Extractive capitalist business coaching culture has taught us that business is a vending machine.
Like this:
We add the ‘right’ input (i.e. the right strategies and ‘clear’ messaging and whatever), we’re supposed to get money output.
It has also taught us to see PEOPLE as vending machines.
Neither your business, nor your people are a vending machine.
Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a morality lesson.
If this whole “treat people like a vending machine” strategy actually worked to get people real money when they need it, believe me, you’d see me teaching it.
I’d be the first to get it to you.
(Caveat: it actually does work. for the few who are deeply committed to being completely fucking shitty. They keep it up year after year and their conscience doesn’t get in the way, and work on their shitty tans on their stupid yachts bought with scammed money. The result is the post-apocalyptic landscape of dysfunctional relationships, dysregulated nervous systems and emptied bank accounts we’re seeing littering the online business-sphere.)
Here’s what I know, in terms of cold hard business pragmatics.
Approaching people like they’re a vending machine (“how do I write this CTA so they’ll buy?”)…. doesn’t work.
And worse: it repels people who might otherwise have been interested in your thing.
Clear, succinct “I help” statements, in the absence of a genuine community of human relationships that’s gathered around your YOU-ness… doesn’t work.
And worse: it makes people tune you out even when they would have otherwise loved to get to know you, because you sound like literally everybody else on social media and they can’t tell you apart.
I’m being way blunt about all of this because there is such a persistent toxic myth that you can either choose between (1) some kind of romantic idea of you just being ~authentic~ and frolicking through a field of daisies, taking it slow, ‘trusting the universe’…
… or (2) doing it the ‘strategic’ way that is ‘pragmatic’ and actually makes you money fast.
THIS DUALITY IS A MYTH.
Writing humane AND effective copy is actually what makes you the most money, in the most sustainable way.
And humane AND effective copy is NOT the same thing as just ~being yourself~, posting a bunch of random shit and hoping some of it ‘sticks.’
It is a deeply confronting engagement with the aliveness inside you, and holding yourself to such a high standard of integrity in your relationships so that you genuinely become a safe place for others to spend money.
Here is my wish for you:
You become so skilled in doing that, that people are transformed just by reading your writing, and the world becomes a safer, more beautiful and humane place just because of your writing….
… so much so that it becomes a no-brainer for people to support you with their money.
Because whatever you’re doing… they know they want more of it.
For ALL of our sake.
There is a method to this madness. And it is many galaxies away from extractive capitalist copywriting.
I will teach it to you. ALL of it. The inner work, and the skill-building.
And we will journey through 7 weeks together, with tons of support from me, to make sure it becomes embodied.
Because nothing else will do.
My unconventional copy course “Writing with the Sword,” an unapologetic “fuck you” to everyone who’s ever told you to squeeze yourself into an “I help” statement, begins Wednesday.
Jump in now.