This morning I was reading an article about Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote the massive bestseller Eat Pray Love, and the “dizzying numbers of women” who have followed in her wake to narrate their lives and loves online. This passage made me tingle:
===
On social media, many of the most chaotic and emotionally lawless people you’ve ever known are posting on a regular basis about having at long last achieved inner peace. Many among us, after observing this cringe-inducing side effect of regular self-narration at mass scale, have given up altogether on sincere ideas of personal epiphany.
===
I’m not on social media, but I am on email, a lot. And the passage above sounds exactly what I feel when I read the often-emailed phrase, “This changes everything.”
For fun or frustration, I just typed that phrase into my Gmail and came up with 52 exact matches in the subject line or preview text.
From coaches… crypto peddlers… course creators… Internet marketing gurus… two A-list copywriters… a B-list copywriter… and about a half-dozen investing mavens who act as the face of various Agora newsletters.
Whenever I hear somebody who has been in business for more than 2 weeks breathlessly announce that “This changes everything,” I conclude that this person or brand is either 1) chaotic or 2) the sales equivalent of “emotionally lawless” ie. unscrupulous.
And I lose a bit of respect for them, if I have any left. I also become a little more jaded towards the idea that anything being advertised at me can be worthwhile.
I’m telling you this as a kind of public service announcement, so you can beware of people using this phrase, or maybe, so I can warn you against using the same in your own marketing.
My second public service announcement is to remind you of my recently reopened Skool group, Daily Email House.
“This changes everything?” I hear you asking.
No.
But Daily Email House might change a few things in your life or head to help you, as the current mission for the group says, “use your email list to pay for a house.”
If you’d like to join me inside: