Daily email reader Lilian asks:
Hey Ben !
Quick question. How do you remember everything people told you ?
It seems like you have hundreds of quote from discussion that you use in your copy…
Do you write them all in notes/paper ?
Do you make them out of memories ?
Thanks for your answer if you take the time !
True story about this:
In August 2021 while on a walk listening to Edward White’s “The 12 Lives of Alfred Hitchcock” audio book… the idea for the cover to my Markauteur book just slipped into my mind. It was all there in my head — exactly what it would look like. I didn’t even have a title for it or know what I’d write inside the book — as the mere possibility of writing a book about the visual & design-side of marketing had never once occurred to me a single time before that.
But there the idea was haunting my brain.
And so, instead of trusting my brain to remember it, I did this:
1. Immediately whipped out my phone
2. Tapped out the idea (for the cover) in an email
3. Sent it to myself
When I got home a few hours later, I then got out a yellow legal pad and sketched out the cover idea. I’m no Picasso. But I was able to get the gesture of it down. And I then immediately sent that to Email Players subscriber Kia Arian and hired her — again, without having the book title or even knowing what I’d say in the book figured out — to start creating it.
The result?
The single most expensive book I sell (retails at $1,108.00), that moved nearly 100 copies on launch. Yes, I did sell it at a discount during the launch. But it was still quite expensive even at the discount, especially to non-Email Players subscribers who did not get as big of a discount Email Players subscribers did.
And it was all from a stray idea I was too paranoid not to write down.
To bring it back to the question, it’s an example of what I mean when I say:
“Ideas are fragile”
Especially ideas for content.
(emails, books, courses, videos, audios, whatever)
Ideas are very fleeting.
They are there in your head one minute, and — poof! — gone the next. I sometimes shudder at all the books and other content I’ve NOT created over the last couple decades simply because of a lost idea here, another idea that slipped away there, yet more ideas gone into the abyss of wherever they came from that I could not remember.
So I am quite paranoid about this these days.
One stray idea can be worth tens of thousands of dollars in sales.
And I mean that, literally, as my Markauteur book proves.
So to answer her question:
I capture everything.
Any idea, quote, thought, story, joke, anecdote, pain, pleasure, fear, desire, analogy, lesson, feeling, email, article, tweet, stray comment, random revelation about something… whatever it is I even think could possibly be relevant to content creation now or in the future.
I have thousands of these notes/ideas cataloged.
And I am always adding to it.
So much so my frustration is never, “oh what am I going to write about???”
It’s “oh crap — I have TOO many ideas to write about…”
And then, when it comes time to create said content like my books or emails or courses or videos for the BerserkerMail YouTube channel or whatever it is… I simply pluck out what I need and get it all down.
All of this is especially applicable using my Email Players methods.
More on that here:
Ben Settle