Thursday, 11:49am
Tampa Bay, FL
“What kind of music do you play here, Bob?” “Oh, we got both kinds. Country and western.” (Bob, the bar owner, and Jake Blues in “The Blues Brothers”)

Howdy…

Each year around July 4th, I like to post something on the blog about the First Amendment to the Constitution.

The part about free speech remains a protection that Americans enjoy (most of the time)… while much of the rest of the world refuses to even consider the concept.

Even otherwise enlightened joints like Europe have an itchy relationship with free speech.

Hell, we couldn’t get such a protection passed here in the States now.  If it hadn’t been wedged into the Constitution by Jefferson in the Bill of Rights 240 years ago, it would still be an unrealized pipe dream of writers and deep thinkers everywhere.

Make no mistake:  Your freedom to write blogs without government interference… as well as your right to use words like “fuck” to your heart’s content while making your point… is protected (mostly).

And this freedom is what fueled America’s dominance in stand up comedy.

Hey, don’t scoff.  Satire, ridicule, and funny stuff very much qualifies as deep thinking.

In fact, it’s how public opinion gets changed the fastest.

And this freedom has been denied to almost every human who has walked the planet in our history.

So don’t take it lightly.  Your ancestors would have killed for such a seemingly obvious privilege (and both did kill to get it, and die defending it).

The Man don’t like free speech.

Bugs him.  Irritates his sense of authority and moral dominance.

Well, fuck The Man.

For every writer who was or will be jailed for writing the truth (as he or she sees it)…

… and for every deep thinker who has been ostracized or exiled (or beheaded) for daring to challenge The Way Things Are…

… here is my toast to you, on the eve of the anniversary of our country’s bid for independence.

We’re not perfect, by a long shot.  We are, in fact, extremely dysfunctional on most levels — government, commerce, entertainment, Fourth Estate, and on down the list.

Still, I love this rickety old experiment in democracy.

As a writer, it’s part of my job to love and enjoy the good parts.  I owe it to all the poor slobs who preceded me in the gig… ink-stained wretches who could barely dream of the freedoms that writers enjoy today.  (Let alone the amazing stage presented by the Web for eveyone with something to say.)  (And even those with nothing to say.)

Mmmm-whaw!  Big kiss to the Constitution.

Our rights are fragile, as recent administrations have made abundantly clear.

Love them, hug them, nurture and protect them with passion and action.

And, most of all…

… enjoy the hell out of them.

To that end, I am proud to introduce another guest post by my friend and colleague Kevin Rogers.  (That stand-up-comic-turned-killer-copywriter who was also the very first writer to guest-post on this blog a while back.)

I laughed out loud several times reading this post, and I hope you get the same raw enjoyment.

The lessons are good ones, too.

So, without further ado… put your hands together and give a rousing Marketing Rebel Rant welcome to our guest, Kevin Rogers.

Kevin Rogers, everybody.

Take it away, Kevin.

And don’t fuck it up.

[Applause, dropped mic, feedback, lights dim...]

Thanks John, I’m honored to be back.

(And a special shout out to everyone who posted jokes and comments last time. Not surprisingly, there’s an army of sharp wits floating around here at camp Carlton.)

I had such a good time examining copywriting tactics through the prism of stand-up comedy on the last post that I’m going back to the well. Only this time let’s flip the script and observe at the art of bombing on stage…

…and how studying the cause and effect can help you avoid “eating the big one” with your marketing campaigns.

One of my first “hell gigs” as a stand-up comic was a deal too good to pass up…

…$75 to drive 600 miles from my apartment in Clearwater, FL to Gadsden, Alabama for one show in a strip mall country bar called Shit Kickerz - or something ridiculous like that.

(Don’t bother doing the math on that. I was 19 and living the dream. Besides, as you’ll see, negative net profit was not my biggest problem on this gig.)

It was a cavernous strip mall dance hall bathed in black light — turning anyone you talked to into a neon cartoon of eyeballs and teeth (bad teeth at that).

Ten minutes before I hit the stage, there were 11 dudes in cowboy hats wandering around looking desperate and 2 girls with poofy bangs drinking bottled beer at the bar.

If this was the audience I’d driven 9 hours to perform for, tomorrow’s trip home was going to feel twice as long. Every cell in my body screamed: Leave now!

The Art of Bombing

When asked to list their worst fears, most people rank public speaking scarier than death.

I believe it was Jerry Seinfeld who pointed out… “that means most people delivering the eulogy at a funeral would rather be in the casket.”

Makes sense.

A classic bombing is almost as painful for the audience as for the performer on stage. I’ve seen some doozies, too. Total meltdowns where the comic snaps and the audience is trapped in their seats… frozen in seething contempt.

The best are those occasions where the comic refuses to go quietly and remains on stage ranting until he’s completely “walked the room” (a comedy phrase for tormenting the audience into getting up and leaving… table by table).

A few comics (Bill Hicks and Andy Kaufman come to mind) made an art form of walking rooms before sobriety or an untimely demise broke them of the habit.

But the truth is, whether you’re an entertainer, a marketer or just the whacky guy at the company picnic, if you’re bold enough to call attention to yourself…

You’re going to bomb eventually.

In fact, I don’t trust anyone who hasn’t crashed and burned a few times. I want my experts wearing scars, don’t you?

Bombing as a comic will cause you to drink a little more and sleep a little less until your next good show… but it’s a necessary evil. Because each soul-drenching death adds another layer to the armor. Preparing you for future battles.

Bombing in marketing, however, can cost you a life savings. Some entrepreneurs never make it past their first tour of duty.

So here to help you avoid such a fate are…

The 3 Mistakes That (Almost Always) Lead To Certain Death.

1. Misjudging your “message to market match.”

One of the most common scenarios John takes on in his famous Hot Seat interventions is… entrepreneurs with a mixed bag of interests trying to be all things to all people.

Which, of course, causes you to be nothing to nobody.

People like to imagine their experts fixated on solving their problem and not much else. So try not to blow the image for them.

My pre-schooler gets freaked out if we run into his teacher at the grocery store. In his mind, any activity she engages in outside of the classroom is a serious breach of their agreement.

She teacher, him student. End of story.

Your customers see you the same way. You get to be the champion of one niche. So, choose wisely.

If you’re a hypnotist/entertainer selling a video on “fertility through guided meditation”… do not mention anywhere in the same ad – or the same website - that you’re also available to perform magic at children’s parties.

No sane woman is taking fertility guidance from “Bonkers the Clown”. So demonstrate your balloon-twisting skills on a totally different site… under a different name… wearing heavy make-up… and a wig.

2.  Wimping out.

This one is crucial… whether you’re speaking at live events or writing direct sales copy, you’ve got to beam with confidence.

Now, there are some pro comics who play the nervous, insecure or ambiguous character (remember Emo Philips?)… but trust me, it’s only an act.

If the crowd were to mistake that meekness for weakness and become aggressive, they’d quickly see another side to the character.

I once watched Bobcat Goldthwait yank an overzealous audience member out of his seat… drag him on stage by the leg… and kick him back off the stage onto the floor.

He then launched right into another joke with that nervous pitchy character voice… and the audience went wild.

Marketing yourself with confidence doesn’t require you to take on a “Rich Jerk” type persona, but you do need to write and speak with gravitas. Always use an active voice rather than a passive one.

(If you don’t know the difference between active and passive RUN to the bookstore and buy “Elements of Style” by Strunk and White.)

Your readers crave leadership.  (Not, leadership is craved by your readers.)

3. Get the crowd behind you BEFORE you take on hecklers.

Most hecklers suck. They’re rude and incoherent and serve no purpose but to interrupt the show.

So for the comic, having to stop the show to tell them, “It’s amazing that out of 100 million sperm, YOU were the fastest swimmer…”

or…

“Hey, man I don’t come to your job and knock the mop out of your hand… can I get back to work here?”

…while good for a quick laugh, is nothing more than a tedious game of Whack-A-Mole.

But, every once in a while, you get a really good heckler. One that shouts out witty jabs at just the right moments (preferably between jokes), and gets a segment of the crowd to rally behind her.

This is a risky scenario marketers also face in this age of Internet forums. The gurus take a beating on message boards… and while it’s RARELY a good idea to respond to the territorial pissings of frustrated wannabes… it can be done to great effect.

The key to success in either situation is to know your final shot before entering the battle, and leading your opponent accordingly.

A few years into my road career, I began welcoming good hecklers because I knew how the game was going to end. And I had a line so good, I could close the show with it.

After lulling the heckler into false confidence, I would feign defeat by saying…

“Look. You’ve been shouting out and disrupting the show all night. We’ve had a little fun with it. But it’s to a point now where it’s unfair to all these good people who paid to see the real show.

So, let’s make a deal. As a peace offering, I’m going to buy you a drink… and all you have to do is keep quiet and sip that drink for the next 5 minutes while I finish up here. Does that sound fair?”

At this point the crowd is touched by the gesture, and the heckler has little choice but to agree. And then I say:

“Great. Waitress… would you bring a vinegar and water to this DOUCHE BAG at table 6!”

Ka-boom! Good night everybody.

Bottom line: You can’t always choose your opponents, but you can always control the battle.

Meanwhile… back at Shit Kickerz…

I had yet to learn any of these survival lessons that night in Alabama. I was introduced to the crowd I described, plus a few more that straggled in unenthusiastically…

…then proceeded to bomb so hard that I literally took up smoking the minute I came off stage. (I had never smoked in my life, but after that – I needed a cigarette!)

Christopher Walken was quoted in the June issue of Esquire. He said:

“When you’re on stage and you know you’re bombing, that’s very, very scary. Because you know you gotta keep going–you’re bombing, but you can’t stop. And you know that a half an hour from now, you’re still gonna be bombing. It takes thick skin.”

I once calculated that every horrifying stage death I endured snipped a week off of the end of my life. (Not to mention the decade of cigarette smoking!)

But I wouldn’t trade it, because the experience makes the time you spend here richer and more productive. Bombing teaches you how not to bomb.

And hopefully this article did, too.

You’ve been great. Enjoy Foghat!

Kevin

P.S. Now that I’ve laid my soul bare, it’s your turn. Tell me about your big bombs, and what you learned from it.

Monday, 12:10pm
Reno, NV
“Let’s just say I was testing the bounds of reality…” (Jim Morrison of The Doors)

Howdy…

We have a winner!

Actually, the winning answer to last Friday’s quiz crashed the gates within ten minutes of the post going live.

But it was good to let the test string out, anyway… because the hard-core thinking and pure cogitation going on was excellent mental exercise.

In fact…

… there was so much fresh thinking in the over 200 responses (as of right now — they’re still trickling in)…

… that I feel compelled to bestow THREE prizes.

One, for the first right answer.  And two more for honorable mentions — one for Best Exhibit Of Pure Kick-Ass Attitude… and another for Cracking Me Up with real wit and cleverness.

I’ll reveal the winners in a moment.

First, though… let’s unravel what we’ve all learned here from this little brain teaser.

Revelation #1: James Surowiecki, in his book “The Wisdom of Crowds”, pointed out how often polls and crowd sampling is dead-on correct.

Crowds aren’t always right, of course.  This is why myth-busting sites like snopes.com serve such a useful role in an advanced society.

(We won’t survive long as a high-tech civilization as long as medieval urban myths cripple the way humans adapt to rapid changes.  For example: Electricity doesn’t “leak” from the sockets in your wall.  A hundred years ago, this was a common myth, though, scaring folks.)

(More modern example: Choose any current email scam… from MicroSoft giving away free computers, to the political conspiracy du jour, to the latest Nigerian money-laundering opportunity.)

The vast majority of the responses to this little quiz we just went through were correct.

If you’d been playing a game show with an “audience survey” option available when you got stuck, you would have had the answer delivered to you by bell curve.

(Surowieki, I believe, even pointed out that this crowd survey option on TV game shows yielded correct answers, by averages, almost without fail.)

Lesson for marketers: Surveys of your target audience rock.

You may not discover the exact way to sell what you offer… but you sure as heck will quickly be handed amazing insight to the wants, needs, fears and suggested price points of your market.

“Survey”, however, was not the right answer.  It’s part of your research, not what you turn to after you’ve got everything in place.

Revelation #2: Though not the right answer, all the folks who said “take action” are at least on the right wavelength.

This gets back to the beef I (and many other front-line marketers) have with MBA programs.

I love education… but you need to know where theory ends and reality begins.

Or you’ll get your head handed to you when you actually start a business that needs to make money.

Too many people have a deep, stubborn resistance to what successful marketers call “movement”.

These resisters have drank way too much of “The Secret” Kool-Aid… and honestly believe that deep thought, brainstorming, theorizing and other brainy pursuits will fuel the engines of success for them.

Uh… no.

Sorry.

That old adage “Success is 1% inspiration and 99% persperation” is true.

Yes, you need brainstorming and deep thinking in the mix.  All the top marketers regularly engage in brutal no-holds-barred brainstorming when they begin a project…

… because they want to collect all the info, all the problems they have overlooked, all the hidden pitfalls others have experienced, and all the ways to make the project WORK…

… before they roll up their sleeves and get busy.

However, too many rookie marketers do the brainstorming…

… and never get busy.

It’s intoxicating to come up with cool new ideas… and plan out how you “could” make it work… if you ever got off your butt and actually got moving.

This is what kills would-be entrepreneurs: They are, at any given time, flush with stuff to do… and none of it ever gets done, because the distraction of the next shiny new idea is more attractive than grinding out the end-game of the current project.

One decent idea, taken all the way to fruition (where sales are made)…

… is more valuable than a thousand GREAT ideas, never realized.

(I’ve dabbled in writing fiction for decades now, as a hobby.  And, just for kicks, I’ve gone to some of the most prestigious week-long “creative writing” programs in the country.

Early on, I made a startling realization:  Most of the folks attending believed they had multiple great novels hiding inside them…

… but were petrified of actually writing any of them.  Those who did get started often discovered their “great” novel was a piece of shit or — worse — needed much more focus and concentration to get finished than the wannabe-writer felt was “fun”.)

(In fiction writing circles, the vast majority of folks don’t want to write a book.  They want to have already written one… and thus enjoy the privileges of being a “real” writer.  Which is bullshit.)

(It’s also killer insight to why there aren’t more successful entrepreneurs online.  It truly is easy to get a biz started, and get it pumping money, online right now.  All the pieces are available — merchant accounts, lead-gathering processes like PPC, easy digital delivery of virtual product, easy drop-shipping of “real” product, simple technology for slamming up websites that work, short-cut mentoring for writing what needs to be written — see Simple Writing System — and on and on.

And yet… at every seminar or gathering of would-be marketers I attend, I meet gaggles of people who are frozen at the threshold of getting their biz started.

They have the “thinking” part down.  Great ideas, fabulous long-range plans, oodles of sizzling passion.

They just can’t pull the trigger.

Their bugaboo is “action”.

Movement gets more shit done in this world than all the pondering in history.  (Write that down and stick it on your wall.)

Revelation #3: Finally…

… the answer to the question “What do you do next”, once you’ve set up the fundamentals of your lead generation, your sales funnel, and everything else necessary to attract, persuade and sell prospects is…

You test.

It’s not glamorous.

It even smacks of “work”, if you need to educate yourself on the process of A/B split testing, or tracking responses, or any of the number-crunching that reveals results.

Nevertheless, it’s what you need to do.

Not sure which headline is better, or which appeal will work best in pay-per-click, or what price will pull in the most sales?  Test.

It’s not voodoo.

Not testing, however, IS relying on voodoo.

Because your intuition as a rookie is completely suspect.

My own intuition, after 25 years in the trenches of business, isn’t infallible, either.

So, we test.

My motto:  It’s a mess to guess.  So, test.

That was fun, wasn’t it?

Even with the answer revealed early on, the brain-challenging thought process people went through is EXCELLENT cognitive exercise.

There were lots of completely wrong answers… but that’s a good thing.  If your head is hazy on the actual processes that successful marketers use, then it’s GOOD to quiz yourself on this stuff.

It helps shake out all the nonsense.

And brings you face-to-face with any holes in your thinking or skill-set.

This, again, is a good thing.  You cannot progress if you are unconsciously ham-strung by faulty thinking or incomplete knowledge.

Okay.

The winners:

First correct answer was given by some dude with “Twitter” as his (or her) handle.  It was the third response through the gate.

So, good job, Twitter.  You’ll be contacted by my personal assistant Diane (assuming you left your correct email address in your profile when you posted your comment).

And a fresh, signed copy of “Kick-Ass Copywriting Secrets of a Marketing Rebel” will be soon be winging it’s way through the mail to you.

Next: The Honorable Mentions.

Brian (comment #130) also gets a copy of “Kick-Ass Secrets”… just because I liked his attitude.   He knew he was too late with the right answer, but dove in anyway…

… and showed some very cool confidence and wit.  Nice job.

And Gail (comment #116) wins a copy, too… for cracking me up with her response.  She definitely looked at this quiz from a different angle.

She’s a rebel.

Rebels get rewarded around here.

To the rest of you… thanks again for participating.

You’re all winners, because you took the time to think this through and give an honest response.  (Well, except for the nutjobs suggesting opium or sex as the right response.  Funny, guys, but being the class clown isn’t the most direct route to success.)

(Though, we’ve got a guest post by an actual stand-up-comedian-turned-successful-copywriter coming up here soon… so maybe that route really does exist…)

Okay, that’s it for today.

That was great fun.  We’ll have to do another quiz here soon.

Be safe celebrating the Fourth.

And for those of you who JUST MISSED being first with the answer: This will teach you not to ignore my emails.

And maybe even convince you to follow me on Twitter.  (I’m johncarlton007.)

Stay frosty,

John

Saturday, 8:42pm
Reno, NV
“Look Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.“ (HAL to astronaut Dave in “2001″)

Howdy…

Okay, let’s do a quickie quiz, what d’ya say?

It’s Saturday evening, after all… and I just got my ass whupped by Michele at Scrabble (her first win, ever, in 10 years of trying) (and I don’t expect to ever hear the last of it anytime soon).

(What’s the time limit on doing the “Ass Whup” dance, mocking your partner, anyway?)

So, to keep my mind off the misery of such a wrenching loss (she accidentally used all 7 letters in her third turn, and that bonus 50 points is what beat me), I’m hiding in my office.

I’ve got maybe 10 minutes before I have to come out and face more taunting and jublilation.

Thus, a quick blog post.  (“Get out of here!  I gotta work…”)

I’m giving a prize away, of course.

Let’s se… how about a fresh copy of “Kick-Ass Copywriting Secrets of a Marketing Rebel” to the first right answer.

I’ve got a nice new one burning a hole on the shelf across from my desk.  It’s got your name on it, Mr/Ms Winner.  I’ll sign it, and have Diane ship it out asap.

Sound good?

Okay.  Here’s the quiz:

The most common question I get from entrepreneurs who are stuck on some part of their marketing…

… is “what do I do next?”

Let’s break it down a bit first:  In the general flow of things, online, you generate leads either from pay-per-click or some mutual affiliate-back-scratching or cool social media blitzing…

… and then you bring those hot, nubile leads to the gateway of your world (which is usually a name-capture page, if you’re looking to build your list)…

… and you proceed to entice them with your evil skills of grabbing attention, and luring them hither…

… into whatever manner you choose to begin your sales process.

The basic structure of this “Hey, c’mere, I wanna show you something” approach hasn’t changed since Web marketing began in earnest.

It’s the part after the basics that get people all hung up and bothered.

Your options within this basic structure, it turns out, are numerous.  Couple of examples:  Straight-on sales page, free offer to dig deeper into your pile of wonder, trial membership…

… you have some choices to make to encourage further engagement with what you offer.

Still, it ain’t rocket science, folks.

If you have a product that your average warm-to-hot prospect should or does want…

… then your main job is to make the process of discovering who you are and what you offer…

… as easy and comfortable as possible.

Yes, there are a few proven steps to go through to ensure the highest possible probability of success (see: Simple Writing System)…

… but the main thing is this: There is no mystery to the “menu” of steps you need to take.

There are choices, sure.

And you gotta make some decisions.

For experienced marketers, this decision-making process is easy, however.

For rookies and entrepreneurs struggling with moving into the Big Leagues… not so much.

So here’s the Big Damn Question for today’s quiz:

What is your first – and only logical, reasonable, righteous and suggested — step to take when presented with a choice of what to do next?

When you’re looking at your pay-per-click campaign, wondering which path to take in cutting up bait for your target market… what do you do?

When you’re crafting a hook for your name-squeeze page, trying to corral as many visitors as possible and build your list to ungodly size… what do you do?

When you’re greasing up your “sales slide” on your main site, looking to bring in the maximum amount of moolah possible with a fast, direct sale… what do you do?

Well?

This is “one answer fits all”.

It is, in fact, a single word.  (Oh, I’m giving it away, aren’t I…)

This is, essentially, the most common question I run into… whether I’m doing bonus “question and answer” teleseminars with new subscribers, or cashing those huge consulting checks that folks pay me for a private hour.

And I sound like a freakin’ broken record answering it.

What do you do?

There IS a single, fabulous answer.

Do you know what it is?

Be the first to nail it in the comments section, and you win that signed copy of “Kick-Ass Copywriting Secrets”.

Okay… go.

Answer (and winner announced) first thing Monday.

Good luck.

Stay frosty,

John

Thursday, 7:13am
Reno, NV
“I yam what I yam.” (Popeye, avoiding introspection.)

Howdy…

Are your routines helping you… or slowly murdering you?

As with most of life, it’s complicated.

And you’re gonna have to spend more than your normal 38 seconds cogitating on this issue if you’re ever gonna make peace with your natural inclination to habitualize your ass into oblivion.

(Side note: During my excellent interview with StomperNet founder Andy Jenkins yesterday, he revealed the startling statistic that most of us now live in 38-second segments.  This, apparently, has been discovered by guys in white coats with clipboards.  The Web has installed a permanent ADD virtual chip in our brains, limiting attention spans to that of a gnat.)

(This is good info for marketers to have, especially when deciding how to position copy, testimonials, video, graphics and other elements on a website for maximum attention-grabbing.  But it’s damned depressing when any conversation requires deeper thought… and you must construct your position with constant virtual shiny objects to hold the interest of  otherwise bright people.)

(I just lost half my audience with that aside, didn’t I.  Sorry.)

Ah… where was I?

Oh, yeah.  Habits and routines.

The omega and alpha of trying to live well.

Routine has both saved my life… and backed me into corners that threaten to ruin me.

So it’s good to stop and examine your routines (and your habits) every so often.  Not just glance at ‘em, and pat ‘em on the head.  But really dig into them…

… questioning their value and their job in your life.

My recommendation: Get in the habit of sitting down for a hour every time the season changes — four times a year — and give yourself a little vicious reality check.

Or, if you travel… put your routines on the witness stand when you get back.

I just spent 3 entire weeks traipsing across Australia.  (I’ll share some photos and cool stories soon.  Ka-wazy adventure.)

And I was forced out of every work-related (and personal-time-related) routine and habit I’ve built up over the past few years.

I’m an old hand at living out of a suitcase in hotels.  Been doing it for decades.

Side note #2: Here’s a quick travel tip, if you’re interested.

I learned the hard way never to check baggage (unless forced to, as when traveling in older planes with miniscule overhead storage)…

… and I’ve used the same beat-to-shit suitcase for 20 years (cuz I know it fits in the bins).  (Plus, I dig having a bag festooned with tags from around the world… currently, there is crap hanging off the straps from Dubai, New York, San Diego, Oz, Italy… it’s just cool.)

I did a 3 city tour, speaking at 3 huge marketing seminars (in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane).  Suit coat, slacks, nice shirts, dress shoes (cuz I look good when I speak)… plus “play clothes” for the rest of the week… all in one carry-on bag.

I am unrepentant about bringing clothes I like to wear, too.  So the coat is cashmere, and most of the shirts are linen-cotton blends that wrinkle just by looking at ‘em.

Your stuff is gonna get creased and crunched.  Don’t sweat it.  Roll clothes tight (it works to limit wrinkles, amazingly), and hang stuff up as soon as you get to your room.  I’ve found that just hanging overnight can smooth out the coat and shirts and slacks enough to avoid ironing (unless you’re a Nazi about crease lines, which I am not).

Hang ‘em in the bathroom while you shower for faster wrinkle release.  (I know some speakers bring a steam iron with them… but I’ve been fine over the years, needing the in-house iron just a handful of times.  Your call.)

I got these tips from Ron LeGrand long ago — one of the most insanely-traveled road warriors I’ve ever met.

You can do just fine with one week’s supply of clothes on a long trip.  Get ‘em laundered by the hotel when necessary (or find a nearby service if the hotel gouges — I spent just $25 to get a load nicely done in Sydney at a 4-star joint, but had to shell out over $40 in Melbourne at an older, needs-a-remodel hotel for the same amount of laundry).

Okay.  End of travel tip.  (Hey — I could work for Fodor’s…)

So…

Back to the story: I know how to live out of a suitcase, in strange towns, getting uprooted over and over again as you travel to new places.

And each time you land in a new environ, any ritual you had in the prior place is suddenly null and void.

It can throw you off your game, if you’re unprepared.

But it also “re-sets” your brain.

And offers a chance to re-examine ALL the routines and habits in your life.

Back home after the jaunt, my first inclination was to settle back into the groove I’ve been in for a while here — including the rituals of work, play, and eating.

But wait — maybe that’s not such a good idea.

Maybe… it’s a better plan to first see how the routines and habits of my life are affecting my wealth and happiness.

For example: I watched maybe twenty minutes of TV while in Australia.  Three-quarters of that time was while visiting James Schramko’s home… and watching a totally batshit game show during a break in the festivities.

(There is no better window into the soul of a foreign culture than looking at what they consider “funny”.  I love Australia… but their TV is incomprehensible to me.)

When I got back home, I felt the invisible pull of the monster plasma screen and lazy-boy calling me…

… and I came face-to-face with an ugly reality: Before I left, I had been racking up an embarrassing amount of TV-viewing each night.

Traveling, I didn’t miss any of it.  I read at night.  Books, the New Yorker, local Aussie papers…

Shit.

I was turning into a couch potato back home, by way of a habit that vanished the moment I was out of sight of the plasma tube.

I’m making a value judgement here: Reading and thinking and reflecting on life is more valuable than watching another rerun of House.

But I had to sit and ponder this for a little bit to realize the truth of the situation.

Because routines and habits are VICIOUS LITTLE BASTARDS.  Who can sneak back into your life like cockroaches under your fridge.

While traveling, I tend to be hyper-aware of my surroundings for long periods of time.  (My biz partner, Stan, may disagree with this, since as a road dog he’s had to pull me out of numerous butt-dumb situations I got myself into from being distracted.  Nevertheless, I experience a hyper-awareness that I get lulled out of when home.))

There’s just a certain “aliveness” to being outside your old comfort zone, among people from a different culture.  (And make no mistake — despite our common language, Australians could never be mistaken for Americans by visiting aliens.  In many ways — meat pies, for instance — they are too far advanced in Oz for yankees to even get our minds around.)

Good habits work FOR you.

Like staking out a dedicated hour every morning to write that book.  If you wait for inspiration, or just lollygag around hoping that an open week will magically appear in your schedule for you to finish it… the book will NEVER get done.

NEVER.

A routine can save you.

Same with meeting deadlines for projects.  No deadline, no finished project.

It’s a rule of nature or something.

Other habits just drain energy from you like a leak in the system, however.

And you probably don’t even know which ones these are in your life, if you haven’t looked lately.  They’ve invisible little energy leaches, rotting your pipes so slowly you don’t notice.

Why not take an evening to sit and examine the mostly unconscious ways you’ve installed “set” events in your life.

Many — like watching TV just cuz it’s there — are robbing you of the joy of being alive.

This culture is wired to turn people into non-thinking zombies… using sugar, mindless entertainment, and truly evil time-wasters like cool video games and iPhone apps best suited for keeping morons entranced.

I know whereof I speak.  I was a zombie-moron of the highest rank, before I got hip to goal-setting (via “Think And Grow Rich”) and broke free of the bonds of frittering away my precious time.

And I’m shocked — shocked! — that I was slipping back so easily with this TV watching bullshit.

The average American TV is on for close to 7 hours a day (I just double-checked with Wiki-answers on this… James had mentioned it while in Oz, expressing amazement at the waste, and my quick research verified it).

That is just sick and wrong.

And anyone desiring to live a better life needs to put energy into NOT being an average American.  With average habits and routines.

Self-examination is hard.  Your brain will resist at first… but you must keep after it, and go deep.

I’m going through a period in my own life where a broad swath of close friends and family are slamming into rough times, health-wise.  This is the second such period I’ve experienced — I don’t know if this shit comes in waves, or if it’s a coincidence.

Regardless, all warnings of mortality should be seen as a reminder to live your life fully each and every day.

Good routines and habits can help you be productive and enjoy the ride.  Bad ones will eat up your time, and one day you’ll blink and your life just went by without notice.

Most of the people you know are zombies.  It’s not their fault — they’re victims of a culture that fosters brain damage.

However, now that I’ve alerted you, it very much IS your fault if you suspect you’re wasting your precious time on bullshit…

… and you don’t do anything about it.

Sorry.  I blew up your excuse.

So, you may as well get with the program.  Summer’s coming on strong, and the nice warm evenings and drawn-out mornings are ripe for ending old habits and starting new ones.

First, you gotta take stock of your current situation.

I’m not gonna get rid of the plasma TV.  But neither am I going to plop down in front of it without a specific reason anymore.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg for me, but you don’t need to know the gory details of my list of bad habits.

You’ve got your own list to worry about.  And start changing.

What do you think?  Is it worth discussing how habits are affecting your life?

Love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Stay frosty,

John Carlton

Tuesday, 12:20pm
Melbourne, Australia
“Buttula spruiks arrival of Spork at his new gig.” (Actual headline in last Thursday’s “The Australian” newspaper)

Howdy…

Reporting in from the fringes of the Outback…

… okay, I’m actually comfortably settled in an intriguing old hotel in Melbourne, nowhere near the Outback.

It still feels like I’m far from home, though.

Two weeks into this March Across Australia now, part of a bedraggled troupe of speakers, and I’m thrashed.  Don’t get me wrong — this is a great country, and we’ve been warmly embraced by the locals and shown amazingly-generous hospitality daily.

It’s just a long damn trip… made longer by that nasty plate of deep-fried snapper I had Saturday night at what looked like a decent little upscale restaurant downtown.  I forgot the old rule of traveling:  Never eat stuff that arrives with the eyeballs still staring at you.

I deserved the ensuing bout of immune-system-destroying dysphoria, I suppose.  Last December, in Dubai, a bunch of us sauntered down to the bad part of town to sample “native” fare the night before we spoke… and nothing happened.  We gobbled questionable curries and unidentifiable chunks of stew, and lived to tell the tale.

Afterward, we all looked at each other and said “What have we done?”

For most of my life, I’ve had little angels (or maybe just confused demons, I dunno) looking out for me… so I somehow managed to stay one step ahead of the Federales in Mexico, just-missed by the would-be hit-and-run jalopy in Hollywood, and usually slightily out of reach of the snarling bugs everywhere else yearning for a vacation in my intestines.  (To name a few examples out of many.)

So, this time I got caught.  It’s not Oz’s fault.  It’s all on me.

And, I’m recovering fairly quickly.  We have a couple of days to dig deeper into Melbourne’s wonders (my second time in the city), and then travel to Brisbane for the final leg of this preposterous journey.

Seems like Sydney was a month ago.

So, anyway, I’m just checking in to let you know that I believe I’ve found the answer to the long suicidal swan dive that American newspapers are taking.

And it’s very simple: Take lessons from the Aussie journalists.

The newspaper biz is thriving over here.  Each town supports at least one local rag, plus a national one.  The issues arrive each day with a thump — they are still huge, still happily sated with lots of ads, and (most important) still a rollicking good read.

That’s the key, as I see it.

It’s the writing.  At first, it felt like I was trying to interpret a completely different language — especially in the editorial sections.  But headlines like “Stone the Kroes, she’s Neelie gone” actually make sense once you get into the story and make the connections.  (These are names of politcians well-known to Aussies.)

More to the point… the actual journalism in the news sections performs the kind of two-step dance I remember from my teen years (when I was so in love with newspapers that I haunted journalism classes, and dreamed of being the next Herb Caen).  You really can cover the standard who/what/where/why/when/how… AND inject some vivid prose with a touch of opinion… thus delivering on the basics of good reporting, while not being boring.

American newspapers are among the most mind-numbing waste of trees in world (in my humble opinion).

They didn’t used to be so dull  Check out some archives — you can go back to Mark Twain’s day, up through WWII and into the 1970s, and find writing that pulls you in and packs a whallop.

Now?  We’re lucky to get a couple of decent columns from Maureen Dowd or PJ O’Rourke each year in the editorial section.  It’s hard to get through the news sections of the NY Times, the Wall St Journal, and the old once-venerated Washington Post without a nap anymore.  Dull, dull, dull.

It’s not like we’re not living though one of the more interesting times in history, either.

The Aussies show craft with their writing.  They are brash, bold and fearless about challenging conventional wisdom, and speaking their minds (usually after spending at least a little time getting their facts straight).

The US news media started veering sideways around two decades ago, and hit full stride in the wrong direction right when the Weblog was invented on the Internet.

And right now, blogs are slaughtering stateside “official” journos for fleshing out stories of interest, working from kitchen tables and home offices.

There are lots of culprits available for blame in this slo-mo hari kari pact.  I grew up with 3 decent newspapers working hard each day to outdo, humiliate and destroy each with better reporting, better writing, and a better experience.  (Count ‘em: The LA Times, in it’s long-gone heyday, the dearly missed Herald Examiner, and the local Daily Report in Cucamonga).

Then, “efficiency” raised its ugly head, and savvy moguls realized they could outsource and deliver the “news” from central locations… and stop paying writers a living wage.  So, instead of a full staff in towns like Reno, where I live, we’ve got a skeleton crew slapping together prepackaged issues that have been designed to offend the least number of folks, while efficiently delivering a “product” to wrap around the advertising.

Yuck.  Same thing happened with radio.  There are just a handful of media comglomerates now (including the honking big Australian invader run by Murdock), for both radio and newspapers in the states… and they possess all the verve and personality you’d expect from a distant corporate board.  Zilch.

Oh, there are a couple of local writers kept on the dole to cover the rescues of tourists in kayak accidents, the wildfires, and the scandals in city hall too big to ignore.  But the “coverage” is thin and frightened, like mice peeking around the corner ready to bolt at the first sidelong glance from the pussycat.

Like GMs grisly demise, this did not have to happen.  The Web isn’t killing newspapers.  Newspapers are killing newspapers.  With sheer incompetence.

I see a silver lining, though.

Now that the best and the brightest of our scribes are no longer being seduced by Wall Street (cuz there aren’t many jobs left there)… and the shiny bright distraction of greed has dimmed a bit… there is an opportunity for more decent writers to re-engage with the noble profession of journalism again.

We need them, too.  Desperately.  This fragile little experiment in democracy can’t survive without the Fourth Estate kicking ass and taking names.

It may all still end up online, which is fine.  Or, more likely, some workable combination of online and offline presentation.

Maybe the new manifestation will be an actual “newsblog”.  The bloggers now working are limited in their ability to dig for stories from scratch — most (like Drudge) must operate solely from swiping the work of real professional journalists for the raw material.

Others (like Huffingtonpost.com) mix it up a bit more… combining nicked stories from the newswires with additional reporting (sometimes) on top of the carping and critiques.  A few (like Politico), though blatantly slanted to one side or the other of the political spectrum, have actually broken major stories later picked up by the mainstream media.

It’s a mess out there right now.  With the not very good result of young people ignoring all actual news, and getting their worldview from places like YouTube (and their facts from the manipulatable Wikipedia).  I like all these alternative sources… but it’s pretty scary to think upcoming generations are relying on them.

Another advantage the Aussies have, of course, is that they’re sports-mad.  I believe Oz has a higher percentage of the population earning a living as a respected pro athlete than the US by a wide margin… and nearly every town has a pro team in one of the main sports.

And the best way to keep a sports nut happy is to print out detailed analysis, with lots of obscure stats, of each game… along with cheeky, opinionated, and fur-raising commentary.

(Ed Dale took us to a footie match, the home town Bulldogs against the Richmond thugs, and we had a blast.  I don’t understand why their version of the game hasn’t caught on the States.  It’s a controlled riot, easily as entertaining as any sports event I’ve ever witnessed.)

The folks who know how to write are dominating the conversations going on right now, in every part of your life.  They’re scripting the movie we’re all living out, and if you want to have a say, you’ll need to get your chops sharpened.

The Aussie audiences love my message of learning the easy path to becoming a writer.  They intuitively know the power of the pen (whether it’s delivered by email, video, webpage, or with newsprint) because the evidence is everywhere.

We’re losing that sense in the US.  The mainstream media will sell its soul for another ad dollar in revenue, and has no interest in the common good.  Newspapers, reduced to thin wrappers for the stuff that doesn’t do well on Craig’s List, are abandoning their responsibility to keep The Man on his toes.

This will change.

The new “elite” will be those in possession of good information… and they will be tempted (as always) to horde it and not let anyone else in on the tips.  Without good investigative reporting, they’ll get away with it, too.

Good reporting requires sacrifice and nerve and hard detective work.  The ranks of reporters are thin at the front lines, and they will welcome fresh help from smart, outraged, energized new writers.

Gonna be an interesting ride, at any rate.

In the meantime, dig harder for the truth when you can.  Don’t get lulled into a bored trance, just cuz we’re lacking local chutzpah in the news media.

As the Aussies show us, it’s still a noble — and very exciting — profession, when done right.

Stay cheeky,

John Carlton

Howdy…

Special guest-star post today… by my old buddy David Garfinkel (”Garf” to those us lucky enough to be close friends).

Garf has been my First Choice as “wingman” for the last half-dozen seminars I’ve given (including the Copywriting Sweatshops, the Hot Seat Marketing Makeovers, and particularly the Simple Writing System main event).

So, while I’m traipsing around Australia, scrambling to meet my seminar obligations while driving on the wrong side of the road in 3 major cities…

… I’ve asked Garf to write a guest post for y’all.

Without further ado… here ’tis:

Want To Know The Dark Secrets Behind Monster Success?

It’s Not Pretty.

By David Garfinkel

The Big Lie.

People say it different ways.

It usually starts out: “It must be nice to… “

And then they finish it with…

“… be born into a rich family.”

“… have such a natural talent.”

“… have genes that make you look like a god (goddess).”

And so on.

Well, part of it is true.

Some people are damned lucky. They don’t face the same struggles regular people do.

But an ugly and dangerous assumption lies underneath all of this.

You see the assumption played out in movies. In schoolrooms. In glossy magazine articles.

You hear it in the rumbling, grumbling soundtrack of your own subconscious mind. Hey, the powers that be have spent enough money, time, and effort spreading this Big Lie into the mass consciousness, everywhere you turn. Of course it’s going to be embedded in your deepest thoughts.

The assumption goes like this:

If you’re lucky enough to __________, your future success is pretty much assured.

But if you’re not, tough luck, Charlie.

(Fill in the blank with: “be born rich,” “have natural talent,” “be unusually well endowed,” etc.)

Oh, sure. People read the rags to riches stories. They memorize Think and Grow Rich. They spend thousands on coaching and seminars.

But deep down inside, many people still believe it won’t make any difference. Because the cultural myths have their unconscious minds in a choke-hold.

The funny thing is, I have seen both sides of this. I grew up very middle class, not rich, not poor, but surrounded by some of the most privileged people on the planet. Right outside Washington, DC. Huge, dripping wads of comfortable, quiet old money, just a few neighborhoods away.

And yeah, the people born with silver spoons who stuck with the program — went to the right schools, took the right jobs, joined the right clubs, moved back into the right neighborhoods — continued with their nicely furnished lives.

But there was a catch. They were cogs in a machine of great uniformity. Human animals in a herd. Marching to a very unforgiving drummer.

The Japanese have a saying: “The nail that sticks out, gets pounded down.” And that saying is as true in land-of-opportunity America as it is in the land of the Rising Sun.

Because even for the very privileged, once you decide to go for your own version of monster success, all the perks are gone. Membership has its price, and you never know how high that price was until you decide to play by different rules.

I didn’t really start to discover this hidden set of fences and pastures until after I left my corporate job as San Francisco Bureau Chief for McGraw-Hill World News in 1985. Thus began the ride of my life, and it has taken me 24 years to start to see clearly what The Big Lie is all about.

Fact is, where you were born or what you were born with has a lot to do with perks and little or nothing to do with world-class performance.

And world class performance is what monster success is all about.

My life has taken me to a place where I’ve decided:

Being really, really good at doing what’s most important to you is where fulfillment comes from.

At least in the business part of your life.

Still, world class achievement does not necessarily equal happiness. I’ve recently read two up-close-and-personal books about people who admit to large swaths of misery in their lives.

One, Warren Buffett, who jockeys between being the richest and second richest guy in the world.

The other, legendary British publishing magnate, poet and libertine Felix Dennis. In his book, he rails over and over that monster success will not make you happy.

But misery of the rich and famous aside, both of these men still prove the point about what makes a world-class performer. Neither was born into great privilege. Both found a formula and followed it and became top performers, out of the herd, up to the alpha position, whether they wanted it or not.

I suspect they were not going for alpha status. I think what happened was: They heard the call to express themselves fully, and they answered the call.

In any event: What’s the formula for monster success?

For the answer, let’s take a side trip to another century. Two other centuries, actually.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. They made a movie about him. Using his middle name (Amadeus). Maybe you saw it last century, in 1984, when it first came out.

The gist of the movie was: That Boy Was A Genius!

Take a look:

“Mozart is the ultimate example of the divine-spark theory of greatness.

“Composing music at age five, giving public performances at age eight, going on to produce hundreds of works, some of which are widely regarded as ethereally great and treasures of Western culture, all in the brief time before his death at age 35. If that isn’t talent, on a mammoth scale, then nothing is.”

Those are the words of my brother in curmudgeonliness, Geoff Colvin, whose book Talent is Overrated is the inspiration for much of what I’m writing here.

Colvin goes on to tear the popular assumption apart:

Mozart’s father Leopold, a famous composer and performer himself, enrolled his son into a home school boot camp of performing and composing at age three.

Leopold was deeply interested in how to teach music to children, and had published a book on the subject the 18th-century year Wolfgang was born (1756).

Wolfgang’s early compositions were often “corrected” (read: rewritten) by Dad before they saw the light of day — and many of them were not original anyway.

Mozart’s first “masterpiece,” Piano Concerto No. 9, was composed when he was 21.

Colvin concludes: “That’s certainly an early age, but we must remember that by then Wolfgang had been through eighteen years of extremely hard, expert training. [I added the italics].

“This is worth pausing to consider. Any divine spark that Mozart may have possessed did not enable him to produce world-class work quickly or easily, which is something we often suppose a divine spark will do.”

Colvin also looks at the world’s greatest investor. Warren Buffett loves to say he was “born to allocate capital,” financial short-hand for, “I was given the divine spark that told me exactly the best investments to make.”

Uh… not exactly, says Colvin. Buffett bought his first stock, Cities Service preferred (Citgo today), at age 11. But he didn’t really start to shine as an investor until 15 or 20 years later.

Oh, one other thing. Dad was a stockbroker. So there mighta been just a little home schooling on the subject.

And a few years after getting his Master’s at Columbia in New York, he went to work for investment legend Benjamin Graham on Wall Street. But not right away.

First, Graham had turned Buffett down to work for free on several occasions.

And this in the light of Buffett being the only student ever to receive an A+ from Graham in his investment class at Columbia.

Are we starting to see a pattern here?

A few years ago, Bonnie St. John was a client of mine. One of two Olympic medal winners who have hired me.

Bonnie won the silver and two bronzes in downhill skiing at Innsbruck, Austria, in 1984.

She started skiing with some interesting challenges. She grew up where there was no snow (San Diego).

African-American people like her weren’t especially welcome on the slopes (especially in those days).

And… wait for it… she only has one leg.

(Yep. That means one-legged skiing. She won her medals at the Paralympics.)

Bonnie’s mom wasn’t a skier, but she was a teacher — a high school principal, in fact.

And Bonnie was so intent on skiing that she somehow got herself into a very white prep school in Vermont which, in addition to great academics, had world-class ski coaches on the faculty.

So.

Is monster success more a matter of hard work and study under great coaches and teachers — and less a matter of talent and accidents of birth?

It’s starting to look that way, more and more, according to research, and according to what I have observed about the top performers I have met and worked with.

But what about The Secret?

Isn’t it true that all you have to do is visualize something, including great achievement, and it’s yours?

Read this:

“You must begin to do what you can where you are, and you must do ALL that you can do where you are.

“You can advance only by being larger than your present place. And, no man is larger than his present place who leaves undone any of the work pertaining to that place. [I added the italics.]

“The world is advanced only by those who more than fill their present places.”

Damn! Sounds like you’re going to have to do the work after all.

But wait! What do those words have to do with The Secret?

Well, quite a bit, actually:

Those words in quotes are from the first paragraph of Chapter 12 of The Science of Getting Rich, by Wallace D. Wattles.

Rhonda Byrne said The Science of Getting Rich was her inspiration. Byrne wrote the book and produced the movie The Secret. She told Oprah Winfrey on her show:

“Something inside of me had me turn the pages one by one, and I can still remember my tears hitting the pages as I was reading it. It gave me a glimpse of The Secret. It was like a flame inside of my heart. And with every day since, it’s just become a raging fire of wanting to share all of this with the world.”

See for yourself:

http://tinyurl.com/rb-oprah

Memo to Rhonda:

Gotta be careful with those tears and all that fire when you’re reading. You could miss a very important paragraph.

So. What does this all mean?

You’ve got to decide for yourself. Me, now I don’t feel so bad when I think back at all the people who called me “workaholic.”

And personally, I’ve never had a problem seeking out the best teachers, coaches, books, seminars.

I do know my natural talent and early success took me only far enough to get in trouble. Just before I started to live the ideas I’m ranting about in this post, I learned about creating success in your imagination, so it could manifest effortlessly on the physical plane.

But fortunately, somehow, when I learned how to visualize I never drank the Kool Aid. I never completely believed great things could be accomplished without doing any work.

What about you?

Cheers,

David

Thursday, 10:06pm
Reno, NV
“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.” (Ansel Adams)

Howdy…

I grew up in a photo-loving family.

Pop still has his trusty Kodak folding camera — a true antique now — and I cannot yet bring myself to dig through that box in the garage with all my old cameras (cuz I know it’s time to start assigning them new fates somewhere else).

I swear to you I still have a box of Polaroid film in the butter drawer of the fridge. Might even be the last batch they ever made (and R.I.P. Polaroid, dear departed friend).

Mom was the photo archivist of the family, and even as other families gravitated toward 16mm film, I retained a purist’s preference for the snapshot over the home movie.

(Side note: I remember meeting someone 20 years ago who mentioned that they were on video from the moment of their birth, and it was unsettling.

Now, it’s rare to meet anyone under the age of 30 who isn’t cataloged on film through their entire childhood. I can’t even imagine watching myself being born. I have a hard time watching old seminar footage of me from ten years ago, for cryin’ out loud.

Anyone out there hauling around a library of self-referenced film with them? What’s it like?)

I believe I fell in love with photography the moment I saw my first photograph… and realized it was actually a moment in time captured forever.

And I formed some very intense ideas about what makes a “good” photograph as a third-grader thumbing through the still-amazing stack of Nazi photos Pop brought home from his stint as a rifleman during WWII.

(There’s no way to tell for sure, but those two dozen shots seem to be a German officer’s front-line cache of “Here’s what I did during the War” snapshots. Fascinating subject material that forced us to imagine what the story actually was behind those uniformed men… especially the one with the open bullet wound in the dorsal lat.)

As I grew up, I would become captivated by very few photos in the piles coming back from the drugstore of family and friends and pets and outings.

I never questioned why I found those few snapshots so iconic.

Later, one of my first jobs in advertising was overseeing the photography for a computer supply catalog every quarter.

That job meant gathering all the equipment (cables, monitors, furniture, floppies, etc) and spending a week or so with a professional photographer in Palo Alto trying to make plastic crap look good.

(I won’t bore you with the hassle that pre-digital photography presented — the need to refrigerate film, manually load it, and nurture it like a fragile duck egg until it could be color-separated and made “camera-ready”, which means ready for the printer to fuss with during the offset process of applying wave after wave of ink until the correct color was achieved.)

(Okay, sorry, I think I just bored you there.)

Anyway… I learned a lot about the technical aspects of photography (like using mashed potatoes as a substitute for ice cream, cuz the real treat wouldn’t survive under the required hot lights for a good shot).

Pro photographers in the ad field earned big bucks. They knew the voodoo.

But you know what?

I always thought they took shitty photographs.

Technically stunning. Yet somehow boring as hell.

It’s one of the reasons I turned my back on a fortune writing for the huge mailers… and wandered off with the scurrilous Gary Halbert to go slumming with entrepreneurs.

The corporations insisted on boring copy and boring photos. Cuz they didn’t (and still don’t) want to “offend” anyone with too much fun.

Can’t have that.

The cooler entrepreneurs, on the other hand (the ones we preferred to deal with), always looked like kids who snuck into the candy store after-hours whenever it came to hooks and photography.

Mostly, they played it safe… but sometimes, we’d talk them into saying “fuck it”, and we’d run outrageous stuff in print ads and direct mail campaigns.

God, that was fun.

Yet, I still parted company with most of my comrades when it came around to snapping photos. If you look at most of my colleagues’ “stock” photo of themselves, it’s one suit-and-tie-with-make-up shot after another.

What’s up with that?

For me, the best shots have always been like a stolen moment in time. No one is looking at the camera, no one is posing, no one is grinning like they think they’re “supposed to” when a camera is brought out.

Good copywriting is like a real conversation.

And a good photo is like a real visual memory — what you see between blinks in real life.

I love “great” photos. I’ve got two Ansel Adams reproductions (Yosemite and a Big Sur beach shot) on the wall across from my desk right now.

But my favorite shots — the ones that I’ve looked at so often, they’ve been burned into my neurons — are mostly casual shots of people I know.

Some are posed, sure (Mom made everyone stand in the same spot by the fireplace for their pre-high-school-graduation photo).

But others were hastily snapped on the fly… and if anyone’s looking at the lens, they haven’t yet mustered their “camera smile”.

I don’t expect anyone to agree with me on this matter. I’m outnumbered 40-million to one — most folks are terrified of being “caught” on film in their natural slack-jawed state… because, I dunno, it might reveal something they’re desperate to keep tamped down.

Like a personality.

Okay, I’m being harsh. That happens when you’re such a reviled minority about something like this.

I cared about how I look on film for around six days back when I was 18. My self-esteem was still traumatized from high school, and photos seemed to amplify every confidence-scaring blemish to Mad magazine-sized proportions.

I soon learned not to care at all. At this point in my career, there is easily two solid years worth of film of me floating around the ether from seminars alone.

I find it hard to watch, because the disconnect of watching and hearing myself makes my head hurt. Do I really sound like that? Do I really look like that?

The photos, however… I still find ones (of me, and of my friends, and of places I love) that immediately retell a great story, complete with emotional nuance and side chapters and intriguing details that have yet to be explored thoroughly.

And I’m telling you right now — loud and clear — that the camera matters as little as the kind of pen you use to write your brilliant notes down.

Here — for your enjoyment and critical dismemberment of — are a few shots I just downloaded from my trusty iPhone. No Zeiss lens, no zoom, no adjustment for light…

… just an instrument for capturing a moment in time.

A crisp, pro-level shot of something boring… remains boring.

But even the fuzziest, most obscure-looking shot of something important to you… remains a treasure worthy of the Smithsonian forever.

So, in this spirit…

… here is a peek at some of the shots I’ve taken over the last few months with my iPhone.

Enjoy… or revile them, as you please.

I don’t care what anyone says… this shot of Reno one wintry evening is nice. Notice the pinpoints of light — a detail none of my old analog cameras could have managed this late in the evening.

North Beach, dusk, from the top floor of the Hilton where we shot the Simple Writing System DVDs. A little Chinatown, a little of the old Beat hangouts, a lot of San Francisco, the prettiest city in the world. (Okay, maybe tied with Paris…)

My good pal (and A-List Copywriter, with 6 controls for Boardroom right now) David Deutsch on the balcony of some gorgeous penthouse we were corralled into in Chicago last year by Tellman Knudsen…

My cherished colleague and Hall Of Fame marketer Joe Sugarman, just last month in Vegas. (He insisted we shake hands and look at least remotely professional, after I’d mugged a little too enthusiastically in the first shot.)

Launch King Jeff Walker and me, being serious for a second at the back of the room while Tony Robbins and Paula Abdul took turns on stage for the SANG event. (In the subsequent shot, I insisted Jeff “stop being taller than me”, and he obliged by stooping. Unfortunately, that shot got murdered by trolls in the iPhone…) (Damn.)

Crushing Paula Abdul with my fingers. I’ll never grow up. (Almost made Jeff spit water through his nose, though.)

On the balcony of Frank Kern’s luxurious penthouse suite at the Hard Rock, just before Mass Control. Andy Jenkins took the shot with my iPhone. (Kern had thrashed the room within hours of checking in…)

My biz partner Stan being clever in Dubai just before I went onstage. That’s Mike Filsaime and Mike Koenigs sitting next to us. We still haven’t told the story of that trip, have we? Whatever you’ve heard is a lie… (And yes, I’m holding the iPhone up and shooting myself like an idiot.  What’s it to ya?)

Okay, so I’m posing. It’s a famous painting. I’m a fan of famous paintings. I get all weird and loony (like an adolescent Beatles fan from those early days) around classic art. I will adore this photo the rest of my days…

And finally, our old pal and golfing nemesis Dean Jackson, freshly settled in his Trump Tower suite in Chitown.

That’s a taste of what I found in the little phone.

For anyone wondering what it’s like on the inside of the Web marketing world, here at least is photographic evidence of something. Not sure what.

If this column goes over all right, I might — might, mind you — share my photos from Australia when I get back.

We leave for Sydney on Tuesday. Virgin Air. I’m gonna start snapping shots on the runway, and not quit until I’ve maxed out the iStorage capacity.

None of us take enough pictures. We just don’t.

And much of the reticence is the hassle of posing and looking good and worrying about composition and all that crap.

My advice: Keep your phone or Casio locked and loaded at all times, and be merciless and unpredictable about grabbing moments in time.

For an entire year, Michele and I photographed most of the meals we ate when dining out. It was senseless, but enormous fun… and someday, I’m telling you, someone will be happy we took the 4.5 seconds to snap those shots.

What’s your take on the sate of photography? You know, the whole technology is only a bit over 150 years old. There are NO photos of anybody farther back than my grandfather on my mother’s side in my family. None.

Let the documentation of our days commence.

And let me know, in the comments, how you’re doing with your own love affair with photography…

Stay frosty,

John

Thursday, 7:55pm
Reno, NV
“It was never part of our plans not to play well… it just happened that way.” (Ron Barassi, Hall O’ Fame footballer & Carlton coach)

G’day, mates.

In about 10 days, my biz partner Stan will morph into Road Dog Stan, and we’ll both be off to the Land Down Unda.

Three weekends, three cities, three seminars to speak at.

We fly into Sydney… will drive up to Melbourne (where my old pal Ed Dale has previously shown me the amazing hospitality Oz residents offer)…

… then fly up to Brisbane (”Brzbin” to locals, I hear).

I’m kinda freaked just listing it all out. Fortunately, Stan and I have left our womenfolk behind many times before to go trudging off like Victorian explorers… into the dense, scary jungles of Seminar Land.

Armed only with laptops, Powerpoint, iPhones, wireless cards, Kindles, iPods, Dopp kits and a wad of clothes stuffed into carry-ons.

I’m telling you, it’s almost barbaric, the way we have to live by our wits in luxury hotels and biz class jets.

I really empathize with Livingstone and Stanley. (Or was that Stanley and Oliver?)

We will be one step above subsistence on the Maslow scale.

So hey…

Here’s a couple of things you can do for us:

Thing Number One: If you’re a business owner in Australia… living in any of these 3 fine cities… and your dream has been to score a face-to-face consultation with me…

… well, here’s your chance.

We’ll have at least a day of down-time in each place, I predict.

And we’re quite open to to meeting with clients.

If you’re interested… or even just curious… just post a comment below. We can access your email from the comment, and my personal assistant Diane will get back to you immediately with more info.

No harm exploring the possibilities, is there.

Thing Number Two: Also…

… since we’re strangers in your strange land…

… we could really do with some inside suggestions of places to eat, drink, and see in each city.

I spent a week in Melbourne with Frank Kern and Ed, and just loved the joint to death. Took the train to the coast, saw naked people on the beach, tasted local delights, hung out in the neighborhood eateries, and logged miles of long walks downtown.

Still, despite my dog-eared copy of Lonely Planet, I’d really love to get some input from locals on stuff to do.

Can’t sit around draining Cooper’s all day, you know.

Thanks, ahead of time.

And Ed — is Carlton playing at home while we’re there? I’d love to see a game.

I’ve got a ton of souvenir gear from them here. I’m so proud to share a name with a once-great team brought to its knees by scandal and shenanigans… now rising again, Phoenix-like, to regain its rightful place as King of all they survey.

Or are they on another losing streak?

Let me know what’s up, guys.

Restaurants, nightclubs, gathering spots, nude beaches, sightseeing, day-trips out of town, nude beaches, cool hotels, tips for getting around, game schedules, nude beaches…

… Did I ask about nude beaches yet?

Looking forward to returning to the Land O’ Dropping Koala’s…

Stay frosty,

John

P.S. The photo is from Melbourne. Ed and Kern and I were driving through town, stuck in traffic… and there it was.

An alley called “AC/DC Lane”.

They must be so proud, the band…

(BTW: I just learned Angus’s bitchin’ lead on “You Shook Me All Nite Long”… wicked clever, that one…)

Me and the T-Nerd hisself…

Thursday, 10:45pm
Reno, NV
“That is just too fuckin’ pretty to be real.” (Bob the drummer)

Howdy…

Sorry for the profanity in the above quote, but that’s what he said.

It was around 15 years ago, in the midst of my 3rd mid-life crisis.

I’d dropped out of advertising for a while — wasn’t sure how long I’d be floating, and gave no forwarding address to old clients — and was living off royalties and nurturing the power-trio rock band I’d formed over the prior months.

We were hanging out by the van — sober, if you must ask — after setting up in yet another filthy biker bar on one of the nastier streets in Reno, killing time until the joint filled up and we could start playing.

Mid-May here in the high desert — nestled in the bosom of the Sierra Nevadas, just below Lake Tahoe — can take your breath away.

The sun had just set, and the sky glowed with that special ambient dusk-glow that made the whole world seem like a dream from the bottom of the ocean.

We all stopped, mid-lies and mid-guffaws, and drank in that certain kind of alive-ness you can only access when you’re outside during the sun-to-stars changing of the guard.

Friday late afternoons have given me a visceral thrill since I was a kid. For most of the culture, it was time to wind down, go home and settle in for the evening. For the rest of us — the night owls and the rebels and the wayward uneasy souls — the day was just getting good.

So we remained silent for a long time, just gazing at the sky and enjoying being exactly where we were, about to do exactly what was coming up.

I won’t even try to describe the sky. Like I said — high desert, spring, mountain-filled horizons…

Bob the drummer broke the silence.

“That is just too fuckin’ pretty to be real,” he said.

And yet, there it was. As real as you or me.

I thought about that scene this afternoon as Michele and I roared down the highway to go grab some cheap Chinese food for dinner. We had the top down, and the gathering dusk swirled through the car and around my heart.

It might have been exactly this day in May, 15 years ago, that Bob said that.

But tonight, it feels like it was just minutes ago.

Why am I telling you this?

Because… that was A Moment. I’ve had a lot of Moments in my life… crisp memories that define feelings I can’t otherwise begin to explain. Smells, sights, sounds, a whispered name… all kinds of random triggers bring these Moments rushing back to me, and I’ve embraced them like lost lovers every single time.

I’m not sure what life is all about. I have no clue what meaning — if any — there is in all the comings and goings, the worries and deadlines, the urgent opportunities and the grand victories.

I only know that — every once in a while — life arises and smacks me upside the head with a beauty so glorious, so deeply satisfying, and so… fucking awesome…

… that I am reduced to tears.

And I don’t know what to make of it.

Part of me doesn’t want to even try.

That Moment in time… kicking back with a couple of lunatic musicians, confident in our ability to soothe the savage beasts in that bar when we hit the stage, soaking up the visual delight that is Nevada at dusk in spring…

… somehow, deep in the ancient lizard-brain recesses, it all just felt right.

I don’t want to feel like that all the time — it would kill me. I’d just melt into a puddle of grinning goo.

But I sure am glad I still get to have these Moments. Maybe they’re little links in the chain of an individual life. Signposts into the past, with promises of the future.

If there really is a future and past. (Have to check with Asimov on that point.)

This, tonight, is what is on my mind.

I’ve been obsessed with business for months now. Speaking at seminars, launching the Simple Writing System, maintaining the Hydra heads of Marketing Rebel, planning for 3 weeks in Australia coming up fast…

… it can eat up all your neurons.

And yet, somehow, Moments sneak in. They always have, and I’m grateful.

So here’s my question for you today: What’s on YOUR mind?

Obviously, I just went into and then out of a reverie. All morning and afternoon, it was biz, biz, biz.

And then a Moment.

Wow.

I love the interaction in this blog. It keeps me grounded.

So, seriously — what’s on your mind this fine, fine spring day as the Earth spins madly around the Sun in an expanding universe of Big Bang galaxies?

Have you had a Moment, too, recently?

Let’s talk about something other than biz, just for today…

Stay frosty,

John

Howdy…

You know what?

I haven’t pissed anybody off in a while. So let’s see if we can’t rile up the mob a little bit, cause a little unrest in the ranks.

The best way to do this, of course, is to lift the blinders most people wear 24/7… and force them to face some uncomfortable truth or another.

Pop some bubbles. Expose the myths.

Oh, people HATE it when you harsh their zombie mellow… and snatch away their cuddly delusions.

Some may thank you later for the wake-up call. But most will snarl and bite, and rush back to the warm embrace of the dream they’ve languished in their entire life.

To be a great marketer, you must be willing to see things as they actually are. Not as you wish they were, nor as you feel they ought to be.

You gotta leave the bubble, and wander outside your comfort zone.

Reality scares the bejesus out of most folks.

However, once you get over the initial shock, you can finally begin to see the wisdom of self-knowledge and reality-based thinking. (The Oracle at Delphi, in ancient Greece, delivered the “Know thyself” quote long ago… and it’s been the main dividing chasm between the Truly Hip and the Hopelessly Clueless ever since.)

So that’s my basic premise, as a teacher and a writer: The myths must be shattered.

Yahoo, damn the torpedoes, and bring it on.

There’s no better premise for a righteous headline hook, by the way, than to challenge the assumptions, common wisdom, and cherished myths of any particular group of people.

However, when it comes to nailing down your own best marketing plan, you MUST have a firm handle on what nonsense beliefs your audience labors under.

It’s perhaps the most fundamental tool in biz. (Consider how deeply Apple understands their fan base of Mac users… and also understands the mindset of PC users across the aisle. Those TV commercials are hilarious inside jokes to the Mac devotees, and gruesome “the truth hurts” reminders to PCers of how much MicroSoft sucks.)

So here is the myth I wanna bust today:

“People who accomplish things must possess some kind of super-potent magic hidden from the rest of us.”

This is — to anyone who has actually rolled up their sleeves and gone after a goal — unmitigated , dangerous bullshit.

Yet, it’s a central belief to the majority out there. I believed it back when I was a slacking loser, and it took a long time to work through to the truth.

And once I did… I immediately realized why so many marketing campaigns are designed the way they are.

Here’s how this is playing out right now, online: During any economic downturn, the urge to engage the Business Opportunity market (biz op) becomes an obsession for many marketers.

Legions of info marketers who — a few months ago — were completely realistic in their advertising…

… are now adopting the mantra of the classic biz op: “This works automatically, without you needing to do ANYTHING!”

Biz op is as old as advertising itself. The appeal is simple: A complete lifestyle change, with no effort. Everything is done FOR you.

It works like… magic.

Now, all good direct response ads emphasize the “fast, simple, easy and cheap” rule. It’s damn difficult to sell a product with slow results, that requires massive effort and a steep learning curve.

Pain don’t sell.

When I counsel clients with products that really are difficult and complex, I urge them to find ways to break down the process… so they can legitimately offer shortcuts, or accelerated quick start guides, or some inside advantage that takes the sting out of the thing.

I mean, even a new degree in rocket science can be broken down into digestible chunks.

You start with an introductory course, you get mentoring if you can, you face up to your shortcomings and fix them (with, say, some remedial math classes), and you buck up and take that first small step on the journey.

The first step can be easy. .. even when the entire journey will be long and arduous.

As a freelancer, I have often tackled a job in a field that I knew absolutely nothing about. So I learned how to get hip as fast as humanly possible… and that skill became an integral part of my ability to teach others how to shortcut the process of understanding new stuff.

You break it down.

You identify areas of mystery or confusion… and clear it up. You get expert help, either from books or interviews with actual experts. You confront what you don’t yet know…

… and do what you need to do to get a handle on it.

You don’t need to become an expert yourself. I still suck at golf, for example… but I’ve nevertheless written dozens of ads that have brought in fortunes for clients.

After grilling true experts, and filling in the knowledge gaps in my brain with info from good resources, I “know” golf as well as many professional golfers.

In fact, “real” golfers are astonished to learn — after chatting with me — that my game is abysmal. And that I do not — as they do — dream, eat, and breathe for the sport.

I like the game, don’t get me wrong. I even lust for the opportunity to play a round with buddies, despite my inability to dink 4-foot putts and my predictable skulling and and shanking and topping of the ball. I live in sand traps. My drives resemble a Rainbird sprinkler — all over the place, and only infrequently in the direction I’m aiming.

I even KNOW all the shortcuts to getting better. The “how to” DVDs I’ve written about are real… and if I’d just take the time to learn the easy step-by-step processes they teach, I would get better.

I just don’t care about getting better. I’m having fun right where I’m at with the game. My buddies are at the same level, and though we stink, we are competitive with each other… and that’s a form of enjoyment you can’t buy.

The ads I’ve written stress how easy and fast you can get wicked-good at the game. And it’s true.

However, there is SOME effort involved. You cannot just take a pill, or get hypmotized, and magically turn into a great golfer.

And yet, this kind of magical thinking is exactly what is starting to appear in many marketing campaigns.

It’s part of a cycle.

Over my long career, I’ve paid attention to the evolution of weight loss advertising, for example, very closely. Gary Halbert was a master at it, and both earned fortunes in it, and went through hellish legal trauma because of it.

Experienced marketers will tell you that the weight loss market can be THE most lucrative business to get into. Nothing else comes even close in America. Not looking younger, not making more money, not living longer.

Americans just want to get skinny.

And for the most part, they would rather not have to work at it. At all. Not even a tiny, little bit.

There are easy ways to lose weight that we all know about. Eat less, and exercise, for example.

You may find a niche in the weight loss market that responds to this appeal. Certainly, most gyms use some part of that angle to bring in new members. However, the marketing directors also know that 90% of new members will never set foot in the gym again after signing up.

It’s a hard gig to make work.

Especially when the diet markets swing around — as they do, regularly, every few years — to promising “lose weight while you sleep” with this new tasty pill.

People want magic.

They want to believe that you really can ingest a pill, or chant three words, or do something else mystical… and be rewarded with a complete new lease on life.

There is, actually, a placebo effect that can kick in… but it’s not something you want to bet on.

True life changes require some effort.

And that just pisses people off.

So marketers are forever seduced by response rates to go ever further into the dark world of promising magic.

Online, with the recession elbowing more and more folks toward looking for new income opportunities, biz op is thriving.

And I’m seeing more and more of the guru’s in the game promising more and more magic.

It’s a cycle. Right now, there are droves of would-be entrepreneurs who honestly want to believe they can create killer marketing using copy-and-paste methods or — shudder – software that magically produces copy.

And whatever large masses of people desperately want to believe… there will arise a marketer with the cojones (and weak integrity) to offer it to them.

I’ve always been the “eat less and exercise” kind of teacher, when it comes to learning to write.

Yes, that first step is both the hardest one you’ll ever take…

… and the easiest one to complete.

It’s like finally deciding to get serious about getting in shape. The first step would be joining a gym, getting some instruction on how to get started working out (either from a book, or a trainer)…

… and then actually showing up and going through the process the first time.

That’s hard. It’s a deal killer for most people.

But, in truth, it’s also everything promised: Once you do go through that first teeth-chattering step…

… results will come fast, the process becomes easy, and the whole thing is actually simple.

Compared with taking a pill, yeah, it’s only relatively fast, easy and simple.

Nevertheless, the real-life magic is in the DOING.

Before I discovered the power of goal setting, it was a complete mystery to me how people got anything done. Life, for me, was a series of accidents and lucky interventions.

Lots of company in that world.

The very concept that I could actually want something… plan to attain it… and then GO GET IT… was just science fiction for me.

Amazing. Life changing.

Magic.

And it was freaking HARD to get started. I had to teach myself how to even want something in the first place. And going after it meant changing my “party hardy” attitudes, and putting my goals first (no matter how bitchin’ the fun stuff I was missing seemed).

But guess what?

Once I got a head of steam up…

… it got really, really easy.

Results happened fast and furious.

And suddenly, it was the simplest thing in the world for me to sit down and plot out attaining a goal. Any goal I wanted.

I moved mountains. I changed my life from top to bottom.

But the magic behind the magic… was that there wasn‘t any real magic to it at all.

It was just a matter of breaking it all down into digestible chunks, and going step-by-step through it, systematically.

I don’t offer voodoo to people coming to me to learn how to write.

I offer the systematic process that will take them from clueless to clued-in as fast as they are capable of moving.

I cannot compete — nor do I try — with marketers who insist that there are effortless ways to produce the writing needed to sell anything.

Go for it, if such a promise appeals to you. And good luck.

No… there IS some effort involved in doing what ALL the top marketers do to support their continued success. They understand that writing — pumped to maximum potency with great salesmanship — is the foundation of wealth, fame and happiness in business.

That reality is threatening to many people… because it seems so hard. And it’s so nice and comfy in this waking dream, with lots of ready-to-use excuses to deflect doubt…

So I don’t do well with zombie prospects.

I need people who are already awake, and ready to get moving.

Thus, my continuing efforts over the years in this blog to pull back the curtain, and expose the reality of selling.

Doing well in business really is easy, simple and fast… once you engage, armed with good advice and basic skills.

To others, you will appear to be performing magic when you write the emails, websites, ads and video scripts that fuel your success.

To those who know, however, it’s just a matter of taking the required steps to get in gear, and continue with the process for as long as you need to.

Relying on luck and believing in myths is a sucker’s game.

The real fun in life begins when you wake up and get busy taking action.

Stay frosty,

John

P.S. Okay, here’s a clue: www.simplewritingsystem.com.

Happy trails…