Motivation

An Internet stranger offers to pick my brain

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A couple days ago, an Internet stranger wrote me to say he’s “pretty open” to having me do some free work for him.

He had seen a podcast I had done about ecommerce advertorials. He’s in the dropshipping space, is interested in advertorials, and would love to get on a call to “pick my brain for a few minutes.”

When I read this, I just raised my eyebrows. “Sounds like a great opportunity to do some free consulting,” I said to myself.

I replied to the guy to say I’m not taking on any client work at the moment, but if he is interested in hiring me, I can let him when I am taking on client work in the future.

And then I took a moment, and I lit up with satisfaction. Not because the guy was asking for something valuable for free, while offering nothing in exchange. I was just happy with the way I instinctively responded.

Here’s why this might matter to you:

Last autumn, I wrote an email where I said, never do anything for free. Especially give out advice.

The thing is, I have done things for free since. Including doling out free advice. Even in situations where I could have asked for money. Even though I knew what I was doing was not smart.

My point is this:

It takes time for a new dam to change the course of a river.

In my life, I’ve often found myself making personal development resolutions, working on them earnestly, not achieving much, or not a damn thing, and then getting exhausted and discouraged and quitting.

And then one day, once I had forgotten all about it, I found to my wonder and surprise that the change I wanted had happened somewhere along the way.

In time, I’ve grown to accept this slowness of change. I’ve stopped being frustrated about it. I’ve found it’s even something you can use to motivate yourself.

It was Bill Gates or Tony Robbins or Kermit the Frog who said something like, most people overestimate what they can achieve in one year, and underestimate what they can achieve in five.

Progress is not linear. It’s often not visible. Don’t let that stop you. At least that’s my free advice.

For more free advice, and more valuable things I don’t do for free, sign up for my email newsletter.

Selling drugs to kids

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IN ONLY SIX MONTHS, that formerly desperate man bought a $385,000 house with half down, and became a millionaire in less than a year. He also bought a vacation house, put away enough to cover his kids’ college educations, easily stopped his bad habits, and attained complete personal and financial freedom… all accomplished automatically, without effort or willpower!

That’s the back envelope copy from a direct mail sales letter written by one Jeff Paul.

​​Jeff was a student and protege of Dan Kennedy, and this sales letter is actually selling Dan’s Psycho Cybernetics program.

I’m sharing this copy with you for two reasons:

First, because I want to point you to Info Marketing Blog. It’s got a few decades’ worth of brilliant direct response ads, and smart and interesting commentary. And if you need proof of that, the guy who runs Info Marketing Blog, Lawrence Bernstein, was called out as a valuable resource during Gary Bencivenga’s farewell seminar by Gary Bencivenga himself.

Second, there’s a masterful marketing and copywriting lesson in those two sentences of copy above. It’s right there at the end:

“… automatically, without effort or willpower!”

When I look outside at the people I know… and when I look inside, at my own feelings and frustrations… I find this is what we all really really want, deep down.

Peace. No effort. Definitely no struggle, and no demands on our willpower. No opportunity for it to go wrong. Instead, all done automatically, by some mechanism outside of us.

That’s why smart marketers like Dan Kennedy and Jeff Paul, and millions of others like them, make those promises.

And if you want to sell, in big numbers, at high prices, you should make these promises too.

Only be careful those desires you stimulate in your sales copy don’t seep into your own subconscious.

Because in my experience, life is all about effort, about exerting your willpower, about getting things done yourself instead of sitting around and wishing they could be done automatically.

How exactly do you reconcile selling something to people that you wouldn’t consume yourself? It seems a little like going down to the elementary school each day to sell drugs to kids, while being religious about never allowing that filth near your own family.

I don’t have a good way to reconcile these things for you. But facts are facts. And if you want to see some market-tested facts, here’s Jeff Paul’s complete sales letter. It’s worth reading. So much so that I’ll even talk about it tomorrow.

Sign up for my email newsletter if you want to read that when it comes out. And here’s the link to the sales letter if you want to get a head start.

https://infomarketingblog.com/wordpress/jeff-pauls-greatest-story-selling-ad/

Cow Tools

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“We give up. Being intelligent, hard-working men, we don’t often say this, but your cartoon has proven to be beyond any of our intellectual capabilities… Is there some significance to this cartoon that eludes us, or have we been completely foolish in our attempts to unravel the mystery behind ‘Cow Tools’?”
— Reader, California

Maybe you’ve heard about Cow Tools. It’s a cartoon that appeared in October 1982. It showed a cow, with some strange implements in front of it. Beneath, the caption read, “Cow tools.”

Cow Tools was done by Gary Larson, as part of his The Far Side comic, which was syndicated in newspapers around the U.S.

Larson’s The Far Side was well-known for its strange and even absurd humor. But Cow Tools missed the mark and left a buncha people confused, or worse. Hundreds of them wrote messages like the above to Larson, asking for an explanation and maybe some peace.

“Off days are a part of life,” Larson likes to say, “whether you’re a cartoonist, a neurosurgeon, or an air-traffic controller.”

Here’s something else Gary said:

In the first year or two of drawing The Far Side, I always believed my career hung by a thread. And this time I was convinced it was finally severed. Ironically, when the dust had finally settled and as a result of all the “noise” it made, Cow Tools became more of a boost to The Far Side than anything else.

So in summary, I drew a really weird, obtuse cartoon that no one understood and wasn’t funny and therefore I went on to even greater success and recognition.

There you go. If you’ve been looking for a permission slip to get going with your own bit of daily content — a cartoon, a dirty limerick, a newsletter email — then I don’t think you will find a better one than the story of Cow Tools.

​​The message is clear. When your thing is good, good. And when it’s not good, even better.

By the way, would you like to get the next issue of The Bejako Side? It’s my own daily cartoon strip. Actually, newsletter. Sometimes off, sometimes it hits the mark. If you’re curious, you can sign up for it here.

The bad news opportunity

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“It’s easy to give lip service to, as well as to try to be entertaining about it… but it’s really a very serious point. And the people I’ve been around, who really have the Midas touch when it comes to money, they’re really very good at this.”
— Dan Kennedy, Wealth Attraction for Entrepreneurs seminar

The ancient Greeks believed in a goddess named Nemesis. Her role was to punish people who’ve had an excessive run of unbroken good luck.

The Greeks knew, just the same as every other people in history has known. Just the same as you know right now:

You can’t have an infinite run of good luck.

Maybe. Not unless you make your own.

I talked a couple of times in the past week about Joe Sugarman. And I’ll keep talking about Joe, because there’s a lot more to the guy than just the hundreds of millions of dollars he made with his orange-tinted BluBlockers sunglasses.

One thing was that Joe saw every problem as an opportunity.

For example, one time when he ran an ad in the WSJ, selling a calculator, Joe screwed up. The price in his ad was cheaper than retail. The manufacturer was furious.

“I have dealers all over the country calling me and complaining,” the manufacturer screamed at Joe.

“Don’t worry,” Joe said, “I’ll fix it.”

So he ran a second, smaller ad announcing the mistake, raising the price, and giving consumers just a few days to respond at the old price. The new ad outpulled the original ad.

That’s what Dan Kennedy is talking about above.​​ People who have a skill for making money — like Joe — have really quick recovery when something bad happens.

​​After all, everything can ultimately be some kind of opportunity, they figure, and looked at in the long-enough term, all news is good news of some sort. Might as well see that sooner rather than later.

Sounds impossible?​​

Last year, I decided to try this idea out for a week.

“Have quick recovery,” I told myself. “All news is good news.”

As I made that decision and wrote it down in my journal, I felt an unpleasant sensation, like I got hit by a big wave. Something was wrong with me physically, and I felt like I might suddenly pass out. I have no idea what happened, and it was gone the next moment.

Normally, if something like this happened to me, I would get concerned, maybe hesitant, maybe look for signs something else bad is about to happen.

Instead, this time, I just shrugged my shoulders, smiled, and got curious. “What good is going to come of this?” I wondered.

Try it yourself. It’s liberating. Plus you might have good ideas come from it. You might even make some money that you wouldn’t have made otherwise.

Make the decision, right now, that for the next week, whenever something seemingly bad happens, you will remind yourself that something good will come of this. You might not see it yet. But what are some ways it could happen?

Maybe it will happen by you signing up to my email newsletter. Or maybe not. Only one way to find out.

The most powerful and trite-sounding idea I’ve accepted over the past year

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A few days ago, I was out for a morning walk when I saw a dad and his eight-year-old son walking towards me. I got to hear a bit of their conversation:

“Dad, did you like going to school?”

“It wasn’t bad. My friends where there.”

“It’s not bad for me either. But I still don’t like it.”

They dropped out of hearing range. But I thought to myself, “Smart kid.”

Maybe I just thought that because I also didn’t like school, even when my friends were there. In fact, I would say I hated school.

I hated being told what to do. I hated the arbitrary stuff I had to do. I hated being forced to sit there all day long. It was like working in an office, but I wasn’t getting paid.

Fortunately I’ve been out of school for a while now. And now I do get paid for the work I do, plus I even enjoy it.

I’m not exactly sure how I got here. But I do know that at some point, I sat down and made a list of things I enjoyed doing up to that point… and another list of things I didn’t enjoy, or even hated.

I came back to both lists occasionally. And over time, without trying hard, I experienced more of the things on the first list. And over time, again without trying hard, I somehow eliminated all the things on the second list.

There’s a bigger point in there.

The most powerful ideas I’ve internalized over the past year is also one of the most trite-sounding. I heard it for years, and each time I just rolled my eyes. The idea is simply this:

Bring your attention to what you want.

Over the past year, I realized this isn’t some “law of attraction” fluff. Rather, it’s practical advice.

Get things out of your head. Write down what you want, to the best of your knowledge. Also write down what you want to stay away from. And then come back to those lists regularly.

Making and reviewing those lists might be all you have to do to stick it out for the long term and enjoy the process.

Because in my experience, success comes from figuring out how to play the long game. Even if that means eliminating things that everyone says are important and good — like school.

Ok, on to business:

You might be wondering what this work is that I do. It’s mainly writing, specifically, copywriting. Like I said, I enjoy it, and I find it pays very well. If it’s something you’re interested in learning more about, sign up for my daily email newsletter, where I write more about copywriting, and occasional “law of attraction” fluff.

An open letter to my non-native copywriting brethren

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For my upcoming business of copy guide, Copy Zone, I interviewed three working copywriters about their experiences getting client work.

Only afterwards, I realized a curious and unintended thing had happened:

All three of these copywriters are non-native English speakers. To be fair, one of them is writing copy in his own language (Spanish). But the other two are working and writing in English, and successfully so.

I bring this up because a few days ago, I got a comment and a question from a new reader:

I love your writing and how you take your readers (us) on the journey with you.

I mean, is it even possible for me (a non-native copywriter) to write close to your writing style and finesse?

I don’t know about my writing style and finesse. If there is something fine and stylish about my writing, I think it’s mainly the result of work.

But on the broader question of whether it’s possible for a non-native speaker copywriter to succeed… well, the case studies I will include in Copy Zone definitely show that yes, it is possible.

On the other hand, most people never do anything, and never achieve anything.

One of my favorite “fun” writers is William Goldman, who wrote the screenplays for movies like The Princess Bride and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Goldman also wrote books, including one about Hollywood called Adventures in the Screen Trade.

And in that book, Goldman said that, in Hollywood, nobody knows anything.

​​In spite of huge money being on the line… in spite of a bunch of smart and ambitious people working day and night to identify or create the next hit… nobody in Hollywood has any clue of what will end up being successful or why.

My belief is that it’s not just Hollywood where nobody knows anything.

The world is a complex and mysterious place. The only way to find out the answer to many questions is to run the cellular automaton a few million steps and see what ends up happening.

And if you want an example of how weird and unpredictable life can be, then take me.

I am technically a non-native English speaker, though I consider English to be my first language. ​​Meaning, I didn’t grow up speaking English for the first decade or so of my life… but today English is the language I know best, because I’ve done most of my reading, writing, and arithmeticking in English.

I’m not giving myself as an example of somebody who succeeded in copywriting despite a non-native level of English skill.

All I want to point out is that, at birth, and for some years after, nobody could have predicted I would end up speaking English as my first language. And even fewer bodies could have predicted that, one day, I will make my living writing sales copy.

So can you make it as a non-native copywriter?

​​You certainly can. ​​I imagine you knew that already.

But will you make it?

​​Well, here’s something else you probably knew already. That’s a question that only you, and a bit of time, can really answer.

Last point:

If you want to know when my Copy Zone guide is out, or if you want occasional free advice on the business side of copywriting, then grab a spot on my daily email newsletter.

The secret pleasure of self-pity

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A few days ago, I was walking down a promenade street. The street is on a very, very gentle slope. There was a little girl, maybe six years old, riding a little bicycle up the street towards me.

She started veering left and right on her bike. The gentle slope was getting to her. She came to a stop.

“Oof,” she said, “I just cannot… ride… any further.”

And she passed the back of her hand across her forehead, the way I guess she has seen her mom do a million times.

​​Then she looked around to see if any of her family were there to witness her suffering. But they were too far down the street, and they were busy talking to each other.

For some reason, this scene got me thinking about the exquisite pleasure of feeling sorry for yourself. Perhaps because self-pity is an emotion I indulge in pretty often.

I was wondering what it is. Why is it such a pleasurable sensation? After all, self-pity seems to be completely self-defeating.

Maybe you have an explanation for me. The best that I could come up with is that self-pity, like so much of the human brain, can be explained by our prime directive to think less.

Like for example, how we rely on social proof, so we don’t have to investigate and make up our own minds.

Or how we jump to extremes so we can ignore the full spectrum of options. Like my favorite question, “What’s your number one tip for succeeding as a copywriter?”

And this same drive to think less is why I figure we feel pleasure when we feel sorry for ourselves. Because it’s pleasurable to come to a stop when the going stops being fast, cheap, or easy.

All of which might sound like I’m getting cynical on you, or that I’m trying to bring you down.

No. Quite the opposite.

Because I have this belief that, while we come preprogrammed into life… and while we remain highly programmable throughout life by outside influence… we also have individual agency.

In other words, you might often find yourself giving in to self-pity. But you don’t have to give in — at least not every time, and not in the long term.

Like that little girl on the bike, you can face forward again, exhale with resignation, set your sights on the top of the street, put your hands back on the handle bars, and start pedaling again, back up the gentle slope.

On the topic of bicycling:

I write an email newsletter every day. It rarely has to do with bicyling, but it frequently has to do with marketing, copywriting, and influence. In case you like, you can sign up for it here.

You are not an introvert

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In my last-ever real job, some 10 years ago, I was a manager at a 100-person IT company.

Well, not really a manager. I was a scrum master, which might sound either like some kind of S&M role or a made-up demon name from Ghostbusters.

So each each week, I the scrum master and our teams “product owner” (another Ghostbusters-themed managerial role) had to meet with the owner of the company to give him an update on how we were progressing.

We had been working for over a year, building a large piece of software that was one day supposed to be sold to big pharma companies like Glaxo Smith Kline.

But it wasn’t ready yet. Or anywhere close to ready. Our team wasn’t making any money. We were just a giant drain on company resources.

So when we sat down with the owner of the company, he gave us a weary look.

“Tell me guys,” he said a little bitterly, “how many sales have you made this week?”

I put on my straight face. And I shrugged my shoulders as if to suggest it’s all relative. “Do you mean the week starting this Monday,” I said, “or starting Sunday?”

The owner of the company locked his eyes on me. He squinted for a second.

​​And then he brightened and started to laugh, the joke being that we had never made any sales and it was doubtful we ever would. “All right all right,” he said with a smile, “at least tell me how the development is going.”

Now I don’t have a life history of joshing and ribbing and joking with people who have authority over me.

But I did it in this case, and it worked out well.

The reason I did it — the reason the joke came naturally, at the right moment, on its own — was that the previous few days, I had started walking around town, approaching girls on the street, complimenting them, and even asking them out.

On the one hand, approaching unfamiliar girls in the middle of the street, often in the middle of a crowd, and starting a conversation — well, it was immensely hard.

But it was also very liberating. Literally. There were parts of my brain that I didn’t even know were there that suddenly became active and alive.

And that’s how I found myself spontaneously teasing my boss, and instantly turning him from a bitter to a good mood.

My point being that over the past few years or the past decade, there’s been a lot of celebrating of introverts, and a lot of proud ownership of being an introvert.

​​Some people even take a holier-than-thou attitude to it, and claim that they alone are the real introverts, while others are just poser-introverts.

Whatever. I’d like to suggest to you that if you think you are an introvert — even a real, natural introvert, the way I thought of myself for years, and which I had very hard evidence for — it’s only one configuration of the person you can be.

Clinging to the idea you are an introvert is little like saying you are a sitting person. Because whenever you see an empty chair, you are tempted to sit in it, and when you do sit, you find it comforting. And then, concluding from that, “Oh no, I’m not a walking type. I just can’t. It drains me. I’m a sitting person.”

And my bigger belief, if you care to know it is this:

You are lots of things. You have different abilities and resources, including those you are not aware of, until you put ourselves into a situation to make use of them.

​​Yes, it might be immensely hard at first. But it can also be liberating. Literally.

Ok, on to business:

If you are looking for more ideas like this, or if you are interested in psychology, marketing, and copywriting, you might like my daily email newsletter. You can sign up for it here.

Glorious past and a glorious future — but the present…

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After I finished high school, I worked in a bookstore for a year.

One night, while I was working the register, I noticed we had these chocolate-covered coffee beans for sale.

I grabbed a bag, ripped it open, and threw one of these suckers into my mouth.

Of course, it was sweet and smooth chocolate on the outside. But when I bit through it, I got to the bitter, chalky coffee bean in the middle.

It left a bad taste in my mouth.

Ok, no problem. I just had another chocolate-covered coffee bean — and the bad taste was instantly fixed.

The sweet chocolate on the outside took care of the bitterness left lingering from earlier.

But then again, I was left with that charcoal-like coffee bean in the middle.

The rest of the evening was a blur. When I came to, hours later, I noticed a half dozen empty bags of chocolate-covered coffee beans all around me. I was sweating, scratching my face, glancing furiously at customers who avoided making eye contact with me.

I hadn’t thought about this scene for years but for some reason it connected to a quote I read recently. It comes from Eric Hoffer who wrote:

“There is no more potent dwarfing of the present than by viewing it as a mere link between a glorious past and a glorious future.”

Hoffer was writing about how leaders of mass movements get people to make big sacrifices. We were great once, these leaders say, and we will great again one day. Whatever is happening right now is nothing in the cosmic scale of history.

This attitude is effective at the mass movement level because it is effective at the individual level. At least for the right profile of person.

For example, I personally had a big realization over the past year.

​​I realized I spend a lot of time daydreaming about how glorious life will be after I just achieve a few more things. And I wince when I think back on the times when I was more productive, successful, or happy than I am right now.

The fact is, that’s how I feel much of the time, regardless of what’s going on in my life externally.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not telling you that it’s not worthwhile working to achieve anything.

​​The fact is, working towards a goal is one of the sure-fire ways I’ve found to feel positive in life.

But what I am telling you is:

You’ve gotta learn to enjoy the present now, as much as you can. This includes the process of working to achieve anything.

Otherwise, you might come to, years later, with a half dozen completed projects all around you… and find yourself sweating, scratching your face, and thinking furiously of the next fix that can take the bad taste out of your mouth.

And now for business:

If you are working to achieve anything, you might find you need good marketing and writing ideas to help your project become a success. In that case, you might like my newsletter, because these are topics I write about on most days. You can sign up here.

Dumb “accomplishment purchases”

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Two days ago, I found myself in a hypnotic daze, fumbling around on a domain-buying website.

I was 100% ready to put down $5,899 to buy a 14-year-old domain.

The back story is that a couple years ago, I had an idea for an info business. I even had a great name in mind.

But back then, the .com domain was taken. For that and a few more reasons, my drive to start up that business gradually got weaker… and weaker… and then slipped into a coma.

But then, a few days ago, against all odds, my drive for that business awoke from the coma and jumped out of bed. And the first thing it had me do was see if the domain had become available.

It had!

It was there, ready to be bought, for the low, low price of $5,899, or 24 monthly payments of just $245.79.

I clicked on the “Buy Now” button.

The page asked me to create an account. So I did. I tried to log in.

No soap.

“Click the verification link in the email we just sent you,” it said.

I checked my inbox. Nothing.

I checked it again. Still nothing.

“Fine,” I said, “I’ll do it later tonight.” And I started looking over my notes and plans from two years ago about this business idea.

“Hmm,” I said to myself.

I spent more time reading notes and making plans.

This wasn’t going to be easy, I remembered.

By the time the evening rolled around, my interest in this info business — and that $5,899 domain — had snuck back into bed and fell into a deep sleep.

As of today, it seems to be back in a coma.

I’m sharing this with you as a precautionary tale that might save you some grief.

Because from what I’ve seen in my 6+ years of working as a direct response copywriter… most people in the DR world are by nature opportunity seekers.

That includes me.

And as an opportunity seeker, I often, in a hypnotic daze, mistake spending money with accomplishment.

Like I said, maybe that’s you too. If so, remember my domain-buying story, and the following coma of my drive to build the actual business.

This isn’t just about saving yourself thousands or tens of thousands of dollars… though there’s a good chance that remembering this story can do that.

But more important, it’s about saving your drive and self-respect. Because every failed “accomplishment purchase” saps those virtues a little bit.

The fact is, good opportunities are out there.

But inevitably, it takes some work to make them work. And the fewer dumb “accomplishment purchases” you’ve made before, the easier it will be to do that necessary work.

Anyways, here’s an easy opportunity that costs little money and requires even less work.

I have an email newsletter. It’s free to sign up and even more free to read. In case you want to grab a spot, here’s where to go.