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I am following the teaching of a guy who teaches marketing…
Marketing is finding a need or a problem you can help resolve, finding the people who have it. Create or find the solution to sell, finding buyers for it, and selling it mostly through audio, video, or the written word.
The company that is the best at it is Agora Financial. So this marketing teacher went to Agora to find out how they teach tens, maybe hundreds of people to write in a way that Agora’s marketing is so extraordinary.
Now, whether you know it or not, we are all in sales, and we are all in marketing or should be. You, me, everyone.
Some of us are good at it, most of us are not.
Some of us accept that we are in marketing, and most of us don’t.
But to be really good at it, you need something that is not a common ingredient: curiosity.
Agora screens applicants for its copywriting staff for curiosity. Not for marketing knowledge, not for writing ability, but for curiosity.
Curiosity is the desire to know. Know more. Interest leading to inquiry: intellectual curiosity.
The new writers’ first six months are mainly two activities: research and analysis of other people’s marketing material.
180 days of those activities, before they are even allowed to write any copy.
And this is what I wanted to share most. You think that you can acquire a skill by reading about it, watching a few videos, trying it a few times is the hallmark of a failure waiting to happen.
Incurious people don’t even get to fully understanding what they are supposed to do, and they are already moving to something else, thinking that they got the skill licked.
Most things don’t give up their secrets, don’t allow you to possess them in a brief encounter… just like a person worth having won’t jump into bed with you after meeting you.
If you fill your life with things like one-night stands, your life will be empty. Meaningless. Lacking any purpose, any rhyme, any reason, any success.
Now, most people think that the capacity that is most missing is persistence, but I am here to tell you: it is curiosity. Curiosity is the motive power underneath persistence. Persistence is a behavior.
Same with discipline, commitment, purposefulness, deliberateness, my Prison Break students pretended to take on.
Their Hero program reports give it away: I researched what commitment is Romanian, and found the answer… ugh.
Curiosity isn’t ‘wanting to find THE answer‘ and be done. Curiosity wants to know what people say about it, how it looks, how it smells, how literature talks about it, how songwriters, philosophers, soldiers etc. relate to it. You want to make it yours…
What you call persistence is probably dutifulness… joyless servitude… no joy, no curiosity, no love, no enjoyment of the process.
If you are trying to learn something, or make money with something, or master something and your relationship to it is dutiful… then please stop and look… You are lacking curiosity.
You don’t have to love the topic. And you don’t have to love learning. You don’t have to enjoy researching or maybe even the doing. You ‘just’ need to be curious. Curious enough to go deep.
Curiosity is an energy… and without it you are the walking dead.
Activity moved by curiosity leads to fulfillment.
There is general curiosity, and then there is specific curiosity.
It is obvious that I am curious. I want to know everything. I poke at the Universe to find out more.
My curiosity score is 30%. I don’t FEEL curious. I just want to know.
My readers’ average curiosity score is 1%. And they are dull, boring, and bored.
A student who has a curiosity score of 3% is head and shoulder above others in everything… And if he keeps it up…
…with a puny 3% curiosity power you will go far in a world of dead wood.
But how the heck do you get curious if you are not curious?
I have been, no surprise there, experimenting.
And I have found that ambition and curiosity go hand in hand… maybe even meaning the same thing?
And I have also found that desire, the habit to visualize what you want and consider that you have it if you can visualize it, is what kills both curiosity and ambition.
But all that you are visualizing is not real. They are mind-construct, built from imagination, and things that you have seen.
Curiosity and ambition goes for what isn’t… not in imagination, not in reality, it is the unknown. Magical and exciting.
Visualization makes you delusional. You really think that you have done something…
I see this in the area of wealth, in the area of sex, in the area of healing.
Areas with the most desire are areas where the least amount of effort is actually invested.
Now, here is the million dollar question: Can I, with any of my methods, open you up to curiosity?
The general answer is no, I can’t.
The second million dollar question: can I take, select people over to curiosity, ambition, and the desire to discover?
And, or course, the answer is yes.
But how will I know who I can take and who I can’t?
Not surprisingly the answer is in the Starting Point Measurements.
Especially certain numbers,
8. your relationship to feedback and instruction:
9. The level of discomfort you are willing to allow w/o trying to fix it. This is your TLB score…
10. The size of your vocabulary: the number of words you can use accurately:
11. To what degree you think of yourself:
12. # of fixed mindset:
13. Ambition:
14. Desire:
15. Degree of inauthenticity overall:
16. Level of integrity 1-100:
.
.
35. Your curiosity…
Most of those questions reveal how much room you have for curiosity. The more you think of yourself, and the more desire you have the less ‘room’ you have for getting anything done, being curious, or having any ambition.
Now, I am going to go into uncharted territories here:
The energies I sell are powerful. Used for personal transformation could result in the whole reshuffling your priorities, and making you relate to the world more actively… and more accurately.
But if your relationship to life is passive, if your emphasis is on getting, having, just because you want it, is going to make your relationship to the transformation that’s possible the same: passive. Do me….
Remember, how you do anything is how you do everything.
I have been using raising your cell hydration, setting up the Water Energizer as a valuable test. It won’t happen if your attitude is passive.
- You have to buy the right kind of water, water that can be made coherent.
- You have to set it up correctly, you have to make sure the audio plays continuously, then you have to do it again and again.
It is literally impossible to expect you to do anything in life if you are not willing to do what it takes to raise your cell hydration. But if you are one of the rare people who does what it takes… I can almost guarantee that only the sky is the limit for you, no matter what size of issues you deal with.
And you will deal with issues… but just like you overcame the issues with the water, you can overcome the other issues, and end up successful.
Because you have what it takes.
If you have low or no curiosity… Can you grow it?
First you need to really get that your curiosity is low… that you don’t go and seek out things to see… that you are passive in life.
Breathe… Tesla said and it is true… Your virtues and your failings are just two sides of the same coin, and you can’t have one without the other. So all is well…
You want to go a little further every day in the direction of curiosity. Be forewarned…
Curiosity is in the direction of the uncomfortable, scary, and you’ll resist. Your resistance is a good guide.
The process is very connected to expanding your cone of vision… Incurious people also have penlight width visual field, so everything outside of the narrow cone will be threatening.
You want to go, every day, a little wider into that scary peripheral vision and see that there is nothing scary there.
That is, I say, the training, the practice you want to take on if you EVER want to amount to more than you have.
Ask questions, and ask better questions. Find questions that don’t come from the mind. All clarifying questions come from the mind… they ask someone to explain… and you put the onus of responsibility on their shoulders.
Are you curious enough?
Sure Rosemary. I’d love to. I’ll contact you through Facebook: we are “FB friends… remember?”
Hi Sophie,
Would you be available to meet with me for tea or coffee sometime to offer some mentoring to me about starting a web site? I’ve lived here in Syracuse for the past 9 years and in my past I produced a public access TV program for over 20 years and I’d like to get back to interviewing. I really like your site and acknowledge your layout. I am 74 years old and mention it since you recently let us know you turned 70.