All of the sudden, you’re a new good idea

Having gone viral a few times in my career, I’m nostalgic for a time when one random guy’s idea was considered interesting enough to make headlines.

Hell, you could steal the spotlight and capture the media cycle for a few days or even months if you were lucky.

But that was before the democratization of distribution and the end of journalism. Before social media became the biggest disease our society has ever known.

Today, when anyone makes anything, they compete with everything.

Whereas product launches, news stories and other world events used to stay in the conversation for weeks after their initial release, now they come and go like a fart in the wind. Even the remarkable things swiftly disappear from our collective memory.

It’s like they never even existed.

Forget about art, it’s all just bits and pixels now. Units of pop cultural data that’s been eaten, digested, pooped out and flushed away in the span of a day. Today’s shit storm is tomorrow’s wrapping paper.

Hyde visualized it best in his pop music anthology:

The scroll of familiar content that passed by at a steady clip with the purpose of perpetually micro dosing your brain with feel good, zero substance stimuli.

Now, for us creators, this new reality is a scary thing. It triggers our fear of falling off the radar. We believe that if we don’t keep doing what we do, someday, people will stop asking us to do it. If we don’t keep interest up on a mass scale, it’s a one way ticket to irrelevance. We’re as good as dead.

But consider this.

What if overstaying our welcome is what precisely what makes people disdain us?

Because if we are always there, nobody will have a chance to miss us.

We can’t be sought after if nobody has to look for us.

Perhaps withdrawing would generate scarcity and earn us greater respect and honor.

McConaughey writes about this pattern of absence and presence in his memoir. He took a twenty month sabbatical from acting as a result, even turning down one fifteen million offer. The award winning actor writes:

The target draws the arrow. Being gone and not seeing me shirtless on the beach, not seeing me in your living room, or in your theater in the romantic comedies, I was unbranded. When you’re gone long enough, all of the sudden, you’re a new good idea.

Matthew’s career is a reminder than people never forget the prize they couldn’t get.

If the modern media landscape is making you feel irrelevant, then maybe going away for a while is what your career is actually calling for.

Why not listen to that feeling? It’s not like it’s forever.

Don’t worry, life is long. And in time, when you do resurface show up on people’s radars, they’ll be delighted to see the light.

How could you use scarcity to your advance?