Chuck Jones

100,000 bad emails

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“I was a profound failure. Not really profound enough. I kind of slid in the middle of failure. Some of us were picturesque. I was just dull.”

Chuck Jones went to art college at age 15.

You might have heard of Chuck Jones before. He eventually became the Oscar-winning animator behind the best Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons… the creator of Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote… and the director of How The Grinch Stole Christmas.

But back at art college, Jones found everyone else was taller and could draw infinitely better than him.

He was dejected. One thing that helped him was a teacher who stepped in front of the whole class and said:

“Every one of you has 100,000 bad drawings in you. The sooner you get rid of them, the better it will be for everybody.”

This includes everybody who signed up for my Influential Emails training. They’ve all been getting emails from me. I want to know why they signed up, and what they hope to get out of it. One guy replied:

For me, the challenge is finding ideas that seem unrelated, connecting them to create insights and then communicate them in an intriguing way without sounding fake.

In all honesty, its to remove the fear of I don’t know what to write with the confidence that I have a process for figuring out exactly what to do.

I’ll talk about the specifics of my process inside Infuential Emails. But honestly, the comment above brilliantly lays out the gist of my process, in just one sentence. That’s all you need to get started. That, along with the Chuck Jones quote above to get over any lingering fear.

But wait, there’s more!

This is part of a bigger thing I’ve found in life.

Many times, if I’m faced with a brick wall in my path and I can’t see any way through it, I’ll take out a piece of paper. And I’ll start writing down my currently available ideas.

“#1. Bang head against wall. #2 Beat fists against wall. #3 Lie down and die. #4….” When I free up my brain of bad ideas that take me nowhere, I sometimes find good ideas underneath.

Do you remember the rejection game? It was a trendy thing some 10 years ago.

Each day the goal was to get somebody to tell you no. As soon as you did that, you succeeded. The point was to keep the streak going for as long as you could.

I tried it back then. It was surprisingly fun and liberating.

Because when you seek out and reward yourself for reaching what you normally avoid, you don’t just achieve more. You reframe what success means.

Did you find this informative and motivational? Are you ready to get going writing something yourself? If so, good.

But did you think I’ve written more coherent and interesting emails in the past, and that this isn’t among one of my standouts?

Even better. I’ve just gotten rid of another one of those 100,000 bad emails, and freed up my brain for something new and possibly amazing the next time I sit down to write. And you can do the same, starting today.

Eleemosynary enlightenment

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The atmosphere around the large conference table was tense.

At one end sat a team of lawyers, dressed in three-piece suits and aggressively staring down the table.

At the other end sat a bunch of sloppy-looking beatnik types, trying to keep calm but obviously nervous.

The time was the late 1930s. The place was Hollywood. The lawyers were studio lawyers. The beatnik types were studio animators, trying to form a union. Among them was Chuck Jones, the famous director of all those Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons.

Jones really didn’t want to be there. He certainly didn’t want to start trouble.

And then one of the lawyers stood up. He stalked down to where the animators were huddled together. And he slammed his hand down on the table.

“One thing I want to make eminently clear,” he said. “Mr. Schlesinger is NOT running an eleemosynary institution.”

Leon Schesinger was the head of the studio. That much was clear. But what about that eleemosynary? What the hell did that mean?

“I loved words always,” Jones said later. “And I knew what he was doing.”

Jones felt like he was being played, manipulated, made to feel small and dumb. Like his vocabulary was small. Which it wasn’t!

In a flash, this sense of injustice boiled up and over. And Jones, very unlike himself, stood up, slammed his own hand down on the table, and started to yell.

“What do you mean by that word!”

The lawyer took a step back. “It… it means a charitable organization.”

Jones kept yelling. “Well why in the damn hell didn’t you just say that? How dare you use a word like that? We’re supposed to be working together here to try to solve a problem!”

The other animators suddenly took courage also. A team spirit was forming, thanks to Chuck Jones’s unexpected outburst.

The meeting didn’t go anywhere. After it was over, Jones expected he would be fired for his combativeness and troublemaking. And sure enough, he was called down immediately to Leon Schlesinger’s office.

But it wasn’t what Jones expected. ​​

“I want to apologize,” said Schlesinger. “The lawyer didn’t understand we were trying to work this thing out together.”

The negotiations continued for some time after that. The animators kept together, with Jones at their head, all starting with that fight that Jones decided to pick. And eventually, Schesinger signed the contract allowing his workers to unionize.

My point for tonight is enlightenment. In other words, I don’t want to push a one-sided but misleading conclusion from the story above.

Instead, I want to throw out the idea that in complex situations, like in dealing with people, there is no single best way to proceed in all situations.

So in the interest of enlightenment, since we’ve already heard from Chuck Jones, let me leave you with some words to the other extreme. They come from that great philosopher of human nature, Dale Carnegie:

“You cannot win an argument. You can’t because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it. […] Distrust your first instinctive impression. Our first natural reaction in a disagreeable situation is to be defensive. Be careful. Keep calm and watch out for your first reaction. It may be you at your worst, not your best.”

And one final thought for tonight:

If you want more complex and multi-sided negotiation and marketing advice, you might like to try out my email newsletter.

How the Grinch stole V-day

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Every marketer in Whoville likes Valentine’s a lot.
But this marketer from Whoville for some reason does not.
So instead of an email that ties into V-day, too,
Here’s how Chuck Jones sold the Grinch, and why it matters to you.

Let’s set the stage:

The year is 1962. Our main character is Charles Martin Jones, better known as Chuck Jones.

If you’ve ever watched Saturday morning cartoons before Cartoon Network came out, you probably know this name. Because Chuck Jones directed a bunch of the most famous Warner Brothers cartoons of all time, the ones with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner.

In fact, when 1000 professional animators were asked to rank the 50 greatest cartoons of all time, Chuck Jones’s cartoons came in 10 times among the top 50… 4 times out of the top 5… and one, What’s Opera Doc?, took the number one spot.

But in 1962, that was all in the past. Because Jones was no longer at Warners, but was now at MGM. He was pushing to get a Christmas feature made, based on a book by his friend Ted Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss.

There are lots of interesting details about How the Grinch Stole Christmas went from a book to a cartoon. But there’s only one bit that’s relevant for us today:

Once Jones created the storyboard for the cartoon, he had to go and sell it. Because in those days, you didn’t pitch a show to a network. Instead you had to find sponsors first. So Jones went around town, giving presentation after presentation of his storyboard for How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

But nobody wanted it. The cereal people… the chocolate people… the sea monkey people. They all said no.

All in all, Chuck Jones had to pitch the Grinch 25 times before an unlikely group — The Foundation for Commercial Banks — finally agreed to finance it.

And then, as you probably know, the Grinch cartoon became a huge success. It’s been playing every Christmas season ever since it came out. And Dr. Seuss’s book, which sold 5,000 copies before the cartoon — not bad for a kid’s book — started selling 50,000 copies a year once the cartoon came out, and never let up.

By now this might sound like a typical story of a sleeper hit, and of the Elmer Fudds who were too dumb to recognize it. And you know what? That’s exactly what it is, and why I’m telling it to you.

Because there are too many stories like this. Star Wars… Harry Potter… The Beatles. Giant hits to which the industry experts said no, no, no.

Did you ever ask yourself why?

You might think it’s the sclerosis of industry insiders… but something else is going on. And if you’re in the business of creating offers and you want them to become big hits, then this is relevant to you too. I’ll tell you the explanation I’ve found for this mysterious phenomenon in my email tomorrow.

Simplicity itself: Bugs Bunny and copywriting

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I watched a video just now with Looney Toons director Chuck Jones demonstrating how to draw Bugs Bunny.

“Start with a pear-shaped body,” says Jones. “A circle for the head… a little nose…”

So far so good. I’m following along as Jones draws 2 bubbles on the page and one dark triangle for the nose.

“Then you extend the angle of the nose in a V above the head. That shows you where to put the ears.”

Hold on, how do I draw the ears like that?

“… the eyes go on those same lines as the ears… depending on what our budget is, we can use 2 or 3 whiskers.”

At this point, just about 4-5 seconds after drawing those initial two bubbles, Jones has drawn a cheeky, perfect, live Bugs Bunny. But I have no idea how he did it. So he explains:

“If you’re gonna draw Bugs, the best way is to learn how to draw a carrot. Then you can hook a rabbit onto it. Simplicity itself.”

Fact is, just because somebody is an amazing practitioner, like Chuck Jones, that doesn’t mean they can explain their method well. And even if they can explain their method well, maybe they just don’t want to, not to every Joe Schmoe off the street. The same happens in every field, including marketing and copywriting circles.

Maybe you’re following some expert’s paint-by-numbers, plug-and-play approach to writing sales copy. But if you’re not getting the results you want… if you’re not making sales you expected to make… if you’re not impressing clients…

Then it’s probably not your fault. There’s just a gap in the education. Maybe the expert can’t explain their method well… or maybe they are saving it all up for a higher-priced product.

The long-term answer is to keep searching for other experts to learn from. In the meantime, if you are looking to get better at writing sales copy, here are a few things that are guaranteed to sharpen your chops:

1) Write something every day — even if it’s a short email like this

2) Read some good ads

3) Read one of the proven books about direct response advertising. Most of the secrets in this business were discovered 50 or 60 years ago, and you can get access to almost all this wisdom for a few dollars on Amazon.

I can’t help you with 1). But if you want some pointers for where to track down good ads for 2) or if you want my suggestions for books in 3) write me an email and I will share my recommendations.