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Name the anxiety nobody names
It works like using an obscure vocabulary word for something someone couldn't put a finger on. When the name lands, it strikes a chord inside the reader, and the reader is hooked.
Finding the anxiety starts with a deep understanding of the company and the audience. Many companies begin with a manifesto or a culture document that records the pain they set out to solve, which is necessary and still falls short of sufficient. The best find the one, two, or three most important issues for their audience.
Those issues keep moving. What keeps an audience up at night this quarter differs from last quarter, and it may differ between Friday and Monday. Keeping a finger on the pulse matters as much as any narrative, which is why the work is so hard to outsource. The message has to match the zeitgeist to the mission and say the quiet part out loud before anyone else phrases it.
How does naming a feeling change it?
Psychologist Matthew Lieberman and colleagues scanned volunteers' brains in a 2007 study in Psychological Science. When participants put a name to the emotion in a face they were viewing, activity in the amygdala dropped and activity in the right prefrontal cortex rose. The effect is called affect labeling. It is one reason a precise word for a vague unease can feel like relief.
How did FOMO start as a word?
Patrick McGinnis coined the term fear of missing out in a 2004 opinion piece in The Harbus, the Harvard Business School student newspaper. He used it to describe the pressure students felt to attend every event. The phrase spread through social media over the following decade. Oxford Dictionaries added FOMO to its online dictionary in 2013.