High school teacher conducts social experiment … and …

I watched a clip this morning of a high school classroom going through a social experiment:

The teacher gave half the class three words and the other half a different set of three words in which they were tasked to make anagrams out of their list of words. She gave them a few minutes per anagram, and told the class to raise their hands when they were finished. 

One half finished the first anagram relatively quickly while the other half struggled hard. Not a single person on that side of the class raised their hand in time. 

Same story with the second word: The half that finished the first anagram also finished this one quickly while the other side that failed failed again. (Wow, there’s a grammatically correct back-to-back failed sentence for ya.) 

The third anagram had the same story beats but a bit different result:

The same side that finished the first two anagrams also finished quickly, but the side that failed the first two times struggled yet again. 

The difference? 

Both sides of the class had the same third word - only the first two words were different. And yet, the side that experienced success experienced success again and the side that experienced failure experienced failure again. 

After this demonstration, she asked the failure side how they felt, and, as you could imagine, they felt like big, fat failures. 

But then she revealed the secret:

Not only did both sides of the class have different words, but the failure side’s first two words were impossible to turn into anagrams. It wasn’t just a tough anagram - it was impossible. 

The teacher then went on to teach a powerful lesson:

Success begets success and failure begets failure. However, this isn’t because one side was smarter and one side was dumber… it was because the successful side built their confidence while the failure side impaled their confidence. 

This weird human glitch (or mayhap cheat code depending on your frame of reference) applies even more to the world of business than it does in a classroom setting that’s divorced from the real world. 

Take, for example, Dan Kennedy’s counterintuitive secret for marketing dominance: 

(Paraphrased) 

“Whoever can spend the most to acquire a new customer wins.” 

Most business owners would read this and feel their stomach stoop so low into their body that they feel nauseated. They’d try to fight it with logic, belittle the insight it offers, and do everything they can to follow the “safe” route of driving your cost per acquisition lower, not higher. And then they’d wonder why their business couldn’t get off life support as competitors smacked them down some pegs. 

Or another example: 

Having an anti-needy mindset. 

Most marketing today is ripe with neediness - and there’s nothing that’s a bigger turnoff because neediness is a signal that you lack confidence. 

Same as the first example above: It takes confidence in yourself, in your product, and in your business to actively try to pay more for your customers than your competitors can. That’s why most business owners shy away from the concept instead of embracing it. They lack confidence. 

(By the way, Dan Kennedy’s point is not that a business should just light all their money on fire on the frontend without having the backend paved to the road of profits.) 

There’s almost nothing in the world more dangerous than a lack of confidence. In fact, even a delusional sense of unearned confidence will put you leagues ahead of the guy who lacks confidence and is afraid to fake it. 

Food for thought - 

Where in your business are you lacking confidence? 

Mayhap in your email strategy?

(Many such cases of lack of confidence in emails - especially when your strategy starts and ends at discounting…) 

If that’s the case, hit reply, and let’s find a time to chat. 

Or - if you know of any other business owners in need of a better email strategy, make an introduction and I’ll give you a fat 50% of our first month working together. 

(If’n they’re qualified to my strict standards this could be a yuuuuuge payday for your wallet.) 

John