I've noticed that most of us contain a psychological quirk that when we believe we should do something that we really don't want to do, we subconsciously do the worst version of the thing we can as a form of self sabotage. Partially, it's so we can say to ourselves, "See, X doesn't work after all, I don't need to do it anymore" and partially, it's because we're secretly afraid of a blow to our ego if an action we staked our identity on being wrong turns out actually to be right.<p>Whatever the reason, it's a habit that you need to take notice of and exterminate within you. Other people aren't stupid. If enough other people are saying do a thing that you can't understand why anyone would do, don't bother doing it unenthusiastically. Either commit to an act of radical empathy and truly understand why other people are excited to do it or decide it's too much of a bother and don't do it.<p>Without reading the emails, I can't tell if the low response rate is due in any part to how the email is crafted but I have a reasonably high confidence based on the blog post that the author was intellectually capable enough to have executed a better cold email campaign but couldn't get over the psychological hurdle.