I spent half the day today writing proposals to program computers instead of actually programming computers, and damn, I felt good.
I grew up loving books, but the way things were presented to me, the only way to get a job writing was to either be an author or write for a newspaper. Yep, that was pretty much it. Somehow I ended up writing computer code instead, though it took years to recognize that this was a kind of writing too.
Years later, I learned about direct response copywriting, and somehow I just “got it.” I don’t mean that I became an expert overnight, but I immediately grasped the power behind the task. And I think the reason for that was this: copywriting, done right (and ethically,) is just like computer programming, but the computer in question is the human brain.
Granted, it’s a little fuzzier, and nobody’s been able to express it in a way that would work in a programming manual: “if you write X, then Y will happen.” But the probabilities are higher if you follow what works, and what’s interesting, to me, in the writing/marketing market is that the “correctness” of your work is more about how it ranks against the other noise in the prospect’s environment.
In programming, you have a one on one audience with the CPU. If you make a mistake, things just don’t work. In copywriting, you’re one voice among tens, hundreds, or thousands, and so you’ve got to get noticed, and sometimes, amazingly, making a mistake is actually the way to get attention and win the game. (Though it’s a rookie mistake to not be careful – mistakes in professional copy are seldom accidents.)
I spent the other half of the day programming computers, which is my first love and continues to reside in the deepest regions of my comfort zone. But I was able to do that work, for profit, because of the kind of work I did in the other half of the day, and that’s the stuff we need to teach more.
Photo by matryosha
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