I went to a $3k copywriting conference 4 weeks ago. Since then, my impressions have settled.
What’s left? What ideas did I really get from the high-powered speakers at this conference?
What’s left today is the same as what struck me while I was still sitting in the freezing-cold conference room.
All the speakers kept repeating the word “simple.” Simple business model. Simple deliverables. Simple promises.
But here’s what I realized while listening to all these speakers:
Getting to simple isn’t simple. It takes time and thought and work to figure out what’s essential. It takes discipline and more work to eliminate what’s not essential. And there’s layers to it, so once you’ve made things simple once, you will probably realize that it’s still not really there, and there’s more that you can do.
Mark Ford wrote a post yesterday about how he loves to teach. And he wrote about physicist Richard Feynman, who believed that teaching is the best way to understand anything.
It’s easy to think you understand something, Feynman believed, until you try to explain it simply. And an audience gives you real feedback. Was it simple? Do they understand? Or are they lost?
If they’re lost, it’s because you lost them somewhere along the way.
Writing is a great way to make things simple. And writing to an audience is even better. Then tomorrow, you can do it all again, at a new level of understanding. Does that make sense? Write in and tell me, because it will help me figure things out also.