· 3 min read

▣ The Attention Heist

What you notice reveals how attention actually works. And once you understand the mechanic, you'll see why certain TikTok content goes viral while most gets ignored.

▣ The Attention Heist

Watch the video above before reading. Count how many passes the team in white makes.

Done? Good.

In Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris's famous 1999 experiment, a large portion of viewers failed to notice a person in a full gorilla suit walk into the middle of the frame, stop, beat its chest for nine seconds, and walk off.

They were counting basketball passes.

The finding became known as inattentional blindness. When attention locks onto one task, even highly visible events can go completely unnoticed. Whatever you choose to focus on also determines what disappears.

Obvious risks go unaddressed. Obvious opportunities feel invisible. People look directly at something important and fail to register it.

The world responds to what attention selects, not what objectively matters.

Consider how people actually consume the internet.

When someone opens TikTok, they arrive with a narrow, unspoken task: is this worth another second of my attention? They're scanning for a reason to stop scrolling, not evaluating arguments or reading context.

The content that wins directs attention with precision. A hand enters the frame and a stain disappears. A room changes color. A small problem resolves itself in real time. The viewer doesn't need persuasion because their attention has already been guided to the payoff.

It's the gorilla experiment inverted. Instead of attention missing what matters, it's pointed so clearly that nothing else can compete.

Today's Featured Opportunity is built around that principle: The $20 TikTok Launch Lab—a system for identifying products whose value can be understood instantly on camera, testing them through high-volume creator demos, and compounding the results into a repeatable engine for visual proof.

Read the full playbook here:

A repeatable system for identifying, validating, and scaling visually demonstrable products through creator-native distribution and structured experimentation.

Full Playbook

From the Vault:

Enterprise pays $50K+ for trend detection. Microbrands need execution speed. The gap is infrastructure that delivers shippable SKU packs instead of dashboards.

Full Playbook

Most newsrooms use AI daily but lack pre-publish safety gates. When prompt remnants ship to print, screenshots go viral and Legal starts asking questions.

Full Playbook

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