The Psychology Of Money

How to write flawless transitions from your anecdotes to your sales pitches every day

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A couple months ago, I wrote an email about a surprising passage in Morgan Housel’s Psychology of Money.

The passage talked about the Wright brothers, and how they were publicly flying airplanes for four years before newspapers took any notice.

To which I got a reply from a reader, asking about another interesting anecdote from the same book:

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I’m curious if you could give some examples as to how you would segway the passage of the Bill Gates and Lakesides computer study program story in the chapter about “Luck and Risk” to make different points?

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The topic of the actual Bill Gates story is irrelevant here. The point is simply this:

It might be a worthwhile exercise to sit down with an interesting story you come acrosss… write down different morals to squeeze out of that story… and sketch out how you would link that to what you sell.

But I’ve never done it, and I don’t plan on starting now.

Instead, what I do whenever I come across a story that I find surprising is just write it down, and have it sitting around for when it fits naturally into a point I want to make.

In my experience, this is the only way to write flawless transitions from your anecdotes to your sales pitches every single day.

Sometimes, surprising stories I’ve written down sit around for days, weeks, months, or years before I use them for something. And there are many surprising facts and stories and anecdotes I’ve written down and never used at all.

That’s ok.

Surprising facts and stories and anecdotes are free and plentiful. Millions of books are filled with them. Plus each day of your own life will provide a dozen new ones if you only keep your antennae up.

What’s not free or plentiful is your readers’ attention or ongoing interest.

And shoehorning a story to make a point that doesn’t really fit… or worse yet, pulling out a bland, predictable takeway from an otherwise good story, is a great way to lose readers’ interest today and to make it harder to get tomorrow.

I have more to say about the topic of keeping readers’ interest for the long term.

Specifically, I have a simple three-word question I use to guide all my emails, which you might also benefit from.

I’ve revealed this three-word question before, but perhaps you’ve missed it.

In case you would like to find out what it is, you can do that on the free training I will put on in a few days’ time.

The training will cover how I write and profit from this newsletter that you are reading now.

It will happen on Monday January 22, 2024 at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. But you will have to be signed up to my list first. Click here to do so.

Do you know the flip side of this famous historical anecdote?

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Everybody and his monkey knows the story of how, back in 1903, some smug realist at the New York Times wrote that heavier-than-air flight won’t be possible for another “one million to ten million years.”

And then, several weeks later, the Wright brothers took off and flew for the first time.

Like I say, you probably know that.

But what you might not know is the flip side of this story, how little anybody cared about that first flight, or the second flight, or the third, then or for years afterwards.

​​Here’s an excerpt from a book I just finished reading:

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Several years went by before the public grasped what the Wrights were doing; people were so convinced that flying was impossible that most of those who saw them flying at Dayton in 1905 decided that what they had seen must be some trick without significance — somewhat as most people today would regard a demonstration of, say, telepathy. It was not until May, 1908 — nearly four and a half years after the Wright’s first flight — that experienced reporters were sent to observe what they were doing, experienced editors gave full credence to these reporters’ excited dispatches, and the world at last woke up to the fact that human flight had been successfully accomplished.

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That’s an interesting historical anecdote.

I had never heard it before.

It can be saved and used effectively in lots of different contexts. I would like to pass it on to you if you write and need lots of sticky messages to make your points more effectively.

I also want to clue you in to a resource that’s full of such sticky messages.

​​I already wrote about it in a recent email.

I’m talking about Morgan Housel’s Psychology of Money. I finished reading it a few days ago. It’s where I got the passage above, even though Housel didn’t write it — he’s just citing yet another book in his own book.

The Psychology of Money was published just over three years ago. And yet, it has over 30,000 5-star reviews on Amazon.

That’s not because the advice in the book is so new or so inspiring (“Save more”).

Rather, Housel’s Psychology of Money is so popular because it’s so effectively written, using lots of historical illustrations and novel metaphors and personal stories.

If you want to see how to write a book that keeps selling itself based on its content alone, then The Psychology of Money is worth a skim, read, or even some careful reverse engineering. To get your own copy:

https://bejakovic.com/housel