KAA

When I was a little boy in the village, I loved fishing and hunting. To catch fish or any bush meat, you always had to have a strategy.

One of those strategies was setting our traps along grasscutter paths and then moving behind them to beat the thick bushes with sticks. Sometimes, we even set parts of the bush on fire. The grasscutters would run straight into our waiting traps.

It was always fun to sit still, watch the reactions of those gullible grasscutters, and guide them toward our traps. Proof that they lack reasonable intelligence is the fact that the strategy worked almost every time.

But that wasn’t my favorite strategy.

My most memorable one was when we wanted to take eggs from my grandmother’s hens, especially when the mother hen was particularly aggressive.

I was always a good runner, so I would deliberately provoke the mother hen. She would abandon her eggs and come charging after me.

While she was chasing me, someone else was busy collecting as many eggs as we wanted. Poor thing. If only she had been a little wiser.

Now, coming to social media, there’s a reason why one of the highest-CTR thumbnail texts or video titles is, “You Should Not Watch This” or “Keep Off This Video.”

It’s reverse psychology, and it almost always works because human beings are naturally drawn to what they are told to avoid. That intense curiosity is a marketplace the smart know how to exploit.

It becomes a relief when a group of people you have never paid attention to decides to make you their enemy. Their efforts to hide you become the very reason people begin searching for you.

My advice? Get yourself such unwitting promoters. They make up a large percentage of the gullibility market.

-KAA