I’ve been busy and lacking focus. Over the past two months, I’ve been writing divergent articles based on books, news, and half-formed ideas while learning the art of YouTube content creation. As a result, I’ve struggled to refocus on writing my book.
In short, I’ve made progress on everything except the thing that actually matters to me.
This is a story about YouTube, attention, and why doing fewer things on purpose can actually move your most important work forward.
Candy-coated Broccoli
While developing for YouTube has been a tremendous black hole of time, it recently taught me a highly valuable lesson that only an immediate quantitative response could. Across four consecutive videos, I managed 410k, 7.2k, 229, and 10.5k views. The third number isn’t a typo. 229. Coincidentally, that’s the video and essay I shared with you regarding cat litter.
I’m personally very proud of that work, and it taught me an incredibly important lesson on how YouTube works and how people think. While I intended it to be an insightful look at the impact of maintaining the status quo, those who showed up for my business school lecture were a handful of cat lovers who wanted to know what kind of litter I use.
If my niche is unexpected connections and systems thinking in everyday life, then I’m asking people to eat broccoli in a world that craves constant candy. My mistake wasn’t the vegetables, but how I chose to serve them. I started where I was interested, not where my audience already was as they scrolled by.
On platforms like YouTube, there’s no commitment and no patience for warm-ups. It’s thumbnail, title, and hook, with only about half the audience making it to the 30-second mark. If the entry point doesn’t immediately match expectations, people don’t argue. They bail. In other words, if you want to serve vegetables on the internet, don’t lead with the nutrition label. Earn their engagement first.
In my next video, The Real Reasons Companies Went Back to Elite College Recruiting, I used a Wall Street Journal article as the entry point to explore the hidden psychology of hiring. This time, the audience was much more willing to show up and see where it went. In terms of views, the result was 50x better.
So, I can get people to eat their vegetables, but the question is: what’s the cost?
By adapting my content strategy, I’ve created a Ron Swanson problem.
The Wisdom of Ron Swanson
The television show Parks & Rec is full of amazing life lessons, but one line always stuck with me. Near the end of the series, Leslie Knope seeks Ron’s advice as she weighs whether to pursue her political dreams at the cost of her day job or herself.
(I highly recommend watching the quick 1-minute clip below)
Having spent the past two years recovering from corporate burnout and seeking professional direction, it’s been an incredible period of self-discovery, and one I’m committed to sharing with the world through my work. The challenge is that not everything I’m currently developing is perfectly aligned, and emphasizing one means slowing down the others.
Ron puts it perfectly in his advice to Leslie:
Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one. - Ron Swanson
And here I am. I’m just like Leslie. I don’t want to give anything up. I know that switching between projects slows both down. While we can’t always be 100% committed to a single initiative, we need coherent strategies to focus on the most important priorities. Transitions are inherently draining. There’s a mental load that comes with moving between projects, particularly when the tasks are as different as video editing and writing. Not to mention the significant challenge switching communication styles from building YouTube engagement, then immediately returning to an audience who’s already committed after investing hours in reading your story. Trying to say the same thing to both audiences is like getting a teenager’s attention for a minute, then delivering a 90-minute lecture, both on the same topic.
What Ron shared so succinctly is a much more profound productivity heuristic:
The Ron Swanson Rule: If two projects compete for the same cognitive energy, you don’t have two projects. You have one project and a hobby that is actively distracting you from what matters. As a result, both suffer.
We’re incredibly good at creating rational narratives to explain our work, and often the person we’re trying to convince is ourselves. I am absolutely a victim of that mindset. I justify YouTube as a source of visibility and quantitative feedback. Substack provides a venue to explore depth with a more broccoli-tolerant audience. The book is the end goal, and what I hope becomes my professional centerpoint. But when they all take up my time, and more critically, identical intellectual resources, are my priorities correct, or is that just a story I’m telling myself?
Stepping back, I’ve been forced to confront my role in advancing all of them simultaneously.
Do all of them NEED to be done immediately, or is saying “not now” the most strategic choice I’m avoiding?
This has been more of a wake-up call for me to focus on value and long-term meaning.
As we all live incredibly complex lives, professionally and personally, can you relate? What does your priority list look like?
Certainly, you can rationalize everything on it, but ask the difficult questions:
How do they interact with each other?
Are they dependent on the same or different resources?
And if they rely on the same one, is dividing your focus making both of them slower and worse?
That’s the exact challenge that I’m wrestling with. Overall, it’s the book that matters most to me. That creates a clearer evaluation criterion, not justifying each piece individually, but emphasizing a unifying prioritization principle: If it serves the book, do it. If it’s actively inhibiting the book, it’s out. It goes on a “someday maybe” list. Let go of arbitrary deadlines and dedicate resources in service to your overall objective. Will I be perfect at this? Of course not! But that becomes a much more valuable self-evaluation scorecard.
So I ask you: What’s one thing you could put on a “not now” list this month, and what would that enable that matters more?
