“If you got an area of excellence… then rich can be arranged”

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The Color of Money is green and it’s also the title of an 1986 Martin Scorsese film about pool hustlers. The movie contains a valuable truth about business, so let me quickly spell it out.

The Color of Money has two main characters:

An old pool shark, named Fast Eddie Felson, played by Paul Newman, and…

A young pool shark, named Vincent Lauria, played by a 24-year-old Tom Cruise.

In the beginning of the movie, Fast Eddie tries to recruit Vincent and so he says:

“If you got an area of excellence… if you’re the best at something, anything… then rich can be arranged.”

Vincent knows he’s the best at pool. He likes the idea of being rich. So he agrees to team up with Eddie.

It’s only later, once the two are already on the road, driving around in Eddie’s big white Cadillac and cleaning out dirty poolhalls around the Midwest, that Eddie tells Vincent the whole truth and nothing but the truth:

“Pool excellence is not about excellent pool. It’s about becoming something.”

Becoming what exactly?

Well, a businessman. In pool, it means being a flake… tanking on occasion… hustling the other guy and sometimes even the audience.

Maybe your business is not pool. And maybe you really dislike the idea of tanking on purpose or hustling anybody.

Fine.

So just take this as a reminder that excellence in whatever you do is about working on your business as well as in it.

And also:

If your business happens to be freelance copywriting, then take this as a reminder that my copy Zone Offer is now in the oven and is baking at 475°F.

I want to make sure the final result — all about the business of copywriting, as opposed to the craft — is fully baked before I put it on the table. More info on that soon — sign up here if you want to get notified.

Marketers are from Mars, prospects are from—?

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John Gray catches a lot of flak for his 1992 best-seller, Men are from Mars, Women are from Wenus.

But I’ve personally gotten a lot of use out of this short idea from Gray’s book:

“The most frequently expressed complaint women have about men is that men don’t listen. Either a man completely ignores her when she speaks to him, or he listens for a few beats, assesses what is bothering her, and then proudly puts on his Mr. Fix-It cap and offers her a solution to make her feel better. He is confused when she doesn’t appreciate this gesture of love. No matter how many times she tells him that he’s not listening, he doesn’t get it and keeps doing the same thing. She wants empathy, but he thinks she wants solutions.”

The thing is, it’s not just men who prematurely jump to solutions. And it’s not just women who will ignore offered solutions, even when they are perfectly good.

We are all like this, much of the time.

When we are frustrated, most of us hate having suggestions tossed at us. “Don’t you think I’ve thought of that? It would never work in my case! Why don’t you just listen for a second?”

I know I’ve reacted like this, at least internally, while keeping up a stoic front. And I’ve seen plenty of other guys — some of them manly, practical-minded men – nervously shrugging off good solutions to their ongoing problems.

The question to me is why? Why do women and men both choose not solve problems for which there are good solutions?

I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about this.

My conclusion is this isn’t a trivial human quirk, or like Gray says, just a hysterical cry for a bit of empathy.

Instead, my feeling is it goes back to fundamental human needs, like those I talked about yesterday.

Specifically, the need for uniqueness… and the need for meaning.

​​It might not seem very rational from the outside, but it makes perfect sense from the inside:

People will hold on to their problems just so they can keep feeling unique. “I might not have much… but I’ve got trouble like nobody’s ever seen.”

Or they will cling to pain and failure, even when there’s an easy way out. Because if there really is an easy way out, then what was the purpose of all that suffering they’ve experienced in the past?

In other words:

You might be selling your prospect a shiny new chrome pipe. And your prospect might desperately need it — the old pipe is rusted out and the basement is filling up with water. But what you don’t realize is that installing that new pipe might undermine the very foundations of your prospect’s house.

So that’s the problem that you face.

It’s tricky.

And it’s definitely unique.

But don’t worry. I won’t irritate you with any pigheaded suggestions for how you can solve this problem. At least I won’t do it here.

I’ll save that for an upcoming paid product. Maybe I will call it Marketers Are From Mars, Prospects Are From— but where exactly? I still have to work that part out. In case you want to get notified when this mansplaining guide comes out, sign up for my email newsletter.

Hating and loving in love and copy

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A few years ago, I was walking along the street when I saw a queer sight:

An elderly couple was walking towards me, together but not together.

The woman was walking on the sidewalk.

​​Walking parallel to her, but about 10 feet away and in the actual road where the cars go, was her husband.

“That’s a strange way to walk with somebody,” I thought.

As they passed, I heard the woman speaking to the man, without facing him:

“That’s good. The further you are, the better. I don’t want to see you or hear you.”

Like I said, these people were elderly. I guess in their 60s or 70s. They’ve probably been married for a few decades, or maybe a half century.

How fitting, I thought. It really sums up the human condition.

The woman can’t stand her stupid husband. And yet they are together. If anything happened to him, she would probably be lost.

I had a suspicion about this kind of thing for a while.

It didn’t become clear in my head until I heard a Tony Robbins talk on the matter.

All human beings have a few fundamental needs, says Tony. And all our problems surface because half of our needs directly contradict the other half.

Turns out we are all rather complex bundles of different desires.

And though we say we want one thing, the exact opposite urge is also lurking somewhere, not far below the surface.

So when you write your copy, keep this in mind.

Promise people excitement and novelty… as well as certainty and control.

Offer to make them unique and outstanding… as well as beloved and part of a community.

People want magic. They will go through their whole lives wanting to believe it’s true. All you have to do is to tell them it is in fact so.

The BYAF compliance method

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“Can I move? I’m better when I move.”

There’s a sexy scene in the 1969 classic Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid:

Butch and Sundance are American outlaws who have run away to Bolivia. They’re trying to get work at a Bolivian silver mine.

The boss at the mine wants to see if either Butch or Sundance can shoot a gun. What a joke. Sundance is the fastest and deadliest gun in the West.

So the boss throws a rock 30 feet away. “Hit that,” he says.

Sundance straightens his arm… takes aim… fires and misses.
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The boss spits on the ground. He turns around and starts to walk away.

“Can I move?” Sundance asks.

“Move?” the boss says. “What the hell you mean move?”

In a split second, Sundance squats down, pulls out his gun, shoots the rock and then shoots it again while it’s midair, splitting it in two.

In other words:​​

It’s not common sense… but sometimes you get better results if you give people some space to move.

A while back, I read an academic paper about something called the BYAF compliance method.

​​BYAF = but you are free.

​​You make a request, and you tell people they are free to say no. It’s supposed to double the number of yeses you get.

It also goes against all copywriting dogma.

​​Copywriters will tell you that you should close off all doors… conclusively answer all objections… and PUSH PUSH PUSH for the sale.

So who’s right?

The BYAF crowd has 42 scientific studies on its side.

​​The “slam all the doors shut” copywriters have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars worth of sales behind them.

You might think the conclusion is clear. But I think it really depends on who you’re dealing with.

For example, Jim Camp was a negotiation expert who worked with Fortune 500 execs while they negotiated multi-billion-dollar deals.

One of the big tenets of his negotiation system was allowing people to say no.

​​It didn’t mean ending the negotiation… in fact, no was just the beginning.

Because Camp said that in the kinds of negotiations he was involved in, “slamming all the doors shut” so your prospect feels caged in and only has the option you want him to take… well, that was a recipe for an abrupt end to the negotiation, without ever being welcome back for round two.

Does this apply in copywriting?

I definitely think so.

Sure, there are markets where people need you to be a German Shepherd, barking at them so they make their way into the fold in an orderly fashion.

​​But there are other markets, equally as profitable or more so, where it’s better to allow people to move before you ask them to shoot.

And now, if you’d like to sign up for my newsletter:

Click here and fill out the form that appears. But of course, you’re are free to do whatever you choose.

Copy Stalker guidance to the A-list Room

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The camera starts at the face of a sleeping man. It then pans over his forehead, across his bald head, to the stream next to which the man is lying.

The camera keeps panning over the water. It pauses for a second on a clod of dirt that sticks out of the stream.

The camera moves on to more flowing water and in the water, it focuses on some trash:

A large metal syringe… a box with coins in it… a Russian Orthodox icon… gears from a clock, covered with moss… a long black spring… a page of a calendar… a gun… ceramic tiles, covered with floating layers of dirt and algae.

The camera completes its trip and ends up where it started, on the sleeping man’s hand, halfway in the flowing water. A black dog, which has been sitting and guarding the man, stands up. The man opens his eyes.

That’s part of a long, dialogue-free scene from the movie Stalker.

The stalker in the title of the movie is a guide.

For a bit of money, he will take you inside the Zone — a mysterious and magical place, with its own strange and even deadly rules.

But why go inside the Zone?

Well, somewhere inside the Zone there is The Room. And if you can survive the Zone and make it inside the Room, it is said you will be granted your innermost wish.

Stalker is one of my favorite movies. I’ve seen it a grand total of two times. But I’m not here to recommend you see it even once.

Statistically speaking, odds are great you would hate it.

Stalker is dark, depressing, and slow. It’s a scifi movie without costumes, without cool sets, without special effects — unless you count the black dog. There’s no action and little dialogue, and what dialogue there is is philosophical rather than sexy.

So what’s up? If I’m not recommending Stalker to you, then why talk about it? For two reasons:

Reason one is that the Zone in Stalker is why I’m calling my new offer Copy Zone.

Copy Zone will be my travel guide to the magical, mysterious, and sometimes dangerous world of freelance copywritering.

I’ve been walking in and out of the Copy Zone for a few years. I know it well and I’ve already led a few people inside.

​​If you like, then my guide will show you the rules and signposts to go inside Copy Zone safely — and even to reach the fabled A-List Room, if that’s really what your innermost heart desires.

The other reason I’m telling you about Stalker is that yesterday, I promised to talk about pop culture that your audience isn’t familiar with.

And if you’re still reading, you can take a look at what I did in this email, and how I turned a 1979 Soviet sci-fi film into marketing.

I’ll leave you with two quotes. One is from Andrei Tarkovsky, the director of Stalker. When he was told that Stalker is too slow for human consumption, Tarkovsky replied:

“The film needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts.”

The other quote is maybe more practical. It comes from comedian Andrew Schulz. Schulz has this simple rule about talking about topics that his audience can’t relate to:

“Who cares if they relate to it? Make them relate to it.”

Last thing:

If you’d like to be notified when my Copy Zone guide becomes available, sign up here for my email newsletter.

I’m sorry Ms. Jackson

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This one right here goes out to all the email copywriters… the business owners who write their own emails… maybe even those with a YouTube channel.

Here’s the story:​​

A few weeks ago, a music industry insider named Ted Gioia made a big splash by writing an article with the title:

“Is Old Music Killing New Music?”

Gioia had a bunch of stats and anecdotes to prove that old music — stuff that came out 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago — is crowding out the new music being produced today.

Gioia has his theory for why this is.

Basically, he says, record company execs just wants to get a piece of the American pie to take their bite out. So they keep giving people tried-and-true stuff. They’re not willing to take risks.

It’s short-term thinking, Gioia says. Because ironically, the execs are making themselves irrelevant in the process. But one way or another, the fact remains, in Gioia’s words:

“Never before in history have new tracks attained hit status while generating so little cultural impact.”

In my own uninformed yet subjective opinion, this is part of a bigger trend.

It’s not only music that’s getting old. I think it’s movies also, and perhaps other pop culture too.

This matters for marketers.

Because from what I’ve seen writing approximately a billion sales emails… pop culture always gets a great response.

Pop culture references turns you into a magician who can abracadabra a sales point… get people to enjoy it… and maybe even get them to buy.

So what exactly am I telling you?

Well, it’s the same thing that some 40 years ago, A-list copywriter Gene Schwartz said:

“If a movie does a hundred million dollars or more, especially a movie that does two hundred or three hundred million dollars or more, I would go to it two or three times.”

This is a good idea today just as it was in Gene’s time.

Go see blockbusters. But make sure you see the same ones that Gene was talking about, like Lethal Weapon and Home Alone and Pulp Fiction.

In other words, don’t take risks with any of this new stuff. Give people the tried-and-true. And keep doing it. Forever. Forever-ever. For-EVER-ever.

“Whoa there Bejako,” you say. ​”You’ve been handing out a lot of careless and maybe even harmful advice lately.”

Oh yeah, like what?​

“Well, like ​first you said to bet on the Bengals for the Super Bowl. We know how that turned out. Then a couple days ago you almost got me sucked into QAnon.”

That was an honest mistake.
​
“Whatever. The point is, now you’re telling me to pander to my audience with references to Fleetwood Mac and Kill Bill. But isn’t this the same short-term thinking as those record company execs? Won’t I be making myself irrelevant in the process?”

I don’t know. You might be right. I might be wrong. So all I can say is:

I’m sorry dear reader. I am for real. Never meant to send you bad advice. I apologize a trillion times.

But I’ll do more than apologize.

I’ll tell you how to avoid pandering and talk about pop culture your audience isn’t familiar with, without taking much of a risk. That’s in my email tomorrow. I hope you’ll read it. You and your mama.

Super Bowl 2022 wager update

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I was finishing up my workday today when an email landed in my inbox and made my heart freeze. The subject line read:

“The Best, Funniest, and Cringiest Crypto Ads from the Super Bowl”

“Oh God,” I gasped, “the Super Bowl… I completely forgot!”

Super Bowl 2022 is kind of a big deal in my life. Because last week, I made a wager in this very newsletter.

The bet was for readers to write in and pick this year’s Super Bowl winner.

The prize was a 50% discount on my upcoming Copy Zone offer.

The outcome was being proven wrong twice:

1. Having a stake on the outcome of the game didn’t make me watch the Super Bowl (or even remember that it’s on)

2. People on my list, and therefore me as well, overwhelmingly expected the Bengals to win

It turns out the Rams won, though it was close and tense until the end. (I watched the highlights just now.)

Anyways, if you bet on the Rams, I will send you a separate email with a 50% discount code. You can use this code, if you want to, during the Copy Zone launch later this month.

If you didn’t bet on the Rams, I would like to send you home with a consolation prize. Something in the form of a direct response idea you can profit from.

But unfortunately, since I’m writing this email late in the day… much later than I normally do… I don’t have my usual direct response idea primped and ready.

Fortunately, “the best crypto ad” from this Super Bowl, at least according to that email I got, is actually a direct response ad.

Shocking, right?

Apparently, the response to this ad was so high that the website hosting the landing page crashed.

Even so, according to some back of the envelope math, it’s unlikely the ad recouped the $13M cost of the 1-minute Super Bowl slot.

So can you learn anything from this ad? Perhaps how not to do DR advertising. In case you’re curious:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zLsUhOCqyU

How to de-cult your mom (or any other QAnonized family member)

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How careless and maybe even harmful was my email yesterday. I just didn’t realize what I was getting you into.

I’ll explain everything.

But first, let me tell you about a 72-year-old Florida woman I’ll call Susan.

Starting in 2019, Susan fell deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole that is QAnon.

Each day, she spent many hours binging on conspiracy videos and scrolling through that freedom-figthing app, Telegram.

Susan’s daughter, Karen, watched all this in horror.

Now, I’m personally not sure what the harm is in a retired, 72-year-old lady thinking that Hilary Clinton is harvesting adrenochrome from the living bodies of young children.

But Karen and Susan live together. And I guess it can get exhausting if all your mom ever wants to talk about is Satanic pedophiles.

So Karen tried everything to get her mom to snap out of her QAnon haze.

Karen tried listening patiently. She got angry. She threw facts and reason in her mom’s face.

Nothing worked.

But then Karen got lucky.

She found something that’s completely snapped her mom out of her QAanon habits…

… a safe, positive, apolitical alternative:

Wordle.

I talked about Wordle yesterday. It’s a little word game that’s been going viral over the past few months.

I even casually recommended you check it out.

I should have been more careful.

Because as the story of Susan above shows, Wordle and QAnon have lots in common. I’m not kidding.

Both QAnon and Wordle are fundamentally puzzles.

They feature clues, and with work, reveal more clues.

Both create an atmosphere of tension, of uncertainty, of consequence.

Both allow you to feel progress as you work to resolve that tension.

And finally, both offer a simple, clear solution… one that takes all the clues and snaps them together in a perfect fit.

The result at the end is an addicting emotional payoff. And the urgent desire to go for another spin.

Like Susan above:

​​”Now she spends as much as 2 to 3 hours per day,” her daughter Karen said, “playing bootleg Wordle on another site that lets you play as much as you like. I’m not even joking.”

So my point is, be careful when you play Wordle. If the New York Times ever decides to shut it down or put it behind a paywall, you might find yourself craving a fix and getting sucked into QAnon…

… or maybe even something worse.

Like getting obsessed with my Gospel of Insight Marketing book.

Because you can create the same feeling that Wordle and QAnon create with your own writing.

You can flood people with satisfaction… give them the feeling it all makes sense… and create a need for more of the same.

That’s what that my Insight book is about, or at least that’s the promise of it. And as usual, I’ll use the ideas I’m writing about to write the actual book itself.

That’s all in the future though. But if you’re into this puzzle stuff, then keep your antenna up. I’ll drop more clues in the coming days and weeks. Sign up here if you want to be in on the comms.

My guilty-pleasure morning ritual gets an ugly update

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I sat down a few moments ago for my guilty-pleasure morning ritual. The coffee was ready, I flipped open my laptop and—

“Oh what the hell is this,” I said out loud.

The game was still the same. But the background of the site had changed from dark gray to white.

I checked the URL. It was no longer some weird .co.uk domain. It was now nytimes.com.

Perhaps you’ve seen the same.

After all, millions of people around the world have all been playing this game each day, and millions more have been joining them week by week.

The game is a word-guessing game, called Wordle, created by a guy named Josh Wardle.

Wardle created Wordle some time ago as a game that just he and his girlfriend could play together. His friends and family got in on it too. Then Wardle released Wordle publicly on his website last October.

That first month, a total of 90 people played it.

Two months later, in December, the number of people playing Wordle each day had grown to 300,000.

By January, it was millions each day.

On February 1st, the New York Times bought Wordle from Wardle, for a “low 7 figures” sum. And today, here we are, with the stupid, white, failing NYT background.

Oh well. In the end, the corporations absorb everything. But let’s talk influence:

I can see many things that went into making Wordle a success. I want to point out just one. It might be relevant to you if you are interested in the creative or marketing side of reality.

Like, I said, Wordle is my guilty-pleasure morning ritual.

That’s because there’s only one Wordle puzzle each day.

Once you play — whether you win or lose — that’s it. You gotta wait until tomorrow, when the next one comes out.

This has a few key consequences:

One of course is scarcity. It makes each Wordle puzzle feel more valuable and interesting. It keeps you coming back day after day.

Two is that you can’t glut yourself.

With most games – and with things other than games too — I often keep playing to the point where I start to feel disgusted.

But there’s no risk of that with Wordle. It’s like a Spartan marriage. The two sides meet only rarely, and are full of desire for each other.

But maybe the most important thing is that each Wordle puzzle feels unique and real.

Wordle grew so quickly because players shared their results on Twitter. (Through a clever design, Wardle allowed people to share their results without giving away the puzzle.)

That worked because there is only one puzzle a day. Everybody in the world who played Wordle on a given day had that same puzzle.

In other words, it made sense to brag about your results, because other Wordle players actually shared your experience. It even created a sense of connection to other people playing Wordle.

But maybe you haven’t played Wordle yet, and you’re getting lost in what I’m talking about. Or maybe you’re wondering what this might mean for you, or how can you use this.

I’ll give you just one idea bouncing around in my head:

For a long time, I’ve been writing these daily emails, and then posting them to my website as an archive. This has helped me in the past because these blog archives were the main way people found me and my newsletter.

But that’s slowly changing. And so today I remembered an idea I had a while ago:

To scrap the archive, and simply post the latest daily email on my site. Each day, the email on the front page would be updated, and the previous email would disappear. Plus there would be a newsletter optin form for people who don’t want to miss out.

I’m not sure if this is smart. I’m not sure whether I will do it. But maybe.

Because Wardle’s Wordle success shows that in a world where everybody’s working hard to get you as addicted and engaged as possible… less can be more.

Anyways, if you have any advice for me on the technical side of how I could easily implement my latest-email-front-page idea on my WordPress site, please write in and let me know.

And if you haven’t played Wordle yet, you can find it on the white-background page at the link below. (I got today’s puzzle in two tries only — my best score yet.)

https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html

How to create belief with the flimsiest proof

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Right now, in Beijing, there is a pudgy guy named Xu Xiaodong who trains mixed martial arts.

Around 2017, Xu started talking shit about kung fu. Not smart. There was immediate blowback. Kung fu masters from all around China threatened to knock him out and break his arms.

But Xu accepted their challenge. He started fighting these masters on the regular. He won each match easily. 17 of them in a row.

It all came to a head in 2018 when Xu faced wing chun master Ding Hao. The fight was broadcast live to millions.

In the first round, Xu knocked the wing chun master down six times. The fight was stopped and declared a draw. The wing chun master complained later that the studio didn’t give him enough rice to eat, and said that Xu was lucky to get away without getting knocked out.

But I’m not here to rag on kung fu. I just wanna point out a fundamental human truth:

Proof and desire are mutually reinforcing.

All around the world — and in China in particular — there are crazy levels of belief in the mystical powers of kung fu and its variants.

It’s not just what people see in movies and on TV. Real life practitioners of kung fu experience it first hand when they train with a true kung fu master. It’s only when the master has to fight an outsider, who is not invested in the kung fu belief structure, that the weaknesses of kung fu become apparent.

My point being:
​​
If you have enough desire, even the flimsiest proof will work. That’s true of people practicing kung fu… and it’s true of people reading your copy. To make a carrot look like a hot dog, simply amp up somebody’s hunger.

By the way, I discovered the crazy story of Xu Xiaodong in a fascinating video titled The Bizarre World of Fake Martial Arts.

The video shows Xu’s pummeling of the wing chun master. But it’s worth watching from beginning to end — both because it’s entertaining, and because it offers some direct illustrations of powerful persuasion techniques. If you wanna take a look, here’s the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjbSCEhmjJA