Let me tell you one thing. I just realized. We pay attention only to an object that is really interesting or sexy on its own, or we pay attention to worlds we are immersed enough in. Okay. We stop paying attention to our real world when it gets boring. We call it dissociation or daydreaming. We literally invent our own worlds to pay attention to. So, either object that is really sexy on its own can get attention, or interesting enough world can get it. That’s why people, even if they’re talking about something really boring, are able to get views. For example, if you just talk about a really complicated technical concept. It is going to generate no attention. The object is not enough on its own, and neither did you put any effort to create a world. But on the other hand, with a bit of storytelling, you can create a world where people get immersed, where they try to predict what happens next. They try to interpret things, you know. Like for example, if you create a image where A child is crossing street and looking away, but a car is speeding down. You look at that image and you are immersed into that world that hey, this is a world where a car is going to hit the kid. You interpreted it. You try to figure out what happens next, what are the consequences. So that’s what attention is all about. Either you look at something. Like really pretty face and it captures your attention and in that case maybe having a world can be distracting from that. But on the other hand if you have something really mundane then you got a world work on the world. A perfume bottle on its own won’t do much or insurance is nothing. That’s why you got to do so much world building.
I think this is also why just using adjectives about a concept still keeps us indifferent. Like, okay, if you have a really technical LLM concept and use use the words like the most brilliant AI hack, it’s still very abstract because it just went deeper on the object which was not interesting in the first place. Instead of building the world.
You have to build a world using things people care about or will resonate with. Like people generally don’t view their life as something that is too great. And for a lot of people it is busy, it is crowded, it is loud. So the antithesis of this life is something that is quiet. Solitary and calm, and that’s the positioning a lot of luxury decks, right? It is the opposite of the ordinary. So if you are a luxury product, you cannot Go on and be a perfume brand and keep yapping about how special your ingredients are. Everybody has fucking ingredients. You have to talk about the world.
You have to build a world using things people care about or will resonate with. Like people generally don’t view their life as something that is too great. And for a lot of people it is busy, it is crowded, it is loud. So the antithesis of this life is something that is quiet. Solitary and calm, and that’s the positioning a lot of luxury decks, right? It is the opposite of the ordinary. So if you are a luxury product, you cannot Go on and be a perfume brand and keep yapping about how special your ingredients are. Everybody has fucking ingredients. You have to talk about the world.
Imagine you have a target audience that’s business-oriented but not particularly tech-literate. Let’s say you want to talk about AI and how a research finding made it significantly more efficient.
If you amateurishly apply my advice, you’ll stop saying that this discovery made AI unstoppable.
Instead, you might graduate to saying something like: inference used to require 10,000 GPUs; now it only takes 2,000 to run enterprise-grade software.
But what you should really be saying is
Earlier, it cost millions of dollars to serve just a hundred users. Now you can serve 10,000.
Or, even better, you could simply say: “You used to need a thousand dollars to start an AI company. Now you can do it with just ten dollars. Here’s how.”
What builds a world? Let’s think about it. First of all, consequences builds a world. A chain of if then, if then builds a world. Okay. Another is anticipation. Like if two or more objects inside your world are placed such that the brain can just anticipate a event happening then it will watch it like a speeding car and a unattended child on a road. Another is aesthetic sense. Like if it’s Hello Kitty in her little world, it’s just pretty to look at. Those are the kind of environments where people want to immerse themselves because of the external conditions that exist. A simplified, peaceful, nice little world, or maybe someone might want to immerse more into Silent Hill because that game also looks cool.
So listen. Since there are not many objects that command attention on their own, like I think the things like face, a ring, a flower, or stuff like that, or really hot looking body can garner attention on its own. But I anticipate that eighty percent or more than that of total attention in the world is actually generated and commanded by the world. Because commerce and things we talk about or care about are beyond just a ring, a face, a body, or a flower, right? We are interested in way more things. We are interested in bullshit like B two B CRMs. That is not Something that has innate attention generating power. A world was created for it.
I understand now that you are not supposed to talk about the object itself too much. You cannot. And when you’re trying to sell it, you are not supposed to double down on the features of it or whatever you think is cool about it. You can never make a plumber be more interested in LLMs if you keep talking about how it has a new architecture or How we are getting the same results using lesser number of parameters, or how the inference cost has gone down, it doesn’t mean anything to him. You have to think in terms of world only. Like the classic advice is, don’t make it about yourself, make it about the next person. But Even that is a bit shoddy because I don’t feel like it is a really actionable advice. I think, think about your product. Think about the world and the world will bring in the people that are meant for it. Think about your product, then think about the world ninety percent of the time.That’s the Pareto distribution here.
A study shows that eighty percent of the people buy sport equipment for reason other than sports. You think talking more about the sport equipment in terms of how it is of good materials or how it helps you shoot a shot better is going to help sell those people? You’re losing out on eighty percent of the market. Go for the worlds, man.
Commerce has moved beyond sustenance, right? So we are doing things beyond their rudimentary purpose. That means a lot of commerce is happening not because of the intrinsic object and its qualities, but because of something superficial that might be going on in our minds. You can’t really then go on to target this. ever compounding commerce that is happening beyond sustenance by just talking about the product and its quality is that’s not the optimal move here because then you will be just capped at the sustenance level economy but we have so much more than that I bet that ninety percent or more of the economy is beyond the sustenance mode so You’re reducing your time so much by not taking world seriously.
Like imagine hundreds shoes were sold. Only ten would be sold because of their utility. Else would be sold for the aesthetics. Or because their favorite influencer promoted them. Or they wanted to buy expensive shit to show they are rich. or because it was their childhood dream even though that shoe has no utility for them now.
You take product, you take a unique proposition of it, you figure out the world that creates, and then you find the people you poach it to, and the world itself also gives you the positioning. The proposition gives you positioning. It’s, it’s all connected. If you go from the world root first.
Product → Unique proposition → World → People → Positioning → Communication.
This should have been obvious in hindsight. I have read studies where people, when they are drinking or smoking stuff from different brands, they are not able to tell the difference. They are not tell apart cigarette brands, champagne brands, wine, whatever. So what good would it do if you just keep talking about the quality of your ingredients if people are not able to tell apart a two dollar wine from a twenty thousand dollar wine?
That’s why you gotta go for world. You remember stories from your childhood. You remember the bedtime stories your grandma told you. You remember the gossip your coworker told you. You remember the bitching your girlfriend did about her friends. You remember the Do man apocalyptic stories that were told to you on a YouTube conspiracy video. Like we we are made for worlds man. We are not made for products or objects unless those objects are severely primal like food, a hot face, and stuff like that.