Mid-2000s, late twenties, and I got pulled into a funnel.
Blogs were taking off. Everybody had an email list and a free PDF, and I wanted the free prize inside, so I signed up and read the thing.
The copy was overwritten and wandering, wild claims stacked on top of each other, and somewhere underneath it all there was supposedly a product. I never found it. I got to the bottom of the page still not knowing what the man was selling or what it would do for me.
I wasn’t only a mark. I was studying it. I was desperate for side income and trying to reverse-engineer the machine so I could run one myself. So I read those pages twice, once as a customer trying to figure out what I was buying and once as a would-be builder trying to figure out how he did it.
I failed at both, because the page was built to be unclear.
It took me twenty years to see that the man knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted the sale. Everything on that page was organized around one decision he’d made before he wrote a word, and the fog was on purpose. The only person in that transaction without a settled intent was me.
That’s the asymmetry that still bothers me. The loud ones decide what they’re after and go get it every day, without embarrassment. Plenty of people who actually know things never decide at all. They’d rather do the work than talk about it, and they keep meaning to get around to the offer. So the worst products get the distribution and the good ones sit in a drafts folder.
I know how I’d gimmick my own lane. I spent thirteen years in Toastmasters helping frightened people get to where they could stand up in a room and be heard. I could write the page promising you’ll be the next great keynote speaker. I know every move. Somebody once pitched me an eighteen-thousand-dollar speaker program with nothing to show me up front, and it felt like a toll booth on somebody’s hope.
The honest version and the gimmick sit right next to each other in my head, and the gimmick would sell faster.
The line between a grifter and somebody who’s just wrong is intent, and intent leaves evidence. A person who was merely wrong corrects it out loud, and you can watch them do it. One correction is a person learning. A pattern with a direction to it is something else, and the direction usually points toward the money.
The people who pay for it are the ones on the edge. Real trouble, honestly trying to climb out, with something good in them and no idea how to package it. What they get offered is three simple steps and a miracle. The real answer is slower, and a desperate person can’t afford slow, so they buy the shortcut, and then the next one, a little more broke and a lot more cynical each time.
Now the part I’d rather leave out.
I’ve been describing practitioners who won’t ship as if I were reporting on them. I’ve had a finished guide on my hard drive for weeks. Before that, two books out this year and about thirty copies sold, and I had never once asked anybody directly to buy anything I made.
I called that integrity. It was unsettled intent. I never decided what I was offering or what it cost, so I never had to find out whether anybody wanted it. The loud man with the bad product and I delivered about the same amount of help to the person who needed it. He took their money and I never showed up. His is worse. Mine isn’t good.
So, plainly.
It’s called Intent. It’s ten pages. It’s the first of ten principles I’m writing on communicating clearly, with people and with AI, and it opens with two days I spent arguing with a man who was right. It costs $4.99.
