Adam Street's Blog
The spiritual and practical path to freedom to do your art

What’s your prospect’s Boogy-Man?

There’s tons of rules for great storytelling.  

There’s the classic books by Joseph Campbell and his ‘Heroe’s Journey’.  

And a butt-load of other books based on Campbell’s work too.  Which is saying something because Campbell’s books are already pretty plump…

The bottom line is this… 

There’s one super-important story element you need to always have.  You can get rid of almost every story “rule” and still have a descent story.  Everything but this one thing. 

It’s what I use in my marketing.

And my comic books.

It’s what I taught my college students (and Girl Scouts by the way…).

Your stories need a VILLAIN.  

Your bad guy is what powers your story.

Crappy villain=mediocre hero.  Mediocre hero = mediocre story.

Cliffhanger was a great movie because  John Lithgow was a great bad guy.

When we talk about Silence of the Lambs, do we talk about Jodie Foster?  Nope.  Hannibal Lecter, baby!

When you tell your story you better have a good villain.  Your story is only as good as your defeat.

When you speak to your audience, who is their villain?

The gurus say to ask, “what keeps them up at night?”

F*#! that!   

What pisses them off?  What boogy-man is lurking in the dark that is going to get them?

Don’t believe me?  

Ask someone who hates “The Vid” vaccine, what they don’t like about it.  They will talk your ear off.  

This would happen if the topic was medicine.  

What to eat.

Religion.

How to raise kids.  Whatever.

Don’t be milquetoast.  Find what gets under your avatar’s skin and talk about it.

Need help?  https://adamstreet.net .

Adam

Use this Dan Kennedy gem for fundraising over the holidays

This post is a little different.

Today is a shout out to anyone that needs to raise money this holiday season. 

This morning I snatched up my copy of the Ultimate Sales Letter and I ran across this little gem.  

Dan had to write a corporate fundraising letter for the Arthritis Foundation’s annual telethon.  The first thing he did was he grabbed a bunch of other fundraising letters to see what all of them were doing wrong.  

He found it.  

They all talked about THEIR priorities and what they needed the money for.  They never addressed the donor’s needs and priorities.

Like, not at all.  

Before he wrote his letter he visualized himself a business owner being pelted with pleas from charities.  He asked himself, “If I were to give, what would be important to me?”

For example:

What benefit to me or my company justifies the cost?

Who else had picked this drive to contribute to? (How can I validate my judgement?)

How would I get the money to give?  (What budget would it come out of?)

These are real questions that REAL people have.  And once you add in all the noise of the hundreds of options out there, it gets even more complicated.

It doesn’t matter if you’re raising money for a charity to rescue beetles in Qatar or curing cancer.  Take Kennedy’s insight and run with it.

They say don’t bite the hand that feeds you.  But, you don’t want to ignore the hand either.

https://www.adamstreet.net/

Adam

I’m the best, deal with it

I am the best.

I act like it.  

I charge like it.

I own it.

Sound a little full of myself, eh?  Well, I’m the best at what I do.  You’re the best at what you do.  Let me explain. 

When I did my Scumdog [Wanna-be] Millionaire post https://adamstreetblog.com/scumdog-wanna-be-millionaires/ , it was about a guy who was looking for an artist.  He found ME.  

On THAT day, for THAT project, for THAT Scumdog, I was the BEST artist for that job.

If you wanted to get a kids animated movie made and you had an unlimited budget.  Wouldn’t it make sense to go to Pixar and commission them to do it?  They’re arguably the best in the world at feature animation.

There’s a problem though.  

You can’t get Pixar.

You can’t get DreamWork either.

Industrial Light and Magic?  Keep looking Bubba…

You may end up hiring a small animation studio in Florida.  And on that day, for your project, they will be best studio for that job.

Life can seem cruddy when our engines aren’t firing on all cylinders.  Our confidence can whittle down like an old set of tires.   

But no matter the people or the products are out there.  You and your products are the BEST.

Own it.

Act like it.

Charge like it.

https://adamstreet.net

Adam 

How to get Die-Hard fans

One of the legs of my Blockbuster Marketing framework is to put more of YOU in your marketing.  

A lot of people deny this.  They treat talking about themselves like niching down.  They fear showing more of who they are will narrow their audience too much.

If I talk about ME and my story, isn’t that narcissistic? 

Won’t people get tired of me?

Am I even that interesting?  

Yes.  You.  Are.

Keep in mind you can explain yourself in a very BORING way, but that’s not my point today.  My point is you’re taking the most unique thing about your marketing message and… 

You’re throwing it away. 

Megan Macedo said, “a lot of how things are talked about in the world of business ignores the fact that we’re human beings. There’s this switch that people flip where it’s like, “This is my personal life and this is my professional life.” It doesn’t work like that. Your brain is not divided in two.”

Everyone has different degrees of transparency and there’s things that you do and do not want to share with your audience.  And that’s fine. 

You’ll never see Seth Godin talk his family for example. Yet Wayne Dyer talked about his kids in his work all the time.  It’s totally up to you.

Just know the more transparent you become you will lose some people.  But on the other hand, you’re separating the wheat from the chaff.  

The more you peel away your “brand” like an onion the more die-hard fans you’ll have.

Cheryl Strayed said, “ One of the most important lessons I learned though the success of Wild is that if you take that risk, if you take chance, if you tell the truest, hardest, deepest story that you have within you, you’re not going to step into the light and find that you’re there alone.  You’re going to be surrounded by people who are there with you.”

If you want more die-hard fans… 

https://adamstreet.net

Adam

Thinking like Jobs and Bezos

Authors are like musicians sometimes.  

Their first book is amazing and every book afterwards  never lives up to the first one.  

This isn’t true in Simon Sinek’s case.  I read his book The Infinite Game and enjoyed it as much as his first book Start With Why.  

The Infinite Game is about leaders who use a finite mindset can easily blow it with limited thinking.  The leaders who embrace an infinite mindset, build stronger and more innovative organizations. 

This is true if you run a clothing store with one location.

It’s true if you run a million dollar online business.

It’s true if sell baseball cards out of your mother’s attic.

Sinek put it like this: 

“To ask, “What’s best for me” is finite thinking. To ask, “What’s best for us” is infinite thinking.” 

This is why the music industry got hit so hard in the Internet age.  All they could see is THEIR profits and THEIR problems.  And when they started suing power user of Napster for copyright infringement, they looked like bullies.  

Hell, worse than bullies.

They were like Colonel Quaritch from the movie Avatar or Burke from the Aliens movie.

Apple cleaned their clock because Steve Jobs approached music with infinite thinking.   

So did Bezos at Amazon with the publishing.

Sinek’s book was a great reminder for me to approach my short term decisions with long term thinking.  

That’s why doing work that matters is so important.  We effect ourselves AND the people around us.  

It’s not only your job but that’s your legacy too.

Wanna keep upping your infinite mindset?

https://adamstreet.net

Adam