There’s a tradition around these parts:
Every January 1, I write an email reviewing my previous year, and publicly setting some new goals or themes for the coming year.
I will do that tomorrow. Today, though, I want to review 2022, and 2021, and maybe 2012.
Because in my life, I’ve noticed the following keeps happening over and over:
1. I set a new goal for myself
2. I work intensely on reaching that goal
3. I don’t reach the goal in any reasonable amount of time, and I gradually stop working to reach it
4. I forget all about the goal
5. Some time later, possibly years later, I realize that, somewhere along the way, through foggy or indirect means, I’ve actually reached my goal and got what I wanted so long ago.
This has happened over and over, starting in my 20s. It’s happening still today.
Maybe you want examples.
This very newsletter, which I believe I first dreamed about in 2012, is one.
There have been many more, a lot of them too personal to share even in this therapy-like email, including goals or “themes” I set in 2022 and 2021, some of which have come true over the past year or two.
But maybe you don’t want examples. Maybe you’re just wondering how this might possibly be relevant to you. So lemme tell ya.
The ultimate experience or breakthrough in Bejako’s Method for Producing Results is:
“It just happened! I don’t know what I did in the end, and most likely I did nothing, but the result is finally here!”
I’m a serious dabbler in self-help literature, and I’ve read from gurus who have experienced or witnessed the same. They extrapolate those kinds of experiences to conclude that:
1. Effort is not needed
2. Effort can in fact be counterproductive
After all, you weren’t trying and striving when you got the big result. Instead, you were relaxing and forgetting that you even had a goal. So you might as well relax and forget the goal, all the time, and “all these things shall be added unto you.”
I believe that’s a fundamental error. I have no proof for that, other than what I’ve experienced and achieved in my life, both personally and business-wise.
I believe all 5 steps of Bejako’s Method for Producing Results are necessary.
In particular, I believe that step 2, effort, often intense, dogged, frustrating effort, is necessary.
But that’s no kind of a conclusion to make, especially in a newsletter like this one, about direct marketing. Instead, let me tell you the more inspiring flip side.
If what I say above is true not just for me, but more generally, and I believe it is, then it applies to you too.
Right now, you might be in steps 1 and 2 above, working towards a goal but not yet seeing results.
Or you might be in steps 3 and 4, having given up on your goal and maybe even forgotten the goal altogether.
I’d like to propose that, if you see nothing happening, or you’ve concluded you never will, you have already done the work, or are doing work now, even if you’re not aware of it, to get to the goals you care about.
If you find yourself in 2026 getting to one of those goals, magically and seemingly without effort, write in and let me know. I’d love to hear about it. Because there is magic in the world, at least in my experience. It just doesn’t work on a 365-day schedule.