I’ve decided to let Adam Neumann act as my personal advisor on all personal branding and positioning matters

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A few weeks ago, a friend clued me into an amusingly shocking fact:

Adam Neumann is back.

You might remember Neumann as the former CEO of WeWork. ​​Handsome, charismatic, and prophet-like, Neumann built a $40-billion company, only to have it all crash down as the WeWork IPO failed. ​​In the wake of that, news reports exposed WeWork’s flimsy business model and the cult-like culture that fluffed it up for investors.

After Neumann was forced out as CEO, he was disgraced in the media as a grifter, hype artist, and woo-woo crackpot whose delusional self-belief infected others. “Serves you right for getting so big so fast,” cackled the little men at the Wall Street Journal and Vanity Fair, “you’ll never work in this town again!”

Well, like I said, Neumann is back. Is it really any surprise?

He now has a new company, something to do with climate and crypto. He has raised $70 million for it already.

Will this new MacGuffin turn into another multi-billion-dollar venture?

Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t. One thing is for sure:

Adam Neumann does some very important things very right.

For example:

Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson once said that Neumann reminded him of Jobs. Some time later, Neumann claimed that Isaacson might write his biography. (Isaacson apparently never considered writing such a book.)

Another example:

Jamie Dimon, the billionaire CEO of JP Morgan Chase, lead a round of investment into WeWork. As a result, Neumann called Dimon his own “personal banker” and said Dimon might leave JPMorgan to run Neumann’s family investment office one day. (Dimon apparently never had any plans to leave JPMorgan.)

You might think these are examples of braggartly and grasping status-building. But I think it goes much deeper than that. I will have more to say about it, and probably soon.

For now, I’d like to announce that I’ve decided to allow Adam Neumann to act as my personal advisor on all matters personal branding and positioning. I respect Adam’s skills and instincts within this sphere. And I always look to surround myself with the best advisors, associates, and underlings. Adam is definitely fit to be among my inner circle.

It might take a bit of time for word to reach Adam that I have decided to let him become a trusted advisor to me.

In the meantime, I will continue to offer you the chance to transform your own business through my consulting service.

Once Adam joins my team, I might raise my consulting rate to $100k/hr and a 20% stake of your business. Or I might just drop the consulting and focus on my own more lucrative projects. We will see what input Adam has to give me on the matter.

For now though, you have the opportunity to have me help you elevate your offer, wow your clients and customers, and even position yourself as a prophet in your industry. In case you want a piece of the action:

https://bejakovic.com/consulting

Rejection stings, but this might help

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“You have to love yourself first. How else can you expect anyone else to love you?”

I knew a girl once who shared that bit of wisdom with me. I was young and naive and it sounded reasonable.

But then I lived a bit more. There were times when — not only did I not love myself — I didn’t remotely like myself.

And yet, other people loved me. My mom and my dad, of course. Friends. Girlfriends. They didn’t know or didn’t care whether I found myself unlovable — they loved me.

Message received, loud and clear. So I concluded the following:

When somebody loves you, it says much more about them than about you. It says they are able and ready to love. All we know about you (not you specifically, you know what I mean) is that you are an adequate target for their love.

Anyways, that’s a bit of personal philosophy I wanted to share with you. I’m not trying to depress you, by the way. Quite the opposite.

Because I believe it works the same the other way around. If somebody does not love you… well, it says more about them than it says about you.

But this newsletter is about marketing and copywriting. So let me tie it up:

I bring this up in case you’re hustling, in business for yourself, or trying to flush customers or clients out of their hiding places. If that’s you, then you know (or soon will) that rejection is part of the game. Leads dismiss you. Clients leave you. Clients ignore you.

And?​​

It doesn’t say much about you. Not as long as you’re at least adequate. And if you’re not, that’s usually easy to fix.
​​
I’ve been rejected thousands of times, personally and in business. It stings almost every time. But little logical reminders, like the one above, can help.

Can help what?

They can help you go out there and get rejected again. They can help you keep working. Which is how you find success eventually — and even self-acceptance, if you haven’t got it now.

Anyways, on to JV opportunities:

​​Over the past couple days, I have been making a call for people who might be a good fit for my “cash buyers’ list​​”.

I’ve had a healthy number of people respond so far. Which makes me think there might still be more people out there who could be a good fit for this offer.

S​o if you haven’t taken me up on this invitation yet, and you want to know more about it, read on here:

​https://bejakovic.com/an-email-business-worth-0-52-billion-yes-billion/​​

60% of the time, flattery works every time… but what about the other 40%?

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Last night, as I sometimes do, I started reading a book. The opening scene was very instructive, and I want to share it with you:

Myriel, a lowly French priest with a shadowy past, is waiting in the lobby of a great cardinal.

​​The time is 1804, and Napoleon has just been crowned emperor.

As the priest is waiting, Napoleon himself suddenly enters and starts to cross the lobby.

The priest stares at Napoleon. ​​Napoleon, a little peeved at being stared at, snaps and asks the priest what he’s on about. The priest responds:

“Sire, you are looking at a good man, and I am looking at a great man. Each of us can profit by it.”

That evening, Napoleon asks the cardinal what the priest’s name is. A few days later, to everyone’s surprise, the lowly priest is promoted to bishop.

Now as you probably know, flattery will get you everywhere. In fact studies show that 60% of the time, flattery works every time.

But what about those missing 40%?

Why is it that sometimes you stand up on your tippy-toes, look adoringly at a person you admire, shout at them how great you think they are… and they just frown, mutter an uncomfortable thanks, and hurry out the room?

Well, in my opinion, what’s missing in those cases is the other part of the lowly priest’s message above.

​​In many situations, it’s not enough to flatter the other person as being great. You also have to paint yourself as somebody good, somebody deserving.

Most people enjoy being flattered. But many people don’t like displays of servility.

So if you claim, or even better show, that you are somebody worthwhile, this does two things.

One, it keeps you from looking servile.

Two, it makes the flattery more meaningful — since it’s coming from somebody good and deserving.

That’s my bit of advice to you if you ever want to connect with people, particularly those who might be somehow higher up or further along than you are.

And now, on to something entirely unrelated:

Yesterday I wrote about my “cash buyers’ list”. That’s a term I got from the real estate investing industry. But to get on my own cash buyers’ list, you don’t need any real estate, you don’t need any cash, and you don’t need to buy anything.

That’s not to say I’m promiscuous about adding people to my cash buyer’s list. In fact, I am very very selective about who I allow onto this list.

If you didn’t read my email yesterday, and you’re curious what I’m on about, you can read more below, including how and why you might want to get onto my cash buyers’ list:

https://bejakovic.com/an-email-business-worth-0-52-billion-yes-billion/​​

An email business worth $0.52 billion (yes, billion)

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Never give away your best stuff for free, right?

Instead, use your free emails to sell high-priced products and subscriptions, right?

That’s certainly one way to run an email-based business. And it’s proven to work well for many people.

But is it the only way?

Let’s reach into the archives of this very newsletter, to a breaking story I wrote about two years ago.

Back then, I reported that the Morning Brew, a daily email newsletter without any backend offers, had sold a controlling stake for $75 million.

That’s not too shabby for a project that was started in a college dorm, by just one dude, some five years earlier.

Today I’ve got some similar, but even more greedy news for you.

It’s about Axios.

Axios is basically a collection of email newsletters on topics like politics, the economy, and technology. For example, I’ve been subscribed to their “Axios World” newsletter for a couple years.

Axios was launched in 2017 by three ex-Politico journalists.

And get this:

Axios, an email-based business that was started five years ago, just got sold for $525 million.

$525 million.

From my back-of-the-envelope math, that’s $25 million more than a half billion dollars. For a bunch of email newsletters. At a moment when everybody seems to be panicking about a recession.

So yes. Never give away your best stuff for free in your emails… not unless… you want a pool filled with gold coins in which you can go swimming like Scrooge McDuck.

Now of course, you can make the claim that Axios is much more than just a bunch of email newsletters.

You can make the claim that it’s a business like any other, with VC funding, a team of employees, and extensive advertiser relationships.

That’s absolutely true.

And it brings me to my offer for today.

It’s also something from the archives of this very newsletter, also from two years ago. Back then, I called this offer my “cash buyers list.”

It works like this:

I have certain skills at a high level, mainly around copywriting and content creation. I also have a simmering, lingering desire to start an email-based equivalent of a magazine, newspaper, or morning talk show that could grow grow into something cool and valuable in a few years’ time.

But I can’t do all that myself. Nor do I want to.

So if you have 1) money to invest or 2) complementary skills to mine, then I’d like to talk to you.

I’m not promising anything and I don’t have any project kicking off right now. But if the idea of something Axios-like or Morning Brew-like gets you excited… and you have something to contribute besides enthusiasm and an “eagerness to learn”… then write me an email and let me know what you can contribute.

If it turns out to be a fit in some way, and I manage to put the other pieces in place… then who knows where you and I and our email-based business might be in five years’ time.

On writing badly

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“Don’t fight such a current if it feels right. Trust your material if it’s taking you into terrain you didn’t intend to enter but where the vibrations are good. Adjust your style accordingly and proceed to whatever destination you reach. Don’t become a prisoner of a preconceived plan. Writing is no respecter of blueprints.”

I’m re-reading William Zinsser’s book On Writing Well. I don’t like this book. I have several reasons why, but one is that I don’t like the style.

The passage above is one example. It comes from a chapter on “unity.” That’s what Zinsser calls being consistent with your pronouns, your tense, and your mood. But…

It seems no one told William Zinsser about being consistent with your imagery. So in the passage above, the reader is first floating on a body of water (current). Then he’s on hard land (terrain) or perhaps a volcano (vibrations). Suddenly, he seems to be in trouble with the law (a prisoner) and finally he’s building a house (blueprints).

My point is that a lot of the “rules” of writing well, even by supposed authorities like Zinsser, don’t mean much. A good writer can break these rules. So can a mediocre writer.

My advice, in case you want it, is to not worry about the rules of “good” writing. Instead, spend your energy on looking for something new or unique to say. And if you don’t know where to find such stuff, then start with what’s already been written by others — “On Writing Well” — and turn it on its head.

At least that’s what I do. Each day, I write a few hundred words like this. My goal is to say something new or unique about writing, persuasion, and marketing.

I’ve got an email newsletter where I publish these daily essays. In case the vibrations are good and you want to reach the destination of being subscribed to this newsletter, then click here and float down the current it leads you to.

Bejako goes back to school for a push

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I went back to school today. For the first time in 10+ years, I sat in class, behind a desk. With a bunch of other little idiots next to me, I listened to a smiling teacher as he pointed to his chest and said, “Me llamo Rubén. ¿Cómo te llamas?”

This went on for the better part of four hours, from 9am until 1pm.

For four precious hours, we went through the elementary particles of the Spanish language, presented at a snail’s pace. For four hours, I practiced saying the same damn things a million times to various Italians, Germans, and Greeks who were in the class with me.

You might have your doubts that this is an effective way to learn a language.

I have reasons to believe it will be useful.

And in any case, I’ll only do it for this week. This time investment (and during my most productive hours!) is not sustainable for longer than that. But I figure it’s worth doing at the start to kick things off.

And this brings me to one of the most valuable ideas that has shaped how I have run my career.

For example, I got going as a freelance copywriter by charging $5 for a 7-part email sequence.

Do you think that’s a shockingly low rate? Do you think I allowed myself to be exploited?

Who cares. I did it for a week and then I increased my rates a bit. And then a week later, I increased my rates a bit more. And then a bit more still.

Point being, it’s easy to fix and improve things once you get them going. But in most cases, the getting going is the hard part.

This isn’t my idea or observation, by the way. This is something I was fortunate enough to read a long time ago in an essay by somebody very rich, very successful, and very smart. Here’s what he said:

A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don’t. You build something, make it available, and if you’ve made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don’t, in which case the market must not exist.

Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going.

The guy who wrote that is Paul Graham, a multimillionaire computer programmer who started the early-stage investing firm Y Combinator (Airbnb, Coinbase, Stripe).

Graham said that one of the most common pieces of advice they give Y Combinator is to Do Things That Don’t Scale.

Now at this point, I had a valuable caution to give my newsletter readers about Graham’s bit of advice. But I’m not including that on this public archived post. I often reserve the most valuable and important ideas for my newsletter readers. I have to reward them somehow. If you’d like to join them, and start getting my daily emails, you can sign up here.

How to force insight

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I woke up very early this morning while it was still dark. I have some personal stuff on my mind, maybe that’s why.

Rather than rolling around in bed or sitting down in front of the computer, I got dressed and I walked down to the beach. And on my way back, I saw…

1. A blind jogger? It was a couple, a man and a woman, jogging towards me. They were jogging very close to each other, almost hip-to-hip. As they got near, I realized they were holding a short length of rope between them. The man had a sun hat on, pulled down over his eyes. He was more speed-walking than jogging, and he seemed intently focused on the rope.

2. Two Dutch guys stumbling home. One was tall, very drunk, and constantly talking. The other was short, a little less drunk, and trying to get his bearings on which way to go. And then, the tall, talkative one aggressively stomped his foot on the ground and scared a bunch of pigeons which flew at my head.

3. Another couple, dressed all in black. As they passed me, the man looked at me. And perhaps because I also wear all black, he smiled and nodded.

Ben Settle once shared a metaphor which has stuck in my head:

The cookie jar of ideas. It represents all the valuable knowledge in your industry.

As you get going in your industry, you take, take, take from the cookie jar for a long time. Eventually it’s time to add something back in.

But how do you do it? How do you create new cookies out of thin air? How do you come up with new insights for others to use? Do you have to be a genius or to have supernatural inspiration?

I’m sure that would help. But if you’re short on genius or inspiration, you can do what I do:

Simply describe what you see.

If it catches your eye, actually take notes and spell out what’s going on.

Do it over and over.

​​And once you have a bunch of detailed and interesting observations, then put your head in your hands, and stare at your observations for a while. Out of thin air, a cookie will suddenly appear.

And now for something entirely unrelated:

I would like to remind you of my consulting offer, and specifically my Email Marketing Audit.

I could try to tie this offer up to my cookie jar message above. I could try to tell you something like, “This observe-and-abstract method is how I have gained the many email marketing insights yadda yadda…”

But the fact is, one thing I genuinely have learned by observing successful email marketers is that it’s often better not to tie up your content with your sales at all… rather than to do it in a ham-handed or cheese-fisted way.

So no, this promotional add-on has nothing to do with the cookie jar.

Instead, if you want more info on my Email Marketing Audit, for no other reason than because you think it might benefit you and your business, you can find that here:

https://bejakovic.com/audit

“Email Marketing: A Lecture by Rowan Atkinson”

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Here’s a quick checklist of elements that make for engaging, effective, and influential emails:

1. Conflict, outrage. We seem to take a constant delight in seeing or participating in a fight. The more real it is, the more engaging it is. The more status the fight participants have, the more engaging it is.

2. Surprising connections between unrelated things, or surprising distinctions in things that seemed simple and unified.

3. Metaphors, analogies, and “transubstantiation.”

4. Angst. All good copy is rooted in angst. As Dan Kennedy likes to say, “The sky is either falling or is about to fall.”

5. Imitation and parody.

6. An engaging character. As Matt Furey didn’t but should have said, “For the email marketer, nothing transcends character.” The email of personality, rather than the email of “value.” Email is not about sharing valuable information. It’s about writing about normal things in a valuable and interesting way. It’s about accuracy of human observation and precision of the observation.

7. All right, enough of this. Let me come clean:

Everything I’ve just told you actually comes from a video titled “Visual Comedy: A Lecture by Rowan Atkinson.”

Atkinson you might best know as the clumsy priest from Four Weddings and a Funeral.

I watched Atkinson’s Visual Comedy guide a few days ago, expecting to be entertained. And I was that. But I found the video surprisingly full of deep analysis of what actually makes for visual comedy. It was like a prehistoric episode of the Every Frame a Painting series, if you’ve ever seen that.

And not only was this video insightful.

I realized that much, or maybe all, of what makes for good visual comedy can be ported very easily to email marketing.

For example, point #1 above is really about slapstick. As the Visual Comedy video says, “We seem to take a constant delight in seeing people hurt and humiliated. The more real it is, the funnier it is. The more dignified the victim, the funnier it is.”

And that Matt Furey non-quote in point #6?

​​It actually comes from Charlie Chaplin. “For the comedian, nothing transcends character.”

If you like, I’ve linked the entire Rowan Atkinson video below. You can watch it and try to figure out which techniques of visual comedy I mapped to each of my email marketing points above.

Of course, there’s more in this video than just what I’ve written above. The list of connections between visual comedy and email marketing is long and distinguished, and doesn’t just stop at 6″.

As just one example:

Maybe the most valuable part of this video is the detailed discussion of what exactly makes for an engaging character in visual comedy. I found almost all of this applied to email marketing directly, without the need for even the smallest bit of translation. Now that I think about it, maybe it’s a lesson I should apply myself.

So to wrap up:

​If you’re a goofy and thoughtless person who enjoys laughing when somebody slips on a banana peel…

​Or if you’re a deep and serious thinker who is interested in uncovering the hidden structure of things most people take for granted…

​Then I believe you will get value out of this video. Or maybe you’ll just get some pointed human observation. You can find it below. Before you click to watch it, you might want to sign up for my daily email newsletter, and get more insightful things like the essay you’ve just read.

I spent 120+ hours to uncover this marketing secret for you

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Do you remember the TV show Lost?

It was a big cultural phenomenon some 15-20 years ago. A planeful of people crash on a mysterious island. They have to fend for themselves while uncovering the island’s many bizarre secrets.

I watched Lost a few years after it came out. I did it because my girlfriend at the time insisted. She insisted because everybody else insisted.

So we got into bed one night and we watched the pilot episode.

Beautiful setting. Good-looking actors. Some ridiculous cliffhangers.

“Do we really need to keep watching this?” I asked my girlfriend.

“Yes! Everybody says it’s sooo good.”

So we watched another episode. More of the same.

And a third episode. ​

​​Beautiful setting. Good-looking actors. Some ridiculous cliffhangers.

But bit by bit, I was getting sucked in.

​​I was starting to like or dislike the various characters. I formed theories about the island’s bizarre secrets and the show’s unresolved cliffhangers. I looked forward to settling into bed each night for yet another episode.

And that’s how I ended up wasting about a hundred hours of my life, watching the remaining 120+ episodes of Lost. Even though my initial experience summed up what each of those episodes were all about:

Beautiful setting. Good-looking actors. Some ridiculous cliffhangers.

I recently talked about Derren Brown’s book Tricks of the Mind. Here’s one curious thing from that book that got to me:

“It is generally the most disinterested spectator who is the hardest to fool. Those who watch less end up seeing more.”

Brown was talking about doing magic. Apparently, a drunk at the bar who is not paying attention to the magician on stage will spot the sleight much more easily than an attentive audience member who is focused on the magician and who is determined to catch the trick.

That’s because, as Brown says, magic is about “entering into a relationship with a person whereby you can lead him, economically and deftly, to experience an event as magical.”

As in magic, so in marketing.

Except you might already be a little sick of being told that marketing is all about the relationship.

And the fact is, what I’m telling you about is both more and less than a relationship. You can see some of the stuff I mean in my Lost history above. Social proof and pressure… a sufficiently tight curiosity gap… an attractive or inviting selling context.

Or, in a few simple but powerful words:

“One prime objective of all advertising is to heighten expectations.”

And with that, I’d like to promote a book to you. And it’s NOT Derren Brown’s Tricks of the Mind.

Instead, it’s one of the top five marketing books I would recommend to anyone…

It’s part of A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos’s mandatory reading for copywriters who want to make it into the top 10% in just a year…

And it’s where I got the quote above about that prime objective. I spotted that quote on, I believe, my third re-reading of this book.

Of course, there’s a lot more in this book besides this one quote.

Like horses. And beer. And ketchup. If you’d like to read more:

https://bejakovic.com/lost

“So cringe”: Content creators get rich without anyone knowing who they are

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I sat down just a few minutes ago, my hotdog + espresso soup at the ready, and I watched 8 minutes of:

* A hot girl putting a live fish down her sweatpants

​* A man walking up the side of a 30-foot light pole

​* A motorcyclist’s head falling off

​* Pigtails being cut by office scissors and meat cleavers

​* Cheating wives and husbands caught in the act and running for cover

​* A leech up somebody’s nose

The backstory is all these videos were produced by Network Media, a video content mill that’s gotten 200 billion views on Facebook and Snapchat over the past two years.

200.

Billion.

Let me repeat that number so that it perhaps has a chance to sink into your brain. If each of those video views were a hotdog, that means that you and everybody else on the planet would have eaten 25 Network Media hotdogs each over the past two years.

Network Media was started by Rick Lax, who looks a little like a young Mickey Rourke.

Lax ​​has a law degree.

But Lax’s primary passion was never law. It was always magic.

Lax wasn’t popular as a kid. To make things worse, he never could quite make it at the highest levels of the magic business.

He was apparently hurt to be excluded even from this community of misfits.

So Lax went outside the magic establishment, and started posting videos on Facebook, iterating, optimizing, and cranking out content. At first, his videos showed magic tricks. Later, they showed random stuff Lax figured out to be popular.

It got so Lax’s Facebook videos were easily getting 100 million views each.

Lax started to monetize his videos with Facebook’s “paid creator” ad share as soon as that became available. Immediately, he started making six figures a month.

What’s more, Lax realized the demand for his bizarre videos, which applied his insights from magic, was endless. So he brought on more people, often broke actors and singers, who were making minimum wage before Lax found them.

Lax turned many of his anonymous content creators into millionaires. By late 2021, Lax’s Network Media was pulling in $5 million a month across all its different videos.

I’d like to tell you more of Lax’s story, but I’ve just finished my hotdog + espresso soup and my time is up. So I’ll make you an offer instead.

Check out article below. It’s where I learned about Rick Lax and his $5M/month viral video business. The article contains lots of titillating facts, plus some useful techniques.

In fact, if you read the article below, you can find out why almost all of Lax’s video feature something surreal, such as tampons in the fridge or a dirty hairbrush as part of a cooking video.

​​Maybe that will even explain why I’m eating hotdogs in espresso sauce as I write this email.

So my offers is, read the article below, find out the technical term for this “tampons in the fridge” technique, sign up to my email newsletter, and then write me an email to tell me the name of this technique.

In return, I will share with you something else interesting, valuable, and related. It’s something that I might share with my entire list down the line, but that I will share with you first, and for certain, if you only take me up on my offer.

In case you want to do that, here’s the link to get started:

https://bejakovic.com/lax