How to look like a wizard without doing any magic

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Two weeks ago, I got a message from a reader who had started a new podcast in the “business writing niche.” He wanted to know, would I like to be his first podcast guest?

I have a long-standing policy of accepting all podcast invites… well, except here.

I replied to the guy to say I’d be happy to be the first guest. I just want to make sure the interview will actually be published.

(I know from personal experience how even seemingly simple projects actually require a lot of behind-the-scenes work.)

And so I said if he would publish just one episode — even just him announcing what the podcast will be about — then I’d come on as the first guest.

The guy wrote back to say he will do as I ask. It’s been two weeks. I still haven’t heard back from him. Maybe he’s working on it, and I’ll hear from him soon. Maybe I won’t.

In either case, I feel good about how I handled the request. And I think it applies more generally, not just if people invite you to a brand-new podcast.

In my experience, you only want to work with people who demonstrate that they are internally motivated, that they get things done, that they will gonna make it one way or another, with or without you.

It makes you look like a wizard, when in reality, somebody else is stocking and stirring the cauldron, and attributing the magic effect of the potion to you.

And by the way, working only with internally motivated, sure-to-succeed people isn’t something you can only do once you have a lot of money, a lot of success, or wizard status.

A few days ago, Josh Spector shared a recipe for how to do it even if you’re completely new.

Specifically, Josh shared a recipe for how to create any career opportunity (or I’d add, business opportunity) you want — in the next 6 months.

Says Josh, this process works amazingly well, and yet, many people won’t do it because it sounds like a lot of work.

But maybe that doesn’t deter you. If so, here’s Josh’s playbook:

https://fortheinterested.com/how-to-get-any-career-opportunity-you-want-in-the-next-six-months/

Boredom Therapy

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I remember one time as a kid, I was home alone, sitting in one part of the apartment.

“All right,” I said to myself. “Time to go sit in the other part of the apartment now. Let’s go.”

But nothing happened.

Because I was at home, and alone, it was a very low-stakes situation. So I just kept sitting there, and observed the strangeness of it.

“Let’s go now,” I said again to myself.

Still nothing. So I sat and waited, knowing that eventually something would happen.

And sure enough, at some point a little later, my body, on its own, without any seeming command from me, got up and moved to the other room.

I’m reading a book now called A Life of One’s Own. It records the experiences of one woman, Marion Milner, who decided to keep a close eye on her own mind, what makes her happy, what she really wants out of life, what she can do to get more of it.

Last night, as I was reading this book, I came across the following passage:

“The function of will might be to stand back, to wait, not to push.”

Milner wrote that for much of her life, she thought there were two possible paths through life. One was the path of the whip, of using her will to force and push herself to move. The other path was a kind of negation of the will, a cow-like acceptance of whatever happens.

But in time, Milner realized there might be a third path. That’s what the quote above is about.

Maybe it’s not about sitting around like a cow… or of whipping yourself until you finally act… but of using the will in some other way, to stand back, to wait.

This reminded me of something else I read recently, about “free won’t.”

You might know about neuroscience experiments that show our actions and choices are detectable in the brain a good fraction of a second before we become consciously aware of them — ie. before we consciously “decide” on them.

This has led some people to conclude there’s no such thing as free will.

What you might not know are some equally interesting neuroscience experiments, in fact by some of the same neuroscientists as above. These other experiments show that in that fraction of a second from the time that our brain decides to do something to the time it actually happens, the conscious mind can veto the decision, and stop it from being carried into action.

Hence, even if we don’t have free will… we might still have “free won’t.”

I don’t know what this all neuroscience really means in practical terms. But the first part, about actions and choices coming from somewhere outside our consciousness, meshes with my life experiences, such as the one I had as a kid, telling myself to move, and having nothing happen.

The second part, about the power of the conscious veto, meshes with what Milner is saying, and some of my other life experiences.

In fact, I wrote an email almost two years ago, back on March 23, 2022, about how I’d started taking 7 minutes to do nothing before I got to work.

My 7-minute productivity hack involved just sitting and staring and allowing myself to get antsy. When the seven minutes were up, I found I was ready and eager to start work, instead of having to force and push myself.

At the time, I didn’t make the leap that this could be more broadly useful. But it’s something I’ve realized over the past few months. I call it Boredom Therapy. Here’s an example session:

1. Say I sit down to read a book like Milner’s. It’s going great for a couple minutes. But suddenly I get the idea, “Let me check my email. Maybe there’s something exciting waiting for me!”

2. If I catch that thought early enough, it’s easy to stop myself, at least once, from going and checking my email. But here’s the crucial part.

At this point, I don’t just force myself to go back to reading, even though my thoughts are clearly elsewhere, and even though the email-checking idea is almost bound to pop up again soon.

Instead, I put the book down, and I just do… nothing. I allow my thoughts to run as they will, and I just sit there.

3. In time, my thoughts get spent, and I get eager to read the book again.

I still wait a moment to make sure this is not a trick my thoughts are playing on me — another form of restlessness.

If it is a little trick, then I just keep waiting and doing nothing. Otherwise, I lift the book off my chest (I tend to read lying on the couch), and I pick up reading where I left off.

I used the example of reading a book to show how I use Boredom Therapy. But Boredom Therapy is just as good for getting work done… or for exercising at the gym (when I think, “I’m not feeling it, let’s go home”)… or, if Milner is right, for living your life in general, the way you want to, and enjoying the process.

I realize this might all sound vague or fluffy or even a little suspicious. After all, you’ve probably never heard of Marion Milner before, and you don’t know why you should listen to her. And as for me, I have a long and public track record of magical, impractical, and even nonsensical thinking.

So let me tell you one last story. It has to do with an A-list copywriter, Gene Schwartz.

Schwartz had enough time in his life to write several books about copywriting, including possibly the greatest book in the field, Breakthrough Advertising.

He was also a published biblical scholar.

And of course, he wrote hundreds of sales letters for himself and for his clients, which paid for his Park Avenue penthouse, his world-class art collection, and his Manhattan millionaire lifestyle.

Schwartz did all this by working just three hours a day.

He famously had a kitchen timer that he set for 33 minutes and 33 seconds. He worked in these half-hour blocks, and then he took a break.

These 33:33 time blocks are what people today tend to focus on. But if you ask me, it’s the wrong thing to focus on.

The right thing is exactly what I’ve been telling you, Boredom Therapy, because Schwartz practiced the same. In his own words:

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I have no goals for the next 33.33 minutes except to work on the copy.

Okay, I don’t have to work on the copy. There is absolutely no necessity for me to work on the copy.

I can sit there. I can stare. I can drink the coffee. I can stare some more, drink some more coffee.

I can do anything in the world except… not get up from the desk, not even write my own name. I just sit there.

Sooner or later, I’ll get bored. My boredom comes in one or two minutes.

Then, I begin looking at the copy. As I look at the copy, I begin paging up and down, and as I do that, something reaches out from that computer and grabs me, and says, “Hey, aren’t I beautiful? Hey, aren’t I powerful? Hey, start with me.”

===

By the way, that quote is part of a talk that Schwartz gave at Rodale Press.

To my knowledge, Schwartz’s talk is not available anywhere for free. But it is available as a free bonus if you buy Brian Kurtz’s book Overdeliver, which sells for $12.69 in Kindle format on Amazon.

In fact, this Gene Schwartz talk is part of a dozen bonuses, which sold for hundreds of dollars worth of real value in their time, which Brian has been giving away to buyers of Overdeliver.

If you ask me, it’s the absolute best deal in direct marketing land.

Not because you pay $12.69 to get hundreds of dollars’ worth of books, trainings, and courses.

But because the direct marketing wisdom in these books, trainings, and courses, much of it not available anywhere else, like Schwartz’s talk, has directly been worth tens of thousands of dollars to me so far… and will be worth much more in time, as I continue to revisit, rediscover, and apply the ideas in these free bonuses.

if you want to benefit from this incredible collection also, here’s where to go:

https://overdeliverbook.com/

How I use AI in my latest little startup

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Comes a question from a tech-curious reader named Jordan:

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Yo John quick question, is the Daily Email Habit built with the AI tools you mentioned building in the “the death of infoproducts” email?

There seems to be a lot of tech behind this (Especially with the streak stuff) and it only makes me wonder.

===

I mainly bring up this question so I can gush about AI. Have you heard about AI? It’s pretty incredible.

At the moment, AI is not doing the content behind the scenes at Daily Email Habit. I write each daily puzzle by hand, and I find the day’s meme or cartoon by hand also.

But as Jordan guessed, AI definitely helped (read: did everything) with the tech.

ChatGPT wrote all the back-end code I’m using to track the streaks for different Daily Email habit subscribers — how many days straight they have been sending a daily email — and to display each user’s streak inside of the Daily Email Habit email (not technically trivial).

And if in the future I decide to add more bells and whistles to Daily Email Habit, you can bet my ragged little AI elf will be the one doing all the work.

The reason why I’m telling you this:

If you’re only offering what you do as courses, or coaching, or really any kind of strict DIY how-to info, it’s worth thinking how to turn some or all of that into a cross-cut saw, or a calculator, or a Wordle-like daily puzzle, or at least how to add in a streak counter.

Because right now, creating tools or devices or games has become shockingly easy and quick, even if you don’t want to write a line of code. And a tool or a device or game can make your customers’ experience much nicer… and it can create a little moat around what you offer, beyond just your personal authority.

And AI does it all. Like I said, it’s pretty incredible.

Except, how do you decide what to tell AI to create?

How do you have cool ideas?

How do you find out what device or tool or game people in your market might want, and might be willing to pay for, so you can command AI to go down to the shed and make it?

Also, how do you develop a sense of taste, so that you don’t just accept the first thing that AI comes back with, but keep going until it matches your vision?

And once you do create something you’re happy with, how do you package it up and sell it?

For all that, my answer is as familiar as it is fundamental:

You write.

Writing gives you a point of view. It gives you a sense of taste. It exposes you to ideas, both your own (which might disappear otherwise) and from other people (which you might ignore otherwise).

Writing puts you in contact with people in your market, so you can get your finger on the pulse of what people are interested in and are willing to pay paying for.

And of course, writing helps you make better decisions — because writing is really an exercise in decision making.

In short, if you want to get the most out of AI, write.

It might sound self-serving when I say that. So let me share a message I got a couple days ago, from Justin Zack, who is the Head of Partnerships at Write With AI, a paid newsletter with 54,000 subscribers, all about how to… write with AI.

I figure if anybody has the inside scoop on getting AI to work for you, it’s Justin. And yet, Justin signed up for my Daily Email Habit service, so he can write and so he can think. Says Justin:

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I’m 2 days into the daily email habit (which means I have a 1-day streak, lol).

BUT, I friggin’ love it.

Exactly what I needed to get me thinking about my list and how to write better emails.

===

Actually, I just checked, and Justin’s streak is up to three days now.

Maybe you can start your own streak?

To to find out the daily email puzzle I’m using as a starting point for each of my own emails… the same puzzle that folks like Justin are using to get over the initial hurdle, to write something more interesting, and to write something different than they might write otherwise… take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

“DID IT MAKE SALES???”

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Yesterday, I sent an email with some sort of pulp fiction story, featuring a secret agent named Bond Jebakovic. Reactions were… mixed. Here’s one:

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This email went right above my head. The hook didn’t hook me and I found no place to enter back into the narrative while *gasp* skimming the rest.

I had no idea what you were yapping about…

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Some reviewers were more favorable though:

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This, my friend, is ridiculous. I applaud you! 😆

At first, I was completely befuddled reading your email. (Possibly because I was exhausted and grumpy after a long day.)

I came back and re-read this morning. The metaphor began to emerge… and of course, I clicked the link because. Curiosity.

I celebrate audacious self-expression (it feels like you had great fun writing this — did you?) and being yourself in business. This is work as play, and so delightful.

I don’t know how well it works as “marketing,” but maybe you’ll tell us later. (Hint, hint.)

I personally think it’s worth creating, just because you wanted to.

Thanks for being! 🥰

===

A few other people wanted that same question answered. “Did this work as marketing? DID IT MAKE SALES???”

As of writing right now, some 12 hours after yesterday’s email went out, I can say the email did make a few sales, three specifically.

Is that good? Bad? I can only tell you this:

In my experience, the sales for any given email are probably 20% due to actual copy in the email… 40% due to the list, meaning the relationship they have built up with you over time… and the remaining 40% due to the offer (is it exciting, is it new).

The offer in last night’s email was my new Daily Email Habit service.

I opened this offer up to my list 4 days ago, and I’ve been promoting it every day since via daily emails.

I’ve made sales with each email. A few dozen with the first one… and then, predictably, fewer sales with each following email, because there were fewer people on my list for whom this offer is new and exciting. (The ones who found it exciting and new probably already bought.)

But there’s a bigger point:

That is simply autonomy. Doing what you want, how you want, when you want, just because you want.

Autonomy is very important for me. Maybe it’s the same for you.

Like my reader above says, I had fun writing yesterday’s email. And, even though the email might have been unreadable to many, it was valuable to me, because of the idea at the core of the email, which I wanted to present in a dramatic fashion, and which might come back to me in the future in some new and profitable way.

But imagine if I had a full-time job, and imagine if I wrote something like I did yesterday. What kind of careless or indulgent boss would let it slide?

Or imagine if I were working for a client, and I decided to deliver yesterday’s email as copy for him to send out?

At best, I’d get pushback, and I’d have to do some convincing that this is really the best way to proceed.

At worst, I’d get yelled at and told to go read some HubSpot articles to learn how email marketing is really done.

If you’re in either of those situations — a full-time job, or clients — don’t get me wrong. I’m not ragging on you. There are lots of good reasons for both a job and for clients — money, security, experience.

Still, it’s nice to have something of your own as well, something where you can do as you like, something you can fall back on if the job or the clients ever go south.

Of course, autonomy is good for you. But it goes beyond just self-interest.

Autonomy frees up your mind and probably makes you better at your work for your employer or your clients, because you can be more relaxed and honest, since you know you have alternatives.

Autonomy allows you to create stuff you wouldn’t be able to create otherwise. Many times, that stuff won’t work. But sometimes it will, and the world will be a slightly better place for it.

And autonomy inspires others and gives them hope. At least I know I’ve been inspired in the past by seeing others living and working how they want — it’s what pushed me into working for myself, much more than the promise of becoming a billionaire.

All that’s to say… autonomy good. And daily emails, even if they don’t hook everybody every day, are my own little daily step towards autonomy.

Maybe they can be yours as well?

If you want my help with writing daily emails consistently, so you can build something for yourself, and not just for your clients or employer:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

The Hitman’s insane and devious new plan

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It was a dark and stormy morning, and the anti-hero of our story, Bond Jebakovic, was racing his bright red, high-powered crotch rocket down a small and dingy alley of this otherwise fine Catalan town, for Poblenou is where our story takes place.

Bond turned the corner and braked to a screeching stop, almost flying over the handlebar.

Up ahead was a crowd of small and odd monsters, known as Nens, milling about on the street, bouncing into each other, bouncing off the trees, bouncing into the buildings and falling down in the road.

Fortunately, the Nen cohort hadn’t spotted Bond yet. He quietly turned his crotch rocket down an even smaller, even dingier side-alley.

Bond emerged from the other end of side-alley. His blood ran cold. Twice as many small Nens, looking at him with their small curious eyes, their little hands ready to pull him off the crotch rocket and probably tear him apart.

Bond checked his Invisible Watch. It was 8:58am. Of course! The Nen Disciplining Factory was about to begin its morning session, and that’s why the Nens were milling about and bouncing around everywhere.

There was nowhere to turn. Bond quickly fixed his hair, and gunned his bright-red crotch rocket straight into the Nen throng.

The Nens’ little hands reached out to try to grab him, but he was too fast, too agile. He weaved and zoomed through the crowd, and emerged on the other side without even his hair getting out of place.

Bond cruised safely on. A few minutes later, he was already at The Castle — a sheer cliff-like building in which he lived and worked. He raced up the winding staircase, and unlocked the heavy vault-like doors of his lair.

Bond initiated his communication terminal and uploaded the microfiche he had gone out to collect.

“Come on, come on,” he said impatiently to the terminal. He needed to see what the microfiche contained so he could alert the other operatives inside the B.E.J.A.K.O. network.

“Open the ‘Hitman’ dossier,” Bond commanded his terminal. The terminal obeyed.

“Focus on quadrant 4. Zoom in.”

The picture was still blurry.

“Enhance,” Bond commanded the terminal. The blurry picture came into focus. And suddenly, there it was.

In the lower right corner of the image, which showed the opened pages of a secret report lying on a table, Bond could finally see the new plan of his devious but brilliant Korean arch-rival, known only as The Hitman.

Bond knew that The Hitman was trying to control the world by spinning up dozens of robotic boy bands, including one of the biggest acts in the world, GTS.

The Hitman had already gained control of the minds of hundreds of millions of victims worldwide. Via catchy ear worms, he had turned them into dancing little monsters, much like the Nens that Bond had barely escaped this morning.

But The Hitman would not rest until he had achieved total world domination. He now had a new plan, as Bond could read in the zoomed-in, enhanced image on his communication terminal. The secret report read:

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GTS’s music videos, The Hitman decided, should be designed to deepen viewer immersion. “We thought, Instead of just having a plot for the music video itself, why not have some lore behind it? Wouldn’t that make it easier for fans to dive deep?”

The experiment started in 2015 with the single “U Need I.” The accompanying music video was rife with allusions to a larger narrative. The tone was sombre, and the scenes cinematic in nature, with no bright colors or elaborate choreography. Images had dark subtext: one boy reached numbly for pills behind a bathroom mirror; another stared down at his own bloodied hands.

It was the first entry in the so-called Gangnam Universe, in which alternate versions of the seven members are trapped in a cycle of tragedy, and struggle to break free.

This fantastical scenario energized a passionate subset of fans. As The Hitman had hoped, they generated countless artistic tributes and traded theories about the meaning of each installment.

===

But that wasn’t all the secret report showed. Bond read on:

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A few weeks later, The Hitman said, “Music delivers a very strong experience and emotions in an instant of listening. But we want to make it so that it can be part of a much longer and more sustained type of content consumption.”

He continued, “I’ve read books about gamification and why people are addicted to games.” He was studying multiplayer online role-playing games and first-person shooters, and planned to develop games across multiple genres; some would feature alter egos of The Hitman’s artists, but others would have no connection with the idols.

This turn felt at once arbitrary and revealing: increasingly, the organization seemed to be losing interest in the musicians themselves.

===

“My God…” Bond muttered to himself. “The Hitman is insane, and even more dangerous than I could have imagined. I must stop him before he has a chance to carry out his plans. I must alert the other operatives inside the B.E.J.A.K.O. network. But how can they protect themselves against The Hitman’s devious mind-control techniques?”

Bond paced up and down his lair. Then he went to make breakfast. Then he picked up the pacing again.

“I got it!” Bond finally said. “I’ll give them a mind vaccine to protect them against The Hitman’s control. I can even help them apply it.”

Bond sat down at his communication terminal, and typed up a quick message. Well, not so quick, but quick enough.

In a few words, Bond alerted his fellow operatives inside his the B.E.J.A.K.O. network of the Hitman’s new plan. And he ended his message with ​this secret link​, containing instructions on how to protect themselves, and how to apply the mind vaccine, with his help.

Not the kind of testimonial I want

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Last night, I opened up my Daily Email Habit service to my entire list.

Since then, over the past 12 hours, close to two dozen new people have signed up.

Many of those people have written me to say they are excited to get started and develop their skills.

Others, who didn’t sign up for good reasons of their own, wrote to tell me how they like the concept and design of the service.

And then, I got the following “testimonial” from a reader who neither signed up for Daily Email Habit, nor had a good reason for not signing up:

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What a brilliant idea!

This is truly an extremely valuable offer for someone who has any sort of expertise and has his/her offers nailed down to get into the habit of daily writing.

Sadly, I have none of the above 2 things at the moment. Once I do find my ICP for whom I have sufficient expertise, this will be something I’ll definitely come to you for.

Thank you for launching such an amazing offer!

===

I didn’t reply to this. I had a sense there’s a game afoot here that I don’t want to play.

I tried to figure out what game that is, and what’s really going on in the message above, in between that compliment sandwich.

I had to translate it to myself to understand. For some reason, I thought of a little olive, looking out at a large tract of land and saying:

“What beautiful, fertile soil! This land would be perfect to support a whole orchard of olive trees, given that they have deep roots and broad branches. But alas, as you can see, I have neither. Just look at me! Do you see any roots or branches on me? No, there are none. It’s quite sad. Beautiful land though.”

There are lots of good reasons not to write daily emails, but lack of expertise is not one of them. You don’t write consistently because you have expertise… you have expertise because you write consistently.

That’s something that I believe on a deep level, and that’s why I put it right on the sales page for Daily Email, at the very start of the deck copy, right after “I’ll help you start a consistent daily email habit that…”

Like I said, there are lots of good reasons why you might not want to write daily emails. There are also lots of good reasons why you might.

If you decide to write daily emails, you most certainly don’t need my Daily Email Habit service to do it. But my service might help you stick with it… be more consistent… save time… or write better emails than you would otherwise. For more info on all that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Build your list by… writing

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Last Wednesday, I got a message from Chavy Helfgott, who is a copywriter and brand strategies, and who also happens to subscribe to my Daily Email Habit service. Chavy wrote:

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At least for the beginning, I’m posting my emails on LinkedIn as well (as I have a large following there) and – I got 8 new subscribers from today’s post! This is after neglecting my LinkedIn account and rarely posting for quite a while.

Thank you for this. It feels amazing to have had a concrete result so fast.

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Yesterday, I wrote that I’ll one day have an official launch for Daily Email Habit, but that day is not today, or any time soon.

I also invited people to reply if they are interested in Daily Email Habit, so I can send them the full details. A good number of people did reply.

I sent the folks the details… and then I asked myself, what exactly am I doing? What is my purpose in creating this extra obstacle for others and work for myself?

And so I’ve decided to open up Daily Email Habit to my entire list, both to stop myself from fielding these one-on-one messages, and to make Daily Email Habit available to people who might benefit from it.

If you’re interested in Daily Email Habit, and how it might possibly help you, the full info is at the link below.

I can tell you that the core promise of Daily Email Habit is a daily nudge to write your own daily email.

The effect of consistent nudging is consistent daily emails. And the effect of consistent daily emails is that they grow your expertise and authority… create or deepen your relationship with your audience… build up a stockpile of interesting content can reuse as you see fit… and make you better at writing, in all formats.

Plus, you can do like Chavy is doing, and simply post your daily email to LinkedIn or wherever and get people to opt in for your list. And yes, it does work — she sent me a screenshot of 8 shiny new subscribers from last Wednesday to prove it.

For full info on Daily Email Habit:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

My daily email counter goes back in the oven

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I remember one time as a kid, my mom made a cake. It took hours to mix the ingredients, and it took hours more to bake in the oven.

When the cake re-emerged from the oven, it was 10pm already. And something was off— I don’t remember what. Maybe the taste was off, or the appearance, or the consistency.

I do remember my mom sitting on the couch afterwards and muttering to herself about what could have gone wrong, and what she could do in round two to fix it.

She sat there and ruminated, and sat some more. Eventually, she stood up.

“I’m going to try it again,” she said.

By this time, it was probably 11pm. I just shrugged and went to bed.

I found out the next morning that my mom finished round two of the cake at 2am. This time, it turned out exactly how she wanted.

And it was delicious.

This made a deep impression on young Bejako.

At the time, my childish attitude was, “Try, and if at first you don’t succeed, clearly this is not meant to happen, at least not today.”

Well, actually, that’s still my attitude today, though with the years, I’ve also learned some persistence.

One week ago, last Monday to be exact, I released my Daily Email Habit service to the priority list.

Daily Email Habit is at core a daily prompt to get you over the initial hurdle of what to write about each day in a daily email. The prompt is the core of Daily Email Habit, but I also have some extra bits to make the experience more engaging and fun.

One of these is a streak counter at the bottom of each email that shows you how many straight days you’ve been sending a daily email. You update the counter by pressing a button in each Daily Email Habit email, and you have 24 hours to do so — otherwise the counter resets to 0.

It took a surprising amount of backend tomfoolery and jerry-rigging to make this simple counter. (Email is not a very sophisticated technical platform.)

Of course, the counter seemed to be working fine when I released Daily Email Habit last Monday… but by Tuesday I already had a bunch of emails from people saying their streaks were all wrong.

So I went in, debugged, updated the database by hand. Problem confidently solved.

The streak counter has been running smoothly ever since… until this morning, when I got a message from a Daily Email Habit subscriber:

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Hey John,

My streak reset for some reason…

even though I put YES for everything

writing to you at 10:57 EST (I made the time limit)

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… and beneath this was a screenshot of all the daily emails this subscriber has sent to his list over the past week, to back up his claim.

What to do?

The usual. Go to the couch, sit, mutter to myself about what could have gone wrong, and what I can do in round two to fix it. And then get to work, even if it’s getting late in the day.

One thing is for sure. I won’t let this stupid email counter get the better of me.

By the way, I am planning to have an official launch for Daily Email Habit at some date in the future. But before that happens, I want to create a launch bonus, equivalent in value to what I’m charging monthly for Daily Email Habit, and this is taking time. Honestly, I don’t know how long it will take.

But if you think that writing a daily email consistently could be valuable to you, and if you’re interested in seeing if Daily Email habit could help you get there, then hit reply and tell me why this service sounds interesting to you.

Do this, and I’ll get you the details all about how Daily Email Habit works so you can decide if it’s for you or not. Plus, if you do join now, you will still get any bonuses I offer when I have the official launch, per my usual protocol of rewarding early buyers.

Meme and troll your way to success

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Two days ago, I wrote an email about Flat Earthers, and how I get where they’re coming from. I got a reply to that from long-time reader, pro copywriter, and original Crazy Email Lady, Liza Schermann, who wrote:

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Haha I love this! “For much of my life, I’ve had sympathy for Flat Earthers”. Should be the headline on your website.

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In the words of farm boy Westley, “As you wish.”

After Liza’s email, I went into my WordPress settings, and changed the tagline of my site. Any visitor to any page of my site, aside from the optin page, will now see a masthead up top that reads, “Desert Kite: For much of my life, I’ve had sympathy for Flat Earthers.”

Stupid inside joke? Trivial? Trolling?

Perhaps. And yet…

Yesterday, I promised to share an interesting idea that’s been bouncing around my head after I heard it a few weeks ago.

The idea comes from Omid Malekan, who is now a professor of crypto (!) at Columbia University, and who was previously the resident crypto expert at Citibank.

Malekan was writing about memecoins, basically stupid inside joke cryptocurrencies, trivial and trolling shitcoins, which are now having their moment and are currently worth over $100 billion in aggregate.

Malekan thinks memecoins are a bubble bound to pop. But in trying to make that case, he decided to “steelman” the case for memecoins, and argue for the other side as well as he could. And he discovered something interesting:

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I did realize some interesting things. Like historically, a lot of things start out as a joke and then end up becoming really significant and important. This is particularly true in the art world where a lot of what we today consider to be like, ‘Oh this is an amazing genius work of art,’ was just at the time 50 or 100 years ago the artist trolling.

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Malekan gave the example of Don Quixote, which started out with Cervantes trolling the popular form of writing at the time, knightly romances.

In time though, Cervantes’s book took a life on its own. Today, it’s held up as the first novel, and it’s taught as canon and forced down the throats of university students worldwide.

The list gets much wider and more significant if you don’t look at just trolling but also include, play, fun, and aimless games.

I read once that agriculture didn’t arise by the gradual conquering and mastering of plants to produce food. Rather, it grew out of symbolic, playful, or temporary gardens that people grew for no practical purpose, the way Eastern Europeans still plant little pots of wheat before Easter.

What about language?

My personal theory, though I’m sure others have had it before, is that the wide variety of modern languages is there thanks to memeing, trolling teenagers throughout history. And if you want proof of that, look at how new creole languages still emerge today, with new grammar and vocabulary, thanks to the kids of the displaced parents.

But you probably don’t want proof of that. You probably want me to get to the point of this email, if any.

My point is simply that play, fun, aimless games, or even mockery, trolling, and memes, have value in business, beyond simply being a sweetener for your content.

Get ready for the pitch now, because I’m about to give it to you:

If you want an example of memery and trolling turning to gold, take what I call my Most Valuable Email trick. It started out as a joke. It was my own attempt to put a smile on my own face and later on the faces of my readers, once I had a few.

Then the Most Valuable Email trick became a habit.

Later, I discovered this Most Valuable Email trick was actually useful to me.

And today, it’s directly influenced not just my copy, but the design of my website and emails… my personal positioning… and even the business strategy of what I do with this little newsletter.

Plus I’ve shared the MVE trick with others, and this memey or jokey thing has had real concrete benefits for them too.

Here’s Shakoor Chowdhury, a marketer who does performance deals with ecommerce clients (he’s driving $300k+ in sales each month for just one of them). Shakoor wrote about MVE:

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John, this is by far my favorite of your programs and really kickstarted my email marketing.

There were really two parts to MVE that changed my life:

1. Using “the meat” — emails cannot just be all information and value with no entertainment, you have to give people a reason WHY they should listen

2. the use of [the MVE trick] in your copy, what a powerful concept… instead of [doing what everybody else does, if you you use the MVE trick, it] also quickly raises your authority and credibility

When I bought this course I was very inconsistent, but you gave me direction and I started writing daily and grew a list of 470 subscribers in less than a month of implementing

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If you would like to find out how to meme and troll your way to success:

​https://bejakovic.com/mve

Wickedful

by

I like to go see movies without knowing anything about them other than they’re playing at my local movie theater. I don’t want to know the genre, the actors in it, the plot summary, the reviews.

“Let them surprise me,” I say with a magnanimate sweep of my hand, as I hand over my 7 euro at the box office.

And so this Wednesday, I went to see Wicked. I only knew it had something to do with the Wizard of Oz. But I was surprised to find it’s three hours long, and a musical of the kind I don’t like, and a heavy-handed morality play to boot.

I emerged from the theater several years older, no wiser, and looking desesperately for something, anything, a little shred from this ordeal that I could reclaim for my daily email.

And there was something.

In between all the unendful singing, Wicked also has bits of dialogue. And the dialogue regularly makes use of a little word-trick. Each time it happened, it put a smile on my face and lightened the heavy burden of watching this movie.

I won’t spell out exactly what this word-trick is. But perhaps you can guess? I’ve tried to use it myself numerious times in this email.

My point for today is that it makes sense to make up and use your own words, terms, slang, even if it’s nonsense, or silly. It lightens the burden of reading (or watching) otherwise valuable but dry material.

You might shrug at that. Perhaps it’s because you’ve heard this advice before. Perhaps it’s because you think it doesn’t apply to you, and the serious business you are engagified in.

So there’s a bigger and to me much more interesting point I want to share with you. But I will save it for my email tomorrow. It’s not that humor is important, though it is. It’s not that it can be done in every field, even if your field is accounting for mortuary offices.

Rather, the point I want to share with you is a surprising idea I heard recently in the crypto space, which applies much more broadly, to business and perhaps to life.

Maybe you think that’s a grand claim. I can only promise to pay it off tomorrow.

Meanwhile, if you would like to learn a different trick, one that can lighten the burden of reading AND writing daily emails, you might like the enfollowing:

https://bejakovic.com/mve