Yesterday I was thinking about how hard it must be to say Mass at a young church.

If you’re unfamiliar with the format of a Catholic Mass, we have 2 readings, the Gospel, and then the homily.

The homily is supposed to explain the scripture and how we can apply it in our daily lives.

The thing with a young church like mine is that many of us have young kids who don’t even remotely want to be there. They are eating, trying to run away, or flopping in their parents’ arms.

And we all tend to go to the same mass.

I’d wager that at any given time, between the kids, the parents, and the people in the immediate vicinity of the kids, the priest has maybe half of the attendees’ full attention.

But he still gives the homily. The mass still goes on. The parents still decide to go to church.

Because we all realize the same thing: the message is important.

Shortcuts Degrade the Message

I suspect a lot of us take shortcuts in creating content because it feels like we don’t have anyone’s full attention.

So we ask AI for ideas. Maybe even have it write the script, or most of the article.

Come up with the questions we’re going to ask our guests.

Have it edit the episode, the text, and the video.

Because then the level of effort we’re putting into the content is worth the attention we feel we’re getting for it.

Except now the content doesn’t even have our full attention, and the message suffers.

It’s half-baked. It’s not resonating because we didn’t take the time needed to properly craft one.

But a funny thing happens when the message is good.

It starts to get attention.

Focus on the Message

Later on, once the kids were occupied and I got a moment to myself, I started to think about this week’s homily I thought I had only half-heard.

Ironically enough, it was about where we should focus. We have limited resources, and we need to understand how to spend them.

Perhaps it’s what inspired this article. And if the priest had asked ChatGPT to create some bland interpretation of the gospel instead of a highly resonant story, who knows what I’d be writing about…or what impact it would have had on the rest of the attendees.

The same thing is true of good content. Maybe that article you published gets picked up by Google. Or that YouTube video finds its audience 6 months later.

Maybe you make a thoughtful comment on a LinkedIn post, and someone sees it and reaches out 3 weeks later.

When you spend time crafting a message through your content, the payoff might not be immediate.

But if and when it does find the right audience — the people it will truly resonate with — you’ll be happy you took the time to create something worth consuming.

Photo by David Tomaseti on Unsplash