If, like me, you’re into pop psychology, you’ve probably heard the following (ahem) fascinating, dramatic, and yet true story:
A UFO cult was expecting a UFO to land in Chicago on Dec 21 1954, and whisk away the believers before a huge tidal wave wiped out the face of the Earth.
December 21 came and went. No UFO came. No tidal wave came either.
The UFO cult was headed by a woman named Dorothy Martin. She was in contact with the aliens via automatic writing (and sometimes over the phone).
In the hours after the supposed UFO arrival failed to materialize, Martin got the message that the aliens had decided to spare the Earth because of the good work of the UFO cult in spreading the word.
That’s the dramatic part. Here’s the fascinating part:
The UFO cult, which until then had been very secretive, very hostile to publicity, very closed to outsiders, suddenly went on a PR blitz, announcing to the world the good news. It was no longer enough for the cultists to be in direct contact with powerful aliens who had decided to spare the Earth from destruction — everybody else had to know about it too.
I’ve written about this before in my newsletter. I got the story from Robert Cialdini’s book Influence, in the chapter on social proof. Cialdini in turn got the story from the book When Prophecy Fails, a classic of pop psychology, which was written by the researchers who infiltrated the UFO cult in order to study it.
Only one problem:
I was wrong. Cialdini was wrong. I mean, we were wrong to report this as a fascinating, dramatic, yet true story.
Today, with recently dug up reports and research, it appears that the original research was tainted, exaggerated, or even made up. As many as half the cult members were actually researchers who infiltrated the cult. One of the infiltrating researchers became a cult leader, and told people to say and do things that would look good in the book. Several of the legit cult members changed their tune and walked after the UFO failed to show, completely negating the claims of “cognitive dissonance,” a term this book introduced.
Over the past few years, it has seemed like all the dramatic, memorable social science stories were invented:
* The marshmallow test, in which kids who could delay marshmallow gratification did dramatically better later in life. (The result doesn’t hold up when you control for some obvious other variables.)
* The Harvard “power poses” research, where standing like Superman — head high, arms akimbo, legs apart — raises your testosterone and lowers your cortisol. (Sloppy data collection and wishful statistics.)
* The Stanford prison experiment, where ordinary people suddenly turned into monsters when put into positions of power. (The “guards” were apparently told what part to play.)
So what’s left? What do we have when all the good stories are gone?
What’s left is a mountain of boring, incremental progress, unintelligible and uninteresting to anybody except the experts in the field, which grows decade by decade, century by century.
Harumph. If you didn’t like that, I’m afraid you’re gonna hate this:
I’ve been listening to a bunch of big-time, behind-the-scenes marketers who do not primarily make their money by teaching or by via their personal brands. (These interviews are part of bonus #5 in my recent Tour de Commandments bonus bundle.)
One thing I’ve noticed these behind-the-scenes, big-time marketers say is some version of:
“There’s really no secret to the success of this funnel/offer/business. It’s just been a bunch of small and incremental improvements and fixes over time, which added up.”
It’s instinctive for all of us to search for the dramatic, memorable breakthrough that upends our entire understanding of how things work. It’s a good story. Our brains like it. It sticks in the memory and it invites us to share it with others.
The real story though is about smaller, less dramatic, even boring improvements that accumulate.
I’ll leave you today with that idea, and by pointing you to my Most Valuable Email training.
The Most Valuable Email trick, which I teach in this training, started out as a way of making my emails more fun to readers and myself.
It’s since become the guiding philosophy of this newsletter, and it’s become a transformative practice that has allowed me to accumulate hundreds of small improvements in the way I write, in the way I create offers, in the way I position myself.
Over time, it’s added up.
If you too have a personal brand online, and if you want to rack up your marketing and persuasion wizard points, slowly but surely, over time, to levels that you cannot even imagine now: