Levine’s Trench in Marketing aka: Why Some Copywriters are so Mean Online.
Ever notice how some copywriting communities, instead of being a helpful and productive place, turn into a nest of vipers, or crabs in a bucket, or… Well just downright nasty?
There’s a Magic: the Gathering concept that perfectly diagnoses this.
Magic players call it the Levine’s Trench.
It explains how passionate players start as friendly and fun to be around and then turn into arrogant, condescending jerks.
And it turns out, this concept isn’t just about Magic, it applies to nearly everything.
So what is it?
It’s a graph.
This was made by a professional Magic player Eric Levine from RagingLevine.com
This describes how a player’s niceness and their skill at Magic are connected.
Think of this line as a Magic player’s journey from total beginner to pro, and how somewhere in the middle of that journey they may fall into Levine’s Trench and become just terrible to deal with.
When a player first gets into Magic, once they’ve stepped beyond playing a few games with their friends. Now they’re reading strategy articles, thinking up new decks, etc.
They’re great to be around, they are all around positive people. They’ll think “Wow this game is awesome. I am having so much fun.”
Every time they learn something new it’s like picking up a piece of candy and shoving it straight into the brain’s dopamine factory.
And believe me. There is A LOT to learn.
Getting good at Magic is similar to copywriting in the sense it involves two different but interlocking aspects - theory and practice.
First, there’s learning the theory that leads to victory. (Card advantage, mana advantage, tempo, who’s the beatdown, etc.)
Then you have to figure out how to apply that information to any given game of Magic.
With copywriting, first comes learning the different principles of marketing, copywriting, headlines, subheads, adding proof, weaving a story, lining up sophistication, injecting identification, etc.
Then when it’s time to write we sift through all of that information, retrieve the right piece of information, and then apply it.
Intermediate writers may know the right stuff, but make errors when they apply it.
I remember reading the copywriting classics until I passed out. It was invigorating, there’s so much to learn and every discovery is fun.
Whether it’s copywriting or Magic, people in this wondrous phase of discovery are generally pleasant to be around. Their enthusiasm compensates for their lack of ability.
Even if nobody will bet on them writing a successful campaign or winning a tournament. Their presence adds to the vibe in a happy positive way.
So where does it go wrong?
Why do these people turn into assholes?
Why do these copywriters hang out in forums and Facebook groups tearing down a beginner’s piece with advice that isn’t helpful at all?
Why do they spend their time discouraging or humiliating others?
Why do these Magic players try to trip up their opponents with obscure rules and trap them into plays they didn’t intend? (In Magic this is called sharking, or being a rules shark.)
Why do they spend most of their time crapping on other people’s decks and ideas?
It’s because they fell into Levine’s Trench.
This is when somebody has reached competency and is improving but still falls short of mastery.
Maybe the copywriter is good enough to know why a headline is bad, but not good enough to write a winning campaign.
The Magic player beats their friends or starts to do well at the local tournaments, but watch them sink after they’re thrown into a national 1,500+ player National Championship.
That area that exists between getting good - and - actually great.
It's in this maddening phase of development that folks fall into the Trench.
How Levine’s Trench Makes Nice People Mean.
So how does one fall into the Trench?
And how come their lack of skill turns them into a stinking jerk?
I was pondering about this in the shower when I found the answer.
It’s because their craft starts to become infused with their identity.
At this point they’re not somebody writing a copy.
No they’ve become something much worse…
They’ve become… A copywriter.
There is a crucial distinction between someone who is writing copy, and a copywriter.
Once they’re a copywriter it’s become a part of who they are.
This opens the door for all sorts of brain gremlins to cause havoc and smash things with wrenches.
Now their shortcomings become personal failings.
Their piece didn’t flop, THEY flopped.
They didn’t make a bad play, THEY’RE a bad player.
All successes and failures are no longer contained to their craft, now it’s personal.
They’ll tear themselves down, they’ll become poisoned with envy.
Because if their failings are extensions of their identity, then so it is with everybody else.
That’s not a beginner over there.
No, that's a bad writer!
They’re not as good of a writer as me.
Better hop in their thread and beat up their copy to prove my superiority.
Because they’re insecure about their ability, this extends to insecurity about their status and position within their imagined tribe.
Now it’s personal.
Now it’s fight or flight.
And the result is the writer is getting on the internet tearing apart somebody’s copy and also the person who wrote it.
In a messed up way, tearing down other people's copy is like self-defense.
So how do we fix this?
How do people grow from an asshole trapped in the Trench to a master that’s helping others climb out?
Either the person keeps at it and becomes a master at their given craft (or at least close enough).
Or at some point, they realize what they’ve become, how their behavior is bad, and that something about what they’re doing is bad for them emotionally.
They reach inside and start to unentangle themselves from all this emotional baggage they didn’t know had moved into their hearts.
Most people need to do both.
And sometimes they just bounce to a new hobby.
They stop taking copywriting so seriously because now they’re obsessed with… SKIING!
Now they’re a SKIER!
Curing Levine’s Trench With Failure!
Luis-Scott Vargas, known as LSV, is one of the all-time Magic greats.
He commented on how his losses and failures helped him cultivate a better mental approach to the game.
Now I’m paraphrasing here, he said that part of why losing is so frustrating for intermediate players is because they simply haven’t done it enough.
In order to achieve LSVs heights, you have to lose a lot of games.
We’re not talking hundreds of times, not even thousands of losses, but tens of thousands of losses.
And that when you’ve lost that many times, one extra loss doesn’t add much to the pile.
Like a pile of rice that is 20 feet high, what’s one more grain?
Instead of their failure becoming a personal indictment, they’re reframed as stepping stones that never end.
The never ending is an important detail because it’s what helps us give grace to others and ourselves.
Because once you become great at something, you’ll still fail.
There’s something crucial here that I think it key to the whole thing.
When you obtain a level of mastery that your abilities become objectively undeniable.
And then you fail anyway.
Maybe because when you realize that even with heightened powers, you will still fail. and that means anyone can fail, no matter what.
Something about this chips away at the shackles.
Because if anyone can fail regardless of their abilities, then we can start to unwrap our abilities from our personal worth.
Hell, do you know which basketball player misses a lot of shots?
Lebron James.
Think about that for a second.
The greatest player to ever touch a basketball will play on the biggest stage, and then miss.
Whenever I’m feeling down I like to picture Lebron James missing a shot.
The Great Marketers Who Were Nice to Me
What kicked off this whole article was thinking about Levine’s Trench in the shower one morning.
I thought about how some of the smartest marketers and best writers I’ve known were nice to me even when I was a nobody.
I remembered how when I was a beginning copywriter at 20 I spent most of my money to attend a John Carlton seminar.
I remember John Carlton, Bond Halbert, Kevin Rogers, being… Nice.
In fact the next time I attended a seminar Bond and Kevin Halbert went out of their way to pick me up from my hotel and drive me there.
For no real reason.
They were just being kind.
They didn’t live in the Trench and thank God for that.
Thanks for reading
-ANDY OUT!
P.S. This realization led to one of my favorite interview questions by the way. Anyone hiring a copywriter should ask about times they failed. You can learn a lot about someone this way. Do they answer with ease and confidence? Or can you feel them squirm?
P.P.S. After I published this I stumbled across an interesting study. It’s about how misogyny plays out in online games. Some researchers decided to analyze the factors surrounding online gamers being downright toxic to women. To summarize, they would have women jump into a match of Halo 3 and start talking over the mic. Predictably this caused men to lash out with sexist comments and other toxic behavior. The researchers tracked and analyzed everything. What they found was that it was the bad players who were the most toxic. Perhaps Levine’s Trench is more of a male phenomenon, or maybe it plays a bigger role in spaces that are typically male-dominated. I dunno, I’ll leave that to the scientists.
P.P.P.S. Originally I was going to include a little segment about chimps. Here’s a lecture from Dr. Robert Sapolsky about how testosterone influences behavior in chimps. I’m not entirely sure how this connects to Levine’s Trench (or if it even does). But I do think there is something primal about how people act out when they’re trapped in the Trench.
Anyway here’s the video if you’re curious:
