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Steal Smart
Each week I receive a blog on direct marketing by industry maven Denny Hatch. Hatch's posts are packed with practical, proven ideas that improve my outreach efforts. Chances are, you've been entranced by some of the techniques I learned and deployed after reading about them in Hatch's emails.
Last week it was a simple two-word phrase that caught my attention. It came from a New York Direct Mail Writer's Guild luncheon that Hatch attended in 1982.
The speaker was Dorothy Kerr, US News and World Report's circulation director. Hatch says that this part of Kerr's speech changed his life:
“If you want to be successful in direct marketing, watch your mail. If you see a mailing coming in over and over again, it is ipso facto successful. Save it. Study it. Memorize it. And steal smart.”
Kerr's advice was to notice what direct mailers repeatedly send because the very repetition proves that the mailers are effective.
Steal Smart
But it's her last two words that are pure genius: “Steal Smart.”
Whoa there — before you jump to conclusions, Kerr is not advocating plagiarism. That verb is defined as “the act of plagiarizing: the copying of another person's ideas, text, or other creative work, and presenting it as one's own, especially without permission.”
Instead, she's talking about best practices.
The old saying, “To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research,” has been attributed to almost everyone from Picasso to Steven Wright.
The musical satirist Tom Lehrer even wrote a song about the renowned Russian mathematician Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky with these lyrics:
“Don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize –
Only be sure always to call it please ‘research.'”
Picasso, Kerr, Lehrer, and the rest of them all suggest doing what my friend Will calls “Swipe and Deploy.” Will's advice is to observe the best practices that successful people around you use and figure out how to employ those ideas to help you get what you want.
This strategy is older than you might think, by the way.
The Latin expression, “Nanos gigantum humeris insidentes,” or “Dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants,” has been traced all the way back to Bernard of Chartres in the 12th century. 500 years later it entered the popular vernacular in a 1675 letter by Isaac Newton who wrote: “If I have seen further [than others], it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Steal Smart
But it doesn't matter whether you already knew about Newton's declaration or just learned of this concept today. What matters is that from now on, when you look for new ways to get what you want, remember to use creative interpretations of proven best practices instead of always trying to reinvent the wheel.
There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium,
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium,
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium,
And gold, protactinium and indium and gallium,
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.
There’s yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium,
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium,
There’s strontium and silicon and silver and samarium,
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium.
There’s holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium,
And phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium,
And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium,
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium.
And lead, praseodymium and platinum, plutonium,
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium,
And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium,
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.
There’s sulfur, californium and fermium, berkelium,
And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium,
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc and rhodium,
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin and sodium.
These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,
And there may be many others but they haven’t been discovered.
Couldn’t resist. after reading your Post, I had to look it up. I used to have it memorized.
That’s it, Michael! So did my brother. Plus, he also knew the song of all the world’s countries by the Animaniacs.
So great to stand on your shoulders, Bruce!
Thank you Jim!
Good one!
Thanks Mary!
Another great post. Having been in advertising and marketing 43 years I’ve learned that there is no new idea, but a compilation of many ideas through the years.
An artist’s technique is a compilation of all he/she had learned through the years, writer’s style too…like you.
I agree, George. There are no new ideas — creativity is creating old things in new ways.