Insight Marketing

Tell, don’t show

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Among copywriters, the most famous movie of all time is Lethal Weapon. That’s because Gene Schwartz, the author of Breakthrough Advertising, which is something like a bible in the field, once said that every copywriter should watch Lethal Weapon at least two or three times, preferably back to back.

Gene was recommending Lethal Weapon because of its BANG-talk-BOOM-talk-JOKE-BANG-BOOM-talk structure.

But Lethal Weapon is an influence gift that keeps on giving. For example:

In one early scene, we see Martin Riggs, a cop played by Mel Gibson, in the middle of a Christmas tree lot. Riggs is being used as a human shield by a cornered drug dealer, who is pointing a gun at Riggs’s head.

Riggs starts yelling to the gathering cops, who all have their guns out. “Shoot him! Shoot the bastard!”

The drug dealer is getting flustered. He begs Riggs to shut up.

​​Riggs keeps yelling. And in a flash, he turns around, grabs the gun from the drug dealer, headbutts him, and ends the standoff.

​​Next scene:

W​e see the same Martin Riggs, in his ramshackle trailer by the beach, late at night. He’s drinking and looking at a framed wedding photo of himself and his wife.

Riggs takes his gun and puts it inside his mouth. He tries to pull the trigger, but he can’t. He starts crying. “Oh, I miss you,” Riggs says to the picture.

Are you getting an idea of what kind of character Martin Riggs might be?

I hope so.

But in case not, there’s one more scene I want to tell you about. In fact, it’s the very next scene in the movie:

The police office psychologist is walking with the police captain through the police station. “May I remind you,” she says to the captain, “that his wife of 11 years was recently killed in a car accident? He’s on the edge, sir. I’m telling you he may be psychotic. You’re making a mistake by keeping him in the field. The man is suicidal.”

So now let me point out the obvious:

Probably the most famous bit of writing advice is to show and not tell.

And it’s good advice.

It’s almost as good as the advice to both show and tell, which is what’s happening in those Lethal Weapon scenes.

Because with buddy cop comedies, sales copy, and with influential writing as well, we are really not looking for people to draw their own conclusions.

Sure, it’s great if they conclude what we want them to, on their own. And that’s why we show them stuff.

But you don’t want to leave it there. You don’t want to give people any wiggle room. So that’s why you tell them your point as well as show it.

What? You say you knew that already? Or you say it’s so obvious that it doesn’t need to be pointed out?

Fine. So let me tell you something else, which might be genuinely new:

You can tell people stuff. Including stuff that’s not supported by the emotional visualization you just showed them.

Because an emotion is like syrup. It can be poured over anything… and once it’s poured onto the pancakes, it’s likely to spread all over the plate, to the sausages also.

That’s a super valuable idea, if you only grasp it.

​​In fact, all my emails are chock full of such super valuable ideas. If you want me to show you as well as tell you that, sign up for my newsletter here.

The first frame is the worst frame

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I have a fish I’d like to sell you today. It’s not a freshly caught fish.

​​It’s actually been sitting around for 18 months. But trust me, this particular fish has hardly spoiled with time.

​​Today it’s just as tasty and nutritious, well almost, as it was 18 months ago, the day that it was caught.

So are you interested? How much would you pay for this fish?

A lot?

A little?

A negative amount? Would you actually pay me to keep this fish away from you?

One day last week, I got a newsletter email from a marketer. The email started off with something like, “I don’t have a lot of time today. So I’m resending a really good email that I wrote a long time ago.”

​​And then below that, there was the 18-month-old email, looking at me with its dead, clouded, fishy eyes.

Actually, I just assume that that’s how the old email was looking at me. I didn’t even check. As soon as I saw that intro about not having time and about resending an old email, I clicked away.

The point of my message today — the freshly caught fish I am actually trying to sell you — is not to say you should never reuse old emails.

My point is simply to be mindful of how you frame your message. Because often, the first frame that our minds jump to is the worst frame.

I’ve seen beginner freelance copywriters try to sell themselves. They do so by framing their message with an explanation of how they are new in the industry and how they have no experience.

I’ve seen business owners try to sell their products. They start off their sales letters by telling the unremarkable life story that brought them to the moment of sitting down to write that sales letter.

In all these cases — the re-warmed 18-month-old email, the self-defeating self-promotion, the boring and pointless sales letter — the problem is the natural human desire, or perhaps need, to explain ourselves.

Don’t explain yourself. Nobody cares. And it’s hurting your message.

Instead, think of how to frame your message so it has the best chance of influencing your reader.

Trumpet your own authority. Or soothe your reader’s ego. Or if you’re truly selling a fish that was caught 18 months ago, then say this thing is delicious and nutritious — and stop yourself there.

But enough fish-mongering. If you’d like to read my emails regularly, and see how I never apologize for the content I send, then sign up for my newsletter here.

The two kinds of people

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In a recent opinion piece for the Washington Post, journalist David Goodhart explains his idea that the world is divided between “somewhere” people and “anywhere” people.

​​Anywhere people, Goodhart writes,

“tend to be educated and mobile; they value openness, autonomy and individual self-realization. They tend to have careers rather than jobs and “achieved identities” based on academic and professional success.”

By contrast, somewhere people are

“more rooted and less well-educated; they tend to value security, familiarity and group attachments (national or local). Their sense of themselves is more likely to come from the place they come from and the local ways of life they are attached to, which means that they are more likely to be discomforted by rapid social change.”

So I want you to ask yourself. How do you feel right now?

Did you mentally put yourself into one of those categories in the past moment?

​​Did you think of other people who fit one of these two categories?

​​Did you maybe have a moment of insight, as if to say, “Wow, i never thought of it that way… but this could explain a lot.”

I’ve written before about the power of creating a syndrome or a disease as a way to get people to feel a moment of insight.

The classic example — the one marketer Rich Schefren likes to use — is ADHD.

​​Maybe you’ve gone through life, distracted and flaky, starting but never finishing projects, jumping from one thing to the next. You’re dissatisfied, but you can’t put your finger on what the problem really is.

And then somebody comes and tells you there’s a syndrome — a collection of symptoms — that has a medical name. Maybe this person also points out you have a few others symptoms, once you didn’t even notice, but which can be explained by this new diagnosis.

Suddenly, you feel enlightened. You have a new handle on the problems in your life. Hope swells up inside of you. Maybe all these different bad issues can be solved, you think, and at once!

So that’s one way to create insight. A new syndrome.

An extension, which can be equally as powerful, is to create a partition. To categorize, not just one group of people, but everybody, as either A or B.

That’s what’s going on with the somewhere people or anywhere people above. In more marketingy circles, there’s Rich Schefren’s partition of the world into business owners and opportunity seekers… or Andre Chaperon’s distinction between marketers who are chefs, and those who are merely cooks.

Maybe you haven’t heard me talk about insight before, so you’re wondering what the good of all this is. I’ll explain that in full detail in an upcoming book, all about the use of insight in marketing.

​​But if you want the situation in a nut — insight is a powerful feeling, just like desire. And just like desire, it can stimulate action.

Of course, just because something feels insightful, that doesn’t make it true.

I recently wrote about how I don’t believe in that biggest and most popular partition of the world — between introverts and extroverts. I feel the same about this somewhere/anywhere partition, even more so.

My point being, partitions, syndromes, and insight are powerful techniques of influence. We are all susceptible to them.

Well, almost all of us.

One large part of the population is what I call “insight-unaware” people. These people can be manipulated at will by techniques of insight. But a small part of the population is what I call “insight-aware.” And those people…

… those people often enjoy other essays I write. If that’s you, then sign up to my email newsletter.

How to be seen as a more credible source of solutions and advice

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Today, YouTube served me with up a recent interview that PBS did with Garry Kasparov.

Kasparov was World Chess Champion for 20 years and then an opposition leader in Russia.

“Unfortunately,” the interviewer said in his opening move to Kasparov, “you turned out to be right. Back in 2015, you wrote a book called ‘Winter is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped.'”

The interviewer took a breath after reading out that title. He went on:

“Now that we see what he’s doing, what should our response be?”

Given Kasparov’s book, this might seem like a reasonable question to ask.

And that’s just the point I want to make to you today. There’s something important hiding inside that question.

In the words of Mark Ford and John Forde from Great Leads… the fact that you understand what’s wrong can help make you seem like a more credible source for solutions, too.

The fact is, just because Kasparov wrote a book critical of Putin gives him no special insight on how to stop the raging war in Ukraine. The two are about as related as knowing that “heavy turbulence makes for unpleasant flights” and knowing how to land a jumbo jet.

And yet, it doesn’t matter. The human instinct to jump from one to the other. Because when we’ve got trouble, it’s natural to look outside ourselves for the solution. And at those times, we are willing to accept a lot of things as qualifications and authority.

The takeaway for you is clear:

Don’t build a better mousetrap.

Instead, write a book. Educate your prospect about the dangerous breeding habits and expansionary intent of the eastern harvest mouse. “The eastern harvest mouse is coming,” your book should say. “And it must be stopped.”

Ok, let’s get to the business end of this post:

If you want more advice on building credibility with your audience, you might get value from my email newsletter. That’s where I regularly write about reasons that credibility fails. You can sign up for it here.

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.

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.

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.

Let’s see if I can make you watch the SuperBowl

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A few days ago, I was listening to an old episode of the James Altucher podcast, and I learned this curious fact:

A person who bets any amount of money on a game is 11x more likely to watch the game.

I’m not sure if this means that you can get people to watch a game, just by getting them to bet. But I’m willing to find out.

Because there’s an old marketing idea that I’ve long thought is super clever.

As far as I know, nobody today in the DM world is using it, at least not online. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you can correct me.

Here’s the idea. It comes from direct marketing legend Joe Sugarman, the guy who made BluBlocker sunglasses into a $300M brand.

Joe once wrote an ad promoting a computer. He ran it around the time of the SuperBowl.

The ad basically said, if the Bears win the SuperBowl, you get this computer at 50% off. If they lose, the price stays as it is. And here’s the outcome, in Joe’s own words:

“There was a lineup of people — we had a retail store — there was a literally a lineup of people all the way around the block waiting to pick up their computer that they were getting for 50% off. The funny part about it was that we were making a nice profit on that as well.”

Like I said, I’m willing to test this idea out.

So I just checked. The Superbowl is in 8 days.

And I happen to be working on a new offer. It’s called Copy Zone. It’s about succeeding in the business part of copywriting — getting started, finding clients, managing clients, performance deals, upleveling.

I am planning to get Copy Zone out by the end of this month. And I’m planning to sell it for $150 to start. But I’ll make you a wager:

If you pick the winner of this Superbowl right — Bengals or Rams — you get my Copy Zone offer for 50% off, or for $75, during the launch window.

Of course, you gotta buy a ticket if you want a piece of this action.

Fortunately, the ticket to play this game is free. But it is time-limited.

So if you want to play this game of chance, you’ll need to get on my email list first. Then just hit reply to my welcome email and pick this year’s SuperBowl Winner.

Bengals. Or Rams.

You have time to enter until I send out my email tomorrow, Monday, Feb 7 2022, at 8:24 CET.

​​Call — or rather, email — now. Our bookies are standing by.

The power of sitting and not taking action

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Yesterday, I found myself reading a promising article titled:

“Buy Things, Not Experiences”

“Wow!” I said, as a gust of wind shook my window. “That’s the opposite of that tired phrase everybody’s always preaching, ‘Buy experiences, not things.'”

A little smile spread across my face. I couldn’t wait to see how the writer would pay off this shocking, denialist headline.

But woof, what a disappointment.

The article sounded like a speech prepared in 15 minutes by a high school debater. Three unrelated, undeveloped, unconvincing arguments. I won’t retell them here, but I’ll tell you the upshot:

The controversial headline got my attention. But the actual content didn’t make me want to read more by the same writer.

In fact, it put me on guard. In case I ever see another link to this guy’s content, I will think twice — Oh, that’s the high school debater, it’s probably not worth wasting my time.

That’s a fate I would like to avoid for the things that I write. Perhaps you want the same for yourself, too.

In that case, I can tell you a little secret which goes against much conventional wisdom in the marketing space:

There’s a lot of value in just sitting on things. Well, at least that’s what I’ve personally found.

For example, this newsletter. I don’t “execute” these emails fast. I don’t write at breakneck speed or jump on good ideas as they come to me.

Instead, I often get an idea for a subject line, topic, angle… and then it sits there, for days, weeks, sometimes months. I have things I wrote down two years ago which have still not matured.

But on occasion, something will click. A second good idea, or illustration, or whatever, will come my way. And I’ll remember — boy, this would go great with that other thing I thought of months ago.

Of course, it doesn’t always click. But in general, by sitting on ideas, like a mother goose on her eggs, I’ve written some of my most effective, interesting, and influential emails.

And maybe, you will find the same with your own writing. By sitting, and not taking action fast. In spite of that tired phrase everybody’s always preaching, “Money loves speed!”

But really, all this has just been a buildup to the thing I really wanted to show you.

Because a few weeks ago, I found a funny clip on YouTube. ​​It was part of a sketch show that ran on the BBC between 2006 and 2010.

​​All the clips I found from this show were clever and well-written, and they often had direct application to persuasion and influence.

Such as the clip I’m about to share with you.

It’s a satire of Richard Dawkins, looking for a new topic after his blockbuster book, The God Delusion.

Maybe you will enjoy the sketch. And maybe, it will give you some good ideas for controversial content that delivers… rather than disappoints. You can find it below.

But before you click to watch it, sign up for my email newsletter. Or don’t, and sit on it for a while. Here’s the video:

Deeply and irrevocably intimate

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Be warned:

Today’s email is long and intimate. I saw no other way to make the point I wanted to make.

But if you stick with me, I hope to make it worth your while with a deep truth about persuasion and belief.

So if you’re still here, let me tell you a personal story, which I’ve only told a few people:

One evening when I was 15 years old, I was sitting at the dinner table. And then things started to go wrong.

My mom was sitting across from me at the same table. She was speaking — I could see that and I could hear the sounds. But I could no longer understand a word she was saying.

She must have realized something was wrong with me. She stood up.

But before she could walk over to my side of the table, a buzzing built up in my ears, and then the world went black. I keeled over and fell to the floor.

Turns out, I’d had a grand mal seizure. Basically, an electrical storm built up in my brain, and all my neurons started firing at once.

My mom called 911 and I wound up at the hospital. Over the next few days, I stayed in the hospital and had a few more seizures. Eventually, they put me on some meds and sent me home.

“We’ll keep an eye on it,” the neurologist said a few days later. “But it’s nothing to worry about. These kinds of seizures are frequent in adolescents, and they usually go away on their own.”

And that’s how it was for me. I was on that anti-seizure medication for a couple years. Eventually I got off it.

And it was all fine, just like the neurologist said. During my medicated time and ever since, I never had any more seizure episodes. I was sure of that (a bit of foreshadowing there).

Fast-forward to age 20. I was attending college in beautiful Santa Cruz, California.

The campus is on top of a hill in the middle of a redwood forest. So while walking between class and dorm, you go among these monumental, swaying, 300-foot-tall coastal redwoods.

And because there are natural gullies and canyons in the Santa Cruz hills, you also get to walk across wooden Ewok bridges that make you feel like you’re flying 80 feet up in the air.

It was summertime and the campus was empty. I was walking on the path through the redwoods and there was no one else around.

I reached one of the Ewok bridges. And as soon as I stepped onto the first plank, it washed over me:

A 100% real, eyes-wide-open, religious epiphany.

I am not joking or making this up. It was hard to describe it then, and it’s even harder now, years later. But the essence of it was an absolute certainty — coupled with a vision — of the oneness and total rightness of everything in the universe.

Like I said, the epiphany came on suddenly. It faded gradually, over the course of what I guess was about a minute. The whole time, I didn’t stop walking, though I probably slowed down a bit in wonder of it all.

So what happened to me that day? Who the hell knows.

Had I been brought up in a religious environment, I might have interpreted it as a revelation from God.

But I wasn’t brought up like that. So I filed this epiphany away as a mysterious one-time experience.

I still think of it often but I almost never talk about it. In fact, until today, I only told two people about it.

And this brings us to last night.

Last night, I was reading a book about the human brain and all the unusual things that can happen to it. Such as, for example, focal seizures — seizures that don’t engulf the whole brain.

Some of these seizures happen in the temporal lobe, the part of the brain that’s in charge of emotion.

These temporal lobe seizures don’t cause fits or fainting. But they can cause “deeply moving spiritual experiences, including a feeling of divine presence and the sense of direct communion with God.”

“Hmm,” I said to myself, as a buzzing started to build in my ears. The book went on:

“The seizures — and visitations — last usually only for a few seconds each time. But these brief temporal lobe storms can sometimes permanently alter the patient’s personality so that even between seizures he is different from other people. This process, called kindling, might permanently alter — and sometimes enrich — the patient’s inner emotional life.”

“Well that sounds nice,” I said, “but it definitely doesn’t apply to me.” Still I kept reading:

“Patients see cosmic significance in trivial events. It is claimed that they tend to be humorless, full of self-importance, and to maintain elaborate diaries that record quotidian events in elaborate detail — a trait called hypergraphia.”

At this point, I almost fell out of my chair. Instead, I just laughed in my usual humorless way. “Haha! And all this time, I thought I was just writing long-winded daily emails about persuasion!”

But I shouldn’t try to joke, because I was dead serious about this. This book was describing me. It listed other common traits of this “temporal lobe personality”:

“Argumentative, pedantic, egocentric, and obsessively preoccupied with philosophical and theological issues.”

Confession time — I don’t know how well I manage to hide it in these daily emails… but these traits all fit me to a tittle. As just one example:

The reason I was reading this brain book in the first place is because it’s part of my big and so-far secret research project. That project has been mushrooming on my computer desktop for years — in a folder labeled, “RELIGION.”

But I feel I’ve forced you to read my elaborate diary for long enough. So let me bring this around to persuasion and make it useful for you.

I don’t know for sure whether I really had a seizure that day in Santa Cruz. I certainly don’t know whether I have “temporal lobe personality” or really, whether such a thing even exists (neurologists are not in agreement).

But last night, as I read the book that seemed to describe me to exactly, I felt both enlightened and depressed.

Enlightened… because these few paragraphs made a jumble of moments, behaviors, and tendencies in my life snap together into a single, easy-to-understand, unitary diagnosis.

But it also made me depressed… because who wants to be diagnosed as a self-absorbed, argumentative blowhard?

In other words, had somebody offered me a magic pill… and promised to rid me of my “temporal lobe personality” and the “rich inner emotional life” it’s supposed to bring… well, I would have paid good money for that pill.

(The fact is, such a magic pill does exist. It’s cheap and it’s usually sold in liquid form. It’s called alcohol.)

Anyways, that’s the truth about marketing I promised you at the start. If it’s not clear, let me evangelize:

You might not be able to trigger a seizure in your prospect’s brain. But you can get your prospect on the path to an epiphany.

And all it really takes is a disease name (“temporal lobe personality”)… a bagful of symptoms (hypergraphia, humorlessness, interest in religion)… and, optionally, an etiology (seizures in the limbic system).

Perhaps you get what I’m saying. But perhaps you want more explanation of how to use this to make sales.

In that case, you might like to know I’m working on a book about it. Predictably, the title of it is The Gospel of Insight Marketing.

But that’s all in the future. My plan is to get that book out in March.

For now, the only offer I have for you is the much less religious, potentially much more useful Niche Expert Cold Email training.

I’m been harping on about this for a few days. But in case you managed to ignore me until now, here’s where you can enlightened on the details of this free offer:

https://bejakovic.com/free-offer-niche-expert-cold-emails/