Rented attention

The protein gel is lime green and tastes, I'm told, of regret.

A friend of mine, a very good runner, is sitting in her kitchen filming herself being delighted by it. Take four. The light's gone funny. She has to say the line again, the one the brand sent over, the one with the word "fuel" in it that no human has ever said out loud, and she has to say it like she means it, because the renewal's coming up and the renewal is most of her income this year. She does not use the gel. She has a brand she actually likes, but they're not the ones paying, so here we are. Lime green. Take five.

There's a particular flavour of quiet that comes after you've posted something you don't believe. She knows it. A lot of athletes know it.

The story we tell about the athlete economy is that the dream is sponsorship. You get good enough, you get famous enough, and a brand puts you on a billboard and the money comes in. And it's true, that is the door. The problem is it's the only door anyone has ever bothered to build. So a hundred thousand brilliant, beloved athletes are all queuing at the same one, hoping a marketing manager they've never met decides, this quarter, that their face is worth renting.

Because that's what it is. Rented attention. You don't own a thing. The brand borrows your audience, pays you for the loan, and the moment the budget tightens, and it always tightens, Q4 comes for everyone, the deal ends and the income ends with it and you are exactly where you started, except a year older. You built nothing. You banked a cheque and gave away the only asset you had, your relationship with the people who actually trust you, to someone whose name will be on a different athlete next season.

This was the thing that wouldn't leave me alone when we started Loaf. Here are these people with audiences a television network would weep for, devotion you genuinely cannot buy, and the entire industry's answer to "how do you make a living from that" is: wait by the inbox, and hope.

I bootstrapped my last company. No investors for years, which was terrifying, but it meant I owned it, and owning it changed how every decision felt. There's a difference between building something that's yours and renting yourself out by the month, and the difference is not mostly about money. It's about whose hands your future sits in. A sponsorship puts it in theirs. The renewal email is them deciding. You refreshing the inbox is you waiting to be chosen, again, by someone who feels nothing for you.

The alternative is almost embarrassingly obvious once you see it. Make your living from the actual sport. From the people who already love you. Take them somewhere hard and real, lead them through it, and get paid properly for the thing you've spent your whole life becoming the best at. Not a cheque for pretending to like a gel. Income from being, undeniably, yourself.

Fay Manners ran a trip with us to Kyrgyzstan. Eighty-three people applied for every single place. It did $59,000 in a week. Nobody had to like a gel. She got paid to do her actual sport, with her actual people, and at the end of it she owned the relationship with every one of them, rather than handing it to a brand to rent until they got bored.

You spent fifteen years building an audience that trusts you. You can keep renting it out one quarter at a time. Or you can build something on top of it that's yours, and stop waiting by the inbox to be chosen.

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." — Eleanor Roosevelt