You ever have a love hate relationship with an acronym?

Take YOLO, for example. Are you as ambivalent about it as I am?

Like, okay, in theory “you only live once” is true (two points), it’s an effective argument for engaging in questionable behavior of any kind (five points), it’s a built-in retort when your husband wants to know who ate all the sweet potato fries (seven gazillion points), AND it labels you as someone who may actually know how to hang ten on a skateboard.

Or was that a surfboard? Or a cheeseboard, maybe? (New sport, no age requirements.)

Just so we’re clear, I happen to think YOLO reminds me too much of the word yo yo to actually take it seriously. Also fro yo, which needs no explanation. And maybe this is why I also happen to be disgusted with the acronym FOMO, because someone was clearly on a “let’s come up with as many cringeworthy acronyms as we can” kick.

My fiancé, THE LOS (short for Carlos and not actually an acronym, as it were), always picks on me because he says I’m like an elephant.

(Kidding, you think I let that boy talk to me like that?)

He’s never actually said that, but he might as well, because I never, ever forget. (I should qualify that statement: I sometimes do “forget” to do the laundry.)

Basically, I’ve got mental associations with everything.

“We can’t buy that car because that car reminds me of the one that Kevin P. drove in high school and Kevin P. once told my friend in the 6th grade he thought I had a big butt so if we get that car I’ll constantly be reminded that my rearend is like a giant horizontal hot air balloon and what kind of mental torture are you trying to put me through?”

Or, God forbid, when we laughingly brainstormed names for a future baby we will never have because trust me I’m not the mothering type and somehow I have zero FOMO about it (because YOLO, of course).

“Sure Isabella might roll off the tongue, buuuuttttttttttt I remember this one time in Ocean City when I just turned twenty one and I was there with my best girlfriends and we were in a 7-11 parking lot and these guys wanted to know our names and I lied and told them it was Isabella (while sipping the side of a vodka infused Big Gulp) so obviously that one’s out.”

If you’re laughing and nodding your head like an antelope (one can only assume the weight of those horns must cause extreme involuntary nodding), then you know what I’m talking about here. Mental associations for everything! Which is not unusual because we’re all human and that’s what humans do to organize and make sense of their world: They connect it.

Which is why, if I had to put on my professor glasses and hypothesize, it’s partly what makes me so good at what I do (copywriting, not cheeseboarding…yet):

Because I’m hyper aware of connections caused by words.

Not just mental associations for me, but for all of us—and most importantly, the person reading the words. And not just words, but morphemes of words, and suffixes of words and sounds of words. I am like the motherfucking Johnny Five of writing. (Should we consider this for my tombstone, you guys?)

But I’m not the only one. When I first partnered up with Jamie to create Brandgasm 101, I quickly learned that website design was the same way: The look and feel of your business and your brand make people think things.

(For example, THE LOS keeps telling me my website header reminds him of blood. Which I may not actually be against, all things considered.)

The things people think are what you want to control—which makes copywriting and design actually sound like the CREEPIEST PROFESSION ON THE PLANET. But it’s true:

Use words the right way, produce the right thoughts. Use them the wrong way, produce the wrong thoughts.

Same for the look and feel of everything you do…right down to your font choice. It can quite literally be the difference between a $100,000 year and a $400,000 one. Which is another reason why I’m emailing, in fact. Because I obviously had a lot to say about acronyms and Big Gulps and because I want to urgently challenge you to aim for the latter end of the revenue spectrum this year (real talk: YOU CAN DO THIS), and because I want to help you do exactly that and because, yes, I want to grab your hand and wave it around and blow on some kazoos and urge you to become one of my Brandgasmers before we stop selling this course on Tuesday.

TUESDAY, you guys. That’s the last day you can ever buy yourself an entire website Brandgasm before we stop selling the DIY version indefinitely.

Jaime and I are working on a whole other (live) beast for the fall (which is anticipated to have a price point of between triple and sextuple what Brandgasm is now), so I’m not going to beat around the proverbial Australian bush:

If you want it, now’s the time.
If you want your website & your work to pop, now’s the time.
If you want to look & sound like the cool, modern, fresh brand that you are, now’s the time.
If you want to instantly convert more customers into HELL YES, now’s the time.
If you want to control the ways in which people respect you and how much money they’re willing to spend and how fast they’re willing to spend it, then I can’t recommend my own course more.

Ha! Because what kind of an arrogant old goat says things like that? I’ll tell you who:

The kind who knows that modesty is never a qualified substitute for passion.

And I wouldn’t have made a course called Brandgasm 101 if I wasn’t crazy passionate about the game of using words and websites to do something brilliant with your one speck of time on this earth. The kind of brilliance that will forever remind you what kind of person you are:

The kind that closed her eyes, clutched her heart tight, and engraved a promise right onto the side of it.

YOLO, it said.

And then I slapped her.