A couple months ago, I wrote an email about a surprising passage in Morgan Housel’s Psychology of Money.
The passage talked about the Wright brothers, and how they were publicly flying airplanes for four years before newspapers took any notice.
To which I got a reply from a reader, asking about another interesting anecdote from the same book:
===
I’m curious if you could give some examples as to how you would segway the passage of the Bill Gates and Lakesides computer study program story in the chapter about “Luck and Risk” to make different points?
===
The topic of the actual Bill Gates story is irrelevant here. The point is simply this:
It might be a worthwhile exercise to sit down with an interesting story you come acrosss… write down different morals to squeeze out of that story… and sketch out how you would link that to what you sell.
But I’ve never done it, and I don’t plan on starting now.
Instead, what I do whenever I come across a story that I find surprising is just write it down, and have it sitting around for when it fits naturally into a point I want to make.
In my experience, this is the only way to write flawless transitions from your anecdotes to your sales pitches every single day.
Sometimes, surprising stories I’ve written down sit around for days, weeks, months, or years before I use them for something. And there are many surprising facts and stories and anecdotes I’ve written down and never used at all.
That’s ok.
Surprising facts and stories and anecdotes are free and plentiful. Millions of books are filled with them. Plus each day of your own life will provide a dozen new ones if you only keep your antennae up.
What’s not free or plentiful is your readers’ attention or ongoing interest.
And shoehorning a story to make a point that doesn’t really fit… or worse yet, pulling out a bland, predictable takeway from an otherwise good story, is a great way to lose readers’ interest today and to make it harder to get tomorrow.
I have more to say about the topic of keeping readers’ interest for the long term.
Specifically, I have a simple three-word question I use to guide all my emails, which you might also benefit from.
I’ve revealed this three-word question before, but perhaps you’ve missed it.
In case you would like to find out what it is, you can do that on the free training I will put on in a few days’ time.
The training will cover how I write and profit from this newsletter that you are reading now.
It will happen on Monday January 22, 2024 at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. But you will have to be signed up to my list first. Click here to do so.