How To Be A Sap, Redux

Thanks John, up until reading this I’d always felt ‘feeling’ things so strongly was a weakness. Now I can see it is a strength.
Thanks for this gift and seasons greetings to you =)
Marcus

Ditto Marcus…John thank you for this gift of insight and your suggestion we take the time to commune with the Sap Factor.

Hey John, really great article. It’s actually my first time on your blog so pretty glad I didn’t have to search through the archives to find this post!

A really nice holiday surprise 🙂

Injecting emotions into marketing seems to be so important!!

All the best for the holidays.

Cheers

ALong these lines, everyone should watch (or re-watch)Jim Valvano’s speech at the Espy’s when he won the Arthur Ashe Award. Be moved to tears. Laugh. Hug. And think. Thanks for posting.

Another great article. Whenever I read your writing, it’s like you write in vivid color, while the rest of us mere mortals are writing in shades of grey. Kind of like the early scene in Wizard of Oz, going from grey to glorious color. Your palette of words you choose is so much more fascinating, and reads well. I find it hard to expand my writing vocabulary, breakout out of the box/boundaries; word lists like your power words helps.

Happy holidays…!

to vivacious, compellingly empathetic prose,

-k

John,

What a holiday treat. I often find myself watching movies or especially HBO series with a few reluctant tears making their way down my face as I sit quietly next to my wife pretending no one is the wiser.

Your ability to capture what you do with the written word is something I strive to emulate. Thanks for what you do and how you do it. I have to ask — where does Deadwood fall in the spectrum of HBO series you’ve seen? I apologize if you have written about it in your archives. I haven’t gotten there yet.

Thanks,

Forrest

Great article – and it immediately brought to mind the last occasion I saw John Wayne on television; it was evident he was extremely ill and yet somehow had gathered the courage and strength to attend and participate in the 1979 Academy Awards. The shock I felt was so powerful I can feel it now.

Margaret

Thinking about this one a lot lately, John. Just started reading your blog a few weeks ago. New student of the copywriting arts. Started on the last post and have worked my way down the RSS feed to mid-2009. My eyes are bleeding. Incredible stuff..

Anyways, getting back to the point of this comment, I’ve been reading books of the self-help genre for quite some time and have wrestled with this concept. Empathy. It seems to go along with the concept of acceptance. Just now, at the age of 33, starting to wrap my head around it, and this post really helped.

Hearing the sagely advice that we should have more empathy can sound to us ‘mericans like we’re being told to be a human punching bag while having to be ok with it. That’s not it at all, of course, but it was my first ego-driven response to the idea.

From what you said, which helped make this very clear to me, is that we have to see life for what it is, rather than for what we want it to be. To accept it, get into the nitty gritty of both our emotions and others’, and make our next move from that place of reality as opposed to a place of fantasy and make-believe. Much more powerful. Makes sense. Sorry I just reiterated what you said, but it helps to think this stuff out.

I’m a fellow Reno resident myself, hope you’re braced for this weekend’s storm. Looks like it might be a good one. Thanks, John. Back to the archives…

Empathy isn’t dead or withered, with all this social media exploding around us it’s merely biding time in the shadowy corners. Waiting for us to get over this shallow diet of instant gratification and self-interest.

As for love and learn, if more people embraced being in the present moment they would find the time for more of this.

For myself, that’s definitely a worthy philosophy for the coming months.

Commercial greetings and all the best to you and yours.

Scott

Empathy is my favorite subject. I can’t hammer it home enough to my copywriting colleagues! I believe it’s the copywriter’s most important job. This is the most eloquent post on the subject I’ve ever see. Beautiful.

I definitely come across in my blog posts as non-feeling and unempathetic. I seem to be more of a grizzled old timer
who tells it like it is, and may the chips fall where they may with musicians.

Guess I have to change that. Damn.

Thanks for the insight John.

Mark in Canada

There’s a factural error in this statement:

“… social media and info-overwhelm continues to nudge everyone toward ADHD-Land, where attention spans are pathetic and fundamental human emotions like empathy wither.”

By definition, ADHD is the motherlode of empathy.

Something else waiting to be capitalised: ADHD peeps make the best usability testers.

Our uncanny ability to connect things is a trait.

It seems we don’t give too much of a shit that many people think it’s OK – useful even – to toss about ADHD as a commonplace dis-ease (or disorder or fill-in-your-blank); whereas few are running around trivializing cancer.

As if ADHD is about a 3-second attention span. Perhaps is the autho is thinking of an eye wink and not a serious block of short-term memory (the essence of ADHD. Which is why the efx of ADHD are similar to Alzheimers, only today is as worse as it gets. Bet you haven’t heard that, eh?).

Social media is a narcissist’s Holy Grail. Narcissism is prevelant especially in American culture. Killing is the American way. News is the same it’s ever been.

Killing emotions is a behaviour taught in childhood.

Fortunately the antidote is more prevelant – and social media has helped that. Vibrational manifesting.

Life is for the living.

Peace and profits,
Tia D.

I’ve always been the kind of person who looks like they don’t have any external feelings but then goes home and takes everything personally to the point where I can’t even sleep because I’m obsessing over the day’s events. I was taught to envy men who didn’t express themselves. Thankfully, over the years I’ve learned to cry.

Thank you for recycling this post John. I hadn’t read it before. I have a feeling that I’ve missed a lot of the golden nuggets you’ve shared over the years while I was working away. I needed to read this today.

Great one John, thanks…

I like the Mega Ambitious goals plus not expecting to reach most of them = best year ever regardless.

Huge take home which glued all the pieces of things I have read in the past such as “create your 1 year goal, then create your 5 year goal, then your 15…yada yada” to the point is was self sabotage…

Agree completely on emotions and feelings, they are a powerful tool, although must be careful not to fall into the manipulation of others using them against us.

Thanks again,
Rob

John – Women have known the above all along…

Val