Arthur Schopenhauer

“START, EVERY TIME, WITH THIS INVIOLABLE RULE:”

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Last night, I had a few extra hours left at home before my flight to warmer climes.

So there I was, sitting in the kitchen, talking with my mom. Suddenly, she looked at the clock. Her eyes lit up.

“Do you want to watch Scent of a Woman?” she asked.

It’s her favorite movie, or one of them. A 90s Hollywood melodrama about a blinded army colonel, played by Al Pacino, who really enjoys women and yelling at the top of his voice.

If you’ve never seen the movie, I’m about to spoil it for you:

The entire two-and-a-half hours is the colonel’s last grand tour around New York City before he attempts to kill himself. Disabled life isn’t worth living, he believes.

Of course, the colonel doesn’t succeed in killing himself.

There’s a climactic scene in a fancy hotel room in which the colonel’s chaperone, an earnest 17-year-old boy, wrestles, cajoles, and begs the colonel for his gun and his life.

“Give me one reason not to kill myself,” Al Pacino yells at his usual 11, while shoving the gun in the boy’s face.

“I’ll give you two,” says the chaperone, tears running down his face. “You can dance the tango and drive a Ferrari better than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

The colonel exhales. His shoulders slump. He turns around. “I’m gonna need a drink,” he says. And he starts disassembling his gun.

I hope you’ve been sufficiently emotionally aroused. Because now I’d like to sell you a piece of writing advice by film director and playwright David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross, Wag The Dog, Hannibal).

At one point, Mamet wrote up a short guide for a few writers working under him. Like Al Pacino, Mamet also enjoys yelling, at least in print, so he wrote his advice mostly in caps:

“START, EVERY TIME, WITH THIS INVIOLABLE RULE: THE SCENE MUST BE DRAMATIC. it must start because the hero HAS A PROBLEM, AND IT MUST CULMINATE WITH THE HERO FINDING HIM OR HERSELF EITHER THWARTED OR EDUCATED THAT ANOTHER WAY EXISTS.”

Going back to Scent of a Woman, you can see how neatly the hotel scene fits this rule:

The colonel has a problem. He’s lost his self-respect and he believes he cannot enjoy life any more. But he finds himself thwarted in his desire to end his misery. And he is educated that, in spite of his disability, life is still worth living.

So there you go. A simple way to write melodrama, which is really all you should be doing when you write sales copy. Just follow Mamet’s rule.

…

Yes?

What, you want more?

Solid copywriting advice is no longer enough for you?

Jeez. All right. Let me try impressing you with another quote. This one comes from a miserable German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer:

“Pedantry also is a form of folly. It arises from a man’s having little confidence in his own understanding, and therefore not liking to leave things to its discretion, to recognize directly what is right in the particular case. Accordingly, he puts his understanding entirely under the guardianship of his reason. Therefore, the pedant, with his general maxims, almost always misses the mark in life, shows himself to be foolish, absurd, and incompetent.”

The point being, you can write serviceable melodrama by following rules, like the one that Mamet lays down. But you’re not likely to ever write something really great. Or even to produce a breakthrough piece of sales copy.

That’s not to say that rules don’t have their place. But maybe Mamet was wrong.

Maybe you shouldn’t start START, EVERY TIME, WITH THIS INVIOLABLE RULE.

Maybe you should just END BY CHECKING YOUR LIST OF RULES, to make sure you HAVEN’T WRITTEN ANYTHING IRRETRIEVABLY STUPID WHILE TRUSTING YOUR INSTINCTS.

Ok, enough shouting. Here’s a quiet message instead:

Every day, I write about marketing and copywriting. Often I include movie illustrations for the points I’m making. If this kind of thing makes your eyes light up, consider signing up for my email newsletter here.

Positioning remarkable ideas against popular incumbents

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In 2005, Wired magazine published an article titled, “GTD: A New Cult for the Info Age.”

It was about David Allen’s Getting Things Done. This was a productivity system, which Allen first described in a 2001 book of the same name.

The basic premise of GTD was that we are all flooded with more and more distractions and tasks. The old ways of dealing with all this work, such as todo lists or goal-setting, are not enough.

As the Wired article describes, a few frustrated knowledge workers found Allen’s book. They identified themselves with the problems he described. And they adopted and promoted the GTD system with evangelical zeal.

By 2005, GTD had become a kind of cult. But this was still not the high point of Allen’s success. Interest in GTD kept building and spreading in all parts of American society for the rest of the 2000s.

Then, in 2012, a guy named Cal Newport wrote a post on his Study Hacks blog. The title was “Getting (Unremarkable) Things Done: The Problem With David Allen’s Universalism.”

The gist of Newport’s post was that GTD was great — if you’re a secretary or a mid-tier manager. But if you do any kind of creative, thought-intensive work, GTD will fail. In Newport’s words:

“Allen preaches task universalism: when you get down to concrete actions, all work is created equal. I disagree with this idea. Creating real value requires […] a fundamentally different activity than knocking off organizational tasks.”

Newport came out with his own solution to the problem behind GTD. He called it “deep work.”

Interest in deep work rose as interest in GTD declined. According to Google Trends, the two crossed paths, one on the way up, the other on the way down, in 2014. Today, if you check on Amazon, you will find Deep Work has knowledge workers’ attention, not GTD.

I don’t think Cal Newport did this consciously, but he hit upon an ideal way to position Deep Work. And that was in contrast to an existing, popular solution.

This is something smart marketers have been doing for years. I first heard Rich Schefren talk about this. Rich says this is one way he was able to get millions of leads and thousands of high-paying customers.

Rich’s advice is to go out into the marketplace and find a successful offer. Then, figure out how to make that offer a part of the problem — rather than a part of the solution.

You can go out and do that now. And you might have the same success as Rich Schefren or Cal Newport.

But here’s a nuanced point that might help you out even more.

After Cal Newport wrote his anti-GTD blog post, he got over 100 comments on the post. Those comments were very divided. A few said, “You might just be right.” But many more said, “You don’t understand GTD, or you’re not using it correctly.”

This corresponds to the Google Trends info. By 2012, interest in GTD had peaked. But overall, GTD was still very popular.

So if you want to position your product against an incumbent, that’s the moment to strike. Not when the incumbent is at the peak of popularity… but also, not when most people have already moved on. As Arthur Schopenhauer wrote:

“To truth only a brief celebration is allowed between the two long periods during which it is condemned as paradoxical, or disparaged as trivial.”