The one piece of influential writing which molded me above all others – above all the Ben Settle emails, all the Dan Kennedy books, all the Dan Lok Facebook ads — is an old issue of the Gary Halbert newsletter, titled:
The Difference Between Winners and Losers.
I read this issue in the first few weeks after I discovered copywriting, years before I actually became a freelance copywriter.
And I’ll make a dramatic claim:
I don’t know if I would have ever started as a copywriter without this Winners/Losers issue. Without the basic idea I got from it.
One thing I know for sure is that whenever I come back to the core idea from this Winners/Losers issue, big things, transformative things, often happen.
Maybe I’ve made you curious. So here’s the gist, in Gary’s own words:
Non-alcoholics can never truly understand alcoholism. Straight people can never understand what it is to be gay. Gays can’t hope to thoroughly comprehend what it is to be straight. And…
Spectators Can Never Understand
What It Is To Be A Player!
In that newsletter, Gary gave a quick, cheap, and easy exercise that anyone could do to 1000x their chances of becoming rich. It just involved putting out a classified ad and fielding all the calls that would come in.
Just follow the simple instructions, and ultimate success is 1000x more likely.
“But most of you are not going to follow these simple instructions,” Gary said. “I know that already from past experience.”
“I won’t be like those people,” I told Gary, who was already dead. “I will do what you tell me, and I will become a success!”
Of course, as you can probably guess, I never did follow Gary’s instructions and I never did put out the classified ad. But the idea, along with a bit of shame, stuck with me.
And that’s how I achieved what I have achieved. Because on occasion, I remember Gary’s Difference Between Winners and Losers.
And rather than saying, “Yeah that’s good advice” or “Pff I’ve heard that before,” I shut up for a minute and actually follow the step-by-step instructions that some smart and successful person has laid out for me.
Because like Gary said, knowing something intellectually is not good enough. You have to do it, apply it, experience it yourself to have a chance of becoming a player.
Perhaps keep that in mind, as I switch to an almost entirely unrelated topic:
My Copy Riddles program is now open for enrollment, until this Sunday at 12 midnight PST.
“Pff I know all about that,” I hear you say. “You haven’t stopped talking about your Copy Riddles program for a century and a half.”
Well, maybe this is the moment when you finally hear me. For two reasons:
First, because Copy Riddles was actually born when I finally followed another bit of Gary’s step-by-step advice. This was advice I had known intellectually for years, but that I had never put into practice. And when I finally did put it into practice, big, transformative things happened.
And second:
Because Copy Riddles is built around the idea that you gotta experience things yourself.
Spectators can never understand what it is to be a player… and copy readers can never understand what it is to be a copywriter.
That’s why I built and organized Copy Riddles as a series of practical exercises, simple but powerful, that you do every day to implant copywriting skills into your head — and to actually get the experience of creating effective copy.
But maybe that’s all a little vague for you.
Fortunately, I have written up a quite extensive and exclusive report, with all the details of how Copy Riddles works. In case you’re interested: