Ten days ago, after I sent out an email where I compared the British royal family to marketers building a list, I got this punctuation-free reply:
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Can you send something on writing advertorials
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Last night, after I sent out an email about personal positioning with a story featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Larry King, I got a reply from the same guy:
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Hello can you do more advertorials more on
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Now here are a couple of intimate facts about me that you may or may not care to know:
1. I like hearing from my readers.
My cold heart always warms up a few degrees above absolute zero whenever I see a reader reply sitting in my inbox.
2. At the same time, I’m easily influenced — that’s why I study influence.
So when I get a nagging, ungrammatical, 7-word reader reply that seems to shout over top of me by completely ignoring the content of the email that I sent out — that annoys me.
Not only that, but it stays in my head for a good while interfering with other work.
I recently started a journal on the topic of fast writing.
Fast writing for me doesn’t mean typing more words per minute.
It doesn’t even mean writing my daily email in 15 minutes instead of 55 minutes.
Instead, fast writing for me is all about ways to change how I work so as to get more done at the end of the month, while keeping the same adequate level of quality, and while spending less time at the damned computer than I do now.
The first idea in my fast writing journal is to eliminate distractions.
So I unsubscribed the guy above from my list.
He was a distraction. And I don’t need a third email from him in another two weeks, saying, “Hey can you advertorials more more”
John Cleese of Monty Python fame has this tiny book on creativity. In it, Cleese, who I would consider a very creative person — not only Monty Python, but A Fish Called Wanda, Fawlty Towers — says the number one enemy of creativity is distractions.
Writing, even sales copy, even a daily email, takes a certain amount of creativity.
If writing is what you do, then help yourself out and make a habit of eliminating distractions that interfere with your work.
And if you happen to write a daily email, and if you happen to also be an easily influenced person, then you might like what I’ve figured out with my Most Valuable Email.
It’s a way to influence and feel good in the process. You can find out more about that here: