The S.W.I.P.E.S. Email

Swipe📁 • Wisdom🧠 • Interesting🧐 • Picture🖼 • Essay📄 • Sketch✎
A fun email for Friday. I hope you enjoy!

Edition: Friday, December 23rd, 2022

🎤 Listen to this email here:

Swipe:

Here's an example of a great cold email!

- It seems personal, but doesn't use any personalization (less work).
- It gets straight to the point of what's important to me.
- Shows proof he can deliver the results.
- Gives a juice screenshot with stats.
- Offers to give some suggestions if I reach out.

I love seeing good emails in my inbox in a sea of bad emails!

Wisdom:

“Once you understand the motivation, reward and punishment structure of any system, you can begin to control it.”
- Guido Van Rossum (founder of Python)

Interesting:

Fun fact: Every time you fill out one of these Google Captcha's you're slightly training an A.I.

A.I. systems for self driving or identifying objects need massive amounts of human labelling to learn from, and you're labelling these 9 pics as either:
- It's a car
- It's not a car

The A.I. system then shows these same pics to many other humans (sorry you're not that special 😛), and then determines if it was correct or incorrect about labelling the images.

...and that's how it learns and gets better. Neat huh!

Picture:

Canva just released "Canva Docs", which is interesting for writers that use tons of visuals in their writing 👀

I played around with it and it's kinda neat.

Their built-in editor AI is pretty sweet. Check this out:

My prompt: Write me 5 reasons copywriting is awesome

The result:

And it even has text-to-image generation:

I asked it to draw: "Show me a guy putting on sneakers in the dessert"

Not sure I'll be switching from Google Docs over to Canva docs just yet....but so far no editor has even COME CLOSE to Google Docs for me except this...so I'm impressed already!!

Essay:

Remember how "The Will Smith Slap" was what EVERYONE IN THE PLANET was talking about for a while?

Whatever happened to that?

Then everyone was talking about the Johnny Depp divorce thing.

Then everyone was talking about Iran....

Some topics capture the public imagination, and the whole world gets obsessed for a short period of time....then moves on.

This is known as "The Current Thing."

Here's some cool visualizations of "The Current Thing" from 2022:

Or here's some more "Current Thing" for 2021:

This cycle seems to play out across every industry, every country, and every group...it's cool to see it in visual form like above!

Sketch:

Have you been using ChatGPT (the A.I. writing tool)?

Outside of testing it out, what have you been using it for?

I've been using it for:
- Running ideas by it.
- Occasionally drumming up headline or subject line ideas.
- Asking it to come up with content ideas.

I'm starting to use it a bit less now as the initial novelty has worn off....and it's interesting to watch how others are using it:

Some responses from Twitter:

Jason: I’ve been going to subject matter expert episodes of long form podcasts on YouTube (1hr to 2 hour) coping the transcripts and then asking ChatGPT to summarize in long sentences and 20 points what was said in the interview.

Kamphey: I ask for FAQ for topics, to add more sections to blog posts. I used it to figure out subsections, subheadlines. I asked for clickbait titles, buzzfeed type titles. I asked for B2B titles, and subheadlines and subsections. I asked it to summarize youtube videos.

Olivia: Since we are a content agency we are exploring its power with:
1. Headlines
2. Summaries
3. Outlines
4. Content Ideas based on research?
5. Articles
6. Tweets
7. Threads
8. Text extraction
9. Copy

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What's interesting is ChatGPT likely won't take away a SINGLE job in the whole world (for now)...

...but it's going to make some jobs a whole lot easier, and restructure what some job titles do.

Example:

"Manually-Writing-Numbers-On-A-Chalkboard-Guy" probably didn't lose his job the moment electronic spreadsheets came out:

However he probably shifted certain tasks to computers over time, so he didn't have to begrudgingly add numbers all day...instead a computer could do it faster, and he could focus on more important stuff:

Then the spreadsheet technology got even better and he would have to re-train himself to use something more like this on a modern computer:

Ultimately "Manually-Writing-Numbers-On-A-Chalkboard-Guy" would be able to start his on company managing the books for multiple other companies....and raising his potential income level by A LOT:

Inside our Copywriting Course forum and Office Hours we've been working side-by-side with A.I. tools, and it's been invigorating to have new tools to use for creativity!

Although sometimes you have to beware of using these tools wrong, like for trying to game search engine results: