Don’t judge a book by its cover.

(Sharkbait over Clickbait)

I have a confession to share.

I am pretty weary of “hooky” marketing. I’ve always had this intuition there is something fishy about marketers and self-promoters.  Marketing, once the domain of big brands and the Don Draper’s of the world, seems to have gone mainstream.   Look anywhere online, Twitter, Facebook, or even Google, for that matter, and it seems you are in  Clickbait central. 

Tom Harari seems like a good example of this self-promotion mania.  He has grown his Twitter audience from ~1K to over 14K in a matter of months.  He credits his success to consistently writing “threads.”  Looking at his profile (snapshot below), my bait radar starts flashing red.  It all seems a little too perfect. Easy unfollow. Or so I thought until I fortunately accidentally met Tom in a breakout room in a writing class that I am taking.  Tom is not at all what I expected.

As part of the class, Tom shared two pieces of great wisdom:

“Switch from a consumption mindset to a creator mindset.  The consumption mindset is dopamine seeking.  Take care of your mental health”

“Hooks are only clickbait if you don’t deliver value”

Strangely,  I agree with both of these pieces of advice.  I only spent a total of 10 minutes with Tom on Zoom.  I was intrigued. After the class, I went down a rabbit hole of really reviewing Tom’s work. What I found was surprising. He has thought deeply and writes with stunning clarity on a wide range of topics. His words-to-wisdom ratio is off the charts!  My favorite of Tom’s writings includes a Twitter thread on life lessons on turning 38, a how-to manual on multiplying time, and creativity lessons from Pablo Picasso! I’ve completely changed my mind about him.  Maybe Tom’s content starts a bit hooky, but it's in no way clickbait. It's more like Sharkbait, the clownfish from the Disney movie Finding Nemo.  A little bright and colorful to draw you in but deep and thoughtful on the inside.

But this article isn’t about Tom.  In fact, it isn’t about me either.  It's about clarifying an old adage, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,”  which needs to be reviewed and reinterpreted for the internet era. 

The basic intuition is book covers may be misleading.  People that are too slick may have dubious motives.  People who are understated but accomplished may be diamonds in the rough.  I think this was a reasonable heuristic for pre-internet times.  But things have changed dramatically.  With internet economics, we are living through our own printing press moment.  Over 90% of data in the world has been created in the last 2 years. We are not in Kansas anymore. There is an unending ocean of content, and absolutely everyone is looking to draw in eyeballs. This is true of every news organization, political candidate, or anyone sharing anything on the internet. Interesting times indeed.

The deluge of information has led to shorter attention spans. We are increasingly quick to jump to conclusions.  The 30-second elevator pitch is now down to two seconds or less scan.   This is a structural shift which I think we don’t fully understand.  But what’s clear is the old strategy of being understated and accomplished now only works if you already have a seat at the table. If you don’t already have a seat at the table, you need to crisp up your pitch.  Which leads to more optimized book covers.  It's a reasonable strategy, and Tom is a testament to the fact that it works. 

So, I think we need to update our radars. Verify book covers. Discriminate between the sharp presentation of valuable content (Sharkbait) against clickbait. Book covers are just wrapping. Focus on what’s on the inside.  And in fact, applying the old heuristic was a misapplication of the principle. By discriminating against slick purveyors of information, I was, in fact, judging books by their covers!

So this is a part apology to people like Tom who have been unfairly discriminated against but also a call to action for people like me. Let’s update our book covers for the internet era.  You don’t need to be “hooky” if you don’t want to.   But your cover at least needs to be comprehensible if you want a remote chance of attention.