elBenbo’s indigenous World-Building in action

Email Players subscriber coach Riley Holland checks in: (about my recent takes on World-Building I’ve been teaching for the past decade) === Hi Ben, I wanted to express some major appreciation for BizWorld and the new EP on world builidng. Specifically there was one sentence in BizWorld that triggered series of epiphanies for me that are kind of blowing my mind: You mentioned in that first section, almost offhandedly, that world building has its roots in a person's childhood. I immediately had a flashback to being 10-12 years old and drawing and writing comics with my brother, and writing articles for a parody tabloid I made with a friend and sold at school. In both cases, we were spontaneously building worlds -- the comics were based on an alternate history of the solar system, and the tabloid even had a "Mickey Mouse," a shady circus clown who would appear in most articles, with lots of other crossovers between articles, too. That made me think: it's almost as though human creativity (when unadulterated, like with kids just doing it for its own sake) has the overall template for world building embedded in it, almost like human DNA has the template for bodies built into it -- each unique, but always following the same basic structure. Then I realized that's not even an insight, it's just obvious: world building is what humans have always done when spontaneously creative, like in the myths of indigenous people. In that case the mythic world is superimposed on the natural world that they don't realize they built it, they just think it's the world. With civilization, myth becomes more of a cultural artifact, and you couldn't get a better example of world building than Greek myth, with the same world of characters and stories being mined for centuries (to this day) by poets, artists, and dramatists -- and eventually even Freud -- always putting their own spin on it, but never messing with the overall world too much, since that world was a collective one. The biblical tradition is a little different, since it's linear and canonical, so you don't have any spinoffs or guest appearances, unless you go full gnostic, or read the Old Testament as a prefiguration of Christ. But even there, you had Milton writing Paradise Lost and Regained within the worlds of Genesis and the New Testament, and lots of people today have ideas about the bible that actually came from Milton. Then as the printing press proliferated, you had people writing novels -- originally a derisive term to indicate they were making up their own stories, (how dare they) and building their own worlds individually instead of collectively. Now, with the internet, we can do what you write about: each create our own individual worlds not only in fiction, but in business, and every aspect of our lives. This is already a too-long email, so I won't go into how I'm starting to see sports as worlds... This is all just to say that I think you've tapped into something deeply archetypal here (not just rooted in a person's childhood, but in the childhood of our species), but also very new in the sense that usually worlds have been built by cultures, and not individuals, but now technology has brought us to an era where an individual can completely define and operate within their own worlds. I've never seen anyone talk about anything like this in business, except maybe stuff about Trappist monks. Business has a bad rap, which it often deserves, for being so often cut off from creative and archetypal roots, but you're making a connection here that's completely transforming my way of thinking about it, and helping me tap into that same well of inspiration and creative energy that I had as a kid. I'm sure it's doing that for lots of other people, too. So thank you for that. === Riley was talking about the August Email Players issue and my new book on the subject. And to be clear, it's too late to get that issue. And the upcoming September issue is not “about” World-Building at all. But what I teach about Sociological Marketing is a requirement to do World-Building the way I taught in this last issue and in my BizWorld book. And it’s like I told Riley: all these things are a bit rough to talk about to direct marketers because they tend to all be Psychological Marketers — and have no clue about Sociological Marketing, especially how I teach it in the upcoming September Email Players issue —and are conditioned to reflexively copy, swipe, look for checklists, now fap to AI, etc. As I’ve been saying all week: Sociological Marketing is not “best.” But it can work better than Psychological Marketing. Certainly it has for my business. But at the same time, like with World-Building, most direct marketers are not wired to do it. Thus, their fapping over spreadsheets, swipes, soft metrics that sound good in the here and now but ultimately mean nothing in the long term, and the list goes on. Sociological Marketing transcends all that. And, in many ways, is antithetical to direct marketing. They can obviously work together if you understand it. But, only if you are willing to think differently, behave differently, approach differently. I’ve written about this before in my elBenbo Press book. But the September issue drills down way deeper into the subject, and breaks out pieces of it to look at, study, see how they can fit into what you’re doing now and potentially even switch over 100% to how I go about it, if’n that is of interest to you, and if’n that is something your business can benefit from. Okay enough of this clacking. The deadline to get in on the September issue is tonight. When I send the list in to the printer, it’ll be too late. Here’s the link: [https∶//www.EmailPlayers.com]( Ben Settle This email was sent by Ben Settle as owner of Settle, LLC. Copyright © 2023 Settle, LLC. All Rights Reserved. No part of this email may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from Settle, LLC. Click here to [unsubscribe]( Settle, LLC PO Box 1056 Gold Beach Oregon 97444 USA