Writing to your mom or your friend

Advice is to make you think and inspire you; certainty and wisdom, though, you have to figure out for yourself. Take the quote below:

“It took a lot of thinking through, a lot of taste, and lot of iterations, and a lot of feedback cycles, to realize ‘ok, we need to write this like we’re writing to our mom or our friend’, because that’s going to make sure the language comes off so clean”
-Patrick Campbell, Profitwell

Someone like Patrick had probably already been told to, “write like you’re writing to a friend”. Or he’d read it in a book or article. That’s not uncommon writing advice.

When you give (or write down) advice though, you’re not actually transferring any wisdom at all, contrary to the sales pitch of many consulting firms.

You might capture someone’s imagination though. All you’re really transfering when you give advice to someone is inspiration,  to get them to try doing something – with the hope that through taking action, that person might eventually acquire wisdom for themself.

It worked for Patrick, BTW; his Profitwell marketing emails have always been so clear that I often used to mistakenly assume he’d written me a quick note, personally (like the host of the episode I pulled that quote from). When in reality, he probably has 60,000 people on his list.