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My favorite professor, a pot farmer, and how to make your content less boring

Last week I told you about the “favorite professor effect”. Now I’m gonna tell you about my favorite college professor, a guy called Dustin Frye.

 

Frye was my favorite professor because he understood a secret about how to teach stuff. The best online marketers understand this secret. Most regular people don’t.

 

Professor Frye was objectively a very bad teacher. Some of my other professors had written books and gotten published in super-prestigious journals and were considered experts in their field. Others were mind-bogglingly smart. But Frye was just a normal dude.

 

Meanwhile, Frye had just gotten out of grad school and was making a name for himself. And he wasn’t some rising star, either: he actually got denied tenure after I graduated, and went to work at a less prestigious school.

 

But Professor Frye’s classes were still my favorite, because he was entertaining. Most teachers just kinda read from the textbook. But Frye’s classes were human: he taught, but he also cracked jokes and told us funny stories from his life.

 

For example. One day we were reading this economics paper that compared people to their brothers. So Frye started telling us about his brother.

 

“My brother and I couldn’t be more different,” said Professor Frye. “I’m an economics professor at a prestigious university. And my brother is a pot farmer.”

 

He told us that his brother’s pot farming business hadn’t been doing well lately. “It really cuts into your profit margins when you smoke most of what you grow.”

 

Now I am doing the exact same thing that Professor Frye did. You joined my email list so you could learn more about selling courses and coaching programs. And here I am telling you stories about an economics professor and a drug dealer.

 

But that’s my whole point! Learning all by itself is boring. If all you do is teach, teach, teach, then your students will get bored with you!

 

If you want people to actually read what you write or watch what you record, you need to entertain people.

 

That means you have to crack jokes, tell stories, and do more than just info-dump all your knowledge.

 

(This is also why I put memes in my emails. It makes them more entertaining, so you’re more likely to open them next time.)



College professors get paid a flat salary. Meanwhile, you get paid per student who signs up for your programs. So you might want to be more entertaining.

 

If you want to send entertaining emails (like this one) to your audience, check this out:

 

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