“I’m supposed to invite you to hang out with us on Friday.”
It was 10th grade, and I had just started a new high school. There was a group of proto-hipsters there who thought I showed some promise. So one of them was sent as an emissary to invite me to a concert with them.
I went.
The concert was terrible, in one of those rat-infested Baltimore slum-houses.
But afterwards, we went back to the safe suburbs.
Now, the key to this story is that there was a girl in the group who was like a breastier version of Audrey Hepburn.
Quiet, pretty, and apparently interested in me.
“Would you like to go on the porch and get some air?” she asked me when we got back to the suburbs.
I mumbled something and followed her out.
So there we were, in the early October night, staring at the moon, occasionally looking over at each other, and saying…
Nothing.
I don’t know how long this went on but I guess between two minutes and two hours.
Eventually she got restless.
And then resigned.
“I’m gonna go back inside,” breasty Audrey said.
And that was it.
She went on to date a sequence of local bad boy rock stars and then she became a painter or a potter or maybe a basket weaver.
That night was the closest I got to her. And even though she was making herself as approachable as could be, I was simply too dimwitted to know what to do.
I bring this story up for two reasons.
First, because I like to rub salt into my wounds and remind myself of the many times I’ve managed to miss a wide-open goal.
The second reason is more practical and perhaps more relevant to you.
Because a similar scenario to the above plays out every day on platforms such as Upwork.
Most Upwork clients are on there because they don’t have any other place to find copywriters.
They’ve never worked with a copywriter before.
They don’t know what they should expect of you.
They don’t know what they should do themselves.
It’s much like dating early on in high school. Both sides are nervous. Neither side really knows what to do except what they’ve overheard from their not-much-more experienced older brothers and sisters.
So what should YOU do?
Well, you have to take charge of that awkward date.
I’ll talk about specific ways to do this in a little bonus report I’m preparing for the relaunch of my Upwork book. In case you want to get notified when this book is out, you can sign up here: