How to make your content eternally interesting even if it’s not very “good”

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During my 11 years living in Budapest, Hungary, I walked up and down Nagymező street perhaps a thousand times. Each time, I looked up at the Robert Capa museum and I told myself, “I should really go there.”

As you might know, Robert Capa was one of the most famous and influential photographers of the 20th century. What you might not know is that the man’s real name was Endre Friedmann, and he was Hungarian – hence the museum on Nagymező utca.

I did eventually make it to that museum, and I did eventually find out some curious Robert Capa facts. They might be useful to you if you write or take photos or build elaborate Lego creations.

​​For example:

Capa published his first photo as a freelance journalist in 1932. The photo showed Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky giving a speech in Copenhagen.

The photo is a little blurry and Trotsky’s hand is in front of his face. But there is an undeniable energy in the shot — you can almost hear the dogmatic and impassioned Marxist on stage.

Capa really made his name a few years later, in 1936. His photograph of a loyalist soldier during the Spanish civil war, falling after being shot, has become one of the most famous photos of the 20th century.

During World War II, Capa took pictures of the Allied landing in Normandy, and he took photos of the liberation of Paris.

After WWII, Capa hung out with and photographed famous and celebrated artists — Henri Matisse, John Steinbeck, Alfred Hitchcock.

There’s a photo from the summer of 1948 that Capa took, which shows an old man grinning as he holds a baby on the beach. It could be any old photo of any old grandpa with his grandson — except that old man is Pablo Picasso, and the grandson is actually Picasso’s son, Claude.

The point is this:

Capa made a point of going to out-of-the-way places, meeting important and influential people, being at the right spot at the right moment. Many of his photographs are not technically great or even very good. But they are inherently interesting — even today, almost a hundred years later — because of their content.

The past few days I’ve been promoting my Insight Exposed training. That training talks about the tools to capture snapshots, and the process for developing those snapshots into something valuable.

But what’s the content of those snapshots? If the content is plain, familiar, or uninteresting in itself, you will have to work hard to turn those snapshots into something interesting and insightful.

On the other hand, if you make a point of going to out-of-the-way places, meeting important and influential people, being at the right spot at the right moment, you won’t have to be technically great or even very good. Your work will be inherently interesting because of the content. So I talk all about that in the final section of Insight Exposed.

Insight Exposed is an offer I am only making available for people who are signed up to my email list. If you’d like to get Insight Exposed or you’d like to get on my email list, then click here and fill out the form that appears.

I tried to make this email light and fluffy and still potentially valuable

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Two weeks ago, I got a check in the mail for $1,000. A real, physical check, landing in a real, physical mailbox, in Baltimore, MD, some 3,750 miles or 6,040 kilometers away from where I actually live now.

The backstory is t​hat last December, I wrote four articles for the Professional Writers Alliance.

​​It was great opportunity — write a few easy articles, promote myself to a list of copywriters, and even get paid for it. ​​​​$1,000 — that’s 42.5 movie nights for a couple, at an average ticket price of $11.75, if I can stay disciplined and not buy any popcorn.

But not just that.

​​I’m even supposed to get an extra $100 — that’s 4.25 more movie nights, no popcorn — after I do a kind of private podcast interview next week with Jen Adams from PWA. ​​Hopefully, it won’t be a check again because that first check is still languishing at a friend’s house in Baltimore, I imagine under a growing pile of magazines and takeout boxes.

I’m telling you all this because of the strange chain of events that led to this $1,000 check.

I wrote those PWA articles about my experience self-publishing my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters on Amazon.

I wrote that book, as I’ve shared many times before, based on James Altucher’s “I plagiarized” blog post, which I read the first time back in January 2020.

I discovered James’s blog a short time earlier because Mark Ford linked to it in his email newsletter.

I signed up Mark Ford’s newsletter maybe back in 2018, because Mark is a big name in the direct response world. I kept reading after I signed up because I in some way identified with Mark, or at least I identified the kind of person I might like to one day to be with Mark.

Maybe the point of the above chain of events is obvious to you. Maybe it’s not.

If not, you can find it explained in section 3.3 of my Insight Exposed training. You might potentially find that explanation valuable, and even enjoyable, at least in the long term. Insight Exposed is only available to people who are signed up to my email list. If you’d like to sign up to my list, you can do that here.

SEO Sauron makes a prophecy abot the coming “Age of Men”

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A few months ago, I heard a depressing yet hopeful interview with Jon Morrow.

​​Maybe you know Morrow – he is a kind of Sauron of SEO, who has spawned immense armies of SEO writers within the fires of his online fortress, which in the tongue of men is called Mount Smart Blogger.

But in the same way that the destruction of the One Ring caused Mount Doom to crumble and instantly destroyed Sauron’s vast armies, so a new force — AI — threatens Mount Smart Blogger and Morrow’s numberless hordes of vicious SEO writers.

Morrow, to his credit, is fully aware and forthright about this. In the interview, he even says he’s been preparing for it all by creating courses on using AI for writing filler content. He’s also launching some kind of new AI-based email writing service, I guess to drive down the cost of email copy to the the level of SEO articles.

That was the depressing part of the interview. All that talk of SEO writing, of millions of words of filler content just to please Google, of poor minions getting paid 10 cents per word to create it.

But there was also a hopeful part.​​ During this interview, Morrow also talked about the coming age.

In that future world, Morrow believes, a lot of what used to set content apart will no longer work. Depth of information… drama in the form of stories… really incredible design… new data to share. All of that former magic will disappear, because it will become an automated commodity.

Is there anything left for men to do? Well, Morrow thinks so, and that was the part I found hopeful. From the interview:

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Saying things that are genuinely new ideas, genuinely new types of thought leadership. My prediction is, in the world of AI, it’s the only one that’s going to have long-term value.

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Like I said, I found this hopeful. All the technical, mechanical stuff drops away, and we are left with appreciating ideas, sharing ideas, building ideas.

I don’t look at this as the “world of AI.” I look at it as the coming “Age of Men.”

Anyways, if you think Morrow might be right in his prophecy, then it might make sense to, like Morrow, start preparing now.

I’ll tell you one added thing I believe about this future world:

There are no “genuinely new” ideas, not really. But you don’t need genuinely new ideas. You just need ideas will be genuinely new to the people you communicate with.

This is something I talk more about in Part 3 of my Insight Exposed training. I also list specific habits I practice to dig up ideas that are new to my audience, and give my best how-to suggestions for how you can do the same.

Insight Exposed is a course I am only making available to people who are signed up to my email list. If you’d like to get on my list, click here and fill out the form that appears.

“Nothing you suggest is working”

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Yesterday, I got an email from a reader who was trying to buy my Insight Exposed program. The order page was popping up an error message telling him his password was wrong — but there was no place to put in any kind of password.

I wrote back to this reader, explaining the two-step process to get rid of this error message. A few minutes later, he wrote back to say:

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Thanks for writing.

Nothing you suggest is working.

I am inept at things like this. Is there a thing called computer log in voodoo?

However even I have to say that IMHO your order page malfunction is probably costing a lot of money.

Just sayin, for your sake. And mine too because I do WANT TO BUY YOUR INSIGHT EXPOSED.

please help.

P.S. I do love reading your emails. I love your style and good spirit.

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As soon as I read this message, I remembered Tony Robbins. When Tony would host arena-sized self-improvement seminars, inevitably somebody would get up to the mic and say:

“Tony I just can’t get a job/find a boyfriend/make any money. Nothing is working. I’ve tried everything!”

To which Tony would arch his brow and, using his best Tony the Tiger voice, say:

“Everrrrrrything? Ok, tell me the last hundred things you’ve tried.”

“Hah, gee Tony, it wasn’t a hundred things…”

“All right, tell me the last twenty things you’ve tried.”

“Well, it wasn’t twenty either…”

“Ok, tell me the last five things you’ve tried.”

“Well you see Tony, I’m just really having a lot of trouble getting started…”

And so it was with my reader above. I wrote him back to ask what exactly he had tried that wasn’t working. I didn’t get a response. But a short time later, I did get a notification that he had bought Insight Exposed from me.

I’m not blaming this guy or anybody else. I just wanted to tell you about that Tony Robbins “Everrrrrrything?” response, which might be useful with people who say nothing is working. And if you’re anything like me, those people might include yourself at times.

Anyways, I’ve gotten a surprising and pleasing number of orders so far for Insight Exposed, which makes me doubt that my problematic order page is costing me a lot of money.

That doesn’t change the reality that my order page and my entire cart/membership software are quirky and unintuitive. That’s something I will have to deal with in time. For now though, I’ll have to just have to manually reply to a few readers who are having problems with their order process.

In case you yourself are interested in Insight Exposed, you will have to get on my email list first, because this is an offer I am only making available to my newsletter subscribers. If you’d like to get on my list, here’s where to go.

I was shamed this morning by Dan Kennedy’s disembodied voice

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I went for a walk this morning before starting work, and as I was stepping out onto the sunny street, I felt a flash of guilt.

“You won’t amount to much this way,” I heard a disembodied but familiar voice say to me.

I shrugged it off. I told myself that I was doing the right thing for me. Still, for a moment, that voice, and that tiny cloud of guilt covered up the Barcelona morning sun.

The voice belonged to marketer, copywriter, and prolific content machine Dan Kennedy, who was speaking somewhere in my head.

Dan’s voice was talking to me because I’d gotten up around 7:45am, it was now around 8:30am, and I was going out for a walk, which meant I wouldn’t get back to the apartment and to work before 9:15am.

On the other hand, as that disembodied voice reminded me, Dan trained himself to get up in the morning, go to the bathroom, and shuffle to his writing desk, all within 15 mins.

That’s one part of why Dan has been able to write dozens of books, hundreds of newsletters, thousands of “Weekly faxes” and probably millions of words of sales copy to promote his own business and the businesses of the wagonfuls of clients he has worked with — all finished each day before 4pm.

Like I say, skipping a morning walk and getting to work right away is one part of why Dan has been able to do so much. But thankfully, it’s not the only part.

Dan once said that he wrote his No B.S. Time Management book in a weekend — Saturday, Sunday, and a bit of Monday.

244 pages… fifteen chapters… hundreds of personal stories, business case studies, metaphors and analogies… all done in two-and-a half days.

How?

Turns out Dan had most of the stuff already written, either as rough chunks of content, or as stories he had used earlier, or as elements from other books, newsletters, and faxes. But not only that.

He had all this stuff organized in boxes with labels on them. I don’t know the specifics of Dan’s boxing and labeling system. It doesn’t particularly matter, since I don’t work mainly on my laptop, and I want stuff I can search and store digitally.

What does matter is that Dan’s boxes of content, and the labels on those boxes, allowed him to pull out all this material on Saturday morning… look over it… glue it all together… tweak some transitions here and there… and produce a book by Monday afternoon.

And not just any book. A career-defining book. A book that’s gone on to sell tens of thousands of copies, that has led to millions in client and product sales, and that has become Dan’s most influential, and cult-building book, if Amazon reviews are anything to go by.

It might sounds impossible, but you can do this too.

It won’t be automatic, and it will take time and work. But if you’ve decided that writing is for you, that you want to influence people, that you want to make good money doing so, then this kind of organization — whether you use a system of text files or a bunch of cardboard boxes — can make you drastically more productive. Miraculously so.

I’ve been crowing about my Insight Exposed system for the past few days, because it can help you get to this level of organization more quickly than you might do otherwise.

Insight Exposed lays out my own system for labeling, organizing, retrieving, and gluing together ingredients for written content and sales copy. There are no cardboard boxes and no post-it notes in my system. It’s all digital, but you can adapt it to whatever “technology” you like.

Insight Exposed is only available to people who are signed up to my email list. In case you are interested in it, you can sign up for my list here.

An “eery dejà vu feeling” from my Fight Club email last night

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Last night, I sent out an email about going to see Fight Club at a local movie theater. To which I got the following reply from copywritress Liza Schermann, who has been living the “barefoot writer” life in sunny Edinburgh, Scotland. Liza wrote:

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Seeing this email in my inbox provoked an eery dejà vu feeling. I had just gone over the part of Insight Exposed where you have a screenshot of this note from your journal. For a split second, I had no idea where I’d seen this before. Then I remembered.

Like an open kitchen restaurant, only for email. The email that was getting cooked right before my eyes a few minutes ago is now served. Thank you, Chef Bejakovic! 👨‍🍳

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I remember hearing marketer and copywriter Dan Kennedy say once that you shouldn’t ever let clients see you writing copy, because it’s not impressive work and it spoils the mystique.

That might be good advice, but I definitely don’t heed it Insight Exposed, my new training about how I take notes and keep journals.

Like Liza says, Insight Exposed is like an open kitchen. I smile from beneath my chef’s hat, I explain the provenance of a few recent emails, and I show you the various animal bits and pieces from which the email sausage was made.

Let me be clear:

Insight Exposed is not a copywriting training. But it shows you something that may be more important and valuable than copywriting technique. It shows you how I go from a bit of information I spotted somewhere and expand it into something that makes people buy, remember, share, and maybe even change their own minds.

I am only making Insight Exposed available to people who are signed up to my email list. In case you are interested in Insight Exposed, you can sign up for my list here.

I am not dangerous, but I am interested in dangerous people

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This past September, I went to the Barcelona Martial Arts Academy for my third-ever attempt at training Brazilian jujitsu.

My second-ever attempt was 10 years ago, in the gym of an elementary school in Budapest, Hungary. My first-ever attempt was freshman year of college, in Santa Cruz, California, in the school of a proper Brazilian-born BJJ champion.

On each attempt, I didn’t last more than a few months. But obviously there’s something that appeals to me about the sport, since I keep thinking about it and coming back to it decade after decade.

All that’s to say, I am not in any way dangerous, in spite of multiple attempts to become so. But I am interested in dangerous people. And I’d like to tell you something surprising I just learned from a very dangerous man.

A few days ago, while at the gym, I got to listening to an interview with Frank Shamrock. Shamrock was the first UFC Middleweight Champion. He was the No. 1-ranked pound-for-pound fighter in the world during his reign. He retired undefeated from the UFC.

At the start of that interview I listened to, Shamrock matter-of-factly said he achieved all this by becoming the world’s first “superathlete.” I don’t have an exact definition of what a “superathlete” is, but I do get the gist of what Shamrock means.

So the question then becomes, how did Shamrock become the world’s first “superathlete”? From the interview:

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I was the only guy with a notebook, for years. That’s one of the reasons I figured it out. Cause I wrote it down, asked questions, created a theory. Practice, apply, if it works, put it in stone.

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I felt quite dangerous after hearing this. Frank Shamrock keeps a notebook, and so do I.

Of course, my notebook is not about the best ways to break people. But I do have a notebook about the best ways to persuade people. It works the same way. Find a new idea, write it down, apply it. Review the results, if it works, put it in stone.

I’m currently promoting my Insight Exposed training. It talks about the system I’ve devised for keeping notebooks, journals, keeping track of good ideas, reflecting to get better.

​​This system has made me exponentially better at copywriting, at marketing, at persuasion. But it’s done much more than that as well. I use the same journaling system for everything. Enjoying life… a project I call “religion”… even the process of journaling itself.

Which brings up an anti-sales point:
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The fact is, nobody needs my Insight Exposed training. You can take Frank Shamrock’s approach above and apply it to become the world’s first “supernotetaker.” That’s what I did, and in time, it worked out just fine.

The only reason you might want my Insight Exposed training is that it can tell you the lessons I’ve learned, so you can save hours or days of your time along your journey. Even more importantly, getting Insight Exposed today might get you working on your own “superhuman” system now, instead of in a year from now.

I’m only making Insight Exposed available to people who are signed up to my daily email newsletter. In case you’d like to get on my email list, click here and fill out the form that appears.

“How is being clever working out for you?”

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A few months ago, I went to a local old-school movie theater and queued in a line that stretched around the block. In the entire line, there were maybe three women. The rest were all guys, mostly young guys, under 25.

The movie being shown was Fight Club.

I got several valuable snapshots from that experience. The most valuable was an exchange from the actual movie, a scene in which the main character, “the Narrator,” played by Ed Norton, meets Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt.

The two are sitting next to each other on a plane. Tyler starts telling the Ed Norton character how you can make all kinds of explosives using simple household items. And then the following exchange goes down:

NARRATOR: Tyler, you are by far the most interesting single-serving friend I have ever met. [Pause.] See I have this thing, everything on a plane is single-serving—

TD: Oh, I get it. It’s very clever.

NARRATOR Thank you.

TD: How is that working out for you? Being clever?

NARRATOR [a little unnerved, shrugs his shoulders.] Great.

TD: Keep that up then. Keep it right up.

I read an article a few months ago, The Impotence of Being Clever. It’s one of a few related blips on my radar. Another was a second article, Beware What Sounds Insightful.

Both articles circle around the growing mass-realization that things that sound clever and insightful often aren’t — that “insightful” is a brand of shiny varnish that can be applied to any cheap furniture.

Last fall, I put on a live training called Age of Insight. It was all about exactly this brand of shiny varnish. About presentation techniques that take any idea and make it sound profound.

I’ve done a ton of thinking about this topic, and as a result, Age of Insight is the most in-depth treatment of it that anybody has created, at least to my knowledge.

Like I wrote back when I was putting on that training, I believe insightful presentation techniques will become mandatory in coming years. You will have to know them and use them, just like you have to know copywriting techniques to effectively sell a product, at least if you want to do it in writing.

There’s a deeper parallel there:

You can use copywriting techniques to sell a mediocre product. And you will sell some of it, definitely more than if you didn’t use proven copywriting techniques. But you are unlikely to sell a lot of it, or sell it for very long.

On the other hand, you can use copywriting techniques to sell a good or even great product. You can make a fortune doing that, feel good about it, and even enjoy the process for the long term.

The same with this insight stuff.

You can use insightful presentation techniques to sell a mediocre idea. And you will do better than if you didn’t use them at all.

But if you also find a genuinely novel, surprising, even mind-blowing idea, and then use insight techniques to sell that — well, the result can be explosive, and it can survive for the long term.

I’m not sure when will I re-release Age of Insight, which deals with the presentation side. But right now, I’m releasing Insight Exposed, which is about good or great “insight products” — meaning novel, surprising, even mind-blowing ideas.
Insight Exposed is only available to people who are on my email list. If you’d like to get on my list, click here and fill ou the form that appears.

Announcing: Insight Exposed

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Today, I’m launching a new course, Insight Exposed. It reveals the secret weapon behind my ability to write insightful content: my own home-brewed journaling, note-taking, and archiving system.

The launch will run through this Saturday. I have a lot more to say about Insight Exposed, but since this course is only available to people who are signed up to my email list, there’s no sense in sharing all that publicly.

In case you are interested in Insight Exposed, or in developing your own journaling and note-taking system, one that could save you hundreds of hours of work, you might want to get on my email list. Click here to do that.

My best recommendation for books that are sure to give you a change of perspective

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Back in 2019, I started reading an obscure non-fiction book called The Land Beyond the Forest. I got the idea to read it because I heard that it was a source for Bram Stoker, when he created the modern character of Count Dracula.

The Land Beyond the Forest was written by Emily Gerard, a Scottish woman who lived in Transylvania, modern Romania, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Gerard wrote up a kind of sociological character study of the Germans, Romanians, Hungarians, and Gypsies who lived around her.

At that time, Transylvania, with its deep forests and high mountains, still had pockets of medieval life in quickly modernizing, industrializing, urban Europe. The people Gerard wrote about truly lived with different traditions and beliefs to what’s become dogma in the past century or so. I guess that’s what Bram Stoker was latching on to when he used Gerard’s book for inspiration.

For example, Gypsies in Gerard’s time were a forest-dwelling, pot-mending, violin-playing elf people. This is how Gerard describes the three tenets of their half-pagan, half-Christian religion:

1. The Gypsy fears God without loving him

2. The Gypsy believes in the devil but thinks him silly and weak

3. The Gypsy scoffs at the idea of immortality: “We’re already wretched enough in this life. Why begin it anew?”

I read Gerard’s book and I really found myself experiencing a fresh change of perspective. I found the experience so enjoyable that I started going back, century by century, and reading a book for each century. If you’re looking for a change in perspective, or a moment of insight, that’s my best recommendation to you as well.

Also, here’s a notice you may or may not need. Tonight was the last night to join my Insights & More Book Club, at least for a while. At the stroke of midnight tonight, as wolves howled, and owls hooted, and an icy black shape moved in the shadows under the pine trees, I closed the doors to the Insights & More Book Club, to keep everyone inside safe, and to lock any werewolves, ghouls, and vampires out.

I will reopen the Insights & More Book Club in two month’s time. But in order to have the chance to get in, you have to be signed up to my email newsletter. If that’s something you aren’t willing to do, no problem. Otherwise, click here and fill out the form that appears.