John von Neumann was probably the smartest person of the 20th century. He didn’t have Einstein’s hair or the dopey absent-minded scientist look. That’s perhaps why he never became the icon like Einstein.
But according to friends and colleagues (a smart bunch made up of past and future Nobel laureates), von Neumann was the sharpest of them all. Eugene Wigner, who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics, said of Von Neumann, “Only he was fully awake.”
I first read about von Neumann in a textbook for a math class. There were little sidebars about the giants of the field, and von Neumann was in there. A few bits of von Neumann’s life story, as told in that sidebar, have stuck with me for years:
* While von Neumann was a kid, his parents would get him to perform mental tricks at parties they hosted. A guest would randomly choose a page of the phone book. Little 6-year-old Jancsi would look at the page for a few moments. And then he could answer any question about who had what phone number and what phone number had who.
* Unlike most of his physicist and mathematician colleagues, von Neumann was a sociable animal. He liked loud music, drinking, and partying.
* Probably due to his work on building the first atom bomb, von Neumann developed cancer at age 52. The disease progressed quickly and he died a few months after he was diagnosed. And in those last few months, von Neumann’s mental powers started to lapse. Colleagues could hear him screaming in terror at the loss.
Here’s what gets me:
Even with an advanced stage of cancer, I’m sure von Neuman’s brain was still a few standard deviations ahead of the rest of us. And yet it didn’t matter.
Because it’s never really about what you’ve got. Only change matters. Positive change is nice. Negative change is terrifying. It’s feeling the ground give way under you as you’re sucked into a sinkhole.
I’m not sure what my point is today. I certainly don’t think that harping on real or possible loss is the best way to lead off a message. People have heard it too much and they’ve become wary.
But if you want to really understand the people in your market… their motivations… their hesitations… then you’ll have to look at their loss, or their fear of loss. Of health, of money, or even of perceived intelligence.
Speaking of which:
Have you thought about another day passing, without learning anything new to make you better at making sales and persuading people of your value? Pretty terrifying, isn’t it?
There’s an easy fix though. Each day I write a short new email, with a marketing or copywriting lesson, wrapped up in some kind of story. Not always as depressing as today’s. If you want to try out those emails and see if they soothe your sense of dread, click here and fill out the form.