A while back, when there was still such a thing as professional sports, I noticed that the top three or four men’s tennis players all had one unusual thing in common:
They were all in settled, long-term relationships, often with the same girl they had started dating while they were still teenagers.
Further down the rankings, you had tennis players who were known to be playboys. Regardless of their natural talent, these playboys hovered around the top 20, but could never break into the very peak of the sport.
Coincidence?
Probably. But maybe not. Maybe a stable relationship really is crucial for massive success.
Don’t worry. I’m not telling you to go in search of a ball and chain to lock around your ankle. My point is simply this:
When I look at top copywriters — meaning people who get paid millions of dollars a year, with schedules booked up months in advance — they all fall into one of two categories.
One is guys like Chris Haddad or Jon Benson, who got successful promoting their own offers. The other is guys like Dan Ferrari and Stefan Georgi, who worked in-house at a direct response publisher for long enough to get a pile of successes in their knapsacks.
What you don’t see are playboys who came up by bouncing around from client to client. Maybe this promiscuous lifestyle worked many winters ago. But I don’t see it happening today.
Not to say you can’t make good money as a copywriting playboy. It’s what I’ve done in my career. I now make more money for less work than at any job I could have ever held.
But if you want to make it to the top… or if you want to be perceived as more than a commodity service provider… then jumping from client to client is unlikely to get you there. If you want clients to stop seeing you as a piece of meat, you will have to get hitched — either to your own business, or to somebody else’s.
That’s something I’m working on as well right now. If you want to follow how I’m doing that, click here and subscribe to my email newsletter.