Guruship

How to turn failure into prestige

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In the year 52 BC, the Roman army, led by Julius Caesar, secretly advanced their massive siege towers towards the Gallic walled city of Avaricum.

The sentries on the walls were hiding from heavy rain.

Caesar took advantage of the situation, and he took the walls without much fight.

The remaining Gallic soldiers grouped themselves in the middle of town. They were set on a desperate fight to the end.

But the Romans just stayed on the walls, watching the Gauls from above.

Gradually, panic took the defenders. They started running out the city for dear life.

They didn’t get far.

The Romans massacred them along with everyone else in the city, women and children included.

Out of 40,000 Gauls inside Avaricum, only 800 survived.

The leader of the Gauls, Vercingetorix, was stationed outside the city with his army. He had been tasked with fighting Caesar in the open and keeping the city of Avaricum safe.

Vercingetorix had failed spectacularly. The fact that he had vocally opposed the idea of making a stand at Avaricum didn’t help, either.

As the few remaining survivors from the city dragged themselves into Vercingetorix’s camp… there was a real chance that the soldiers’ sympathy with the survivors and general anger at Vercingetorix would cause a riot.

But let’s pause for a second with the massacring and rioting.

Take a moment. And ask yourself, what might you do if you were in Vercingetorix’s sandals?

It’s not just an idle hypothetical.

Say you have an online presence today and you hope to position yourself as a leader in your field. There’s a good chance that sooner or later… you will be involved in some kind of scandal, failure, or controversy, whether deserved or not.

When that happens, discontent might bubble up among those who normally follow and support you. It might even break into a riot that lands your metaphorical head on a metaphorical plate.

So what can you do? Let me tell you what Vercingetorix did:

He called a council of war. He spoke to his troops and asked his army to not be disheartened by the loss.

The Romans didn’t beat them through superior courage in a fair fight. Instead, the Romans did it through trickery and their knowledge of siege warfare.

But Vercingetorix would soon repair this setback. He would lead his people to greater successes.

He was well on the way to uniting all the Gaul tribes against the Romans. And when Gaul was united, the whole world could not stand against her. In the meantime, it was time to get to work fortifying the camps.

Maybe it’s not clear from this what Vercingetorix’s real message was. So here’s an explanation, in Caesar’s own words:

“This speech made a good impression on the Gauls. What pleased them most was that, despite a signal disaster, Vercingetorix had not lost heart or concealed himself or shrunk from facing the multitude. And so while a reverse weakens the authority of commanders in general, his prestige, on the contrary, in consequence of the disaster, waxed daily greater.”

So here’s my takeaway for you, if you are a leader or you hope to be one some day:

The crowd mind hasn’t changed any in the past two millennia.

Today as then, when you face a crisis or setback, the crowd will tear you apart — as soon as you back down, apologize, or show weakness or fear.

The good news is, it’s easy to show no weakness or fear when you have a computer screen to protect you. And when your angry army is armed not with sharp swords… but with dull Twitter accounts.

Keep this in mind, and when disaster hits, you will see it’s really an opportunity. Not just to survive. But to get the crowd to love you even more.

Ok, so much for the history and leadership lesson. If you want more like this, you might like my daily email newsletter. You can give it a try here.

Don’t read this if you can’t stand harsh glaring lights

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“It is important that you get clear for yourself that your only access to impacting life is action. The world does not care what you intend, how committed you are, how you feel, or what you think, and certainly, it has no interest in what you want and don’t want.”
— Werner Erhard, founder of est

Last week, after I sent out my Copy Koala Millions™ email, a reader named Lester wrote in with this interesting point:

“The one other thing I remember from Carlton is how in almost all business segments, the customers want easy/painless/low effort results. BUT the body building/fitness guys want the opposite. You have to sell how fucking painful and hard it will be with what you are selling.”

It’s true — 99% of sales copy promises quick/easy/foolproof results, preferably accomplished by an external mechanism, which you activate by pressing a large red button that reads “INSTANT RESULTS HERE.”

But like Lester says, not every market is like that. Bodybuilders for one… maybe also small business owners and entrepreneurs.

For example, yesterday I wrote about Dan Kennedy’s “#1 most powerful personal discipline in all the world.”

Dan promises that this one discipline can make you successful beyond your wildest dreams.

But honestly, I didn’t need that promise to buy what Dan was selling. I became hypnotized as soon as I read the words “powerful personal discipline.” At that point, I was 86% sold already.

That’s why I said yesterday that I don’t need to sell this idea to you either. Because if you feel the twitching of this same drive for overcoming inside you… you probably perked up just because I kept stuffing the terms “self discipline” and “personal discipline” a dozen times in what I wrote yesterday.

The fact is, there’s a very real need inside most people for occasional struggle, suffering, and proving their own worth.

Suffering and struggle might not sell in front-end copy going out to a cold list of people who are already suffering and struggling with a problem.

But it definitely does sell, including in sister markets to direct response. Such as the seminar business, for example.

Werner Erhard, the guy I quoted up top, ran est, the biggest personal development product of the 1970s. est consisted of two weekend-long seminars where people would literally piss themselves because they weren’t allowed to go to the bathroom — in a giant hall filled with hundreds of strangers.

On day two, attendees would go through the “danger process.” From the book Odd Gods:

“A row of the audience at a time would go on stage and be confronted by est staff. One person would ‘bullbait’ all of them, saying and doing things in order to get them to react. Other volunteers would be body catchers for those who fell, a common occurrence.”

Like I said, this went on for two weekends in a row. In other words, people would show up one weekend, get humiliated and brutalized, and come back the next weekend for more. When it was all said and done, people found it transformative, and enthusiastically recommended est to their friends and family.

My point is simply a reminder. We are no longer living in the world of one-off sales letters pitching a book of Chinese medicine secrets. Today, there’s plenty of money to be made by being strict, demanding, and harsh. Yes, even in your sales copy.

… well with one caveat. I’ll get to that in my email tomorrow. Read it or fail.

Excuses for the perfect murder

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“Come on Bobby, get in the car! We’ll give you a ride!”

“No, Dickie. It’s just a couple blocks. I’ll walk.”

“Get in Bobby! Quit being such a wet blanket! I want to show you my new tennis racket!”

On May 21 1924, two Chicago teenagers, Nathan Leopold and Richard “Dickie” Loeb, rented a car. It was the first step of their plan for the afternoon’s perfect crime.

Leopold, a former child prodigy, was 19. He had just graduated from the University of Chicago and was preparing to enter Harvard Law School.

Loeb was 18. A year earlier, he had graduated from the University of Michigan as the youngest graduate ever.
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Leopoold and Loeb drove slowly down the street. They spotted their chosen victim. 14-year-old Bobby Franks, Loeb’s second cousin.

It was supposed to be the perfect murder. A demonstration that Leopold and Loeb were supermen. Because Leopold was a big reader of Friedrich Nietzsche. He was fascinated by Nietzsche’s idea of the superman — the rare, unusually gifted man who can rise above common morality.

Besides, Leopold thought, he and Loeb were too smart. They had planned everything. Nobody could ever catch them.

Leopold and Loeb cajoled Bobby into the car. A few moments later, they knocked him out with a chisel, dragged him to the back seat, and strangled him.

​​They then disposed of the body in a pre-planned location, 25 miles south of Chicago. They washed the upholstery of the car and went on with their lives.

“Err… fascinating stuff, Bejako,” I hear you say. “But why are you creeping me out? Where is this story going?

All right, let me get to it.

Yesterday, I talked abut a squeaky-clean guru who seemed to blatantly lie about his backstory to please the audience. I promised to wrap that email up today.

So the first half of what I want to tell you is:

Sell a transfer of responsibility.

Because Leopold and Loeb did not succeed in carrying off the perfect murder. An act of Providence interfered.

Loeb’s horn-rimmed glasses slipped out next to the body of Bobby Franks. The glasses had a custom hinge that could be traced back to only three people in Chicago, Loeb among them.

At the subsequent trial, Leopold and Loeb’s lawyer focused all his efforts on avoiding the death penalty. He gave a 12-hour-long closing statement, which has become a classic of American law. He supposedly brought tears to the judge’s eyes.

The lawyer managed to keep Leopold and Loeb from the gallows. He persuaded the judge to spare them in spite of the gruesome and senseless crime… in spite of the innocence of the victim… and in spite of the public outcry for the two young supermen to be hanged.

So how did the lawyer do it?

First, he admitted that Leopold and Loeb had done the deed.

And then, over those 12 hours, he explained the real blame lay at the feet of Loeb’s domineering governess… of nature and evolution… of bloodthirsty newspapers… of callous university professors who exposed the two teenagers to ideas they were not ready for… of the Macmillan publishing company and its reckless spreading of inflammatory books… and of course, of Friedrich Nietzsche.

In other words, the deed might have been Leopold and Loeb’s. But the fault was everybody else’s. And the judge bought it.

Just imagine:

If an appeal like this can sway an impartial, third-party, external judge… what can it do for a partial, first-party, internal judge?

That’s what I’m talking about. Transfer of responsibility.

That’s why smart marketers find ways to take that internal judge in the prospect’s mind.. and show him how all those bad outcomes in the past are everybody else’s fault. And not only that.

Smart marketers also make the prospect believe any possible bad outcomes in the future won’t be his fault either.

But perhaps you’re worried about the bad future outcome of this email never finishing. So let me really wrap it up.

My conclusion is that a transfer of responsibility is something you want to sell to people…

But it’s not something you want to buy yourself. Or at least I don’t.

Because I’ve learned from direct marketing how powerful this drive to escape responsibility can be. And I’ve since noticed it in myself as well.

I’ve also learned that trustworthiness and authority can be easily bought online.

That’s why I’ve made it a personal policy not to get attached to online personalities. Even the ones I like and feel I can trust.

Of course, I consider their ideas. But I take on the responsibility of deciding whether these ideas are something I should believe in and act upon… or not.

Perhaps that’s a policy that makes sense for you to adopt as well. And you know. Not because I say so.

Last thing:

If you like reading Friedrich Nietsche, you might like my email newsletter. Here’s where you can give it a try.

About those “nice and genuine” gurus…

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I got the following earnest question a few days ago:

“Among all of the A-List direct response copywriters that you’ve been able to meet, who was the nicest and most genuine? And did he/she share a golden piece of advice that made a difference in your development as a writer/marketer?”

As for the one golden secret whispered to me by an A-list copywriter… there was none. I studied the same stuff that’s available to everyone, much of it for free or in affordable old books.

But as for that nicest and most genuine part… well, let me tell you a story. I’ve told this story before, but it seems to need repeating.

Some time ago, I found myself in a semi-private setting with a successful online guru. I won’t say who he is or what he sells. But I will tell you he is a genuinely nice guy. Warm, cheery, helpful.

And not only that. He’s also very clean-cut. A true family man, very devoted to his faith.

So in this private setting, I listened to this guru tell his origin story.

It was dramatic, inspiring, and really ideal for that setting. I won’t retell it here because I don’t want to identify the guy. But let me compare it to the first time the Joker tells his backstory in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight:

“You wanna know how I got these scars? My father was a drinker and a fiend. And one night…”

A few days later, I heard a recording of a different semi-private event. One I had not attended. It featured the same genuinely nice, clean-cut guru telling his rags-to-riches origin story.

Again, I won’t retell it here. But it’s comparable to the Joker saying a bit later in the movie,

“Do you wanna know how I got these scars? So I had a wife who tells me I worry too much…”

In other words, the story finished in the same place. But all the details, big and small, leading up to that point, were different.

A completely different origin story. Incompatible with the first version I had heard. But again, perfectly fitted to this second environment.

So what’s my point?

Rather than spelling it out, I’d like to invite you to draw your own conclusion today.

But if you really want to know the unsettling lesson I take away from the story above… well, I’ll share that with you in my email tomorrow. You can sign up here if you’d like to read that.

Hypno-wizards and their willing victims

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Imagine a small, dark cell. There’s a light bulb swinging overhead. One man is seated at a table under the light bulb. Two men are standing over the seated man, and a few more sit in the shadows along the wall, watching the proceedings.

“Who else was involved in planning the robbery?” asks one of the standing men.

“It was me…” stammers the man at the table. “Well, we had talked about it the night before…”

The other standing man leans in. “Who is this ‘we’?”

The seated man looks up into the light and blinks over and over. “It was just me. Bjørn… I…”

“Bjørn was also involved in planning the robbery?”

Suddenly, one of the men sitting in the shadows coughs. He makes a show of crossing his legs in an unusual way. The parts of his legs beneath the knee form a clear letter X.

The man under the light bulb straightens up. “Nobody else was involved. I acted alone. My goal was to support the revolution.”

In 1951, a man named Palle Hardrup robbed a bank in Copenhagen. The robbery wasn’t his first, but it was the first one that went bad, and Hardrup killed two people. Soon after, he was arrested and interrogated.

During the interrogations, it became clear Hardrup might have been acting under the direction of somebody else.

That somebody else turned out to be Bjørn Nielsen, a self-taught hypnotist.

Over the next 10 years, the story slowly unfolded across Danish courthouses, prisons, and hospitals. Eventually, it even made it to the European Court of Human Rights.

The question was who was responsible for the robbery and the murders. Hardrup, who had confessed to the the crimes… Nielsen, who dozens of witnesses claimed had hypnotized Hardrup over the course of two years, and who still seemed to have total control over his hypno-puppet, each time the symbol X appeared in some way… or Hardrup and Nielsen both.

What do you think? I’ll tell you what Dan Kennedy thinks:

Dan thinks if you want to get rich, then be the wizard… and beware other wizards.

What Dan is saying is we all crave to give up responsibility in our lives. It’s a dangerous thing to allow yourself to do… but there is lots of money to be made in providing that service to other people.

And that’s what I think those Copenhagen hypnosis murders illustrate.

Human beings are extremely programmable.

We also have individual agency.

And if you ask me, those are two magnetic poles that cannot be reduced down to one.

This is something you might want to keep in mind… if you too have decided to get rich, the way I’ve finally done recently, for the first time in my life.

And in case you want to get educated about persuasion, marketing, and copywriting to help you in your quest to get rich… you might like my daily email newsletter.

Coming soon — The Destiny & Power Newsletter

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I meant to publish this post yesterday, but you know what? It’s not a joke. So here goes:

Some time in the long-lost 1970s, a guy named Uri Geller became a worldwide star by going on different TV shows and doing the impossible.

Under bright studio lights, with millions watching, Geller bent solid metal spoons, made stopped watches run again, and saw through walls and closed doors — using only the power of his mind.

(Yes, this is from the video I shared a few days ago, if you managed to watch it till the end.)

Then there was this second guy, a former stage magician named The Great Randi.

Randi started following Geller around from TV show to TV show. He’d appear a week later, and expose every one of Geller’s mysterious and transcendent acts for what they really were.

“It’s just parlor tricks,” said Randi. “Don’t believe this guy or his lies. He’s trying to con you, prey on your weaknesses, and probably steal your money.” And he showed exactly how Geller did did his illusions.

So what do you think happened?

Maybe you’ll say it was predictable. But it was eye-opening to me:

Uri’s popularity was unharmed.

Meanwhile, people starting booing poor Randi and chasing him off TV. “We’re going to commercial break,” shouted one TV host at Randi, “and you can piss off!”

Now that you know this interesting story, you can do with it what you will.

I know what I will do.

My conclusion is that hitting the road with an “Enlightened Rationalist” act is a sucker’s game.

I’d much rather win the love and loyalty of people who have the urge to believe — and fight for what they believe.

And that’s why I’ll be changing my own skeptical and cynical ways. I don’t expect the change to be immediate, but it will come, and soon.

You’ll be able to find it in my new newsletter, which I’ll call Destiny & Power. If you want to read this new newsletter, joining it is free and easy. You can do it right here, in just a few seconds.

And if you don’t want to read it, well, I hope you’ll change your mind. Because Destiny & Power welcomes and embraces everyone.

Guru to a bunch of bossy bottoms

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Today’s post is long and heavy. My intention in saying this is to deter you from reading on, but I am aware it might have the opposite effect. Still I feel I’ve done my duty by making this warning. So here goes:

In high school, I was friends with a girl I will call Caroline. Caroline and I liked the same music… liked the same movies… had the same sense of humor. It was like kismet.

Then one day, along with some friends including Caroline, I drank a bottle of gin.

I was not an expert drinker in those days, so I lost control. I started running around like a jackass… I made out with Caroline in a burrito shop bathroom… and then I blacked out for the rest of the evening. Eventually, I puked all over a friend’s car, was taken home, and passed out in my own bed, to wake up the next morning without even a hangover.

And here’s where the plot curdles:

I wasn’t pleased about the drunken burrito-shop makeout with Caroline, but I wasn’t ashamed either.

What I did find unsettling was hearing from several friends how Caroline was going around in the following days, elated that something had finally happened between me and her. She had been hoping for this for months, she said, and now it was finally here. It seems she had had a crush on me for a while.

And the weirdest thing happened. I began to really hate Caroline.

I guess there were two parts to it. One part I understood right then and there, back in 11th grade… the other I realized tonight. Let me tell you about both parts, and how they are strangely relevant to the world of copywriting and online marketing.

Back then, what I realized in a moment of insight was that Caroline had gradually adopted my personality.

I’m not sure how I didn’t notice this before. Maybe I was naive, or maybe I was egotistical.

But what became as clear as gin was that Caroline had picked up on the music I liked and then started listening to the same… she did the same with the movies I said I enjoyed… and she had mimicked whatever humor and mannerisms I had at that time. That was the explanation for the seeming kismet.

My 17-year-old self found this repulsive. The idea that somebody would abandon their own personality and adopt mine… it was the sign of a person who is weird and weak. Not somebody I wanted to be associated with. So in my typical fashion, I cut off all contact with Caroline, and didn’t talk to her for years.

That’s the part I realized back in 11th grade about why Caroline repelled me.

But I never took it one step further, until tonight. I never asked myself, what’s so bad about having somebody idolize you? Why not let them have their fun, and get what you can out of the relationship, which should in theory be a lot?

I’ll tell you what I discovered. The term of art for it is a “bossy bottom.” Or at least that’s what Michael Taft called it in an interview I heard with him today.

Taft teaches meditation, and he’s worked with lots of individuals as well as big corporations like Google and for all I know Halliburton. He has a best-selling book on meditation… he has a successful podcast on the same… and in this particular field, he’s apparently a bit of a celeb.

So Taft talked about how he won’t teach people who treat him as a guru and look up at him with glossy eyes. “I don’t want to teach people who are in a trance,” Taft said. “And plus, that’s not even the biggest issue.”

Because according to Taft, these entranced and enguru-ed people aren’t the passive followers they might seem. Taft believes they control the guru as much as the guru controls them.

These “bossy bottoms” can manipulate the guru by modulating what they allow to apparently affect them. “Oh when he does this thing, I won’t react… but when he does this other thing, I will react.”

So that’s part 2 of my repulsion for Caroline. It’s not that I found her weak and weird… but that I realized how she had actually manipulated me, controlled me, and influenced me, in a way that I was blind to. She had made me feel weak and weird.

Perhaps it’s now clear how this might apply to marketing. Because the high form of marketing is achieving guruship. It’s where you have the biggest and easiest influence. As Ken McCarthy said in a recent interview:

I don’t know where I first got the notion that being a celebrity was a great thing. And then somebody put it in my ear that really anybody can be a celebrity. It’s a manufactured thing.

And I’m like, wow, that’s interesting.

And then the next piece was, celebrity is relative. So you don’t have to be world famous to make a ton of money, you just have to be famous within a finite group of money-spending people, and you can have all the money you can handle.

And when those three items congealed in my brain, I was like: “Whoa, I’m going to be a celebrity.”

And it really can be easy. The steps to become a guru are by now well-known. There’s not much more to it than going outdoors, finding a soapbox no shorter than 6 inches in height, and standing up on it day after day.

Of course, there are other things you can do to speed up the process. But even with just your 6-inch soapbox, people out there will find you, listen to you, and start to follow you. And eventually, if you’re halfway decent and at least a quarterway successful, some of them will begin to idolize you.

As Ken says, it’s easy and it’s profitable. That’s the argument for it. And if you’re doing the Lord’s work or you really love your flock of followers, it can be the best thing in the world.

But if you are just looking to become a guru as a shortcut to freedom… or if you’re after power and control… then maybe today’s post will be an argument against becoming a guru. Because you can’t become a guru, not unless you agree to be completely and secretly manipulated in turn.

But if that don’t dissuade you… and you want to know in more detail what I mean by a 6-inch soapbox, you can see one here.