When we hear someone’s idea, we accept it or dismiss it in under a minute.
Is it useful?
Is it interesting?
Is it something we want to engage with, or something we can blissfully forget in the next 5 minutes?
We assume we “get it” from the very first words we hear.
Even though the depth, the core, the essence, all of it, lives far beyond what can possibly be communicated in that short window.
We do the same with people.
We meet someone and almost instantly decide whether we like them or not.
We do the same with places.
We see a house and feel like we already know what it’s like inside.
And yet.
When it’s our ideas, we spend most of our time obsessing over the core, and almost no time thinking about how to package it so others actually want to engage with it beyond the first few seconds.
David Ogilvy famously said that 95% of your advertising budget can be wasted if your headline is ineffective.
Alex Hormozi says the exact same content can perform many times better with a different thumbnail.
Seth Godin argues that Darwin’s theory spread so widely partly because it just sounded better, “survival of the fittest” was digestible enough for people to bite in it quickly.
Lately, scrolling through my LinkedIn inbox, my email, my Instagram, I’m confronted with this same reality over and over, and over again.
If I can’t understand it fast,
I don’t really care to dig deeper.
And that makes me think:
If I want to “sell” my work, my ideas, my vision to the world, maybe I don’t need to work harder on the thing itself.
Maybe I need to work harder on the cover, that sticks with people long enough to understand the rest.
The cover is what buys attention.
The cover is what earns curiosity.
The cover is what gives the idea a chance to live long enough to be understood.
So, over to you, dear reader,
Where in your work, and in your life, might you need to spend more of your time budget on the cover, not the main thing?
Because no matter how much we tell ourselves that the cover isn’t everything, that we shouldn't judge the book by it - our decision to stay with something longer depends on it more than we’d like to admit.
