The piece of writing advice that changed George Lucas’ life

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One of my favorite biographies I’ve read so far is George Lucas: A Life by Brian Jay Jones.

There’s a tremendous amount of useful insights and life lessons (as well as high being a highly entertaining read).

For example.

As a young, fresh, recently graduated filmmaker, George Lucas had the golden opportunity to “protegé” under Francis Ford Coppola—famous for films such as The Godfather and Apocalypse Now—who was eager to take Lucas under his wing.

The two seemed to connect excellently.

Sure, they had their fair share of drama across the years, but George Lucas wouldn’t be the same—and we probably wouldn’t have gotten the Star Wars that exists today—if it weren’t for the support and teachings of Coppola.

One of Coppola’s teachings, which had an immense influence on Lucas—he often stated he had to be chained to his desk to get any work of writing done at all, and that still wouldn’t be without blood, sweat, and tears, if that tells you anything—went as follows:

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“Don’t ever read what you’ve written. Try to get it done in a week or two, then go back and fix it… you just keep fixing it.”

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Now if that ain’t the truth.

And it’s the same for every type of writing. Whether it’s film scripts, novels, biographies, non-fiction business books, sales letters, email sequences, entire promotions, paid advertisements, and whatever else you can imagine.

It’s all the same.

You start writing it. You try to get it done as fast as possible—no re-reading allowed. And only once you’re done with the entire first draft do you go back to the beginning and start fixing the damn thing.

After all, it’s only after god-knows-how-many revisions that the project starts to resemble a finished product.

Just look at the early drafts of Star Wars.

Some of the scenes are hardly recognizable or non-existent to begin with.

Anyway.

I’ve learned a lot—and still do every time I pick it up again—from Jones’ biography George Lucas.

More.

I’d recommend everyone in business, especially in creative fields, to check out the book for themselves.

Simply the way George Lucas approached his projects, and why he made the decisions he did, is worth its weight in gold.

But enough rambling.

Check out the book here and see for yourself: https://alexvandromme.com/lucas


The dangers of being a contrarian

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Earl Nightingale once said, “Watch what everyone else does—do the opposite. The majority is always wrong.”

Dan Kennedy once said, "Everybody who makes a lot of money defies industry norms. Everybody who makes average money conforms to them."

Someone, somewhere, once said, “In a world of beauty, the ugly stands out”.

At least two out of three quotes are made by highly successful people. Many of the most successful people I’ve come across frequently repeat all three.

More.

They’ve all personally made me a lot of money as well.

And above all, they share an important theme—that of doing things differently.

There’s a lot of value in being a contrarian.

All of this, however, needs an important disclaimer—there’s a lot of danger involved in blindly being a contrarian.

See, becoming a contrarian just for the sake of it won’t bring you much success. In fact, it’ll make you look stupid, and dumb, and quite ironically, you’ll become no more than a conformist chasing whatever is popular at the current time.

No, you’ve got to have some reasoning behind the madness.

You have to be deliberate about how and why you’re doing things differently. You first have to understand the basics. You’ve got to learn and master the foundations and principles some of the brightest minds who came before you bled for to discover and share with future generations.

Regardless of what industry you’re in, you need to know the rules before you can break them.

Everything has an order, everything has a reason.

Yet not every reason is as sound as they often appear to be.

That’s where the contrarian approach comes in—to put everything you’ve been taught so far to the test, and see how far you can push the boundaries established in your industry.

The difference between a true contrarian successfully thriving where no man has gone before and a dunce nobody even pays attention to is that of experience and mastery of the foundational principles his domain is built upon.

Rules are made to be broken, but only after you understand why they existed in the first place.

Don’t rush to the finish goal, skipping your fundamentals in the process.

Speaking of fundamentals.

Check out Email Valhalla today to improve your email writing fundamentals so you can write entertaining emails your readers love to read and buy from.

Click here for more information: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla


The numbers, Mason! What do they mean?

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I’m currently in the midst of creating a course about paid advertising.

More specifically, a course about paid advertising aimed towards creatives (including self-published fiction authors).

I’ve mentioned this a couple of times before in previous emails. And everytime I do so I always get some questions from readers eager to get their hands on it.

Sometimes those questions are to ask when the course is coming, what they can expect from it, and whether it’s going to help them in particular.

Other times it’s questions from people wanting some help with their ads at the moment.

One of those “help me” questions I got recently was about how to navigate the enormous dashboard of data, statistics, acronyms, and confusing numbers every major ad platform throws at you.

What’s important, what does it all mean, and how should you decide what to do depending on what those numbers are telling you?

A good (and popular) question indeed.

More.

Watch any video about paid advertising, open any book, go to any course, and chances are you’ll get overwhelmed with all kinds of numbers, acronyms, and terminology to the point of utter and complete confusion where you don’t know what to do.

More often than not people will immediately stop right then and there, thinking this is way too complicated (they’re right) and it’s not for them (they’re wrong).

The truth is, most courses are making it way more difficult than it needs to be (almost as if they’re doing it on purpose, hoping you’ll ask the author of the course if they have a “done-for-you” service—which they almost always have).

But all of that is completely unnecessary.

In fact, there are only really three (3!) numbers/acronyms you need to know to run a successful business powered by paid advertising.

These three numbers alone can help you decide whether your ads are working, if you should let them keep running as is, switch it up, try other variations, add upsells or downsells to your funnel, try another marketing angle, switch up the targeting, adjust your phrasing, limit the daily budget, and so much more.

Even more.

Those course creators I talked about before?

Most of them pretty much only rely on these three numbers as well. They don’t always mention they do, but at the end of the day. Those are the only ones that matter.

Which three numbers I’m referring to and exactly how to approach them for you and your business can be found in my upcoming and soon-to-be-released paid ads course.

For now, you’ll just have to hang tight and keep your eyes open.

If, however, you have ad-related questions or topics you’d like me to address, feel free to reply to this email and let me know.

I won’t promise I’ll have the answer, but chances are pretty high I do.


How not to lose all motivation when writing

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I came across the following Reddit post:

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“Here´s the thing. I´ve been trying to write for a while now. I love writing. I love to create places and characters and outlines. I´ve had a story in my mind for years and I have it all outlined and planned. But when I have to sit down and actully write it I lose all motivation, inspiration and fun. I dont know. Am I doing something wrong? Does this happen to you as well? Could use some advice.”

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My answer: you don’t "love writing”.

You love ideating stories and thinking about writing.

The solution?

Learn how to actually love the writing process. With that I mean the entire process. Ideating, first drafting, experimenting, going back to clean up your mess of a first draft, writing a second, and a third draft, editing everything, making sure the timeline fits and there are no plot holes, fixing the dialogue, and ultimately getting your writing ready to be published (or posted).

Every one of these can be further divided into their own steps—if you’d like to play the complex game that is.

Or you can look at the source of everything, that is, enjoyment as a whole, and why we, as people, find one thing more fun and enjoyable than another.

Hint: there are only two ingredients to a “fun activity” no matter what it is, who it’s for, or how to do it.

Playing chess, writing a book, going skydiving, painting, poetry, playing a video game,… it doesn’t matter. Every single one of these shares the same two foundational ingredients to what makes something fun.

If those two ingredients are present the activity becomes fun. If they’re missing from the activity (including those mentioned above) you’ll no longer enjoy it.

The trick lies in knowing you can artificially implement these ingredients into everything you do, essentially turning everything into something fun and enjoyable.

As to what these ingredients are, and how to apply them to learning to love the writing process, no matter what kind of writing you do, how long you’ve already been writing, or who/what you’re writing for (business or professional, fiction, non-fiction, or persuasive) and especially if you want to learn how you can write more than you do now, better than you do now, and faster than you do now (so you’ll also earn more money than you do now) then I’ll have to refer you to my little gem of a book titled:

“The Art of Loving to Write“.

It’s an incredibly short, yet powerful, read (and so inexpensive everyone can afford it).

No matter who you are or what market you’re in. If you do any type of writing in your life (professional or personal), I can guarantee this book can and will be useful to you—so useful in fact that you’re likely to see immediate improvements the same day after you finish reading the book.

Which, good news, the book is short enough for you to finish it in one sitting if that’s what you like

Here’s the link to get your hands on The Art of Loving to Write: https://alexvandromme.com/loving


Things will go wron

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I have this habit of reading up to 12 books at any given time.

I do this both for my enjoyment and my daily education—that’s one of the main lessons I’ve picked up from other extremely successful writers, creators, and simply anyone whose lifestyle I admire and want to recreate (they all spend a ton of time in their day reading).

Not the “you have to read 52 business/self-help books a year, bro” type. But the “I’d like to broaden my horizons and learn the art of writing from the masters” type, which includes a lot of fiction—something way too many people overlook.

Anyway.

During this daily reading, whenever I read something that tickles my fancy I like to highlight the sentence or paragraph and slap a page marker (these see-through colored type of sticky notes) on them.

This allows me to regularly flip through some books, immediately go to those pages where I highlighted interesting stuff, and reread them.

Today I opened up The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel and read the following sentence:

“A good rule of thumb for a lot of things in life is that everything that can break will eventually break.”

This seemed oddly befitting my current situation.

My X account could ‘break’—and so it did last year when I lost all of my progress, including over 5k followers, and a big chunk of my monthly income.

But so it goes.

Nobody is ever safe from whatever universal law that says whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.

Luckily for me, I found a solution that’s as safe and foolproof as you can get nowadays. In fact, I’ve been doing this particular thing for almost two years now. It’s also been the sole driver behind everything I’ve achieved in those past two years, and the very reason why losing my Twitter account—my main driver of traffic and revenue back then—wasn’t as disastrous as it could’ve been (and probably would’ve been for many others, who didn’t have the same safety measure in place).

The solution?

Growing and writing a daily email list (as well as meticulously backing it up every single day to make sure I’ll never lose it and never have to “start from scratch” no matter what happens).

So if you don’t yet have an email list, aren’t able to grow it, or aren’t making money with it. Then check out Email Valhalla to learn exactly how I do all of those (and how you can do so too).

Click the link here for more information: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla


Getting more done in the same amount of time

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A while ago I received a hangboard—a wooden training instrument with specific-sized holes to train yourself to hang on to small ledges with anywhere from all 5 to 2 fingers per hand—as a gift.

A great and useful tool to up my bouldering game.

For months now, it’s been above the door of my room where I work, read, sleep, relax, and more than occasionally waste a lot of time—long story short, I’m in there a lot.

I also enter and leave a lot, whether it’s to get something to drink, to eat, to go to the toilet, to go on a walk, to the gym, to talk to people, whatever it is.

The consequence?

Every time I leave my room I use the hangboard.

It’s the easiest thing ever. It takes all but 5 seconds and it’s always “on the way” to whatever I want to do.

The result?

I get tons of practice and training without thinking about it, let alone realizing I’m “training”.

Now, I don’t know how this might be useful in your life, but what I do know is that you could use this same strategy to force yourself to write a small opening line (or a subject line) to an email every time you think of an idea worthy to write down.

You want to write it down anyway, so why not practice creating more curiosity in your writing—and then send it to the world and see what happens?

Anyway.

Another way to learn how to create more curiosity in your writing and improve your persuasiveness is by checking out Email Valhalla here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla


I know nothing

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Yesterday, I, once again, went quizzing with friends.

I mostly go quizzing for the social aspect and the enjoyment that comes with it—definitely not to win.

Why?

Simply said, I know fuck all.

Truth be told, I can’t be bothered following sports, mainstream media, politics, or any of the other major topics most questions asked in a quiz are built around (after all, the aim is to cater to the general public).

Not saying there’s anything wrong with that—just not my thing.

And yet, out of the 50-something teams that participated we (mostly my friends) managed to place 12th. Definitely not bad to say the least. (something, something choose your friends wisely, I guess?).

Situations like this always make me think.

This isn’t so different from what I normally do. I’m not the smartest marketer out there, nor the most-talented writer, and definitely not the most successful advertiser.

All I know, and ultimately excel at, is to figure out who to listen to, learn from them, implement their teachings in my own business, and achieve rock-solid results.

It’s not the least bit new, sexy, or exciting.

Frankly, it just sounds boring and even obvious.

Yet so many people seem to struggle with this simple plan—whether it’s because of their ego, their inability to think critically about the information they allow themselves to absorb, or simply due to their laziness, I have no idea.

All I can say is, that it, quite literally, pays to study from someone who can demonstrate they know their shit—not to be confused with being full of it—and hyperfocus on doing so until you master that specific skillset… and only then move onto the next thing.

Speaking of a valuable skillset to build.

If there’s anything I would recommend to almost anyone trying to build a name for themselves, create something they think is cool and exciting, and sell it to the world, then it, without a doubt, would be the skill to write persuasive and entertaining emails your readers can’t help but 1) keep reading them day after day and 2) buy whatever it is you’re selling.

And for more information on how to learn just that, check out Email Valhalla here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla


The abysmal state of Hollywood

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What do The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the 2022 Halo series, and the last season of Game of Thrones have in common?

Yes, they all have abysmal ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. Clearly, the audience didn’t like them. But why?

There’s something they all share. A common reason why the audience hates them—sometimes even without knowing why.

It’s not that they necessarily had bad writing. Or that they had lots of plot holes. It’s not even that they often felt rushed and unpolished.

No, it’s something much more fundamental.

Here’s a tip. They all had previously built fanbases.

The Rings of Power has the fanbase of every Lord of The Rings lover, films and books alike. The Halo series was a highly anticipated movie by every gamer out there who, in their youth, spent hundreds of sleepless nights grinding behind their screen. And, well, the last season of Game of Thrones had millions of fans who watched all the previous seasons of course.

But then. Every single one of these managed to completely fuck up by pissing off their audience and not thinking—not even caring about what their audience wanted.

The Halo series barely has any resemblance to the original story, characters, and world that fans knew and loved from the games.

Game of Thrones managed to disregard some of the prior arcs and character-building that were built previously and made characters do things they never would’ve done with their personality, beliefs, and personal history just because it seemed useful to do so for the story.

And don’t get me started about The Rings of Power where the new show writers casually decided to do away with the decades of work Tolkien put into building the world and create his lore just because “they wanted to give add their own twist to it”—and publicly admitted to do so.

This is a common case of not thinking—not caring about your audience.

And it happens way too often.

Hollywood—and especially Marvel as of late—does it all the time. Think about how many films and shows with (badly written) heroical female leads you’ve seen pop up as of late. And how almost all of them completely flopped.

But this isn’t just limited to the movie businesses. No, no.

This is applicable to business as well.

Especially nowadays when it’s clear just how rampant the wave of newbie self-proclaimed masters, experts, gurus, and other nonsensical titles filled with people who don’t care about helping their audience.

In fact, most people who want to start a business come here with an idea of something they want to create, and only after it’s built do they ever think and wonder “Who can I sell this to?”.

When, in case it’s not obvious, it should be the other way around.

First ask yourself “Who do I want to help and what do they need?” And only when you’ve answered those two questions should you start creating something.

Always remember: market first, product second.

Which begs the question, how do you figure out what people want?

Well, for starters, if you happen to have an email list, it’s as simple as being in constant communication with your readers, writing entertaining and engaging emails, seeing which topics resonate, and if all else fails, simply asking them questions (which doesn’t mean you should always trust what people say—especially not if it’s about money or buying stuff, most people lie even though they don’t even realize it).

To get started writing these types of emails to stay in constant connection with your audience, check out Email Valhalla here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla


How to always keep your audience engaged

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Here’s a valuable persuasive writing tip (or any kind of writing for that matter) I learned from a screenwriter somewhere (can’t remember who or where I learned it from):

“Plot and character are the two main ingredients to keep the audience engaged.”

Or in other words, at any point in time, if you want to keep the attention of your viewer (or reader more likely), you either need to be advancing the plot one way or another, or you need to be developing the characters.

Fail to do either of those and you’ll end up losing the attention you fought so very hard to get.

One of the best examples I know of to see this in action is the 1987 film Lethal Weapon starring Mel Gibson and Danny Glover.

It’s a one hour and 49 minutes long masterpiece perfectly giving the audience 15 minutes of plot (lots of action, attention-grabbing scenes, discoveries, and plot twists) followed by 10 minutes of character development (more mundane, day-to-day stuff, conversations, relationship forming, getting to know the various people) only to jump straight into non-stop action and plot-developing cinema and rinse and repeat.

At no point does either one become too much, or too little, and at no point does the film lose the attention of the audience by failing to do either.

A powerful lesson to bring into your own writing—especially when it comes to persuasive writing.

There’s many ways to go about doing so.

If you’d like to get a taste of a few of them, then check out Email Valhalla here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla


They Laughed When I Made An Email List – But When The Sales Started Coming In!

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There are two types of people in life:

Those who recognized the subject line and those who didn’t.

Let me explain:

See, one of the most famous ads ever written was the historic masterpiece written by John Caples and its headline was “They Laughed When I Sat Down At The Piano – But When I Started to Play!”

Caples then goes on to tell a (made up—which is dubious in its own right and quite possibly illegal nowadays) story about a man who sat down to play piano at a gathering with his friends.

The good friends they are all started laughing because this man had (as far as they were aware) never played a single note in his life.

But then, suddenly the man started playing the most magnificent music anyone had ever heard.

He earned admiration and respect from every single person in the room.

He then tells the story of how he learned to play piano from some music institutes across the country which would send him these lesson bundles to practice on your own (the product the ad is about).

The ad made a shit ton of money and with it easily became one of the most swiped and copied ads ever.

Which is laughably stupid.

Not the money-making part, it’s a good ad. But the swiping part.

The only thing you’re doing with swiping, well, anything, is shooting yourself in the foot. You’re not original, your audience will realize, you will look stupid, nobody will buy your stupid stuff, and you lose all credibility you had as a marketer—which probably wasn’t a lot to begin with since if you’re down to copy someone else’s work, you’re probably also doing a lot of other dubious stuff that hurts your credibility.

Am I calling swipe files stupid? No.

I’m calling the act of swiping stupid.

Swipe files are great for idea generation, to learn what makes something “good” and to improve your own ability.

I have a swipe file full of old-school ads (before 1990) which I open every morning when I hand copy an entire ad—a practice Gary Bencivenga, the world’s greatest living copywriter, and many other top players recommend.

But the stuff you write?

No, that needs to be original.

Your thoughts, your ideas, your interests, your style, and your structure.

You’ll never see me talk about swiping inside my courses. I simply don’t teach you how to copy, how to mindlessly follow some checklist that will undoubtedly end up with bad results, nor how to be a fraud and destroy your entire reputation and credibility.

I give you the tools and principles you need to succeed together with the freedom to experiment and grow on your own personal journey.

I created my courses as more of a guiding hand in the right direction than a step-by-step template on how to do something.

Anyway.

If this didn’t scare you off (which I hope it didn’t because you shouldn’t be on my list in that case) then go check out Email Valhalla today.

Why?

Because I said so. (how’s that for persuasive communication, huh?)

Here’s the link: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla