Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson published a book called 12 Rules For Life, a dense, 400-page book about life advice that tells you to clean your room.

Unlike every other dense, 400-page book about life advice that tells you to clean your room, 12 Rules For Life shot to the top of bestseller lists.

Why were people buying a dense, 400-page book about life advice that tells you to clean your room? Because around the same time, Jordan Peterson went viral for something completely unrelated.

He was protesting a law about gender pronouns. Someone filmed him and the video went viral.

Now all of a sudden a bunch of people knew Jordan Peterson as the guy who “owned the libs”. So they read his book. Some of them really liked it.

This isn’t a political email — I’m not trying to be pro- or anti-Jordan Peterson. But there’s a lesson here.

The lesson is, there’s always a gap between what people think they need, and what they actually need.

20-year-old men thought they needed a viral video where this Canadian professor with a funny voice “owned the libs”. But they actually needed a 400-page book about life advice that told them to clean their room.

Similarly, your audience thinks they need one thing, and actually needs another thing.

People who want to lose weight think they need to discover some “magic diet”, but they actually need to develop healthy eating and exercise habits.

New business owners think they need some marketing hack to make millions of dollars, but they actually need to get clear on who their audience is and develop good products to sell to those people.

You know what they actually need, because you’ve been on the journey they’re going on. The problem is, they don’t know what they actually need. They’re out there looking for what they think they need.

So you need to offer them what they think they need. You need to give them some “hook” or “bait” that gets them into your orbit.

Then once they know, like, and trust you, they’ll give you a chance with the other thing.

If you need help creating that “hook” content — and then getting the people you hooked to know, like, and trust you — then check this out:

theoseeds.com/brandvoice

How to get your customers to ignore you

A few years ago I was walking down the street in Panama City. Some guy came up to me and said, in a big, booming voice:

“EXCUSE ME, SIR! DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH OR SPANISH?”

In the 30-ish days I spent in Panama City I saw this guy maybe 4 or 5 different times. Every time I saw him, he said the same thing to me in his big booming voice.

And every time he spoke to me in his big, booming voice, I ignored him.

I didn’t look up. I didn’t acknowledge him. I just walked right past him, without saying a word.

Why? I’ve learned that in Latin America, when some random dude on the street starts speaking English to you, you need to ignore him. Because they either want to sell you something, they want to beg you for money, they want to tell you about their god, or they want to rob you.

(If the dude had talked to me in Spanish, I might have responded. The people who speak Spanish to me are usually nice and just want to chat.)

You probably do the same thing when a salesman knocks on your door, or when a telemarketer calls you, or when you see somebody handing out flyers on the street. You instinctively ignore them, because you know nothing good can happen if you talk to them.

Most marketers do the same thing that the guy in Panama did. They do the online equivalent of speaking in a big booming voice: they write in all caps, they say stuff that’s obviously not true, they inflate their authority, and they try to sound as hype-y as possible.

In other words, they try to “sound like a marketer”.

That’s the worst thing you can do!

Because if you sound like a marketer, your audience will tune you out!

At this point, most people know that most people who sell stuff on the internet are full of shit. If you talk like a marketer, they’ll ignore you.

How do you fix this? Just talk like a regular person.

Don’t do weird gimmicky stuff to get attention. Because it usually hurts you more than it helps you.

(Oh, and, the smarter your audience is, the more this rule applies to you.)

If you want help making content that sounds like a real person wrote it, with no weird gimmicky stuff, check this out:

theoseeds.com/brandvoice

How to sell more colonoscopies by making them longer and more painful

Imagine for a second that you are a colonoscopy doctor.

What’s your biggest problem in the world?

Getting your customers to come back!

Everybody knows they need a colonoscopy. And most people bite the bullet eventually. They say “fine, I’ll do it,” and they come to you.

“Come back in 10 years, because we need to do another one,” you say. Then 10 years pass, and you don’t hear back from them.

So you call them. “I know I need to come see you again, doc,” they say. “But last time was too painful. I don’t wanna come back.”

What do you do?

Once upon a time, some psychologists did a study on how to make colonoscopies seem less painful, so people would come back for a second colonoscopy.

They found something really weird. They found that when they made colonoscopies longer and more painful, people remember them being less painful.

Here’s why. When you rip the camera right out, people go from being in extreme pain to not being in pain at all. They go from a 10 to a 0, instantly. So when they reflect back on how painful it was, they remember the 10.

But when you pull everything out slowly, people don’t go straight from 10 to 0. They go from a 10, gradually down to a 5, then gradually down to a 0. So when they think back to how much pain they were in, they don’t remember the 10 — they remember the 5.

Psychologists call this the “peak-end effect”. Basically, when we look back on past experiences, we remember the very end.

This is true for painful stuff like colonoscopies. It’s also true for fun stuff. If you go see the Blue Man Group, or Cirque du Soleil, or fireworks on the 4th of July, they will “save the best for last”. Why? Because that’s what you’ll remember.

You probably see where I’m going with this. I’m about to say that every program you sell — whether it’s a course, a coaching program, a book — is a stepping stone to the next program you sell.

It’s a way better stepping stone if you end it strong.

So finish strong. Give people your most interesting, most useful, and most entertaining tidbit last. That way they come back for more.

-Theo