Seduced By The Cargo Cult — Are you getting results… or just going through the motions?

I’m going through an exercise right now that many might find “quaint” or trivial, or somehow beneath anyone of advanced education: I’m copying words from a computer screen directly on to index cards, using a cheap blue ballpoint pen, sitting at my kitchen table as Friday afternoon wanes into Friday evening.

The index cards are three inches by five inches. Standard.

Neurological imprinting. My mind and my hand work together to drill the form of bullet points used in direct response sales letters deeply into my brain, and associate the form of the bullet point with it’s phrasing.

Couple of reasons.

The Cargo Cult is seductive

First, head off to Wikipedia and read up on Cargo Cults.

Back? Good. Strange stuff, that cargo cult.

Since I’m a smart guy, and because a good friend of mine who teaches graduate numerical analysis at Cornell swap war stories about unenlightened programmers mistaking “object oriented coding” for good program design, I don’t want to be seduced by a “cargo cult.”

As noted by David Straker almost 20 years ago, coding and programming aren’t really the same thing.

In the same way, writing blog posts isn’t the same as succeeding in the blogging business, writing sales letters isn’t the same as successfully selling products, and doing your own taxes isn’t the same as being a successful entrepreneur. Even though each of these activities may be critically necessary, necessity here doesn’t imply sufficiency.

So it is in business.

When you’re a struggling entrepreneur, falling into a cargo cult mentality is deadly to your bottom line… more simply put:

Copying out bullet points written by Gary Halbert, John Carlton, Craig Clemons, Gary Bencivenga and others isn’t sufficient for success. It may not even be necessary for success. But someone needs to write sales copy somewhere, and if that ain’t you, you’ll need to what good sales copy sounds like (because you’re going to read it out loud as part of your due diligence).

Doing something is usually better than doing nothing

Here’s my second reason: when you’re stuck, or tired, and you can’t think of what else to do, whipping out some index cards and spending a couple of hours copying phrases can get you going again. It’s like pulling teeth to get started, but it beats doing laundry, and after you get through the first 5 or 6, it becomes very pleasant. You will find your mind will be able to partition the activity of the copying from actual creative work.

For example, I just finished index card #197, which is a bullet point taken from Gary Bencivenga’s “Bencivenga’s Bullets” newsletter landing page. It’s a good one:

New ways to apply salesmanship-in-advertising. You’ll learn lots of simple secrets that translate the laws of compelling salesmanship into direct response copy. For example, you’ll discover ingenious closing secrets used by the greatest salespeople in other fields and see exactly how to apply them in direct marketing.

Here’s a key point: I do NOT want to be a copywriter! Nor a direct marketer. But I do need to know how to write decent sales letters and advertising copy… until I make enough cash to hire a real pro. Along the way, I’ll accumulate enough experience to recognize great copy, and to know when someone is blowing smoke up my butt.

In fact, if you recall an article I wrote a while back on my secrets for inspiration and smashing writer’s block, this entire article has been written while I am supposed to be writing out bullet points. Writing out bullet points on index cards is valuable enough that I could throw them in the trash when I was done and still be net positive productive!

You should do the same

If you’re a kinesthetic learner—as I am—writing and copying, verbatim, important material will help you to mastery much, much faster.*

But beware the cargo cult: hours and hours of writing out phrases no more makes you a writer than practicing scales over and over makes you a musician!

What happens instead, you move into unconscious competence. When faced with a problem that might stump the less practiced, your body is free to write or play while your mind explores alternatives.

By the way, you can learn what I just told you by paying a marketing guru a lot of money. Either way, you still have to do the work. The sad fact, which I have learned from experience, is that most people could have entire plan for riches laid out in front of them, step-by-step, but if it requires work or thinking on their part, they would rather “take their chances” on a lottery ticket.

Truly, the secret is… there is no secret.

Tagged as: Copywriting