Why You Got All That Stuff

What You Can Do About Your Cluttered Lifestyle and Achieve Your Goals Anyway

Dr. Robert C. Worstell

• Publisher: Midwest Journal Press
• eBook ISBN: 9781365876899
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

Look around at the room you're sitting in.

If a fire broke out and you only had time to saveone thing – what would it be?

Why?

What would you miss most from the stuff youcouldn't save?

Questions like this are important because we allhave way too much stuff in our lives. There are movements calledde-cluttering, and minimalism which deal with this a lot.

Most people have a hard time with throwing outanything, or even giving it away. Ever wonder why?

Deeper than that, why did you ever get that stuffto begin with?

The answers to this came from an unlikely area. Itwasn't psychology or some self-help book. It came from a study of thebest marketers and advertisers of all time. And crossed this with howlegends, myths, and modern films all have the same basic plot. These two together explain why we want what wewant.

We get sold a lot of stuff. We either use it up,wear it out, or hold onto it. But we really don't know why or how tofix having to have them to begin with. Until now. And when we do, wecan find out the exact stuff we really need to achieve ourgoals, to get whatever we want.

Hold on to your seat – this is a helluva ride...

(from the Introduction)

Get Your Copy Now.

Part I – Why You Got All That Stuff

How to Avoid Fake Marketing and Grow Rich Meanwhile

Journeys are never truly over. Another stage begins just as you returned from the last one.

(This book wasn't planned, it's a natural extension of applying what we've learned about how to re-stack your mindset. And I won't put a glib face on it for you. What's coming up explains all the dysfunction of our culture. It explains why our largest cities have the most violence and crime. It explains why politicians betray their trust consistently. It explains every single facet of that world around you. But the solution to our problems, your problems, aren't out there. They are within you, within your mindset. But let me back up to the simpler, lighter view of things...)

After a full decade as a self-publishing non-fiction author, I finally completed all my necessary research into the various fields I was interested in. There are crumbs to pick up and dust motes to sweep. That's about it. Because when the good data starts repeating along with the tripe, then you can consider yourself done. Time to move on, to the next phase.

And that phase for me is understanding fiction.

Why? Because most people (95%) are fascinated with entertainment, factual or not. And so understanding the bulk of humanity could give me more clues about the wider game of life itself.

Living on a farm really shows how narrow any human's focus can devolve to. There is much more to life than what we are exposed to on corporate news channels and cable. And that is the whole point of my personal journey: to see how deep this rabbit hole goes - and to leave a path for anyone who wants to follow.

The trick, as we've gone over, is to distill the essence of really workable data, the truths we can live by. And you know this to be in the area of 5% out of all you've ever studied, experienced, or understood to be true up to this point.

How to Determine Truth

First, it's that ancient statement: "Truth is as valuable as it's workable." So a workable truth is the highest form, some datum you can put to use over and over to get the same results. In Nature, this is finding the underlying systems which work all the time. These can adjust to changes and still produce a result. Like flower seeds that can wait a hundred years for the proper conditions in deserts before they bloom once, for just a few days, and produce their seeds again to continue the process.

There are seeds in the prairies which will come up in a pasture that is being managed like the days when bison roamed. Modern biologists often have never seen those plants before - not in their lifetime of studies. Hundreds of years, perhaps, we just don't know.

Our oldest understanding of analysis is to test any datum against these five questions:

1) Can I put this to use? Can I get it to work for me?

2) How does this make me feel?

3) What does this mean to me?

4) How does this fit in with everything else I know?

5) What does this inspire me to do now?

The datum will answer these questions positively, will enable you to get a positive result. The best datums will be answer all of them positively, the worst few or none.

That given, no two people will score or analyze any datum to the same values. Not even twins. We are each individuals and must stack our own mindsets the way that suits us. (All news articles are “fake” to someone at some point.)

Of course, you then throw out huge areas of unworkability as you do this. And you'll also find people you don't need to trust any further. (Examples of corporate broadcast "news", politicians in general, government-sponsored scientists, vacuous celebrities, make the list along with the traditional lawyers and used-car salespersons.)

How Copywriting Helps Us Understand Better

Copywriting is a vital subset of marketing. And marketing is a necessary research line when you are working to improve the sales of your product - like books.

I took up this study a few years ago after one of these "accidental millionaires" claimed that he was an expert on copywriting and this is what made him rich. (No, he stumbled across a short-cut marketing scheme that worked for a few years. Now he's out of that and into other areas. Still loves the limelight, though.) Chasing up his back-trail let me to studying all the classics of copywriting, which led me to Gary Halbert, and that then let me to Eugene Schwartz.

The point of copywriting it to align a key desire with your product or service. So you can tell them that what they want can be supplied by that product.

Promotion is getting your product-pitch in front of other people's audiences. Copywriting is presenting your pitch so that you can help them get what they want (while giving them what they need.)

Schwartz was one of the most effective copywriters ever. It's a pity that he wrote his masterpiece (Breakthrough Advertising) for hire and so the publisher had the rights. (And someone got control of those rights and today only publishes it as an expensive gift to seminar attendees. You can't buy it anywhere without spending hundreds per copy. Which is why he was interested in acquiring those rights...)

Anyway, Schwartz wrote the thing with the idea of teaching copywriters. The sequence is linear, but there are nuggets sat right down in the middle of it. That made the reading a bit odd, but it makes perfect sense educationally, as you're able to understand everything just as you need that data.

There are basics hidden in there to much bigger truths.

Let me show you some real nuggets:

The Four Dimensions of Thought and Feeling:

1. Desires

These are the wants, needs, cravings, thirsts, hungers, lusts, etc. that drive your prospect through life. They are physical – such as the desire to be thin, or strong, or healthy, or free from acne, corns, bad breath or what have you. they are material – such as the desire to possess money, or a big car, or a beautiful dress. they are sensual – such as the thirst for a cold glass of beer, or the need for a tired body to stretch out on a soft bed.

2. Identifications

These are the roles your prospect wants to play in life, and the personality traits he wants your product to help him build, or project.

These longings for identification – longings for a sharply-defined personality – longings for social status – are, of course, not material or physical or sensual at all. they complement and intensify the physical desires – add another dimension to them – by making each purchase serve a double duty.

3. Beliefs

These are the opinions, attitudes, prejudices, fragments of knowledge and conceptions of reality that your prospect lives by. This is the world of emotionalized reason that he inhabits – the way he accepts or rejects facts and builds up his universe, the types of thinking he uses to arrive at decisions, the ideas and values which give him comfort and which he believes are permanent and true.

[4. Faith]

But – important as they are – desire and identification alone are never enough. By themselves, they can never produce the full reaction the copy writer must have if he is to achieve the maximum success with his product. No matter how intense the desire. no matter how demanding the need to identify, both these reactions must be fused with a third great emotional force – Belief – before they can produce the final overwhelming determinant of action – Absolute Conviction.

It is this fusion of desire and belief – this conviction – this certainty – this feeling in the prospect of being right in his choice – of being assured of what he has been promised – that the copywriter seeks as his ultimate goal.

All that is interesting stuff, as he's just boiled down the vast fields of all thought and feeling down to just four points. I haven't seen this combination show up with any of the hundreds and hundreds of books I've covered about the nature of thought.

Look at point number 2. Identifications are of key interest.

To check this, let's enter another set of data as a comparative. The Joseph Campbell Monomyth (See appendix for full Wikipedia explanation.) That the Hero's Journey he figured out as the common plot of all myth and legend.

Part of that was the use of Jungian archetypes. These are basically symbols for anything you want them to be. Could be thousands that a person could use to define their journey. If you use Vogler's "Writer's Journey" then this boils down to just a few usual ones to explain the whole scene.

The trick is that archetypes are symbolic identifications. That's the big hint.

Let's pull up another quote that will help give us more to work with:

The Architecture of Belief

Every claim, every image, every proof in your ad has two separate sources of strength -

1. The content of that statement itself; and

2. The preparation you have made for that statement – either by recognizing that preparation as already existing in your prospect's mind, or by deliberately laving the groundwork for that statement in the preceding portion of the ad itself.

We can strengthen the power of each of these statements in two separate ways -

1. By increasing the intensity of its content

2. By changing the place or position or sequence in which that statement occurs in the ad

Start your ad with an accepted statement, then build a chain of following acceptances on this first one. When a power-claim headline doesn't work... they immediately split it against a second head, with far fewer claims in it, but far more likely to be believed. Then they build a belief bridge from this second headline, to the same exact claims they had featured in the first, but now anticipated by careful preparation every step along the way.

1. The introduction of the product claim itself – may be made ...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Part I – Why You Got All That Stuff
• Part 2 – How To Get What You Want Anyway
• Appendix: The Hero's Journey (Monomyth)
• Bibliography
• Bonus