“Could it be real?” Agassi asked himself in wonder. He slowed the tape down. “No… it can’t be true!”
The first three times that Andre Agassi faced Boris Becker, he lost.
The time was the late 1980s. Both Agassi and Becker were rising tennis stars — both future number ones.
But those first three meetings, it was all Becker. Three tight competitive matches. And each time Agassi fell short.
The trouble was Becker’s booming serve. The damn thing was unreadable and unreturnable.
The defeats stung Agassi. So he locked himself away and looked at hours and hours of footage of Becker serving, and winning, and winning.
And then Agassi noticed something. At first, he couldn’t believe it.
So he looked at more video tapes. And then more. On each one. Every damn time.
Becker had a tell.
Right before he served his unreturnable serve, he did this thing with his tongue.
If he stuck his tongue out to the left, it meant he would serve wide.
If he stuck his tongue straight out, it meant he would serve down the middle.
From then on, until the end of their careers, Andre Agassi beat Boris Becker 10 times out of 11. Becker kept telling his wife in disbelief, “It’s like he reads my mind!”
I’m telling you this story for two reasons:
One is to show you how people give away a lot with their physical gestures. And not just in poker or in tennis. Real life, too, or even Zoom. You just gotta pay attention. People can literally give away secrets they think are hidden inside their skulls.
But there’s a second thing. Like Agassi said:
“The hardest part wasn’t returning his serve. The hardest part was not letting him know that I knew this. So I had to resist the temptation of reading his serve for the majority of the match and choose the moments when I was gonna use that information to break the match open.”
So my second thing is to advise you to apply this same restraint to marketing and copywriting.
Once you figure out how to read your prospect’s mind, have discipline. And only use that information in those crucial, break-point, match-over opportunities.
Otherwise, your prospect will wise up. He will stick his tongue back inside his mouth. And then it’s back to the video room, for hundreds of hours of more research.
For example, I’ve figured out a magic phrase to get people to sign up to my email newsletter. But I can’t use it all the time, or it will lose its magic. I have to save it for special moments.
So for now, if you’d like to get on my email newsletter, so you can learn more about persuasion and marketing and copywriting, let me just say, here’s where you can sign up.