I have this unfortunate flaw in that I wake up every day, thanks to some internal alarm clock, which always rings earlier than I want.
Today it was 6am. I sat around in the dark for a while and then, at around 7, I went out for my morning walk.
At 7am on a Saturday in Barcelona, two worlds overlap.
I walked down the street, turned a corner, and saw a flash of naked ass. A girl was pulling up her leather pants, on the curb next to a small tree and some recycling containers. I guess she had just peed. Her friend stood guard but was facing in the wrong direction, away from where I and a few other people were coming and witnessing the shame. Pants up, the two oblivious girls staggered off drunkenly towards home.
That world, of people who hadn’t yet gone to bed by 7am, is one world.
I kept walking and the beach opened up before me. And the second world, the world of early-rising people, was already busy at work there.
A woman was holding her dog on a leash and yelling at her other dog to stop fooling around because it was time to go home. Two boys were kicking around a ball in the sand. And in the water, thanks to the large and rolling waves — not a common sight in Barcelona — there were some surfers.
Maybe you’re wondering whether there will be any hard “point” to today’s email. The point is this:
Down by the concrete pier that juts out into the Mediterranean, there was a clump of maybe a half dozen surfers. They were all bunched up. The waves were steady there and every 30 or so seconds, one of the surfers would catch a wave.
Meanwhile, further away from the pier, there was another surfer by himself. Every few minutes a small wave crested where he was waiting. The surfer would make an effort at catching it, but it was too small. As far as I saw, he never caught a wave, but he made a show at it.
And then further still, in the middle of the beach, there was yet another solitary surfer. He was bobbing up and down as the sea swelled underneath him. But he didn’t even have a wave to pretend to catch.
I think my point is clear, but if not:
It’s good to be different and distinct. It helps people make up their minds quickly about you. But if you rely on natural forces for motion — waves, money, desire — then you want to put yourself in a place where those things are moving.
It might seem clever and easy to go where nobody else has thought to go. Maybe you will get lucky. More likely, you will just bob around stubbornly in the cold water, while others, just a few feet away from you, have all the fun.
That’s most of my motivational message for you for today. And then there’s still the following promotional material:
My offer for you today is my Copy Riddles program. As I have said before, this program is really about going where the waves are:
– It’s about a proven way to write winning copy that’s been endorsed by A-list copywriters like Gary Halbert, Parris Lampropoulos, and Gary Bencivenga
– It features a bunch of examples from sales letters written to perennial markets, including finance, health, and personal development
– It gets you working alongside some of the top copywriters of all time who, whether by instinct or by design, knew how to tap into human desire where it was flowing
If any of that moves you: