Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t – Why that is and What You Can Do About It by Steven Pressfield. I’m a big fan of Steven’s earlier book The War of Art which I reviewed a couple years ago. In this new release he comes out of the gate just like the title of the book with why we for the most part dislike reading and why we are lazy when it comes to paying attention. As you might guess, he had me hooked at page one!
The Challenge of Mind Capture or Getting Attention
Early on Pressfield addresses the challenge of getting people to pay attention by offering up three quick remedies to this challenge:
- Streamline your message, focus it, and make it super easy to understand.
- Make it fun, sexy, interesting, or informative. Make it so a person would have to be crazy NOT to read it.
- Apply that to all forms of writing or art or commerce.
If all you took away was this advice the book would be worth reading. However, the book gets even better and is a gem of a 2×4 to the mind about how to effectively communicate.
Here are a few other areas Pressfield covers in this excellent book:
*The lessons learned from writing ads that all writers can borrow and apply
*How to borrow proven concepts and layouts to save time and gain attention
*Dealing with procrastination and the resistance to get things started and to final completion
*The power of the three-act structure in effective storytelling to connect with others
*Why the Hero’s Journey connects and is used in print, TV, and movies
*How to handle failure, rejection, keep moving and push on towards success despite great odds
“In the real world, no one is waiting to read what you’ve written. Sight unseen, they hate what you’ve written. Why? Because they might actually have to read it. Nobody wants to read anything…It isn’t that people are mean or cruel. They’re just busy.”
-Steven Pressfield, pg. 4
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