False Consensus Bias Keeps You From Becoming a Top Creator
Learn how to step outside of yourself
I did a coaching call with students in my writing program today. We did an exercise where I had them study headlines from top writers on Medium.
I told them to remove their bias and try to understand why the article was popular, even if it wasn’t appealing to them.
Still, some students had a difficult time with this. Most aspiring creators do, too.
Some of the replies to the exercise:
“This isn’t something I’d be interested in.”
“I don’t fit into this demographic.”
“It’s just not my style.”
All of those are fine answers, but they miss the point that most creators miss.
There are people out there, lots of them, who see the world differently than you do. People understand this logically, but can’t embrace this emotionally.
Politics is the easiest example.
Don’t lie…
It’s difficult for you to see how people on the “other side” believe the things they believe. You think it’s insane they voted for who they voted for. It’s difficult for you to picture that someone else can live in that reality.
How does this apply to content?
False consensus bias keeps you from learning what works and what doesn’t. Deep down, you feel like people consume content the same exact way you do. If you never get past that, you’re never going to be able to learn.
The point isn’t to consume the content you don’t like, but it’s to at least understand why it works, even if it doesn’t work for you.
To the student who said it didn’t fit her demographic, I told her to look at the post through the lens of how she might fit pieces of that style into a different demographic.
Even if you don’t like a certain style of content, you should be able to understand why it’s appealing. And people who can’t do that are the same as people who can’t understand why people vote for different parties.
The point isn’t to morph yourself into something you’re not, but to understand the landscape so you can make smart decisions on what kind of stuff you should make as well as the best way to make it.
The Biggest Blindspot Most Creators Have
If you’re going to create content, you have to understand tradeoffs. You have to understand the pros and cons of creating different types of content.
Here’s a big one…
A lot of writers are allergic to anything that resembles marketing — clickbait headlines, sentence hooks, and stylistic devices like using short sentences.
This would be fine if they stopped there but they don’t.
Since it’s not something they’re into, they write off the concept wholesale and fail to learn anything. They just think that sort of content is dumb, they think they’re above it all, and they maintain this air of artistic superiority.
But then, they also get mad when no one reads their shit.
Instead of looking at something like marketing in black-or-white terms, think of it as a spectrum.
Let’s say an overly clickbait headline, something like “This One Little Trick to Reduce Belly Fat,” scores a 10 on your clickbait radar if you’re using a 1-10 scale. That’s fine, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything to improve the catchiness of your headlines.
Maybe you decide to write headlines that are a 3 or 4, which is fine, but don’t just choose zero. Having an understanding of what works lets you decide to which degree you’re going to dial up the pizazz. But it should have…some…pizazz.
You Don’t Get to Dictate What the World Thinks
My audience has every single type of human being in it. Left, right, gay, straight, trans, woke, conservative, Christian, atheist, black, brown, white, you name it.
One of my biggest strengths is simply understanding that people see the world differently than I do. Instead of writing off, you know, half of a population, I decided to focus on the commonalities we have.
If you can’t understand why someone who disagrees with you could even come to that conclusion, you’re not good at critical thinking. You have massive blindspots and these blind spots will pop up in your work.
Too many writers get it in their heads that their worldview is the only one that’s correct, which leaves them rigid. Good creators are flexible. They can toy around with ideas and hold contradictory thoughts in their mind. They can explore a topic they disagree with without straw-manning.
In a polarized world, where people will turn their brains into pretzels just to stay faithful to their team, people are hungry for creators who either try to be objective or at least admit their biases up front.
Right now, we have a massive influx of people who aren’t objective but think they are. Have tons of biases but pretend they don’t. Their tunnel vision about the world gives them tunnel vision to the content world, which leaves them bumping their head against the wall.
They don’t understand why people don’t like their work because they don’t try to understand. They can only see the world through what they want, what they think, and what they believe.
Stay true to who you are. Keep your convictions. There are too many creators who just make what they think the market wants instead of what they want. But you still have to understand how marketplaces work, including the marketplace of ideas.
Taste masking is dead.
This is why you see such gaps between the critic scores and the audience scores on rotten tomatoes. The audience scores reflect the market.
For better or worse, the gatekeepers are gone. You have all the power in the world to build an audience. You don’t need to pander to get that done, but just having the simple awareness that other people don’t think like you will make you ten times more self-aware than the average content creator.
You can’t break the rules if you don’t know how they work.
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