By Hiran de Silva
Imagine there’s a beautifully produced instructional video titled “How to Get from London to Oxford.”
It’s elegant. It’s engaging. The presenter narrates confidently over drone shots of English countryside — villages, rolling hills, places to stop for coffee, the comfort of the journey, and the sense of accomplishment you’ll feel upon arrival. Every turn is clearly described, every landmark charmingly framed. It’s a joy to watch.
Encouraged by hundreds of thousands of views, likes, and glowing comments, you follow the instructions exactly. You’re confident you’re on the right path — after all, so many people can’t be wrong.
And then, a curious thing happens.
When you arrive at your “destination,” you realise you’re not in Oxford. You’re in Otford, a small village in Kent — nowhere near your intended goal.
The Missing Feedback Loop
Perplexed, you return to the comments. Surely, someone else must have noticed?
But scrolling through the thousands of replies, you find that almost everyone seems delighted. They praise the video, the visuals, the clarity of the explanation. A few isolated comments mention arriving at Otford, but they’re quickly lost in the noise.
You leave your own comment, pointing out that the route doesn’t reach Oxford — that the directions, however elegant, lead somewhere entirely different.
Silence. No reply from the creator. No acknowledgment from the audience.
And then it dawns on you: most people never actually made the journey. They watched the video, perhaps even started it, but they never tested it in the real world. The apparent “success” of the content is built entirely on engagement, not results.
When Engagement Becomes the Destination
At this point, the penny drops. The purpose of the video was never to get you to Oxford. The purpose was to get you to click.
“Oxford” was chosen because it’s a familiar, desirable destination. “Otford” wouldn’t draw nearly as many viewers. The headline was crafted not for truth but for traction — and in the modern social media economy, traction is the currency.
So the route may be wrong, the instructions misleading, and the promise unfulfilled — but the video performed. And that, in the metrics-driven world of online content, is what really matters.
The Excel Parallel
This phenomenon is not limited to travel guides. It’s visible across countless Excel tutorials, productivity videos, and so-called “modern Excel” masterclasses.
A creator might demonstrate how to build an “inventory system,” a “budget model,” or a “financial dashboard.” The video looks polished. The process appears simple. The end result seems powerful. The likes, comments, and views pile up.
But when someone with real-world responsibility — a finance manager, an FP&A analyst, a project accountant — actually follows the instructions and tries to deploy the technique at enterprise scale, they end up in Otford. The system collapses under volume, users, or version control.
And yet, the illusion of success remains — because the metric of success was never functional delivery. It was audience engagement.
The Social Media Mirage
We’ve built an entire ecosystem where “teaching” often means entertaining the algorithm, not empowering the learner.
The goal is not necessarily to get you where you need to go — but to keep you clicking, watching, and reacting.
From a business point of view, this makes perfect sense. Engagement equals visibility; visibility equals sponsorship; sponsorship equals income. But from a learner’s point of view — especially one trying to achieve a specific, professional outcome — it’s a dangerous diversion.
If your goal is to reach Oxford — to build scalable, auditable, enterprise-grade systems that deliver real results — then following the social media satnav might not get you there. You’ll find yourself, instead, pleasantly stranded in Otford, surrounded by others admiring the scenery, unaware that the true destination lies elsewhere.
The Real Journey
The irony is that creating genuinely correct directions is not harder. It simply doesn’t generate as much noise. Accuracy and integrity rarely trend. But for those who truly intend to reach the real destination — whether that’s a robust financial model, a working consolidation engine, or an automated reporting architecture — the difference between Oxford and Otford is the difference between insight and illusion.
So perhaps the real lesson here is this:
If you actually intend to travel, don’t judge the map by how many people have admired it. Judge it by whether anyone has truly arrived.
Final Thought
Social media can show you the road to anywhere — but not necessarily to where you need to go.
Before you set off, ask yourself:
Are you travelling to Oxford — or are you just admiring the view to Otford?
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