(img: jamie)
In grade 4 my teacher read one of my written assignments out loud, in front of the entire class, and proceeded to outright laugh at it.
That wasn't a fun day.
I was pretty embarrassed and remember feeling slightly betrayed by this teacher because until then, I had thought super highly of her.
To this day, that particular moment marks one of the most confusing events of grade school for me.
Why did she decide to laugh AT me, in front of the whole class? Was she having a bad day or did my story really suck that badly?
If memory serves me correctly the assignment was to come up with a fictional "scary" story.
I had written something about a group of boys who got lost in the woods during a camping trip.
I'll never know exactly why she decided to pick on me that day but it did leave a lasting impression on my writing abilities.
Thankfully I had a pretty good self-image (thanks Mom!) and that event didn't change it... I continued to feel confident about myself and my own personal value.
But it did make me dislike writing assignments for the next few years.
It wasn't until Grade 10, when I stumbled upon the most amazing English teacher ever, that I began to develop an appreciation for writing again.
She taught us about sentence structure, story writing, how paragraphs should connect with each other and the importance of "flow" in your writing...
... not that you would even know that from reading these blog posts, LOL!
However, it did begin to build my confidence in my writing ability again.
During University this came in handy as I routinely jammed out 20-40 page essay's the night before they were due.
And later, as I entered the workforce and written email communication became widespread, it served me well there as well.
When others were sending out one sentence responses to customers, bosses, or colleagues - I could formulate a more complete written and thoughtful response and I believe it helped my career.
Next, as I played around with building little websites and blogs and sending out email blasts, I began to leverage my writing more and more.
Today the paragraphs I write are often a single sentence, my grammar is non-existent and I overuse these little dots "..." as a lazy way to connect thoughts together.
Let's face it, I'm not in the running for any English awards - that's for damn sure!
But the ability to write is definitely one of the skills I'd like to pass on to our children.
Today we have a 13-year-old son and a 9-year-old daughter and my wife and I have been spending a lot of time thinking about what skills will be important in their lives.
And even though the English language is slowly becoming a lost art form, I strongly believe that the ability to write can be one of the key skills in supporting themselves financially.
Whether it's communicating in a job, writing to a potential employer, persuading people to join them in some amazing journey, or selling something spectacular - the written word can be very useful in any almost any and every pursuit.
It wasn't until we began studying business that we realized just how powerful writing skills can be.
For example, we have customers/members of ours at Rock Star Real Estate that have read this blog, or our emails, forYEARS before deciding to work with us.
Another one of our websites attracts hundreds of visitors a day because Google thinks the written content is worthy enough to serve it up in search results.
Just these two items alone have had completely massive results in our business building and in our financial lives.
So today when we meet younger people just getting started in their careers, we not only encourage them to develop their writing skills, we also encourage them to study "persuasive and influential" writing.
If you're going to study something you may as well study something that's going to make you some money right? 🙂
So with that in mind, we'd like to share with you a PDF that we CANNOT believe is made public and free to all of us.
It's a resource that I've personally downloaded and hoard in my Dropbox account as some sort of prized and cherished digital treasure.
Over the years we've even printed it off for people and handed it to them.
We read it many years ago, and actually, I think there was a previous version of it... But nonetheless, this version is still very valuable.
It's called Make Your Words Sell! The Simple Art of e-Persuasion, we highly recommend downloading it.
Click here to read about how it came to be and scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to get the PDF (or just click right here to go directly to it.)
Please don't dismiss this document as just a few simple lessons in writing. It covers some very sophisticated marketing and business principles that we use ourselves regularly.
It's the type of knowledge that isn't shared very well in any courses, classes or programs we've taken.
Hope you enjoy it!
Until next time... Your Life! Your Terms!
