The Most Powerful Sentence of All Time With Neil Gordon

[0:00] 

I’m Igor Kheifets, and this is The List Building Lifestyle, the podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world, and help people improve their lives in the process, this podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my best-selling book, The List Building Lifestyle: Confessions of an Email Millionaire, at igorsbook.com. Get the free book plus $3,000 bonus package that includes my best capture page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Visit www.igorsbook.com for details. And now, it’s time to claim your List Building Lifestyle.

[0:53] Igor Kheifets

Welcome back to The List Building Lifestyle. I’m your host Igor Kheifets and today I want to answer the most annoying question in the world: what do you do for a living?

I can say I’m an email marketer, an affiliate marketer, an e-farmer, I build email lists and write copy. There are a million different ways I can describe myself and that’s exactly the problem with that question. How many times have you asked someone what they do for a living and they mumbled through it?

Well, today my guest is going to help us solve that challenge once and for all. And using his methodology, you’re going to learn about coming up with incredibly accurate and powerful angles for any kind of marketing material, including emails, short-form videos, long-form videos, even your book or product, or even if you’re just running an affiliate promotion for somebody else.

I’ve now been using this methodology for a couple of months. I’ve applied it to pretty much everything I’ve done in these couple of months. Webinars, emails, videos, training programs, books. And it’s been a bulletproof approach to coming up with unique angles that get the job done.

That’s why I invited Neil Gordon on the show. He’s the author of The Most Powerful Sentence of All Time. That’s the name of his book, which you can get on Amazon. I highly recommend that you do because it’s an eye-opener and a great story too. Neil, welcome to The List Building Lifestyle.

[2:34] Neil Gordon

Thank you so much for that lovely introduction, Igor. Makes me want to listen to the episode.

[2:41] Igor Kheifets

Well, every word is true. This was one of those rare occasions where I didn’t have to manufacture a grandiose opener because when you use the material, it makes it so much easier to introduce the guest.

When I came across your book, recommended to me by our mutual friend John Bykovich, I read it in one sitting. Which doesn’t happen often these days. My mind starts racing, I drop a book, come back in a week, very sporadic. But in this case, I literally sat down on the couch while my wife was watching TV and my kids were running around, and I just made it a point to finish it because I kept being pulled into the story to find out how this woman was going to sell her thing. So thank you for writing that.

[4:08] Neil Gordon

Of course. I appreciate that you had such a positive experience with it. It’s not an accident that when a book resonates you just plow right through. That’s happened to me with books of a similar nature. So it’s gratifying to know that happened for you.

[4:27] Igor Kheifets

So let’s start. Where did the methodology come from? Was it a grueling process that lasted years? A spark of inspiration in the shower?

[4:51] Neil Gordon

For years, I had wanted to write a business parable. I apply my methodology to writing books, and I’ve been helping authors write nonfiction how-to books for a long time. That’s very fluid and easy for me. The parable format felt like a juicier opportunity to get my stuff out. I believe that when you have a parable that resonates with people, it’s more likely to get passed around.

But I was stalled on it. I wasn’t really into the vulnerability of putting my heart and soul into something.

Going back to 2021, I started drafting something I liked. I put months into planning out the structure. Then I was supposed to go on a trip in November of 2021, but I got COVID right beforehand. So I had two weeks blocked out of my calendar and I just wrote a full draft in about four days.

Fast forward two months. I was having an immersive day-long therapy experience and I realized that what I’d spent almost all of 2021 writing wasn’t really the book I wanted to write. It wasn’t the story I wanted to tell to frame this methodology. In the middle of that session, I realized there was something very close to my heart that I wanted to do: make the expert down and out.

I love parables like The Go-Giver, where the mentor is this stratospherically successful person. But I wanted to create a story inspired by my own struggles in the 2010s when I was moonlighting driving for Lyft. I needed to write that story because the whole point of this methodology is that it doesn’t matter who it comes from. The context doesn’t matter. It’s empowering in and of itself.

So I spent the next year and a half, maybe two years, toiling away and struggling to get it onto the page. It was hard. Eventually, I got a workable draft and went ahead with publishing.

[8:06] Igor Kheifets

I’m familiar with the experience of writing something and looking at it and thinking this is nothing like what I wanted, and then trashing it. Happens with almost every book I write. It’s such a process.

So for those not familiar with your methodology, can you give us the bullet point version?

[8:43] Neil Gordon

A lot of people who have some sort of vision, an unconventional idea, an alternate way of solving a problem, the kind of people you might see give a TED Talk or head up an ambitious startup, they all struggle with the larger belief that information is going to drive interest in their ideas. That if you go up on stage and give a talk packed with information, “here are ten things you need to know,” that’s going to win people over because you’re giving value.

We’ve been in the information age and information is such a commodity now that you don’t really need to make it the main feature of your content. That was already true. But with artificial intelligence being as pervasive as it is, the information we have is now even less valuable because we don’t even have to go through the same steps to access it.

What I teach people is one sentence that miraculously and instantaneously helps someone shift a belief around what’s possible for them in solving a problem. If you have some powerful idea at the heart of your company or your talk, you build strategically up to this sentence and it just flips a switch in people’s minds. They suddenly see a different possibility for themselves. That’s why they buy in. They get chills. They have light bulb moments. And because of that, they want to go further with the idea in whatever form that might take.

[10:53] Igor Kheifets

This is true, by the way. I especially see it not only with my customers now, but with the reach of my emails and the sales of my stuff. I actually did it about 30 or 40 minutes before our call. I was developing it for my latest book, Zero to Online, and I picked five friends, sent them 15 bullets each, and said, which ones resonate most for this product? Which ones should I use?

And what’s funny is that everybody chose two or three, but there was one bullet that four out of five also chose. Bullet number nine. And the specific belief was that you need a unique idea or unique business to stand out and build a business. Especially true in social media, right? If I’m like everybody else, my voice won’t be heard.

The counter to that belief is that you actually don’t need to be unique. You just need a business model that’s proven and to copy it from somebody who’s done it before. You can be as unique as a brick and still make quite a bit of money without reinventing the wheel. Because most online businesses are not reinventing the wheel. Social media marketing agencies, email marketing, Amazon stores, they’re all the same models. Every category has dozens of competitors. Very little is truly new under the sun.

That’s the big premise I decided to go with. The others will now be supporting material to this main one. I hope it becomes the showstopper, the scroll stopper up front that makes people stop and think: they’re telling me not to be unique? I thought I needed to be unique. Interesting.

[13:49] Neil Gordon

What you’re tapping into there is a really important part of being persuasive this way. That’s the name of the methodology: a silver bullet. What we’re ultimately doing is establishing an idea. But the way I talk about it is that you first set up the flawed belief, the flawed approach, to then queue up the true approach, your idea.

So a draft of your silver bullet could be something like: the key to having a successful business is not to create a unique model, but rather to utilize a model that’s already been proven in the marketplace. Which is essentially what you already said. And it’s just a matter of asking whether this needs to be wordsmithed or not. But the idea itself is already there. And just think about all of the franchise models. People are buying a completely pre-fabricated business model and following the playbook and getting themselves some freedom.

[15:24] Igor Kheifets

The best McDonald’s operators are former farmers, I’ve heard. People who can follow a checklist. Wake up in the morning, here’s your checklist, go.

[15:32] Neil Gordon

There you go.

[15:33] Igor Kheifets

Yeah, no creativity at all. You’re making a good point, actually. What separates a really good silver bullet from a bad one? How can we tell if we’re onto something versus still fuzzy?

[15:57] Neil Gordon

There are some pretty overt red flags that you have a silver bullet that isn’t likely to resonate. What a lot of people misinterpret with this technique is thinking they need to come up with multiple aspects to the silver bullet.

Essentially, a silver bullet is a cause and effect sentence. When you take this action, you get this outcome. As simple as that.

Some famous silver bullets: fortune favors the bold. The boldness is the action, the fortune is the outcome. Happy wife, happy life. That’s a silver bullet too. When you do the things that make your wife happy, you have a happy life in general. I’m not saying everyone would agree with that, I’m just saying it’s a very famous cause and effect sentence.

The mistake people make is packing in other actions or other outcomes. It would be like: happy life comes from having a happy wife and a nice home and financial security. That might all be true by some interpretation of life, but it muddies the waters. There is no way that saying would have become as famous as happy wife, happy life. It doesn’t even rhyme anymore. It just goes on and on.

The reason multiple actions in a silver bullet don’t work is because they leave too much room for interpretation. Are those all of equal importance? Do I do one first? Is one foundational and the others ancillary? So many questions come up in a split second of hearing something like that that it just doesn’t empower people the way a one-to-one sentence does.

And this is so incredibly important to remember: the goal isn’t to give people information. The goal is to convince them that change is possible for them. That’s the goal of this technique. When you have one action to take to get one amazing outcome you want for yourself, that’s empowering because it simplifies things and gives you a path forward.

[18:43] Igor Kheifets

I believe that’s one of the reasons I found your methodology so fascinating and almost intoxicating, because I spent many years marketing within industries that have customers with very low self-esteem specifically when it comes to achieving the outcomes being advertised.

I started as a customer in the dating space. I had very little self-esteem when it came to approaching or talking to women, let alone getting a date. Very terrifying stuff.

And in the online business space, I’ve worked with people of great stature and competence in other areas of life who have zero confidence in themselves when it comes to building an online business, loading an email sequence, or doing something as simple as buying a domain and attaching a professional email address to it.

So when you say your methodology helps people gain the belief that the outcome or transformation we’re selling is possible for them, I find it exciting. Because oftentimes you can be making lots of claims and hammering people with benefits, features, step-by-step systems. But ultimately, if they don’t think it’s possible for them, there’s nothing you can do. There’s no offer you can make. No benefit you can talk about. You can show them dozens of case studies of people who look and talk exactly like them. And still they will think: it’s possible for them. Just not for me.

[21:09] Neil Gordon

That’s exactly right. And I admit that because I’ve engaged in a number of services over the years that over-promised and under-delivered, which I imagine so many people have experienced by now, I’m pretty jaded and skeptical about promises made to me. I don’t find that most people are really able to deliver on what they promise. Partly because their values are askew. They care about marketing and sales but not about fulfillment. And the other thing is they don’t really have clarity about what makes their approach work, so they’re just throwing darts blindly at the board and hoping the sheer volume gets some client outcomes.

This winds up being valuable both for convincing others that change is possible, and it also helps us understand the real value of our own systems and the way we go about solving problems.

[22:35] Igor Kheifets

I want to ask about the flip side of that coin. You mentioned being over-promised and under-delivered, which makes us jaded. But have you ever been in this weird place where you were so certain of an outcome that it didn’t matter what the person on the other side promised or didn’t promise? You ignored your own suspicion and said, I’m still going to do it no matter what. Can we tap into that confidence using the silver bullet method?

[23:34] Neil Gordon

I personally relate more to that in an earlier chapter of my life. My struggles to market myself before I had any skills for it led me to driving for Lyft. I was living in LA and I had this really valuable concept to offer to the world, but I didn’t have clarity around how to get it out there. I had invested in a high-ticket program, something like $10,000, taken out a no-interest credit card to make it work. And I built a funnel that was okay but didn’t really do much. So I was back to driving for Lyft.

Then I had this terrible experience dropping people off at a crowded venue, stuck for 20 minutes on a Friday night when I was supposed to be getting fares. So I just fired myself, went home, and went back to the funnel I’d been dragging my feet on. Starting the following Monday, I worked on it full-time. It was done in four or five days. I didn’t realize how close to the end I was.

What I haven’t said yet is that the reason I originally converted to that program several years prior is because when I watched the webinar, the presenter, unbeknownst to him, incorporated a silver bullet into it. And it’s why I converted. I was like, this person has a real vision. The silver bullet was: your value is based on the outcome you deliver.

[25:49] Igor Kheifets

That’s actually a pretty fair statement.

[25:52] Neil Gordon

Yeah, it’s really solid. Your value isn’t based on how much stuff you give, how many bonuses, how much content. It’s based on the outcome you deliver. And I knew the outcome I could potentially deliver. So that kind of fed me. I have value. I don’t need to worry about anything else but getting this outcome to people. That’s what really fed my drive to fire myself from Lyft and ultimately change my life.

[26:29] Igor Kheifets

Sometimes you snap into place thanks to hearing one or two things. Oftentimes people will quote a silver bullet-like statement whenever they’re asked why they made a life-changing move.

I remember I was at a small event, about $2,000 per seat, a room full of really interesting people. One of them, by the way, was America’s number one highest-paid sex worker. Very nice person. Tiny, but extremely intelligent. There was clearly a reason she was the highest-paid.

Anyway, a communication expert in the room said something like: don’t communicate in a way so people understand. Communicate in a way where you cannot be misunderstood.

Many years later, I still remember that statement. It still guides me when I’m putting together an email or preparing for an important talk. It helps me zero in on what’s important and deliver it in a way that creates no confusion. Because we often imagine that what we’re about to say is super clear, because it’s clear to us. But we have no idea how it’s going to land on someone across the table. I specifically remind myself to be impossible to misunderstand when I talk to my teenage daughter or my son, because they have fewer reference points and it’s very easy to be misunderstood.

[29:22] Neil Gordon

It’s an interesting example because if we don’t honor the nuance of what he said, we would easily assume that being understood and not being misunderstood are the same thing. But by highlighting it in that concise silver bullet way, it prompts meaningful thought about what the actual difference is and how you might show up differently as a result.

Even just asking the question and being curious and wanting to go deeper, that’s a form of empowerment in and of itself. Empowerment doesn’t have to be knowing everything that needs to be done from here on out. You could empower someone where they just think, that’s interesting, I’m not fully understanding it yet but I see value in it, I want to go deeper. Then they book a call or buy a product. That level of empowerment becomes incredibly valuable when we’re talking about conversion optimization.

[30:45] Igor Kheifets

Especially when you can get your prospect to do some legwork and go look you up and go deeper into your universe.

I’ve been optimizing a funnel for a low-ticket product for about 16 months. After all that time, I looked at my numbers and realized that anyone who came in through that funnel never made it beyond the first purchase. Very frustrating, because I’d invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into advertising, optimization, copywriting, design, workflows, tracking. A whole team worked on that thing. We couldn’t get them past the initial $30 purchase. Even a year later, the original buyers hadn’t gone further.

That made me realize the message was not on point. They were curious enough to get the program but it didn’t resonate enough to make them go deeper into the rabbit hole. Because for me, that happens a lot. I’ll read someone’s book and halfway through I’m done, not continuing. With something else, I’ll finish the book and immediately want more. I’ll contact the author, get them on the show, dig deeper into their universe because I want deeper mastery of the skill. Whatever the case, there’s a drive from within to go looking.

It’s kind of like the first time someone discovers Tony Robbins. Almost always, they want to go deeper into the Tony Robbins world. The energy is so powerful. You want to go to the event, experience Tony live, get his business mastery program. And if we can create that pull by communicating our most powerful sentence, everyone benefits.

[33:27] Neil Gordon

What you’re describing is the larger pattern, whether it’s with Tony or with what you described reading books. We’re observing the phenomenon of a person believing that change is possible. That’s ultimately why people go deeper. My guess with Tony specifically is that his energy is so high and there’s just so much to be offered that people see the possibility of just being moved in some way.

[34:07] Igor Kheifets

He’s got the certainty. I found Tony Robbins when I was at the very early stages of my journey. No self-confidence, no money. And listening to Tony felt so empowering that I got my act together, lost a lot of weight, got into educating myself on how to talk to women, how to date. Before that I would never have thought of doing something like that. I would just stay home and play video games because that was the safe space. But there was that empowering. All of a sudden, there was a seed of belief that change was possible even for someone like me.

[34:50] Neil Gordon

That’s right. And it’s something that has been true for as long as people have been persuading anybody of anything.

[34:59] Igor Kheifets

Which is something we do every day, all day long, whether we realize it or not. Let me ask you something. Can we make this even more practical by walking us through some examples of repositioning fuzzy, less powerful statements into really powerful transformation-inspiring silver bullets?

[35:37] Neil Gordon

What I’ll say there is that I need to honor the privacy of clients who haven’t given me permission to share their material publicly. But what we’re looking for based on your question is a before and after shift.

A good public example is Dan Pink’s famous TED Talk on the puzzle of motivation, which is also what he discusses in his book Drive. It becomes a mini-masterclass on this in action. He made a discovery through his immersion in the world of business. He says it several times in the talk: there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.

He believed that carrots and sticks are how you motivate people. You want people to work harder and do better work, you pay them more and threaten punishment if they don’t stay in line. The revelation he shares is that that might work for line workers doing repetitive tasks. But when you’re a manager or a decision maker who needs to think critically, carrots and sticks aren’t going to help. In fact, they might have a negative effect.

What he reveals is that the secret to high performance is not rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive to do things because they matter.

He also does a very good job of building up to that silver bullet in the talk, which is something I recommend. This is not a tagline. This is not something you generally lead with at the outset. By and large, what I do with my speaking clients is have them build gradually to the reveal of a silver bullet at a strategic place in the talk.

[38:48] Igor Kheifets

Without breaking client privilege or mentioning names, could you also provide an example from more of a direct response world? A product that wasn’t selling that you were able to unlock a new perspective for?

[39:14] Neil Gordon

One of the best direct response transformations I’ve seen is actually my own VSL from a couple of years ago. I was following someone else’s model at first and it wasn’t getting much traction. They didn’t know about the silver bullet, so they didn’t know there was a place to include it. I adapted the format. I was following an almost color-by-number VSL script and I thought, he’s not saying I should do this, but I’m going to try it.

This was for an information product. And I instantly got 2x ROAS. Just like that. And it scaled consistently for the better part of the year. Right up until the pandemic, when things changed in that particular vertical.

Just working through and realizing the silver bullet needed to go in the VSL to build trust. Instead of people glancing over generic high-level content, which is so played out in webinars and video sales letters, when we bring the silver bullet in it converts at a rather significant profit.

[41:18] Igor Kheifets

Would you be able to share the silver bullet?

[41:21] Neil Gordon

It’s actually an adaptation of what we’ve been talking about today: people are empowered not by that which they know is true, but rather that which they believe is possible. It was a course about the silver bullet being used in public speaking. I was busting the myth that you go up there and give people a bunch of tips. That’s not speaking that will serve an audience. You just give them a bunch of tips, they get overwhelmed with everything they have to do, and they’re not empowered. Instead, you convince them that change is possible. Not from what you know, but from what you convince people is possible.

Another example is a webinar I did. This wasn’t a situation where I was struggling. It worked brilliantly from the beginning. But where it becomes important in contrasting it with approaches that don’t work: it was a standard on-demand webinar with a Calendly link for booking high-ticket sales calls. People were getting maybe 20 to 30% no-show rates at the time, and paying $100 to $150 per call in ads.

I put together a webinar driven by silver bullets. Five phases, and each of the five things I taught had a silver bullet at the heart of it. I paid $33 per call instead of $150. And instead of a 30% no-show rate, I had approximately 2%. I think out of around 400 calls, maybe six people were no-shows.

[43:45] Igor Kheifets

Did you promise them free money for showing up?

[43:48] Neil Gordon

No, nothing like that. The silver bullets are the X factor. They’re the thing that shows people there’s value here. And I’m sure as soon as we hang up, I’ll think of another great example I’m not thinking of right now.

[44:15] Igor Kheifets

Where in a VSL or webinar do you place the silver bullet? Is there a rule for placement?

[44:25] Neil Gordon

Usually in a shorter form VSL or mini webinar of seven to ten minutes, somewhere around minute four or five, roughly halfway or a little more than halfway through. Before that, you’re establishing why they’re there, making sure they know they’re there for a certain outcome, and that they’re experiencing certain pain points. Maybe you show that they’ve tried things that don’t work and explain why. Then you start making a case for a different way of doing things, perhaps through case studies or statistics. And then you land the silver bullet.

After that, you might show case studies of people who believed the flawed thing beforehand, then because of this idea changed things and got amazing outcomes. And then if you want this outcome too, here’s what we can do for you, leading into the call to action.

The important thing is that you’re not just providing three pieces of generic content to build trust. That is so played out. People can go to an LLM and search for that kind of content in seconds. Instead, you help them shift the belief around how to go about solving the problem in general. That’s why you build up to it, and then you do the rest: credibility for the idea, proof of concept, social proof, call to action.

[46:36] Igor Kheifets

Do you ever put silver bullets up front, like in the headline or webinar title?

[46:44] Neil Gordon

I don’t like to. I like to allude to a shift. Like: the key to solving a problem. Or focusing on the myth up front: the myth about blank, or the reason why blank doesn’t work anymore. Because I believe that in the mid-2020s, appealing to the cortisol response around stress is more likely to get attention. I like to allude to a revelatory insight without leading with it. Once in a while, someone leads with their silver bullet and it works. Everything needs to be tested. But by and large I recommend building toward it.

[47:40] Igor Kheifets

Do silver bullets have an expiration date?

[47:48] Neil Gordon

That’s an interesting question. I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that before.

It ultimately comes down to the subject matter. If it’s about people, I don’t think it will ever go out of date. We’ve been homo sapiens for 300,000 years. We’re still going to have a fight or flight response to threat. A silver bullet that talks about mitigating threat or avoiding harm is going to be just as relevant in 1,000 years as it is today, and as it would have been 1,000 years ago. We don’t evolve that quickly.

But if somebody creates a silver bullet about the importance of immersing yourself in deep research to become an expert, that might not be as necessary now. We don’t need the same resources to find things that we did even five years ago. So there are things that might have been true before technology disrupted everything that are no longer true.

[49:57] Igor Kheifets

Interesting. So a silver bullet based around human nature or human behavior tends to live longer than one based around technology.

[50:09] Neil Gordon

Yeah, technology or the way problems are solved within a certain level of technology. And I actually like the Mongol example for this. The reason they were so dominant is because they were expert warriors on horseback with long bows. They were unstoppable. Their silver bullet could have been something like: dominance comes from agility on horseback. But then gunpowder becomes pervasive and heavy artillery becomes a thing. All of a sudden, that silver bullet is completely rendered obsolete because they’ll never get close enough to use their skills. And so it really just depends on how vulnerable the underlying belief system is to things that change at a rapid pace.

[51:33] Igor Kheifets

Ultimately, however, we’re always linking back to what does the person in front of us believe. Because we have to start that conversation with what they believe today.

[51:48] Neil Gordon

Yeah. And this is important not just in terms of a silver bullet, but in terms of communicating in general. And this is potentially a silver bullet that will stand the test of time: we are infinitely more likely to be successful in how we impact others through our communication when we first meet them where they’re at in that moment.

You could have a solution that people have no idea they need. You could even understand that the root cause of the problem they need to solve is something they don’t understand. But if you have a talk to give, start with the problem they do believe they have. Then work your way to reframing the problem as the root cause with your more sophisticated understanding. And from that sophisticated understanding that they’re now on the journey with you to discover, take them to a silver bullet, to a solution they didn’t know they needed. You can do that in a very short amount of time if you start where they’re at, if you start with the pain they are actually in.

That’s kind of copywriting 101. But a lot of people don’t regard what copywriters do so effectively. They start with where they’re at rather than where their audience is at.

[53:04] Igor Kheifets

I agree. And these days, copywriters get even more discounted because everyone thinks ChatGPT can write their copy just as well. The problem is that ChatGPT doesn’t think like a copywriter. It mechanically writes copy. But that’s a topic for a totally different episode.

Neil, thank you for taking the time to sit down with me today. I want to remind everyone one more time to go to Amazon and get a copy of The Most Powerful Sentence of All Time. It’s a business fable, written in the tradition of The Go-Giver, readable in one sitting. And I’ll just say: magic will happen if you use the technique described in the book. It’s easily readable in one sitting, an incredible resource, and really underrated in my opinion. I’ve read every copywriting book on the top recommended lists, and I think this one should be there alongside the classics.

So go get a copy of The Most Powerful Sentence of All Time by Neil Gordon on Amazon. Neil, thank you again. It was a pleasure hosting you on The List Building Lifestyle. Until next time, we’ll chat. Have a good one.

[55:20] 

Thank you for listening to The List Building Lifestyle. Get access to previous episodes, transcripts, and other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also, remember to claim your free copy of my best-selling book at www.igorsbook.com. It explains how I made millions with list building starting from scratch, plus $3,000 worth of free bonuses, including my best landing page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Go to www.igorsbook.com now to claim your free package.