Today I’d like to recommend a book to you, not just to buy and hoard, but to actually read and apply.
A bit of background:
I myself have a book, my charmingly titled “10 Commandments of Con Men, Pickup Artists, Magicians, etc.”
I regularly go on Amazon to check on that book — how it’s selling, if there are any nasty new reviews, if it’s maybe reached bestseller status.
As I’ve been doing this, over the course of weeks, months, years, and decades, I’ve been seeing a curious book pop up in the in the “Customers Also Bought” section. The full title of that book I’ve kept seeing:
“The Most Powerful Sentence of All Time: A Fable About Persuasion”
As I tend to do, I went snooping. I found the guy who wrote the book. Turns out he’s got an email list and he writes interesting daily emails about, well waddya know, persuasion.
After a few months of lurking on this guy’s email list, I actually replied to one of his emails. We started chatting. We got on a Zoom call and talked. We got chummy.
Somewhere along the line, Neil, for that is the name of the dude behind the Most Powerful Sentence Of All Time, picked up and read my 10 Commandments book.
I decided to pick up and read his book as well.
And that, dear reader, is the short version of how I got to where I am right now, sitting on my couch, wearing my Garfield pajamas, writing you to recommend Neil’s Most Powerful Sentence Of All Time.
I’m recommending it to you for one very simple reason:
Neil’s book is a recipe book for what copywriters call the “Big Idea.”
In copywriting land, where I used to live for many years, everybody will tell you about the importance of the Big Idea.
The trouble is, nobody can tell you what the Big Idea really is, or how to get one.
There’s a lot of handwaving.
Occasionally, there are some criteria thrown out, like “interesting,” “easy to understand,” “convincing,” “useful,” none of which is particularly easy or useful.
Sometimes, people (myself included) just give up altogether and tell you to come up with 100 ideas, and to throw them to the lions’ den of your market. If any of the ideas survives, why, it must be the Big Idea.
In short, nobody really has a recipe, a process for coming up with a Big Idea, or for shaping and polishing some kind of a promising but rough hunch into a clear and precise sentence that is immediately interesting, easy to understand, useful, convincing etc.
Well, nobody except Neil. And he gives it to you in his book.
Btw, Neil’s book is written as a parable.
Unfortunately, it’s not the kind of parable with talking bears or rabbits. This parable features people.
But it is written as fiction. And because of that, it’s likely to suck you in and make reading about this important topic both enjoyable and memorable.
Let me wrap this up.
French chateau owner and Madison Avenue copywriter David Ogilvy once wrote:
“Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea.”
If you don’t want almost all your future campaigns to pass like a ship in the night, here’s where to go: