A Content Creator's Best Friend

According to an article in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, the economic value produced by content creators—entrepreneurs who create online content to educate, entertain, and inspire their audience—worldwide is estimated to be over $104 billion, with over 165 million people joining the creator economy in the last two years.

The authors of the article go on to say, “Creators who can generate robust user engagement in the form of likes, comments, shares, and subscriptions can attract advertisers and earn higher revenue from their content.”

For content creators, the ability to create engaging content is critical to their professional success.

But coming up with interesting ideas for content can be incredibly difficult.

One solution may be hiding in plain sight—it’s called the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon—and it can help creators come up with interesting ideas seemingly on autopilot.

What is the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon?

Have you ever bought a vehicle, like a red Jeep, then suddenly saw dozens of red Jeeps every time you went for a drive?

Maybe you joined a fraternity or sorority in college, then suddenly it seemed like you saw Greek letters everywhere—on hoodies, on car window decals, and even on your favorite tv shows.

Or maybe you read an article about the most common limiting beliefs, then you suddenly started seeing these limiting beliefs pop up everywhere in normal conversation.

This is the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon in action, because our minds are designed to identify patterns in our environment.

The Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon, also called the frequency illusion, is a cognitive bias that happens when we have a novel experience or learn something new, then suddenly begin to notice it everywhere—even if it had been there all along.

It allows us to observe patterns we otherwise would have ignored.

This is why the Baader-Meinhoff Phenomenon is a content creator’s best friend.

We just have to learn how to expand our perceptual awareness.

How the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon works

The Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon can be boiled down to one phrase: Whatever you focus on, you’ll find.

• Focus on problems, you’ll find more problems.
• Focus on solutions, you’ll find more solutions.
• Focus on complaining, you’ll find more things to complain about.
• Focus on gratitude, you’ll find more things to be grateful for.
• Focus on obstacles, you’ll find more obstacles.
• Focus on opportunities, you’ll find more opportunities.

This occurs because the Baader-Meinhoff Phenomenon is a combination of what psychologists call selective attention and confirmation bias.

Here’s how it works. We can’t remember what we don’t attend to (aka, pay attention to). If we want to remember more of what we come across so we can collect valuable data, observe interesting patterns, and make insightful connections we ordinarily wouldn’t have to create engaging content, we have to prime our minds to selectively attend to what’s going on around us.

Basically, we say to our mind, “Hey, pay attention next time you see something related to [insert topic].”

Then, once we selectively attend to what’s going on around us, we need our minds to actively seek out more stimuli related to the topic we picked—to seek confirmation, aka, confirmation bias.

By priming our minds to focus on anything related to a specific topic, we’ll find more things related to that topic—which allows us to create content almost effortlessly.

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Remember, our minds are primed to identify patterns.

So when you prime your mind to focus on a specific topic, it's more likely to find things related to that topic while you’re going about your normal life—as if you’ve been surrounded by things related to that topic all along.

But you’re not actually coming across more things related to the topic.

Of the 100 things you come across in a day, maybe only three relate to the topic you chose. But it seems like things related to that topic are happening everywhere all the time because those three things are taking up more of your perceptual awareness while the other 97 got filtered out.

So when you sit down to create content related to that specific topic, you'll have already collected multiple ideas because your mind selectively attended to and sought out those three pieces related to it from earlier.

This is how creators can leverage the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon to expand their perceptual awareness and create content almost effortlessly.

Final thoughts

You can easily leverage the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon to help you create content almost effortlessly, too.

Next time you want to create content:

• think of the topic
• brainstorm a few ideas or concepts you want to explore
• go live your life and see what patterns your mind picks up on
• once you've identified enough patterns and discovered unique combinations, turn them into incredible content

Because if you focus on inspiration, you’ll find inspiration all around you for endless content creation ideas in your everyday life.