How to completely dismantle your pre-talk nerves

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A couple days ago, a new Amazon review popped up for my “10 Commandments of Con Men etc” (5-stars; “Here’s why you should buy two copies…”).

That review came from Matt Cascarino, who is the chief creative officer at FARM, a marketing agency that’s had among its clients the American Cancer Society, the SPCA, New Era (the company that makes Major League Baseball’s official caps), and Kelley Blue Book.

I know Matt reads my emails and I have interacted with him before, so I wrote him an email to say thanks for the nice review. To which Matt responded with an even better testimonial:

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I just got home from a new business pitch where I worked SIX commandments into my 18 minutes of material. Specifically, “commit to the bit” completely dismantled my typical pre-talk nerves.

I genuinely enjoy presenting, but your book helped me be more methodical when mapping out my talk.

Thanks for reaching out. Your book is insanely good and worth every hour you poured into it.

And no, your mom didn’t tell me to say that.

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I’m about to give you a link to my 10 Commandments book in a bit, and if you haven’t yet read it, maybe Matt’s experience and recommendation will convince you to do so.

But before you go, here’s a tip I learned early in my email marketing career, which I didn’t realize the full power of until last year:

It’s okay to email people one-on-one.

That might seem like a particularly stupid point to make, but the fact is, having an email newsletter does something to the brain, and many people, myself included on occasion, start to think that the only way to reach out to people who have signed up to your newsletter is via broadcast emails, preferably ones that start with “Dear Friend.”

No.

You can write people on your list one-on-one, over and above broadcast emails.

Again, that might seem super obvious. What is less obvious is that I’ve used this strategy to make valuable connections with prospects right when they sign up to my list… to drive in sales that would never have happened otherwise… and to get nice extra testimonials like the one that Matt gave me (which my mom confirms she had no part of).

And now, as promised, here’s my new 10 Commandments book, to help you dismantle your pre-talk nerves, or take away the sting from objections to your offer, or hide a secret in plain sight:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

The curiosity mistake

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Yesterday, I wrote an email about a course I bought via the “dark marketplace” for courses.

There was some valuable and potentially profitable point in that email, but it didn’t matter much.

Because almost all the responses I got, and I got a hobuncha, said something like the following:

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I’m sure you’re getting plenty of replies like mine, but I can’t help it… what’s the course??

Not planning to buy it, just plain ol’ curiosity. It’s so weird thinking in 2025 that there’s still info that can’t be accessed immediately with just 2-3 clicks…

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I didn’t share the name of the course yesterday and I won’t share it today.

Like I wrote in my email yesterday, I bought the course without knowing anything about it, based on a recommendation alone.

I can’t recommend it to others since I haven’t received it or gone through it yet. In fact, I can’t say anything more about it other than what I have, aside from its name. But what are you gonna do with that?

Legend says that near the end of his career, direct marketer Gary Halbert quizzed a protege. Halbert asked, “The best way to get a prospect’s attention is to appeal to…”

The protege thought for a moment. “Their sense of self-interest,” he said.

“No!” said Halbert, and he whacked the protege on the wrist with a large wooden ruler. “The right answer is, their sense of curiosity.”

True true.

Now here’s the valuable and potentially profitable point of this email:

Another legendary marketer, John Caples, found that pure curiosity headlines always and dramatically underperform pure benefit headlines in terms of sales.

Sure, curiosity headlines got the attention, just like Halbert said. But Caples found that benefit headlines got the money. The best performing of all were headlines with both a benefit and an element of curiosity.

All that’s to say, idle curiosity isn’t worth much, not unless you can channel it into something else.

I’m telling you this if you’re trying to sell, and I’m telling you also in case you are not.

But on to sales, specifically of my new 10 Commandments book.

I’ve tried to make this book intriguing and curiosity-baiting up to 11. I mean, that was the whole idea behind talking about con men and pickup artists and such. But as I say at the close of the book:

“Of course, the real question is, what are you going to do with this stuff? Learning new techniques is nice, as is getting an a-ha moment, a new insight into something profound about yourself. But none of it matters much unless you put it to use and somehow apply it in your life. Will you do that?”

I hope you will. The book contains simple but powerful ideas to make you more effective in communicating, whether you want to sell, negotiate, or even seduce. If you’re curious, and if you’re looking to benefit, here’s where you can find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Dark marketplace for courses

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I just bought a course, based solely on the glowing recommendation of somebody I’ve come to trust and respect.

The course is made up of five actual, physical books. It costs $300.

Since the seller is only willing to ship in the U.S., I will need to have these five books shipped to my friend’s post office box in South Carolina, and then pay more to have them forwarded on to me in Spain.

The whole process to order this course has taken about three weeks. The seller has no website, no phone number, no email address publicly listed.

And in case you’re wondering, there are no copies of the course available on Amazon or eBay or other popular “web sites.”

(After this course was recommended by somebody I’ve come to trust and respect in a semi-public setting, I saw someone on Twitter asking how and where to get this course. There were no responses.)

The way I managed to get this course is I remembered a copywriter who mentioned he had worked with the creator of the course. I contacted the copywriter. He put me in touch with the family of the guy who created the course.

Then it was back and forth over email with the daughter of the course creator for a couple weeks, with each back-and-forth taking another few days.

Finally, I made the payment last Friday. I had hoped to hear that the course has been shipped, but the weekend passed. Yesterday, I got a message from the daughter. She wrote:

“Hope you had a great weekend. Thanks for sending the PayPal; I received it and have the package ready. I forgot to ask earlier: Are you interested in other courses that I have…”

… and here followed a list of about 15 more attractive-sounding courses, at least going by titles alone, because that’s all there was. No price, no details, no sales page, no order form. That’s the upsell process. And thanks to this upsell process, it will be another few days before my course is shipped.

I’m not telling you this to complain. I’m happy to get this course and amused by the ordering process.

I am telling you this because, while you might not realize it, there’s a dark marketplace for courses. “Dark” as in “dark web,” the web that’s not accessible publicly or at least searchable by Google and Perplexity.

The fact is, there are billions of dollars’ worth of info products that are not sold on Clickbank, or eBay, or Amazon, or on anybody’s website.

Maybe these info products were created before the web and are simply sitting in a garage or warehouse, in book format or on tapes or DVDs.

Or maybe these info products were online once. But the hosting expired. Or they were a one-time offer. Or the creator simply moved on to other things, and the only place are now is on somebody’s hard drive.

Or maybe these info products are available online, but not publicly. Maybe they are simply sold via backchannels, to people who are on private email lists, or inside private communities, or only to people who know somebody who knows somebody.

To be fair:

Not everything that’s old is gold, and not everything that’s hidden is worth uncovering.

But there is gold, and a lot of it, among the many info products in the dark marketplace.

This is a legit opportunity, for anybody who has the digging instinct, and a bit of marketing and copywriting chops. To wit:

You can find these dark market info products, and simply sell them as-is to a new audience…

Or you can convert them to a new, more accessible format…

Or you can repackage and rebrand them into an offer of your own, while paying the original creator a licensing fee.

If any of this gets you excited, and you’re thinking “Oh if only there were more info on how to do all this,” well, then you’re in luck. This is the kind of stuff that’s taught, discussed, and practiced inside Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin community.

Travis happens to be the person who recommended the course that I ended up buying, based on his recommendation alone. That’s because I happen to be a member of Royalty Ronin, and while I’m not very publicly active there, I do lurk and absorb information and even put it to use.

As I’ve written before, at $300 per month, Royalty Ronin is expensive. But at least in my case, it has paid for itself many times over.

If you’re curious about profiting from the dark marketplace for courses, but hesitant to risk $300 to test out Ronin for a month, then you’re in luck once again. Because Travis is currently offering a week’s trial of Royalty Ronin for free.

If you’d like to join me inside and see if it’s for you:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

“Amputees needed”

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“Amputees needed” was the newspaper ad that neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran ran to recruit subjects for his phantom limb research back in the 1990s.

I’ve written about Ramachandran lots in these emails before. I read about him again last night, in a book about neuroplasticity. The story clicked with something I’ve been thinking about a lot, which seems very important to me, and which I wanted to share with you. In case you’re with me:

As you might know, “phantom limb” is a strange condition where people who have had a limb amputated, say, an arm, keep feeling that arm as being there. They can even feel the arm doing stuff like reaching out to pick up the phone.

Kind of weird already, but where it gets uncomfortable is that, for many amputees, these phantom limbs don’t move. Instead, the phantom limbs feel like they are paralyzed, frozen.

What’s worse, phantom limbs often cause agonizing pain, out in space, where there’s nothing, and where nothing can be done. Patients often contemplate suicide because it’s such an painful and maddening condition.

Phantom limb has been known as a phenomenon since the American Civil War, but it probably goes back to the beginnings of time, as long as humans, and their animal ancestors, were losing limbs.

Phantom limbs, weird and uncomfortable as they are, get at the core of being a living, thinking being. They make it very clear that we have no direct experience of what’s happening in our body or in the world outside us, but only mental representations of such.

But back to Ramachandran. Back in the 1990s, he managed to cure — eliminate — the phantom limb in a large number of amputees, and he done it in a curious, extremely low-tech way.

Basically, Ramachandran had the amputees view an image of their (still attached) arm, reflected in a mirror, doing stuff.

The crazy thing is, this was good enough to convince the amputees’ brains their amputated arm was somehow back.

The neurology isn’t 100% clear to me, but I guess the feedback these patients were getting, visually via the mirror and neurally from their (real, non-mirrored) arm, was somehow enough to rewire the maps in their brain that represent body image.

In other words, the phantom limb first stopped being paralyzed and in pain. The paralysis and pain gone, the phantom limb was finally free to wave goodbye and move on to Valhalla.

Once again, phantom limb is a condition that’s been around for as long as humans have been around, and probably longer. It’s been ruining the lives of those afflicted by it for thousands of years. The fix was so simple, and yet nobody thought of it until a few decades ago.

But there’s still a deeper point, and one I find myself thinking about a lot lately.

A hundred years ago, a psychologist named Jean Piaget found that children’s thinking is black and white, magical, absolute.

To children, ideas are the same as things, with the same concreteness and reality. An idea, if it pops up in a kid’s head, must be true, has always been true, will always be true, isn’t made false by evidence or by previous ideas that contradict it.

In time, we grow up, and we learn that an idea can be false, or a little bit true, or that there’s nuances and gradations, that we should look for support and proof.

But I’d like to claim, the kind of black-and-white, imagined-is-real thinking of children stays inside us forever. We learn to work with it and cover it up to ourselves, but it remains the baseline of how our brains work, how we perceive the world and ourselves.

If you doubt me, think of Ramachandran’s amputee patients. They weren’t idiots.

The “adult” part of them knew, while watching a mirror reflection of their real arm, that they hadn’t regrown their amputated arm. But it didn’t matter. The “child” part of the brain saw the phantom arm reappear, and could work with it, and stop it from being paralyzed and in pain.

As I write in my new 10 Commandments book, the human brain and the reality it creates for us are far stranger than we admit to ourselves on a daily basis. If you want to read some more ways about how to work with the “child” part of your prospect’s minds, and maybe even your own, for good and for profit, then you might like:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

How to push-pull prospects on your list

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A few days ago, long-time reader and personal development coach Miro Skender sent me a message with a highlighted passage from my new 10 Commandments book which says:

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Expose human beings to anything constant — even incontestably good things like compliments, security, or money — and people soon stop responding. Like Macknick and Martinez-Conde say, we need contrast to see, hear, feel, think, and pay attention. Otherwise the world becomes literally invisible.

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Miro then said how he knows this fact of human psychology well. He knows how to apply it in his work with coaching clients. But he doesn’t know how to put it to use with prospects on his list. Do I have any ideas?

It’s a good question.

Prospects get bored and leave if you expose them to a constant stream of the same — even if it’s good, valuable, well-written same. But not only that. You make fewer sales with the prospects who stay, because your emails are simply less persuasive than they could be.

I thought of how best to answer Miro’s question in an email. Should I give an example from my own previous emails? Or from a sales letter written by an A-list copywriter? Or would a metaphor be needed to really get the point across?

There are benefits to doing each, I thought. So why choose among them and risk doing a sub-optimal job?

I soon realized that answering Miro’s question properly would involve a ton of work, way too much for a daily email.

Fortunately, I remembered I had done it all already, and more, inside my now-retired Most Valuable Postcard #2, code name “Ferrari Monster.”

The background on the Most Valuable Postcard is that it was a short-lived, paid, monthly newsletter I ran back in the summer of 2022.

It was short-lived because I found it was way too much work and stress to write up something as in-depth and researched as I wanted to make each of these monthly guides to be.

I pulled the plug on Most Valuable Postcard after the second issue, but not before I got glowing reviews from a group of initial subscribers that I let in.

For example, email marketer Daniel Throssell, who was one of those early subscribers, wrote me to say after the first issue:

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Seriously though, dude, I know it’s issue #1 but this program you’ve created is amazing. You’ve honestly made me pause and reconsider some ideas about how I want to do my own newsletter because this is just so excellently executed. I love pretty much everything about how you’ve done this, from the format to the content to the value you deliver in your insights. Really impressed.

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I don’t make back issues of Most Valuable Postcard available regularly. Most Valuable Postcard #2 wasn’t available yesterday. It won’t be available tomorrow. But it is available today.

If you’d like to find out more about what’s inside, and how you can use it to push-pull the prospects on your list:

https://bejakovic.com/mvp2/

The crazy things my readers buy

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Over the past few weeks, I’ve been running Amazon ads for my new 10 Commandments book.

One ad campaign is “automatic targeting,” where Amazon simply tries to put my book in front of shoppers on its other pages. The ad reporting shows me which of these other pages resulted in clicks and sales for my book.

I’ve also been heavily promoting my new 10 Commandments book to my own list. Since I’m using an Amazon affiliate link (this is apparently against Amazon policies, but I love to live dangerous), I can see some of the other stuff that people who clicked on my affiliate link also bought.

If you just felt a chill rush up your back, as though you’ve been stripped naked in public, calm down. I cannot tell who specifically is buying anything, only that some people who bought my new 10 Commandments book (hundreds so far) or who clicked on my affiliate link (thousands) were also in the market for other things.

As you can guess, people who ended up buying my book were also in the market for dozens of ordinary, everyday purchases such as computer cables and supplement gummies and of course a “4.4 inch fixed-blade SEAX knife with a sheepsfoot blade.”

My readers were also in the market for a bunch of books that are in some way related to my own book, such as Jim Camp’s Start With No and Henning Nelms’s Magic and Showmanship — both of which I reference in my book — as well as Made to Stick, which is one of my go-to books for effective communication.

So far, so milquetoast. But then, my readers bought some quirky things I would not have expected or even known about had I not done this Amazon sleuthing. The top 3:

#1: How To Be The Jerk Women Love — a 1991 guide to picking up women by acting the jerk, written by “F.J. Shark.” A 5-star Amazon review by a shopper who goes by “The King of Jerks”:

“Some women made fun of me for praising this book. The laugh is on them. It ended up they were dumped by bigger jerks than me. What goes around comes around.”

#2: What is Wrong with Men — a feminist social critique, I guess written in reaction to F.J. Shark’s book and its positive reviews. “What is Wrong with Men” was only published a few days ago and doesn’t have any positive Amazon reviews yet, but the NY Times called it a “kind of road map for the current masculinity crisis. Reeled me in, like Absolut and cranberry. What a pairing!”

#3, and most intriguingly: Grade 23 Titanium Externally Threaded Nipple Bar Barbell Rings. For those who are too busy living life to worry either about acting the jerk or the jerks in their lives.

I’m telling you all this as a little hack so you can safely, legally, and ethically peek into the private shopping carts of your customers.

Amazon is the world’s biggest online marketplace. An estimated 64,000 metric tons of stuff pass through their warehouses every day. I just gave you a couple of ways to see what some of that stuff is, so you can adjust what and how you sell to your audience.

If you’d like to contribute to that data (don’t worry, it’s all anonymized), or more importantly, if you’d like to read my new 10 Commandments book — about effective communication, and magic and showmanship, and one secret negotiating trick of Jim Camp that he did not reveal in Start With No — then here is my Amazon affiliate link, ready to serve you:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

How I ended up paying an inconcievable price for coaching

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The date was July 17, 2019. I remember exactly where I was, walking in the old 18th century part of my home town of Zagreb, Croatia, where I was living at the time.

I pulled out my phone and saw that I had a new email from Dan Ferrrari.

In case you don’t know, Dan is an A-list copywriter. I profiled him in Commandment IV of my first 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters, because he has string of winning sales letters that few if any copywriters over the past 10 years can match. As just one example, Dan once wrote a sales letter that tripled sales over the previous control and sold out the entire stock of a longevity supplement.

In July 2019, my connection to Dan was extremely tenuous and unlikely.

I had gotten on his email list years earlier, but he never sent any emails.

Then, in the spring of 2019, while I was on a short trip to visit a friend in Baltimore — my first trip back to the U.S. in over five years — Dan finally sent an email to his list. Is anybody in the Baltimore/Washington area who wants to meet?

I replied yes. I don’t know exactly why or what I was hoping for. I just had a sense I was stuck with copywriting as a career. I had only heard stellar things about Dan. I thought if I met him in person maybe it would lead to something.

Aaaand… it turned out no. Our schedules didn’t fit, and we never ended up meeting in Baltimore.

I went back to Croatia, and Dan went back to his non-emailing.

And then, a few weeks later, Dan wrote me to ask whether I might be interested in his coaching program? I said yes.

To which, Dan replied with nothing. No response, first for a few days, then a week, then a month.

I forgot about Dan, and started fishing around for a different copywriting coach. But crazy as it might seem today, nobody in 2019 was offering coaching for copywriting.

And then, over a month after our last email exchange, Dan did reply. We got on a call to discuss his coaching program. I asked about everything but the price because I didn’t want that to cloud my judgment. The coaching sounded like the exact thing I had been looking for. I told Dan I’m in, and I figured I’d make the price work for me somehow.

The day after the call, Dan sent me an email with a PayPal payment link and the actual per month price for the coaching.

That was the email I got while walking around the old town in Zagreb. The reason I remember exactly where I was is that the price took my breath away.

I expected the coaching to be expensive. But not this expensive. I won’t say exactly how expensive it turned out to be. I’ll just say it was as high as my total income on many months at the time.

Still, I had some savings. I decided that, as long as I had some money in the bank, I was willing to give it a go. I mean, everything seemed to be building up to here — my stagnation with copywriting as a career, the near misses I’d had in meeting with Dan, the constant drum beating of “get a mentor” that was popular at the time.

So I took a deep breath, PayPaled Dan the money, and the coaching started.

I’ve written before about the actual coaching I got from Dan. I won’t repeat that here. Here I just want to focus on the price of the coaching, which, as I said, took my breath away when I first saw it.

Had anybody sat me down a few days prior and asked me whether I would pay, each month, what I ended up paying Dan, I would have just stared at them bug-eyed. “Absolutely not” would be my answer, and I would have meant it 100%.

Here’s the fundamental dilemma of setting prices:

Nobody knows what anything is truly worth. You don’t know what your offer is truly worth to your customers. They don’t know either. You can ask them, but they cannot and will not tell you the truth. The only way to know is to put an offer in front of them and see if they will buy.

I ended up buying Dan’s coaching at a price that would have been inconceivable to me only days earlier. Your customers or clients might end up buying your offers at prices that seem inconceivable to you now.

The only way to know is to put your offer in front of them, and see if they will buy.

That said, you can be a little more strategic about your price than simply throwing darts at a dartboard now and then. And on that note, I’d like to remind you of a mini-course I released yesterday, called Modified Depoorter Pricing.

This mini-course is about a pricing strategy I’ve used in the past to sell both services (back when I was working as a sales copywriter) and, later, my own courses.

This pricing strategy was elegant and worked very well when I used it.

My one regret is, I haven’t been consistent enough or thorough enough about using this pricing strategy. So I’ve created a mini-course outlining this pricing strategy, both for your benefit and for mine.

This is a “mini-course,” because I didn’t fill it with a lot of fluff or infotainment. You can consume it in 10 minutes if you so choose.

As such, I still don’t have a sales page for it. But if you’d like to get it nonetheless, you can do so at the link below.

The reason you might want to act now is that I will soon use the Modified Depoorter Pricing strategy to increase the price of this mini-course from its current modest level. To get it before then:

https://bejakovic.com/depoorter

Modified Depoorter Pricing

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I recently came across a clever pricing strategy for an online product.

I realized this pricing strategy is something I had used in the past to sell both services (back when I was working as a sales copywriter) and, later, my own courses.

This pricing strategy was elegant and worked very well when I used it.

The only problem was, I wasn’t consistent enough or thorough enough about using this pricing strategy.

So I’ve created a mini-course outlining this pricing strategy, both for your benefit and for mine. I’m calling this mini-course Modified Depoorter Pricing.

It’s a mini-course, because I didn’t fill it with a lot of fluff or infotainment.

It’s simply the core idea spelled out — Depoorter Pricing — plus a few key distinctions to help you apply it well to your particular situation — hence Modified Depoorter Pricing.

At this point, I don’t have a sales page for this mini-course. Everything I’ve just told you is all I have to tell you today. Maybe that will change in the future.

For now, the only added sales appeal I have to share is that I’m making a very special price available for the first 10 people who buy Modified Depoorter Pricing. If that’s enough for you:

https://bejakovic.com/depoorter

When not to use stories in your emails

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Stories in emails are great, except when they’re not. Here are five situations when not to use stories in your emails:

#1. If you’re in a marketplace of one (as far as your prospects are concerned), or in a marketplace where nobody else is sending regular, conversational emails.

It might seem like there are no such marketplaces any more, but there are plenty, particularly in various local service businesses — think lawyers, doctors, morticians.

In such marketplaces, no need to go nuclear by telling stories in emails, and it might even seem tryhard or unprofessional. (“Why is my lawyer writing me about his grandfather again? Why is he not working on my divorce settlement?”)

#2. If you’re in a marketplace that’s driven by current news. For example, if you are selling anything to do with finance or investing.

#3. If you’re selling done-for-you vs done-with-you or do-it-yourself.

Stories, particularly personal stories, are really there to allow the reader to identify with you and align with you, so you can congruently tell them what to do and how to live their lives.

But if you are providing a DFY solution and you aren’t asking people to change who they are, then you have better options than telling stories — and so you shouldn’t use stories as your go-to.

#4. If you have a hot new offer or some other important message and you don’t want to bury it under a drawn-out story that most people will not read.

#5. The inverse of #1 above: if you are in a crowded marketplace where everybody else is telling stories, where storytelling has become the norm, and where your audience is likely to be hearing from a bunch of your competitors.

In such a marketplace, you end up in an arms race of storytelling. Your stories have to be more vulnerable, more shocking, more engagingly told. And yet, readers are glutted and paying less and less attention, and they’re looking for the signal among the storytelling noise. As I wrote in an email a couple months ago:

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I’ve noticed I practically never read the infotainment part in the newsletters subscribe to any more. Instead, I just scroll down to see the practical takeaway, and maybe the offer.

Granted, I’m a rather “sophisticated” consumer of email newsletters (meaning, I’ve been exposed to a ton of them, particularly in the copywriting and marketing space, over the past 10+ years of working in this field). Still, that just makes me a kind of owl-eyed canary in a coalmine, and maybe points to a bigger trend that will be obvious to others soon.

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All that’s to say, story emails are bett, but other kinds of emails can be even better.

And for that, may I remind you of my Daily Email Habit service, which sometimes prompts you to send a story email, but most days (like today), it does not.

For more information on Daily Email Habit:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Conditioning vs. shaping

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Robin Timmers, “the largest copywriter in the Netherlands,” writes in to say:

“I do wanna say I really enjoyed your new book, while reading it on holiday. (Left you a review on Amazon.)”

… and sure enuff, Robin’s review is now showing up on the Amazon page for my new 10 Commandments book (“Great lil’ book with lots of funny, weird and most of all valuable principles of persuasion”).

Robin’s is the 10th 5-star review my new book has gotten in the couple of weeks since being published. It’s important to me to mark and celebrate the occasion.

But what about you? I make a habit of including some tidbit in each email which is either fun or valuable, whether you choose to buy or not.

So let me tell you something interesting but entirely unrelated, which might be valuable to you.

I’m reading a book about neuroplasticity called The Brain That Changes Itself. One story in that book is of a scientist named Edward Taub, who experimented on monkeys to simulate the effects of stroke.

The long and short of it is, Taub worked to get monkeys that were effectively paralyzed in say, their left arm, to regain use of that arm.

Taub tried giving the monkeys rewards for performing regular monkey actions with their left arm, such as reaching for food. Behaviorists call this approach conditioning. Conditioning didn’t work. Paralyzed monkeys stayed paralyzed.

But then Taub started a different approach known as shaping, which involved rewarding the monkeys for even very small steps along the way to the big movement. (I’m guessing here, but imagine rewarding the monkey for just wiggling his left pinky finger at first.)

The effect of shaping was the monkeys eventually regained full function of their previously paralyzed arms.

On the one hand, this is kind of Obvious Adams — of course you want to break up a big task into component pieces and master the component pieces one by one.

On the other hand, people have been having strokes for thousands of years, and many have been paralyzed for life as a result.

Taub translated this monkey shaping research into a simple and structured program for humans, which relies on no fancy modern equipment, that has allowed stroke victims to regain use of paralyzed limbs, often years after their stroke.

Obvious yes, but somehow nobody else thought to follow this basic idea to this powerful conclusion, for thousands of years, until a few decades ago.

This distinction of conditioning vs shaping is something to keep in mind whether you’re in the business of teaching people stuff, or encouraging behavior (eg. buying and consumption), or simply trying to manage the primate known as yourself better, so you can get yourself to accomplish stuff you cannot accomplish now.

Break up the big action into tiny component pieces, often so tiny as to seem useless or irrelevant to task at hand. Master each of those tiny components. Reward yourself for doing so.

And that, in a way, does tie into the top of my email, about celebrating my 10th testimonial. And now, if you haven’t yet read my “funny, weird, and most of all valuable” new book, you can find it here:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments