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Would you rather be right or persuasive?
Ignaz Semmelweis was a Hungarian physician.
He was working in Austria during the mid 1800s when he noticed women were dying at shockingly high rates after deliveries performed by doctors compared to deliveries performed by midwives.
He had a hunch that it had something to do with this:
Midwives simply stayed with the women and delivered babies.
But doctors?
They’d go straight from doing autopsies to delivering babies without washing their hands.
Why?
Germ theory wasn’t popular, nor had it even really been discovered yet.
But none-the-less, Semmelweis followed his intuition and ordered doctors and medical students to wash their hands with a chlorinated lime solution before examining patients.
The result?
The mortality rate for women after childbirth plummeted from 18% down to 2%.
An amazing, life saving discovery. The first documented case of effectively controlling the spread of infection through handwashing. At the time, the cause of disease was widely believed to be things like “bad air”, not bacteria.
But when he tried to share his discovery with the medical community:
No one believed him.
He was mocked and rejected by many of his peers. He lost his prestigious position at the hospital in Vienna. And went on to dedicate his life to attacking the people who criticized his findings.
He wrote furious open letters to his colleagues.
He accused them of murder for rejecting his ideas. He went on to suffer from severe depression, paranoia, and other erratic behavior. Eventually his family admitted him to an insane asylum.
Within days of being admitted.
He was beaten by guards, developed a gangrenous wound, and died of sepsis.
The very type of infection he’d dedicated his life to preventing.
All to say…
When it comes to marketing.
You can either be right, or you can be persuasive.
And there’s a big difference between the two.
So if you’ve got something brilliant cooking, and you want to win more clients, customers, and colleagues to your side using email, you can apply to work with me here:
Your pal,
Kevin Hood