Two weeks ago, I got a check in the mail for $1,000. A real, physical check, landing in a real, physical mailbox, in Baltimore, MD, some 3,750 miles or 6,040 kilometers away from where I actually live now.
The backstory is that last December, I wrote four articles for the Professional Writers Alliance.
It was great opportunity — write a few easy articles, promote myself to a list of copywriters, and even get paid for it. $1,000 — that’s 42.5 movie nights for a couple, at an average ticket price of $11.75, if I can stay disciplined and not buy any popcorn.
But not just that.
I’m even supposed to get an extra $100 — that’s 4.25 more movie nights, no popcorn — after I do a kind of private podcast interview next week with Jen Adams from PWA. Hopefully, it won’t be a check again because that first check is still languishing at a friend’s house in Baltimore, I imagine under a growing pile of magazines and takeout boxes.
I’m telling you all this because of the strange chain of events that led to this $1,000 check.
I wrote those PWA articles about my experience self-publishing my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters on Amazon.
I wrote that book, as I’ve shared many times before, based on James Altucher’s “I plagiarized” blog post, which I read the first time back in January 2020.
I discovered James’s blog a short time earlier because Mark Ford linked to it in his email newsletter.
I signed up Mark Ford’s newsletter maybe back in 2018, because Mark is a big name in the direct response world. I kept reading after I signed up because I in some way identified with Mark, or at least I identified the kind of person I might like to one day to be with Mark.
Maybe the point of the above chain of events is obvious to you. Maybe it’s not.
If not, you can find it explained in section 3.3 of my Insight Exposed training. You might potentially find that explanation valuable, and even enjoyable, at least in the long term. Insight Exposed is only available to people who are signed up to my email list. If you’d like to sign up to my list, you can do that here.