Pay close attention

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Several years ago, I saw a grainy but mindblowing video from the 1970s:

A tennis coach took an out of shape 45-year-old woman and had her go from never having held a racket at minute 0, to playing serviceable tennis at minute 45, running around, getting forehands over the net and into the court, even serving.

If you’ve ever played tennis — as I have, for years, before I gave up the sport in frustration — you know this is almost miraculous. It takes months to learn what this woman was doing with such ease, particularly at her age.

The coach in that video was Tim Gallwey, who wrote a book called The Inner Game of Tennis. The book is well-worth a read even if, like me, you are naturally averse to ideas like “inner game” and “mindset.”

Gallwey’s technique for teaching tennis involved getting the student to pay close attention — to the sound of the ball as it hits the racquet, or to the rotation of the seams as the ball travels through the air, or to the exact spot that the ball crosses the net.

And that was it. Just pay attention, to one thing, closely.

Magically, inner-gamingly, this was somehow enough to get people like that 45-year-old woman to learn to play tennis in a single sessions of not trying very hard.

I found this very interesting at the time. It has stuck with me ever since. But as often happens, I never really dug much deeper.

And then, a couple days ago, I was reading a 2007 book about the discovery of neuroplasticity, titled The Brain That Changes Itself. From that book:

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Finally, Merzenich [the scientist who conclusively proved neuroplasticity exists] discovered that paying close attention is essential to long-term plastic change. In numerous experiments he found that lasting changes occurred only when his monkeys paid close attention. When the animals performed tasks without paying attention, they changed their brain maps, but the changes did not last.

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Why do kids pick up skills and languages and social norms so easily and thoroughly, without seeming effort?

A part of the brain, known as nucleus basalis, is turned on in kids’ brains. All the time. The nucleus basalis makes it so kids pay attention to everything.

Eventually, the nucleus basalis gets turned off, or at least stops being on all the time, or even most of the time. Attention becomes more of a thing you have to do consciously, like Gallwey instructed his tennis students to do. But the results seem well worth it.

So if you want to master a skill, internalize a new belief, or learn Korean, pay attention — to something, anything. Don’t just go through the motions. Don’t do it automatically. Don’t just rote repeat. The results — so say neuroscientists and real life practitioners like Gallwey — will be rapid and almost magical acquisition of new skill and knowledge.

On the flip side:

If a stranger tells you to pay close attention — not me, but a stranger, particularly one in a tuxedo, with slicked back hair, and speaking in a heavy Italian accent — then beware.

You’re likely about to get fooled, and badly.

The topic of attention makes up a large part of my new 10 Commandments book. The fact is, nothing gets done in the world of influence, persuasion, comedy, magic, or hypnosis, without attention.

The difference is that influence professionals — the magicians, door to door salesmen, hypnotists — guide the attention of their audience or prospect or patient to achieve a specific outcome. Sometimes that’s aligned with what the audience or patient or prospect wants. Sometimes it’s not.

If this is a topic that interests you, click through to the following page, and pay close attention to the description of Commandment VII:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

How to evaluate business opportunities

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Last week, I read an article about Samuel Langhorne Clemens, alias Mark Twain. I found the article hard going but I forced myself to push on through. And boy am I glad I did.

Because towards the end, when summing up Twain’s life, the author of the article wrote about all the time Twain spent not-writing, and instead investing in and losing money on various hare-brained business opportunities. Says the article:

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Why did a talent like Twain waste so much time on extraliterary pursuits? The question assumes a distinction he scarcely countenanced between writing and other forms of commercial activity. If there is a constant in his life, it’s his labored obsession with labor-saving. He poured his earnings into schemes meant to spin off money like a perpetual-motion machine.

===

That phrase, “labored obsession with labor-saving,” really got to me. It hit home.

So one possible conclusion to this email would be to say that the constant human drive for “labor-saving,” for “almost passive income,” for business opportunities, is what keeps so many people broke, stressed, and working too hard.

Reasonable conclusion.

And yet, business opportunities do exist.

I got into copywriting 10+ years ago because getting paid thousands of dollars to write a sales letter sounded pretty good. And it turned out to be pretty good.

Working on commission with clients and getting paid a share of their profits sounded even better. So I started doing that. It turned out to be even better that straight-up copywriting.

Creating a course that people had already paid for and that I could keep selling sounded still better than working on commission with clients. It turned out to be exactly that way.

So, how do you evaluate possible business opportunities? How do you decide that something is worth diving into? How do you avoid wasting your time, money, and self-respect?

I thought about it. I came up with three questions to ask myself, which maybe you can ask yourself as well:

1. “Is this a 5-month plan or are you ok if it turns into a 5-year plan?”

For example, I hate the very idea of checking charts doing “technical analysis” or trading stocks or other financial vapor. I might be able to force myself to do it for 5 months. There’s no way I could do it for 5 years without throwing myself under a fast-moving train. But the chances that I would be so successful with trading in 5 months’ time that I never have to do it again are nil. Therefore trading, profitable bizopp though it might be, is out for me.

2. “Are you building up some kind of asset regardless?”

I recently thought of running ads to promote affiliate offers. Solid business opportunity, if you have good offers to promote, a good source of traffic, and copywriting skills to bridge the gap.

But what if it still doesn’t work? I have then just spent time and money to run ads to somebody else’s offer, without making money.

The solution in my mind is simple – get those people on a list first before sending them to the affiliate offer. For one, it increase the chances they will buy the affiliate offer in time. But more than that, it turns a black/white business opportunity into a gradually growing asset (an email list) that has value on its own, regardless of whether the direct business opportunity pans out.

3. “What happens if the opportunity disappears?”

I currently have a community on Skool. I was even thinking of starting another one. A lot of people are doing the same. After all, Skool already has a lot of users, plus they make it easy in some ways to run a group in a profitable way.

But what happens when Skool becomes a dumpster fire like Facebook? Or when it shuts down like Clubhouse? Or when it introduces new rules that specifically say, “no Bejakos,” like the r/copywriting subreddit already did?

In that case, I also have the email addresses of everyone in my community. I can simply send them an email and tell them that the community has been moved to a different URL. It would be an inconvenience, but not any kind of failure.

And with that, I have a hot new business opportunity to tell you about, specifically a bridge to sell you.

Well not really. Not even figuratively. All I have is my $4.99 new 10 Commandments book.

The underlying business opportunity there is more effective communication skills.

I don’t know if you’re ok with “more effective communication skills” as a 5-year business plan.

But if you are, it’s an asset that’s only going to build on itself, and one that will never disappear, as long as there are humans and as long as there is business. If you’d like to start investing now:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

The world’s best daygamer in action

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A few days ago, I was walking in a shopping mall with a guy named Nick, who considers himself to be the world’s best daygamer.

Daygame, in case you don’t know, is the practice of approaching a woman in the daytime, starting a conversation, and then getting her phone number, with the clear and stated goal of inviting her out later.

As we walked through the mall, Nick and I passed two girls walking together. One was very attractive. Nick’s highly trained eyes spotted something as we passed the two of them. He immediately spun around, leaving me behind.

“Excuse me, miss!” he said in a commanding tone. The two girls stopped and turned. Nick got up close to the very attractive of the two girls and looked her in the eye. He shook his head in mock disapproval. “You can’t do that,” he said.

“Do what?” the girl asked with a coy smile.

“You can’t just look at me like I’m a piece of meat,” Nick said.

The girl was beaming now. “And why not?” she said. “You look great.”

A few moments later, the girl waved off her friend, who was hovering a few steps away. The friend disappeared. The very attractive girl and Nick were left alone, leaning on the railing, talking closely in a little bubble of intimacy, as dozens of shoppers passed by, completely oblivious to what was going on.

Point being, a seduction needs to gradual. That doesn’t mean it needs to be slow.

This isn’t just about seduction, either.

Techniques exist that allow you to seamlessly lead to a fast seduction, or negotiation, or sale — so fast that it can seem impossible to those who haven’t experienced it themselves.

If this is something you’re interested in reading more about, you can do so in my new 10 Commandments book, specifically, the canonical Commandment III and the apocryphal Commandment XI, which I give away as a bonus at the end of the book. For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

How to keep your readers from feeling cheap, cheated, or used

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I got an email yesterday from Parker Worth, whose online profile describes him as “just a guy with a neck tattoo.”

Maybe Parker’s a bit more — he’s got an online audience of over 70,000 people spread across X and LinkedIn and his email list, and he’s built a nice business on the back of it, teaching people how to write online.

Parker is apparently reading my new 10 Commandments book. He wrote in to say:

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Loving the book so far man.

Super refreshing especially in the age of AI Amazon garbage.

Will give it a solid review once finished

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On the note of AI garbage, a telling story:

While doing research for this book, I was looking for articles that discuss the use of misdirection in the movie The Sting, which I reference a few times in the book.

Not only did The Sting win the 1973 Oscar for best original screenplay (and Hollywood screenwriters are one of the disciplines I profile in my book) but the movie is a realistic depiction of how con men used to play the “big con” (and con men another group I profile in the book).

So while looking for something on the use of misdirection in The Sting, I found a 2,000-word blog post, published in mid 2024, that discussed exactly this topic in depth.

At first, the blog post seemed highly relevant to what I was looking for and had me nodding along.

Gradually a few small tells started to show — odd discrepancies with character names and plot twists from the actual movie, which I’ve seen a bunch of times and know well.

Finally, as the blog post recapped the climax of the movie as it never happened, I realized this was completely made up AI garbage, which had nothing new or unique or even true to say about what I was interested in. Realization made, I cursed at my laptop for a few minutes and made particular note of this blog to make sure I never come back there and waste my time again.

Point being:

You can fool some of Bejako some of the time, but you can’t fool all of him all the time.

I’m not sure what my point is beyond that except to say, these days, it’s more important than ever to give people something that feels real.

This is not new with AI. It started long before, with the ability to automate your communication (via things like email autoresponders), and even before that, with mass media that allowed one person to speak to thousands at the same time.

None of us wants to feel cheap, cheated, or used.

That’s why I spent so long doing research for my tiny new book, reading dozens of other books, watching hours and hours of obscure videos on YouTube, digging through 100-year-old newspapers, and thinking up how to integrate my own real-world experiences from my past and present careers of writing sales copy, picking up girls on the street, and selling myself to prospective clients on sales calls.

I discarded ten times the material that I finally deemed was actually good enough to include in the published version.

That’s ok. I believe all this research and prep are a major reason why I’ve heard from so many people, like Parker above, who tell me that they love the book. If you would like to see if you might love it as well:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Help for paranoid people

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Do you tend to notice cruelty in the world, and miss out on much of the positive stuff?

Do you feel superior to all the people in the world you see doing bad things?

Are you constantly comparing yourself to others, and are you preoccupied with what others think of you?

Do you often feel separate from people, different and alone?

I know I just made my email opening sound like the beginning of a Nyquil commercial. It’s not a great way to open an email, and not something I like to do in general. But if you have a genuine new diagnosis for a genuine long-running problem that people have, often the best thing is to call it out.

I can tell you, with only a small amount of hesitation, that when I first read the symptom checklist above, I got quite tingly, like Spider-Man when he senses trouble. I recognized myself in pretty much all of the symptoms, unpleasant (“missing out on the positive stuff”) and unflattering (“feeling superior to others”) as they are.

The list of symptoms above came from a curious book called Transforming Your Self, by a guy named Steve Andreas, who was an NLP trainer. I randomly came across Andreas’s book and read it 5 years ago.

Along with another half-dozen impactful self-help books I have read since, Transforming Yourself has formed the start of a self-transformation journey I am still on, which has overall made me a significantly happier and more resilient person than I had been in the decades preceding.

Chapter 11 of Transforming Your Self is titled, “Changing the ‘Not Self.'” It’s in that chapter that, almost as a throwaway, the above list of symptoms comes.

According to the book, the diagnosis, the disease or syndrome that brings all those symptoms together, is paranoia. And what’s the root cause behind paranoia and all the real-life symptoms it translates to?

Says Steve Andreas in Transforming Your Self, the root cause is negative self definitions, specifically self-definitions that are negative not in substance, but in form. For example:

A. I am a good person (a self definition that’s positive in substance and in form)

B. I am a bad person (a self definition that’s negative in substance but positive in form)

C. I am not a bad person (a self definition that’s positive in substance but negative in form)

Andreas says that paranoia, and all the misery it brings, is the consequence of otherwise good people defining their identity by using negative syntax, as in option C. “I am NOT the kind of person who…”

Is Andreas right? Or is this more unprovable NLP mystification?

I don’t know. Like I said, I can only tell you the idea hit me when I read it, and it seems to have permeated me since, and done me some good. I’m sharing it with you now for two reasons:

1. Because maybe you recognize yourself in the list of symptoms above as well, and maybe knowing the possible root cause can be helpful to you too.

2. Because, if you insist on a marketing lesson, this story illustrates the power of a new diagnosis, and specifically a new problem mechanism or a root cause, in creating a feeling of insight, which can be exploited for marketing purposes.

That’s the end of my email about paranoia. And now, since I am still promoting my new 10 Commandments book, let me move to that.

You might think that my email today was not wise in its opening (a bunch of Nyquil-commercial questions) and is not wise in its closing (an offer that’s entirely unrelated to the topic of the email).

The only thing I can say in my defense is that emotions linger and transfer. In other words, if you create a feeling of insight with one story, your readers’ minds will transfer or associate some of that feeling with your offer when it does come.

This is not particular to the feeling of insight. The same holds for feelings like trust, suspicion, or even the willingness to obey.

In fact, that’s what the influence professionals I profile in my new book, people like con men and pickup artists and even stage magicians, fundamentally rely on, and it’s what my new book is about in many ways.

In case you still haven’t gotten your copy, but are curious:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Copywriting client wants case studies you ain’t got?

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An ongoing customer (not sure he wants me to share his name) replied to my email yesterday with a “business of copywriting” question:

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Bought [your new 10 Commandments book] just now.

Great email. Keep ripping John.

And if can ask a question…

Im about to close an email marketing brand for a 4k a month deal. (They’ve done so bad in Klaviyo lol)

And the VP is IN. But the brand owner wants to see examples of prior work in supplements…. ugh.

I don’t have any atm. I’ve done mostly saas/tech cold email copywriting. And some small projects in DTC.

You got any “how a genius copywriter handles show us your case studies objection” in your store of knowledge? 😂

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It’s been a long time since I looked for copywriting clients, and even longer before I applied for copywriting jobs where I wasn’t 100% qualified.

But I gave my thoughts to this customer. Maybe they can be useful to you too.

The standard response when a question like this pops up is to tell the copywriter to go write some custom samples, and send the prospective client that.

Of course, that’s really a stab in the dark. What’s going on in the owner’s mind? It might be:

1. Maybe the owner iss not convinced that the copywriter can write compliant or effective copy for supplements, even though he’s written copy in other niches

2. Maybe the owner is not convinced that the style of copy he’s seen from the copywriter is the right way to go (eg. maybe he just wants standard image-heavy ecom emails instead of text-heavy emails)

3. Maybe the owner is not convinced that $4k a month is really a smart expense for his company right now

Custom samples can help in situation 1, but they won’t do anything in situations 2 and 3, or in the dozen other possible situations that might really be underlying the request for prior work. The copywriter would just be wasting his time, and driving the prospective client further away.

Ideally, the copywriter above would already know (or could find out) what the owner is really concerned about, and he could address that directly using completely different approaches in each case, rather than by taking a stab in the dark.

Which brings me back to my 10 Commandments book, specifically to Commandment VIII.

That commandment lays out a little change I made in how I talked to prospective copywriting clients, back when I was hunting after such.

I estimate this little change doubled my closing rate, meaning that for every three or four sales calls I had to get on with prospects, I closed two new clients, instead of just one.

This same stuff, which I discuss in detail in Commandment VIII, could be relevant to the copywriter above, even though it sounds like he’s already dug himself into a bit of a hole.

Maybe the same advice could be useful to you too? If you haven’t yet gotten a copy of my new book, only one way to find out:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Reader tells me to give up on the 10 Commandments

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A couple weeks ago, after I wrote an email in which I announced the imminent release of my new 10 Commandments book, a reader decided to reply with:

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Some advice… give up on the Book of 10 and take hold on the Promise of 1 – just as you so neatly summarised in this email. 1 is so much better than 10 in that, that single promise fulfils all the old hat laws you could ever throw at it.

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I never bothered to reply to this, and the reader has since unsubscribed from my list.

That’s just as well. What follows wouldn’t be useful to him, but maybe you can benefit from the advice I was silently thinking of for this reader, which I couldn’t share for reasons that will be obvious if you read on:

Don’t tell people they’re wrong.

Particularly, don’t tell people they’re wrong if they are a couple of years into a project, the way I was with my now-released 10 Commandments book.

Even if you’re right, people have to find out on their own. And in telling them, you will only antagonize them.

Ironically enough, the very first commandment of my new 10 Commandments book is directly related to this issue.

That first commandment (of 10) goes beyond keeping mum when you’re sure somebody is making a mistake, and tells you some proactive and positive things to do in order to take advantage of the underlying human psychology, which makes people so resist being told that they are wrong.

My ex-reader won’t profit from the advice in that commandment. But you can:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

The fiction business

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The last week or so, I’ve been spending a lot of time obsessively checking how my new book is doing on Amazon. This morning, in a bout of such checking, Amazon offered to show me its “Movers and Shakers: Our biggest gainers in sales rank over the past 24 hours. Updated frequently.”

This is something I had long wished for but didn’t know existed — a kind of first derivative of sales, what’s selling better lately, what’s moving up in the ranks quickly?

I checked the Kindle store. Unfortunately, there are just two pages of movers and shakers for the entire Kindle store, as opposed to movers and shakers across subcategories.

And what is moving and shaking in the Kindle store?

The same damn stuff as always.

Out of the 100 top movers and shakers, 99 are fiction books, mostly romance novels and literotica. Exactly one is a non-fiction book, Mark Manson’s Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, which, based on its promise alone, might as well be classified as fiction.

This made me think of something I heard Dan Kennedy say in one of his closed-door, multithousand-dollar, info marketing seminars. Said Dan:

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Many people make the mistake of thinking we’re in the non fiction business. Big mistake. We’re in the fiction business. First of all, remember that most of your customers never do anything with most of what they buy from you, therefore, their experience is fictional, not non-fictional. [The small audience of top info marketers laughs, but Dan continues.] Laugh if you want. I’m being very serious. They’re having a fictional experience. They actually believe they’re doing something. they are not, but they think they are doing something.

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If you sell information online, this is a very bitter pill to swallow, and in fact, it’s one that I keep refusing to swallow.

Which is dumb, because why argue against Dan Kennedy, who basically made everybody who has been successful in the info publishing business?

But I keep hoping and in fact working on getting people to not just buy my stuff, but to actually consume it, and ultimately, to put it to use and to benefit from it. It’s slow going, but it gives me hope and a goal to look forward to.

Anyways, as I say in the conclusion of my new 10 Commandments book, I hope you will apply the 10 principles I share in that book in your own business and personal life.

I’ve worked hard to make the book both interesting and practical, with new distinctions to help you actually get traction, putting to work good ideas that you may have heard of before but haven’t done anything with. Of course, you might also come across commandments that are entirely new to you. Put those to work as well.

And on that note, I’ve gotten a few more reviews after writing my dirge about having just one review a few days ago. Here’s a review from Maliha Mannan, who writes over at The Side Blogger:

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As someone who makes an offer almost daily via email, it’s essential that people like me, and also buy from me. This book is full of ideas for doing just that. I read it too quickly, so I plan to read it again soon (it’s a tiny book but packed with curious ideas that you should take a minute to fully comprehend, appreciate, and implement). I see it becoming one of those books I read at least once a year. It’s that good!

===

In case you too would like to get a copy of my new non-fiction book:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Get low

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Some time ago, I was browsing through the list of Recommended Creators on Kit, basically other newsletter owners I could do a list swap or cross-promotion with. Among the million and one marketing ones, there was a standout:

Lil Jon’s Wellness Newsletter

It turns out that rap star Lil Jon is now “on a journey of wellness and enlightened.” And if you like, he will send you “simple wellness tips each Wednesday.”

I gotta say this made me chuckle.

All I really knew of Lil Jon is his 2002 megahit, Get Low.

The video for that song showed Lil Jon as a kind of king of the ghetto club, holding a chalice and a glass cane that looked like a scepter, and with his mouth full of gold teeth. The video also featured the usual women grinding and twerking on stripper poles, while the refrain of the song ran:

“To the window/to the floor/till the sweat drop down my balls/till all these bitches crawl”

After I saw that Lil Jon is now enlightened and willing to send me wellness tips each Wednesday, I got curious.

What happened? I had to read about the man.

“Well I’ll be damned,” I said after Wikipedia hit me. It turns out that the “king of the ghetto club” thing was just an act.

I don’t know how much you care to know about Lil Jon, but here are a few facts that can be enlightening:

1. Lil Jon’s dad was an aerospace engineer and his mom an army nurse.

2. He grew up in a middle class neighborhood and attended a magnet school.

3. As a teenager he was heavily into skating culture and his favorite bands included the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

4. He’s been described as a “high achiever” and a “passionate reader.”

You might think this email is just about how your public persona can be vastly different from who you really are. But it’s more than that.

I’ve been going on lots of first dates lately. Inevitably the girls ask me what I do. To which I say, “Not much. Mostly I sit around. I watch TV. I play a LOT of video games.” Then I look the girl straight in the eye and smile to make it clear I am rather proud of what I just said.

One girl so far has been confused and shocked. The rest were first amused and then pleased.

Because what’s the alternative? A boring conversation about work, or worse yet, digging myself deeper and deeper into the quicksand of trying to impress the girl. That’s not good for me or her.

I think this whole topic is worth developing more, and maybe I will do that in a future book on personal positioning. I could call the chapter about this “Idiot Positioning,” or with a hat tip to Lil Jon, maybe “Crunk Positioning.”

But maybe I’m running ahead of myself. Maybe I haven’t sold you on this whole idea yet. Maybe you are skeptical that making yourself out to look dirty or stupid or like a loser is actually a good strategy.

What can I tell you? Effective communication is not always what it seems. Insults can work as glue between friends. Assurances can be veiled warnings. And making yourself out to be an idiot, and smiling about it, can work in your favor.

And if you want to understand why, and how to make this work for you, I suggest consulting Commandment VI of my new 10 Commandments book. In case you haven’t gotten your copy yet:

​https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Free course by bestselling author on how to write a book in 30 days

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No not me. I don’t do free courses. And though I’ve reached various levels of Amazon bestsellerdom over the years, I’d feel like a liar branding myself a “bestselling author.”

No, the bestselling author in question is James Altucher.

Altucher has published 25 books in his life. Some were total flops. Others got on the WSJ and USA Today bestseller lists. A couple were the number one selling books across all of of Amazon for a while.

I’ve been a fan of James Altucher for years. And even though I’ve just published a book (my new 10 Commandments book, which is built around an idea I actually got from Altucher), I was eager to listen to his new course.

It’s delivered for free, at least in part, via his podacst.

The initial lesson was inspiring and insightful, as usual with his material.

First came all the benefits that Altucher has personally seen from writing his many books.

Then he exploded objections about what writing a book really entails (spoiler: short, disorganized, and ungrammatical are perfectly ok, particularly in the first draft).

Then he gave three patented questions for positioning yourself so that your book naturally clicks with your audience, in the present moment.

All good stuff. And then, in lesson two, Altucher got to the Hero’s Journey. And I groaned.

As you might know, the Hero’s Journey is a story structure that keeps repeating, over and over, throughout various stories and cultures and ages. A familiar recent example is the first Matrix movie:

Neo is just some dude. Then he gets a call (literally, via a cellphone) to go on a quest. At first, he resists. Then he’s forced into it. He meets a guide in the form of a wise sage named Morpheus. He faces increasing challenges and obstacles as he progresses on his quest. He makes friends and allies along the way. Finally, there’s a climactic battle between Neo and the forces of evil, or rather, a climactic battle between Neo and his own doubts, fears, and limiting beliefs.

My issue with the hero’s journey, or with James Altucher talking it up, is not that the structure is not effective. Rather, like any structure or format that simplifies a complex topic and creates a feeling of insight (Myers-Briggs, AIDA), is that true believers start to shoehorn the entire world into this one structure.

Altucher does it in his course. Everything becomes a Hero’s journey, from Princess Leia’s backstory in Star Wars, to Moses dying right before he reaches Israel, to some woman writing a tweet about crypto.

If I didn’t already know the Hero’s Journey well, and if I didn’t already know there are lots of other effective ways to communicate that didn’t fit into this mold, I’d be very confused about what these very different stories actually have in common.

Anyways, this email is getting long. I got two conclusions for you:

1. If you want to follow the canonical Hero’s Journey as a paint-by-numbers structure, like the Matrix does, you’ll probably be fine. You might not write the next Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, and you might have to lie a little if you’re telling your own life story, but you will have a serviceable structure that people will understand and even respond to.

2. If you don’t want to follow the canonical Hero’s Journey. you don’t have to. The basic thing you want to have in a good story is tension, which comes from ups and downs, twists and turns. Remember that, and you can write effective content — a story, a book, a Tweet — that doesn’t fit the Hero’s Journey, even if true believers are sure to argue otherwise.

And now back to my new 10 Commandments book, specifically to the topic of tension, ups and downs, twists and turns.

Turns out this isn’t just valuable in telling stories, but in influence in general.

I have an entire chapter on the topic, which starts out with a famous screenplay (which doesn’t fit the Hero’s Journey), then moves on to a pickup artist seducing a lingerie model in a Hollywood nightclub (a story that doesn’t fit the Hero’s Journey), and finally ends with an example of a real live con game I dug up from a 1912 newspaper article, featuring the “Charles Gondorff Syndicate,” who managed to con a man for about $1.8 million in today’s money.

All these persuaders and influencers were relying on the same same basic technique, one that you can use if you want to sell more, persuade more, or simply communicate more effectively in your personal life. In the book, I sum it up in two words. Best part? Those words are not “lying,” “cheating,” or “Hero’s Journey.” For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments