Happy New Year

Happy new year!

Quick question: what are your goals for 2025?

I’m gonna guess some combination of a) make more money, b) help more people, and c) work less than you did in 2024.

This marketing channel can help you with all 3 of those things:

Email.

Email is the best way to sell courses and get clients because via email, you can sell all you want.

Most social media sites punish you for linking off-platform. Facebook and LinkedIn throttle your reach if you put a link in your post. And Instagram won’t let you put a link in your post.

But when you send email, you can sell as much as you want.

Plus, you can write an email in just 20 minutes.

You don’t have to film a bunch of videos or write whole blog articles.

So if you want 2025 to be better than 2024…

Email can help.

Best,

Theo

P.S. Want me to help you figure out how to use email? Or write your emails for you? Reply to this email and let’s chat.

Catch-22

Catch-22 is my favorite book of all time. It’s my favorite book for 2 reasons:

1. It's deep, profound, and full of great life lessons.

2. It’s also full of the most screamingly funny ridiculous crap that has ever been printed in an award-winning novel.

Here’s a small sample of the ridiculous crap that happens in Catch-22:

• One character is hired by the Americans to bomb a bridge held by the Germans. Then, he is hired by the Germans to defend the same bridge from the Americans.

• There’s a character whose name is “Major Major Major” who gets promoted to the rank Major. Major Major Major Major spends all day in his office hiding from everyone. No one is allowed to see him in his office while he’s in his office. If they want to see him in his office, they have to wait until he leaves his office.

• The main character is a bombardier pilot. His commanding officer keeps raising the number of bombing missions that he has to fly before he can go home. The main character needs to fly 30 missions and have already flown 28. Then the mission total gets raised to 35. He’ll get to 33 and the colonel will raise the mission total to 40. This goes on for 500 pages of the book, until the mission total is up to 80.

• The main character can get out of combat duty if he’s considered crazy. Everybody who willingly goes into combat is considered crazy: you’d have to be crazy to risk your life like that! So he asks to get out of combat duty because he’s crazy. Now that he’s asked to get out of combat duty, he’s no longer considered crazy. They throw him back into combat.

Today Catch-22 is an American literature classic. They teach it in schools. It’s even become a word — if you need X to do Y and you need Y to do X, that’s a “catch-22”.

I read Joseph Heller’s second novel Something Happened a few years later. It’s just as deep as Catch-22, just as profound, just as good a book, and not even the slightest bit funny.

Guess what happened? Nobody bought Something Happened.

People just forgot about it.

That's one of the dark, dirty secrets about making good content. People will say they want to learn, but deep down, they really want you to entertain them. 

They want you to make them laugh, make them cry, even make them angry or afraid. Just teaching people stuff isn't enough.

That’s why I write my emails the way I write them. I lead them with something interesting, that makes you laugh or gets you curious.

Then I transition into teaching something. For example, in this email I’m teaching you not to teach too much, and to entertain people instead. Because people do like to learn — but only once you entertain them first.

Want me to write entertaining content emails for you? You can learn about that here:

theoseeds.com/brandvoice

Role Models

One day when I was a sophomore in college, I showed up at a WeWork in San Francisco.

The security guard asked to see my ID. I didn’t have a government ID with me. So I just showed him a picture of my school ID, as confidently as I could.

This was the picture on my school ID:

The guard laughed, and by some miracle he let me in.

I was at this WeWork to start my marketing internship. Someone had told me that if I wanted to start a business one day, I should learn everything I can about marketing.

So I Googled lists of marketing agencies in San Francisco. Then I cold emailed every single one of them.

I was on spring break when they got back to me. They talked my ear off for 30 minutes. Then they agreed to hire me for the summer.

So that summer, I went into San Francisco every Tuesday and hung out in their WeWork.

One of them, James, was the smartest dude I had ever met. We talked about business, dating, psychology, careers, science, chess, and life in general.

He always had something unique and interesting to say. And he seemed like a happy dude.

I decided that I wanted to be like James. From that point forward, I read all the books James recommended to me. I learned skills James told me to learn. James told me that I should start meditating and I started meditating. Et cetera.

That’s why I decided to get into the digital marketing world in the first place. I wanted to be like James.

On the flipside, there are a few people I know who respect me because they wish they had my life. When I tell them about a book they should read, they read it. When I give them life advice, they take it.

This is a huge part of human psychology. We find people we admire and respect. Then we copy everything they do, hoping we can be like them.

This is why every single high school basketball player who watches Steph Curry shooting 3-pointers starts shooting way more 3-pointers themselves.

This is why whenever Taylor Swift or Katy Perry or any celebrity starts dressing in a new style, it becomes a fashion trend.

This is also why coaches brand themselves the way they do.

If you look at the coach you admire/are jealous of, they probably constantly talk about how cool their life is. (The stereotype is the guy in your Facebook feed driving a Lamborghini trying to sell you his dropshipping course.)

They do that because they’re trying to turn themselves into role models.

Turn yourself into a role model, and you’ll sell more stuff.

How do you turn yourself into a role model? The best way is to seem like a) you have a cool life, b) you’re talented, and c) you know what you’re talking about.

How do you get there? Produce as much content as you can. The more good advice you give, and the more you get in front of people, the more you become a role model.

Want some help turning yourself into a role model? I can write emails that position you as an authority, make your audience trust you, and make you sales.

Here’s more info about that:

theoseeds.com/brandvoice