A few days ago, I was minding my own business, washing the dishes. The weather was warm so I opened the window.
Just as I was in the middle of scrubbing the salad bowl, a little blackbird landed on my windowsill.
“CHEEP,” said the blackbird.
“Oh hello there,” I said. “How do you do?”
The blackbird paced for a moment and then sat down on the windowsill. He seemed to be getting comfortable, which made me frown and pause my dishwashing. And then the blackbird spoke:
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Interesting that you ask that. Very interesting.
Something I am really struggling with at the moment is securing a mate.
I can’t get a mate for my familybuilding services. Even when I catch the eye of female blackbirds, they seem to smell my neediness from a mile away even if I don’t reveal it intentionally.
I wanted to ask:
How would you go about getting a mate if:
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… and then the blackbird listed his unique mate-getting situation, which happens to be the same unique situation faced by all single blackbirds, crows, and seagulls, as well as by all individuals, whether human or avine, who are hoping to go from zero to one in any endeavor that involves selling yourself.
I’ve long ago decided that I don’t want to be in the business of taking people or birds from zero to one.
So I just nodded to the blackbird in understanding, picked him up, placed him on the outside window sill, and closed the window shut.
That said, I do have one piece of advice.
I’m only sharing it because it applies to anybody who is looking to do anything new and frightening, whether they are beginners or much more advanced.
It applies to newbie copywriters looking for their first client… to experienced copywriters looking to send their first email to their own list… to business owners looking to go into a drastically more upscale market and charge 2x or 3x or 10x of what they are charging now.
It also applies to securing a mate. In fact, this piece of advice is something I heard from the infamous pick-up coach Owen Cook, aka RSD Tyler, the villain in Neil Strauss’s book The Game.
Owen was talking about the horrifying prospect of flying up to an attractive and unfamiliar female blackbird, in the middle of a park with lots of other blackbirds around, and striking up a fun and natural interaction.
Perfectly easy if you have total belief in yourself and your worth.
Perfectly impossible if you are overwhelmed by fear and self-doubt.
So here’s Owen’s observation:
“The halfway point between fear and total belief is indifference.”
You can’t go from fear and neediness to total belief and confidence.
But you can go from fear and neediness to indifference.
One way to do it is repeat exposure in a short enough period of time.
Go and cheep at seven attractive and unfamiliar blackbirds today. Each of those interactions might go horribly, though they probably won’t.
But whatever the outcome of the interactions, by the end of the seven, you will realize you are still alive. In fact, you are perfectly fine.
Do this a few days in a row, and those innate survival mechanisms, which underlie both fear and neediness, will begin to get habituated and calm down. You will start to get indifferent. And that’s the halfway point to total belief and confidence.
In other words, if you think you have a neediness problem… what you really got is an activity problem.
That’s all the free advice from Bejako’s windowsill for today.
If you’d like to buy something from me, I can recommend my Simple Money Emails training.
No, Simple Money Emails won’t replace the need to actually write and send emails, whether for your own business or for a client business.
But Simple Money Emails can teach you my effective one-two system for writing emails, much like this one, that make sales, keep readers reading, and keep birds chirping. If that’s an outcome you’d like as well: