Pride

Announcing: My new 183-day challenge

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I woke up this morning to an email inviting me to promote a “6-figure challenge” challenge.

From what I understand, the challenge is for an audience of experts to build their own 6-figure challenge funnel.

I have never participated in an online challenge. I do not ever plan on participating in an online challenge. And so, simply as a matter of only promoting dogfood that my own dog has happily eaten in the past, I won’t be promoting this offer.

But this did bring to mind another challenge I read about just last night. You might want to take a deep breath — because it’s the challenge of voluntary poverty. Bear with me for a moment while I tell you about it.

I read about this challenge in a book by “the father of American psychology,” William James. A hundred years ago, James had this to say:

Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition.

Maybe this sounds to you like another classic self-defeating Bejako gambit, promoting the challenge of voluntary poverty to an audience of copywriters, marketers, and business owners. But hold on. James goes on to explain:

It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases.

Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There are thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman.

What James is saying is that in many cases — maybe in most cases — there is a tradeoff between the desire for wealth and the desire for freedom and independence.

​​And freedom and independence — that’s something I bet you care about.

I’m going by my own feelings here. I’ve always cared more about freedom than money. And in fact, I originally got interested in copywriting not because of the promise of sales letters that would pay me millions of dollars in royalties. I got interested because copywriting meant I wouldn’t have to keep sitting in somebody else’s office, day after day, from dark in the morning until dark in the afternoon.

There’s a fair chance you’re like me, and that you also care about being free and independent.

And so, starting today, I would like to announce my 183-day Voluntary Poverty Challenge. ​​For the low, low price of $5,000, you can join my challenge and have my team of certified poverty coaches reorganize your life along lines recommended by William Jam—

Yeah right. My point is simply that there are often tradeoffs among our most fundamental motivating forces. ​​And also, that it’s possible to sell even something hard and mean — voluntary poverty — by appealing to deeper psychological drivers like the desire for freedom.

But really, I have a 183-day challenge for you. Join my email newsletter, and look out for my email each day, waiting for the day when I will fail and not write anything. It hasn’t happened for the past several thousand days, but maybe it will happen in the next 183 days. And then you can gloat. If you’d like to join this exciting challenge, click here to get started.

You are a copywriting god… in the making

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Today is June 21, which means that in 10 days, the second issue of my Most Valuable Postcard is going out.

I am preparing to write it by watching a popular Ted talk about classical music… researching the motivations of men who like to go to strip clubs… and revisiting an old Jeff Walker presentation I mentioned a few weeks ago.

Today, I want to share with you a fascinating moment from that presentation. A bit of background:

Some time in the late 2000s, Jeff Walker was offering a business opportunity called Product Launch Manager. The basic idea was:

No list, no product, big money.

HOW???

By managing big companies’ launches using Jeff’s Product Launch Formula.

This was ideal for the most rabid of Jeff’s customers, the people who bought all his products, maybe even consumed those products, but never did anything beyond that.

Now comes the fascinating moment. ​​

At the end of this five-day event, speaking from the stage to a small segment of this group of hyper-responders, who had each agreed to pay $25k to attend, Jeff raised his hands up in the air, lowered his head to his chest, and said in a soft yet penetrating voice:

“You are marketing gods. If you can speak Internet marketing, you are in a separate class from the rest of the people walking the face of the earth.”

Jeff says this set the room on fire.

People jumped up from their chairs. Others started rolling around in the aisles. Still others were tweeting to let the whole world know. “Jeff says we are marketing gods!”

The implied message was that, by paying a lot of money, by attending an event and hearing a bunch of stuff, and finally by getting Jeff’s benediction, these folks had achieved true success.

And who knows, maybe some of them did go on to achieve true success.

After all, Jeff’s program was a step-by-step roadmap for what to do to manage big launches for big clients.

Put one foot in front of the other, while looking at the map, and you will get to your destination, sooner or later.

Still, the thing that struck me was simply the audacity of the claim — marketing gods! — and how much it resonated with people.

I feel it’s something to keep in mind when you are crafting your own promises… and the promises behind those promises.

Anyways, today, being June 21, is also the last day that I will email inviting you to register for my Most Valuable Email presentation, which happens tomorrow at 7pm CET.

At the end of that presentation, I would like to raise my hands, lower my head, and say in a soft and yet penetrating voice:

“You are now copywriting gods… go ye forth and use your new daily email knowledge to line your pockets with many shekels.”

And sure, I will give you a step-by-step roadmap. I will tell you how I write the one kind of email that has been most valuable to me in the history of this newsletter.

This one kind of email has allowed me:

1. To get in the heads of my readers, including some of the most successful and sophisticated direct marketers and copywriters out there…

2. To pump up my own authority, even when I don’t brag about all the successful and sophisticated marketers and copywriters who read my stuff every day…

3. And maybe most importantly, to drastically improve as a copywriter and marketer.

So there is that promise in the air, “… and you can do it too!”

Well, about that:

Attending tomorrow’s presentation, learning all the stuff I will share, and even having my benediction at the end will still only make you something like a copywriting god… in the making.

In other words, it won’t do you a damn bit of good unless you do the moderately hard work of putting one foot in front of the other, and not just once, but many times over.

So the close to this email is not as fire-generating as Jeff’s talk from the stage.

But it is a fact of life, and it might lead you to success sooner, rather than later or never.

Whatever the case may be:

If you would like to get the info inside my Most Valuable Email presentation, you will have to sign up to my newsletter before 7pm CET tomorrow. And once you get my confirmation email, you will have to hit reply, and let me know you’d like to attend, at the last minute, this fearsome email revival meeting.