I’ve been reading recently about how marketing and magic are related.
It’s exciting stuff because it all links to how your mind works.
We all have brains that work in basically the same way, sure, there are differences between us, but the fundamentals haven’t changed significantly in centuries.
It’s those fundamentals that the magicians exploit.
It’s mostly about distraction and ‘forcing’.
This article is about how big tech companies use those fundamentals to keep you using their platforms.
When I split up with my first wife, I had no job, little income, no savings and nowhere to live.
I had a car that I couldn’t afford and which had dropped in value by 50% due to a Government decision, so I couldn’t cover the remaining cost by selling it.
I had trouble making decisions because I was suffering from depression.
I was lucky though.
I had parents who were prepared to help me get back on my feet.
Without their help, I could have been homeless.
That’s how simple it is to go from home ownership to homeless.
When you have little or no income and no home, you are only one missed rental payment from eviction and homelessness.
You need less income to survive and thrive when you own your home.
A national study recently found that people in Australia who live on their pension alone can manage when they own their home, but if they’re paying rent, they struggle to make their money go far enough.
As some wag said, “I have too much month at the end of the money.”
Your Internet business can pay your mortgage when you build it right.
Stop thinking of $10k per month or six figures a year.
Think in terms of that extra $100 a week.
Is that easier to get your head around and your belief system rocking?
I understand it’s often easier to use those and other accounts to sign up for and sign into other sites.
It’s a terrible idea though.
You know they track you so they can push advertising at you “for your convenience”.
The more places you use your account details for increases exponentially the amount of data they have on you.
Add that to the way they track where you go, which stores you visit, and listen in to the conversations you have; these companies know more about you than you do.
They can predict your behaviour with fantastic accuracy.
Most of the advertising you see as you wander aimlessly around the Internet is targeted to you specifically.
OK, so you might think that this is all pretty harmless.
You might think you’re not doing anything wrong, so where’s the harm?
“I’ve got nothing to hide” is a common statement I get when I talk about this invasion of our privacy to people IRL.
So why do you have the doors of your house or apartment shut and locked?
Why do you lock your car door when you leave it?
Because some people might steal your possessions?
What if they didn’t steal anything but went through your home and tried on your underwear or other clothing?
Would that bother you?
What about if you spotted someone taking photographs of you or your kids on a daily basis?
Would that bother you?
How about if you discovered a hidden microphone in your home or car?
That’s right.
You already have one of those.
You carry it with you everywhere.
You even pay monthly for the privilege of carrying it around.
Your mobile phone is useful for you, but it’s more beneficial for the companies who make them and sell them to you.
You pay them to collect your data and sell it to other people.
Do like I do and turn the data off when you’re not using it.
It’ll still work just fine as a phone and camera, but you screw up their tracking and data collection, and the microphone in your pocket doesn’t work either.
Regards, Brent.
P.S. Something a bit light-hearted after that rant.
I’ve put together a collection of coffee mugs for your entertainment.
Starting with a quote from a video of a very successful and very influential marketer, Dan Kennedy, about thriving during a recession. In that talk, Dan said:
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You pay attention to everybody else who’s in your business. It’s like being Amish. It works just like real incest. Everybody gets dumber and dumber and dumber until the whole thing just grinds to a halt.
So you can’t do that. You’ve got to pay attention outside your little Amish community of jewellers or carpet cleaners or whatever it is that, up until tonight, you thought you were.
You’ve got to pay attention to other stuff because you ain’t going to find any breakthroughs in the five other people standing in a circle looking at you. They aren’t any smarter than you are. They are probably dumber than you are.
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Since you’re a smart cookie, you can clearly see the link to Woke thought.
When everybody is thinking the same way, nobody is thinking.
That’s no way to improve the planet’s average I.Q., and we will never solve our problems, even on a personal level, if we don’t get smarter.
When you wait for a solution that fits all sizes, it won’t work.
Freedom of speech and freedom of thought are the solutions.
Question everything.
Ask “What if you’re wrong?” of anyone who is dogmatic about any subject.
Even Stephen Hawking admitted that the thesis he got his PHD with was wrong.
You’ll have to read his book “A Brief History Of Time” to get proof of that statement.
When people attack you because they don’t like how you think, that’s proof that they don’t think themselves and have accepted someone else’s thoughts as accurate without testing the ideas.
Regards, Brent.
P.S. I’m writing this email because the program I’ve been working on all day has had the IDE crash, and I lost the last 3 hours of work.
I needed the mental break.
Fortunately, I’ve made a lot of progress today, and I’ll be able to recreate it fairly quickly.
The message is to save and back up your work regularly, I didn’t.
Some of you are working towards your financial and time freedom using one or more of the modules here https://go.wm-tips.com/full, and that’s great.
Remember, though, that it’s only those who remain consistent who get there.
Getting the first new business started is always the hardest.
Someone once described beginning a business as boiling water.
Water will not boil until it reaches its boiling point.
So is starting any business.
When you work on it up to the ‘boiling point’, magic will happen.
Unfortunately, a business’s ‘boiling point’ is not as clear-cut as that of water, so many people give up before reaching that point.
An important factor in why I could focus and start my first business was that I was unemployed and had few other prospects.
Every day, I could bury myself in all aspects of starting and running the business.
I usually worked until 2 am, sleeping only 4-5 hours before returning to work the next day.
There were times when I wanted to give up.
But whenever I asked myself, “What other alternatives do I have?” the answer was “None”.
That pushed me to continue working.
Don’t get me wrong.
I had good skills, so I potentially had other career choices.
My answer was ‘None’ because I wanted a career that could lead me to time and financial freedom, and I reckoned that running a business was the only answer.
That’s not quite how it worked out though.
That business provided me with a good income for several years, but it would never lead me to the financial position I wanted.
So I started another one online where scaling is so much easier.
If you are starting and thinking of giving up, telling yourself to ‘Not Give Up’ is easier said than done.
If your goal is to achieve time and financial freedom, perhaps you can ask yourself the same question that I asked myself,
“What other alternatives do you have that can lead you to time and financial freedom?”
If the answer is none, then forget about giving up and keep working.
Regards, Brent.
P.S. Now that you’re all enthusiastic about the possibilities of your financial and time freedom, you’ll want to know what to do next.
https://go.wm-tips.com/full has complete training on five different ways to build your financial freedom at no cost.
These are proven methods used daily by some of the biggest names in online business.
You can get similar training from multiple sources online, but what you won’t get from those sources is the step-by-step process using free tools.
And you won’t get all the methods in one place.
They’ll sell you each method separately for more than you’ll pay for this training.
There are no upsells or ridiculous bonuses, just a solid set of training modules in text and video format for easy consumption at your own pace.
Everyone notices different things at any scene, and what they don’t see, they make up.
As much as we all think we remember things accurately, it’s not true.
Unless you have had special and extensive training to notice details and remember them, there are always gaps in what you remember.
Often our brains fill in those gaps from other memory segments, and sometimes it fills in the gaps with imagination.
Have you ever told someone a story from work or a social interaction where you added some details that you know didn’t happen?
What you said that you wished you had said or done what you wished you had done?
You are not alone, we all do that.
As marketers, we can use words to help our readers remember things they don’t like, such as the daily commute and the dumb shit the bosses ask you to do at work.
You don’t have to fill in the details because they’ll do that for you.
Then you make the switch and allow them to imagine a future where that doesn’t happen.
For example, it’s a wonderful feeling to wake up when you’ve had enough sleep, not when the alarm goes off.
You have a leisurely breakfast, check your emails and the sales stats from overnight.
Perhaps you spend a couple of hours on your latest project before heading out for shopping, golf, lunch with friends, or whatever else you want to do.
It’s your day to do as you wish with no time clocks or rush hour traffic.
All you have to do to have that lifestyle is click here: https://go.wm-tips.com/write because the training you’ll get on creating and populating profitable blogs will give you that lifestyle with those few hours per day of “work”.
Regards, Brent.
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Some of what I have learned has ended up as an email.
Today isn’t an exception.
The book suggested that the word OK came from World War 1 battlefield communications.
Apparently, every morning there was a morse code transmission to all troop positions with the numbers of soldiers killed in battle the previous day.
0 k meant no one died, which soon became known as an OK day.
It seemed logical to me, but I did some additional research and discovered that the linguists think it came from an editorial joke 175 years ago, well before WW1, and spread from there.
I prefer the first explanation because it makes more sense than some dozy editorial joke with a different meaning going viral.
Without the book, I probably would never have done the research.
The lesson for all of us is that you can never trust what you see, read or hear as being gospel truth.
For an example, see the image of the city on Mars that the A.I. tool created for me at
