Be warned:
Today’s email is long and intimate. I saw no other way to make the point I wanted to make.
But if you stick with me, I hope to make it worth your while with a deep truth about persuasion and belief.
So if you’re still here, let me tell you a personal story, which I’ve only told a few people:
One evening when I was 15 years old, I was sitting at the dinner table. And then things started to go wrong.
My mom was sitting across from me at the same table. She was speaking — I could see that and I could hear the sounds. But I could no longer understand a word she was saying.
She must have realized something was wrong with me. She stood up.
But before she could walk over to my side of the table, a buzzing built up in my ears, and then the world went black. I keeled over and fell to the floor.
Turns out, I’d had a grand mal seizure. Basically, an electrical storm built up in my brain, and all my neurons started firing at once.
My mom called 911 and I wound up at the hospital. Over the next few days, I stayed in the hospital and had a few more seizures. Eventually, they put me on some meds and sent me home.
“We’ll keep an eye on it,” the neurologist said a few days later. “But it’s nothing to worry about. These kinds of seizures are frequent in adolescents, and they usually go away on their own.”
And that’s how it was for me. I was on that anti-seizure medication for a couple years. Eventually I got off it.
And it was all fine, just like the neurologist said. During my medicated time and ever since, I never had any more seizure episodes. I was sure of that (a bit of foreshadowing there).
Fast-forward to age 20. I was attending college in beautiful Santa Cruz, California.
The campus is on top of a hill in the middle of a redwood forest. So while walking between class and dorm, you go among these monumental, swaying, 300-foot-tall coastal redwoods.
And because there are natural gullies and canyons in the Santa Cruz hills, you also get to walk across wooden Ewok bridges that make you feel like you’re flying 80 feet up in the air.
It was summertime and the campus was empty. I was walking on the path through the redwoods and there was no one else around.
I reached one of the Ewok bridges. And as soon as I stepped onto the first plank, it washed over me:
A 100% real, eyes-wide-open, religious epiphany.
I am not joking or making this up. It was hard to describe it then, and it’s even harder now, years later. But the essence of it was an absolute certainty — coupled with a vision — of the oneness and total rightness of everything in the universe.
Like I said, the epiphany came on suddenly. It faded gradually, over the course of what I guess was about a minute. The whole time, I didn’t stop walking, though I probably slowed down a bit in wonder of it all.
So what happened to me that day? Who the hell knows.
Had I been brought up in a religious environment, I might have interpreted it as a revelation from God.
But I wasn’t brought up like that. So I filed this epiphany away as a mysterious one-time experience.
I still think of it often but I almost never talk about it. In fact, until today, I only told two people about it.
And this brings us to last night.
Last night, I was reading a book about the human brain and all the unusual things that can happen to it. Such as, for example, focal seizures — seizures that don’t engulf the whole brain.
Some of these seizures happen in the temporal lobe, the part of the brain that’s in charge of emotion.
These temporal lobe seizures don’t cause fits or fainting. But they can cause “deeply moving spiritual experiences, including a feeling of divine presence and the sense of direct communion with God.”
“Hmm,” I said to myself, as a buzzing started to build in my ears. The book went on:
“The seizures — and visitations — last usually only for a few seconds each time. But these brief temporal lobe storms can sometimes permanently alter the patient’s personality so that even between seizures he is different from other people. This process, called kindling, might permanently alter — and sometimes enrich — the patient’s inner emotional life.”
“Well that sounds nice,” I said, “but it definitely doesn’t apply to me.” Still I kept reading:
“Patients see cosmic significance in trivial events. It is claimed that they tend to be humorless, full of self-importance, and to maintain elaborate diaries that record quotidian events in elaborate detail — a trait called hypergraphia.”
At this point, I almost fell out of my chair. Instead, I just laughed in my usual humorless way. “Haha! And all this time, I thought I was just writing long-winded daily emails about persuasion!”
But I shouldn’t try to joke, because I was dead serious about this. This book was describing me. It listed other common traits of this “temporal lobe personality”:
“Argumentative, pedantic, egocentric, and obsessively preoccupied with philosophical and theological issues.”
Confession time — I don’t know how well I manage to hide it in these daily emails… but these traits all fit me to a tittle. As just one example:
The reason I was reading this brain book in the first place is because it’s part of my big and so-far secret research project. That project has been mushrooming on my computer desktop for years — in a folder labeled, “RELIGION.”
But I feel I’ve forced you to read my elaborate diary for long enough. So let me bring this around to persuasion and make it useful for you.
I don’t know for sure whether I really had a seizure that day in Santa Cruz. I certainly don’t know whether I have “temporal lobe personality” or really, whether such a thing even exists (neurologists are not in agreement).
But last night, as I read the book that seemed to describe me to exactly, I felt both enlightened and depressed.
Enlightened… because these few paragraphs made a jumble of moments, behaviors, and tendencies in my life snap together into a single, easy-to-understand, unitary diagnosis.
But it also made me depressed… because who wants to be diagnosed as a self-absorbed, argumentative blowhard?
In other words, had somebody offered me a magic pill… and promised to rid me of my “temporal lobe personality” and the “rich inner emotional life” it’s supposed to bring… well, I would have paid good money for that pill.
(The fact is, such a magic pill does exist. It’s cheap and it’s usually sold in liquid form. It’s called alcohol.)
Anyways, that’s the truth about marketing I promised you at the start. If it’s not clear, let me evangelize:
You might not be able to trigger a seizure in your prospect’s brain. But you can get your prospect on the path to an epiphany.
And all it really takes is a disease name (“temporal lobe personality”)… a bagful of symptoms (hypergraphia, humorlessness, interest in religion)… and, optionally, an etiology (seizures in the limbic system).
Perhaps you get what I’m saying. But perhaps you want more explanation of how to use this to make sales.
In that case, you might like to know I’m working on a book about it. Predictably, the title of it is The Gospel of Insight Marketing.
But that’s all in the future. My plan is to get that book out in March.
For now, the only offer I have for you is the much less religious, potentially much more useful Niche Expert Cold Email training.
I’m been harping on about this for a few days. But in case you managed to ignore me until now, here’s where you can enlightened on the details of this free offer: