Albert Einstein

First-cousin marketing incest

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A little over 100 years ago, on June 2, 1919 to be specific, a rather shabby-looking man named Albert took the hand of a fairly unattractive woman named Elsa. They looked deeply into each other’s eyes, and after a few moments of nervous calculation, each of them said “ja.”

The shabby-looking man was Albert Einstein. The rather unattractive woman was Elsa Einstein, Albert’s first cousin and second wife.

Einstein wasn’t the only famously smart person to marry his first cousin. H.G. Wells, author of some 50 books and best known today as the “father of science fiction,” also married his first cousin, Isabel Mary Smith. So did Charles Darwin, who married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood in 1839.

What’s my point?

Marketer Dan Kennedy has this routine about “marketing incest.” Here’s how Dan puts it:

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Whatever business you’re in, whatever product, service, profession — what do you pay most attention to? Everybody else in that business. If you don’t read anything else, you read your trade journal. If you go to no other meeting once a year, you probably go to your convention. If you’re traveling to another city, you look at your category in the Yellow Pages. You pay attention to everybody else who’s in your business. It’s like being Amish.

What happens with this kind of thinking — it’s a “closed” kind of thinking. It works just like real incest. Everybody gets dumber and dumber and dumber until the whole thing just grinds to a halt, and they just stand there looking at each other and nothing happens.

You’ve got to pay attention outside your little Amish community of jewelers or carpet cleaners or whatever it is that, up until tonight, you thought you were. You’ve got to pay attention to other stuff because you ain’t going to find any breakthroughs in the five other people standing in a circle looking at you. They aren’t any smarter than you are. They’re probably dumber than you are.

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My point is, “consanguineous” incest is universally reviled, and for good genetic reasons. You don’t want to marry your sister or brother — bad things happen if you do it, and that’s why most societies around the world find the practice disgusting.

On the other hand, “affinal” incest, marrying between first and second cousins and more distant relatives — well, I won’t say it has a long and glorious history, but it definitely does have a history, and much of it, including some very smart people.

I might be digging myself into an unnecessarily deep hole here, so let me state clearly that I am not advocating incest of any kind.

Well, except maybe in the marketing sense. Like Dan says, you don’t want to practice consanguineous marketing incest — copying what the five other guys who are most like you are doing. That’s likely to only produce worse and worse results with time.

On the other hand, going into a cousin industry, and copying ideas from there — well, that might just be another issue altogether. But I will write more about that in my email tomorrow, and tell you my experiences in paying a visit to a cousin industry lately.

If you’d like to read that email when it comes out, sign up to my email newsletter.

The End of Marketing and the Last Mail

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If you want to get influence and become famous in the near future, I have a strategy you can start using today.

Let me set it up by telling you about Francis Fukuyama. He was the 90s version of Jordan Peterson. A sober academic… who somehow exploded into the high heavens and became an international celebrity.

But unlike Peterson, Fukuyama did it without the help of YouTube. Instead, he did it with a book called The End of History and The Last Man.

In that book, Fukuyama prophesied that there be some standing here (meaning 1992, when the book was published)… who will not taste death before they see liberal democracy ruling the world.

That seems a bit naive today. We got empires like China and Russia on the ascendant… we got huge corporations, controlling more power than most elected bodies… we got the Taliban flag, hoisted over Kabul once again.

But whatever. That’s how it goes with predictions. Most predictions, even by experts or otherwise smart people, end up ridiculously off the mark. In fact, a reliable way to get a laugh is to bring up stupid past predictions:

“The cinema is little more than a fad. It’s canned drama. What audiences really want to see is flesh and blood on the stage.” — Charlie Chaplin, 1916

“There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.” — Albert Einstein, 1932

“Everyone’s always asking me when Apple will come out with a cell phone. My answer is, ‘Probably never.'” — David Pogue, The New York Times, 2006

No matter. Francis Fukuyama became a star by making a bold prediction. And so can you.

Because like kicking the cat, predictions give us a feeling of control in an out-of-control world. And as the singularity nears… and as the fog over the horizon continues to get thicker, limiting our field of view with each passing month… we as a society feel more and more need for dramatic, outlandish, and yet believable predictions.

That’s why I keep making my ongoing prediction about the end of marketing. Or at least the end of classic-style DR marketing, with its flashing neon signs and blaring warning sirens.

My personal bet for the future is on influence instead of persuasion… insight instead of desire… and breakthroughs in print instead of salesmanship in print.

So make a prediction. Even if it ends up being proven wrong. That’s my free idea for you to start building influence today.

I have more such ideas inside Influential Emails, the training I’m offering right now. In fact, I got got to thinking about this prediction stuff because of my “12+4 Most Influential Emails.” This is one of the free bonuses inside my current offer.

This free bonus contains 12+4 emails, including one which influenced me more than any other email I’ve ever gotten from a marketer. The email was all about a prediction. And the crazy thing is, the prediction didn’t even come from the marketer who wrote the email.

Instead, it came from somebody else… writing in another format, years earlier.

That’s the power of influence, and of influential writing.

The initial idea stuck around… lived on in somebody else’s head… made its way into my head… and I will now be passing it on to people who join my Influential Emails program.

Perhaps that will be you. Or perhaps not. But if you’d like more info to help you make that decision, I predict you’ll soon find it here:

https://influentialemails.com/

Screaming in terror at a loss of supreme intelligence

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John von Neumann was probably the smartest person of the 20th century. He didn’t have Einstein’s hair or the dopey absent-minded scientist look. That’s perhaps why he never became the icon like Einstein.

But according to friends and colleagues (a smart bunch made up of past and future Nobel laureates), von Neumann was the sharpest of them all. Eugene Wigner, who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics, said of Von Neumann, “Only he was fully awake.”

I first read about von Neumann in a textbook for a math class. There were little sidebars about the giants of the field, and von Neumann was in there. A few bits of von Neumann’s life story, as told in that sidebar, have stuck with me for years:

* While von Neumann was a kid, his parents would get him to perform mental tricks at parties they hosted. ​​A guest would randomly choose a page of the phone book. Little 6-year-old Jancsi would look at the page for a few moments. And then he could answer any question about who had what phone number and what phone number had who.

* Unlike most of his physicist and mathematician colleagues, von Neumann was a sociable animal. He liked loud music, drinking, and partying.

* Probably due to his work on building the first atom bomb, von Neumann developed cancer at age 52. The disease progressed quickly and he died a few months after he was diagnosed. And in those last few months, von Neumann’s mental powers started to lapse. Colleagues could hear him screaming in terror at the loss.

Here’s what gets me:

Even with an advanced stage of cancer, I’m sure von Neuman’s brain was still a few standard deviations ahead of the rest of us. And yet it didn’t matter.

Because it’s never really about what you’ve got. Only change matters. Positive change is nice. Negative change is terrifying. It’s feeling the ground give way under you as you’re sucked into a sinkhole.

I’m not sure what my point is today. I certainly don’t think that harping on real or possible loss is the best way to lead off a message. People have heard it too much and they’ve become wary.

But if you want to really understand the people in your market… their motivations… their hesitations… then you’ll have to look at their loss, or their fear of loss. Of health, of money, or even of perceived intelligence.

Speaking of which:

Have you thought about another day passing, without learning anything new to make you better at making sales and persuading people of your value? Pretty terrifying, isn’t it?

There’s an easy fix though. Each day I write a short new email, with a marketing or copywriting lesson, wrapped up in some kind of story. Not always as depressing as today’s. If you want to try out those emails and see if they soothe your sense of dread, click here and fill out the form.