THE SECOND BARRIER TO ENGAGEMENT

When you're working on something, the more time and energy you devote to it the more important it can start to seem to you. You know what it's like. Being the dedicated professional that you are, you take on an assignment and pour your heart and soul into it. And before you know it, you can't believe the rest of the world isn't as focused on it as you are.

Then you start to think the rest of the world actually is that focused on it. That's an easy delusion to embrace when you've spent weeks or months reading everything you can find on the subject, talking to other people who are involved with it, following tweeters who tweet about it. And so you unwittingly find yourself in an exciting little echo chamber where everyone is talking like your thing is the next big thing. 

And then comes the time when you launch your big plan to engage people in a fascinating conversation about your thing. And nobody wants to talk about it. Well, nobody except the people you've already been dancing around the echo chamber with. And you have that painful realization that maybe normal, real, everyday people aren't paying attention to your thing. Maybe they don't care.

It's not that they shouldn't care. Maybe they really should. But maybe you just forgot to show them why they need to care. You forgot to build the bridge of relevance for them. 

We all have things we care about in our lives. But there are only so many things we can care about at once. And in the day-to-day chaotic bubble of our individual lives, we can get so focused on things other than your thing that it is hard to get our attention. As informed and worldly as many of us like to think we are, the cold hard truth is that most of us don't look far beyond our bubbles most days. We don't pay as much attention to institutions and governments and businesses and other people as they all like to think we do. 

And even if I do notice you, I only have so much intellectual and emotional bandwidth to offer. So you need to convince me that your thing is worth it. And the best way to do that is to make me feel something.  To make me care. To make me see why it's not really your thing but mine. 

(It may well be this is the first barrier to engagement, but I'm kind of writing these as they come to me so let's not obsess over the order, okay?)