Influential Writing

PSA: Lock your laptop

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I’ve just came home from the Drassanes, Barcelona’s 13th-century-Gothic-shipyard-turned-maritime-museum.

I go there to work sometimes instead of sitting at home. The museum cafe attracts idle foreigners with laptops, like me, because it’s huge, old, beautiful, quiet, and free.

Until a few days ago, I was super casual with my stuff when working at the Drassanes. I’d leave my laptop, screen open, no password set, as I went to investigate the bathroom around the corner from the cafe.

I mean, it’s a museum, right? And just a bunch of other digital nomads sitting there, deep in their own worlds. Who’s gonna take my stuff?

Probably nobody.

Probably.

Even so, I’ve recently become paranoid.

My paranoia set in after I read Kieran Drew’s latest email, about the ordeal which followed after Kieran’s laptop and phone were stolen a few weeks ago, in Buenos Aires, where Kieran has been living lately (he is English).

As a result of the theft, Kieran has had his personal accounts hijacked, his money taken from his bank, and his half-finished book, which was only saved locally to his laptop, disappear in smoke.

Plus there was and is just a bunch of stress and fear… plus endless hours on the phone trying to recover what could be recovered… plus, I imagine, a feeling like you’ve been lobotomized, since all the stuff you rely on being there is simply not.

So yeah.

I finally put a password on my laptop. I’ve been keeping an eye on all those shifty nomads who pretend to work around me. And I’ll start being a little more diligent about backing things up, and security in general. In my paranoid state, I’m advising you to do the same.

And now, to the business end of this email:

Kieran, as you might know, is a guy who writes online.

Unlike many others who write online, Kieran makes a lot of money from it, over $1.4 million over the past four years.

Pretty magically, he does it by writing an email only once a week, and only about stuff that interests him (or that befalls him, like the recent theft).

Kieran has now put together a new guide about how to write online, about what you like, and make a living at it, even a very good living.

Spoiler alert:

Kieran’s guide is not filled with the newest and hottest tactical info. If you’ve seen it all before, and if you can only get aroused by the latest gimmick, you won’t find it in Kieran’s guide, or, for that matter, in Kieran’s other content.

What you will find is exactly what Kieran has done and found to work over the years, and the principled 4-step process he now teaches to others whom he has helped to succeed as well. If you’re interested:

https://bejakovic.com/writeonline

Did I live up to my 2025 “themes”?

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Each January 1, I write an email reviewing my (usually failed) goals of the past year, and setting several new goals for the year to come, which I will then… well, let’s take it one step at a time.

Rewind back to January 1 2025. I wrote then that I’m kind of over goal setting, but for the sake of an interesting email, I chose 3 goals, or rather “themes,” for 2025:

#1. Recurring income (it’s clear enough what that means)

#2. Less of me (meaning, getting better at making offers that don’t rely entirely on my personal authority and charm to sell)

#3. Tech (developing software tools that I could sell or give away or use myself)

How did I do?

On the tech front, absolutely nothing. If anything, I’ve become even more of a Luddite than I was a year ago.

Once upon a time, I worked as a software engineer, but I’ve realized dabbling in programming and software development a waste of my time now. Instead, if a good opportunity comes along, I will partner with people who want to fiddle around with code.

As for my other two themes, I actually did pretty good.

I had a good chunk of my income this year in the form of recurring income (both via payment plans on high-ticket offers, and via continuity products like Daily Email Habit).

As for “less of me,” I’ve learned a lot and implemented a good amount about making offers that are attractive even to people who don’t really know me and love me via these emails. Ironically, I think the success of my “I endorse YOU” auction, with the $31k winning bid, was proof of that.

Now fast forward back to the future, specifically, to today. What about the coming year, 2026?

Over the past days and weeks, no clear theme or two or three for 2026 came to my mind. So this morning, I sat down and made a list of 10 things I want to get done with my Bejako Business in 2026. Here they are:

1. Publish a new book

2. Make $1M in auction revenue (selling my stuff and others’ stuff, to my audience and to other audiences)

3. Develop a series of high ticket offers that actually sell, like [censored] etc.

4. Stick to a monthly schedule of 1) newsletter ad or list swap, 2) in-house offer, 3) zero-delivery offer

5. Keep building up Monetization Mastermind (my invite-only group of list owners who want to partner up on various deals)

6. Keep experimenting with Daily Email House

7. Grow the list to 8k

8. Build up my status more

9. Partner with more people

10. Keep uncovering new bubbles of people and connecting them to each other

That’s a lot. Some of it is pretty reachable, or at least has fuzzy enough criteria of success to sound like it.

Some of it is ambitious, or even very ambitious.

Is it all possible to do it all, or a large part?

I believe it is. I’ll tell you how:

Double up and triple up. In other words, make everything do double or triple work, and feed into other things that I want to do.

For example, the new book I want to publish is directly connected to the high-ticket offer I am currently working on. The two will feed off each other.

Having a new book, as well as a high-ticket offer that sells well (inshallah), will be status-boosting.

And all this can feed into more auctions and partners and connections… and and so on.

You might say this sounds like the best-case scenario, and not like the worst- or even likely-case scenario.

I agree. So how to improve my chances?

How to actually double up and triple up, consistently, throughout the year, as I keep working on different projects, and as life starts getting in the way, and I as a person change?

My answer to this, which is the one point of today’s email, finally, which can be relevant to you, is:

More planning and research and preparation.

Specifically, I heard somebody smart and successful recommend recently to schedule “regular thinking time,” and to treat it like a non-negotiable meeting with yourself.

So if there is a theme to my 2026, “thinking time” is it.

And as for whether I will reach my 10 goals… or fail on most or on all counts… stay tuned, and maybe you will have the opportunity to nod and smirk in case you see me struggling… or nod and smile if you see me succeed.

Also, I got an offer for you today:

On the one hand, I believe “thinking time” is best done alone.

On the other hand, it’s inevitably true that other people can help keep us accountable in ways that we cannot keep ourselves (well, most of us, Daniel Throssell is an exception).

Maybe more importantly, other people can immediately spot and point out blind spots in our own thinking that we might never spot.

So here’s my offer to you:

Would some kind of organized and shared “thinking time” be useful to you?

I’m imagining it as a regularly scheduled call with myself and other people, where we can all share what we’re working on and how we’re thinking about proceeding.

But it doesn’t have to be like that, and maybe you have better ideas.

In any case, if organized, structured, regular, and shared “thinking time” might be useful to you, write in and let me know to say so, and what it could help you with, and how you imagine it looking.

Thanks in advance.

What do I write about NOW?

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I woke up this morning to find out that, after about 8 years of this daily email newsletter, my dad finally found me online and signed up to hear from me every day.

“Oh God,” I said to myself, “what do I write about NOW?”

This always happens whenever somebody from my real life signs up for my newsletter. I suddenly get in my head and start thinking what people will think. It lasts a day or two. Then I gradually relax and get back to writing for myself.

To date, as far as I know, this newsletter counts among its readers my mom… my dad… friends I have had for 20+ years… girls I’ve known or dated or been in long-term relationships with… a mom of an ex-gf… several people I have only met in real life after being in contact with them via this newsletter… a motley collection of people I have never met in real life but that I have surprisingly fun and even important relationships with online, entirely via typing and maybe occasionally by Zoom… and then of course the large and mostly silent majority who sometimes read, sometimes reply, and sometimes buy from me and make my life, the way it is, possible.

I really struggled to write today’s email.

For one thing, because I’m in my head, like I said at the start.

For another thing, Christmas Eve is not very inspiring or exciting where I’m at right now.

It’s rainy and gray in Zagreb today. I’m currently at an Airbnb and getting ready to go for a Christmas Eve gym session, before heading for the Christmas Eve suckling pig roast at my mom’s and grandma’s.

In terms of email fodder, nothing much is going on compared with years past. (I checked my email from December 24 2024. I found the Holy Grail on Christmas Eve last year, and I wrote an email about it).

A final thing is that, though I’m no believer and frankly I have zero tradition of Christmas from when I was a kid (New Year’s was the big holiday then, with presents and a tree and a commie version of Santa Claus), I still feel some reluctance to go into my usual full-salesman mode on Christmas Eve. (I will reserve that for tomorrow.)

So lemme just say how strange and in a way miraculous it is to be able to do what I’m doing.

I wanna say thanks that you’re reading these emails, including presumably today, on Christmas Eve.

If you celebrate, enjoy your own version of suckling pig or however it is you feast today. If you don’t celebrate, I hope you’re doing well wherever you are in the world. In the words of my spirit animal, Ebenezer Scrooge, “A Merry Christmas to everybody!”

“The Bible of persuasion” (was $1,997, now $0.99)

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Boy I got something hot for you.

Super hot.

It sells for $1,997 right now… is worth millions if you apply it thoroughly… but you can get it today for $0.99.

Thanks to Daily Email House member Anthony La Tour, I got clued into an amazing fact earlier this morning. In Anthony’s words:

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So recently, I’ve been getting things ready for a road trip from Oregon to California tomorrow for Thanksgiving with my wife and the kids (wish me luck… this is their first time). As I was scrolling around Audible for something to pass the time on the road, I came across two new “audiobooks” from Dan Kennedy:

Mind Hijacking & Magnetic Story Selling

These are NOT audiobooks. They are recordings from the seminars he gave. In the case of Magnetic Story Selling (which is HIGHLY useful for writing emails), multiple seminars.

Magnetic Story Selling is currently being offered at $1,997 just for the physical book. The price of the seminar ticket alone for Mind Hijacking was over $7,000.

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For the purposes of this email, I just wanna focus on that Magnetic Story Selling book (print version) that Anthony mentions.

I checked, and sure enough, it’s selling for $1,997 online right now.

Also included as bonuses are several Dan Kennedy seminars, including one called Influential Writing.

I first heard about that training some five years ago from Internet Marketer Rich Schefren, who said it was one of Dan Kennedy’s two best trainings.

I got my hands on it after that (don’t ask how).

I’ve since gone through Influential Writing many, many times.

It’s on my phone and I used to listen to it while walking on the beach. It’s shaped my ideas about writing an email newsletter more than just about anything else has, outside Ben Settle’s initial advice to get started and to make your emails “infotaining.”

And now, if what Anthony says is right, you can get the recording of the Influential Writing seminar as part of the Magnetic Story Selling audiobook… not for the ~10k that it cost initial attendees… nor for the $1,997 that it costs as part of the “multimedia book” being sold on Russell Brunson’s site… but for $33 on Audible, or for $0.99 if you sign up to an Audible subscription.

I wish I had known about this last week, because I would have definitely included it inside my Black Friday Bundle Collector’s Edition of amazing and secret deals. As it is, it’s too late, and too good for me not to share.

If you want to influence people via the written word, then Influential Writing is, as one of the testimonials says, “the Bible of persuasion.” Nothing else comes close. And if you wanna get this audiobook version, which apparently includes it:

https://bejakovic.com/mss

Don’t count on people remembering you

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Cautionary tale:

A few days ago, a dude joined my Daily Email House group. The description in his Skool bio sold that he had recently sold a media company and that he is now building a newsletter business.

I got curious. I wanted to look him up, and find more about this media company and newsletter business.

But the dude’s name is very common. I won’t say it here, but it’s on the commonness level of “Ben Johnson.”

In other words, it’s hopeless to find this guy online with a quick search, and there’s no link in his Skool profile. I shrugged, and had I not needed a topic for today’s email, I would have forgotten all about him.

Yesterday, I talked about how to make a long-term bet on list growth, which is to pick a platform you believe in, and then invest either your time or your money into it.

But there’s quick and cheap stuff you can do also.

Putting a link to your optin page in all your online profiles one of ’em. This probably won’t get you thousands of subscribers. But it might get you a few, and you never know who might be hiding among those few (me, for example).

There’s a bigger point here, which is not to count on other people to do the work of remembering you and seeking you out.

That’s one of the main benefits of an email list.

An email list gives you a chance to be the one who gets in touch with others, when it suits you, as often as it suits you, rather than hoping and waiting for them to think of you.

Of course, if you have more than one channel to reliably get in touch with people on your own terms, even better. which is one of the reasons I have set up my Daily Email House group.

Daily Email House is another way for me to connect and bond more deeply with readers. As you can imagine, I have to give people value and even fun in order to make it worth their while to get and stay inside the group.

If you would like to make this deal with me yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/house

To all my dog trainers, pottery instructors, and professional alpaca whisperers

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Yesterday I got a question from Liza Schermann, the original “Crazy Email Lady” and current head copywriter at surging startup Scandinavian Biolabs. Liza wanted to know:

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Why so tempting??

I promised myself never to click through to the sales page of Daily Email Habit. It’s too good an offer not to buy, but I knew I wouldn’t commit. Yesterday, I gave in and clicked against my better judgement.

Anyhow, now I’m wondering:

The example you provide on the sales page is very specific to online marketing. Are most of the prompts geared towards this crowd? Or is it a mix, and people can adjust as they see fit for their own purposes?

I happen to be in this crowd, so it makes perfect sense to me. But maybe there’s a dog trainer, a pottery instructor, or a professional alpaca whisperer on your list who’s scratching their head wondering what to do with a prompt about daily emails (or something similar).

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I got variants of this question all week. In a nutshell:

Daily emails, like the kind Daily Email Habit gets you to write (including the sample prompt on the sales page) will work in any business or industry. The only caveat is you must be willing to put yourself (or some sort of avatar you write behind) as the face of that business.

In fact, that’s the point of daily emails, unpleasant though it may sound.

You’re ultimately selling yourself as the product, rather than whatever your “product” officially is. In the words of Dan Kennedy, a direct marketer who has managed to sell himself for millions and millions of dollars:

“The higher up in income you go, the more you’re paid for who you are, rather than what you do.”

So now the question becomes, are daily emails, the way Daily Email Habit helps you to write, a fit for you?

Only you can decide that.

Maybe you don’t like the business of selling you, even for a premium, and maybe you want your products or services to stand for themselves, at competitive market rates.

That’s a fine decision. In this case, don’t go the daily email route, because the relationship and authority you build up will only interfere with people buying from you on the strength of your product or price alone.

On the other hand, if you want to charge higher prices… or surround yourself with a moat that’s not easily crossed by marauding neighbors… or have a ready source of income whenever your business or personal life needs it… then daily emails work great.

And Daily Email Habit will help you write them, in an effective and (relatively) painless way, whether you are a dog trainer, pottery instructor, or professional alpaca whisperer.

But that doesn’t change the cruel truth:

The price for Daily Email Habit is going up tonight at 12 midnight PST, from a modest $30/month to an obscene $50/month.

If you’re considering getting in before the price increases for ever and ever, and you want the full info on DEH:

https://bejakovic.com/deh/

Why close down a successful info product business?

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Yesterday, I wrote about guy who is closing down his successful info product business (and who got me to instantly pony over $500 to get a clearance bundle of his courses.)

I didn’t share the guy’s name in my email. This predictably drew a higher-than-usual number of responses from readers.

For example, long-time reader and customer Sean Clark wrote in to ask:

“Do you know why he’s shutting it down vs letting someone else take it over or license the content, etc?”

According to the sales page for the clearance bundle, the info marketer in question has simply decided to retire from teaching, and to go back to doing full-time.

But that still doesn’t really answer Sean’s question.

My suspicion:

The guy in question, being highly sophisticated in business generally and in direct marketing specifically, knows that the majority of the value of a course lies not in the course itself, but in the relationship the buyer has with the person selling the course.

In other words, if he’s really planning to step away from the info business 100%, then the value of his courses will soon drop to a feather over 0, whether he hands it over to somebody else or not.

Don’t believe me?

Then ask yourself, what would you pay for the magnificent and life-transforming courses by sales trainers and personal development gurus of years past, such as J. Douglas Edwards or Og Mandino or W. Clement Stone?

No?

Names don’t ring a bell?

You wouldn’t pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to learn from these dead masters?

That’s my point. These folks influenced and helped hundreds of thousands of people, including today’s gurus, or gurus who trained today’s gurus. The ideas from these old-timers would be as sure to help you as, say, Russell Brunson’s or Tony Robins’s ideas. Maybe more so. And yet…

Before you you think I’m trying to drown you in the impermanence of human existence, there’s a flip side to this depressing truth, which is much more positive.

That flip side is that, if you build up some sort of relationship with an audience, they will want to buy from you and only you, and will be willing to pay a premium far above what the information itself might sell for otherwise, at least while you still choose to be in business.

And so let me remind you that today, Thursday November 13, is the last day to sign up to my Daily Email Habit service at the still ridiculously low price of $1/day, aka $30/month.

Daily Email habit helps you start and stick with showing up in people’s inboxes, every day, with something relevant and interesting to say.

This habit, practiced for weeks and months and years, leads to a relationship and to standing with an audience, so they want to buy from you or hire you, even if hundreds or thousands of equally good alternatives are out there.

If you want to get started building your standing and authority today, and benefit both from taking action sooner and from not suffering from the price increase:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

I’m three years behind where I should be

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A reader writes in reply to my announcement yesterday, about the price increase for my Daily Email Habit service:

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Hi,

I’m just starting my business and don’t have an email list yet. Does this make sense for me?

Thanks

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I don’t know this reader’s business or her circumstances or goals.

I can only tell you my personal experience, and how I wish it were different.

I started writing daily emails in 2018. At that point I had been working as a freelance copywriter for 3 full years.

I had tried and failed with various side projects.

I eventually started writing daily emails as a sandbox to practice ideas and possibly attract prospective clients, and show them that I can do what I claim I can do.

Three big questions now:

1. Would I be better off today had I started this daily email newsletter 3 years earlier?

2. Would I have been better off in 2018 had I already been writing this newsletter for 3 years?

3. Would I have been better off back in 2015, when I had nothing, knew nothing, and had done nothing, had I started writing a daily email newsletter in addition to trying to get copywriting clients?

Yes, to all three. There’s no doubt about it. Consider:

1. I would have been writing for three extra years

That would have translated into expertise, both in performing my job, and in selling myself to clients.

It also would mean three extra years of content — about 500,000 words — that I could repurpose into books, courses, trainings, talks given from the stage, lead magnets, bonuses.

2. I would have built my authority and status sooner and to higher levels

People treat you differently if you have a platform, even if it’s a platform anybody can create and assemble for free like an email newsletter.

The very fact of having something to say, and saying it publicly, gives you greater standing, status, and respect.

3. I would have had a side hustle to balance out ups and downs of client work

This would have made me less needy, more comfortable negotiating, and would have allowed me to turn away projects that I knew shouldn’t work on.

4. I would have organized my own experiences and thoughts about my business, the way I did only in 2021, and only because I had been writing daily emails

I made a lot of mistakes while working as a freelancer, including some that I estimate cost me hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of dollars.

Writing regularly, about what I am doing and learning, might have saved me from making some of those mistakes.

5. Writing to a dedicated audience would have eventually provided income

This would have balanced out what I was making with freelance work, and it only would have compounded in time.

6. Finally, I would have been building my list for an extra 3 years

For much of my time writing this email newsletter, the only thing I did to grow my list was to write my daily email and to post it on my website as a blog post.

It’s an incredibly inefficient and slow way to grow an email list. And yet, in time it still produced results and got me some subscribers, including people who then went on to promote me in various ways and who sped up the growth of my list.

In other words, just the very act of writing and making it available for people to find, is enough to build me the kernels of a list, which in turn became this “business,” though I still don’t even think of what I do as a business.

For all these reasons and more, I wish I had started my email list three years earlier.

It would have made the early days of my freelance career easier and faster.

It would have made the mid term of my copywriting career, around 2018, more profitable and more exciting.

And it would have made me richer and even more famous and beloved than I already am today (hard to believe, I know).

Again, this is all unique to me.

I don’t know your circumstances. I won’t try to persuade you that what makes perfect sense for me makes perfect sense for you.

If you wanna focus on the fact that I worked as freelance copywriter who specialized in writing sales emails… and therefore it was particularly beneficial to me to start writing sales emails for myself every day… you can focus on that.

But you can also focus on the other things I wrote above, which are relevant whether you’re a service provider doing something other than copywriting… or you sell courses or coaching… or you have handmade dog toys you want to get out into the world.

Whatever you decide to focus on:

The price for Daily Email Habit is going up this Thursday at 12 midnight PST, from a modest $30/month to the Martin Shkreli-like $50/month.

Daily Email Habit helps you start and stick with consistent daily emailing, and gives you, in a very condensed daily drip, a practical way to apply what I’ve learned over the past 8 years of writing this daily email newsletter.

I only wish I had started with it earlier.

If you wanna get started today, and take advantage of the still-reasonable monthly price:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

10 ideas for writing better daily emails in 10 weeks

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Once upon a time, I had a habit of focusing on one aspect of writing daily emails for a week at a time. The next week, I’d pick something else, and so on, until I got really good at writing emails.

At some point, I dropped the habit. That’s a shame. Recently, I had the idea to pick it up again, and so I made a list of 10 things to focus on in my daily emails, one thing per week, in order to make your emails much more fun, sticky, and effective in terms of sales and influence.

In case you’re curious or would like to do something similar, here’s 10 ideas for writing better daily emails in 10 weeks:

1. Be narcissistic, or give undue importance to yourself or things associated with you.

(This can be done earnestly or tongue-in-cheek. For example, I once wrote an email about how I had drafted a patent application to protect my Most Valuable Email trick, because it is too valuable not to protect, and because it satisfies the three criteria required by the U.S. Patent Office, namely novelty, non-obviousness, and concrete and practical application.)

2. Push-pull, near misses, teasing.

3. Fun vibe.

4. DHV = demonstrations of higher value.

Another term for this is status building, such as for example, when I tell you that I am currently running the only private, invite-only group of email marketers and course creators in the email marketing niche, which brings together pretty much everybody you have heard of in this space.

5. Clarity.

6. Personal frame. Meaning, every email should really be about you, or should have a frame of “you,” even if the picture inside the frame is, say, a scene from a Batman movie.

7. Being black-and-white, dogmatic.

8. Teasing or building up upcoming things (push-pull on a longer scale).

9. Transparency, Skeleton Protocol.

10. Reason why.

If some of the terms above — “push pull,” “near misses,” “Skeleton Protocol” — are unfamiliar to you, that’s because you have not read my new 10 Commandments book.

It took me several years of research, thinking, and paring down my ideas to the most valuable ones to be able to write this book.

This book is not a replacement for Bob Cialdini’s bestselling Influence, but a complement to it. As Rob Marsh, founder of the Copywriter Club, wrote after he read my new 10 Commandments book:

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In addition to Cialdini’s well known 6 principles of influence (urgency, scarcity, consistency and so on), it’s time to add Bejakovic’s 10 commandments of persuasion. This book will make you a better writer and a better sales person. But more than that, you can use John’s commandments to be more persuasive, more engaging and more interesting in everything you do.

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Imagine if you had been one of the first few thousand people who had read Cialdini’s Influence, back in 1984.

Entire multi-million dollar info businesses have been built up in the ensuing years by simply repackaging and selling the ideas in this book.

And many much bigger businesses have been built up by taking the ideas in Cialdini’s book, including the many nuances in there beyond just the chapter headings, and applying those ideas to sales and influence systems.

Would I be bold or arrogant enough to claim my new 10 Commandments book offers a similar opportunity today, in 2025?

Clearly I would. So in case you haven’t read it yet, you have only one option:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

The (yes, THE) secret of storytelling

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A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos likes to tell the story of how he became a copywriter. I’ve heard him tell this story multiple times, mostly online, and once in real life as well.

I forget the details of how it all goes, but there’s one detail that I never forget.

At one point, Parris was working at a real estate office, and the office manager at the time, in a fit of fury and impotence, punched his hand through a window.

And now comes the bit I always remember, which I’ve heard Parris repeat every time I’ve heard him tell this story:

There was a thin trail of blood on the floor, from the broken window to the elevator, as the manager walked out of the office, never to return again.

And that, in a snapshot, is THE secret of storytelling.

In a few more words, from an article I read about Irving Thalberg, a movie producer who was called the “Boy Wonder” of Hollywood, and who invented and popularized many Hollywood tropes that we now take for granted as elements of effective storytelling:

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The real reason for the enduring Thalberg myth has less to do with any of this than with that perennial idea, which fascinated [F. Scott Fitzgerald, who worked as a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1930s, and who wrote a novel with a fictionalized Thalberg as protagonist] as it does us, that there are secrets of storytelling, to which a few are privy.

Yet good Hollywood films have more or less a single story. Raise the stakes, place insuperable obstacles before the protagonist, have the protagonist somehow surmount them while becoming braver and better. What works for Dorothy works for Rocky. In truth, we may follow stories, but we respond to themes; the story is just the tonality in which those themes are played. […]

No one can recall the ins and outs of Salozzo’s drug scheme in “The Godfather,” but we remember Pacino’s face in closeup: we come for the story, stay for the sublimations.

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I don’t really know what the guy behind this article is talking about when he talks about “themes” and “sublimations.”

I do know that few stories are memorable… that the structure of storytelling, hyped up as it is, is often irrelevant… and that what actually makes a story work is not the rags-to-riches, or riches-to-rags, or hero quest skeleton underneath… but a few dramatic and memorable snapshots:

The “kiss of death” that Michael Corleone gives his brother Fredo in the Godfather II; Rocky running up the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the thin trail of blood from the broken window to the elevator.

So if it’s not the structure but the memorable snapshot that is the secret of storytelling… then how do you come up with memorable snapshots?

I hate to break it to you, but if that were a knowable secret, then every Hollywood movie would be a forever-beloved blockbuster. Which is clearly not the case.

The best you can do is to come up with the best snapshots you can, and then to test them out on your audience. See if the audience oohs and aahs, if they feed you back the same snapshot days and weeks and months later, and if they come back for more. Then double down on what works, and discard the rest.

And since I gotta sell you something, let me tie this into the topic of writing daily emails, because daily emails make for a particularly easy and fertile way to test out new ideas and ways of presenting those ideas to an audience.

I’ve written books and created courses that people buy and enjoy and then come back for more of. One secret of how I make such info products is that I repurpose my daily emails, or rather, the emails that worked — ideas and snapshots that I field-tested on my audience, and that I got positive feedback on.

If you want to start writing daily emails of your own, and if you want a field-tested guide for how to do that well:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/