A Flashback In History: What I Learned From The Fall Of The Mugabe Regime

Dear Renegade,

Let’s face it, for many of us solopreneurs, selling can be a drag. Worse, selling online requires you to write those insane sales pages that just drag your creativity down. Or do they?

Here I’m going to share a process that makes it insanely easy to write a pretty solid sales page in just a couple of hours at most.

It’s based on a template of course.

But not just ANY template.

I based my copy process based on this truly insane Million Dollar Template by copywriting Hall Of Famer Clayton Makepeace, a guy who has reportedly sold over $1 Billion dollars worth of products for his clients.

The great thing about the Clayton Makepeace Million Dollar copy template is that it’s got all your bases covered for what you need to include on a sales page:

• Big Promise
• Glicken (okay, this is an advanced copywriting thing, you can just copy what the template tells you, it will help, trust me!)
• Offer
• Proof
• Snapshot of Their Future Self
• Eliminate Risk (What marketing legend Jay Abraham calls “Risk Reversal” e.g. “Try it without paying anything for 30 days.” “Ship it back no questions asked if you don’t like it.” etc.)
• Add Urgency
• Amplify the Pain of Not Buying (Sales legend Jordan Belfort teaches this really well in his Straight Line System)
• Take the order

And I’m not the only marketer who has discovered the helpfulness of Clayton’s template. Roy Furr and Todd Brown, much more expert marketers than yours truly, also swear by this template.

So go here to get Clayton’s Million Dollar copy template for free:

https://www.breakthroughmarketingsecrets.com/blog/this-20-point-copywriting-outline-was-behind-my-first-million-dollar-sales-letters/

It will change your copywriting experience, for great win 😉

Yours in marketing adventures and general mayhem,

Ten
The Renegade Solopreneur Coach

Dear Fellow Renegade,

History is full of lessons that apply not just to nation states and great men, but to mere mortals and solopreneurs like me as well, and this is why I consider it a good exercise to try and learn as much as possible from our political leaders. If a politician is an obvious liar and a crook, and that therefore gets him or her terrible results, it’d be foolish to blindly take the same path in one’s own life as well.

So, let me quickly recap some of the stunning lessons that surfaced for me from the fall of the (in)famous Mugabe regime in my country of Zimbabwe a few years back.

Let me preface this by saying this is not a support of the Mugabe regime. Neither is it a takedown of the Mugabe regime nor its successors. Rather, it’s an attempt to, as impartially as possible, draw out any lessons ordinary folks and solopreneurs like me can use to optimize our own lives and businesses. I’m not in the pay of the Zimbabwe government, its enemies (the US, the Brits), nor its allies (the Tanzanians, the rest of the Africans, and China).

Now, of course, no human observer can be truly rational and impartial, we all have biases, and it’s even harder to be impartial when the observer is a citizen of the country he’s writing about. So take this with a lot of salt.

Lesson #1: You Can’t Fool All Of The People All Of The Time

The Mugabe regime got a lot of things wrong. Sure, it got a few things right as well, but it certainly got a lot of them wrong. One can point to its failures on the economy, with world record breaking inflation, sky high unemployment, and a collapse in real incomes, and a junk worthless currency, to realize there was economic failure of sky high proportions. That’s just on the economic front. Then there were the failures in the health sector, which killed a lot of people. That, in my book, ranks even worse than the economic failure, but let’s move on. Then there was the failure in the education sector, and a lot more. And what did the Mugabe regime do? They blissfully blamed all their failures on their enemies, the West.

Then of course, there was the failure that finally eliminated the regime: failure in the security sector. Which was obvious to everyone once it had eliminated the regime, and where blaming anyone, while nice, was just talk that could not save the day. The birds had come home to roost at last. You can fool some of the people some of the time. You might even fool some of the people ALL the time. But you can’t fool ALL of the people ALL of the time.

Lesson #2: “It’s The Economy, Stupid!” — Bill Clinton

Mugabe might well have read a note from Bill Clinton’s political playbook. It’s rather funny how universal some aspects of politics are. Whether you’re an American president or a Zimbabwean or even Cuban president – ultimately people are gonna judge you on how your regime helps them lead healthy prosperous lives or whether you destroy their prospects for the good life. I guess it’s like the social scientists and anthropologists have said in their works – humanity is the same everywhere, we all ultimately want to be happy – and no “revolucion Cubano” or what have you, will substitute for that if it can’t ultimately deliver the economic outcomes people want. And here the Mugabe regime failed spectacularly. Its days were ultimately numbered once the starving masses decided they had had enough because the regime had gone long enough and they had sacrificed enough and still, the regime was unable to transform its people’s fortunes.

This applies obviously to you and me in our own personal lives as well. I’ve personally been fired by clients on certain projects in my line of work where they evidently decided I was not good for their economy. And I’ve been hired by clients for the same reason – it was clear to them that I was good for their company’s economy. So it’s something that applies whether you’re in public office or merely a real estate developer in New York. And obviously, in family matters too, they say financial considerations are the biggest problem behind many divorces. So you always got to be aware how you influence the economy of your business, clients, or your personal team.

Lesson #3: Lie With The Dogs, Get Up With The Fleas

A third personal lesson is obviously that you are the company you keep. In their official statement against Mugabe’s regime, the military leaders stated that they wanted to eliminate “certain crooked elements/individuals around the president.” Something to that effect. And it’s hard to argue that the certain elements around the then president were NOT corrupt. The accusations against the corruption of the regime had long been made by the enemies of the Mugabe regime, and here now were the highest ranking members of the regime making the same accusations against their peers, all part of the regime! So, it’s reasonable to consider that the regime was corrupt for sure. But among his many mistakes, and a lesson for you and me, is that ol’ Mugabe unfortunately chose to surround himself with a bunch of corrupt individuals, who apparently now had to be eliminated from office in this “special intervention” by sympathizers of the president!

If you keep a company of corrupt individuals, you’ll soon slide down the slippery slope yourself into unfettered corruption. It’s hard to avoid the fleas if you are lying with the dogs, you can’t avoid the fleas for long, they are mighty contagious!

And there you have it, lessons for any would-be diplomat, president, politician, or just a solopreneur rainmaker like you and me.

Cheers,

Ten
The Renegade Solopreneur Coach

I help solopreneurs get MORE PROFITABLE in WAY LESS TIME, grow and scale their one man businesses into time independent 7-8 figure machines that make money even when you’re asleep. Learn how in my Renegade Solopreneur Profits Bootcamp.