Mock Motivation: Why no one cares what you have to say
If you care about becoming a better writer, you should read this article.
Hey, wait, come back! I’m just kidding. That’s not the real start to this article. That’s only an example of a common approach to communication that will absolutely kill your ability to gain and keep an audience’s attention.
I call this approach to communication “mock motivation.”
Mock motivation is when you try to convince your audience to endure what you’re about to say by promising they’ll gain some benefit at the end.
What’s good about mock motivation is that it at least tries to engage the reader. A lot of communication is more like public journaling where the speaker doesn’t even bother to appeal to the reader’s values. The attitude is: “Here’s what I want to say and you should care just 'cause."
Mock motivation acknowledges that when you ask someone to listen to you, you are asking them to say “no” to everything else on earth they could be doing during that time. Your content has to be better than sex, pizza, and Breaking Bad. At least at the margin.
The problem is, unless the audience has a strong reason to believe that you can deliver on your promise, your promise is meaningless. For example, if Warren Buffett wrote a book on making money, it could be the most boring book in the world and people would plow through it.
But most of us aren’t the Warren Buffett of our subject. If you’re trying to persuade people to change their mind about climate change or Black Lives Matter or, God help you, the philosophy by which they live their life, promising that your ideas will lead to a better world or a happier life mean exactly NOTHING.
So how do we actually get people to care what we have to say? By making the process of consuming your content satisfying.
The two fundamental tools are: desire and reward.
Desire
People consume content to fulfill a desire. They want to create a video in iMovie but can’t figure out how to manipulate the audio, so they type their question into Google and read articles that answer the question. They want to lose 10 pounds fast, so they watch a bunch of YouTube videos on weight loss. They want to understand why a man was murdered by a police officer and what we should do about it, so they read books on racism and police brutality.
This is one reason mock motivation seems to make sense. It attempts to appeal to the audience’s desires. But it usually isn’t appealing to the question they’re seeking to answer right at this moment. And that means the audience isn’t compelled to listen. "Yeah, I want to be happier or I want us to have the best policy on minimum wages, but answering that question is not the thing that matters most to me at this moment."
So does that mean we can only get people to consume our content if it’s answering a question they’re already looking to answer?
No. We can create desire. This is exactly what great fiction writers do.
In an outstanding essay in the New York Times, leading thriller writer Lee Child talks about how to create suspense. “As novelists, we should ask or imply a question at the beginning of the story, and then we should delay the answer. . . . Readers are human, and humans seem programmed to wait for answers to questions they witness being asked.”
In practice this can look very similar to mock motivation, but there’s a crucial difference. The mock motiviationist raises a question: “How do we achieve happiness?” Or, “What should be the right policy on minimum wage?” But what he doesn’t understand is that in most cases the audience already believes it knows the answer to these questions.
Contrast that with a clickbait title like, “How to achieve happiness: the number one mistake almost everyone makes.” Now you’re compelling people to listen because, even if they believe they know how to achieve happiness, they don’t know about this one mistake.
As communicators, we need to ask ourselves, not "what question does the audience have?” but "what question does the audience have right now that it believes it doesn’t have the answer to?"
You might be thinking, “Wait a minute, Watkins. I don’t click those articles.” Yeah. Me neither. But it’s not because the articles fail to create desire. It’s because of the next tool in our toolkit:
Reward
The reason clickbait titles stopped working, or at least stopped working as well as they did five years ago, is because we learned that they almost never delivered on their promise. We’d eagerly click to find out about our “one mistake” pursuing happiness and the answer would be totally disappointing.
It’s like reading a novel where we start out with a compelling mystery but the ending is a letdown.
Truly compelling content creates desire then satisfies it. In fiction that means an ending that is surprising yet, in retrospect, inevitable. In persuasion, what we want is to raise a question the audience desperately wants answered—and deliver a surprising yet compelling answer.
Unlike fiction, however, we rarely wait until the end to give our answer. Typically, we give our answer, or at least indicate our answer, near the beginning. We spend most of our time justifying our surprising answer in a compelling way.
But motivation isn’t just something we tack on at the start of our content. It’s something we have to constantly maintain because you’re only as good as your last paragraph.
How do we maintain genuine motivation?
Wouldn’t you know it...desire and reward.
Rewards aren’t exclusively answers to questions by the way. You can reward with things like:
Humor and wit
Insightful observations
Surprising facts
Clarifying analogies
Memorable formulations
Stories
The key is that you’re not asking your audience to endure your content to get a reward—consuming your content is the reward. And if it leads to further rewards down the road? That’s just an incredible bonus.
Example
Okay, what does this look like in practice? Here’s how I start my article “The ESG Myth.”
Business has been attacked as greedy, but at its core the profit motive is how we flourish. It was business — and especially large scale industrial businesses — that lifted humanity out of eons of poverty, and extended lifespans from 30 to 80. And what fueled business was each investor’s, executive’s, and worker’s greed — their desire for a better life.
Today’s most popular investing trend, however, is based on the surprising premise that investors and businesses have been insufficiently greedy.
I begin by creating desire. The reader should be wondering, “What investing trend could be based on the view people are insufficiently greed?” Then, I immediately start to dole out the reward: I’m talking about “'ESG investing,' which stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance investing.”
Then in explaining how ESG investing works I deepen the desire by explaining the paradox at the heart of ESG:
On the one hand, it holds that most businesses are greedy: absent careful monitoring, businesses will place profits ahead of their obligations to society. On the other hand, to say that integrating ESG considerations into our investments can improve financial outcomes means that these greedy businesses and investors have been leaving money on the table.
Next paragraph? Reward. "The resolution to this paradox is the insistence that companies are overly focused on their short-term profits.” But as I go on to explain, the "the evidence for widespread short-termism is scant.” Notice that this creates more desire: “Well, what’s the evidence?”
You get the picture. We grab and maintain attention by constantly creating desire and offering rewards.
Does it work?
I don’t know. You tell me. Did you finish this essay?
Like this essay? Listen to my podcast interview with Ezra Drake where we delve deep into what I call the virtue of audience obsession.
