Reader tells me to give up on the 10 Commandments

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

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

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

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

Don’t tell people they’re wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

The fiction business

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

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

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

And what is moving and shaking in the Kindle store?

The same damn stuff as always.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Get low

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

Lil Jon’s Wellness Newsletter

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

I gotta say this made me chuckle.

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

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

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

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

What happened? I had to read about the man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

​https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

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

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

No, the bestselling author in question is James Altucher.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

1 week, 1 review

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One week ago, I published my new 10 Commandments book. Since then, I’ve sold around 200 copies. I’ve also gotten exactly one review, a five-star one from email copywriter Anthony La Tour.

I’m grateful to Anthony for his review. He did what he could for me.

But one review? It don’t look good to have a book with one review. What gives?

A part is that this new 10 Commandments book is longer than my previous 10 Commandments book. It’s taking people longer to read. Maybe more reviews will come when a few more people finish.

Another part is that Amazon is slow to approve and propagate reviews.

A couple people have written me that they’ve submitted reviews that Amazon has not yet published. And in the UK Amazon marketplace, two good souls, copywriter Andrew Harkin and craftsman writer James Carran, both gave me nice 5-star reviews, which are not yet shown in the US Amazon store.

And finally, still another part is that effective email marketing is to blame.

About a dozen of my readers who have audiences of their own have promoted my book to their lists, which is a kind of review that doesn’t show up on Amazon. Plus another dozen or so people have replied to my daily emails to tell me that they like, love, or adore the new book.

I’m grateful to everyone who has written me or promoted my book or reviewed it.

Now let me share with you my favorite review, which has come not from a copywriter, not a list owner, not a direct marketer, but from one of my best friends, Sam.

Sam and I have known each other for 20+ years from our time subsisting on popcorn and beer while studying computer science at the birthplace of NLP, the University of California at Santa Cruz.

During those 20+ years, Sam and I have mostly maintained a kind of dry, sarcastic, bantery interaction with each other, which tends to shy away from emotional confessions and naked sincerity. But here’s what Sam wrote me yesterday:

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I just finished your book. I love it. Yes, yes, just like your mom’s praise you think I’m saying this because you’re a good guy and a better friend but it is really fucking good. I am impressed that you finished it and impressed by how good it is. The stories are great, the pacing is great, and even people that didn’t know anything about it would find it intriguing. I’m imagining if we came across it in the UCSC library return cart or at an Airbnb we would be intrigued enough to crack it open and captivated enough to finish it. BJ all around! [“BJ” is Sam’s shorthand for “brilliant job.”]

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I’ve confessed before how to my non-entrepreneurial brain, praise from readers is more much meaningful than sales made. It’s not something I’m proud of, but it is a fact.

(I’d be much more successful if I only cared more about money, but like Rich Schefren says, you gotta put your business goals ahead of your personal development goals.)

Sam’s praise was particularly meaningful. And in case you’re wondering whether this might possibly have anything to do with you, except being a shameless plug for my new book, here’s the basic idea:

Ultimately, most people care about the praise and respect of others above almost all other things. Even the people who care much more about money than I do really just care about money as a means to get that praise and respect.

Maybe this is obvious to you, or maybe it seems trivial. What might not be as obvious or trivial is how this very fundamental human need for praise and respect translates into specific episodes of influence, across various disciplines ranging from boardroom negotiation, copywriting, screenwriting, and yes, confidence games.

In case you would like to dig into this topic a little more deeply, so you can apply it to your business or everyday interactions, you can find it drilled and fracked inside Commandment I of my new book. Commandment I, because it’s that fundamental. To find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

One Big Black Love

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Well well well. Look at what the cat dragged in.

Or don’t. Rather, read on so I can tell you I’ve been assembling a list of 10 magic words associated with each discipline I profile in my new 10 Commandments book.

It’s been fairly straightforward for each. The main problem is choosing just one word or phrase per discipline, because there are lots of good candidates.

The one outlier is screenwriting because, unlike pickup or standup comedy or door-to-door sales, screenwriting is not a “live” discipline — there’s no direct and instant feedback to the screenwriter as the movie is being shown to audiences.

Still, the movie industry is huge and has been around for a century. Lots of regularities have emerged in how successful screenplays work, which is why I feature screenwriters in my book.

But what about magic words used by screenwriters?

I had the idea to look at most common words in movie titles, excluding stop words like “a,” “the,” and “and.” I found a Reddit post where some dude did exactly this data analysis, using all movie titles from IMDB.

Unfortunately, the Reddit post doesn’t include a downloadable list, but just a word cloud. In order of size, the most common non-stop words in movie titles are:

1. Love

2. One

3. Black

4. Big

… which gives us the guaranteed blockbuster title, One Big Black Love.

While doing this fascinating research I also found a list of the most common phrases aka cliches used in screenplays.

But I’ll only share that list with you over my dead body. Look, I’m just doing my job. In fact, “job” is my middle name. Or maybe “taking candy from a baby” is my middle name.

In any case, if you haven’t yet gotten a copy of my new 10 Commandments book, you can do so at the link below. When I finish up the 10 Magic Words, I will add that in as bonus to the already bonus 11th Commandment page.

Here’s the link. Go ahead. Click it. Make my day:

​https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments​

Gary Bencivenga, Milton Erickson, Chris Voss, David Mamet, Derren Brown, Harry Houdini, …

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Yesterday I got a message from Miro Skender, who is a personal development coach, one of the few successful ones in the small market of my home country, Croatia. Miro wrote (I’m translating freely):

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I mean, you and your book!!!! I start reading, then some quote or you mention somebody, so I have to Google or ChatGPT to find out more, then you mention somebody else and again, it’s like browser windows keep popping up on my computer on their own. Then I say, fuck it, I’m just going to read, two pages later I’m searching for my favorite comedian on YT 😂

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In case it’s not 100% clear, Miro is talking about my new 10 Commandments book. As for the engagement trick that’s making his browser tabs explode:

It’s a universal truth, one I’ve found to be very powerful in marketing and influence, and yet one I find lots of people ignoring to their own detriment, that it’s much easier to sell people than to sell ideas.

Ideas are shadowy and hard to grasp. It takes work and effort.

On the other hand, we all have big chunks of our brain dedicated to detecting, recognizing, and evaluating other people. It’s automatic.

You can apply this fundamental truth in a million ways, but here’s just one simple and practical one:

I ran ads on Amazon for my previous 10 Commandments book, about A-list copywriters. I tried ads based on keywords (eg. “stages of market sophistication”). I tried ads based on related book titles (eg. “Breakthrough Advertising”). But nothing worked as well as simply matching the names of people who are somehow connected to my book (eg. “Eugene Schwartz”).

I’m doing the same for this new 10 Commandments book. I’m running ads on Amazon for search terms like Gary Bencivenga, Milton Erickson, Chris Voss, David Mamet, Derren Brown, Harry Houdini, Jim Camp, Patrice O’Neal, Robert Cialdini…

… all of whom are somehow connected to my book. In case you would like to find out how, or to get sucked into my new book yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Offer

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A few days ago, I was listening to a call put on by Internet marketer Travis Sago.

I’ve promoted Travis heavily over the past couple months as an affiliate for his Royalty Ronin community, which I am a member of and happily pay for.

In case you somehow missed all that promotion, the background on Travis is that he used to have a big Clickbank business in the relationship niche.

He then started working with other online business owners to help them pull more money out of their own customer lists. He made millions for them and for himself doing this. He eventually started teaching other marketers how to do the same.

Travis also happens to be a master of email copy. I always describe him as a “nice guy Ben Settle.” Travis is the one who first turned me on to the power of insight in marketing, because he both teaches it and practices it.

Anyways, in that call I was listening to, Travis said the following about the kinds of emails his list likes the best:

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I see this in email lists too. They’re like, “Oh, I’ve gotta keep giving them amazing content all the time.”

My best stuff, what people people like best, is when I make offers.

Now you have to wrap — ever pill a dog? You have to put the pill in some cheese, right?

But they love it. I think people want to solve problems.

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Maybe Travis’s “pill a dog” analogy doesn’t read very elegantly here in a transcript. It sounds cuter in the live call with Travis’s perpetually cheery voice saying it.

In any case, taking a cue from Travis, I got an offer for you today.

Last year, Travis wrote a book called Make ‘Em Beg To Buy From You. That books sells for $9.99 on Amazon right now. It’s frankly a steal, because it contains large and key excerpts from Travis’s $2k course Phoneless Sales Machine, which is all about how to persuade people to buy expensive offers in the most efficient and easy way possible.

So, $9.99 on Amazon right now, and worth much more than that.

But I got a deal for you:

I made an agreement with Travis, and you can get a free copy of his Make ‘Em Beg To Buy From You (in PDF format) if you have already bought my new 10 Commandments book. Just sign up to get the “apocryphal Commandment XI” (link at the end of my new 10 Commandments book) and follow the instructions at the bottom of that extra chapter.

And if you haven’t yet gotten a copy of my new 10 Commandments book, you can do so here:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

God I hate marketing

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I was at the gym yesterday, listening to a Spanish-language podcast — two likeable and chill Mexican guys, Hector and Beto, having a conversation in Spanish about ordinary things.

Halfway through the episode, Hector said the Spanish equivalent of, “And now we have to tell you about our new sponsor.”

I ran to my phone in desperation so I could skip ahead before hearing anything about the sponsor. I still heard the guys continuing the conversation for a bit, now about a new language-learning app.

After I skipped past the sponsored content, I thought, how odd. I mean, I listen to this podcast for the comprehensible input, and because I like these two guys. What does it matter if they’re talking about the traffic in Mexico City versus some new language-learning app?

I recently had a conversation with my friend Sam. Somehow that conversation veered to the 90s TV drama My So-Called Life, which was supposed to represent the lives of teenagers at the time.

I remember the cool, hot guy in that show, played by Jared Leto, casually mentioning in one episode that he was going to a Dinosaur Jr. concert. That made my teen self dismiss Dinosaur Jr. for the next 15 years. I figured if they were being plugged on TV, they must be shit. (Later, I somehow rediscovered Dinosaur Jr. and thought they were amazing.)

The point is, I hate marketing. I use the word “hate” because it’s adequate to represent the strength of my feeling here. I hate having somebody step into my life and tell me what to think or do, or worse yet, helpfully “suggest” it in a way that seems altruistic but that is of course self-interested.

And yet…

I have frequently bought stuff because I was marketed to. I have bought courses, subscriptions, clothes, food, shoes, and books because of marketing.

I’ve also bought experiences — hotel rooms, trips, rental cars, conferences, and one time, a hot-air-baloon ride — because somebody marketed it to me.

I’ve probably made even more fundamental choices in life — universities to apply to, cities to live in, careers to choose, attitudes to believe in — based on marketing.

In each of those cases, had I thought about the marketing at all, I would have been grateful for the guidance and help, at least at the moment of purchase, and if the actual product or service turned out to be good, later as well.

Aaron Sorkin once talked about good manipulation vs. bad manipulation. “There’s no difference,” said Sorkin. “It’s only when manipulation is obvious, then it’s bad manipulation.”

I used to think Sorkin was right. I don’t think so any more.

I don’t think it’s about obvious vs. non-obvious.

Good manipulation is simply the manipulation that ends up working. At least that’s what I can see in myself.

When somebody successfully manipulates me, I backwards rationalize and justify and tell myself that I am grateful and this person is cool for cluing me in and guiding and taking me to some place better or at least new.

Bad manipulation, on the other hand, is the kind that ends up not working.

No matter how helpful, funny, cute, informative the manipulation aims to be, I end up interpreting it at best as a distraction, at worst as an insult to my intelligence and self-sovereignty.

All that’s to say, if you want to influence others — and unless you’re a Carmelite nun, who lives according to a vow of total obedience, then you try to influence others most of the time — you might as well become effective at it.

It’s not only a matter of getting what you want in life more often, but also of being seen as a cool, helpful person more often, rather than as a distraction or a “manipulator.”

And with that, I’d like to remind you of my new 10 Commandments book. Much of the book deals with techniques to overcome people’s natural tendency to resist and react being moved — even though they will end up happy and grateful if you do succeed in moving them.

Specifically, Commandments I-V, Commandments VIII-IX, and the apocryphal 11th commandment that I give away as a bonus at the end of the book, are all one way or another about this tricky and inevitable conflict in human nature.

In case you haven’t gotten a copy of my new book yet:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Paperback

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A long-time reader named Jordan writes in reponse to my announcement yesterday, about the ebook version of my new 10 Commandments book being live on Amazon:

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I’ll wait for the paperback to be ready, I’ve found digital copies more likely to go unread (since like courses, the digital backlog always seems bigger and more step requiring than physical ones)

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I’m telling you this because:

1. There might be something to what Jordan says.

I know direct marketing legends like Dan Kennedy bang the drum about the value of physical content arriving in the mail, both for the excitement of actually getting something real delivered, and for the fact it will hang around the house and be visible and be more likely to be consumed, shared, and remembered.

2. Because the Amazon elves have finally woken up and done their job, so the paperback version of my book is now up and live.

If you like the sight of a book lying on your desk, or you want a reference you can reach for without relying on anything digital, or you simply enjoy the feel of some paper and ink in your hands:

​https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments​