Attention is the leverage of media. This is the first way you can scale a brand or a business without eating into your future goodwill because the more attention you accumulate, the more productive everything in your business will become.

Most other resources on which we rely as individuals—such as food, money, and electricity—are things that facilitate life, and in some cases it’s possible to live without them, at least for a while. Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attent

Way back in 1971 Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize–winning social scientist, observed, “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information c

only give free content to the marketplace because we will sell them something later. Attention without the intention to sell them something is bad attention. It is worthless, unprofitable, and a waste of time.