I’ve spent the past hour preparing and attempting to write this email. Here are some of the ideas I approached and then discarded:
1. The strange, 100-year-old, menage-a-trois history that inspired Wonder Woman
2. How even classic comic books like Superman had woke politics behind them
3. A demonstration of an idea I heard during a Dan Kennedy seminar, that the opening of your writing should set the emotional tenor even if everything else is discarded
4. An email in which I pretend to promote the Brent Charleton offer that’s currently being promoted by Ian Stanley, Dan Ferrari, and Justin Goff, but then I come clean that I am in fact not promoting it (there was a point there, really)
5. Something like in the movie Fight Club, where they splice in a frame from a porn movie, but where I would do something similar but in an email? (I have no idea how)
6. Running a lottery within the actual email, with money bets and money prizes (I realized this is probably illegal)
7. Kicking off a P.T. Barnum-like hoax
8. Telling a personal story about myself and purposefully holding back key information
9. Writing up an email using the FREE framework I devised during my Age of Insight training (FREE is my alternative to the AIDA framework)
10. Thinking up some way to illustrate the following quote by legendary music producer Rick Rubin, who said, “Never judge an idea based on the description of the idea, show it to me”
I played around with all 10 of these ideas. Somehow, they didn’t come together. Maybe they will in the future. But even if they don’t, that’s fine, because at least I have my email for today.
The point I want to make to you today is something I read in John Cleese’s book Creativity.
Cleese, as you might know, was one of the members of comedy sketch troupe Monty Python. Later he had one of the most successful British sitcoms of all time, Fawlty Towers. He also made some very funny movies, including A Fish Called Wanda.
All that’s to say, Cleese is a creative guy. And in his book Creativity, about creativity, Cleese writes:
“You can’t have a new idea until you’ve gotten rid of an old one.”
That might seem obvious, but maybe seeing my discarded ideas above will make it stick in your head better. And the next time you are struggling to come up with one good idea, maybe will remember to quickly discard 10 bad ideas first, so you don’t end up taking an hour+ to write an email like I just did.
Anyways, all this was really just a build up to a little promotional plug I am about to make.
It’s for my Most Valuable Email course. What might not be obvious is that each of those 10 discarded ideas above was my unsuccessful attempt to put the Most Valuable Email trick in action.
It normally doesn’t take that long. But even if it does, it’s almost always worth it, at least in my experience.
In any case, if you would like to find out Most Valuable Email trick, and even start putting it in action (you can use any of my 10 ideas above if they work for you), here’s where to go: