A couple days ago, I wrote an email in which I used the Matrix as a pop culture illustration. To which I got a reply from a guy who said, yea that’s great and all but “what if your reader hasn’t seen the movie and therefore doesn’t have a clue what the h*ll you’re talking about?”
A reasonable question… but something about the tone of it — it’s amazing how that comes through — made my terrier ears perk up.
I looked up this Matrix Denier to see if I’d had any previous email interactions with him.
And oh boy. Here’s the sorry story:
Two years ago, I ran a launch for my Copy Riddles program.
The Matrix Denier was signed up to my list at the time.
He replied on the last day of the launch to tell me that I name-drop famous copywriters a lot… that he wouldn’t be buying my course because my emails aren’t good enough to impress him… and that, rather than create my own offers, I should go back and study the work of people like Andre Chaperon and Ben Settle.
I shrugged, and I used this reply for a new email that I sent out to my list to promote my Copy Riddles course.
The Matrix Denier didn’t like this, and he wrote me in an offended and hurt tone to say so. Which I again turned into an email, and sent it out to my list as part of a sequence of emails about the different types of denial we all engage in.
This was the straw that broke the Denier’s back. He unsubscribed from my list, and as the reason why, he fired this farewell shot:
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“You’re simply too dumb to be helped. I tried twice & you can’t tell the difference between a troll & someone with advice. Good luck. You’ll need it.”
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Like I said, now he’s back on my list. Well, he was, until yesterday, when I unsubscribed him. No sense in wasting perfectly good Matrix analogies on someone who would rather complain than go see a movie I specifically recommended as great marketing fodder.
The point of this being that a couple years have passed.
I’m still writing… my status in the industry has grown… and so has the number of people who recommend me and point new readers to my newsletter.
Meanwhile, I don’t know what the Matrix Denier has gained in those two years. Going by the tone of his replies, and by the fact he even took the time to write me, just so he could complain and say “But what about me?” makes me think he hasn’t gone far from where he was two years ago.
In other words, you might as well get going now.
Time passes unstoppably. It’s a trite observation, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
Whatever it is that you’re doing or want to do, if you start now, and start accumulating a bit of something valuable every day — whether of skills or money or subscribers — then you can be in much better position in a couple of years, while those around you are left standing still.
And on that note, my Copy Riddles was and remains a great program, the best thing I sell. If you’d like to find out more about it or use it to start accumulating your copywriting skills, starting today: