Personal Change

Selling drugs to kids

by

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

by

“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.

Sales copy written by hallucinatory voices

by

True story:

An otherwise healthy woman, identified only as AB, suddenly started hearing voices in her head.

The year was 1984. The place was England.

The voices reassured AB they were medical professionals trying to help her. They even gave AB some convincing secret info to prove their claims.

But AB concluded she was going insane. She went to a psychiatrist and was prescribed an antipsychotic medication.

The voices stopped. AB, relieved and happy, went on holiday.

​​But then the voices returned. They told her to head home. They sent AB to an unknown address. It turned out to be a medical center specializing in brain scans. The voices told AB to get one of those brain scans on her own noggin.

AB’s doctor was initially reluctant — brain scans are expensive and the woman was crazy — but in the end, AB got her brain scan. And then another.

It turned out that, even though she showed no symptoms, she had a large tumor inside her skull.

One brain surgery later, and the tumor was removed.

After AB regained consciousness following surgery, the voices told her, “We are pleased to have helped you. Goodbye.” AB never heard from them again, and she continued to live a normal and healthy life.

AB’s psychiatrist, who wrote up this report, said that his colleagues fell into two camps:

Group one thought this was proof positive of benevolent telepathic communication.

Group two thought AB was a big ole grifter, and that she was inventing this story as a way of getting free access to the UK’s health services (AB wasn’t born in the UK, but she had lived there for 15 years before this case).

The psychiatrist offered a third explanation. Even though AB wasn’t manifesting any symptoms, it’s likely that the large tumor in her head made her feel somehow off. It’s possible that her unconscious started slyly gathering relevant information and making its own diagnosis. Eventually, this erupted in AB’s head as hallucinations.

I find this third explanation plausible. And I bring it up for two reasons.

First, it meshes well with how I imagine my sense of self. And that’s a flimsy wooden raft, floating on the surface of a dark and deep loch.

Reason two is that this might help reduce your workload.

Because writing is work. But you know what’s not work? Having ideas pop up in your head without any effort.

For example, I sometimes just “visit” what I want to write. I look over the topic and any research I might have collected. I then go do other stuff and allow the monsters under the surface to digest that information.

For me, there’s no work. I don’t have to do it. All I have to do is simply write it down.

Maybe you can try the same. Just put a lump of an idea into your head. Then go about your day. When you start hearing voices, calmly reach for a writing apparatus and take dictation. And when the voices finish, don’t forget to say thank you, and invite them to visit you again.

“Sign up,” a voice in your head is saying right now. “Sign up to this guy’s email newsletter. He has interesting and valuable things to say.”

What’s that? You say you want to sign up to my email newsletter? Well, I don’t usually do this, but all right. Here’s how you can get in.

The bad news opportunity

by

“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

by

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

by

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.

How not to get stupider and maybe even get smarter

by

Last Thursday, I tried to access the RT website. As you might know, RT used to stand for Russia Today.

RT is the Kremlin’s answer to CNN — a source of generic news, more or less fact-based, which are nonetheless filtered and shaped to push a certain viewpoint and agenda.

I tried to access the RT website because I had gotten sucked into reading news about the Ukraine war. But all the news sources I was reading were American or European journalists and analysts, and their data sources were ultimately either the Pentagon or Ukrainian government announcements.

​​So I wanted to see what the Russians have to say.

It turned out I cannot.

​​The RT site is blocked throughout the EU. When I type in the URL, I get some kind of security exception which none of my browsers can get around without special evasive maneuvers.

I remembered hearing something about this early when the war started. And sure enough, I soon found a video of Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, saying that Russian media outlets RT and Sputnik are now banned across Europe because they spread lies and threaten to “sow division in our union.”

Like I said, there’s no doubt RT is manipulative, biased, and has its own agenda. But so are all of our other sources of news, including the ones that get state funding either in the EU or the US.

And when a politician like von der Leyen says she is restricting access to information because she doesn’t want division among the people she rules… well, this reminds me of something I truly believe:

A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points. That’s a statement by Alan Kay, who is something of a genius inventor, technology prophet, and expert on learning and education.

The inverse also holds:

A consistent and uniform perspective, designed to minimize division, leads to a loss of IQ. Maybe not 80 points, but 15 or 20 for sure.

Perhaps you don’t agree with, not in the current situation, not when there’s a black-and-white crisis like the current war in Ukraine.

But perhaps you’re like me, and you intuitively believe in the value of broader viewpoints and longer-term thinking.

If you do, I’d like to suggest you take on other position even when it seems repulsive. Even when you firmly believe it to be propaganda, manipulation, or even straight-up lies.

At worst, it will turn out to be a topic for a new email to your list. At best, it might mean a transformative change in perspective, worth an extra 80 IQ points.

For more possibly perspective-shifting ideas:

You might like to know I write a daily email newsletter, mostly about persuasion, influence, and copywriting. You can try it out here, until the European Commission blocks me from spreading divisive ideas.

7 minutes to productivity

by

Let me tell you how I prepared to write this email:

I set a timer on my phone for seven minutes.

Then I sat down at the kitchen table, put my head in my hands, and started to press my thumb against my teeth. ​​I stared out the window… I stared at the sad house plant across from me… I tapped my fingers on the chair. I played the Bee Gees “You Win Again” in my head, and I realized I don’t remember the lyrics. I gradually got more and more antsy, tapping my foot on the floor, looking out the window and trying to peek into the neighbor’s house.

Finally, just as I was ready to jump out of my skin, the timer rang, and my seven minutes were up. ​​I got to work right away.

And that’s the idea I want to share with you.

I once read an article by marketer Sean D’Souza. Sean was talking about how he organizes his work day. He separates his tasks in different blocks. And in between each block, he takes a special kind of break:

He gets down on the floor, puts two books under his head, and just lies there.

I tried Sean’s system exactly, including the two books. But each time, within a minute, the same thoughts raced through my head:

​​​”What the hell am I doing? Why am I lying here? I’m not tired. If I want a break from work, fine. But let me go read a magazine for a minute or check my email or at least wash the dishes.”

That was a mistake. Because whenever I did go do something, well, that would often stretch out into 10, 15, 30 minutes. And at the end of my “productive” break, I’d have to force myself back into work.

I realized only later the essence of Sean’s system.

It’s to do nothing.

​​Even seven minutes of doing nothing drives me slightly insane. I find I’m eager and thrilled to get to work.

​​Plus the fact that I haven’t done anything — well, except playing the Bee Gees in my head — this usually allows all kinds of surprising ideas to bubble up. Ideas which would have been suppressed had I gotten external stimulation, even if that meant washing the dishes.

Perhaps this won’t be useful to you.

After all, perhaps you’re not like me. Perhaps you have a deep and broad capacity for work because of ingrained self-discipline. Or perhaps you genuinely look forward to the work you do.

I find I actually enjoy the work I do. Even so, I always feel resistance to getting started, and getting re-started after a break. In my experience, expectation is nothing like experience.

That’s why taking short do-nothing breaks has worked great for me. I get my work done sooner. I do better work, because I get more use of that time of day where I’m good for anything. Plus I find it very easy to convince myself to start doing nothing, and I find it even easier to stop.

So that’s my productivity idea for you. Try out my do-nothing breaks. Or think up your own tricks to work harder, with more focus and intensity.

Because working harder is the difference between huge success and failure.

​​If you have nothing else going for you, can go far simply by working harder. The good news is, like Gene Schwartz said once, working harder doesn’t mean working longer. In fact, it can even mean working shorter. Or doing nothing at all.

Are you still here?

This email is done. In record time. But if you’d like to read more essays I write about marketing, copywriting, and personal change, sign up here for my newsletter.

The Prince of Get Rich Quick

by

At age 23, David B. was flat broke and was waiting tables to make ends meet. Full of shame and unsatisfied ambition, he made a commitment to himself that by age 28 he would be worth $1M.

And sure enough, by age 27 1/2, David was worth over $1M.

By age 29, he was bringing in $6M a year, living in a mansion overlooking San Diego, and driving a big white Rolls Royce.

How did he do it?

Well, that’s the topic of a 1989 Rolling Stone article about David Bendah, titled The Prince of Get Rich Quick.

I’d never heard of David B. until a few days ago. But back in the 1980s he was apparently a big deal (hence the Rolling Stone story). He started a publishing business that was bringing in tens of millions a year selling get-rich-quick books.

Bendah eventually did land in jail, but that was only when greed got the better of him, and once he moved from selling get-rich info to running a full on envelope-stuffing scheme. (After all, why bother with a product when you can just sell your own marketing?)

The Rolling Stone article on Bendah is eye-opening and has many ideas that can make you rich or save you from losing it all (like Bendah). They are as relevant today as they were in 1989.

I won’t spell out all these many idea. There would be no point. Instead, I’ll give you just one:

“In all of Bendah’s books, the crucial step toward success is getting beyond ego problems, which he interprets as understanding and accepting who you are and what talents you have.”

I think Bendah’s advice is actually spot on. It just needs to be extended a bit further.

In Bendah’s case, his talents were obviously in the promotion of opportunities. And who he was was was a die-hard opportunity seeker in his own right – or at least that’s my interpretation of how he wound up in jail, even after having created a successful, multi-million-dollar business.

Your own talents and your own instinctive drives might be different from Bendah’s. But whatever you have inside you, it’s worth facing it honestly… using it for all it’s worth… but also keeping an eye on it, if it’s something that can get you in trouble.

Anyways, I once bounced around the idea of creating AIDA School — a classroom-style place to learn direct response copywriting.

​​That’s not gonna happen. But maybe one day I will create just the curriculum for AIDA School. And if I do, the David Bendah Rolling Stone article will go in, and will be required reading.

In case you’re curious about learning more about direct response copywriting and my future AIDA school curriculum… then sign up for my email newsletter, where I will talk more about both. And in case you want to read the David Bendah article now:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/david-bendah-the-prince-of-get-rich-quick-52915/

 

More on people’s deepest secrets, fears, and desires

by

INTERVIEWER: I think finding something that helps you find fulfillment and happiness is important. And if that happens to be heroin, and you got it under control… maybe it’s okay.

MATTHEW: I do, but then it’s the money thing. It’s a lot of money.

INTERVIEWER: How much do you spend? How much do you spend a week?

MATTHEW: A month, probably $1,500. So I could have a nice apartment.

That’s from an interview with Matthew, a functional heroin addict. Matthew says he smokes heroin, every day, all day. And yet he has a job, and he does it well, and nobody knows.

The interview with Matthew is part of a YouTube channel called Soft White Underbelly.

I discovered Soft White Underbelly a few weeks ago. It features hundreds or maybe thousands of in-depth interviews with drug addicts, homeless people, child abuse victims, prostitutes, escorts, inbred Appalachian families, gang members, a high-level mob boss, a strychnine-drinking Pentecostal preacher, a conman who ran real-estate frauds totaling in the tens of millions of dollars, and various others on the outside of what you might call mainstream society.

I won’t lie — I got sucked into this channel because of purely prurient curiosity about the lives of escorts and prostitutes and even a male gigolo.

I’m not sure what my persuasion and influence takeaway for you is today. Except that, in my experience, being interested and curious is like a superpower in almost any field.

You achieve focus by being interested. And you achieve interest, if you don’t have it already, by seeing details.

I talked yesterday about how there are primal urges that motivate all people — except these are secrets most of us will never share with others. Often, we can’t even face up to them on our own, in the dead of night, as we’re falling asleep, with the covers pulled up to our eyeballs.

But the people who are interviewed on Soft White Underbelly are incredibly open about the most shocking, intimate, painful, and humiliating things in their lives.

Maybe some of these stories aren’t true. But I bet many of them are. And they’re very revealing.

Yes, these are extreme stories of people coping with bad life situations and bad life choices.

But like I said yesterday, the human experience is similar among all of us. And a person doesn’t need to have extreme abuse or trauma or misfortune to fall into the same patterns of thought and behavior as the people on Soft White Underbelly.

So if you pay attention to the details of their stories… it might be useful both to understand others better, and to understand yourself better.

Or who knows, maybe I’m just trying to justify my own prurient fascination.

In case you want to decide for yourself, let me recommend a SFU interview to start with.
​
​​It’s with a black-hat hacker, who started in the 1980s by phreaking phones and early ATMs, then graduated to more lucrative and high-scale tech exploits ($10M for hacking the DirectTV receiver), and culminated about 10 years ago with… well, I won’t spoil it.

If you’re interested, the full interview is below. But before you watch it, if you want more ideas on understanding yourself and other people better — both for profit and for curiosity’s sake — then sign up to my email newsletter.