ATTENTION IS FOOL’S GOLD
Recently, one of my kids said they want to YouTube. I wasn’t surprised — my kid is not an exception to the 1 in 3 kids who want to be creators.1 And I said, OK, what will you do on it? My kid didn’t have an answer. So I continued by saying YouTube is a medium. If there’s something you want to teach, and you build an expertise, we can talk about it. Attention without a goal can make you spiral out of control, as you don’t have a purpose to align to and become guided by vanity metrics.
Was I buying time? Absolutely. My kid is not starting a YouTube channel anytime soon. But the undertone of the conversation is far more insidious. We are living in a world where attention is king. Attention is profitable. Attention provides momentary fame and clout. And attention and retention are often at odds with each other.
ATTENTION IS CURRENCY
I was in a conversation with someone once, and she said, “I never understood why your guests never reposted your podcast.” I don’t have a podcast now, but I did a few years back. I didn’t have much of a response, outside of thinking about how it was a weird thing to observe and honestly not even something I observed. I didn’t have requirements to be on the show. And it hit me that we were thinking about things differently. She cared about attention. I cared about retention.
In your personal life, getting attention might mean being the class clown that prefers making people laugh to deflect engaging in any conversation that might expose your inadequacies, disrupting the class. In business, retention may mean finding people who are willing to engage with your products or thought leadership rather than people who engage with inflammatory political memes for “views.”
And we have a newfound Pavlovian relationship with attention, where our eyeball-catching outtakes get people to stop, look, and increase our metrics. Our follows. Our likes. One of the most dangerous phenomena happening today is the silent undercurrent orienting us all to optimize for attention over retention.
Attention is the ability to make somebody stop and look, for whatever reason. Attention is easy. Attention doesn’t require alignment. Retention is the ability to keep somebody coming back. Over and over and over again. Retention is hard. Retention is valuable. Retention does not survive without alignment.
ATTENTION IS EASY
Cancel culture reminds us that attention is pretty easy to solicit online. The easiest way to get attention is to talk trash or spew hate online, and the data proves it. A study analyzing 4.1 million tweets found that negative messages get retweeted and spread faster than positive or neutral messages.2 Multiple studies confirm that negativity in tweets increases the probability of being retweeted.3 And Stanford research on 30 million tweets from news organizations found that biased sources leaning into negative, highly charged content achieved about 12% higher engagement rates than balanced sources.4
Negativity gets people’s attention. It always has. It always will.
The evolutionary reason is said to be because scanning for threats kept us alive. The negativity bias provides an evolutionary advantage — it is more critical for survival to avoid a harmful stimulus than to pursue a potentially helpful one.5 The amygdala shows enhanced responses to negative stimuli across multiple studies.6
The brain prioritizes negative stimuli. The amygdala and attentional systems respond more strongly and rapidly to negative information.7 Negative content spreads faster and wider. This is evolutionarily adaptive — detecting threats quickly was critical for survival. The effect is universal — it holds across cultures, political ideologies, and platforms.
Negativity is also a crass mechanism to reinforce our dominance over others. Clout is a powerful drug, but more on that below in the section on insecurity.
Retention is very different from attention, because it requires a clear goal that is generally tied to a higher purpose and is driven by accountability. Retention for my Substack is marked by those of you who keep opening my newsletter week after week. Comment if you are here!
How long have you been here?!
This newsletter often feels like an echo chamber. And week after week, people ask how to be successful on Substack. The only answer is to decenter attention. Because it takes a long time to get attention on Substack, let me explain the math.
If the average American reads 15 minutes a day, they read for 91 hours per year.8
If the average American scrolls social for 2 hours and 11 minutes a day, they scroll social for 796 hours a year.9 That means social media is consumed roughly 9x more than books, minute for minute, on average.
You have to optimize for retention. Not attention. Because even when you get attention, it’s short-lived. Someone smarter, hotter, cooler will come along. You’ll get pushed off your throne.
Retention is:
INTERNAL: Holding onto your moral compass to keep your own personality within the bounds of the values you want to remain
EXTERNAL: Having a message that serves a greater purpose and keeping people tuned in
FOR PROFIT: Selling a product and retaining the customer over time
Even in business terms, retention is the strongest way to grow. People who are locked in — and retained — will continue to buy your product or your thoughts. In business, attention may give you leads, but retention is what closes deals and keeps a customer valuable for a long time.
While attention is cheap, retention is expensive. Companies have campaigns to nurture existing customers to ensure retention. I spend time every week stretching the limits of my brain to ensure retention. Retention requires purging people and things that work against your goal. I don’t chase viral topics. I don’t optimize videos for rage bait. I don’t engage with trolls. And I don’t participate in internet pile-ons to prove my moral superiority at the cost of someone who is down.
Most people are optimizing for attention and not retention.
But sometimes, you are forced to play the retention game in an attention economy — you become a target. We see this most frequently with female founders. Focused on retention, people might use them to get attention. Many of us saw the rise and fall of the #girlboss. Regardless of your opinion, the women were often focused on their business. But the harsh double standards women are held to in business ensured that an audience would be eager for any exposé if the leaders tripped and fell. And, inevitably, the leaders tripped and fell. Instead of growing their brands, they focused on neutralizing the negative attention.
Attention takes a lot of time. Either the recipient is pre-occupied with optimizing for attention, correcting public views that result due to attention, or hiding from attention. All are time consuming.
I just finished Glossy by Marisa Meltzer, where she talks about the death of #girlboss: she says high-profile female founders were being publicly eviscerated in ways that male CEOs simply weren’t.10 Think about Sophia Amoruso, Jenna Lyons, and others. The media coverage was brutal, and it followed a script — accusations of mismanagement, workplace culture controversies, discrimination lawsuits.
The double standard operates on multiple levels. First, female founders are celebrated for being “nice” and “authentic” and “building community” — these stereotypically feminine traits. But the moment they exercise the same hard-nosed business decisions that male CEOs make daily, they’re torn apart. They’re difficult, cold, calculating — and most importantly — they are dethroned.
She goes on to talk about how male CEOs can be demanding perfectionists (think Steve Jobs) and they become legends. Women do the same thing and they are labeled as toxic bosses. The system that holds women back is more insidious than we often acknowledge because it punishes women whether they conform to feminine stereotypes or reject them. There’s a narrative arc that only seems to exist for women: the rise, the celebration, the whispers of trouble, the exposé, the fall. And each step is covered with this moralizing tone. When WeWork imploded, Adam Neumann was portrayed as a cautionary tale about hubris. When The Wing had problems, Audrey Gelman was portrayed as a fraud who had betrayed feminism itself.
The author talks about how the same outlets that had breathlessly celebrated these “girlboss” founders turned on them with shocking speed. It was almost like the media had built them up specifically to tear them down. Because the media seeks attention. But a business seeks retention.
Of course, the elephant in the room that must be addressed is that millennial women were offered a #girlboss philosophy as the silver bullet. Work hard, hustle, get ahead, and life will work. And there was some terrible behavior. But I am not addressing either of those angles here, only acknowledging the indisputable reality that we love a powerful female’s public reckoning.
AVOID WHO YOU DON’T WANT TO BECOME
When it comes to retention, you need a goal to retain people for. Your goal needs an end state. And that end state relies on the compounding interest of change rather than the stagnation of comfort.
If you hang with people misaligned with your goal, you will feel one of two things:
One: Like you’re betraying your goal. You know your time is not being well spent. There’s misalignment. You feel it in your chest every time you’re with them.
Two: Like your friend group has betrayed your values. Because they deviated from your initial values. Or you deviated. Either way, someone moved.
Betrayal requires proximity. In order to be betrayed, you have to have thought you were standing on the same ground. And then the ground shifts. If you feel betrayal, something has shifted. Examine it.
It’s very hard to fix things within an existing model. You have to leave the model altogether.
INTEGRITY IS INDISPUTABLE
Retention requires a promise, and a promise requires integrity. Nothing better illustrates this than Zohran Mamdani’s debate a few nights ago with opponent Andrew Cuomo. “What I don’t have in experience, I make up for in integrity. And what you don’t have in integrity, you could never make up for in experience.”
My jaw dropped. Because Zohran is in the business of retention. He wants as many viewers as possible to align with his message and vote for him. Zohran brilliantly clocked that while a leap in competence is plausible and celebrated (think janitor to CEO), a leap in integrity is unlikely. A lapse in integrity can be a lifelong stain.
INSECURE PEOPLE ARE MEAN
Insecurity is one of the hidden motives behind a certain brand of attention.
What are your thoughts so far? I had to stretch my brain for this one
We already determined that being nasty on the internet has outsized returns. A separate point is that insecure people thrive off of being mean. We see this in influencer Reddit culture all the time. The people who support you end up resenting you later. They loved you when you were at their level. Then your growth makes them uncomfortable. “I used to love her.” “She used to be so real.” Early supporters often become late-stage saboteurs.
As I was thinking about attention versus retention, attention is a game that is easier for the insecure. Because the insecure don’t believe they can retain anybody. If you experience insecurity, I urge you to dig deep. Insecurity is lethal for goals and relationships.
But also, in the quest to be above attention, you have to avoid the insecure. If you’re around somebody insecure, it’s very hard to change around them. Because they are mean.
Here’s the mechanism:
Insecurity is a threat state. When someone is insecure, their brain is constantly scanning for threats to their self-image. Your change, growth, and success register as a threat. Not because you are directly harming them, but because comparison is automatic and they clock their lack of progress.
So they become mean. Meanness is a preemptive defense. They attack before they feel attacked, because by diminishing you they don’t have to diminish themselves in comparison. And it’s easier to tear you down than build themselves up. The criticism, mockery, or dismissal is them trying to restore the status quo where they felt safe.
Your change destabilizes their reality. If you were both stuck together and you grow, they are measurably worth “less” than you in their POV, confirming their worst fears of uselessness.
They regulate through control. Insecure people regulate their emotions externally, not internally. They need the environment to stay predictable. When you change, you become unpredictable. They can’t control you anymore. So they get mean to try to control you back into the box where they understand you.
Insecure people genuinely believe your win is their loss and experience zero-sum thinking. Not metaphorically — they feel it. Mirror neurons fire. Social comparison circuits activate. Your success literally feels like their failure in their nervous system.
You cannot grow around people who need you to stay small. They will punish every step forward. Not always consciously, not always dramatically — but consistently. The punishment might look like jokes, skepticism, withdrawal, or outright hostility.
This is why you have to leave. Not because they’re bad people. But because their nervous system is organized around keeping things the same, and yours is trying to change.
ATTENTION IS NOT FREE
Attention is a currency. If attention is worth a cent, retention is worth a dollar. We are all familiar with the saying that all press is good press, when artists are trying to reveal a work they entertain negative criticism to keep their names on people’s tongues. But with retention and a goal, you may want people to stay as an artist. And that’s the hard part.
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COMPLAINER OR PROBLEM SOLVER
If you see a complainer, it’s a bad sign.
If you are a complainer, here’s how you change it: You’re one step away from fixing the issue. You have to move from being a complainer to a problem solver. Because problem solvers are the most valuable people in society.
Complainers point at problems. Problem solvers hold them. There’s a difference.
Complainers optimize for attention — broadcasting their problems to get sympathy. Problem solvers optimize for retention — people come back to those who can actually help them.
Below is a series of steps to morph from complainer to problem solver, the lifecycle of a solution. It also matches up nicely with attention versus retention.
Identify issue
Evaluate priority
Determine accountable parties
Brainstorm the desired outcome
Match outcome to potential paths forward
Assign to appropriate owner/timeline (or delegate/handoff)
Execute solution
Problem solvers don’t just catch peoples’ attention, they produce results.
IN CLOSING
Retention thrives in emotional regulation and lack of ego. Attention thrives in ego. Maximize for retention in an attention economy.
If you find yourself optimizing your attention (it’s not your fault, we are taught that it’s the primary metric of our time) think about your purpose. What do you want to be known for? Why? How does that align with the actions you are taking? Are you building something that lasts, or are you building something that trends?
What did you think? I love your comments, please keep them coming! Or like. Or restack. It gets more people here due to the quality of my work rather than my personal pleas for attention, as most recs happen through friends. My purpose: making opportunity accessible.
Check out last week’s post while you are here
Your anger is killing your dreams
Years ago, I was on a call with a reporter and my co-founder. She asked me a question, so I looked at him, urging him to respond with a nod. He started to reply and she said “I asked Layla. Do you always mansplain?” My eyes widened in horror. My co-founder is extremely respectful, calm even under the wildest circumstances, and predictable. He is not one…
CITATIONS
Harris Poll & LEGO, 2019
Tsugawa & Ohsaki, 2015
Jiménez-Zafra et al., 2021; Antypas et al., 2023
Goldenberg et al., 2021
Norris, 2021
Ito et al., 1998
Norris, 2021
Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2023
Insider Intelligence, 2024
Meltzer, 2022
As always Layla another piece littered with real world, practical, thoughtful advice. I commonly come across people clamouring for a mentor or coach- folks Layla is giving this gold away for free- just sit yourselves down, turn off the IG, read it all and apply.
Hi Layla! I'm a new follower; this might be my second newsletter from you, and I found myself pulling out my notebook to take notes and jot down quotes! I work in the advancement space in higher education, and my entire job actually centers around retention, so this was extremely timely and spot on! Thank you!