You're invited

This is the Experience Spectrum. It reveals all the ways that your audience can experience your work.

The thing is, most work created winds up on the left-side of the spectrum. This is dangerous for a number of reasons — most notably, the source (you) doesn’t matter.

Gold is gold. Iron is iron. Wheat is wheat. Your product, service, or content is one of dozens if not hundreds if not thousands claiming to “be” the same things.

So how do we create something proprietary instead? That’s the far-right on the Experience Spectrum. What does it take to slide our work all the way to that far end, where WE matter, THEY love it, and nobody else has created what we’ve created?

Over the next three weeks, starting last Friday, continuing each of the next two Fridays, I will be diving into this complex concept head-on to make sense of it.

What does it take to create someone’s favorite thing?

Easy to ask. Complex to answer.

Yes, I’m writing from the angle of making someone’s favorite podcast or show … but this applies to the created work more broadly, too. If your work is experienced by anyone else, I hope you’ll join this journey.

As for that magic wand you see floating at the top of the graphic? That’s Bob, a 4,000-year-old magic wand who only grants two types of wishes. He has a very specific-if-sarcastic role to play in all of this. (Almost as if he was a conveniently concocted device to make a really long article much more entertaining. But nah. Probably just a coincidence.)

I hope you’ll join this journey across three mega-posts, beginning now with The Experience Spectrum. Read the full essay here.

(Part 2 of 3 comes out this Friday.)

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For more content like this, and to support my work as an independent creator, consider the following 4 things:

Subscribe to my blog (3-5 short emails per week), purchase a print, Kindle, or audio book, or, if you’re a podcaster, join my weekly journey to build a system (in public) that we can use to make our audience’s favorite show. Lastly, I’m offering highly-produced online keynotes during this social distancing period to clients holding virtual events.

Thank you for reading, listening, watching, and generally being the type of person who cares about making better things for others.