This past weekend we had some family over and my brother-in-law asked me about Casual Marketer and what it was because my mother-in-law had mentioned something or other about my writing. I proceeded to give him a high-level overview of the whole physical newsletter concept and how I write daily emails which I turn into blog updates.
He then made the mistake of asking an interesting question.
I’m not entirely sure what came over me, but I immediately decided that his polite show of interest was actually a burning curiosity on his part, so I launched into a detailed breakdown of the mechanics and marketing of the entire business.
It took me about ten minutes to realize that his eyes had glazed over to the point where he looked like he had cataracts. I’m a bit mischievous so whereas a normal person would have stopped, realized they were boring their house guest and changed topics, I proceeded to go much deeper discussing the finer points of font selection for a physical newsletter versus the typography I use on the site.
Needless to say, he was looking around for something to either cut out my tongue to stop me from talking or perhaps slice his wrists to end the monotonous droning on about this stupid newsletter. He was lucky he didn’t ask to see one because that would have given me the opportunity to really torture him.
As I was thinking about it today, I came to the realization that nobody cares about what you’re doing in your business as much as you. I know that sounds really cynical and jaded, but it’s true. Your business is your business.
For me it was funny to punish his polite conversational curiosity with the finer details of my business that I largely don’t even find interesting, but we’ve all experienced this first hand ourselves where we’ll be out at some kind of social function, ask an innocuous question and then get a lengthy verbal dissertation about this other person’s job or business.
I once met a lady at a function my son’s school put on who sold women’s maternity clothes and being reasonably personable I decided to feign interest – she promptly proceeded to tell me in excruciating detail about maternity bras. I wanted to curl up in the foetal position… Get it, maternity clothes, foetal position. Oh boy, sorry about that.
That’s all well and good, but what’s the lesson out of this?
Candidly, there isn’t one.
I just thought it was funny to tell you how I tortured my brother-in-law with meaningless details around my business. It then made me think about a funny experience with the maternity bra lady who told me about how she once got stopped at airport security because her nursing bra had so many metal clasps it set off the metal detectors and they had to manually check her bosom for explosives. And finally, I just really liked the subject line “Nobody Cares” – I reckon the open rates on this one will be really high because that’s a subject that will invoke curiosity.
And that’s it. I could go off on some long-winded homily (a tedious moralizing discourse) about how nobody cares about your business as much as you, so it’s you against the world, and you can do it because I believe in you… But I won’t.