Pro-Tip For Success: Do The Improbable

Yesterday we entered 2024, and I made a triumphant return to blogging. I also made some huge claims regarding writing challenges.

Here’s the thing; I’ve got a lot of data for doing challenges like these, and I’ll have a lot more by the end of the year.

Really though, it doesn’t take a lot of data to point out two obvious and related things:

• People have a tendency to give advice like, “do this absurd thing to guarantee success!”
• People never actually do the thing

From those things, we can draw the conclusion that in order to achieve skill, notoriety and the pot of gold at the end of a quest, all we have to do is seek these things out and then triumph.

Easier said than done, sure, but that’s part of the appeal. There’s no free lunch and if nobody else completes the challenge, you’re the only one that basks in the glory.

Let me give you some examples.

#1: Steve Vai’s 10-Hour Guitar Workout

What some kids today would consider a long time ago, I was a teenage nerd who played guitar. (I’m still a nerd who plays guitar, just a slightly older and creakier one.)

I know, difficult to believe.

Unlike a lot of guitar-playing nerds, I actually brainwashed myself into thinking that the goal wasn’t to get girls and have fun, but to actually get good at playing the instrument.

More fool me, I suppose.

As part of that journey, I came across guitar-wizard Steve Vai’s 10-Hour Guitar Workout, and, being my moderation-is-impossible self, I actually did it. For a while.

The reality; a lot of guitarists back in the guitar magazine days of the 2000s would say to practice for many hours a day. I can pretty conclusively state that it was a little white lie on their part; realistically, you don’t get much from it except tendonitis and the idea you should be doing something else.

However… there are rewards which I’ll discuss in a later section of this article.

#2; The Ray Bradbury Challenge

Let’s talk about something old-fashioned that I’m doing right now.

One of the things that blurs the line between hobby and business interest for me is in reading how old pulp writers used to work. It’s instructive, because these guys used to write day-in, day-out on ancient typewriters and consistently pump out thousands of words a day.

A lot of pulp writing was bad writing, but a lot was very good, all things considered.

Ray Bradbury is a famous pulp writer, and he gave this advice for aspiring authors:

• Read one poem, one short story and one essay every day (by good writers)
• Write at least one short story a week, (he wrote one a day at several points in his career)

Again, you’ll see this recommended around. What’s interesting is that many people seem to have blogs, reddit threads and so on where they start this challenge but few actually seem to stick at it.

I’m doing the challenge this year, and will be inviting you all to join me within the next few days.

#3; The Gary Halbert Copywriting Challenge

Here’s another one that will be relevant to a lot of the audience here.

Gary Halbert, famous copywriter, wrote that you should do a whole bunch of things to get good at copywriting. I can’t remember off the top of my head, but it was things like:

• Read about 10 books cover-to-cover
• Handwrite many sales letters
• Copy and print the layout of sales letters
• Do the whole thing all over again

Now, I wrote about this challenge a couple of years back. You can find tons of people on the internet who say they’ve done this challenge, and yet they all omit to mention the one thing I discovered doing it:

It’s simply not possible in terms of the time-commitment and the deadline. (I think it was a month.)

When I blogged about this way back, people tried to argue in the comments and instead confirmed it; most people who “do the challenge” massively omit things. They read the books once, not twice. They do the handwriting portion for a few days and stop, and they don’t do the layouts. (Fair enough, but still…)

This is a pattern that repeats across most challenges in most disciplines.

Bonus Points: These Challenges Are Often Subpar… But One Thing Works

In any endeavour, the spoils go to the victor. If you do a challenge and you cop out, you don’t get the glory.

What I’ve learned over the various years of throwing myself neck-deep into some of the most intense challenges ever is threefold:

1. Most urban-legend style challenges aren’t actually possible
2. While they aren’t possible, they cause a transformative effect
3. Most people don’t do enough to achieve the transformative effect, and cope by saying they did the light challenge

So, let’s go back to two of the challenges above;

The Gary Halbert Challenge, which I didn’t complete, made me realise a few things:

1. The traditional wisdom for getting good at copywriting is really lacking – handwriting, copying old ads – all the stuff that people take for granted; honestly, it’s not very efficient (or good) advice
2. I could use my natural affinity for systems to be better than virtually every other copywriter working in the late 2010’s

What’s more, that same systematic thinking would lead me to discovering opportunities outside of copywriting with tech, AI and IP licensing which now grant me the mythical “passive income” that people dream of.

With the guitar challenge; I pivoted to composing music rather than playing it, got the attention of noted composers, ended up getting invited to a scholarship at one of the world’s best music institutions, and then promptly left it all behind to do something else.

Typical.

Returning to that is another challenge which we’ll talk about the other day. Let’s wrap this one up.

Final Thoughts

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about character and legacy. My current thesis is that the simplest way to go about securing both of those is to seek out things and follow an individual path of attaining whatever you consider great things.

This, relevant to today’s topic because ultimately, boiling it down to, “attempt the improbable and allow the transformative effects to change you,” seems a good course of action for attainment.

In light of yesterday’s article where I talk about media addiction, it seems a healthy option as well.

P.S. One of the reasons that The Vault is taking so long is that I want to actually build something that helps people achieve the ends I talk about here. It seems to me that having a private member’s site filled with useful articles is all well and good, but it’s far better to tap into the energy I’m talking about here, and it’s taken me a long time to figure out how to do that. The Vault will be ready imminently, and I want to be able to guarantee that it will be transformative for your personal journey.

Also: I’m going to help you all get rich, get women and become supersmart philosopher kings. So it’ll be worth the wait.