Catch-22 is my favorite book of all time. It’s my favorite book for 2 reasons:
It's deep, profound, and full of great life lessons.
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: