A few days ago, a reader of this newsletter wrote in with a problem.
He’s an expert in his field. But he feels sick telling his mess-to-success, rags-to-riches origin story. He hates hyping it up and repeating it over and over, even though it’s all true.
I can understand. So here’s an alternative. Take a look at the following background story from Dan Kennedy:
I often tell the story, when I went through a divorce and went broke I started over in info-marketing and my chief asset consisted of a cat who licked stamps.
My wife abandoned the cat and left the cat behind. We quickly came to an agreement that, if it was going to get fed, it had to do something other than hiss, and snarl, and scratch, and bite, which were unattractive attributes of this little monster.
We arrived at a working relationship where it sat on the coffee table, I sat facing the TV at night stuffing my envelopes and getting my mail ready. It sat facing me, and I took the strip of stamps and held it out and the cat licked them and then I did all my stamps.
I kept a little bowl of water there so the cat could, you know… I’m sure all that glue … but they’ve got nine lives! All the glue probably didn’t kill it, its personality probably did.
That’s the end of Dan’s story. In the presentation he gave, he moves on and talks marketing.
So what’s my point in bringing up this story?
You might think it’s humor. And yes, humor is a big part of the story above. If you can be funny like Dan, you are that much ahead of the rest of us.
But there’s something else to Dan’s story. Because it’s certainly not rags-to-riches, is it?
No, something else is going on. I’ll spell it out in my email tomorrow (click here if you wanna get it), and I’ll tell you how it’s relevant for your sales copy… or for your in-person, nose-to-nose, toes-to-toes origin story. Whether you are funny or not.