In case you’re the type who wants access to the most elite opportunities and most exclusive clubs, here’s an instructive story:
Carter Burwell is an American film composer. He has scored dozens of big-budget Hollywood movies, including The Big Lebowski, Being John Malkovich, No Country For Old Men, and Twilight.
But Burwell is not just a film composer. He has has a very colorful history.
Even before the age of 20, Burwell was already a trained animator, a would-be rock star, a factory worker, a would-be architect, and a self-taught computer programmer.
And then one day, after seeing a help-wanted ad in the New York Times, Burwell got hired as chief computer scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Lab, working for Nobel prize winner James Watson, codiscoverer of the structure of DNA.
How did Burwell get inside this elite and exclusive club? From an article about Burwell I just read:
“Burwell wrote a jokey letter in which he said that, although he had none of the required skills, he would cost less to employ than someone with a Ph.D. would. Surprisingly, the letter got him the job, and he spent two years as the chief computer scientist on a protein-cataloguing project funded by a grant from the Muscular Dystrophy Association.”
My point is not to write jokey application letters or cold emails.
It’s certainly not to compete on being cheaper than other options.
My point is simply to be immensely lucky, the way Burwell obviously is.
And in case you’re shocked and possibly outraged by that point, then let me rephrase it in a more how-to way:
Figure out how to weigh the odds so heavily in your favor… that you can be sure you’ve won, long before the coin has been tossed in the air.
That’s an idea from A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos.
It’s a bit of personal philosophy that Parris practices. It’s how he keeps getting access to the most elite copywriting opportunities, and working with the most exclusive clients.
Maybe you want some examples of what this means in practice.
You can find those in my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters, specifically chapter two, which is all about Parris’s “stack the odds” idea above. That chapter also ties in nicely to the Carter Burwell story above. Si te interesa: