Notes on the principle of “Nobody cares about you”

tl;dr — People are inherently self-focused and consumed by their own experiences, perceptions and goals. This means:

1. Nobody naturally cares about you or your priorities - they only care about how you intersect with their own interests
2. We often mistakenly assume others share our perspective and values
3. To effectively communicate or influence others, you must understand and speak to their needs, values and goals, not your own

The implication is that successful communication requires getting out of your own head and truly understanding your audience's mindset, rather than assuming they'll automatically care about what matters to you. A powerful example is the Budweiser/Dylan Mulvaney ad campaign that failed because it referenced things important to the creators but not the target consumers.

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The Problem of Self-Focused Perception

The late Daniel Kahneman once wrote about a fallacy where one's immediate perceptions crowd the frame and overwhelm any other sensory inputs, thus becoming the most salient thing. He called it: "What you see is all there is."

Obviously, this becomes problematic for long-term thinking, but more than that it indicates a broader problem: we are all subsumed in our experience. When our immediate perceptions dominate our attention, our viewpoint becomes all-consuming, leaving no room for others' perspectives.

Key Implications

This has a few implications:

1. It is impossible to escape the tyranny of my own experience and my own spin on things.
2. It means that everyone else is like this as well. Everyone's experience is overwhelmingly their own frame.

The Core Insight: Nobody Cares About You

If that's so, we arrive at a stunning and unavoidable conclusions— nobody cares about you (or put slightly more nuanced: people only care about you insofar as you intersect with them).

People's cares will always be paramount to them, and therefore if I want to get someone to care about what I care about (e.g. in my writing, marketing, communication, or in general) I need to somehow begin to understand the mind of the other.

Aside from the fact that I'm not psychic, this problem was confounded by the fact that I think I already know. Our “theories of mind” developed early on in our lives, trick us into thinking we understand others. We create a model in our heads of another’s thoughts, experiences, and feelings through their broad similarity to us.

But it is precisely this broad similarity which so frustratingly leads to nuanced differences and myriad misunderstandings. For really, it is only in the most broad of senses that we are alike. Those broad similarities are less interesting and predictive of our everyday lives than the differences.

Common Communication Mistakes

So, overwhelmed by our sense of the world and convinced it's shared by others, we craft communication that appeals to us. This might work some of the time if we get lucky (either those parts of us that it resonates with are broad enough, or the people we are trying to reach happen to share the same idiosyncrasies as we do).

Much of the time though, we are not as effective as we could be in our communication because of the fundamental truth that people are different to us and don't care about us. Just because something is important to us does not mean it will be important to anyone else.

There is an extreme version of this where people truly locked into their own experience talk about themselves and what things mean to them expecting you to care. “I worked on this for a long time,” they'll say, "It's important, valuable, sacred to me, and so therefore it must be to you,” but you’ve not told me why I should care!

To summarise:

1. People are locked into their own experience of the world.
2. People have their own goals.
3. We naively mistake our goals for their goals.

This is why much marketing communication falls flat; it's solipsistic, referencing only the things that are salient to the creator, and not those he's trying to influence.

The ultimate example of this is this Dylan Mulvaney Budweiser commercial that referenced things (tropes of the left, for example) that were important to the creators of the ad but not the consumers of the product.

If you tell this to a marketer, especially, but also any professional communicator, they'll pay lip service to the idea. The problem is that the data speaks for itself. If you don't talk to others about their own problems, values, etc., they won't buy. The fact that so much ad spend is wasted tells you all you need to know about how successful we really are in solving this problem.

Traditional ways of solving this are also lacking. Polls and focus groups, for example, are notoriously inaccurate ways of determining what people really want. The context affects the responses as well as the choices. People might prefer this over that, but what about in the real world?

Would they prefer it enough to spend money on it?

Would they prefer it over nothing?

Another issue is that people's minds are opaque even to themselves. We're not good at understanding what's driving us and are liable to deceive ourselves with neat rational stories. The truth is that we're emotional beings and make decisions at that level first, so you can't just ask someone why they purchased this or that or why they did this or that. They'll give you a post-hoc rationale, but the truth is much more complex.

Solutions and Tools

If this is true, what's left to us?

We do have a few tools at our disposal.

1. Leverage human psychology and fundamentals. We're all running the same hardware, so if you can tap into precognitive elements like emotion, you can predict with much more accuracy the behavior resulting.
2. Collect a set of successful campaigns, communications, etc., and then try to analyze them. Try to understand what made them so successful in reverse, but be careful not to get caught inside your own mind.
3. Be aware of external factors as well. A particular speech or ad may work not because of anything in the ad or the speech itself but because of the context in which it was delivered.
4. Observe things in the world. It's there that you'll get the most visible feedback and most honest feedback as well. Don't look away just because it's not what you want to see.

Also, don't look away just because it's not what you want to see. OkCupid published their data from online dating and caused a firestorm because the data reflected a reality that was perhaps more divided and "racist" than people would have liked to believe.

If you're looking to deal with reality, though, it doesn't help to tell yourself fantasies about how you want the world to be. People are going to do what makes the most sense to them at that time, in that circumstance.

Sometimes we're just not great at predicting what people need, and they're not shy about doing what they want regardless of what they're supposed to do.

Steve Jobs didn't ask people if they wanted an iPhone. He couldn't have, there were no iPhones, but he could see the trends: Palm Pilot, Blackberry, and he gave people what they wanted without knowing they wanted it. This is the real trick.

As Seth Godin says, "We want status and affiliation," so all we need to do to get what we want is to align it with what other people want either in reality or in conceptual terms.

Talk about ourselves and what's important to us in terms that will resonate with what they are looking for.

Because remember — nobody cares about you.

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