The cliché goes like this: You cannot judge a book by its cover. This may be true but, it doesn’t seem to be a truth acted upon by most people. You may not be able to judge a book by its cover but, you certainly can misjudge it.
Never mind books but, look at most YouTube videos with sensational thumbnail images or titles which almost always have words like: “Best Ever” or “Most Amazing” or “Watch this Before You Eat something or another” designed to clickbait us to watch. Also blogs and articles with precisely the same objective of trying to entice us to click and read, only to find that it was not as interesting as the title suggested.
So, if it is true that an exciting title / thumbnail can over-sell and mislead, it must follow that a boring or uninspiring title / thumbnail can stop people reading or watching interesting and worthy contents. How keen would you be to watch a video of paint dry or someone count from one to a million?
I know from personal experience that the titles I choose for my blog posts definitely influenced the readership and responses. What I thought the most-worthy topics I wrote about got perhaps the least readership simply because I did not pay sufficient attention to the title and just used boring, negative or obscure set of words. But to be honest, this is my fault because I am selfish in this regard and choose titles that firstly amuse me and possibly a small circle of friends where there is an in-joke going on between us. On few occasions, I tried to clickbait and it worked but, I felt cheap about it so, I don’t do it anymore.
I once met a keynote speaker in Florida who specialised in giving inspirational talks on change management in organisation through complex and large projects. He said something that surprised me and did not seem intuitive at the time however, I slowly came around his way of thinking. He said: the trouble with these big initiatives is that we spend a great deal of effort and time thinking up a catchy and memorable title, borrowing from Latin, Greek, or the galaxy, so much so, that we neglect to focus on the important things like pinning down the scope of work, identifying the key risk elements, or making sure we bring all stakeholders along with us. So, we end up with mugs, hats, and T shirts proclaiming the clever name we came up with, while the actual management of the project is left to languish in the background.
This problem goes beyond creative work. Some parents spend so much time thinking of a name for their soon-to-arrive baby and proportionately less time on how to bring them up. The chosen names are not always to the liking of the growing children who at the very least get teased at school for the name sound, spelling, or initials. I am not making this up but, I once came across a man called Mike Hunt. What in the world were his parents thinking? I also wonder why Mike did not change his name once he came of age, maybe he thought it gave him an edge over others, who knows? More amusing, I once had dinner at a restaurant in England owned and run by a lovely woman called Mary Christmas who didn’t seem to mind her parents’ sense of humour.
Outward appearances we experience often compel us to misjudge people. Be honest, if you were to go to see your doctor and he had tattoos all over his hands and rings in his nose and lips, would you feel comfortable trusting him to treat you? How comfortable are you accepting a job where your direct supervisor is many years younger than you? Do you raise your eyebrows if your hear on a flight PA system the Captain is a woman? If you answered the door and standing in front of you was a large man claiming to be your babysitter, how confident would you be to say: come in, please!
Yet, in all of the above examples, these people could be highly qualified and trustworthy to do an excellent job. We all have a tendency to misjudge situations by the outer appearance.
Going back to the inspirational keynote speaker I referred to earlier, I actually stumbled across him early in the morning of the conference as I took a walk around the hotel where the venue was held. I wandered into the auditorium and there was a man in semi-darkness wearing a pirate-like eyepatch, hotel slippers and scruffy pyjamas, fiddling with the podium set up, screen, and projector. I thought to myself: Jeese, the staff in this place are dreadful, don’t they even have a dress-code? My imagination then ran wild and I wondered if he had escaped from a local psychiatric hospital. You guessed it, he turned out to be the keynote speaker getting ready for his presentation, which as it happened, was one of the most impressive deliveries I ever witnessed; he was masterful!
