John Carlton’s Best Ads: The 17th Version

You see, I was already a hard worker.  When I went solo as a freelance writer, I had one rule:  Business before pleasure.  I had spent my twenties being a gloriously wild and undisciplined scoundrel… and when I finally decided to start working hard, I worked hard.

But that didn’t  prepare me for working  with Halbert.  The bastard.

I wrote seventeen (17!) completely different versions of this diet ad.  Each one took me days to polish… and each one met with the same fate.  Halbert  read it, tossed the manuscript in the trashcan, and told me to go back and put some frigging empathy into the copy.

Empathy.   I had empathy.   Hey, I’m an empathetic kinda guy.  I’ve always tried to walk a mile in the other person’s shoes before coming to any conclusions. I had a degree in psychology, for God’s sake.

But Gary didn’t see it that way.  He didn’t  have any fancy college degree.  He’d learned his salesman’s chops in the mean streets of real experience with real customers. And he knew empathy when he saw it.

The sixteenth  version was the worst  of the lot.  My brain was ready to explode with the eftort.  I considered quitting.  I’d been a very successful  freelancer  before teaming up with Halbert, after all.

But I’d joined up with him for a reason.   I knew that — as good as I was — he was better.   He held the keys to what I really wanted:  The secrets of writing the best copy in the world.

So I tossed that nasty sixteenth version in the trash myself, without bothering to show it to Gary.  And I sucked  up my frustration and went back at it.  I forced my entire being to get in synch with the potential customer.   I became Mr. Empathy.

This version — the seventeenth– mailed for almost two years, bringing in millions of dollars a month for the client.  I bought a new car with my first share of the royalties.  It was just a massive success… and would have continued to be a success, if Gary hadn’t ruined the relationship we had with the client, who promptly stopped mailing the winner just to spite us.

Genius is weird and volatile.  If you know someone, and you suspect  they might be a genius… and they don’t  drive you absolutely nuts with their unpredictable and often irrational behavior… then they aren’t a real genius.  They’re just smart.

I’ve  had the pleasure and horror of working closely with some of the true certified geniuses in direct response… including Gary, Jay Abraham, Jim Rutz and a few others  I won’t mention because I don’t want them to know where I live anymore.

The road to getting really good at anything is tough and not for sissies.  The payoff is staggering, of course. But if you aren’t prepared  to work your tail off, and suffer abuse and indignities and hair-tearing  frustration, you won’t get very far.

Seventeen  versions.  But it paid off.  You can smell the empathy rising from the copy.