The Copywriter Comeback Series starts soon ✍️
Dani Paige asked twelve copywriters (including me) in the course creator space, “What’s one hyper-specific thing every copywriter should know or do to thrive in 2025?” Every interview is less than 15 minutes and has one specific “do this next” piece of advice for copywriters.
Yes, I made New Year’s Resolutions (but you don’t have to)
New Year’s Resolutions, let’s talk about it.
I already have more freakishly good habits than a tech bro. I get up hours before sunrise, work out 3-5x/week, do death-defying sports, drink green smoothies and electrolyte water daily, microdose THC oil, and gobble up books like there is an impending shortage.
Plus I have many wonderful vices.
I whip out Candy Crush every time I’m feeling mildly uncomfortable. I drink one and a half bottles of tequila every month. I watch 90+ minutes of bad real estate shows in bed every night, the absolute bottom of the barrel. I buy books I’ll never read and sports equipment I don’t know how to use, just for the dopamine hit. I could blow an entire Saturday laying around snorting ketamine and listening to Brian Eno. My main sources of calories are ramen and Knorr Sidekicks. I could go on.
For years I’ve been noodling on the idea of a clean sweep on some of these unsavoury habits. Anytime I broached the idea with my therapist, she wasn’t very encouraging. “Let’s talk about what’s behind these behaviours,” she would say. “What are you disassociating from?”
Fine by me if it means I can keep drinking my tequila nightcap while rolling my eyes at Ryan Serhant on Owning Manhattan (who, btw, is the spitting image of my ex-husband).
This is the first year since my divorce that I’ve had bandwidth for New Year’s Resolutions.
All that time flying down the green circles over Christmas made me feel like tackling some habits I’ve been wanting to change for a while now. It inspired me to be so kind and so loving to Tarzan, and take care of her like I was her best boyfriend ever, which is a really awesome energy to be starting the new year.
A few personal habits I’m changing—
>> I deleted Candy Crush (hopefully forever)
>> I committed to a month of abstinence from alcohol, drugs and online shopping
>> I took the TV out of my bedroom and picked up some easy-reading novels from the library, Emily Henry and such
>> I booked a check-in with holistic nutritionist Lisa Kilgour to help me figure out what other tech bro wisdom I can incorporate into my diet
I’ve also checked out a whole stack of books on habits. It’s annoying how many of them assume that my main goal is to lose weight, but even so I’m learning a lot about how my brain works.
After listening to this episode about dopamine on Diary Of A CEO I learned that there are two ways to get dopamine, and your brain is wired to balance pleasure with pain.
The Two Ways To Get Dopamine Are
1) The “buy now, pay later” dopamine you get from pleasure-seeking activities like gaming, drinking, and eating giant Toblerone bars from Santa. The activities that feel good in the moment but you sometimes regret later. This type of dopamine is pleasure first, pain later.
2) The “pay in advance” dopamine that comes from activities requiring discipline or discomfort, like braving the bunny hill for the first time, decluttering your bathroom cabinet, or reading Crime and Punishment. The pain is much less than a hangover, and you still get the pleasure—except minus that nagging feeling of “I’m going to pay for this later.”
Earning big servings of dopamine feels like a fun edge for me. It’s only been eight days but I feel like Jack in Titanic. King of the world. I was doing Romanian deadlifts at 6am this morning even though my coach isn’t back from Türkiye yet.
In the past I may have travelled a bit too far down the road of “I’m only successful because I’m white, charming and conventionally pretty.” A truer truth is that I have many established habits and routines that contribute to my success. I already told you lots of them and I didn’t even mention ice bathing.
A few other business habits—
>> I’m writing you this email on Wednesday, six days before it lands in your inbox
>> Yesterday Sandra and I had a monthly meeting to review our quarterly plans and turn them into projects and tasks, as we do every month
>> I pulled the hook for this email out of an Apple Note that I took between sets of TRX single leg squats at the gym this morning (did I mention I go to the gym??)
>> If you reply to my email and say something nice, I will reflexively say, “Can you put that in a Google review?” (Serious, can you?)
Something like 43% of our daily actions are habitual, performed without thought. My goal this year is to be just a bit more thoughtful about the things I do without thought.
Just to see what happens.
I already made a note to check in the first week of February and tell you how it’s going.
Over to you:
What’s one habit you want to adopt in 2025? Or a habit you want to drop?
I’d love to know.
Hopefully it’s not that Saturday afternoon with Brian Eno thing I mentioned earlier because at least one of us better be doing that
T-Boss
