Around age 15, a short time after I had learned to read, I started going through the books of Henry Miller because his books were 1) banned upon publication in the U.S. and 2) had sex in them, and those two things are all the endorsement a 15-year-old boy needs.
Anyways, in one Henry Miller book, I forget which, Henry Miller, who was a kind of joyous social parasite, furiously writes about some cousins of his, who (it being the Great Depression) are starving.
The part that made Miller furious was his cousins’ patiently accepting their fate and subsisting on a leaf of cabbage a day, because, from I can remember, they are too proud or too feckless to ask for help in their starvation.
Henry Miller, who was living in Paris at the time, and was surviving on borrowed food, drinking borrowed wine, and sleeping in borrowed beds, couldn’t understand this.
Whenever he was starving, he would simply beat down his friends’ and enemies’ doors and beg and scream and complain until they fed him.
You’ve probably heard of direct marketing legend Gary Halbert. Halbert used to give talks in which he’d play the “hot dog stand” game with his audience.
“You and I have competing hot dog stands,” Halbert would say. “I’ll give you every advantage you want. I’ll just ask for one thing. Take whatever you want, give me this one thing, and my hot dog stand will whoop yours.”
Halbert’s one thing was a “starving crowd.”
Except, I’d like to suggest to you today there are two kinds of starving crowd.
There’s the “Henry Miller” starving crowd, people who cannot and will not accept their starvation, and who demand that the problem be fixed, and now.
And then there’s the “Cabbage Cousins” starving crowd.
Whether through pride, weakness resulting from starvation, or simply the fact that there’s a pound of bacon stashed somewhere in their house, which they secretly reach for late at night, the “Cabbage Cousins” starving crow accepts what to everybody else looks like unbearable starvation.
And if you wanna play the “hot dog stand” game with me, I’ll give you as big of a starving crowd as you like, provided that it’s the “Cabbage Cousins” kind.
Just give me a few Henry Millers instead, and I bet you I’ll push more hot dogs than you.
(You know what I mean. Don’t give me Henry Miller the broke social parasite. But do give me people who have some money, and a problem, and have shown that they are intent on getting that problem solved, and now.)
Anyways, I’m not sure if this was illuminating. But it is a distinction I had to draw for myself, and I figured it might be useful to you as well.
Maybe you’re wondering how you can know that somebody is intent on getting a problem solved, so you can distinguish the Henry Millers from the Cabbage Cousins in real life.
Fortunately, Gary Halbert has written up the answer for you. In case you’re curious:
https://thegaryhalbertletter.com/newsletters/direct_marketing_to_a_starving_crowd.htm