For just a moment, think back to your high school days. And imagine you get home one day from a long hard seven hours of being unpopular and ridiculous…
… only to find your parents sitting on the couch, arms crossed, waiting for you.
Without a word, your father stands up, grabs you by the arm, and leads you to a spare room. He locks you in there — it’s for your own good, he says. There’s a bucket in there in case you really need to pee.
The next day, you’re allowed to go to school again. But when you get back home, the same thing happens. Room, lock, bucket. And this goes on for months.
So now the trick question:
How do you think you would feel about this?
Think about that for a moment.
And once you’re done thinking, let me suggest that the reality of how you would feel might be quite different from what you just imagined.
At least that’s what I learned in a fascinating talk by Rich Schefren, to whom this room-bucket story actually happened.
You might know of Rich already. I’ve mentioned him literally hundreds of times in this newsletter.
Rich is a super smart and successful marketer. He’s one of the people in this business I respect and admire the most.
All that respect and admiration came from listening to Rich talk about business, about marketing, about writing.
“Boy this guy is insightful,” I always think to myself, “and really nice to boot.”
But the fact is, all this time I knew nothing of Rich’s crazy life story, except that at one point he ran a downtown Manhattan clothing store and at another time a hypnosis center.
I didn’t know anything about Rich’s teenage association with the actual Goodfellas in New York… I didn’t know about that room with the bucket… I didn’t know he worked in a boiler room while Jordan Belfort aka the Wolf of Wall Street performed his famous “One-Call Close.”
I’m a copywriter and I’ve hyped up gurus before. Meaning that, I know all the usual elements of origin stories in the DR world — I was living in a van down by the river, my parents hung up on me when I called them for help, my wife left me and took everything but the cat.
And yet, even though I’m so jaded, Rich’s story actually made me say, “Holy calf, this is crazy.”
So Rich’s talk is worth watching just because his story is fascinating.
But then there’s the back end of the talk, where Rich ties it up with some life lessons.
Now in general, I’m allergic to life lesson porn.
But if there is anybody I would take life lessons from, it’s Rich Schefren.
And in fact, over the past week, I’ve gone back in my head over and over to the story of Rich in the room with the bucket, and the conclusion he drew from this experience.
In case you are curious, you can hear Rich talk all about it, and about many other interesting things, at the link below: