Any time someone says to you, “Absolutely anybody can do this, and become extraordinarily successful, and make millions of dollars, just by following these simple steps” you need to hang on to your pocketbook.
I do not believe that “anybody can do…” any specific thing. At least not to a level of proficiency that the world is going to richly reward. Can anybody build a Google AdWords campaign? Well certainly yes, anybody can sign up, write a few ads, insert a few keywords and set a bid price. Yes, any computer literate person can do that. And any reasonably intelligent person can be made reasonably competent at this, so long as they’ll sit down and pay attention.
But the extraordinarily successful people are the ones who, in their head, somehow ‘crawl inside’ of that ad campaign and feel what all those numbers and columns mean… who are able to sense what those visitors are clicking on and why they’re clicking. In their mind, the numbers come alive, they have meaning… there’s a mental and emotional connection to what goes on. They can look at somebody’s ad campaign and in 10 seconds know whether it’s put together right, or not. Those are the ones who manage $10,000 or $100,000 of clicks every month and make it profitable.
Now…. Who can do that? Can anybody do that? Well, I just don’t think that “anybody” can. A lot of people can. It helps an awful lot if they’re learning on their own dime. I sure have met a lot of people who can, who have a passion for it, who love to do it. It would be foolhardy of me to point to some specific person and say “That guy could never do this” – I don’t know that about him.
So, can “anybody” do AdWords? Yes and no. There’s the doing of the thing, and then there’s the Art Factor. The Art Factor comes into play when your heart and soul get connected to it, when you are able to crawl inside the thing and live in it and breathe it. It’s something that goes beyond systemization. If you have a passion for it, if you have the discipline for it, then yeah. You can pick up the art factor. Then you can do it.
I could say the same thing about…
Writing headlines
Developing a killer USP for your company
Crafting ultra-persuasive ad copy
Delivering a scintillating newsletter
Churning out a killer rant about something you’re mad about (I told Joe DiSorbo, maybe you never thought of yourself as a great copywriter, but that rant you just wrote sure was a great piece of copy! Anyone who knows how to write can write a great rant, when they get wound up. A copywriter writes a great rant on command.)
One of my favorite scientists is Barbara McClintock. McClintock was a biologist at Cornell who made startling discoveries that scientists are still ignoring today, 50 years later.
She was so far ahead of her time that for 20 years she hardly bothered to publish any of her work. She was tired of being ignored or belittled by her peers, who were stuck in rigid paradigms.
McClintock discovered that DNA is intelligent. It has the ability to re-engineer itself on the fly in hostile situations – in fact it’s literally pre-programmed to re-program itself. This discovery was so radical that they thought she was crazy at the time and her insights are mostly dismissed even now. Big Institutions funded by Big Pharma peddling materialistic philosophy would have us believe life itself is nothing more than a happy accident of dumb chemicals. But McClintock was perhaps the first to understand (even before Watson and Crick discovered DNA) that living things are organized by information.
