Last night, in a desperate hunt for a movie to watch, I turned to the Rotten Tomatoes 100% Club. That’s a list of some 370 movies that have had uniformly positive reviews — a perfect 100% Rotten Tomatoes score.
This led me to Man On Wire, a 2008 documentary about a man named Philippe Petit. In case you haven’t seen this movie, the gist is:
Petit was a tightrope walker. And obsessive.
Back in 1968, when he was just 18 years old, Petit hit upon the idea of walking on a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center.
Problem:
The towers hadn’t been built yet. So Petit spent the next six years scheming, practicing, and waiting in preparation for his audacious August 7, 1974 walk between The South and North Towers, which lasted 45 minutes.
But here’s a question that maybe immediately pops into your head, as it did into mine when I heard about this stunt:
How exactly do you stretch a wire across the two towers? The wire weighed 200 kilograms, or about 450 lbs. Petit was doing his setup clandestinely, in the middle of the night, while hiding from security guards, so helicopters and cranes were out of the question.
So what the hell do you do?
You can’t just hoist the wire up from the ground — it’s a 400 meter drop (over 1,300 feet). You can’t just toss the heavy wire across the 40 meters (130 feet) that separate the corners of the two towers.
A hint comes early in the movie.
You see a silhouette of a man packing things into a bag. It’s supposed to represent Petit.
Along with other unrecognizable equipment, the silhouette gives away something familiar — an arrow.
The fact is, one of Petit’s henchmen shot an arrow with a bow from one tower to the another. And that arrow had a fishing line attached to the end of it.
They used that first fishing line to pull across a slightly sturdier string.
Then they used that string to pull across a strong rope.
And finally, they used the rope to pull across the actual wire, which like I said, weighed as much as an adult melon-headed whale.
Maybe see where I’m going with this.
Because when I saw this in the movie, a lightbulb went off in my head.
“I know this technique!” I shouted in the darkness.
But not from tightrope walking. I know this technique from sales. I first read about it in one of Gary Bencivenga’s Marketing Bullets. Gary called it one of the “the most powerful master strategies I ever learned.”
You can find the explanation of this sales technique below. But not just that.
You can also find lots of inspiring personal stuff about Gary at the page below. Such as for example, that for a long time, Gary was such a bad copywriter that he considered giving up and becoming a mailman. He even went to the post office to pick up a job application.
The only reason Gary stuck with copywriting, the only reason he persevered and eventually became so successful, the only reason we know of him today, was that he was told at the post office that they are not hiring at the moment, and when they do start hiring again, thousands of prior applicants will be ahead of Gary in line.
So Gary stuck with copywriting and marketing.
And one of the biggest things that Gary learned in the years that followed, and used in all his copy and marketing, from his sales letters to his olive oil business, was this “Man On Wire” sales technique. In case you are interested: