on NOT surrendering your individuality, for Barry and alike

For Barry and anyone in doubt of his/her own inner wisdom.
This is from a newsletter from Perry Marshal, a sales guru. My partner is receiving his newsletters and forwarded this particular one to me this morning.

This forwarding was perfect in timing. Yesterday I gathered a couple of people. People who have a particular wisdom, experiences (child abuse, homosexuality,…) who worked it through and found a deep inner personal good feeling with their sexuality/sensuality/healthy boundaries. My guts is telling me that ‘my’ time is ready to unite those gems and open up the treasures of our sexuality. They were waiting for something like this and I was waiting for the right people to arrive in my cave.
Two of them are working in my practice doing massage.
I observed, talked, listened these past months, felt if the alchemy between us was fruitful. We are coming from different directions, different spiritual angles, different physical and emotional approaches and I want that wisdom fertilizing each other and bring forward a new foetus.

For the first time since many years I feel a thrill, a YES!
And the joke is that I find resonating souls right under my nose (of course the silent attraction did its job well), in the most dense city of the country we are gathering the most profound energy of the universe. In the ancient fortress of supressed sexuality we are uniting our forces, with love and kindness…

And Barry you are still welcome, as I offered before your leaving to the UK. It is only a footstep of an ant to get here from London.

NEWSLETTER:
‘Last weekend at the System seminar when I introduced
Glenn Livingston to the crowd, I explained something I’ve
consistently seen, from personally coaching many
hundreds of entrepreneurs to success:

*The really successful ones always refuse to surrender
their individuality to formula, convention or dogma.*

Instead they force formulas, conventions and dogmas
to conform to THEIR vision.

Glenn was a case in point. Here was a guy with a
background in psychotherapy and Fortune 500 corporate
market research – who started at the beginning with zero
experience with direct marketing. He comes into this
crazy Internet world and learns conventions like
headlines and long form sales letters and Google
ads and autoresponders and all that.

These things are conventions because a lot of
people have found that they work.

But where some people slavishly copy the formulas –
and very often get disappointing results – Glenn
brought his own genius to the table. When
something didn’t seem to fit he would draw
from his own experience in other fields to
understand the problem.

When Glenn was a psychotherapist he dealt with
suicidal teenagers. He found that if someone said
“Dr. Livingston, I’m thinking about killing myself”
this was probably something he could talk them
through. However… if they said “Dr. Livingston I’m
afraid I’m going to kill myself” – it was an
URGENT situation.

Slight difference in words.

BIG difference in intent.

He reasoned that keywords might be similar so
he started using a survey method to investigate.
He hit paydirt. Today his Survey method has a 90%+
success rate in predicting successful online ventures.

Glenn refused to surrender his individuality to a formula.
He forced the formula to conform to his individuality.

Today Glenn’s formula is slowly becoming part of
THE formula for online marketing success.

When I was a corporate sales manager selling to
engineers, a lot of copywriters told me that everybody
is the same, all people have an emotional center and
all people will respond to emotional, long-form copy.

But I would sit down and write sales letters and they
just didn’t FEEL right. They didn’t feel like something
my engineer customer would respond to. I knew I
wouldn’t like it if I got it. So I just refused to send them.
I’d throw them in the trash.

But I kept working at it and eventually learned how to
still be an engineer AND a copywriter at the same time.
I learned to write copy the way an engineer would write
copy. To talk to those engineers the way they talk to
each other and themselves.

And I hit the ball out of a park with a 4 page mailer
that sold $10,000 to $15,000 of training courses
every time we sent it out. Even engineers would
tell me they loved reading that sales letter.

I refused to surrender my individuality to a formula.
I forced the formula to conform to my individuality.

Ari Galper went through my Bobsled run a couple
of years ago and we taught him a very formulaic
process. A process that works very well for a
lot of people. But there were some parts that
didn’t feel natural to him. So he took his own
sales philosophy and his chat boxes and
combined those things with my formula to
create a new formula. Now the ChatWise
system is transforming the way people sell online,
especially expensive, specialized and highly
service oriented products.

Before you came into my world, you were
already living a life. You had years, maybe
decades of experience in other things.

I want you to know that these experiences are
valuable and important and in many ways hold
the key to what you’re doing now.

This is that Art Factor that I’ve been talking
about lately – the synthesis of the old and the
new, the formulaic and the individualistic.

Yeah, it’s easier for me to just tell you to
Follow The Yellow Brick Road. And yes
there are certain fundamentals, certain
rudiments that all must master. But the
real joy in building a successful business
is putting YOUR fingerprints and your experience
all over it… and finding that the world applauds
you just for being who you really are.

Never surrender.’

Perry Marshall