How To Make Everyone Love You With Almost No Effort or Real Emotional Commitment Involved
When my grandma passed away a couple years ago, my parents were surprised by what they found rummaging through her stuff.
Among all the pictures, gifts, and more that she received from us and other friends and family members over the years, there was only one thing she kept.
Greeting cards.
Every holiday. Every birthday. Every special day for her that we acknowledged with a cheap, last-minute card. She kept all of them. My parents discovered stacks upon stacks of the guys, all arranged in chronological order.
Her old family photos? Nah, just old trash, thrown out years ago. The computers and other expensive electronics we tried to give her as gifts? All returned to the stores. The only thing that she held onto were generic Hallmark cards that, I’m pretty sure, my parents normally signed off on for me and my brothers.
It’s not just my grandma who was into greeting cards. In the 1960s, there was a car salesman named Joe Girard who was considered the most successful car salesman in the world, pulling in around $200,000 a year in commissions. (This at a time when CEOs were making far less than that.) The secret to his success? Every month, he’d find a reason — usually some kind of major holiday — to send every customer he’d had a postcard. It would be holiday themed and always contain the same message: “I like you.” Nothing more than that. That’s 12 carbon-copy cloned cards a year to every person he’d ever gotten contact information from on the job.
I realize now that I struggle to describe historical events without making them sound super creepy. (Please see previous paragraph.) But the point remains: people love greeting cards, no matter the occasion and no matter the effort put into making them.
One more example. I don’t celebrate my birthday, for a number of reasons. I don’t tell people when it’s my birthday, and don’t really advertise the date unless asked. My birthday this past year was uneventful, spent in Ushuaia, Argentina with a group of people that had no idea I was officially a year older. But what absolutely made my day were the four e-mails from people who remembered what day it was and wanted to acknowledge it regardless of how I acted.
People love greeting cards. It doesn’t matter the format. Just send them if you want people to love you like they love me.