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This problem affects almost every single person I know

Writer's picture: John BrandtJohn Brandt

There’s a certain problem that affects nearly every single person I know. 


It affects all of my clients. 


It affects almost every lead I’ve hopped on a discovery call with. 


It affects every business owner I’ve had the pleasure of knowing (or hearing about). 


It affects my friends and family. 


Even your humble narrator is guilty of making this mistake. 


And it also applies to nearly every goal one of these people could set. From losing weight and gaining muscle to optimizing a marketing channel and scaling a business. 


The problem? 


Overcomplicating everything. 


Now, this can happen for a variety of reasons. 


Sometimes it's the fault of Complexity Bias, an insidious psychological “glitch” that makes us value the complex over the simple. 


Sometimes it’s a fear of failure or success. 


Sometimes it simply gives us an excuse to procrastinate (and I mean procrastinate in the “bad” sense here). 


This is also why the story of Obvious Adams—the plain man who dominated the ad industry by looking for the simplest solution to a problem in the early 1900s—has become so beloved that lazy writers “adopted” it to a businesswoman because god forbid anything learns any important lesson from a man in 2024 and beyond. 


For example: 


Let’s say you want to lose weight. 


There’s a simple way to lose weight and a complex way. But the simple way is the only actual way to lose weight. 


What’s the simple solution? 


Eat fewer calories than your body burns. 


The complex solution? 

Wake up at 6 am every morning to go to the gym. Spend your first 30 minutes at the gym doing “fasted cardio,” then spend the remaining 90 minutes strength training. When you get home, jump into a cold shower before eating your breakfast of eggs and a protein shake. Then incorporate more movement into your work day by constantly jerking your foot. When you get home from work, walk at least 30 minutes around your block before dinner. Then hit the sauna. After your evening shower, eat a home-cooked meal filled with at least 75 g of protein. 


Both accomplish the same goal. But only one is so simple you can stick with it for an extended period of time. 


This also applies to email. 


The simple way to make more money with email is deceptively simple: 


Send better emails more often. 


The complex way gets overly complex that nobody knows what it even means. 


This could mean: 


A/B testing each and every campaign you send out while tracking every possible data point, so you can see what “works best” over the course of 8 months. In the meantime, don’t try to sell too often. You want to use a “jab, jab, right hook approach” where you’re giving away all your best stuff for free that it makes people want to fork over their hard-earned money to you (despite the unfortunate truth that this is not how human psychology works—it’s much better to tease than to give everything away for free). While you’re doing this, you also want to segment your audience to smithereens, so that each email you send only goes out to a max of 10 people. If you have a big list (as many of my clients do), then this means you need to write at least 1,000 emails for each email you send. Yada yada yada. 


Again, both are trying to accomplish the same goal. 


But only one way is reliable because of its simplicity. 


Do with this what thou wilt. 


And if’n you need help sending “better emails more often,” hit reply, and let’s chat. 


John

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