← all drafts ✏️ Edit in Google Docs ↗

The Garden Variety — Week 27 (Jul 6–12)

Film: Good Will Hunting (1997) | CTA: Big Ticket Copywriting ($97)

There's a scene in Good Will Hunting where Will meets Skylar at a bar near MIT. He's not a student. He's there with his friends. She is obviously smart and obviously interested and they have the kind of conversation that most people don't get to have in a bar. By the end of it, he writes his number on a napkin and slides it across.

She calls him. He doesn't pick up.

She calls again. He eventually picks up. The whole first act of whatever happens between them is her doing the reaching — not because Will doesn't want it, but because Will has figured out a hundred reasons why he shouldn't. She's going to leave for California. He's not going to fit. It's going to end and that will hurt, so why start it.

He wants it. He doesn't reach out.

This is a different thing than not knowing someone. You can talk yourself out of calling a person you already know, too.

You've got someone in your contacts — maybe a past client, maybe someone who came through a referral, maybe someone you met at an event in Midtown or at a thing in the North Valley and had a good conversation with, exchanged cards, said "let's talk sometime." And you haven't. Not because the timing is wrong. Not because you don't have anything to offer. Because reaching out means something might actually happen, and then you'd have to deal with that.

This is different from cold outreach. You're not trying to get past the door. The door is already open. The person on the other side already knows your name. What's stopping you is everything else.

There's a scene later in the film where Chuckie — Will's best friend, not a genius, just a guy — tells Will straight out: you're sitting on a winning lottery ticket and you're too scared to cash it. Will acts like he doesn't know what Chuckie means. He knows exactly what Chuckie means.

That's the one that lands. Not the therapy sessions, not the professor, not Skylar telling him she loves him. Chuckie, in a parking lot, saying the obvious thing that everyone else was dancing around.

Sometimes the person in your contacts is the lottery ticket. And you already know it.

I work with people in Atlanta and Albuquerque who have this — a list of people who already know them, who've said something that sounded like interest, who would probably take a 20-minute call. And the list just sits there. The reason they give me is usually some version of "I don't want to come across as pushy." But that's not really it. Push isn't the issue. The issue is: if they say yes, then you actually have to do the thing. If you don't reach out, you can keep telling yourself it's possible without finding out if it's true.

Will holds onto that for most of the movie. The scene that ends it isn't dramatic. Sean just tells him what's already true and Will has to decide whether he's going to act on it or not.

The person you need to reach out to already knows you exist.

That's the whole work, in some ways — knowing what to do is one thing, knowing how to write it so the right person actually responds is another. Big Ticket Copywriting is $97 and it's specifically about that second part: how to write to someone who's warm, who already has some context on you, in a way that moves the thing forward without feeling like a pitch. If you've got a list of people you keep almost reaching out to, that's the right place to start.

[link]

— Brandyn

Draft notes (for Brandyn review)