Glamourous and profitable #1 ranking in an impossible category

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In 1987, Hatton Gardens Hotel in Upton Saint Leonards won the inaugural Loo Of The Year award.

The Loo Of The Year is awarded each year to the best public toilet in the UK, based on criteria such as adequate flushing frequency, urinal privacy, overall cleanliness, lighting, lack of vandalism, and, best of all, a “wow factor.”

The Loo Of The Year awards were set up in 1987 by the communications director of a washroom service company.

That first year, only 50 guests attended, and awards were given in only two categories, hotels and restaurants.

There are now 63 categories, and over 300 guests attended the prestigious event and dinner last year.

Yesterday, I talked about the transformative effect that winning the race at Le Mans had on Jaguar, the car brand. To my mind, there are three key elements in something like winning a top-tier car race:

1. A ranking with a clear number 1

2. An incontestable result, a matter of performance, not popularity or opinion

3. An element of glamour

But even if you cannot get all three, two out of three can still be great for business.

Awards and arbitrary “Top 100” listings only offer #1 and #3, ranking + glamour. The results are definitely a matter of popularity or opinion, but so what?

I wrote an email back in 2019 about the impact that the World’s 50 Best Restaurants listing had on the restaurant and tourism industry.

As one extreme example, a Copenhagen restaurant named Noma already had 2 Michelin stars. Even so, they were struggling to fill tables.

After Noma randomly and unexpectedly came in at the top of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, 100,000 people tried to book a table there in one day. Suddenly, generating business was no longer an issue.

As for Hatton Gardens Hotel:

At the next year’s event ceremony, in 1988, the manager of the Hatton Gardens said visits to his hotel had doubled since winning Loo Of The Year.

Such is the power of a #1 ranking + glamour, above and beyond a certification… or a gold star… or a label. (And yes, even toilets can apparently have glamour — at least glamour enough to double business.)

So create an award for your industry, or create rankings.

Or better yet, pay somebody else to create them, and to announce you the winner.

Put on a tuxedo or an evening gown, get your photo taken in front of one of those step-and-repeat banners, and watch what happens to your business.

And if you detest awards show, and if paying some rando to create a Top 50 ranking and put you at #1 turns you off, don’t worry.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you how to have success with only elements 2+3 off the list above.

Can you guess what example I’ll use?

I’ll give you a hint. It’s a man who built a massive, enduring career, out of nothing, to become the most famous entertainer of his age. And he did it with a series of incontestable challenges, dares, and contests, all of which featured an element of glamour.

While you ponder that, let me remind you that my Daily Email Habit has been voted #1 among the World’s Best 100 Email Prompt Services by a distinguished panel of email marketers, all of whom happen to subscribe to Daily Email Habit.

Here’s what one of the distinguished panelists, Australian copywriter Allan Johnson, had to say in casting his vote:

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This is a very useful service. I have always struggled to commit to daily writing (emails or not) and protecting the streak is now a priority, so thanks.

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If you’d like to find out what makes Daily Email Habit #1:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

What’s next for Jaguar?

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A few weeks ago, Jaguar the car brand ran a new advertising campaign. It was so bad that it had everybody on the Internet talking about Jaguar for a few days.

That sneaky result is not what this email is about. Instead, I want to tell you about something more interesting, and much more value, at least if you sell your own products or services.

I recently watched an old BBC clip, from 1968, titled, “What’s next for Jaguar?”

Jaguar had just come out with a new model then. “Every inch a Jaguar,” said the journalist as he explained all the new features and design choices.

But in the more leisurely pace of 1960s TV, this segment also talked about the history of Jaguar as a company.

It explained how Jaguar had become such an established brand that people would immediately recognize Jaguar design elements, even if the car had no name plate on the back or little cat figurine on the hood.

So let me tell you how Jaguar done it, and trust me, it’s worthwhile reading:

Jaguar was started by two racing enthusiasts. At first, they made sidecars for motorbikes. They then started making race cars.

And they were great at it. Their cars, first called SS, for Swallow Sidecar Company, had both great performance and half the price tag of comparable alternatives like Rolls-Royce and Bentley.

The SS branding was dropped after World War II due to sounding a little Nazi-like, and the company took the name of its main model, Jaguar.

But there was still a problem. Like I said, Jaguar cars had great performance and were cheap. What’s not to love?

Well, the CHEAP. Jaguar suffered from being seen as “budget luxury.” Maybe something like a Mazda Miata today. Yes, a Miata is kind of a sports car… but it ain’t no Porsche.

Let me pause for a moment to say, with all delicacy, that maybe something similar applies to you. Maybe you offer a great service or product, at a really great price.

The market should love it. They should be grateful to you. They should line up at your door.

But they don’t. It’s counterintuitive and stupid. But it’s reality.

So maybe you try to increase prices. But people won’t pay more, or pay anything at all, because they don’t know WHY they should.

What then? Back to Jaguar.

How did Jaguar transform? How did they go from the Miata of the 1930s, to a premium brand in the 1960s, coveted by boys and businessmen alike, driven by celebs like Steve McQueen, Tony Curtis, and Frank Sinatra?

Simple. And I’ll tell you. But first I want you to promise you’ll hold your breath for a moment, instead of immediately blurting out, “Oh but how can that possibly be useful to me!”

Ready? Breathe in, and hold it:

Jaguar’s rebranding trick was to win a series of races in the 1950s, culminating with the biggest race of them all, Le Mans.

Jaguar won Le Mans five times in the 1950s. In 1957, Jaguar took five of the first six places, against competition like Ferrari and Mercedes-Benz and Maserati.

Jaguar got out of racing after that. It was too expensive to maintain a team. But the brand was established, and it’s stuck with us for 70+ years since, until perhaps this new advertising campaign.

“Poof!” you finally burst out with an exhale. “I knew it! How can that possibly be useful to me!”

True. If maintaining a racing division was too expensive for Jaguar to keep doing, it’s probably too expensive for you and your business.

Still, if you think a bit, there might be things you can do, in your own industry, to create the same effect. There might be competitions, contests, or other entirely different things you can do. Because to me, winning races like Le Mans gave Jaguar three things at the core:

1. A ranking with a clear number 1

2. An incontestable result, a matter of performance, not popularity or opinion

3. An element of glamour

Like I said, if you think, search, or scheme a bit, you might be able to find opportunities that will give you all three of these. For example, in the world of direct-response copywriting, this is what “winning the control” did for a freelance copywriter.

Even one or two such results can establish your brand for years or decades to come.

But even if you cannot find a way to get all three elements above for your product or service, you might be able to get two out of three. And that can still be supremely valuable.

To prove it, I’ll give you three examples, over my next three emails, of dominant businesses built on top of having just two out of the three elements above.

For today though, let me remind you of my Daily Email Habit service. It has nothing to do with today’s email. Except of course it does, because I wrote it based on today’s Daily Email Habit prompt. For more information about this service, and to get the prompt that’s coming tomorrow:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

4,2,1,0… what comes next?

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Let’s see if you can solve this mathematical riddle:

My grandmother came from four brothers and sisters…

My grandmother then had two kids, my aunt and my mom…

My mom only had one kid, me…

And I, barring some late-life religious conversion or late-night sexual slip-up, will end up with zero kids.

So the riddle is…

4, 2, 1, 0… what’s the next number in this sequence?

I mean, is there even a number?

Or is the human race doomed? Because I don’t think my family is all that unique.

I look around at people of my generation and I see them either childless or with fewer kids than their parents had at the same age… and definitely fewer than their grandparents or great grandparents had.

Do you have your answer to the riddle?

Here’s mine, or rather, here’s my prediction about what comes after 0:

People will start having more kids again. 1, 2, and maybe 4. Yes, even in rich, modern, urban societies, the ones that offer all the pleasurable temptations and alternatives to a young man or woman to settling down and raising children.

The statistics don’t bear me out yet. But I’m seeing anecdotal evidence for it. People I know, younger than me, getting married earlier… having kids earlier… having more kids. Stuff that was unimaginable to me at their age.

The theory supports me also.

The human brain loves to think linearly. To find a pattern and to keep that pattern going to eternity, like watching a snowball roll down an endless hill.

We love to think in this way about other humans too.

Except humans are not like snowballs down a hill.

We also have the ability to consciously choose our action and shape our identity. To stop rolling, to even turn around, and start hiking up the hill again.

And in fact, that’s often what happens, more often than you might think. History is full of examples of groups of humans — Puritans, Bolsheviks, hippies — choosing their identity in direct opposition to what came before them, or to what’s around them now. Sometimes with great influence.

I’m not sure what my point is.

Maybe it’s that there’s a powerful persuasion lesson in the above, for anybody who would sit down and unpack it a bit.

Or maybe my point is simply to try to convince you to give my Daily Email Habit service a try.

Because if you have kids, or are planning on it, I figure it’s way nicer today than it was 40, 20, or even 10 years ago.

Back then, the only option for most people was to go to work in somebody else’s office, from 9-5, and sit in a car for an hour or two to get there. With the time left over, maybe they’d see their kids only for a few minutes before bed.

Today, there are real alternatives. It’s never been easier to work for yourself, at home, with yourself as a boss.

Now here’s my pitch:

If you’re gonna work for yourself, at home, and have more free time than you would if you had a regular job, then it makes sense to write daily emails.

Daily emails promote what you do and ensure a certain security and continuity. Daily emails nurture an audience of previous customers and ready prospects who know you and trust you and are willing to give you money in the future also.

And daily emails allow you to do that without you having to spend 16 hours a day hunting for new business all the time.

If that makes sense, I’d like to suggest you take a look at the following service. It will help you start and stick with sending daily emails. And it’s completely different to all previous methods I know of that promised the same:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

An important announcement about Christmas trees

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Merry Christmas. Today being Christmas, I’ll keep this one short and just announce the following important fact:

Christmas trees grow in spurts. Each year, Christmas trees grow from April to June, and then they are done for the year.

I learned this important fact recently, in an interview with a Christmas tree farmer.

Turns out the farmer doesn’t know what he’s got for the coming season until the growth spurt is over.

For much of the year, the Christmas trees pretty much sit there, maybe growing a bit, or maybe not growing at all. But when growth does happen, it comes in big and unpredictable lumps.

I’d like to suggest it’s not just Christmas trees.

It’s been pretty much like that in most areas of my life. Constant inputs, lots of waiting, no real progress, then a big, often surprising jump.

I’m telling you this in case you’re working and wondering where it’s going. Maybe your growing season is coming.

And with that, I’m off, to see if it’s possible to rent bikes anywhere in Valencia on Christmas day, so I can bike down to the Albufera lake, which lies just outside the city borders.

Meanwhile, if you want some help with create emails that can act like constant inputs for your business, sales-wise and creative-wise, I have something that can help:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Holy Grail launch party

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Yesterday, I paid 9 euro to see the Holy Grail. And I did see it, although I walked by it at first without noticing it. I got distracted by the heavy medieval chains on the walls.

After I first failed in my quest to find the Holy Grail, I asked Perplexity to guide me to it. It told me to retrace my steps, to the southeast, in the direction towards Jerusalem.

So that’s what I did. And sure enough, I found it.

The Holy Grail is housed in the Chapel of the Chalice in the Valencia cathedral.

I went there yesterday since the cathedral, which dates back to the 13th century, is one of main tourist attractions in the city.

The cathedral features a museum, ancient Roman ruins under it, and an impressive gothic dome.

Plus, like I said, it houses the Holy Grail.

But is it REALLY the Holy Grail? The cup that Jesus drank from at the last supper? The night before he was crucified? The most holy and elusive relic in all Christendom?

It seems a little implausible. To make it more so, when you see the Holy Grail, it looks like a golden goblet that’s fit for a medieval king.

But a little pamphlet, available at the entrance to the chapel in multiple languages, informs you that:

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Only the top portion is the sacred relic: a cup in the form of a carefully shaped and polished bowl. The cup is made of a type of veined sardonyx agate that comes from the region between Alexandria and Syria. Without a doubt, it is a Palestinian artifact, crafted in the first century AD. It is an example of a Jewish “Blessing Cup” for the ritual Paschal Supper in the Hebrew tradition, the most important piece in a Jewish family’s treasury.

Archeological studies, historical documents, the testimony of Tradition, recent discoveries about the design and the inscription in the base, comparative analyses with other similar cups around the world, references from the ancient liturgy, various investigations from distinct scientific disciplines, and even the legends of the Grail – all of these indicate it is perfectly plausible that the Holy Chalice of Valencia was in the hands of Jesus Christ at the Last Supper, and that it contained the Most Precious Blood of the Redeemer. In contrast, there is no evidence that counters this position.

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The pamphlet goes on to tell the history of this stone cup. How it was used in Eucharist services by the early popes, up to the 3rd century… why it left Rome… how it was hidden in the face of the Moorish conquests of Spain… how it finally found its way to the Valencia cathedral… how it was recently used by two Catholic Popes during Mass.

So… is this really the most holy of holy Christian relics? In a little glass display case, behind a rope? In a side chapel where 9 of us were there to see it (I counted)?

I don’t know. I’m not an expert in Christian relics.

But I am an expert in effective communication. And clearly, the Catholic Church, or at least the archdiocese of Valencia, hasn’t done a great job communicating that the Holy Grail is here, if this really be it.

You might think it a bit distasteful to use this as a topic for a daily email, to profane the sacred, and to talk about better marketing for the Holy Grail.

In my defense, it seems the Church agrees it hasn’t done a good job advertising.

There’s a building across the street, which is being refurbished to serve as a Holy Grail information center and museum, to raise worldwide awareness of the Grail’s location, and to increase the number of pilgrims and tourists who come to see it.

But I think an information center, even it were to send out daily emails about the Holy Grail, won’t be enough.

This relic, if it really is the cup that Jesus held in his hands at the final supper, is infamous for being hard to find.

Hundreds of years of popular legend tell us how the best, bravest, and most noble knights went in search of the Grail, and all but a small handful — Galahad, Perceval, Indiana Jones — died or failed on the way.

If the Grail really has been found, and is available for everyone to see, it’s gonna take a giant announcement, an event, a spectacle, fireworks, buildup, in other words, what in marketing we call a launch.

It’s the only way in my mind to resolve the tension between the Holy Grail being sought and not found for hundreds of years… and the Holy Grail now available for tourists to see, for just 9 euro, and in fact not very popular as an attraction.

(By the way, it might be good idea to increase the admission price. I mean, it’s the Holy Grail. Sir Lancelot, despite being one of the greatest knights, quested after it for years and failed at the last step. How can you justify making something that’s so hard to attain available for 9 euro?)

But maybe I should stop giving the Catholic Church advice.

Maybe I should simply take my own advice.

Let me get to a less sacred topic, and remind you of my Daily Email Habit service.

I opened it up a few weeks ago, and have had a steady stream of people signing up since.

For the moment, I’m making it available at $20 a month because I wanted to test it out, polish it, make sure it works for people, take the pressure of myself, and as usual, reward early customers who trust me enough to take me up on my experiments.

I will have an official launch for Daily Email Habit soon, and the price will go up. There will be a big announcement and maybe even fireworks.

But for now, Daily Email Habit is still available at just $20/month, for the reasons listed above. If you would like to test it out, before the whole world finds out about it:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Ponzi-like cold calling

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I’m rereading David Sandler’s book You Can’t Teach A Kid To Ride A Bike At A Seminar, But You Can Teach Him How To Fish.

Even though the title won’t tell you so, it’s a sales book.

Do you know Jim Camp’s Start With No? Camp’s book is in many ways a rewrite of Sandler’s book. But the original, as always, has stuff that the rewrite doesn’t have…

… such as the following story of Ponzi-like cold calling, which could be useful to many, even if they never make a cold call in their life:

In the early days of his sales career, Sandler cold called business owners to sell self-improvement courses and sales training. It was the only way he knew how to get leads.

Valuable point #1: Sandler got 9 out 10 cold-called prospects to agree to meet him. How?

Simple. He’d offer something for free, something that the guy on other end wanted, something nobody else was offering.

Specifically, Sandler would offer to come down to the prospect’s office and demonstrate his cold calling techniques to the prospect’s sales team, and motivate the lazy bums a little.

Like I said, 9 out of 10 business owners agreed to that.

Valuable point #2: Sandler didn’t offer to come do a demo as a means of making a sale. He did it as a means of making cold calls.

Sandler hated making cold calls. If he had to make cold calls at home, he’d put it off, do it half-heartedly, and not make enough of them to set his weekly quota of appointments.

That’s why he did the scheme above.

He’d show up to the prospect’s office, nervous but also amped up. And then, for an hour or so, he’d cold call — for himself.

He’d spend an hour in the prospect’s office, with the sales staff looking at him in wonder, making cold call after cold call, chatting on the phone, digging into the pain, and in many cases, setting new appointments for himself.

A couple days ago, I wrote that identity is just about the most powerful appeal you can make.

Well there’s a close second, and that’s reputation. In fact, for many of us, reputation might even trump identity. Cause you wanna look good in front of people, right? Even if you have to do things you would never do on your own.

And so it was with Sandler. He’d end an hour at a prospect’s office with another 2-3 set appointments, way more than he’d get at home had he spent the afternoon there.

Plus of course, he’d have a way better chance of closing the sale. Because nothing sells like demonstration.

Such story. Much lessons. So few people who will do anything with it.

And yet, it could be so powerful if somebody would only apply it, whether to cold calling… or to any other persuasion-related activity.

I’ll leave you to ponder that, and I’ll just say my email today is a “demonstration” of the daily email prompt I send out this morning for my Daily Email Habit service.

Maybe it’s easy enough to figure out what today’s prompt was.

Or maybe not.

In any case, today’s prompt is gone. Today’s prompt is lost to history, to be known only by the current subscribers to Daily Email Habit.

But a new prompt will appear tomorrow, to help those who want to write emails regularly, both for their own enjoyment, and to impress and influence others in their market. Because powerful things happen when you know that others are watching you.

If you’d like to read the email I write based on that prompt, and maybe try to guess what the prompt was, click here to sign up to my email newsletter.

The epidemic of thinking big

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Lesson for you, really lesson for me:

Last week I was digging through my emails, and I found this:

“Oh, btw. If you use AI at all…and want to do a guest post on Write With AI, let me know. Love to promote you.”

That message came from Justin Zack, who I mentioned a few emails ago. Justin is the Head of Partnerships at a paid newsletter called Write With AI, which has 54k subscribers.

Except, Justin wrote me that back in August. I had completely missed it then.

I wrote Justin to see if he’s still interested. He said, yes.

I asked what kinds of posts had done well previously on Write With AI. He gave me an example by Matt Giaro, which is the top-performing post for Write With AI, on how to write a weekly newsletter with AI.

“Mhm,” I said. Just like I thought. I had a problem.

Because I use AI for research… for filling in things I don’t know or can’t think of… as a replacement for Google and YouTube and Reddit combined.

But I don’t use AI to write. Not my own stuff anyhow. I have a policy that I won’t use AI for anything that’s published under my name.

In part, that’s because I think there’s value in making a big deal of actually being real, live, more or less human being on the Internet.

In part, it’s because AI never actually writes like me, and I’m pedantic about what I put out.

So I told Justin, “Yeah let me go away and think a bit, and see if come up with a topic that could work.” Frankly, I was not optimistic.

And then, independent of all this, I wrote an email for this newsletter (by hand, by myself, without AI) about how I had used AI to create a little tech tool — the in-email streak tracker for my Daily Email Habit service.

Justin, who reads these emails, replied to that email and said, “btw, ‘how I created a daily email counter with AI (with promo for deh)’ is what we should do…. just a thought.”

It was one of those forehead-slapping moments. Why hadn’t I thought of that?

So that’s what we ended up doing.

I’ve written up the post about how I got ChatGPT to be my little code monkey. I’m finishing up that post today. I’ll get it over to Justin, and I guess he will publish it at some point on Write With AI when they get a spot in their busy editorial calendar.

But the lesson I promised you, which is really a lesson for me, because it’s a mistake I keep making:

There’s an epidemic of thinking too big and too broad. I know I’ve definitely been infected by this contagion.

Over time I’ve managed to develop an immunity to it when it comes to writing daily emails. But I still get sick with this disease when it comes to writing in other formats… or when it comes to creating offers, or making new products.

So the lesson I would like to suggest to you, in the hope I myself will remember it, is to make smaller, more specific promises.

Don’t teach people how to walk, run, and jump.

Just teach them how to tie their shoes.

And if you additionally restrict your teaching to just a course on how to tie asymmetrical, decorative laces on $400 fashion sneakers, odds are good you will not only have an easy time selling to that dedicated market, but you’ll be able to charge a premium.

All right, time to tie this shoe up:

My Daily Email Habit service does just one tiny thing. Each day, it helps you get started writing an email to your list, with the ultimate goal of making it easier to stick with the valuable habit of daily emailing.

Here’s a tiny case study I got about Daily Email Habit, from Roald Larsen, who used to be a high-powered consultnant and now runs an online brand called Solopreneur MBA:

“Today I wasn’t really feeling it. But the prompt helped to make it smaller. Easier. More manageable to write and send to the list. Nice.”

But I’m not inviting you to sign up for Daily Email Habit, which costs money. Instead, I’m inviting you to sign up to my daily email newsletter, which I write based on the prompts inside Daily Email Habit, and which is free, at least for the moment. To try it out, click here and fill out the form that appears.

Why I don’t drink alcohol

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I’m zoominating on the high-speed train from Barcelona to Valencia as I write this.

In between looking out the window at the countryside (sun, olive orchards, power line towers, factories, occasional ruins of medieval forts), I also making sure to regularly check what’s happening on the Internet, so you know, so I don’t miss out on something important.

A few minutes ago, this led me to a surging Reddit thread:

“Why do you not drink alcohol?”

Millions want to know, and millions more want to answer.

This thread caught my eye because I myself don’t drink alcohol, and haven’t for the past two years. Why?

Some top Reddit comments apply to me, some not:

– “I drank my lifetime supply” (I definitely did drink, regularly, for years, but having had my fill isn’t what made me stop.)

– “Getting older” (A part of it. With age, drinking just made me feel in general less healthy, though it was probably always true.)

– “Blackouts” (This was actually significant. I noticed that even moderate drinking started to make me not remember what I did the night before, and this scared me.)

– “Tastes bad” (Just add some water to it.)

– “Alcoholism runs in my family” (No. My dad is a lifelong teetotaler and my mom tends to start crying if she has a glass of wine.)

– “I don’t like who I am when I drink” (I like myself much better when I drink.)

So much for crowdsourced wisdom. It’s okay… but there’s one reason I didn’t see anybody on Reddit mention.

The fact is, over the past two years, not drinking alcohol become a part of my identity.

For me, not drinking was at first a health-related experiment… then a kind of on-off habit.

But whatever reasons I initially had have become completely secondary to the fact that now “I just don’t drink.” It’s not something I have to think about, pressure myself to do, feel I need to justify myself over.

Maybe there’s a lesson there?

The way I see it, if you want to make an appeal to people, then identity is as powerful of an appeal as you can make, and much more powerful than any kind of benefit or promise or warning.

This works with yourself as well.

Make something a part of your identity, and it becomes a non-issue to do it regularly, cheerfully, even in the face of hardships and obstacles.

There are intermediate steps, like I said. First experiment, then habit.

But my train’s a-nearing Valencia. So let me just say:

I don’t know if you identify with the sentiment, “I write. It’s just something I do.”

Writing has benefits, as you may know. It also has costs — time, thought, or blood, like Hemingway apocryphally said.

But writing can become just something you do, regardless. And then good things happen.

If you’d like to start an experiment with writing regularly, and maybe make a habit of it, and even an identity one day, then I can help. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Writing formulaic copy month after month

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A couple weeks ago, I got on a call with a long-time reader, who works as an in-house copywriter.

This is part of an illuminating practice I’ve taken up, of actually interacting with people who read my emails and buy my courses.

Anyways, this reader, who has been working as a copywriter at the same company for four years, said the following:

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The main problem is, each month, the offers don’t really change so I’m writing the same stuff repeatedly.

The only difference is when they have a product launch, I get to write different stuff and set up more flows.

Other than that, it’s quite routine. There’s not much growth for my skill set.

To be honest, I don’t write a lot of copy there, because the copy I write there is quite formulaic and it’s also, not much variation. I don’t get to experiment much with ideas.

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About that:

Gary Bencivenga, widely called the world’s best living copywriter before he retired, liked to quote Al Davis, the coach for the infamously tough, mean, aggressive 1965 Oakland Raiders team.

One time, during a press conference before a game, a reporter asked Davis, “So I guess you’ll just have to take what the defense gives you?”

Davis glared. “We don’t take what the defense gives us. We take what we want.”

Gary Bencivenga, who seems to be as sweet and nice of a man as you can put a hat on, recommended Davis’s tough-guy attitude for copywriters also.

Gary didn’t just take the offer the client gave him to promote. Instead, he took what he wanted — he switched the offer altogether, or reworked it, or added to it — until it was as close to his ideal as he could get it, and many miles ahead of where it had started.

So that’s point 1.

Point 2 is that you’re not Gary Bencivenga. You don’t have his authority, and you don’t command the same deference and respect from clients. That’s normal. Gary, again, was the world’s best, and he had a reputation to match.

The situation is even trickier if you’re an in-house copywriter, working with one company full-time. In this case, the power dynamic shifts even more to your client/employer.

And maybe, when you try to “take what you want” — to rework an offer, or to experiment with copywriting ideas, or to simply do something that will stretch and increase your skills — your client/employer gives you a look and just says, “No.”

What then?

It’s up to you. But one thing you can do is say, “Fine. I’ll do my own thing.”

I’m not saying to quit your job. You can “take what you want” on your own time, with nobody controlling what you do or how you do it. It can give you new skills, experience, extra authority.

And who knows?

If you come to your client/employer next time, and cite a personal success story, instead of just pulling a good idea out of the air, maybe you’ll get a better hearing.

If not, you will still feel more fulfilled, skilled, and stimulated. And you’ll have options, because you’re building your own thing on the side, and taking what you want there.

On the call I had with the in-house copywriter I mentioned above, I heard that this is exactly what he’s doing. He’s hunting and working with freelance clients as well. Plus, he’s started his own email list, and he’s writing to it daily.

Who’s got time for all that?

I don’t know. You almost certainly don’t. Or maybe you do. And maybe, if you want some help with the last part, starting and sticking to writing a daily email, you will like my Daily Email Habit service.

Every day, Daily Email Habit prompts you to write something different.

At the end of 7 days, you already have a bunch of little experiments you wouldn’t have had before. And at the end of 30 days, you can experience a transformation.

If you’d like to experience that transformation as soon as possible, it makes sense to get started today:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

May we please have your attention

by

Welcome aboard this Bejakovic Air email from Barcelona to wherever it is you may be right now.

For your safety and entertainment, please pay close attention to this short safety demonstration. Even if you are a frequent newsletter reader, the safety features of this Concord-like newsletter may be different from any you have flown on before.

There are no seat belts on this newsletter. Bejakovic Air only shares ideas that are found to be interesting or possibly useful, with no guarantee of truthfulness or consistency from email to email.

We recommend you fasten yourself to an idea whenever reading this newsletter. Unfasten that idea tomorrow by pulling on the buckle, like so, and consider fastening on tomorrow’s idea to see if it fits more snugly.

The emergency exits of this newsletter are clearly marked. We have 6 exits: two at the front (archive, or delete); two at the back (follow the link, or unsubscribe); and, if you are using a mobile electronic device, you can also swipe left or right, to read other emails in your inbox.

In the unlikely event of an evacuation, press the “Spam Complaint” button above you. Leave all carryon luggage behind so our staff can rifle through it as you leave, and make fun of you once you’ve gone.

Cabin pressure on all Bejakovic Air flights is maintained in a narrow range between “intriguing” and “impossible to parse.”

If we lose cabin pressure or gain too much of it, oxygen masks will deploy automatically. Immediately extinguish all cigarettes, and adjust your own newsletter first before offering to assist with ours.

Thank you for your attention during this brief safety demonstration.

In preparation for takeoff, please make sure your seat is upright and your tray table is stowed away. Now sit back, relax, and enjoy this personal message from our captain:

https://bejakovic.com/deh