What Are You Doing It For?
This topic is another quick one in the same train of thought as yesterday’s post on three exercises to get you thinking in terms of direct response and personal finance planning.
Consider this another thought experiment. It’ll only really work if you do it.
What Are You Doing It For?
In most markets – and I’m still talking about direct response marketing here, but I won’t mention it again – people get the wrong questions and wrong answers. Marketers follow a person down a rabbit-hole of absolute nonsense because they’ve gotten mixed up between what a person says they want and what they actually want.
Three examples from the top of my head, which may apply to you. We’ll come back to them through this:
- Fitness: Most people think they want to be Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan with the ability to also win every Olympic event; and so marketers follow the trail down and sell millions of supplements
- Money; most people think they want to be millionaire celebrities, and so marketers follow them down the rabbit hole, with their stupid Lambo Luxury House Rentals. (Imagine…)
- Survivalism; most people think they want to be Rambo and thus marketers follow them down the rabbit hole, selling MRE’s and tents. (Like you’re going to live in a tent forever.)
There are obviously benefits to creating direct response material in this way. But it’s rarely the best answer.
And of course, it’s never the best answer for your own personal brain hygiene.
Why Do You Want What You Want?
Let’s look at the above examples and determine what 90% of people actually want.
- Fitness; they want to look good and be healthy. You can turn up the volume, but most people simply do not want to be Arnold and have the bodybuilder life. Most just want to be adored by potential sexual partners. This is not injecting yourself with oil and steroids.
- Money; most do not want to be multi-millionaires. That’s a headache and even fewer can deal with celebrity, which is a major flaw in anyone but the most fame-hungry.
- Survivalism; most people into survivalism actually want one of two things: 1) to be freed from perpetual uncertainty or to have their social status and lack thereof reversed. Everyone imagines themselves a king of the wasteland.
Now, you might think, “Jamie… I want those things.”
I would advise that you probably don’t. Get out of marketer-land and think about what what you think you want actually entails:
- Pain walking up the stairs when you’re sixty because you decided to do low-rep legs trying to get massive quads or hit a personal deadlift record of 600lbs?
- Dealing with accountants?
- Sitting in a bunker eating tinned ham because the end of the world actually happened?
Understand, if you’re still with me, that most people never undertake any sort of introspection about why they want what they want, or what the end result will actually be.
People Love To Want
People love to want stuff; Very few actually want the stuff that they love to want.
That’s pretty exhaustive as a sentence when you take in the various implications.
You need to master your own understanding of this in your personal life.
So far as marketing and persuasion is concerned, the sentence is at the essence of what you’re doing.