The First Few Seconds

Welcome to the 144th edition of “In Touch”. As always, I would love to continue the conversation so please hit reply and let me know what you think.

Story of the Week: “The First Few Seconds”

The other evening, my wife was watching Between Father and Son on Netflix. What caught my attention wasn’t so much the storyline as the format: twenty episodes, each averaging around eight minutes.

It reminded me of something else I have noticed on LinkedIn Learning. Its Nano Tips series delivers practical lessons in less than a minute, some lasting as little as 45 seconds. Different industries and different audiences, yet both seem to be adapting to the same reality: our attention spans are getting shorter while competition for our attention has never been greater.

Dr. Gloria Mark, Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, has spent decades studying how digital technology affects our attention. Her research shows that the average time we spend focused on a single screen before switching has fallen from around two and a half minutes in the early 2000s to approximately 47 seconds today. Whether we like it or not, that changes the way we communicate, lead and sell.

There is a deeper lesson here for all of us, whether we lead teams, sell products and services, communicate with customers or speak from a stage. The challenge is no longer simply to have something worth saying. Before we can influence people, we must first earn the privilege of being heard.

That does not always mean getting to the point more quickly. Sometimes it does. At other times, it means creating enough curiosity that people want to discover the point.

At one of my keynotes, instead of beginning with “Good morning,” I slowly poured tea into a cup until it overflowed. The audience watched in complete silence. Before I said anything, curiosity had already filled the room. Only then did I tell them the story of the Zen Master who deliberately overfilled a professor’s cup to make one simple point: before we can learn something new, we often need to empty our minds of what we believe we already know. The overflowing cup wasn’t the lesson. Curiosity was.

Whether we are producing a Netflix series, designing a LinkedIn Learning course, leading a meeting, speaking from a stage or simply having an important conversation, we are all trying to solve the same problem. Not how to say more, but how to make people want to hear more. Every idea we communicate now competes with thousands of others for the same limited resource: attention.

Perhaps the question is no longer whether we have something worth saying. Perhaps the question is whether we can make people want to hear it.

Words of Wisdom

“Make sure you have stopped speaking before your audience has stopped listening.” Dorothy Sarnoff

“Your first 10 words are more important than your next 10,000.” Elmer Wheeler

A Question to Ponder, dear friend.

How do you earn someone's attention before asking for their time?