The Unbreakable Formula for Getting Attention
Visibility + Incongruence = Attention
Two ingredients. Neither alone is sufficient. Together, they're unbeatable.
The Problem With Invisible Work
What is the point of writing articles nobody reads? Why create videos nobody watches? Why build an offer nobody discovers?
Out of sight truly is out of mind. Content created in isolation has negligible value. A brilliant insight shared with no one is indistinguishable from having never had the insight at all.
Notice how we say "pay" attention. The language reveals the economics. Attention is a scarce commodity. It is purchased — with either money, time, or craft. And like all scarce commodities, it commands a premium.
Ingredient One: Visibility
No matter what you do, do it in front of an audience. Pay for having an audience if you can't attract it otherwise.
This sounds obvious. It isn't. Most businesses create content, build products, and develop expertise — then wait for the market to discover them. The market will not discover you. You must be discoverable and then make yourself impossible to miss.
Visibility precedes all other marketing objectives. Understanding your audience, determining strategy, and developing differentiation all come after solving the visibility problem — because none of it matters if no one sees it.
Ingredient Two: Incongruence
Saying the same thing that everyone else is saying is boring. And boring is fatal.
Incongruence is doing what others won't dare and saying what others will avoid. It's the pattern interrupt — the reason a human brain, flooded with thousands of stimuli, suddenly stops and pays attention.
"Doing the exact opposite of what everyone else is doing works well."
This isn't contrarianism for its own sake. It's a recognition of how attention actually works. Your brain is a prediction machine. It filters out the expected. What gets through is the unexpected — the incongruent, the surprising, the thing that doesn't fit the pattern.
The Sequence That Matters
Most people try to convert before they've established attention. They optimize their offer before solving their visibility. They build trust before earning the right to be heard.
The correct sequence:
- Attention first — visibility and incongruence
- Trust second — proof and brand
- Offer third — conversion
Skipping step one and trying to go straight to step three is why most marketing fails. The offer is irrelevant if there's no attention to convert.
In a Data-Saturated World
The most common objection: "There's so much noise today — how do you break through?"
The answer is counterintuitive: more noise means incongruence is more valuable, not less. When everything looks the same, anything different stands out automatically.
The formula doesn't change with saturation. The bar for incongruence rises slightly, but the mechanism is identical. Be visible. Be unexpected. Everything else follows.