Three years ago, I read a viral, trending article titled, “When Orcs Were Real.” And three years in, I’m still thinking about it.
The article starts like this:
All cultures have stories of creatures that are like humans but more beastly, frightening, strong, and cruel than us, and that live by night instead of day.
Gotta scare the kids with something, right?
The question is why this story in particular is scary.
According to the argument in that article, it’s because this story taps into some kind of genetic memory in us.
There was a time, says the article, when orcs were real.
The orcs were bigger than us. Stronger than us. More brutish than us. They were the night to our day.
We, the race of men, were at war with the orc.
For a long time, the orcs’ strength and size meant they were winning. In fact, the orcs came to a rusty scimitar’s distance of wiping out mankind.
But for reasons we can only guess at today, the tide shifted. Men started to win the battles with the orcs. And then we won the war and wiped them entirely, to the point where now they only exist in our nightmares and on our Netflix viewing history.
Now here’s the kicker. This isn’t just some kind of evolutionary psychology handwaving to explain scary bedtime stories.
The orcs were real, and this is backed by the latest archeology and genetics research.
There was in fact an orc race that lived in the shadows, alongside men, for tens of thousands of years.
From what we know of them by their remains, they were like us but bigger. According to their skeletons, they were packed with muscle, and were several times stronger than the strongest of us.
Based on the shapes of their throats and mouths, it seems they couldn’t speak the way we can, but they could communicate in grunts and snorts.
They had a snout-like nose, large teeth, powerful jaws. Going by the size of their eye sockets, they had enormous eyes, meaning they lived by night. Most probably, they were covered in thick fur.
From their dwelling places, we know these orcs were experts in the use of short- and long-range weapons. They fed mostly on raw meat. They were deadly even to the most deadly animals — mammoths, wolves, cave lions.
They were also cannibals. And along with eating their own filthy kind, they hunted and ate men.
Who were these monsters? Today, we know them as the Neanderthals.
When I read that article and I got to the part about the Neanderthals, I said, “Whoa! Never knew that! Or never thought about it that way!”
The little that I knew about Neanderthals before, and what I learned about them through this article, suddenly snapped together into a new consistent picture, which fit what I had experienced first hand — which was about 10 hours of Lord of the Rings movies and a few months’ of reading Tolkien books when I was a teenager.
“So that’s why it’s so intriguing and dramatic,” I thought to myself.
When Orcs Were Real is an example of what I call insightful writing.
The article produced that feeling of insight in me — and not only me. That’s why the article went viral online, getting hundreds of likes, reshares, comments, and even YouTube videos being made after it.
I had this article in mind when gave the Age of Insight presentation a little over a year ago.
In fact, call 2 of that training (there were three calls in total) was all about the how-to of writing for insight using the underlying technique that’s there in the Orcs Were Real article.
That technique is the same technique that you can find in the “American Parasite” video sales letter by Craig Clemens, which went so viral that Joe Rogan tweeted it, not realizing he’s pushing a 40-minute ad to his audience.
The same technique is also there in the End of America VSL, which brought in something like 500,000 new premium subscribers and doubled Stansberry Research’s revenue.
But let’s talk turkey.
Until tomorrow, specifically until Monday, March 4, 2024, at 12 midnight PST, I’m promoting Kieran Drew’s High Impact Writing.
High Impact Writing shows you how to write on LinkedIn in and Twitter to build an audience and grow your business.
As a free bonus to High Impact Writing, I’m also offering the recordings of Age of Insight.
Age of Insight shows you how to have something insightful-sounding to say when you do get on Twitter or LinkedIn.
High Impact Writing sells for $297 until tomorrow night. Age of Insight sold for $297 the one and only time I offered it before.
So you buy one, you get one free. But more importantly, with these two trainings together, you get influence skills and techniques that can change the trajectory of your life and your business for life.
For the full info on High Impact Writing: