Every product you work on should offer your prospect two separate and distinct reasons for buying it. First, it should offer him the fulfillment of a physical want or need. This is the satisfaction your product gives him. And second, it should offer him a particular method of fulfilling that need, that defines him to the outside world as a particular kind of human being.”
Eugene M. Schwartz
You must make the product interesting, not just make the ad different. And that’s what too many copywriters in the U.S. today don’t yet understand.”
Rosser Reeves, about 30 years ago
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
It’s easier to bleed than to sweat, Mr. Motes.”
Flannery O’Connor
Tenacity is when you’ve got enough balls to start something and then you’re too stupid to quit when you realize you shouldn’t have started in the first damn place.”
“In 1999, lost his son to suicide. A few years later he lost his daughter to a drug overdose. At sixty-four years old, he has walked across the United States seven times to raise awareness for depression and suicide and to inspire people he meets to “love life.”
This was, just… when he cries… his language… i just… the juxtaposition of how he looks, the down to earth idioms, his story, the simple quest he’s on and the handful of moments of free-flow beatnik poetry… this is magic.
…so they can go through that situation of pain and convert that damn evil, negative self pity into self reliance and go help others with it through nothing more than telling their own story.”
“The keeping real of shit matters to some people, but it does not matter to me. It’s fashion, and I don’t like fashion, because fashion does not matter.”
What matters is that you do good work.
What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand.
What matters is that the Flaming Lips’s new album is ravishing and I’ve listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people. What matters is that it will stand forever, long after any narrow-hearted curmudgeons have forgotten their appearance on goddamn 90210.
What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who’s up and who’s down, but what someone has done and if they meant it.
What matters is that you want to see and make and do, on as grand a scale as you want, regardless of what the tiny voices of tiny people say.”
It’s finally happened: my inbox has become a problem. More on this below.
But first, here’s a lil’ textexpander snippet to take you to a compose message for your gmail account WITHOUT pulling up the inbox… helpful when, like me, you get sucked into the incessant sucking sound of your inbox.
https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1%key:enter%
Set that up for something like ;gmc (for GMail Compose) and use it when you write an email instead of opening up your inbox.
Up to now email has been relatively easy. Spam hasn’t been a problem for me, the demand wasn’t much larger than the supply, etc.
Now that I’m at the helm of a successful business and a relatively large blog, my inbox is full of stuff.
The hardest part: it’s full of good stuff. Earnest people honestly trying stuff, struggling with their businesses, taking chances on themselves, inspired and motivated by something i’ve written or said somewhere.
I love these people so hard, you guys. And I’m being forced to grow up a little.
In a recent interview with gary veynerchuck, Gary said the thing that scares him the most is knowing that the practices that have built his business to now won’t scale to where he knows the business is going.
I’m so so so much smaller than him, the demands of my inbox so so so much smaller… but I resonate with the thought.
So i’m brushing up on some classic email triage skills… trying to honor the earnestness and desires of those writing to me while honoring my own humanity.
Humanity is like that… limited with the ability to reach for so much.
They’re writing in, reaching with their lives, hungry for a shred of “you’re not alone, when I was there this helped…” I was there. I reached out and mostly never got an email back, but sometimes I did hear back and those were intensely meaningful conversations for me.
And at the same time, humanity is always limited… it’s important to stay in your skin, keep your feet on the ground, listen to your body, not overextend yourself, over-reach. Doing so leads to mania and craziness and unhappiness and too much activity for worse and worse orgasms.
So, anyways… yea, textexpander… pretty cool.
I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.
I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero.
I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap and still comes out on top.
I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary.
I am for art that is smoked like a cigarette, smells like a pair of shoes.
I am for art that flaps like a flag, or helps blow noses like a handkerchief.
I am for art that comes out of a chimney like black hair and scatters in the sky.
I am for the art that a kid licks, after peeling away the wrapper.
I am for art that is put on and taken off like pants, which develops holes like socks, which is eaten like a piece of pie, or abandoned with great contempt like a piece of shit.
I am for all art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.
These are just a few bits and bobs from a longer piece. Cool guy.
Don’t blog about Star Wars. Blog about Jawas. Better, blog about one specific Jawa who’s on the screen for one minute. Become the go-to guy for that Jawa.”
See also Merlin Mann’s Advice to Bloggers Who Want to Take it Seriously.