What’s your unfair advantage—and are you using it? [WRAP 196]

Hey Reader, quick question…

This fall I’ve been working with a group of newsletter writers to help them write more consistently, effectively, and turn more emails into sales.

So if you have a newsletter and that sounds like something you would like—easier to write and more profitable—just click reply and let me know.

💡 One Big Idea

The other day I took a selfie for social. It’s kinda surprising to me that these “natural” selfies still work, but even so they’re starting to feel played out. We’ve all seen thousands of these by now—but again, they still work.

So I was thinking about how to make a person look twice without a great backdrop or a goofy outfit?

And I realized I could just draw on the picture. I’m not even talking about real drawing; I’m talking about accents and exclamation points and really simple hand-written icons and captions—stuff like that.

That post did better than other posts that I’ve made about the same topic, and the only thing that I changed was that I doodled on the picture a little bit.

I’ve been doodling since I was a kid. I’ve even taken a few classes and read a bunch books on doodling, sketchnotes, and cartooning. I still skip it sometimes because it feels “unprofessional.”

But the thing I thought wasn’t professional is what helped me stand out. It made people pause and give my work an extra second.

I say this because I would encourage you to look at the seemingly unimportant or boring things—or other things about your life that you might take for granted—that are actually your unfair advantage.

You can’t worry about being cringe. You can’t worry about random people on the internet criticizing you. Even more importantly, you can’t worry about your neighbor or random family member criticizing you, or the person that you used to know back in college. A lot of those perceived feelings aren’t even real.

Once you start discovering and using your unfair advantage, you’ll see a lot more interest in and connection to your work.

👀 Video to Watch: Start Your Goals NOW

This started as a November "Plan With Me" video that morphed into a goal-setting video. The truth is we only have a handful of working weeks left in 2025.

For me, between travel and holidays I only have 3 full weeks left in the year. Yeah, I could shrug and say "not enough time to do anything worthwhile." But I'm challenging myself to build momentum now to carry into 2026.

​This video will help you do the same 🎯

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📖 Book to Read: Perelandra

This is the 2nd book in CS Lewis’s lesser-known Space Trilogy and it’s a beauty. The book is set in Perelandra—aka Venus to us—and is a retelling of the Garden of Eden and temptation story from Genesis.

In my opinion it’s one of Lewis’s most well-written books with some incredible passages and spiritual allegory (see image).

​Perelandra is a short book too, only 222 pages (in pocketbook sizing, at that). It’s fun to ready, but not a super easy read either. Lewis’s writing is so dense that you really have to pay attention.

This is an aside, but I’m also re-reading The Will of The Many before the second book, The Strength of The Few, comes out on Tuesday. And I saw how different writing from the 1940s is from modern writing in the 2020s.

✌️ Two Things Stand Out

First → modern writing is like a screenplay: quick cuts, sensory detail, and implied emotion rather than direct exposition. Literary writing is more like lawyer presenting a case: long sentences with multiple clauses and doing a lot of the imaginative work for you. You’re being told rather than discovering.

Second → the pacing and formatting is so different. Just in the highlights above, that one paragraph of Perelandra is doing a lot of work. Reading it feels like climbing a staircase, rewarding but takes effort. The Will of The Many has multiple short paragraphs, more whitespace, and driven by the character POV.

Anyway, thought you might find that interesting 🧐

Thanks for reading,

Matt "doodle 'til I die" Ragland