“nobody knows anything” might be the most consistently accurate lines in business.
Not just in Hollywood but also direct marketing or any other industry.
The best example of this is probably George Lucas and Star Wars:
* It was rejected by every major Hollywood studio except 20th Century Fox
* Execs called it “a space opera for children” and though it too weird
* Plus, sci-fi was “out” in the 70’s and everyone assumed nobody would care about sci-fi movies in those days at that time
* He showed a cut to his filmmaker friends and everyone except Steven Spielberg (who loved it), thought it sucked – in fact, Brian DePalma said it was, “the worst movie ever”
* Even Lucas thought it’d fail and went on a long vacation when it released, assuming he’d come back to a miserable failure
* The actors literally made fun of of it, not just Harrison Ford and Alec Guinness, but even usually go-lucky and happy Mark Hamill, none of them thought it’d be successful or be taken seriously
* Turned out everyone except Spielberg was wrong, it became such a big hit, so quickly, that soon a Hollywood executive was forced to admit they were no longer in the Hollywood business, they were in the George Lucas business
i.e., Nobody knows anything.
That idea you have that your Facebook friends say is bad, nobody will care, nobody will buy, etc?
They don’t know.
There were even several friends of mine who shalt NOT be named to protect the guilty… who said my Email Players newsletter (now on its 15th year of continuous publication) would not work, was a disconnect (since it is print, not delivered via email), yada yada yada.
I didn’t care.
Even then I knew nobody knew anything.
And the reason I knew nobody knew anything was because even at that point, I’d had many enormously successful clients who’d fight me tooth & nail on ad ideas, themes, headlines, stories, offers… where sometimes I’d spend MORE time writing emails to convince them to run my ad than it took to write the dayem ad itself… only for them to finally run it and admit “gee, I guess he was right…”
So nobody knows anything.
* Your clients don’t know anything.
* Your idiot Facebook friends definitely don’t know anything.
* Your anon Twitter followers know even less.
* Your coach, your mentor, your mastermind peers also don’t know jack shyte.
* And no, I don’t know anything either, and neither do you… until you run with your ideas.
But you know who DOES know?
Your market.
But even they don’t know until you put what you got in front of them. Something everyone from guys like Bell, to Tolkien, to Ford, to Jobs, and many other visionaries who put it out there and were not afraid to get it cut off all figured out, and knew, and experienced.
I don’t know if this inspires you to action or not.
But if it does then I’ve done my job..
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Ben Settle
