All You Need is One

All You Need is One

I was flicking through Ogilvy on Advertising yesterday and stumbled upon the single page print ad that was written for "How to Win Friends and Influence People." A book I'm almost certain you're familiar with.

The ad (at the time of writing) was attributed with 3 million sales of this book.

One page.

It's easy to get seduced by all manner of tactics and techniques, 10 step funnels, complex logic sequences and retargeting algorithms, but what if you took all of that effort to write one compelling story that persuades in perpetuity?

Couple that with a media asset that is timeless (in this case, to the tune of 30 million copies).

You can make the argument that the world functions a little differently now, attention spans are shorter, and volume of ads has increased massively, but that doesn't change the lesson.

If you can tell a great story, the only thing left to do is to get people to read it.

Leverage is as much about where you are standing as how much force you are applying.

If you are building something, it is far more useful to focus on the work you are doing to produce the result than the result itself.

The constraint we apply to package our idea determines their reach & resonance. "Make 1 decision to eliminate 1,000 decisions."

Labor is generally a more interchangeable resource than vision.

To help understand this idea, consider the contrast between the two concepts ancient Greeks used to think about time.

It should be relatively simple to identify when we aren't accumulating net new experience, but in practice, it doesn't seem to be.

Language is an incredible tool. It makes it possible for us to externalize what we think and communicate it to others.