How careless and maybe even harmful was my email yesterday. I just didn’t realize what I was getting you into.
I’ll explain everything.
But first, let me tell you about a 72-year-old Florida woman I’ll call Susan.
Starting in 2019, Susan fell deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole that is QAnon.
Each day, she spent many hours binging on conspiracy videos and scrolling through that freedom-figthing app, Telegram.
Susan’s daughter, Karen, watched all this in horror.
Now, I’m personally not sure what the harm is in a retired, 72-year-old lady thinking that Hilary Clinton is harvesting adrenochrome from the living bodies of young children.
But Karen and Susan live together. And I guess it can get exhausting if all your mom ever wants to talk about is Satanic pedophiles.
So Karen tried everything to get her mom to snap out of her QAnon haze.
Karen tried listening patiently. She got angry. She threw facts and reason in her mom’s face.
Nothing worked.
But then Karen got lucky.
She found something that’s completely snapped her mom out of her QAanon habits…
… a safe, positive, apolitical alternative:
Wordle.
I talked about Wordle yesterday. It’s a little word game that’s been going viral over the past few months.
I even casually recommended you check it out.
I should have been more careful.
Because as the story of Susan above shows, Wordle and QAnon have lots in common. I’m not kidding.
Both QAnon and Wordle are fundamentally puzzles.
They feature clues, and with work, reveal more clues.
Both create an atmosphere of tension, of uncertainty, of consequence.
Both allow you to feel progress as you work to resolve that tension.
And finally, both offer a simple, clear solution… one that takes all the clues and snaps them together in a perfect fit.
The result at the end is an addicting emotional payoff. And the urgent desire to go for another spin.
Like Susan above:
”Now she spends as much as 2 to 3 hours per day,” her daughter Karen said, “playing bootleg Wordle on another site that lets you play as much as you like. I’m not even joking.”
So my point is, be careful when you play Wordle. If the New York Times ever decides to shut it down or put it behind a paywall, you might find yourself craving a fix and getting sucked into QAnon…
… or maybe even something worse.
Like getting obsessed with my Gospel of Insight Marketing book.
Because you can create the same feeling that Wordle and QAnon create with your own writing.
You can flood people with satisfaction… give them the feeling it all makes sense… and create a need for more of the same.
That’s what that my Insight book is about, or at least that’s the promise of it. And as usual, I’ll use the ideas I’m writing about to write the actual book itself.
That’s all in the future though. But if you’re into this puzzle stuff, then keep your antenna up. I’ll drop more clues in the coming days and weeks. Sign up here if you want to be in on the comms.