in the questions about personal satisfaction and the questions about contributing to the community.

The workers most likely to say they’re proud to be working for their employer and that they gain satisfaction from work are — surprise! — the self-employed. The self-employed who are incorporated — a group that often includes small-business owners — are almost twice as likely as private-sector, for-profit workers to strongly profess pride in their employer.

Government and nonprofit workers fall somewhere in the middle on those questions. But they rank at the very top on “My workplace contributes to the community” and “I contribute to the community through my work.” Local government workers, who include teachers, take the top spot for strong agreement on both, followed by nonprofit workers. Private-sector, for-profit workers once again lag behind.

The jobs that do worse on these measures tend to be in manufacturing or other blue-collar production and extraction jobs, or at the lower-paid end of the service sector. Folks in food services (e.g., bartenders and food prep), janitorial roles and landscaping, and personal services (e.g., barbershops, laundry and hotels) all struggle to find greater meaning in their work. Though some better-paid service jobs also struggle by some measures — think sales, engineering or software development.

On the questions regarding pride in your employer and life satisfaction, we see managers and our old friends in agriculture and forestry take the top spots. But right behind them — and actually in the lead in the other question — lurks the real standout, a set of jobs we’d classify as “care and social services.”

That includes, most notably, religious workers. Looking a bit deeper at about 100 occupations for which we have detailed data, we see clergy were most likely to strongly agree on every question.

Read more:

https://www.seattletimes.com/explore/careers/the-most-fulfilling-jobs-in-america-may-not-be-the-ones-you-expect/

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