NARRATIVE EQUITY

THE MACGUFFIN | JUNE 21st, 2026

THE PATTERN

For weeks, my son has been telling me, "You will see." So excited about it that his teachers had to tell him, "Don't say anything in front of your dad."

There's a specific discomfort when something is being kept from you, it itches, and the strange thing is, you don't even need the full picture to feel pulled in. You just need to know there's a picture you don't have yet.

It's Father's Day today, so I'll finally get my answer (and my gift, first as a dad, yes, I'm genuinely excited). But that same countdown clock runs on anything.

ACT ONE: EASTER EGGS

Taylor Swift has built a meaningful part of her career on this exact feeling. She left easter eggs everywhere, and within hours, hundreds of thousands of people are in group chats, spreadsheets, and Reddit threads, trying to crack something that, as far as anyone can tell, she never actually asked them to crack. That's powerful.

Nobody paid for that attention, she just left something slightly unfinished in public and let the unfinished part do the work.

Compare that to this:

A financial newsletter goes out with the subject line "What you should know about fixed annuities." That's pretty bad because it's generic. But if you reframed it as "How do you get better returns than a CD without losing the safety net?" Suddenly, people open it.

The only thing that changed was the size of the hole in what people knew.

Doing this doesn't require a lot of extra work. What it requires is taking the person in front of you seriously. Most of the time, we're heads down in our own thinking, so deep in it that it all makes total sense to us, and we keep moving forward without noticing we're moving alone.

What I keep coming back to is one question. Not "does this make sense to me," because most of the time it does, but "I see my benefit here, what's in it for you?" That question shows the way.

ACT TWO: INFORMATION GAP

George Loewenstein, an American economist with a great mustache, referred to it as the information gap theory. His research says curiosity isn't really about wanting to learn something new. It's about noticing a specific, located gap between what you know and what you want to know, and feeling genuinely uncomfortable until it closes.

It's human psychology at full speed.

It's a real, physical, can't-look-away discomfort.

Alfred Hitchcock built an entire career on weaponizing that discomfort. He called that "The MacGuffin", the thing the plot revolves around that you're never quite given the full picture of.

The Usual Suspects does this for a hundred minutes straight. The film does not treat you like an idiot who needs everything spelled out, and it does not give you the full picture early. It trusts you to follow through, and you do, because the alternative, walking away with the gap unresolved, is somehow worse than just finishing the movie.

The thing everyone wants and nobody fully explains. And if you think that doesn't apply to (any kind of)business, bear with me.

Your brain treats any open gap like an unfinished task, the same itch as a browser tab you haven't closed yet. That's not a metaphor, that's literally how it sits in your head until it's resolved.

ACT THREE: REVERSE ENGINEERING

Two business examples worth mentioning:

Everyone talks about Patagonia, but what actually happened. Patagonia took out a full-page ad in the New York Times on Black Friday 2011. Three words across the top. "Don't Buy This." It took a second for people to realize Patagonia was telling them not to buy their own jacket unless they actually needed it, as a stand against overconsumption.

That second read is where the campaign actually happened. You wanted to know because you didn't know and didn't quite understand.

A few years later, in 2016, Radiohead made quite a move also. Before releasing "A Moon Shaped Pool", they deleted their website and wiped their social media presence with no explanation. Fans assumed the worst, assumed the best (fans are really good at this), they built entire theories out of nothing, and all of it, every single theory and panicked forum post, was free advertising for an album that hadn't even been announced yet.

The learning for whatever you are creating is that nothing here explains itself, and that's the entire strategy.

But the gap only works if you actually close it eventually. If you just withhold without ever paying off, and you're not building curiosity, you're training people to stop trusting you.

Nothing you raise, sell, pitch, or write should ever be left completely plain; plain is mostly ignored because it doesn't trigger anything.

Look at the last thing you put in front of an audience. Did it answer a question, or did it open one? If it answered, you already closed the gap before anyone came close to you.

— Théo

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