Saved By a Sales Letter

How Copywriting Saved My Life

The following is from my new book, Read This Or Die! Persuading Yourself to a Better Life …

In May 2011, my body began to rebel against my brain. At a business conference in Las Vegas, I was in the audience taking notes, having trouble keeping up with the speaker. My mind would think what I needed to write, but then my hand moved too slowly to get it down. That’s odd, I thought. The person leading the seminar noticed I was having trouble and stopped presenting to ask from stage, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, distracted. “I’m just not feeling well.”

This statement was true, but something else was happening, too— something that scared me. As I paid closer attention, I noticed my handwriting getting smaller and smaller, to the point of being practically illegible by the end of the day. When I returned to my room, I did some googling, and the number one result for my symptoms was Parkinson’s disease. I sighed.

Returning home, I called our family physician in Spokane to tell him my symptoms.

“Come in,” he said. “Let’s talk.”

During our visit, my doctor said, “You’re much too young to have Parkinson’s disease, so I want you to stop being concerned about that. I’m certain that’s not what it is. You’re forty- five years old, Ray. That can’t be what’s happening.”

I agreed with him, nodding, already feeling a small sense of relief.

“But to make you feel better,” he continued, “I’ll get you an appointment with a neurologist who can verify that, so we can figure out what’s really going on. I think it’s probably an impinged nerve in your shoulder.”

It was months before I was able to see that neurologist; and though I left that initial appointment with my family doctor feeling better, my symptoms only continued to worsen. Something was definitely wrong.

Happy Birthday, You’ve Got Parkinson’s

On September 22, 2011, the day before my forty-sixth birthday, my wife, Lynn, and I went to see the neurologist. I didn’t know it at the time, but the doctor made a diagnosis within sixty seconds of seeing me. She knew the hallmark signs, and I had them all.

After five minutes of examination, she said, “I think you have Parkinson’s disease. This is serious. It is degenerative, which means it only gets worse. There’s nothing we can do to treat it or make it better. It is eventually going to make you dependent on other people to do the most basic of tasks, like getting dressed and eating. You’re going to have difficulty walking. You could be in a wheelchair or otherwise disabled in seven years. You have a limited window on your ability to function normally. There are medications you can take to treat the symptoms, but they only work for a little while, and they cause their own side effects that are problematic.”

Lynn and I stared at the neurologist, stunned. Surely, we thought, there had to be another way.

Devout Christians that we were, we considered the diagnosis a test of faith, a good setup for our new career as healing evangelists. Once I got healed, I’d be able to use such a testimony for the edification of others: teaching and preaching and healing, just like Jesus. My whole life, I’d prided myself on being a positive thinker, someone who could imagine a better future for himself and then create it. I believed in the power of prayer and physical healing, even modern- day miracles. I’d followed the self- help gurus for decades and taught their practices and philosophies in my own business. As an established copywriter, I thought you could convince anyone to believe anything. And here I was, sitting in a neurologist’s office, unable to accept what she was telling me. I was sick, and there was no getting better? Really?

This, by the way, is the part of the grieving process they call denial.

The morning I experienced my first few shuddering tremors, a few months after that initial diagnosis, my coffee cup looked like one of those mud puddles in Jurassic Park, quaking with each unexpected vibration. A monster was, indeed, approaching. That was the first time I felt real, honest-to-God, gut-wrenching fear about what was to come. And as the reality of the diagnosis set in, I got scared— for myself, for my wife, for my family and employees and everyone who was depending on me. I wasn’t ready to die and certainly didn’t want to go this way, as a shaky invalid who can’t control himself and is dependent on others. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, I thought. This isn’t fair. What did I do to deserve this? I don’t have to tell you that none of these thoughts made my life one iota better, but I still thought them. Then, after a long period of wound-licking, catastrophizing, and reflecting, I turned to an ally I never would have considered. It wasn’t faith healing or positive thinking that saved me. No, it was something far less conspicuous.

Writing.

I didn’t write my Parkinson’s away, but I used words to understand what I could and could not control. This was a long, difficult process. First, I questioned the diagnosis, trying to bargain with reality. I went for second and third opinions, looking for any “loophole” I could find and finding none. Then, I figured there must be a way out of this situation, some magic pill I could take to reverse the symptoms, a series of special words to recite that would convince God to heal this thing right out of my body. As an entrepreneur, I possessed the audacious belief that I could fix almost any problem, which served me well in many areas of life for many years. But now, that belief only served to make me angrier. I couldn’t fix this, couldn’t fix anything. I was stuck and didn’t have any way out of a terrible situation. I was desperate. So I did something nobody would ever have expected.

I wrote myself a letter.

Words Change Everything

This is a book about change— the kind we hope for and the kind that sometimes comes unexpectedly and in unwelcome ways. When I received my Parkinson’s diagnosis, I did not want my life to change. I wasn’t looking for the kind of transformation that you seek at a weekend seminar, something dramatic and powerful to accelerate my evolution as a human being; and yet, that’s just what I got. Life is funny that way. The things we don’t want to happen, that we can’t see coming, sometimes happen— no matter how hard we believe in their alternatives.

The experience of acquiring an incurable illness brought me to an impasse in terms of my own beliefs and the way that I was used to living. My old way of looking at the world, the ideas on which I’d built an entire life for half a century, had been broken apart, and I wasn’t sure what came next.

And this, my friend, is the starting place of every good story and every great ad.

Copywriting: A Catalyst For Change

I am considered an expert at professional copywriting. For the past four decades, I have taught people a process for convincing consumers why they need whatever the business is selling. I was trained in and then studied on my own the science of persuasion, methods for helping people change their minds and alter their decisions.

Changing a person’s mind, when you know how to do it, is relatively easy. It’s not magic. All you have to do is help people convince themselves that what they want is within reach and then show them how to get it. This is all marketing is: identifying a problem in a person’s life, amplifying the pain to the point of necessary action, and then providing the next right step. Anyone can do this if they understand the process.

You really can change a person’s life by changing their mind; and changing people’s minds, by another name, is “sales.” Sales is the art of helping someone see a product as the solution to their problem, so that it becomes their idea to buy it. Think of it as assisted decision- making: you’re helping someone convince themselves that they need to buy this thing to relieve their discomfort and that, if they don’t, it’ll only hurt worse later.

Human beings tend to change only when they must, and the only one who can convince a person that change is necessary is themselves. A good salesperson, then, doesn’t pressure or force someone to purchase something. Good salespeople blithely lead their prospects to a place where they are the ones convincing themselves that buying this product is necessary. We marketers and salespeople understand that people are much better at convincing themselves of something than we are. I got to that place after flailing around for a time, when I faced the very real prospect of my business failing and my wife being left with nothing but a depressed, ailing husband, I realized I faced an impossible situation, one in which something had to change.

So I tried an experiment. If I couldn’t change the circumstance itself, maybe I could change my mind about it— maybe I could change me. I knew that if anyone had a chance at persuading me that this was even possible, it would be me. How I persuaded myself to change despite desperate circumstances is what this book is about.

As a marketer and trained persuader, I understand that persuasion is a delicate process and must be done right. When you persuade someone, you are creating urgency in them, so that they act now, instead of later. People are persuaded whenever they buy something, vote, or make even the tiniest of decisions. In small but significant ways, we all make decisions on a daily basis without even being conscious of it. Over my many years of studying this craft, I’ve realized there is a simple framework for understanding what it takes to change a person’s mind. Sales starts with words, and copywriting is the art of using the right words to motivate people to make the desired changes in their lives.

Copywriting is an ancient craft, one that’s been motivating people to make big changes for millennia. In ancient times, philosophers used words to debate how the universe worked, writing proofs to convince one another of their arguments. The Ninety-Five Theses Martin Luther tacked on those cathedral doors was, in fact, a sales letter. The Declaration of Independence was a form of defiant persuasion, signaling to the king and the rest of the world that the loosely banded colonies would not tolerate tyranny. All change starts with words. And lest you need more examples, let’s not forget The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, and many others— all examples of how writing can stir people to do all kinds of things, whether for good or for evil. Words are powerful. So whether the purpose is religious, ideological, political, propagandistic, or just plain hateful, human beings have been using language to create change for a long time.

Granted, not all change is equal or even beneficial; the words we use, and how we use them, matter. To effectively persuade another person, you have to use the right words in the right way to convince the person that change is necessary. Of course, people pretend not to like change, but most love it. People change their minds and habits every day, albeit often in small and nearly unnoticeable ways. You can see these changes in your own life. Whenever you decide to buy a certain laundry detergent instead of your typical brand because of the “100 percent all- natural” sticker on the label, you are changing your mind. When you opt to go with your spouse’s movie choice for date night instead of your own, you are allowing yourself to be persuaded (and are wiser for doing so!). Human beings love to change their minds; they just don’t like having changes happen to them against their will— and that distinction is key. We all use persuasion to convince others and ourselves to make all kinds of changes each and every day. Thanks to my vocation, I see persuasion everywhere, and I happen to be pretty good at it myself. But somehow, in my forty years of persuading people for a living, I had never seriously turned the process on myself.

To be fair, I never really had a reason to do so.

When something completely unexpected and absolutely devastating occurs, however, that’s when you need to bring out the big guns. The most important motivator in a person’s life is pain, and when one of the worst things imaginable happens, you’ll try just about anything. After a lot of kicking and screaming regarding my incurable condition, I eventually got sick of all the wallowing and wanted the best version of my life possible.Denial wasn’t working. Positive thinking had failed, too. Even my religious convictions were holding on by a thread. I was desperate for a solution I could trust. That’s when I turned to persuasion.

Persuading Yourself To a Better Life

If I couldn’t change my circumstances, I reasoned, maybe I could change my perspective on them. And that’s how the process started: not with huge aspirations of “changing my life,” but just with a simple desire to feel better. That’s how it works. You don’t need a campaign slogan or flashy marketing campaign to change a life. You just need a hefty dose of reality, a little discontent with the way things are, and the possibility of something better. When people are sick and tired of being sick and tired, they’re experiencing plenty of pain to motivate them to get out of whatever ruts they might be in. That’s what happened to me. That’s all that happened to me. Putting my powers of persuasion to work, I convinced myself that this really terrible situation was truly for my own good and that my greatest life was still possible.

You know what? My sales pitch worked. Turns out I’m a pretty good salesman. You’re good at sales, too; you just don’t know it yet.

In the book, I explain how I used writing to persuade myself to live a better life, despite my circumstances. What’s more, I show you how you can do the same. Whatever you need to change, you can. It’s simply a matter of persuading yourself to do so. You can get the book from Amazon, or click here to check out some free bonus materials that come with it.

Thanks for reading!