When I use the word *attractive* here, I don’t mean visually pretty or aesthetically pleasing. I mean anything that **pulls attention toward itself**. Something can be attractive because it is sexy, controversial, frightening, soothing, outrageous, impressive, or even anger-inducing. The common property is that it exerts a gravitational pull on attention. It makes people stop scrolling and look.
In an interview Piers Morgan asks Clavicular, “What does mogging exactly mean?” He explains that it means outshining and there are different types of mogs. There might be financial, social, or looks or strength-wise mogging. Basically outshining something.
So if you are trying to garner attention, I think you have to be mogging all the time. If you are writing a piece of content, each line of it should be mogging anything else that it could have been. If the opening line could have ten variations, better be a line which mogs everything else. There can be millions of topics you could talk about but the topic you chose should be something that outshines any other when it comes to the potential interest it generates in the person you are targeting. Basically you have to be very intentional when it comes to this thing.
Well when we talk about attention we have to understand that it already exists in different topics and concepts. The easiest way to garner attention is to direct that attention from those things towards something you want it to be at. In the industry it is called “borrowed interest”. The idea that you cannot generate interest and it is way more efficient to borrow it from something that already has a ton of it. The idea that attention is always redirected from somewhere rather than summoned from nowhere.
So it is obvious that interest cannot be equally distributed in all the concepts, right? Some concepts are more of it than others and it is a very skewed distribution. Thus one topic definitely mogs other topics and it is wiser to choose that. This runs at a very bird’s eye view level, such as selection of topic, to something microscopic, as selecting what you want to say in a specific line. For example if you are talking about faces for a facial aesthetics video, you better pick a face that is really attractive to look at or it is a face of someone who is culturally prominent. Or if you are talking about someone, it is better to pick their most attractive or controversial side than mundane.
Content is a nested doll. It’s a culmination of thousands of decisions and sub-decisions and each of those have a variety of options where you shall pick the options which mog others. In a baseball team it is better if you talk about the most interesting player. In context of that player you better talk about the most interesting aspect of that player. In context of that aspect you better talk about the most interesting angle of it, represented using the most interesting word salad and pictures or whatever media you have at your disposal.
But to do all this you need to have a fair bit of awareness of what exists in the world, what is actually currently got holding attention, and what are the options and which one mogs which.
Types of interests in it:
- The inherited interest it has because of how we are as humans, because we view things from the lens of greed, lust, fear, or whatever.
- Cultural interest, where the concept is currently prevalent in current cultural discourse and that’s why it holds attention.
You can think of it like hiring for an organisation. For each position there can be 10 candidates and you have to select the best one. You have to hire thousands of candidates per organisation, at the lowest level or at the C-suite.
If you are hopeless when it comes to content creation because you don’t have any idea, you can actually think about it from this lens. Your act of culminating more and more elements that mock any other creates a piece of content that is really attractive. It’s like you pick a topic and as you culminate the most attractive things about it, you have made a really intriguing piece about that thing.
For example we can just go to Twitter and see how AI is really the craze right now and AI Agents are also something that people are looking out for. Interest definitely exists in that topic. If you keep finding the most attractive things about AI Agents, like:
- How does it affect the finances of a company which uses it?
- What are the politics of it if we remove the people?
- What are the implementation stories and failures?
- Which are the most attractive players who are using it?
If you just keep stacking on attractive things about it, you will have a really good piece of content about AI Agents. If you keep doing it on a daily basis about whatever is happening right now, you will become an AI Agent specialized channel.
This helps you to stop looking at content creation as some innate and unexplainable talent but just an algorithm where you walk through different stages and keep picking up the most competitive choices that are in front of you. And those choices create a scaffolding which gives you a really explosive story.
So the move can be to first of all identify the sources where you can see what is really holding attention right now. You can look at:
- news channels
- newspapers
- magazines
- social media
- Google search analytics
- youtube / spotify charts
- whatever else you can see as an indicator of popularity or interest displayed by people
Within that thing you can look for things that mog others, because of the prevailing cultural conditions and the inherent interest that people hold. And then keep doubling down on the process. It also removes the pressure of originality. You don’t have to invent interest from nothing. You simply identify where interest already exists and assemble the most vivid pieces of it into a coherent structure.
This is why experienced editors can turn almost any subject into a readable piece. They instinctively search for the most charged elements within the material. Things like the a attractive angle, cunty quote or clear conflict.
As content creators or creatives we are always haunted by a poverty that, hey, I need to create something and my page is blank. Our nerves starts twitching just at the thought of creating one thing. But when you enter the world of optionality, that hey there are ten things that could be and I know them because I looked at the right places and I have to choose the one that is the best. You are in such a powerful position.
It’s like when you are a journalist, your stories are worth what your sources are, so it makes it obvious that we need really good sources, right? So invest in good sources.