I don’t beg pardon for good results, and you don’t have to either

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Yesterday, I made a new offer, Authority Audit. One of the first people to take me up on it wrote:

===

You really know your audience (or at least it seems like you’re reading my mind.) This is exactly what I’ve been thinking about, to the point of even redoing all my optins and email sequences. But I know I should be getting way more out of what I got… so thank you for the offer.

===

The fact is, I got more people ordering these Authority Audits than I really want to do. I certainly don’t want still more. So I closed the offer down, even sooner than I expected to.

Yes, I’m telling you this to build up my own standing and authority. I’m also telling you as a permission slip in case you need it.

If you got good results, don’t beg pardon for them. Tell your prospects about your results to help them make up their own minds. Take away their confusion and uncertainty, so they themselves can get some of those good results in the future.

But what if you don’t got results yet? One dude interested in the Authority Audit wrote:

===

Would this go well for someone that’s starting from scratch?

for a background:

Hated social media and only started one to build some sort of “inbound” system of client acquisition

my plan to write articles and content a la Chris Orzechowski but I’ve yet to find what value is and how to define it.

this is the only concern I have as you’ve proven to be the best at what you do.

===

I replied to say that, in his case, there wouldn’t be much for me to review or audit.

I also told him that next week, I will be promoting an offer that might be a better fit — a new training (not my own) for getting clients. For figuring out exactly what value you offer. For defining it in exactly your prospect’s words. So you can start getting leads, clients, results, even if you don’t got ’em yet.

But that’s next week.

For today, I have a little authority- and status-building tip for you.

It’s hidden inside my Most Valuable Email course, as an aside.

​​It has nothing to do with the actual training of the course. Rather it’s something that’s been valuable to me, and so I decided to take a little aside while talking about the MVE trick to share it with people who buy the course.

It’s a little habit you can start today, and tomorrow, to transform how you see yourself and how potential clients and customers see you. It’s something I wish somebody had told me years ago, when I was just starting out. And it’s something that amplifies, rather than clashes with, that client-getting training I will be promoting next week.

​​In case you’re interested:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Announcing: Authority Audit

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I’m reading a book called The Charterhouse of Parma. It was written in 1838 by a guy named Stendhal, who Friedrich Nietzsche called the “last great psychologist.”

​​The Charterhouse of Parma is all about the love affairs and political intrigues at the court of Parma.

​​Two of the main characters are aging count Mosca, who is the prime minister, and his lover, the beautiful and clever duchess Sanseverina.

​​The two plan on running away from their problems in Parma to live in peace in Naples — but they won’t really have much money if they run away. To which the count rightly tells the duchess:

“It will never be the luxury, greater or less, in which we live, that will insure our position; it will be the pleasure the clever folk of the place may find in drinking a cup of tea in your drawing room.”

I wrote this down because I really think it’s true. It’s good to have the trappings of success, and no doubt they will buy you some standing. But it’s poor gruel compared to the endorsement and approval of people who already have standing.

I’ve got a new offer for you today. It’s cheap. I won’t keep it up long. It’s called the Authority Audit.

Over the past year I’ve consulted and coached a few dozen business owners, course creators, coaches, marketers, and copywriters. I’ve found that my feedback on their personal marketing often comes back to the same few fundamental mistakes.

One of these fundamental mistakes is insufficient authority, status, standing. Not in reality usually, but as presented in the marketing itself.

So my offer with the Authority Audit is that I look at who you are and how you present that to the world. And I tell you where you are falling short on the status and authority part. I tell you how you can use what you’ve already got to look much more authoritative. I tell you how you can quickly build up more status to plug up any holes you might actually have.

Like I said, I’m making this offer cheap, $100. You might say that’s a mistake, and that it’s working against my own status and authority. To which I would say — you’re absolutely right.

The reason why the Authority Audit is so cheap is that I want to take what I might tell you and apply it more consciously myself. Because I too am guilty of the same mistakes often.

I’m also planning to create a more in-depth, much more expensive training about this later. And I plan to use any Authority Audits I perform as material for that future training.

I won’t be offering the Authority Audit long, 2-3 days max, and I will close it off without any ceremony and announcement. I also won’t go into detail here as to how it will be organized and delivered.

That’s why I suggest you only get the Authority Audit if you suspect that you’re not doing a good job convincing the world you are somebody… if you can afford $100 right now… and if you already trust me.

​​If all three are true of you, you can order your Authority Audit here:

https://desertkite.thrivecart.com/authority-audit/

The opportunity of the two-sentence newsletter

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Yesterday, I wrote about Sparkloop. It’s a way to monetize your newsletter by promoting other newsletters.

I am using Sparkloop to make some money in the early days of my own health newsletter. I make a few shekels right at signup time (thanks to the coregistration screen that pops up right after somebody opts in). I make a few more shekels with in-line newsletter recommendations each week when I send out a new issue.

I could make more money if I emailed more often. But the weekly schedule already costs me a lot of time, plus I already have this daily marketing newsletter you are reading now. Who’s got time for more daily emails?

I wanna tell you my plan, which you are free to use yourself.

I got it from marketer Josh Spector. Once upon a time, Josh started out by sending a typical “creator economy” newsletter. You know — once a week, a bunch of curated links, some how-to advice.

But then Josh did something really unique. I don’t know if it was his idea originally, but it was certainly the first time I’d seen it.

Josh started a daily newsletter. But instead of aggregating dozens of links or writing hundreds of words of personal content, Josh’s newsletter was typically just two sentences.

One sentence had a bit of intriguing content. The second sentence had an offer. Kind of like this:

===

SUBJECT: The opportunity of the two-sentence newsletter [<== intriguing, bullet-like subject line]

I’ve written up the entire business plan here. [<== minimal content that typically links out to another blog, podcast, newsletter]

***

Today’s email is brought to you by a daily newsletter that embodies the idea above. [<== The promo. That’s a link to Josh’s newsletter by the way]

===

Josh monetizes this daily newsletter by 1) selling that ad spot for $350 or 2) by promoting offers of his own choosing, including other newsletters via Sparkloop.

The nice thing is that creating this kind of content is as close as you can get to effortless, particularly if you are writing a newsletter in a niche that interest you.

But even if you go into an entirely foreign niche, you should be able to gather dozens of interesting tips and write dozens of these two-line emails in a couple hours’ time.

Does it really work? I can tell you that I bought one of Josh’s $350 ads. I got hundreds of clicks to my own (marketing) newsletter, close to a hundred signups, and I actually made sales to some of those new readers in the first 30 days, to the point where I almost paid for the entire ad.

In other words, people read these quick and simple emails, and they act based on them.

So here’s a business plan that pulls all this together:

1. Pick a niche. For reasons that I will tell you in a second, I can suggest “parenting” or “business opportunities” as niches.

2. Run ads either on Facebook or Twitter to get subscribers to your newsletter. You should be able to get new subscribers for at most $2-$3.

3. Monetize right away with Sparkloop’s Upscribe to recoup some (or all) of your ad cost on day zero.

4. Send 2-sentence daily emails with 1) a tip to give people something interesting and 2) a newsletter recommendation.

This is why I recommended parenting or business opportunities above. They are big markets, with lots of interest in general. Plus, based on my research into which newsletters are available to promote on Sparkloop, you will have endless, high-quality, relevant options to promote, each paying you $2-$3 per new subscriber.

5. And that’s it. Keep repeating, keep growing, and you will soon be able to, in the words of David Mamet, “BUY A HOUSE IN BEL AIR AND HIRE SOMEONE TO LIVE THERE FOR YOU.”

I myself am planning to complement my own weekly health newsletter with such a quick daily email newsletter, and do just what I’ve told you above.

There’s no reason why you can’t do it as well, even if you have few resources right now beyond the device — laptop or phone — that are reading this post on.

Of course, a crucial part is Sparkloop, which gives you something easy and attractive to promote, even when you have zero other offers.

If you’d like to sign up to Sparkloop, for free, and start putting the business plan above into action right now, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/sparkloop

AI bros make $4.20, I make $0.36, it’s still a win

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A couple weeks ago, I read a mostly mindboggling email from Scott Oldford, who has been buying up newsletters and newsletter-related services.

Scott’s email was all about about an AI newsletter he bought recently for some undisclosed sum.

The acquired newsletter has 22,000 subscribers. Its creators have been running Facebook ads to get new readers, and paying $1.40 per new reader.

So far, so grim. But please pay attention to the next fact, because it’s remarkable:

That AI newsletter was making 3x that ad spend right at signup time, right when people opted in, without selling anything.

Did that last line make you pull down your glasses to the tip of your nose, and look at me with suspicion? It should have.

Direct response logic says that if you can acquire a customer at breakeven or slight loss, you’re doing well.

Granted, these newsletter subscribers aren’t necessarily customers, but they are a list of people who are potential customers, and they are certainly valuable as an audience in other ways.

Now let me repeat the rather shocking point again:

These AI bros are building that list of subscribers, not at a slight loss, not at cost, but actually getting paid 3x what they put in to acquire each new reader.

What tricky flamingos. How are they doing it?

Well, that’s my offer for you today. It’s called Sparkloop. It’s basically a network of coregistration partners.

If you’ve ever signed up for a Substack newsletter, you’ve seen this approach in action. Once you opt in, a window of newsletter recommendations pops up. “Would you like some more, sir?” it says. And there on the plate are 3 or 4 or 20 different other newsletters, which you can opt into with just a click o’ the button.

That’s what Sparkloop does as well, except it’s not limited to Substack newsletters only, but it can be integrated on almost any platform.

That’s how those AI bros were making 3x their ad spend right at optin time, without selling anything. They had Sparkloop installed, and they were recommending a bunch of other Sparkloop-network newsletters.

Now a word of disclosure:

I have been using Sparkloop myself. Its little window pops up when somebody signs up to my new health newsletter. I have made money from Sparkloop. But it’s nowhere close to what this AI newsletter is making.

The fact is, I’m not making $4.20 per new subscriber… but more like $0.36, at least on day 0.

Still, money is money, and Sparkloop is helping me offset the cost of ads I’ve been running.

Plus, Sparkloop allows you to promote newsletters inside your newsletter as well, which means that if you email regularly and promote other newsletters each time you email, you can hope to make a buck or two more per subscriber in the very first month.

So there you go. If you have a newsletter, and have nothing great to promote yet… or you’re simply looking for other ways to monetize your email list… then try out Sparkloop. I’ve done it, it works, and I’m happy to recommend it to others.

You can sign up for Sparkloop at the link below. Yes, that’s an affiliate link. Yes, I will get paid if you sign up. No, you don’t have to use this link, and no, I won’t ever know if you circumvent my link and go straight to Sparkloop and sign up there. But in case you don’t want to do that:

https://bejakovic.com/sparkloop

“So where are we all supposed to go now?”

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A couple days ago, an article on The Verge by David Pierce picked up steam and then really started chugging along, tearing through any obstacles in its path, and demanding the attention and concern even of slack-jawed layabouts who were minding their own business just moments earlier. The title of Pierce’s article:

“So where are we all supposed to go now?”

Pierce was writing about how social media — first Facebook, then Twitter, now Reddit — are dying. And what, he wanted to know, will be next?

I know all about this because I’m a painfully contrary person. After about 20 years of resisting social media, I am now getting on social media full on.

First, I got on Twitter a couple months ago (under a pseudonym). That’s how I came across that runaway Verge article. And I will also most probably get on LinkedIn in the next few days (under my own name).

I figure what others, smarter than I am, have already figured out:

Maybe social media is a cesspool, and maybe it’s now dying to boot. But there are still billions of people on there. I only need a small and select fraction of those people to do very well.

My ultimate goal — as you can probably guess — is to get these people onto my email lists, either this one that you’re reading now, or my new health newsletter. That’s how I can write to them regularly, with something interesting or valuable, and build a relationship, and even do business and exchange money for my offers.

So what will come after Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit? Where are we all supposed to go now?

I don’t know, and I don’t particularly care. Because I use a mental shortcut known as the Lindy Law, which says that you can expect technology to survive on average as long as it’s already been around.

Email has been around for 52 years, longer than the Internet as we know it.

Will email still be around 52 years from now? Who knows. I figure its odds are better than any new technology that comes out today or tomorrow.

But you probably knew all this before. What you might not know — something that surprised me yesterday — is that there’s an email platform called Beehiiv.

I promoted Beehiiv in my email yesterday, and I gave people a bit of a carrot-and-stick to sign up for a free account on Beehiiv using my affiliate link.

I got lots of people taking me up on the offer, and I got lots of people thanking me for cluing them in to Beehiiv. That’s the part that was surprising to me — so many people had not heard of Beehiiv before.

I personally use Beehiiv, I’m very happy with it, and that’s why I’m happy to recommend it. As for why you might want to try it for your new newsletter or project, here’s my best case for that:

===

Beehiiv is slick and it has a buncha tools that other email providers don’t have. Like a nice-looking website, straight out of the box, that doubles as your email archive. A referral program. Recommendations from and to other newsletters. An ad network if you want to monetize your newsletter that way.

Just as important:

More than any other email platform I’ve directly used or indirectly heard about, Beehiiv is stable and reliable. It doesn’t crash. It doesn’t lock up. It doesn’t fail to send out emails you meant to send and it doesn’t sneakily send out emails you didn’t mean to send.

But really, try it out for yourself and see. Maybe it’s not for you. Or maybe you will love it.

There’s no risk either way. Because Beehiiv is free to start using and to continue using indefinitely — for sending emails and for the website.

You only have to pay something if you wanna upgrade to some of the fancier growth and monetization tools — which I’ve done, because it’s well-worth the money for me, and because I’ve decided to stick with Beehiiv for the long term.

So like I said, I encourage you to give it a try. But—

I know that encouragement, and good arguments, and lists of shiny features, are often not enough to get people to move.

So I’ll give you a bit of a carrot-and-stick too.

Over the past two months, I’ve grown my new newsletter from 73 subscribers to 1,109 subscribers.

And if you try out Beehiiv using my affiliate link, I will send you a recording in which I talk about all the stuff I’ve done to grow that newsletter — what’s worked, what hasn’t, what I plan to do going forward. (I’ll even tell you some stuff I’m planning to do to grow this daily marketing newsletter that you’re reading right now.)

Also, here’s another thing I promise to give you:

I had some deliverability problems early on with my new newsletter. It turned out not to be Beehiiv’s fault. Rather it was that I had failed to set up my DNS right. I fixed that, and my deliverability problems got fixed. But I went one further.

I also came up with a little trick to increase my deliverability going forward and even to increase my open rates.

This trick has nothing to do with DMARC or DKIM records. It has nothing to do with trying to game Gmail. It’s just plain old marketing and psychology. And it’s allowed me to actually increase my open rates while my list has grown quickly and sizeably.

This trick is not complicated — it takes all of five minutes to implement.

And if you take me up on my offer and try out Beehiiv, I will send you a quick writeup of exactly what I did, and how you can do it too, to have the kinds of deliverability and reader engagement that other newsletters can only wonder at.

So that’s the carrot. The stick, or the threat of it, is that there’s a deadline, 24 hours from now, at 8:31pm CET on Thursday, July 6.

If you’re interested, here’s what to do:

1. Head to Beehiiv using this link: https://bejakovic.com/beehiiv

2. Sign up for a free account. You don’t have to sign up for anything paid. I am counting on Beehiiv’s quality and service to convince you to do that over time.

3. Once you’ve signed up, forward me the confirmation email you get from Beehiiv — and I will reply to you with 1) the recording listing all the things I’ve done and will be doing to grow my new newsletter and 2) a write up of my little deliverability and email open trick. Do it before the deadline — 8:31pm CET on Thursday, July 6 — and you get the carrot, and not the stick. ​​

What I’m doing to grow my new newsletter

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I’ve mentioned on a few occasions that I’ve started a new newsletter in the health space.

I’ve had several readers of my daily marketing emails write me to say they want to sign up to my new health newsletter. I turned them away, at least for the moment.

Why do I need a buncha marketers checking out what I do?

Maybe I’m paranoid, but I’ve decided to keep my new project under wraps at least until I dig an 18-foot-deep moat around it, and fill that moat with murky and cold water, and populate the water with several thousand piranhas and two silent and very large crocodiles.

But I will tell you a few things about my new newsletter that might interest you.

First, I’m using Beehiiv as an email platform. I’m so happy with Beehiiv that I’ve decided to promote it. You can find my affiliate link below.

If you’re looking for new email platform for a new project or an existing newsletter, I encourage you to give Beehiiv a try.

It’s slick and it has a buncha tools that other email providers don’t have. Like a nice-looking website, straight out of the box, that doubles as your email archive. A referral program. Recommendations from and to other newsletters. An ad network if you want to monetize your newsletter that way.

Just as important:

More than any other email platform I’ve directly used or indirectly heard about, Beehiiv is stable and reliable. It doesn’t crash. It doesn’t lock up. It doesn’t fail to send out emails you meant to send and it doesn’t sneakily send out emails you didn’t mean to send.

But really, try it out for yourself and see. Maybe it’s not for you. Or maybe you will love it.

There’s no risk either way. Because Beehiiv is free to start using and to continue using indefinitely — for sending emails and for the website.

You only have to pay something if you wanna upgrade to some of the fancier growth and monetization tools — which I’ve done, because it’s well-worth the money for me, and because I’ve decided to stick with Beehiiv for the long term.

So like I said, I encourage you to give it a try. But—

I know that encouragement, and good arguments, and lists of shiny features, are often not enough to get people to move.

So I’ll give you a bit of a carrot-and-stick too.

Here’s the second thing I’ll tell you about my new newsletter.

Over the past two months, I’ve grown my new newsletter from 73 subscribers to 1,109 subscribers.

​​And if you try out Beehiiv using my affiliate link, I will send you a recording in which I talk about all the stuff I’ve done to grow that newsletter — what’s worked, what hasn’t, what I plan to do going forward. (I’ll even tell you some stuff I’m planning to do to grow this daily marketing newsletter that you’re reading right now.)

Also, here’s a third thing:

I had some deliverability problems early on with my new newsletter. It turned out not to be Beehiiv’s fault. Rather it was that I had failed to set up my DNS right. I fixed that, and my deliverability problems got fixed. But I went one further.

I also came up with a little trick to increase my deliverability going forward and even to increase my open rates.

This trick has nothing to do with DMARC or DKIM records. It has nothing to do with trying to game Gmail. It’s just plain old marketing and psychology. And it’s allowed me to actually increase my open rates while my list has grown quickly and sizeably.

This trick is not complicated — it takes all of five minutes to implement.

​​And if you take me up on my offer and try out Beehiiv, I will send you a quick writeup of exactly what I did, and how you can do it too, to have the kinds of deliverability and reader engagement that other newsletters can only wonder at.

So that’s the carrot. The stick, or the threat of it, is that there’s a deadline, 48 hours from now, at 8:31pm CET on Thursday, July 6.

If you’re interested, here’s what to do:

1. Head to Beehiiv using this link: https://bejakovic.com/beehiiv

2. Sign up for a free account. You don’t have to sign up for anything paid. I am counting on Beehiiv’s quality and service to convince you to do that over time.

3. Once you’ve signed up, forward me the confirmation email you get from Beehiiv — and I will reply to you with 1) the recording listing all the things I’ve done and will be doing to grow my new newsletter and 2) a write up of my little deliverability and email open trick. Do it before the deadline — 8:31pm CET on Thursday, July 6 — and you get the carrot, and not the stick.

I saw a funambulist yesterday and I suspect I can do what he does

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Yesterday, I found myself in the middle of a hushed crowd. Everyone was looking up.

Then the crowd collectively gasped, started clapping, and cheered. My girlfriend turned around and started to jokingly shush the people closest to her. “Let the man concentrate!”

Yesterday, a funambulist — a tightrope walker — made his way some 200 meters from one corner of Plaça de Catalunya, the central square in Barcelona, across Passeig de Gracia, the main shopping street in Barcelona.

Halfway across, about 120 feet in the air, the man stopped. He sat down cross-legged on the tight-rope. After a few moments of what looked like comfortable meditation, with the his shirt rippling in the wind, he stood up and kept walking.

Instead of stopping at the end, he turned around and decided to walk back to the start. The crowd underneath was following him like a shadow on the ground.

The funambulist came back to the midpoint of the tight-rope. Slowly and carefully, he lay down on his back on the rope, his arms out to the sides.

This lying down, and the bit of cross-legged sitting before it, looked kind of tricky.

The rest of the time though, the guy was just walking.

He didn’t have one of those balancing poles. Instead, he just kept his arms up and used them to balance. He steadily put one bare foot in front of the other, occasionally shifting his weight a bit, moving his arms a little. That’s it.

I wouldn’t like to be up that high in the air. But really, this tight-rope walking, which I’ve never attempted in my life, looks pretty easy.

Of course, that’s because I know nothing about it. Odds are, if I ever tried to walk on a tight-rope slung two feet off the ground between two trees, I would find it very hard to pull off, very tiring, requiring enormous balance. I would probably find myself falling off over and over, after just a step or two.

Still, it looks easy.

In my email yesterday, I made an unusual offer. I’m trying to get rid of my Copy Riddles course. I’m no longer selling it myself, so I’m looking to find a person who would like to take it from me, along with all the rights to it, and sell it, change it, do whatever with it.

Copy Riddles ties into that tightrope walker’s act. A-list level sales copy looks easy. A bit of intrigue, balanced with a benefit or two, steadily marching towards the order form.

If, like me when I first started writing copy, you think you can do what A-list copywriters do, then you should try to do it yourself.

That’s what Copy Riddles is all about. You get to write copy, starting from the same prompt that A-list copywriters started from. And you find out very quickly how much skill and effort and tricks are involved in producing what they produce.

Surprisingly, I got multiple serious responses to my offer yesterday. I got back to everyone. We will see if any of these negotiations bear fruit.

But I’ve found that, whenever I get several responses to a new offer with just one email, there are inevitably people who didn’t see that email, or meant to reply but didn’t get to it. Plus, since this is an unusual sale, the final details of it are likely to be fluid — depending on who the eventual buyer is and what his or her goals and current situation are.

For all those reasons, I’m writing you again with the same offer. If you are interested in owning the rights to Copy Riddles, so you can sell it and profit from it, then write me, and we can start talking about how that might work.

Would you like to take Copy Riddles off my hands?

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A couple months ago, I stopped selling my flagship course, Copy Riddles.

​​Copy Riddles was based on a Gary Halbert’s advice for how to learn to write bullets — look at the bullets written by the best copywriters, look at the book or course those bullets were selling, and see how the copywriter did his alchemy to transmute lead into gold.

I had various reasons for retiring Copy Riddles. I wrote about one of them in an earlier email. But even if I had no good reasons initially, the fact that I’ve publicly announced that I’m retiring the course means I won’t bring it back.

Frank Sinatra retired in 1971. “I have sung my last song for the public,” he said with a sigh. Fans were shocked. But then, 2 years later, Frank came back with a TV special, Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back, and he started touring again.

Ol’ Blue Eyes could get away with that, but you won’t see Ol’ Bejako doing it, in spite of several people writing to tell me that not selling Copy Riddles is a crime. I’ve simply found it easier to keep my word as a general life policy.

At the same time, I’m genuinely proud of Copy Riddles as a course, and there are people who say there is significant tonnage to what they’ve learned about copywriting from it.

So a few days ago, while I should have been washing myself but was instead just standing in the shower and thinking, I had an idea.

Could I sell the rights to Copy Riddles to somebody else?

Like I said, I don’t want to be the one selling it to the public any more.

But there’s clearly demand for the course, even with my absolute lack of promotion of the thing. Maybe somebody else would like to own the rights to Copy Riddles and sell it himself or herself.

With the tiniest bit of work, you could get affiliates lined up — for example, I’ve had Derek Johanson of CopyHour promote Copy Riddles in the past. I’ve had Bob Bly agree to promote it right before I decided to retire it. And Daniel Throssell asked to promote it right after I retired it.

If you’ve already got a list of people interested in copywriting, you could sell Copy Riddles to your list directly — the thing regularly brought in 5-figure paydays for me when I re-launched it every few months, and that’s with my small list that had seen the offer a lot.

Plus, maybe you could even run cold traffic straight to the sales page. I can’t say with any certainty it would be a winner, but I did talk to A-list copywriter Lorrie Morgan recently, and she was telling me what a good sales letter I’d written for Copy Riddles. Plus, I wrote it in an impersonal way, to be convincing to somebody who doesn’t know anything about me personally and who hasn’t read any of my emails.

All these are just ideas.

​​I don’t know if anybody is interested in taking Copy Riddles off my hands, or really how this would work. But I am intrigued by the potential.

​​If you are intrigued as well, and if you are serious about the idea of buying the rights for Copy Riddles from me, write me to say so, and we can start a conversation around it.

How the mosquito built Rome

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In my email yesterday, I wrote about my home town’s curious plan to stop the coming mosquito hordes by importing a hundred thousand sterile mosquito males. To which I got a mosquito-themed reply from an Insights & More member named Jordan (not sure he wants me to share his last name):

===

The talk about mosquitoes and books reminds me of the… mosquito book.

The Mosquito – Timothy Winegard

It’s actually very very interesting and showcases:

How the mosquito Built Rome
How the mosquito bested one of the greatest conquerors
How the mosquito ended slavery

(hows that for bullet point build out)

===

I found this intriguing so I looked it up and yes — it turns out there’s a credible case to be made for the mosquito having built Rome.

​​In its early days, Rome was surrounded by hundreds of square miles of wetland, called the Pontine Marshes. Perfect for mosquitos. Perfect for malaria. Perfect for dying. Says Winegard:

“Armies coming to attack Rome — beginning with Hannibal and the Carthaginians, and then the Visigoths, Attila and his Huns, and the Vandals — couldn’t essentially either take or hold Rome because of this malarial shield.”

Based on a quick search, it seems Winegard’s Mosquito book gives you:

1. Lots of surprising or even contrary ideas like the one above

2. A credible, well-researched reinterpretation of history

3. A new context for familiar things

… all of which means it might make a perfect choice for the Insights & More Book Club in the future.

Speaking of, the same Jordan who wrote me about the Mosquito book earlier wrote me about the last Insights & More book, the one we just finished. He said:

===

The book was mind blowing (even thought I havent finished it yet)

Can’t wait for my first call experience and the next book

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It’s unfortunately too late to join for the next round of the Insights & More Book Club, because the doors have closed. But if you’d like to have the chance to join in the future, get on my email list. It’s the only place where I actually advertise and open up my book club.

1 mosquito summer lover ~ 3-4 books

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Yesterday, I was at the gym in my home town of Zagreb, Croatia — and for a brief moment, I was amused.

The gym is the daily break in my monk-like life, where I make a bit of contact with the outside world and find out what’s going on.

And so it was yesterday. The radio was blasting. In between the parade of 80s hits — Duran Duran, Guns N’ Roses — a newswoman came on the radio with the following announcement:

“NEWSFLASH: The city of Zagreb will be importing 100,000 mosquitos this summer. From Italy. All males. And all sterile.”

Apparently this is the best idea the local authorities have to control the rampant mosquito population in this crowded, marshy city.

And it’s not such a crazy idea:

The males mate several times throughout the season. The females mate only once. If a female happens to mate with a sterile male, she will still lay her evil mosquito eggs, but those won’t develop into buzzing, bloodsucking, sleep-destroying future monsters. Checkmate, mosquito bitches.

I remember a similar story some twenty years ago, after Neil Strauss published his book The Game.

The Game brought the secret world of pick up artists out of dark and sticky Internet bulletin boards and exposed it to the light of the mainstream.

I remember the outrage that many women expressed upon finding out that there’s a population of men who are gaming the signals of social status and sexual attractiveness.

And who can blame these women?

If you invest in something, and invest big, you want to make sure that investment will be fertile.

That applies to mates, human and mosquito… to business partners… to clients… to employers… to employees… and to teachers your learn from.

Maybe you see where I’m going with this.

I personally believe books are the best teachers in the world. Unfortunately, as James Altucher once calculated, we each have at most 1,000 books left to us for the rest of our lives.

Some of us, like me, read very slowly, and our number is significantly less than 1,000. That translates to 3-4 books each summer.

So you better make sure that each of those 3-4 interactions counts, and each of those learning opportunities is fertile, rather than sterile.

Which brings me to my Insights & More Book Club. The doors are currently open. They will close tomorrow at 12 midnight PST.

The promise of the Insights & More Book Club is top-quality books, filled with surprising ideas. As for all the other details, well, you will have to sign up to my daily email newsletter to find those out. You can do so here.