I’m in Palm Beach. The place is rich.
This morning, I walked along the sandy beach facing the Atlantic, a few hundred yards from where Billionaires Row starts — where people like the CEO of Blackstone and the widow of David Koch have their palatial residences.
I was walking there with my friend Sam, who came to Palm Beach with me.
We were discussing how nice the weather is here… how good the Atlantic Ocean looks against the pristine sand… how pleasant the people are in Palm Beach… even how there’s magically free and abundant parking on the island.
“It’s kind of like heaven,” Sam said. “It makes me want to make a fuckton of money so I could move here.”
I paused for a moment. I looked inside. And I concluded:
Palm Beach is great. But I have zero ambition to move here for the long term, or to make the tens of millions of dollars that would be necessary to support even a B-level lifestyle among the billionaires and multimillionaires here.
I’m telling you this because after the beachside walk, I had the good fortune to have lunch with one of the most successful copywriters in the world.
I won’t name him — I’m not sure he wants me to. But I will say he is a senior copywriter, working for 10+ years at one of the biggest and best-known direct response financial publishers.
Over lunch, one topic that came up was how Bill Bonner — the founder of direct marketing behemoth Agora — has been making financial predictions for 40 years.
Most of those predictions have been proven to be wrong. Year after year, decade after decade.
And yet, loyal readers of Bill Bonner continue to read his opinion pieces. Apparently, he now has the most successful financial-topic Substack out there, making some $1M/year from I guess editorial content alone.
The question is, why would people continue to listen to a financial prophet who is consistently making mistaken prophecies?
The very successful copywriter I met today has an elegant and interesting take on it. It’s something I hadn’t heard before. But that’s his intellectual property, so I won’t share it here.
What I will tell you is my theory on it, which I really got from legendary marketer Dan Kennedy:
The best customers, the most long-term customers, are not really buying whatever offer you’re supposedly making them. Instead, they are really buying you as a person. And they decide whether to buy you or not by how they match up with you on certain intangible, vaporous values.
All that’s to say, you might have really horrible, taboo things inside your head, things you think you should never share about yourself with your audience.
Such as for example, the fact that you are not very money-motivated — not a helpful thing to reveal to a bunch of business owners and marketers.
And yet, even though revealing such things is sure to drive many people in your audience away… it will bind a small number of them even more closely to you. And you can build a successful business — or even, if you insist, a large business — on the strength of those strong bonds alone.