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

rsvp

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Do you have a scalable offer that’s selling for $500 or more?

By scalable I mean a course, mastermind, group coaching, software, etc.

In case you do, hit reply. I have something you might like. And no, it’s not email marketing.

A tabloidy factoid about Dan Ferrari and Ning Li

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A few weeks ago, copywriter Tom Baines wrote me to say:

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Anyway, I’m excited for your new book, and here’s an interesting tabloidy factoid you may already be aware of: Dan Ferarri and Ning Li have both talked openly about how they first connected in a pickup artist subreddit, where Dan initially mentored Ning as a pick-up artist before eventually bringing him over into copywriting and helping him build his career here… I think it’s a fun little overlap.

===

I’m sharing this as a bit of gossip in case you have connections to the copywriting industry. Ning and Dan are both well-known figures there. I never knew the background of how they met, even though I was in Dan’s small and intimate coaching program 5+ years ago.

Beyond gossip, anything worthwhile here?

I heard direct marketing legend Dan Kennedy say on multiple occasions how the top copywriters he knows all have years of “nose to nose, toes to toes” sales experience. And if you look at the famousest copywriters, from Claude Hopkins to Gary Halbert on down to Dan Kennedy himself, all started out in direct or door-to-door sales.

But I think today the “nose to nose, toes to toes” connection has weakened, in large part because door-to-door sales has become a much rarer endeavor.

On the other hand, I know more successful copywriters who have experience with pickup than I can count on my two hands and 10 sticky fingers.

In part, that’s because equivalent social shifts — things like the Internet — which caused d2d selling to drop have also made info about pickup and seduction available to a large pool of eager men.

But it’s more than that.

There are ideas, skills, and attitudes that translate from pickup to copywriting, and vice versa, same as from copy to d2d sales, and vice versa.

All to say:

1. You might have valuable skills and experiences you are not aware of right now.

2. If you want to find out some of the connections between copywriting and d2d sales and pickup, and also seemingly unrelated but deeply connected fields like hypnosis and stage magic and standup comedy, then you might like:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Best way to market your newest book

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A couple weeks ago I got a message from copywriter Andrew Harkin, who gave my new 10 Commandments a nice 5-star review on Amazon (“brilliant little book”). Andrew then wrote me to say:

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Hi John

As promised, just left a review on Amazon UK

Sorry it was a bit later than I intended, but better late than never as they say

I loved it, but then I’m almost obsessed with the craziness of the human mind, psychology etc..

Have you started writing your next one yet? 😉

===

It took me two years to write this new 10 Commandments book, which is criminal, considering it’s only 33,000 words in total.

But in answer to Andrew’s question, just today, I’ve started work on my next book. I will aim to get it out much more quickly than the new 10 Commandments one.

It might seem foolish to be starting work on a new book only a few weeks after publishing the last one, before I’ve done any kind of thorough job promoting that.

But this entire book project got started with an inspiring blog post by James Altucher from 2020. James advised writing a short book, not overthinking it, getting it done quickly, self-publishing it.

And when you self publish, then what? Says James:

“The best way to market your first book? Write your next book.”

… so that’s what I’m doing. That said, I haven’t given up on promoting my new 10 Commandments book. To do so, I have two offers for you today:

1. Do you have a podcast, a Facebook group, or a newsletter? If so, we can do an exclusive interview that gives value to your audience. ( I’ve already agreed to do this with a couple of community and list owners.)

I have lots of stories and conclusions from writing this book, some of which are in the book, many which are not. If you have an audience and want some unique and interesting content just for your audience, hit reply and we can talk.

2. If you haven’t read my “brilliant little book” yet, Andrew in his 5-star review promises that if you do, “your financial & mental investment will reap dividends.”

Do you like the sound of dividends? And for just a $4.99 investment? If you do, here’s where you can get a copy of my (currently) newest book:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

“I’m not the kind of person who” vs. “I hate this”

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It’s 11:07am as I write this.

I’ve just come back from the gym down the road form the Airbnb in which I’m staying.

I’ve gone to the gym today even though I’m traveling — I packed my gym clothes and found a local place to go.

I’ve been going to the gym regularly, 3-4 times a week, sometimes more, for the past 15 years, without break or faltering. It’s become one of the most important things I do for my health and sanity and of course my striking good looks.

And yet, for the first few decades of my life, I knew for a fact that I’m not a gym person, that I only like “real” physical activity such as playing tennis or going for a swim, rather than a contrived workout like deadlifts and squats.

“Gym? Pff. Thank you. That’s not me.”

A long time ago, I read a book called Stumbling On Happiness by a Harvard psychologist named Daniel Gilbert. I don’t remember a lot from the book except the central thread of it.

We are terrible at remembering the past, says Gilbert. As an example, ask people who they voted for the in the last election, and a lot of people will actually, honestly claim that they voted for the winning party, even if they didn’t.

It’s not that these people are lying. Like George Costanza, they fully believe what they’re saying.

You might think it’s just some particularly weak-willed people who fool themselves and others like this. But this is something we all do all every day, to some degree, and are never aware of.

But wait, there’s more.

As bad as we are at remembering the past, says Gilbert, we are even worse at imagining the future.

Ask people how they will feel and what they will do if, say, they win the lottery or if their now-happy marriage ends in bitter divorce, and people will tell you lots of stuff, again honestly. Trouble is, it’s wrong, spectacularly wrong, and it has nothing to do with how they will actually feel or what they will do. And yet, this is how we live our lives all the time.

But back to the gym and to the idea of “I’m not the kind of person who…”

Says Gilbert, if you want to find out what something is like, say raising a child, then don’t ask people who have raised a kid 10 or 20 years ago. They will remember wrong, and they will effectively tell you lies, even though they don’t mean to.

Also, don’t ask people who haven’t raised a kid but who are either looking forward to it or dreading it — their predictions mean nothing.

The only kind of person you can ask if you want to get an honest sense of what raising a kid is like is somebody who is doing it right now. Somebody who is not hallucinating about the future, or making up a fairy tale about the past.

And that, I would like to suggest to you, is something that holds even if the person you are asking for advice and opinions is yourself.

Over and over I’ve asked myself, “Will I like this? Can I do this? Am I the kind of person who can be successful here?”

Over and over I’ve told myself, no no no.

Over and over I’ve tried doing the thing nonetheless.

Sometimes it really turned out I wasn’t successful even after putting in a good try. More importantly, sometimes it really turned out I hated the thing, and how it made me feel.

Other times, though, it was just like the gym. The thing became an important part of my life, a part of my identity, something I stuck with for years or even decades, even though I previously knew for a fact it would never be for me.

In the end, I’ve summed it up for myself by saying, “I’m not the kind of person who ever tells himself, ‘I’m not the kind of person who…'” The only way to know how you look and feel with a mohawk is to shave your head and walk around town like that for a few weeks.

And now let me remind you of my new 10 Commandments book, about con men and door-to-door salesemen and pickup artists.

This entire email has been grooming you in a way, in case the mention of those disciplines makes the hackles on the back of your neck stand up.

I’m not suggesting — it would be foolish to do so — that you go against your own deeply held moral values.

But if a part of you says, “I’m not the kind of person who can sell, seduce, confidently and smoothly persuade,” well, you might surprise yourself.

And if you want some tips and pointers on how to do sell, seduce, and persuade, as well as some psychology to help you make the identity leap easier, then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Ideas are cheap, here’s how to sell them for good money

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A couple days ago I got a message from Alex Popov, who works as a copywriter (he had a couple controls for an Agora affiliate) and as an NLP trainer. Alex read my new 10 Commandments book and wrote me with some qualified praise:

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Hey Bejako!

Your new book is quite simply fascinating.

I know most, not all, of the big persuasion ideas inside, yet I’m learning them in all new mind-expanding ways.

Your book is changing my thinking about these persuasion principles for the better.

Thanks!

Only one, negative, though. The price is ridiculously low. So low in fact, I almost didn’t buy it.

Anyway, I’m glad I did.

Real thanks and use this if you like.

===

I’ve been saying it for a long time:

Ideas are cheap. Even good, profitable, proven ideas.

The real value lies not in sharing an idea. Odds are excellent people have heard it all before, even if you feel you thought it up yourself. (You may have, but others have thought it up before you.)

Instead, the real value lies in:

1. Presenting an idea in a way that has a chance to penetrate the defenses your reader’s mind is sure to throw up (“I don’t get it,” “I’ve heard this before,” “I’m busy,” “I could never do this”)

2. Presenting an idea in a memorable way so that it sticks with your reader long after he’s finished reading

3. All the surrounding stuff besides the idea or even its presentation — all the encouraging, taunting, goading, shaming, motivating your reader to actually do something with the idea you’re sharing other than just squirrel it away

And that’s what you can find in my new 10 Commandments book:

Grifters, suckers, the “World’s Youngest Hypnotist,” an openly racist “comic’s comic,” a couple of tophat-wearing magicians, a pickup artist who describes himself as “average, with a serious tilt towards ugly,” the “world’s most feared negotiator,” the last Russian Tsar, the first black mayor of a major U.S. city, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, Ronald Reagan, and much, much more.

They are all in the book so you see the underlying ideas in a new light in case you know them already, so you remember them in case you don’t, and so you put them to work in your business and personal lives, and profit from them.

As for the ridiculously low price, it’s there for a reason, which has nothing to do with the value of what’s inside. Don’t let it dissuade you:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

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.

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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