Imagine the unlikely scenario that you are Marco Polo, the 13th-century Venetian trader. Humor me for a minute.
Say you’re Marco Polo. And you decide, against your mother’s begging and pleading, to set out and seek your fortune in a faraway, exotic land, two continents away.
You pack up your entire life’s savings — an impressive treasure chest filled with gold — and you set off on the difficult and scary journey into the unknown, over stormy seas, vast deserts, and rugged mountain passes.
Finally, you make it. You arrive to the great kingdom, China.
The next morning, you head to the marketplace.
You open up your treasure chest. You take out your gold. You proudly stack it up in front of the Chinese silk merchants.
This is it. The moment you’ve been waiting for, that you worked so hard for.
You wink at the Chinese silk merchants, and you tilt your head at the gold you’ve stacked up.
But instead of the silk merchants showing surprise and delight in their faces, unrolling bales and bales of silk for you to choose from, and bickering and fighting over you, they just stand there and stare at your gold.
“What is that?” they ask.
“It’s gold,” you reply with a tinge of irritation, “the most valuable and prized form of currency!”
The Chinese just shake their heads. “Not here,” they say. “We use silver here.” And then they start to scatter, their interest drawn elsewhere.
That’s a little allegory I heard a few days ago, in an interview with John Bodi, a pickup artist.
Bodi said he uses this allegory to explain some important facts to men. The currency that trades in Man Land, the currency that many men have been accumulating their whole lives — car, career, bicep curls at the gym — is simply not the currency that they trade over there, in that exotic and distant land, where women live.
Is that true?
It doesn’t really matter. This is not a newsletter about pickup.
I wouldn’t even have shared this allegory with you, except that the day after I heard it, I was listening to a seminar by marketing guru Dan Kennedy. And Dan said the same exact thing, minus the allegory:
“A very hard to swallow thing, but I think necessary to swallow, is that these traditional credentials, this attempt to influence by resume and qualifications, or concern about the lack thereof, is completely irrelevant to influencing people.”
Dan was not talking about pickup. He was talking about writing for influence, so you can make money while running the kind of lean and profitable business you want to run.
If you have gold, says Dan, think twice about trotting it out, because it’s not what impresses your audience. And if you don’t have gold, that’s no reason not to seek your fortune as an influence merchant.
Maybe you find this hard to swallow.
All I can say is I’m not trying to change your mind. I’m just sharing an idea that might be useful to you.
It would be a shame to set off on a journey to the Kingdom of Influence, only to find you don’t have the currency they trade there.
The only bigger shame would be not to set off on the journey at all, and to deny yourself the adventures, fame, and fortune that can result, just because you mistakenly believe you need gold to trade there, and you don’t have any on hand.
“Quit teasing Bejako,” I hear you say. “Let’s say I entertain your idea for a minute, which I’m not saying I do. So what is the currency that they trade over there?”
For that, I will only point you to my Daily Email Habit service.
Each day, it gives you daily prompts or “puzzles” to help you consistently write a daily email newsletter. But these are not random, arbitrary prompts.
Instead, I choose the strategically, for the exact purpose of building up your currency of influence online.
Qualifications are not required. Neither is a resume.
And what is needed, that you already have.
In case you’d like to find out what it is, or even start building up your influence treasure chest today: