There's a difference between being noticed and being invited. One is a relationship; the other is a heist. We've just gotten too fast at the heist to notice the difference.

I haven’t had my coffee yet, and I just heard this. “The fastest way to manipulate people isn’t to change what they do, it’s to change what it means.”

If you’d been in the room with me, you would have heard me snort, “Holy shit. They said the word manipulate out loud.”

The person speaking isn’t wrong, but it does point to a bigger issue we have.

We’ve been conned into believing that the only way to change people’s minds is to con them into doing what we want. I’m calling this insane dance the “Con-Con” and it’s why it feels like you’re high-kicking all day and not getting anywhere.

So how did we get here?

Just call me a BS Blocking Ninja. I’ve become a black belt in blocking. You probably have too. Can we get matching jackets?

Let’s start by talking about volume. How many unsolicited messages do you get every day?

I don’t need to look, but I’m guessing your inbox is full of them, messages that pretend to be personal but clearly aren’t. Outreach that pretends to be a connection but is just a sales pitch with your name mail-merged in. You delete them without reading. That text or phone call from an unknown number - block, blocity block, and a block.

You’ve gotten really, really good at spotting Con-Cons.

But what if you need someone to see your thing? What happens when it’s your turn to reach people? When you actually need attention for something that matters? You might be looking at these same tactics, thinking this is just how it has to be done.

“Spray and pray” / send your message to as many people as you can and pitch them on why you/your thing/your idea is just the solution they need.

The Con-Con didn’t start as a whirling dervish. It started as a new dance.

All of this started innocently enough. Watch any episode of Mad Men, and you’ll see this in practice. Peggy Olson and Don Draper understood the art of reframing how you thought about a product. Watching her shift the strategy from “Mark Your Man.” to “A Basket Full of Kisses.” was a master class in knowing your audience and framing. With every new idea, she wasn’t lying about what she was selling. She thought about what it meant to the person buying it.

Rory Sutherland, one of the most influential voices in advertising, calls this “enchantment.” Psychology applied thoughtfully. It required judgment about where the line was between helping someone see value and manipulating them into a decision.

Tiny Con-Con.

Then, in the 1970s and 80s, behavioral science became a discipline. Suddenly, there were people who could tell you exactly how someone was going to think. What triggers would make them act? What patterns of decision-making could you predict? It wasn’t just intuition anymore. It was a science with studies, data, and replicable results.

Then something subtle but important happened.

This stopped being an individual judgment call and became an organizational one.

Persuasion got operationalized. It moved into dashboards, quotas, and OKRs. Success was no longer defined by whether someone wanted the conversation, but whether the number moved. We all, like it or not, started to be a number and metric in someone else’s funnel.

Jump a decade forward, and the internet and data brokers showed up, accelerating everything again. Information that used to require relationship-building to learn became instantly available for purchase.

“They’re more likely to click on the donut ad with the blue background, not the pink one.”

The behavioral insights got packaged into formulas with step-by-step instructions. Paint-by-numbers persuasion.

The Tiny Con-Con now had scale.

Then the “How to get chosen” narrative got a bit skewed, and the story that a great pitch = guaranteed success. From the Kardashians to Venture Capitalists, nail the pitch and the future is yours.

But here’s what we keep forgetting.

That initial pitch? People asked for it. They weren’t tricked into paying attention. The VC said, “Show me what you’ve got,” and the founder pitched. Kim and the rest of the clan said, “You want to be like me? Here’s now.” Transaction completed as promised, and (mostly) everyone went home happy.

And somewhere between watching those success stories and opening our own laptops, we forgot that part. We saw the pitch that worked and thought, “I need to pitch like that” without noticing that the person being pitched wanted to hear it. They’d literally asked for it.

So now we’re all walking around with pitch energy, applying it to people who never asked, who aren’t professionally obligated to listen, who are actively trying to avoid exactly this. We took a consensual transaction and turned it into an ambush.

We all started thinking that everything starts with a pitch, even when the other person is running in the opposite direction.

Did you notice this was when we all started shouting back?

And we all got louder.

And while we didn’t think it could get any worse AI launch allowing everyone, every day, to easily create “bespoke messaging at scale” with personalized messages for thousands of people who never asked to hear from you.

Congratulations, you’ve automated being annoying.

The Con-Con became automated and infinite.

I know you can feel it, but let’s actually do the math.

What is all this automation creating? A strategy that looks something like this:

1. Send 10,000 emails →

2. Get 200 responses →

3. Push 50 to a meeting →

4. Close 10 deals →

5. Success! Do it again.

Look at that beautiful conversion funnel with those 10 deals and that ROI showing victory. Well done, now you can grow and scale.

But here’s what the spreadsheet conveniently forgets to count:

Those 9,990 people you “burned through” aren’t just people who said no. They’re not neutral, they’re actively negative. They now have their guard up, not just against you but against everyone in your category.

You now live in their spam folder. You didn’t just lose a sale. You lost the right to speak to them forever.

That “trick” or “hack” you heard to get their attention hasn’t just lost you the sale. You’ve lost the right to speak.

The biggest Con of them all in this Con-Con world.

Look, I get why this all happened. We’ve all been told for years that “if you build it, they will come.” Both high school and university are basically a lesson in that. Get the grades, and you’ll have a meaningful career. If you’re qualified for the role, you should be able to get it. For the people out there selling everything from toothpaste to “transformation,” we’ve been promised that if you build it, then tell people about it, the future you want will become a reality.

Umm. No.

Let’s go back to the opening idea.

“Nothing happens unless others decide that it matters.”

Here’s what that actually means.

You don’t get to pitch until someone invites you to pitch them.

We forgot that enchantment comes before conversion rate.

It’s why this all feels icky and forced.

We’ve become the thing we hate. Not because we want to, but because we’ve been convinced it’s the only way. We don’t have to play the KA-POW! Blockity Block game and dance the Con-Con.

Perhaps it’s time to stop asking about the conversion rate and start asking if we’ve identified the connection first. Maybe it’s time to remember that there’s a difference between being noticed and being invited to notice the thing you have to share.

One is a relationship. The other is a heist.

And I don’t know about you, but I know who I want to build the future with. Don’t you?

Maybe the way to change someone’s future isn’t to pitch them, but to create the conditions so they want to join you there.

How’s that for a Ka-Pow?

Joanna Bloor builds in the space of Potential. She works with people carrying ideas that are ahead of the room, long before others know how to recognize them. When the advice is to “just explain it better,” she focuses on a different problem: making the future visible and transferable without simplifying it away.

So, how do you start being anti-Con-Con? How do you stop the ‘Blockity Block’ run-around?

Just ask yourself this: How can I make this easy for others to join?

It sounds like a simple question. But think about the last time you decided to join something new. You didn’t feel pitched or pursued. You heard something, saw a vision, or recognized a value that made you think, ‘I want in on that.’ You weren’t waiting for an invitation; you invited yourself.

When you stop trying to ‘get’ people and start making your work easy to join, you stop the heist. You’re on the right track.

And that’s how you change the future without the heist.”