Today’s Lineup:

• It took me 5 years to be invited into rooms. (What I did in the meantime.)⏳
• Why getting specific wins the sale. 🔬
• It’s official… I’m a Mahjong girlie. 🀄

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The most expensive thing I ever paid for was a coach who looked at everything I did and told me it was great.

Great. All of it. For months.

I paid her anyway. And I walked out knowing exactly as much as I did walking in.

There were others.

Programs that didn’t deliver what they promised.

A mastermind where I turned out to be the most experienced person in the room, so I spent six months teaching instead of learning.

But here’s the part that I desperately need you to hear. Even with all that wasted time and money, investing was never the mistake.

Because somewhere early on I decided getting burned was the cost of building a business. It was an indictment of someone else’s over-promise, not of my willingness to grow.

So I kept going. And I promise you, Friend, two or three incredible programs paid for every dollar I lost on the rest.

Last weekend I was invited into a room where the entire focus was AI and all the women were million-dollar founders. Callan Faulkner put it together, and it felt almost illegal to learn such profound advancements on just a normal Tuesday.

Someone opened their laptop and handed us a Claude skill her team had spent months building. Like, no big deal.

Someone else shared proprietary software that isn’t even public yet. Not a single person held back the good stuff.

You’ve heard that you have to “be in the room” because that’s where the magic happens. It’s true. 

And I bet you probably believe it. You’d love a room like that.

What nobody talks about is what it takes to get the invite.

For about five years, I paid my way into rooms where nobody knew my name.

Bought the ticket.
Booked the flight.
Sat in the back.

Half the time I flew home with a notebook full of things that never worked for me.

Nobody was tracking my progress. Nobody was sending invitations. I just kept buying the ticket, until a few of those rooms finally paid for every dollar I lost on the rest.

Every woman in Callan’s room had her own version of those five years. Rooms she paid for. Flights she booked. Years she kept her own promises when there was no evidence it was working, and nobody was checking.

So if you’ve been burned and you’re sitting this season out, I get it. I’d just hate for a bad coach in 2019 to be the reason you’re not in the right room today.

Every room I’m in now, it’s because I paid to learn the lessons first. The invitations came years later.

The Specificity Test 🔍 ✍️

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Morgan (who manages my social media) sent me a note this weekend that (fortunately or unfortunately) had me rewriting everything I’ve written this past week. 🤦🏻‍♀️

It explained why you can close a woman in a live conversation and lose that same woman in an email.

Here’s what she said. 👇

📌 Vague describes a feeling. Specific hands over a moment.
“I’m struggling with motivation” gets scrolled past. “I think I need to quit” does not.

The first sounds like every caption she has read this year. The second sounds like something a real person actually says, and that is what makes her stop.

🔄 Make the swap on purpose.
Instead of “I felt stuck,” write “I sat in my car for twenty minutes before I could walk into that meeting.”

Instead of “it’s been a hard season,” write “I cried in the Target parking lot on a Tuesday.”

The number, the place, the exact sentence. That is the part that makes her think, wait, that’s me.

💬 Write her objection in her words, not yours.
“I am always so maxed with my time.” sitting in your copy stops reading like copy. It reads like the thought she already had this morning. She stops defending herself against your marketing and starts nodding along with it.

🔦 Audit before you create.
Pull up your last five pieces of content and highlight every vague line: struggling, hard season, wasn’t sure, overwhelmed. You do not need new content this week. You need the specific version of what you already wrote.

Specificity is not a writing style. It is the thing that makes someone feel seen enough to keep reading, and read enough to eventually buy.

Choose one vague line and make it exact. That is the version that converts.

I’m a Mahjong Girl Now 🀄

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I’ve wanted to learn mahjong for ages, and this weekend I finally did.

We were at Julie Solomon’s birthday at the lake here in Nashville. Just us girls. Someone pulled out a set, and I was in.

Well, why did no one tell me that this game is HARD??

I love dominoes. I will play Mexican Train until the sun comes up. Mahjong is that X100.

There are tiles and patterns and a whole card of hands you’re trying to build, and every time I thought I finally had it, someone made a move that made me question my entire life.

I did not win. I want that on the record, because I’m still processing it and I will come back a winner (Kate, I know you’re reading this, and we will crush the competition next time!)

I loved it. I’ve been hunting for something that gets my head out of my phone and off Netflix, and this is it. It’s social, it makes you think, and you can feel yourself getting a little better every round.

Nice chat! Let’s do it again next week.

Until then, remember that everyone pays to play in the beginning, specific copy wins your reader’s attention AND their engagement, and please don’t forget to tell me all of your Mahjong secrets. I need to win!

Amy

P.S. Speaking of expensive lessons: one of my guest’s clients paid ad agencies over $100,000 in fees and roughly broke even. Two things were set up wrong in her ads account, and my guest (major ads expert!) walks through both of them. [Listen Now]