Imagine you’re back in high school and you have an important exam coming up.
You know that if you don’t get at least a B, your parents will beat you, your dog will leave you, and nobody will go with you to prom.
So what do you do? Naturally, you refuse to study for your exam. Or rather, you put off studying until you only have time to cover about 30% of the material that’s likely to show up on the test.
Of course, on exam day, you’re panicking. Your mind races forward and sees how horrible life will be when you get an F: the beatings, the dog breakup, the lonely nights.
Your mind then jolts back to the past, and to all the time you could have spent studying. Anger mixed with guilt boil up inside of you.
As you’re cursing yourself, the teacher appears and hands out the exams. You look at the first question with disgust and find…
You know the answer.
Then the second question. It’s also something you studied.
And so on with the third and the fourth questions. Before you know it, you’ve finished the exam. The nightmare is over, and somehow you survived.
When the grades come out, it turns out you got an A. The parents put the bat away. Your dog doesn’t leave. And you find somebody nice to go to prom with.
So what’s the lesson?
Well personally, I think the lesson is you still should have studied, and you should study in the future. For one thing, you might not be so lucky next time. For another, all the stress and worry outweighed the joy of procrastination.
And here’s why I’m inventing this little allegory.
Since I’ve been working as a copywriter, I’ve gradually developed certain criteria for the kinds of clients I take on.
For example, I don’t accept rush jobs. I don’t enjoy the stress they bring. Plus, rush jobs tend to signal bad things about the client.
I also don’t work with clients who aren’t likely to get value out of my copy, regardless of how good I make it. That could be because they have a bad offer, or because they don’t have any traffic, or because they don’t know what they’re doing and they won’t even use my copy.
Well, recently I took on a client who failed to meet both of those common-sense criteria. The fault was mine — I accepted the job before I got the full information about the client and their situation. And because the promised pay was good, I refused to call off the project once I figured out what was going on.
Inevitably, the project caused me a lot of stress. All along the way, I was cursing myself for ever having accepted it. What’s more, the big money I was promised also became uncertain.
Long story short, the project finished. I managed to do a good job with the copy in spite of the rush. I delivered my work, the client paid me as agreed, it appears they are satisfied with the result, and they might even get their money’s worth, in spite of fundamental problems with their marketing efforts.
So what’s the lesson?
Well, just like in the allegory above, it would have been better to do the right thing and stick to my principles. It seems I got lucky this time, and the project worked out well. I might not be so lucky next time. And in retrospect, I don’t think the stress was worth it anyhow.