What Martial Arts Can Teach You About Writing Copy

If you’ve ever wondered how to build a business that feels natural instead of stressful, you’re going to love this conversation. In this audio, David Deutsch talks with Matt Furey, a former world champion athlete who discovered that the same discipline and focus used in martial arts can also be used in copywriting and business.

Matt shares how he built a multi-million-dollar business by keeping things simple—writing short stories, sending quick emails, and focusing only on the work he enjoys most. He shows that you don’t need to write long, complicated copy to succeed. Instead, you can start with everyday stories, keep your writing conversational, and let the message flow.

This audio is full of inspiration and practical tips on how to write with ease, use storytelling to connect with readers, and even create more freedom in your work life. It’s about learning to write the way you speak—and discovering that success doesn’t have to be complicated.

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Million Dollar Marketing Tips from David and Matt:

• Start with a blank slate – Don’t overthink. Begin with a clear mind and let your ideas flow naturally.
• Use simple stories – Everyday events, even something small your kids did, can turn into powerful copy.
• Always include time and place – Starting with when and where something happened makes your writing feel real and draws readers in.
• Write like you talk – Good copy is conversational. If you can speak, you can write.
• Don’t wait for inspiration – Start writing first, and the story or idea will come to you.
• Focus on what you do best – Build your business around your strengths and delegate the rest.
• Short and simple works – Even a few lines in an email can make money if they tell a good story.
• Practice patience – Success takes time, just like learning a skill. Expect setbacks and keep going.
• Stories sell better than statistics – People connect with stories, not dry numbers.
• Breathe and relax before writing – A calm mind helps creativity flow more easily.

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Interview Transcript:

David:            Matt, for those of you who don’t know, and do you prefer Matt or Matthew? Either one’s fine. Okay. Okay. I go by both depending on which guy gets out of bed in the morning. Ah, okay. We’ll make it a Matt day ’cause it’s shorter and I’ll just, run through his history. Matt in his early days was a swimming champion and a wrestling champion. He studied various martial arts and then realized that there was a connection between the martial arts and wrestling and wrote a breakthrough book and video series entitled The Martial Art of Wrestling.

He began competing in an ancient Chinese style of grappling called Shuai-Chiao. It’s the oldest style of kung fu. In 1997 Matt won a gold medal in Beijing.

That was a very historic occasion because it was the first time that an American had won a gold medal in any martial arts competition that was held in China.

Matt’s martial arts background is really important, because in a way Matt has taken a lot of the things that make someone be really good at martial arts in training the mind and training the body, and kind of taken them and shown how they apply to writing copy and building a business, which I think is really interesting.

When you take that same discipline and that same ability to get rid of resistance and get rid of fear and apply it to writing, awesome things start to happen.

Matt has written a bunch of other books, a bestseller called Combat Conditioning, Combat Abs, and No B.S. Fitness. He’s got about 70 videos right now that run the gamut from fitness to martial arts to wrestling to making money.

Most of his time now is spent teaching others how to make money as information publishers and authors. He’s been featured on the cover of several magazines around the world, including Black Belt, Inside Kung Fu, GQ, Grappling, and many others.

He’s also president of the Psycho-Cybernetics Foundation, which is dedicated to keeping the teaching of Dr. Maxwell Maltz alive and growing. Maxwell Maltz was the plastic surgeon who realized that making people better in terms of their self-image and the way they viewed themselves was just as important as the cosmetic work he was doing in plastic surgery. He has tremendous writings about how to use the mind and controlling the mind to get the success you want and get the happiness you want.

Matt and his family now divide their time between their two homes in Florida and Hainan Island, China, which I imagine is where he is now.

Matt:               That’s exactly right, that’s where I am.

David:            You said that’s like a tropical paradise?

Matt:               I like to call it that. It’s like the Hawaii of China, the way it’s described in various places, and it really is.

David:            I’d like you to tell us a little bit about your business. Your business fascinates me because you don’t do the things that everyone says you’re supposed to do in a business.

You don’t obsess over the copy. You do things quickly. You do your products quickly. You come out with a lot of products. You don’t give guarantees. And you’re running a multi-million dollar business without a lot of people.

Can you say a little bit about how you do that, how you built your business, what it’s like, and possibly how we can do it, too.

Matt:               Well, everything with me all starts with a blank slate. Then on that slate, or screen if you want to use that, goes a vision.

For me, I have two screens. I have “Here’s what I love to do” and then another one is “Here’s what I don’t like to do,” or “Here’s what I’m really good at” and “Here’s this thing that I’m good at, but there are other people who are better, or there are people I can find who can replace me very easily.”

That’s how I look at my business today. If I just whittle everything that I do down to that essence, “Here’s what I do best” and “Here’s what can be replaced,” then it makes it easy for me to reduce my work day to almost nothing.

So I’ve been talking recently about a 4-hour work day. That’s what people will believe. I think that’s a very believable amount of time, that you can reduce your work day from 8 hours to 4, or from 12 to 4.

But the fact is there’s many, many days I don’t even work that long. Two days ago, for example, I did two emails, one to each list of mine. In total it was less than 10 minutes. It was just a few lines long.

The page that they went to was longer copy, but it still wasn’t super long. It was maybe 600 words or 800 words.

And that’s all I did that day. I did nothing else other than call people who work with me, but not even employees. They’re independent contractors, like my web designer, Eddie Baran. He and I have worked together for almost ten years.

So I called him and said, “How are we doing? How’s this latest promotion doing?” and he’ll give me the numbers, but I don’t call that work, calling up and checking on stats.

Then on days in which I’m writing my newsletters or putting together a course, then I’ll work four hours or more.

So when you add it all up, some days are almost nothing. Just write a couple emails, bang, I’m done. I spend the rest of the day with family and practicing martial arts or reading or going to visit some places, and that’s really how my life is.

It didn’t start off that way immediately, but it became that because I had a vision of creating that sort of thing. I always think in terms of doubling my income and reducing the amount of time that I spend doing whatever I’m doing.

If you’re making $25,000 a year now, let’s say, giving the lowest of the low figures for the average American income, you’re probably working 8 hours a day or more. If you want to double your income, let’s get it up to

$50,000, you’re going to have to spend a ½ hour or an hour more a day extra beyond that 8 hours until you figure out and hit your niche or find the people who are going to work with you.

So that first year, making that transition, you might have to do a little bit more, but then you can get it so, “Hey man, I’m making $50,000 a year and I’m working 8 hours just like I did before, but I like what I’m doing.”

Then the next move is going to be $100,000 a year and less time. Now you’re down to 6 hours or so.

There’s many ways to do this and to accomplish this, but it all has to start with a vision. You have to know what it is you want, and you’ve got to know what it is you don’t want, and you’ve got to know where you are in relation to what you want.

As you’re making the move, as you’re making the transition, you have to be patient. You’ve got to accept that sometimes things take a little longer than you thought.

Sometimes they’re a little more work than you thought, but just like in learning a martial art, you get knocked on your ass and you get back up again. You get knocked down and you get back up again. That’s how you learn.

Pretty soon, after going through that – and all human beings who can walk have gone through this – that’s how we learn to walk. We fall down a thousand or more times learning how to stand walk. Same idea. It’s a very simplistic way of explaining the mindset you’ve got to have, but I think everybody gets it.

The funny thing is that I learned that mindset of the baby when I went to the University of Iowa to wrestle. The top collegiate team in the country won 15 national titles in 21 years, three while I was there, and the top

assistant coach there at the time, Jay Robinson, who’s now at the University of Minnesota and has led them to three national titles, on his recruiting trip he took my father and I aside and the thing he talked about was a baby.

“Well, you know, a baby wants to walk, and the parents believe in the baby. No parent tells the baby, ‘You can’t walk.’ All of them believe, so it has this support system. No matter how many times the baby falls down, the parents continue to believe in the baby, that he’s going to make it. And that’s how it is here at Iowa.”

And my dad’s an attorney. He was probably 50 or 55 at the time, and he understood it. It was a very simple metaphor, very simple language, yet both of us got it and both of us liked it.

That’s probably a good segue into what I could say next, that most of what I write is very simple. It’s very simple stories taken from just everyday experiences, or more profound ones as well, but I just take some everyday very common things that go on in my life and talk about them, amplify them, and bring them to life.

I don’t even really try to make them exciting. People identify with them. They identify with very simple things.

David:            What would be an example of a story that you might do that with?

Matt:              People really like anything having to do with my kids. I’ve got two children.

I’ve got a boy, Frank, who’s 8, and I’ve got a daughter, Faith, who’s 4.

If I’m doing an email, and this doesn’t just apply to email, it can be for any type of writing I’m doing, but if I’m doing an email I might just start off with, “Yesterday my daughter clunked my son in the head with a stick.” First sentence.

Second sentence. “Now you might not think that that’s anything out of the ordinary, but remember my daughter is 4 and my son is 8. And my son studies martial arts and he can hit really, really hard.”

So now I’ve already got a build-up and I’ve got the curiosity. “What the hell is this all about?” and they want to read it because it’s a peek into my life that they wouldn’t otherwise get.

I’ve always said that people are voyeurs and they want to look and see what other people are doing, what other people’s lives are about. Most people, the majority of people, are afraid to give anybody a look into their life.

If you do, if you’re one of those who will, you’ll stand out from everybody else. People will often think, like when you were reading my introduction – “Oh, he’s a champion swimmer and a champion wrestler. He’s a world kung fu champion. He was this, he was that. No wonder he’s made all this money. He’s a champion.”

If that were going to be the case it would make sense that all the money would have rolled in when I won the championships. That’s usually when you cash in immediately. If you win an Olympic gold medal you don’t wait five years for everybody to know about it and then all of a sudden you’re rich.

You come home. You go on the speaking circuit right away. A book’s out within a few months, and that’s how you cash in, if you’re even one of the lucky ones who does, depending on how much media coverage you get.

I won my world championship in 1997. I didn’t have my first big year of sales until – depends on how you want to define big year, but let’s just say I didn’t have my first year in which I made $1 million in a single year until 2002. That’s five years.

After time it becomes very easy to do it again. Not only that, it becomes very easy to double and triple and so on that number. So $1 million in a year can become $1 million in a month.

But without going into much more of that, for me it’s just taking something really simple, and most people when they write they think they have to come up with something profound, have some deep insight, have to have some incredible story before they start writing.

With me, first is move your body. First is begin writing. As you’re writing, the story will come to you. It’s stream of consciousness. It’s not wait until you get inspiration, wait till the idea comes and then write. No! It’s start writing.

David:            So it’s the movement, and it’s physical movement too, as well as moving your hand over the keyboard or then pen over the paper.

Matt:               Yeah. For example, in my Zero Resistance Workshop that I did a year ago, I had people begin with deep breathing exercises because I learned a long, long time ago that in China the daoists and sages and health practitioners that live in the mountains – for example, acupuncture and qigong and tai chi and all that comes from Daoism, which is really a health system, but it has its esoteric components — they believe and practice deep breathing exercises before doing anything creative. So if they’re going to write or paint or sculpt or play music or anything, first you begin with breath.

I looked at this and went, “Oh, this is kind of cool. The same type of story applies in the book of Genesis when God creates the world.”

Whether you think it’s a made-up story or the real thing, it doesn’t matter because it’s a map. Just in a chapter or two you had a map there, saying God creates Adam and then He breathes His life into him. So he wasn’t really alive then until he got life breathed into him? Yeah.

Then I always tell the story about how He says, “Be fruitful and multiply,” but how could he have done that? Eve wasn’t even created yet. So it’s obvious what God meant at that time. He meant write books, make meals, [laughing] – that’s how you multiply. That’s how you become fruitful and multiply.

I think even this story in Genesis, a very simple story, but I tell that in front of a group of people and I start off with, “In the beginning…” and pause.

Everyone tunes in. Everyone’s listening, and then I give my own version of the story and how Adam and Eve got a college degree and now they’re ruined.

God shows up and, “Who the hell are you listening to? Why don’t you have any money? Who told you you were broke?”

“Well, this snake oil salesman came down and he said we needed to go to college and get a degree and that’s how you make money. You have a certificate on your wall.” [laughing]

That’s satan. Universities become satan. I just switched them. So you can take anything.

I’ve got National Enquirer. We get a package fed-ex’d to us every week

while we’re here and my wife loves reading the National Enquirer. Dan Kennedy and other copywriters all say, “You’ve got to read the National Enquirer.”

I never read it, but I look at the headlines. The latest one was about Bill Clinton’s mistress and my wife can’t wait to read it. So if you want ideas for your emails or for your copy, you can get it right there. You can do an email with that headline.

David:            I want to go back to your daughter hitting your son and just say more about how do you flip that into selling something, because you seem to be saying, “Okay, you can start anywhere. A story from your family, anywhere that you were today – you can use that as a starting point.”

Matt:               It’s real simple. I go like this. “My daughter hit my son, Frank, this morning with a stick. You might not think that’s any big deal, but remember my daughter is 4 and my son is 8, and my son trains in martial arts.”

“In addition to that, each and every day I have him do exercises taken from my international bestseller, Combat Conditioning.”

“Today after he got hit with the stick, it wasn’t enough for me to say to him, ‘Frank, boys don’t hit girls. Don’t hit her back. Let’s have her say she’s sorry and let’s just end it.’”

“Well, I had my daughter say she’s sorry and my son was still angry. He has a lot of testosterone even at eight years of age running through his veins.”

“So what I did is I grabbed a deck of playing cards that come free with a purchase of the Combat Conditioning book.

This deck of cards is called The Matt Furey Exercise Bible. In this deck of cards I teach four exercises that will burn fat from your body faster than anything else on the market.”

“In addition to that, these four exercises will…” bang bang bang.

So you get the idea? [laughing] It’s just simple. To me it’s just so incredibly simple, and everybody makes it complicated.

David:            It sounds almost so simple that it could never work, and yet this is the basis of how you’ve built a multi-million-dollar business and it’s the basis of how you’ve taught other people to build very large businesses.

Matt:               Yeah, exactly. I think more than anything else people want to read a story.

That’s what they like most, so tell people a story. If you can’t hook them with a story, boy, I don’t know what you’re going to hook them with because that’s all I ever use is a story.

Now the story could come from the news media. The story could come from a book you’re reading. It could come from the latest movie you watched, or it could come from your living room or wherever, but it’s a story.

I can’t even think of an email I’ve ever written which I’ve started with a statistic or anything. You can do that, but if you do make sure there’s a story involved.

That’s the essence of what I do. Now to get good at it, yeah, you’ve got to practice and you’ve got to hear this sort of thing over and over and you’ve got to see it done. The first time you hear it it’s like magic. Wow! Light bulbs go off, but that’s not enough. You’ve got to hear it, see it, and see how it’s applied in dozens of different ways.

David:            I’ll never forget hearing the people that were at your seminar when you did this and seeing the transformation in those people when the light bulb went off and they did emails, people who had never done emails before.

You said this and elaborated on it. You showed them how to do it and said, “Okay, write a story, sell from the story,” and they got up and read these emails and they were so powerful.

Matt:               Yeah, you can get it really fast if you wipe the slate clean. See, that’s first.

Forget all this stuff you’ve heard about writing being difficult and it takes thousands of hours of practice and training in order to know how to write, or how to get good.

Now the fact is the more time and practice you put into anything, the better you will get. But for people starting out, when they hear that, it’s one side of the story.

The other side of the story is you’re already alive, you’re already a human being who knows how to speak, and if you can speak you can write.

They’re really the same skill.

It’s just that when you write, then you have the opportunity to go back and edit what the hell you put on paper, whereas when you’re speaking, just like me using the word “hell,” it’s already out there. It’s already done. I can’t go back and delete it. You can go back and delete it when you make a CD of this, but you can’t take it back after having said it.

The words on paper are a lot easier. If somebody gets it that, “Wait a minute here. This isn’t as difficult as I’ve been making it out to be. If I can speak, I can write,” because what is good copy? It’s colloquial language. It’s talking or writing to another person the way you’d talk to him or her.

It’s not using language nobody identifies with. It’s getting down to very simple sentences, very simple expressions that everybody can instantly identify.

Mark Twain had a saying that if everybody tried to speak the way they write, everyone would stutter. This is how most people write. They sit and they think and they think and they think, and then they write a little bit, and then “Oh well, I don’t like that,” and they start deleting.

That’s not stream of consciousness. That’s questioning everything you’re putting on paper. Once it’s all on paper, now look at it and clean it and edit it and so on, but don’t do it as you’re writing.

Again it comes to a clean slate, do some breathing exercises to amplify that empty mind, and to get yourself into like this pure state. Now you ask the question, “Okay, what do I want to write?” Then as soon as the words start coming to you, you write them.

People talk about finding your voice and I always laugh about this. “How do I find my voice?” Well, if you talked out loud once in awhile and listened to what you’re saying, you might discover it!

David:            So it’s not something that you have to develop or find. You have to just listen to yourself and hear how you say things.

Matt:               I think so. I think that’s a lot of it. If people would stop analyzing what they’re doing before they put something on paper they’d be a lot better off.

Now once it’s on paper, okay, do some editing and get some feedback. As simple as what I’m explaining is, again it helps to have somebody look at it and say, “Did you grab me?”

For example, I had a guy, Steve, and he hadn’t really listened to my email course. He was sending out emails, because I teach that, but he’d never studied my email course. He was writing his email, and I’m getting them each day, and I’m never reading any of them.

I finally said, “You know, Steve, I’ve never managed to get past the first sentence in your emails. Do you know why? Do you want to know why?”

He wrote back and asked for guidance, and I said, “Time and place, time and place, time and place. Remember this. Start with time and place. If you do that it sets a frame and it sucks everybody into it.”

I don’t do it every single time, but I’d say 80% of my emails start with time and place. I hate to toot my own horn here, but

I’ll do it. This is a huge monumental million- dollar tip, that if you start doing this your writing will be transformed.

The email that I dictated earlier had time and place. It might not have had place so much, but people will make up the place. It started with, “This morning my daughter hit my son, Frank, with a stick.”

People will fill in and go, “Well, it must have been the living room or it was outside or in the

kitchen or the back yard or the bathroom.” But if I said, “This morning while in the living room reading a book, my daughter whacked my son, Frank, with a stick.” They don’t know what my living room looks like, so they’re going to fill in the details, but that’s time and place.

If I was to do an email right after this call it would be, “This morning while sitting in a private coffee bar room in Hainan Island, China, I did an incredible teleseminar with David Deutsch.” That might be my opener. It’s got those elements in there.

Now the frame of the story is set. You’ve got the frame on the wall. Now put the picture in. That’s what you do, you fill in the details. You don’t fill all of them in, but you fill enough of them in that they can’t quit reading.

I did an email for a guy last week. He’s a chiropractor and he has a back brace that he sells. He had this great story about people getting unnecessary back surgeries and how one guy kept going to the doctors and he had pain in his testicles.

They couldn’t figure out why he was having it there, so they castrated him. Then he still had the pain, not in his testicles, but in his back, so he had back pain. He had slipped discs and whatever, and the pain radiated down to his testicles.

So here the guy got castrated and didn’t need to be. You can’t ask for a better story than that, so you just tell that story and then tie it into the back brace.

I had another email that I did for a guy who’s got a finger healing product, Harlan Kilstein. Some of you know him. He had this great product, so I talked about how in China, “finger physicians” are used before doing martial arts, feats of strength, before doing magic, etc., and how powerful these different finger gestures are.

In the west we don’t even think this way. What are you talking about? Then I realized to bring it down to earth I’ve got to use the simplest example I can, so I said, “If you don’t think finger movements and gestures make a difference, go outside and give the middle finger to the next ten people you see and check their reactions.”

Now I’ve got everybody. They understand. “Oh, there is something here,” but I didn’t use a Chinese example. I used a western one. Does this make sense?

David:            Yeah. I love that idea of time and place. A lot of people, when they hear you have to tell stories, they think, “Oh, I’m not a storyteller and it takes a long time to tell a story and think up a good one or get a good one and tell it in a way.”

But just remember that all you need is time and place. Just give people a time and place and that is telling a story, or a story naturally comes from that. That’s such an easy way to do it, I think.

Matt:               I don’t know if you’ve ever heard it taught like that before, but I made it up. I never heard anybody teach it that way, but I always think before I do any program, before I have any seminar, I’ll sit with my blank slate and say, “Alright, what is the easiest way humanly possible for me to communicate the essence of what I want them to be able to do?”

Then time and place came up. [laughing] Alright, if you can’t get it now, you don’t want to get it. Once you’ve got time and place established, then it’s just a matter of being able to make that segue, being able to go from here’s this story that starts off in the living room of my house, and how in the heck do you transition from there to your product?

When people realize how easy that is to do, man, you’re set. You’ve got a skill that you can use not only for your own business if you have products and services, but as a service for others, writing copy for other people.

They’ll pay good money for that.

David:            You used an example of something where the product was part of the solution in the story, but a lot of the examples I’ve heard you do in the past I know that you can use that sort of thing where the product has nothing to do seemingly with the story and you somehow manage to connect it.

So if you would, let’s say you were going to get off this phone call and you wanted to do an email to your list based on this phone call that you just did. How would you use it to sell one of your products? How would you connect to that?

Matt:               I’ll just go stream of consciousness here and just start dictating. “This morning I got up early for a phone call with my friend, David

Deutsch, a world-class copywriter. The phone conversation I was going to

have with David was before a live audience, people all over the world tuning in because they want to know how I write riveting, money-making email copy.”

“But when I got up and showered, I felt an uncomfortable sensation in my chest, with a little bit of coughing. I thought, ‘Oh man, I’ve got to sound good when I’m on this call. I can’t be coughing.’ I don’t have a cold and I’m not sick. Maybe I’m just a little bit nervous.”

“I figured out after a few minutes that that’s what it was. I was just a little bit over-excited about being on this call. So what did I do? I got into a comfortable position in a chair, put both my feet on the floor, closed my eyes, and began to do a visualization technique that would clear all the negative energy from my chest.”

“Now you might wonder why I’m saying it was negative. Well, if you get too excited about something it can turn negative. It can be the butterflies in

the stomach. It can be some other effect like that that you don’t want, so I wanted to balance myself out.”

“So I sat in a chair and I did this visualization that I was taught in China several years ago. In fact, I used this visualization just prior to winning the world championship in Beijing, China in 1997.”

“At that time I was preparing for the finals. I had the whole day to get ready. My mind and my emotional state would vacillate from really excited and confident to nervous and fearful, and this was happening all day long – confident one minute, fearful the next.”

“It turns out that about half an hour before I’m to take the mat for my world championship gold medal bout, I’m not in the most confident mental state. I realized that it’s not going to go away and change confidence. Something about this state is ugly. Something about it doesn’t feel right.”

“Those of you who are reading this I’m sure can identify at least one time in your life that you had this happen, and it prevented you from getting the job you wanted, it prevented you from asking for the raise you sought, it prevented you from acing a test in which you knew all the right answers, it prevented you from going up to meet someone who could have a profound positive effect in your life, but you thought the person was better than you are so you were afraid to establish that contact.”

“It can affect your ability to speak publicly. It can affect your ability to write the book that you’ve always wanted to write. It can even affect something as simple as your emotional state when you’re driving a car or riding in an airplane. It’s fear that we want to get rid of or learn how to harmonize with.”

“So as I sat in this chair I did this exercise, and within 60 seconds all the nervousness and the over-excitement I was feeling about being on this call were gone. They went away just as easily and just as quickly as they did before I walked out on the mat for my gold medal match.”

“Now you may not identify with getting in front of 20,000 people to compete for a gold medal match in a foreign country. You might not understand the emotions and everything that goes into. But you most certainly understand what nervousness and fear and anxiety are like and how they can interfere with your ability to create the results you want in your life.”

“Wouldn’t you like to know what the technique I used was, so that any time you feel a little bit off-kilter you can simply sit in the comfort of your own home or in your car at a stop light or in your chair at your office, or even if you need complete privacy, the bathroom – you can go to one of these places and within one minute you are changed.”

Then sign my name, Matt Furey, Zen Master of the Internet, and it’s done.

Now I might add a P.S. In the past I always did P.S.’s. Now I do them some of the time. I don’t think it matters that

much anymore. That would be approximately my entire email. After I’d written it I’d probably go through and delete superfluous words or a phrase here or there, but I would say it’s 98% done.

Here’s an interesting thing I’ve done. Many times after doing an email, if I don’t go back in and look and edit I will mention that. I’ll put that in the P.S.

“P.S. This email was written stream of consciousness without correction. I’ve done this because I wanted you to get the feeling of what I say more than the obsession about grammar, syntax, and spelling.”

So if the email is really good and if it pops, the person gets to the P.S. and he or she has read and saw that I spelled miserable wrong or I spelled mongering wrong or something, and they want to write me and tell me that I had typos instead of getting the product, that obliterates that reflex need that some people have and they go, “Oh wow, he wrote this without even looking at it? He wrote this without correction? Wow.”

I think it ups the ante in my favor and makes people want to buy even more.

David:            Now you don’t believe in a real hard sell. You don’t believe in really almost sometimes any sell or any pitch to a certain extent. You just sort of present the product and almost challenge someone to buy it in a certain way.

Matt:               That’s an interesting take. I’ve never heard that said before. I think you’re right. I don’t see myself as a hard sell guy and I don’t see myself as a hypey guy or anything of the sort, but it’s funny because my competitors in fitness and so on, who sell fitness products, their one criticism of me is I’m just a bunch of hype and I’m over-priced and I’m this and I’m that.

But isn’t it funny. I laughed to my webmaster, Ed, quite some time ago and said, “Isn’t it funny that all these fitness people who are making money with the stuff that I taught them then go online and criticize me and say that I’m a bunch of hype.”

“ Wait a minute here. Exactly where is the hype? I’d like to know. Second of all, it’s really funny that they learned from me and they’re using a lot of what I have taught, but then they’re attacking the person who taught it to them because they want to out-position me.”

Now it’s not a lot. It’s some, but it’s kind of funny. What’s even more funny is many of the exercises in the book they got directly from me. So if I’m hype, what are they? They’re using the same exercises. So it’s too funny, but I appreciate you saying that.

I think you’re right. I think for the most part I don’t really aggressively pound people to get them to buy something, but from time to time I do use stronger language.

I know when my daughter turned one year old, we both share the same birthday, so on 5/5/2005 I did this double happiness birthday sale. It actually coincided with the email copywriting workshop that I did where it was $10,000 a person.

I sat around the table and I had the very emails that I’d written for this. I think I went through them and dissected them and taught people, “Here’s how I’m doing this and here’s how it works,” and I gave the results of how it was working during that event.

I believe in two days it brought in about $240,000, so the emails I did during those two days had a little more push to them, but still in comparison to most people not that much. That’s my read on it. They’re typically done in a colorful way.

I guess that’s part of what you’re saying, too, is that even when I’m pushing somebody, I do it in language that’s somewhat colorful and it’s entertaining. It’s partly entertaining, but it’s also telling people what to do while they’re being entertained. So good call on that.

David:            I think, too, it’s a matter of not so much telling them what to do as you just make it inevitable that if they want to be the kind of person that you’re talking about, then they’ll take this action. You sort of leave it to them to pick up that challenge.

Matt:               Right, that’s a good way to explain it. I’ll often use language like that in closes. “If the above sounds like you, then you know what to do.” Just real simple.

David:           With that, Matt, I want to thank you for being on the call, for taking the time, for finding a way to call in from China and share this with us.

Matt:               It’s been my pleasure. I thank you for having me on and all the people who’ve been on for taking time as well.

Thanks much, David. It’s been a total pleasure. I look forward to seeing you in the future.

David:            Okay, same here. Take care.

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