A couple days ago, I sent out an email about charging out, King Arthur-like, to fight dragons on the borders of your kingdom. That was my metaphor for defending your business interests.
I got lots of interesting replies to that email, and none more so than from Shawn Cartwright. Shawn runs TCCII, an online martial arts academy. He wrote:
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While I sympathize with your position on this, I’d just like to ask this question…
Why are dragons always made out to be the bad guys?
Seriously…
Imagine you were the millenia old beast who woke up one day to find a bunch of unwashed simian descendants using your pristine mountain stream as a latrine?
Or erecting god-awful ugly structures made from your trees they took without so much as a please or thank you.
And shot at you when you went down to have a little chat with them to sort it out.
And then organized some sort of genocidal campaign to eradicate you and take all your stuff.
Is it any wonder they might be a little ill-tempered?
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Shawn asks a great question. In response to it, my mind jumped to a tense scene from the 2015 Disney documentary, Monkey Kingdom.
The scene shows a tiny and cute macaque monkey dangling from a vine a few inches above some murky water.
This monkey is a single mother, the narrator tells you. But not only that. She’s also at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
Higher-caste females are safe up in a tree eating figs. But even though there’s plenty to go around, these higher-caste females are not willing to share any food with the low-born single mom.
So she is forced to roam deep into the jungle to feed her family. That’s why she’s now dangling above the murky water, so she can harvest some water lily seeds.
And then the scene shifts. It suddenly shows a monitor lizard.
The lizard is huge. It’s seven feet long, three or four times the size of the tiny monkey mom.
The lizard is ugly. It’s thick and black and scaly, with a long flame-like tongue flickering in and out of its mouth.
And worst of all, the lizard is treacherous. At first it’s lurking at the edge of the water. But then it slips in silently, and swims under the surface to where the water lilies are.
So why are dragons always made out to be the bad guys?
Because our race and their race have been at war since time immemorial. Because this feeling is baked into us. Because it’s bare-metal.
Bare-metal is my term for the fact that if you keep asking why long enough, you eventually always get to the answer, just because. Because it’s how we humans are. Because it’s right, whether or not it’s historically fair to the dragons, whether or not it makes sense in today’s world.
If you want to influence people, then write about bare-metal topics.
It’s not just slimy, treacherous serpents.
I gave you a few other bare-metal topics above, in that monkey scene setup. But there are many more.
I rewatched Monkey Kingdom last night. And because I’ve become obsessive through writing this newsletter, I took notes every minute or two.
I found 40+ bare metal topics in Monkey Kingdom. They are brilliantly illustrated because it’s monkeys. Monkeys are close enough to us to be relevant, but different enough to illustrate each bare-metal topic distinctly.
So my advice to you is, watch Monkey Kingdom. And take notes.
If I ever create my mythical AIDA School, this movie will be a part of the first-semester curriculum.
And now for something completely different:
Specifically, my Most Valuable Email course.
That course is connected in some way to today’s email, though only lightly.
That don’t change the fact that, as the name of it says, this course is about a type of email that has been most valuable for me.
If you also write about marketing or persuasion or copywriting, this type of email might be just as valuable for you.
To find out more about it — and about love, death, and politics — go here: