If a promotion falls in the forest and no one sees it, did it even happen?
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I live in the Bay Area, and we have this very popular idea here: that success is the same thing as attention. You aren’t truly successful until people see what you’re doing and pay attention to you.
We believe in this idea so much that we’ve built it into our technology: more views is better, more likes is better, more attention is winning. This idea that success = attention (and I’m using equals in the programming language sense here)… depending on what you pay attention to and what you care about, you could argue that this idea has changed the internet, teens, business models, our brains, war, relationships, you get the idea.
Setting aside the impact of it, and frankly side stepping the whole conversation about ad-based revenue models which we can have some other time, I think the idea of success = attention is fundamentally incorrect from the very beginning. Because attention is a zero sum game and success is not. To equate them is to erase all the other modalities of success.
I want to share just one radically different definition of success.
In 1968, the sociologist Robert K. Merton introduced a concept he called “obliteration by incorporation”. Super catchy, right? The idea here is that truly groundbreaking work gets picked up so quickly and so completely that it disappears. We don’t know where it came from or when, we just know that it is. And its origins can be so obscured that sometimes we’ll even come up with a different version of it ourselves as if it’s our own new idea. The original work has been obliterated by incorporation.
A less dramatic term for this is one that I’ve used over the years since the movie Inception came out, and that’s just “incepting people” or “incepting the organization”. What I’ve often told my teams over the years is this: success is hearing your work and your ideas come out of the mouths of the people you were trying to influence as if they came up with it. Everyone won’t know it was your work, but some people will, and we’ll work together to make sure your work and your impact still helps you get ahead professionally since we do currently live in an attention = success world.
Now there are many other ways to think about and define success. Today, I just wanted to share “obliteration by incorporation”, which is basically the polar opposite of our beloved Bay Area definition of success. Thanks for listening.