Last night, I was reading a book about money and I came upon a quirky passage about John D. Rockefeller.
At one point, Rockefeller’s unimaginable wealth was worth 1.5% of the entire U.S. GDP, equivalent to about $349 billion today.
From the book I was reading:
===
John D. Rockefeller was one of the most successful businessmen of all time. He was also a recluse, spending most of his time by himself. He rarely spoke, deliberately making himself inaccessible and staying quiet when you caught his attention.
A refinery worker who occasionally had Rockefeller’s ear once remarked: “He lets everybody else talk, while he sits back and says nothing.”
When asked about his silence during meetings, Rockefeller often recited a poem:
A wise old owl lived in an oak,
The more he saw the less he spoke,
The less he spoke, the more he heard,
Why aren’t we all like that wise old bird?
===
Speaking of wise old birds:
Legendary copywriter Robert Collier wrote that the most powerful appeal in copy is vanity, “that unconscious vanity which makes a man want to feel important in his own eyes and makes him strut mentally.”
Legendary negotiation coach Jim Camp said that from the moment we are all born, we struggle to feel comfortable and safe, or as Camp put it, “okay.” Not behind others in the race of life. Not inferior.
I don’t know about you. I know it’s true in my case. I like to feel smart. Or at least not inferior. I’ll struggle and strive to prove it. Except it never really works.
The point of today’s email is to be like that wise old owl.
Like Jim Camp and Robert Collier and John D. say, there’s real power in shutting up and letting your adversary feel okay, smart, in letting him mentally strut.
It’s the kind of thing you want to do if you’re selling or negotiating.
I’ll only add a little bit, which has nothing to do with selling or negotiation.
And that’s that the only times I’ve really felt okay is when I stopped trying to do anything to feel okay.
Something for you to consider, or to entirely ignore.
As for the business end of this email:
You won’t hear vanity discussed often in copywriting courses. But you will find it analyzed in several different ways in Round 19 of my Copy Riddles program, which deals with a sexy technique for writing bullets that leave other copywriters green with envy.
If you’d like to find out more about Copy Riddles: