A few months ago, I was reading a New Yorker article about foreign nationals — Americans, Frenchmen, Kiwis — who volunteered to fight in Ukraine.
I found the article fascinating. I mean, ask yourself:
What makes someone willing to go halfway around the world, into a war zone, to live in a basement and crawl through mud and huddle in icy trenches, as constant explosions blow out his eardrums and traumatize his nervous system?
What makes a person willing to expose himself to getting shot at and wounded and possibly killed? And what makes him willing to shoot and wound and possibly kill others, who have never done any harm to him or his kind?
Most incredibly, what makes a person do all this voluntarily, without any promise of reward or even any real chance at glory, and without the usual government coaxing or propaganda or impressment?
“Maybe,” you say, “these foreign fighters are fighting for freedom, for justice, for the right thing. Maybe they feel they are doing their duty, as soldiers and as human beings.”
No doubt.
But taking a page from Frank Bettger’s book, let me ask you one further:
In addition to doing the right thing, what other reason might these foreign fighters have to willingly put themselves in what most people would consider a living hell?
Take a moment to think about that. And when you’re done, read about it from the horse’s mouth, or rather, from the Turtle’s mouth. Here’s a bit from the New Yorker article, about a New Zealander fighting in Ukraine, code name Turtle:
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In New Zealand, he’d been “planning out the rest of my life with a girl.” Before coming to Ukraine, he’d ended the relationship, quit his job, and sold his house and car. “In hindsight, it was very selfish,” he acknowledged. Although he may have suggested to his friends and relatives that Russian atrocities — in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha and elsewhere — had instilled in him a sense of obligation, such moral posturing had been disingenuous. “It was just an excuse to be in this environment again,” Turtle said.
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Turtle had spent a large and formative part of his life fighting in war zones — he was first sent to Afghanistan in 2002, when he was 17.
Today, a generation later, he’s left his house, his car, his job, and Mrs. Turtle back in the Shire, and he’s decided to trade all that in for an environment he is more familiar with — an army unit in Mordor.
“In the end, it’s just that I love this shit,” Turtle said. “And maybe I can’t escape that — maybe that’s the way it’s always gonna be.”
All that’s to say:
Never underestimate how powerful the pull of the familiar, the known, the status quo is on people, even if that status quo is hell on earth.
And that’s it. That’s my possibly sobering psychological insight for you for today. Think about how it might apply to you and the people you deal with regularly, and maybe you can get some value out of it.
As for me, the time has come for my once-in-a-blood-moon pitch for my coaching program on email marketing and copywriting.
It might seem tacky to put a sales pitch at the end of an email about extreme self-sacrifice, or extreme self-immolation. I do it because extreme cases uncover the everyday cases. In any case, here’s my pitch.
I’ve only let in two kinds of people into my coaching program so far:
1. Business owners who want to use email to build a stronger, longer-lasting relationship with their prospects and customers, in order to sell more and to sell more easily
2. Copywriters who have a profit-share agreement with a client to manage an email list, allowing a large degree of control and an upside when things go well
There are multiple reasons why I restrict my coaching program to only those two groups of people. If you’re curious, I’ll tell you one reason, which is that my coaching program is expensive. I only want the kinds of people to join who can quickly get much more out of this coaching than what they pay me.
So if you fit one of the two categories above, and if you’re interested in my coaching program, then hit reply, tell me about yourself, and we can talk in more detail.
And in case you’re wondering whether a coaching program is something you possibly need:
I can tell you that personally, in most areas of life where I’ve had success, I didn’t have and didn’t need any kind of coach. Instead, I either figured it out myself, or I followed a book or a course to the letter, and got results that way.
On the other hand, there have been a few areas where I hired a coach, and even paid that coach lots and lots of money.
As I’ve written before, some of the value I got from coaching was genuine technical feedback. Some of the value was added confidence, via getting an experienced second pair of eyes to look over what I was doing.
But the majority of the value I got from expensive coaching — I would say 75% — came from having to justify the price to myself. From finally being forced to abandon the status quo, and to do things I should have been doing already, but found excuses not to do.
Maybe you say that’s stupid or illogical. All I can say is that this get-out-of-the-status-quo motivation made coaching absolutely worth it to me, and made it pay for itself many times over.
So do you need coaching?
Only you can decide if you’re stuck in the status quo, and if you find that unacceptable. If you decide the answer is yes, then like I said, write me an email, and we can talk in more detail to see whether my coaching program and you could be a good fit.