They won't teach this skill in school, that's why you should learn it

The skill everyone tells you is unethical

Most people aren’t going to like this.

Especially if you’re naturally a creative, artist, or someone who values meaning over money.

And frankly, I’ve always been afraid to say this, but George Mack said it well:

Get good at advertising. The ultimate meta-skill. If you can create a persuasive advert or landing page, you can create a persuasive CV or job interview. This is an incredible luck-hack because most people are awful at advertising.

Advertising?

Yucky. Who wants to sound like a used car salesman? Who wants to manipulate people to make money? I thought if I just learned a creative skill and got really good at it, then I’d at least be able to make a decent income.

I wondered the same things, but if you hear me out, I think I’ll change your mind, and I think it will change the direction of your life as it did mine.

In this letter, I want to show you how I personally learned advertising (coming from a spiritual hippy background), why learning that skill is one of the greatest decisions I’ve made, and how you can start practicing today and reap the benefits of it – without feeling like you’ve sold your soul.

Advertising is the skill of sovereign individuals

Do what you love, but learn psychology, marketing, and sales so you can actually make a living from it.

Ever since I was a kid, I knew that the typical path of “getting a high-paying job” wasn’t for me, even though it was drilled into my head by everyone around me.

When I say this, it sounds cringe and dumb, but I knew I was meant for more. I mean, I had to be, right? Who in their right mind wants to be like most people? I think we just get “busy” along the way and don’t have the capacity to entertain those thoughts of doing something magical like our 10-year-old self would.

Anyway, that led me to the internet. That led me to search for ways to make money. That led me to “take online quizzes to make $5,” because it was 2014.

Eventually, I found what most people would consider a scammy guru today who was “making 6 figures from his Facebook ads agency.” It blew my mind that anyone could do that, but it sounded legit, so I spent $999 on his course, and it was... actually pretty good. More practical than anything I’d learned in school, at least.

But I wasn’t at the level of development to effectively put those teachings into practice. I tried, failed for 2 weeks, then fell down a rabbit hole of trying other business models.

I learned about dropservicing, SEO, dropshipping, brand building, photography, digital art, and more. I’d spend about 3-6 months on each of these, but there was one fundamental problem:

I never advertised what I was doing.

I would spend 3 months practicing, 1 month building the website, another month waiting for product to ship to me, maybe another month just creating cool designs for fun to feel like I was doing something, and by that point, I was bored and wanted to move onto the next thing.

Multiple years started to pass by.

It got to the point where I was in my fifth year of university and was taking out loans just so I didn’t have to get a job, because I was supposedly “meant for more” and had to make one of these things work.

But time was up. I had to get whatever job I could, and I did. I felt like a failure. But that seems to be what it took to make me realize what could have made any of those ventures work.

The key insight is that if you don’t advertise your work, you will not earn money from that work.

Meaning, if you don’t illustrate how what you do can benefit someone else’s life, you still need to survive, and you will be forced by no choice of your own to do someone else’s work, and you will not be in control of the advertising, making you more susceptible to engaging in manipulation.

If you don’t create a product to sell, you will have to sell a product for someone else, and your ability to create will not be self-directed for much of your life.

Michelangelo advertised to the Medicis.

Shakespeare wrote for commercial theater.

The starving artist is a modern myth. Historical artists were great marketers, and that’s why you know their name today.

Further, animals that don’t signal (advertise) their value don’t reproduce. Nature is full of advertising, just look at peacocks.

One could even say that advertising is natural selection in a capitalistic society, and I hate to break it to you but you probably aren’t going to change that, unless you advertise persuasively enough, and on a large enough scale, as to why some other model is greater than capitalism.

You say you despise marketing, sales, and advertising, yet you do it everyday. You just do it unconsciously, and are far more prone to both doing the manipulation and being manipulated. There’s a Carl Jung quote that would go perfectly here.

You describe your weekend and present a certain version of yourself.

You persuade your friends to go to a specific dinner spot.

You plead your case at a job interview.

You recommend your favorite show.

You choose what to wear on a first date.

You get your kids to eat their vegetables.

You tell stories.

And if you were to actually practice this, not only would you get more of what you want, you’d be able to control how much damage you do to other people and how much manipulation you are personally susceptible to.

You’ll finally be able to make the business work, or the relationship, or the raise at your job.

And that’s just it, advertising carries a lot of baggage, but it is simply a concept. A word. A description of an act. It is not inherently manipulative, but if it is used by those at lower stages of psychological and moral development (which are more pronounced when you don’t have money and are in survival mode), their manipulative tendencies will shine through in all of their actions, not just advertising.

I think you get the point.

So, how do you actually learn advertising so that you can both get what you want in life without becoming someone you hate?

How to immediately improve your perceived value

You can’t persuade someone to buy a bad product.

Of course, unless they’re drunk, but that’s when you start navigating into very unethical territory.

Imagine a guy. A guy who doesn’t groom himself, care about his health, and just sits in his mom’s basement all day playing video games. He has nothing going for him. If he were to approach a 10 out of 10 girl on the street, and assuming she’s not a snob, would they ever have a chance of getting together? No.

Now imagine they’re both at a bar and have 10 drinks in them. There may be a slight chance that the guy can persuade the girl to go home with him, but that should make your skin crawl. In the advertising world, that’s exactly what we’re trying to avoid.

In social dynamics, there’s a laundry list of things (from looks to health to character) that people look for before making the decision to get into a relationship.

In business or a career, there are 3 main things that people look for. If you nail one, you’re better off than most people. If you nail all 3, you shouldn’t have a problem making money or getting what you want.

• What is the big problem you solve?

• What is the desired outcome you promise?

• What is your unique mechanism for solving the problem and reaching the outcome?

In order to get those things right, you need to target a specific person and understand their problems and desires more than they do.

Many people have heard this before.

But how often do you actually consider it when you are writing, speaking, or building?

When I write a newsletter, all three of those are the macro structure. When I create a product, those are the first three things that I brainstorm. When I write a post, I try to at least hit on one. When I write a book, these shape the chapter outlines. If you were to simply think about those things before putting your work in front of other people, you would be much more likely to get the result you want.

Those are the foundation.

But in order to make the most of them, you need to understand why they work and how to implement them.

How to learn so fast it feels like cheating

If you’re advanced in marketing or sales, you’re going to cringe at this.

The first book that made things click for me was Ca$hvertising by Drew Eric Whitman.

For those unaware, this book is like the poster child for tactics that will get you called out as a grifter. Think the Clickfunnels countdown timer era condensed into a book.

That said, I do feel like it is a great beginner introduction to direct response marketing and advertising. It’s very tactical. However, I would recommend that you adapt those tactics to how you would authentically articulate something.

That’s the first thing to read, in my opinion.

From there, I have a few more recommendations that may not make sense. Truthfully, if you want to learn this fast, I would go straight to the next tip about how to use AI for this, but I would recommend reading these books over the next 1-2 years as they will reshape how you think.

• Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – not about advertising, but it helps you understand flow psychology. If you apply it to your products and advertising, this takes their value to the next level because you are truly benefiting their lives.

• Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz – what most copywriters and marketers recommend to learn customer psychology and how to position your offer.

• Any course on direct response marketing / copywriting – courses tend to be more practical so you can learn the fundamentals by doing.

Now those are all great, but with AI you can effectively create your own interactive course which also doubles as a coach that guides you through whatever you are doing.

Let’s imagine I’m writing a newsletter. I obviously want that newsletter to do well, because I want my audience to grow so I can sustain creative work and make a living.

As a beginner, it’s wise to imitate, then innovate. You need to learn the rules before you can break them.

So, you find a newsletter that has already performed very well. It’s engaging. You like how it reads. And it’s obviously leading to growth.

You take that newsletter, paste it into an AI chat, and use this as your prompt:

I want you to break down the exact structure of this newsletter so that I can replicate it with other topics or ideas. Mainly, break down macro structure, the structure of each section, the psychological tactics used to hold attention, and the core types of ideas that compose it. Make this comprehensive, include examples from the newsletter, and act as if you are teaching me how to replicate it.

Hit send and boom, you have a mini course on how to write that style of newsletter. Most of the time, and since I’ve been doing this for a while, I tend to use this on my own top-performing writing to understand why it did well and incorporate that in more of what I write.

(By the way, this doesn’t only apply to newsletters. It applies to anything. YouTube scripts, landing page copy, social posts, etc. If you simply understand how to do this, you quickly skip the beginner phase.)

To take it a step further, you can now simply ask it to help guide you through writing your own from start to finish. Ask it to help you choose a compelling topic and list out what ideas you have it mind. Ask it to help you brainstorm an outline without generating it all for you. Then, as you write, and if you already have part of a newsletter written, ask it to give you ideas on how to improve each section.

I really enjoy using AI like this, and have a few other tricks up my sleeve. If you want to see those, simply hit this post with a like and I’ll share them if the demand seems to be there.

How to combine learning

If you don’t know what to write about, write about the difficult thing you’ve been trying to learn, because it will help you learn it so much faster.

Learning is doing.

Most people don’t understand that.

They think that reading 10 books will somehow increase their knowledge and skill. It’s obvious how it won’t increase skill (because you actually need to practice for that to happen) but I would argue that you barely increase knowledge.

It doesn’t matter how much you’ve studied. It doesn’t matter if the best in the world at what you’re trying to do gave you a revolutionary piece of advice. You still have to make the same mistakes that they did.

You’re still going to get the job after college and feel like you are starting over from scratch.

You’re still going to build the startup and run into every single problem that everyone else did, no matter how many times you were warned of that problem.

All of this is to say that if you don’t have a project you are building that acts as a filter for your learning, 90%+ of what you learn is not retained. Source? I made it up.

When you watch a Photoshop tutorial, you should have a Photoshop project open where you are following along, and even more crucially, that project must be a stepping stone to your ideal future, not just something you’re working on to practice.

In other words, you need real-world feedback to know if what you’re learning is useful or effective.

When it comes to advertising, you’re in luck.

There is no barrier to entry to writing a newsletter, creating a product, drafting a landing page, posting on social media, or writing a caption. And in today’s world, where most of the attention is on the internet and social media (and if you want to build your own thing, you must go where the attention is), practicing in public is one of the highest leverage things you can do.

Further, if you don’t know what to write about, why not advertising? Psychology? Human behavior? The things you’ve clearly expressed interest in by reading this letter.

If it helps, I like to think of my newsletters and posts as slightly more formal notes. My writing is my note-taking, just with a bit more intention. Meaning, you don’t need to position yourself as an expert, you can share what you’re learning in a persuasive way.

As the Protege Effect illustrates, the teacher learns more than the student, and with the internet on your side, students can find you.

And if you want more ways to practice, I’ve linked some past posts below.

– Dan