Business Ideas

The winners of the 2024 Best Daily Email Awards

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[lights, red carpet, swelling music… I trot out on stage in a tuxedo and black tie, hold up my hands, and say]

Thank you, thank you.

We’re here tonight to celebrate the greatest year ever in daily emails.

[applause]

As you know, tonight’s awards show is organized by the Daily Email Academy, which you happen to be a member of by virtue of reading this newsletter.

[more applause, I give a few measured claps as well]

This is the inaugural Best Daily Email Awards.

While there’s been lots of glamour and excitement in the buildup to this event, there were also inevitably some little hiccups that go with the first of anything.

That’s okay… as Dan Kennedy might say, if we all stopped doing something if the first time wasn’t perfect, the human race would soon die out.

[a bit of laughter]

No, but seriously. There were some issues.

For example, there are thousands of daily email newsletters out there, and hundreds of thousands of actual daily emails in a year.

We in the organizing committee didn’t realize it’s unlikely that any one daily email would get more than one vote, even with a voting body as numerous and global as the Daily Email Academy.

[camera pans out to thoughtful, nodding faces in the audience]

The second issue was that the rules for voting this year didn’t prohibit voting for your own emails. Which is just what a lot of enterprising Academy members ended up doing.

[a bit of chatter in the audience, some shaking heads]

Since this wasn’t against the rules this year, the committee decided to accept such nominations, but it evaluated them with extra scrutiny.

The third and final hiccup was that there were a large number of submissions.

And since other prestigious awards (ahem, looking at you Oscars) are infamous for long, drawn-out ceremonies that last for many hours, with dozens of categories nobody cares about…

… ​​the committee has decided to make tonight’s ceremony short and snappy, like a good daily email, and focus on 5 most relevant and dramatic categories, highlighting diverse topics and styles, for this inaugural 2024, Best Daily Email Awards.

So without further ado… drum roll please… thank you… starting from the top…

The award for the Best Short Daily Email (under 100 words) goes to:

Josh Spector of the For The Interested newsletter, with his email, “So you say you want a resolution…”

In just 33 words, including the subject line, Josh managed to put a little smile on his readers’ faces… get them to open his email… share two valuable resources… and even include a classified ad that paid him a few hundred dollars.

Big congratulations to Josh for this successful daily email, and for being the first ever Best Daily Email Award winner.

Next, the award in the Best Original Story Daily Email goes to…

Australia’s best copywriter, Daniel Throssell, for his email, The Airport Incident.

Daniel’s email was a taut psychological thriller, set within the boarding queue at an airport gate.

Will she? Won’t she?

You had to keep reading to find out, only for the shocking surprise at the end of the email.

Big congratulations to Daniel on winning this prestigious award, and for writing an email that still keeps people talking months later.

Next, the award for the Best Foreign Language Daily Email goes to…

René Kerkdyk, a school teacher and guitar instructor from Hildesheim, Germany, for his email, “Gute Idee – Falsches Werkzeug.”

Fortunately, René’s email was subtitled in English as well. That’s why the committee could confirm the email was funny, charming, and heartfelt, the way that those European productions often are.

Congratulations to René for his successful email, and for being the inaugural Best Foreign Language Daily Email Award winner.

At this point, only two awards remain.

The tension is palpable.

First, we have the award for the Best Documentary Email, which goes to…

Matt Levine over at Bloomberg, for his email, “Money Stuff: Bill Ackman Wants Less Money.”

This was a 4,052-word email about markets and finances, and about a man named Bill Ackman, who is apparently a billionaire hedge fund manager.

I have to admit, I dozed off during this email, but that’s just because I find the topic of financial markets so foreign to me.

But — clearly those who enjoy financial topics thought this email was particularly fine. Also, it’s very likely that out of all the successful email writers on this list, Matt Levine got paid the most to write this exhaustive and exhausting piece.

For all these reasons, “Bill Ackman Wants Less Money” clearly deserves its Best Daily Email award. Congratulations to Matt and to Bloomberg.

And finally, our last Best Daily Email Award of the night, in the Best Adapted Story category, goes to…

…. yes, well, maybe you were wondering…

… of course it goes to me, John Bejakovic, for my email, “You don’t want to sell to a hobbit like me” — a story set in Middle Earth, featuring a boring and conservative hobbit who refused to heed the call of adventure.

I debated about including this email because it’s my own.

But as I wrote last week, the whole point of inventing an awards show is to be in the middle of it, and to use it for promotion and business-getting. So it would be a bit foolish to back out now. I will only say I was not the one to nominate this email.

So congratulations to all the Best Daily Email Award winners. You displayed an incredible amount of talent, creativity, and devotion to your craft.

And thank you to all Daily Email Academy members who voted in this year’s awards.

We will be back next year, with an even bigger, even more glamorous show, to celebrate what’s sure to be a new greatest year ever in daily emails.

Picture it now and ask yourself…​​

Will you be standing on stage to accept one of the 2025 Best Daily Email Awards?

The best way to make sure it happens is to start writing today. And if you’re ready to make the commitment and to dive in and pursue your crazy passion, here’s the official, Daily Email Academy-endorsed guide to producing interesting, acclaimed, and profitable daily emails:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

A grateful reader succeeds in making me blush

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Last night, I got an email from marketer and copywriter Shakoor Chowdhury, who wrote:

===

Hello John,

I wanted to take a moment of my day to say “thank you”!

Besides Dan Kennedy, you have played the most impactful role in growing my revenues every single day

most of my NEW cashflow can be directly attributed to you and your courses “MVE” & “influential emails”…

I write emails daily now and they always bring more money or book appointments with high ticket clients…

This year I decided to focus on building relationships with my customers and not just ‘direct selling’ one time…

And I have to say, nobody is able to teach the concepts of email marketing better than you have…

It is simple, straightforward and teaches the FUNDAMENTALS of what it takes to be an email copywriter

I am a lifelong fan and customer.

Hope many more people and great things find their way to you, you are a bit of a ‘best kept secret’ in the copy world

which is perhaps why you are the best… the mystic ‘guru at the top of the mountain’

I found you because OTHER copywriters spoke so highly of you

===

Like I said in the subject line, Shakoor succeeded in making me blush, and I’m blushing now having to write about it. So let me change the topic immediately.

I recently heard business coach Rich Schefren say that he often gives presents to his mentor Mark Ford, because Mark doesn’t like to be in anybody’s debt, and so he always gives presents in return.

Let me do the same with Shakoor:

Based on what little I know of him, he sounds like a guy who gets things done and would probably have been successful one way or the other.

Last October when Shakoor and I first exchanged a couple emails, he was already working with a number of clients as a kind of full-service marketer for ecom businesses.

With just one of those clients working on a performance deal, Shakoor was taking in $10k+ per month. Overall, at that time, he was driving $300k+ in sales for his clients each month.

Somewhere along the line, Shakoor also had time to run his own dropshipping businesses, one of which got up to 100k+ buyers.

All that’s to say, after Shakoor decided to build up his personal brand and to start writing daily emails, I’m guessing he would have been successful with Dan Kennedy or without Dan Kennedy, with me or without me.

That said, I do appreciate Shakoor’s kind words.

​​I also do appreciate that I have been able to help occasional people learn something about direct marketing and copywriting… and even make transformations in their lives, whether that meant making more money, or getting going with daily emailing so they can build a personal brand and stop relying on cold outreach.

And on that topic:

I’m not currently selling the Influential Emails program that Shakoor was referring to. But I still am selling my Most Valuable Email program.

Most Valuable Email pulls back the curtain and shows you, in less than an hour, how to perform a specific email copywriting trick, one I use regularly in my own emails.

Emails using this trick are different from emails you might be familiar with, like story emails, or “hot takes,” or how-to emails, or personal reveals.

Unlike those other kinds of emails, Most Valuable Emails happen to work well whether you have authority or not, whether you’re just getting started with your personal brand or you have had a following for years.

And yet, none of that is the reason why these kinds of emails are most valuable.

The real reason is that Most Valuable Emails make daily emailing fun and educational for me personally, and easy to stick with for the long term.

And it seems for others like Shakoor also.

Maybe for you too?

I don’t know. But if you’d like to find out more about MVE, and see if it makes sense for you:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Jewish terrorists in Palestine

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On today’s date, July 22 to be exact, a bomb went off in King David Hotel in Jerusalem, in what was then British-controlled Mandatory Palestine.

The year was 1946.

In other words, if you were hoping to hear me take some sort of stance on the current Israel/Palestine conflict, and either to be propped up or outraged in your beliefs, then I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed by this email.

Maybe best stop reading now.

On the other hand, if you want to be exposed to something new and different, then maybe read on.

Still here? All right:

The King David Hotel was the administrative headquarters of the British colonizers. In the attack, 91 British, Jewish, and Arab soldiers died. 46 more were injured.

The bombing was carried out by a Zionist paramilitary organization called Irgun Zvai Leumi, which called for the use of force to establish a Jewish state.

And regarding that terrorist label:

That’s not me making the judgment.

​​Irgun were labeled terrorists by the United Nations, The US and and UK governments, the New York Times, the 1946 Zionist Congress, and the Jewish Agency.

If that’s not enough, Albert Einstein wrote a public letter in 1948 which he compared Irgun to Nazi and fascist parties.

In spite of all this, I had never heard about Irgun until yesterday, when I did a bit of research in preparation for today’s email.

Encyclopedia Britannica described Irgun as “extremely disciplined and daring.” I was curious what that meant in practice, so I looked it up.

​​In brief:

Those wishing to join Irgun had to know somebody in the organization to have any chance to get in.

The initial interview took place in a darkened room.

The novice had a light shined into his eyes, and was quizzed on his motivations, “to weed out romantics and adventurers and those who had not seriously contemplated the potential sacrifices,” as per Wikipedia.

If the novice passed the initial interview, a 4-month indoctrination followed. This was designed to further eliminate the impatient and “those of flawed purpose” who had slipped through the initial screening.

Only if the recruit passed all these preliminary steps did he start a lengthy and arduous training program in weapons use and and military tactics and bomb-making.

The thing that struck me was that Irgun never had more than 40 members at a time.

And yet, with such a small force, they carried out a number of deadly attacks (such as the King David Hotel bombing) or daring exploits (such as capturing Acre prison, a medieval fortress that not even Napoleon had managed to take with army of thousands).

But bringing all this back to the topic of this newsletter, specifically, direct marketing and what it can tell us about human psychology.

What I read of Irgun reminded me of direct marketing authority Dan Kennedy.

Dan once said that there are large commonalities between those who join mass movements, such as Irgun, and direct response customers, particularly those who follow a guru or leader or expert, on whatever topic, whether copywriting or health or investing.

By telling you this, I don’t meant to trivialize or endorse killing people or other terrorist activity. But I do mean to tell you something about human psychology.

The little that I’ve written above about Irgun’s recruiting and training process all applies, pretty much verbatim, to the effective recruiting and training of long-term direct response customers.

If you find that a little shocking… or a little vague… or you’d just like to find out more about the psychology of those who join mass movements, and how that might be relevant in the more mundane, safe, and profit-oriented world of direct marketing… then there’s a kind of manual on the topic.

Dan once gave out copies of this manual to his own small and select group of fanatical followers, who had made it into the room only after a long period of selection and indoctrination.

If you’d like to pick up a copy of the same manual today:

https://bejakovic.com/true-believer

I was ghosted by a business owner for an eternity

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Two weeks ago, July 7 to be specific, I sent an email to a business owner I had been talking to back in 2021.

Back in 2021, the conversation between us had dropped off.

I never followed up, not until 14 days ago, to see if it still makes sense to talk about the project we had been talking about back then, where I would help him get more back-end sales for his ecom brand.

The business owner didn’t respond to me 14 days ago. Or 13 days ago. Or 12 days ago.

He ghosted me entirely, all the way up to yesterday, 2 weeks after I sent him the original email. Yesterday, he wrote:

===

Hi John,

Great to hear from you. Yes, we still own [his brand]. Let’s pick up the conversation again.

Here’s a link to my schedule: [calendly link]

I look forward to talking with you soon.

===

I recently read a book called Business Buying Strategies. It’s a book about, er, strategies to buy businesses.

The book was solid, with worthwhile info by a guy named Jonathan Jay, somebody who had clearly done what he was writing about.

But more interesting than the what-to and how-to in the book were a few bonus chapters. These featured candid interviews with various business owners who had made a habit of buying other businesses.

I made two notes for myself from one of those interviews, here reproduced verbatim:

1. In spite of apparent outward success, business owners can be fucked. They might be in a place where they can’t make payroll, or can’t pay themselves.

2. Business owners get hundreds of emails a day.

All that’s to say:

1. It makes sense to reach out and offer a way out to business owners.

2. It makes sense to follow up if a business owner doesn’t respond or if the conversation goes cold.

By the way, in case you’re interested in growing by acquisition, or in cutting down the gigantic odds of failure that go into starting up anything new, now or in the future, then Jay’s book is worth a read.

Here’s the link if you’d like to spend $7.99 on some valuable info:

https://bejakovic.com/business-buying

Leadership by “dynamic indifference”

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Yesterday, I waited to board my plane with my handwritten, 100% fake-looking boarding pass.

The boarding pass was an ordinary piece of paper that had just my name and the number of the flight on it. And that’s it — no other information on there. It was a consequence of yesterday’s IT meltdown.

At the gate, the crew first let in a few passengers who had managed to check in online and had assigned seats.

Then they realized that the majority of the remaining passengers were just like me. The remaining passengers all had stupid pieces of paper in their hands, without any assigned seats. And since the computers were all down, there was no way to assign seats in any normal way.

First, there was a bit of panic on the ground crew’s faces.

They started calling around to their superiors, consulting with each other, trying to ignore the questions and suggestions that pushy passengers were making to them.

In the end, the ground crew shrugged their shoulders.

“Ok everybody can board,” they said. “You can sit wherever you find a free seat.”

And it worked out just fine. The boarding completed was as quickly, or maybe more quickly, than with the usual “excuse me but you’re in my seat” hokey pokey.

Point being:

Let’s burn down all the computers and ticket-booking systems and rules about who sits where and who does what. Let’s abolish all the top-down mandates, because the people will self-organize just as well or better.

Anarchy!

“Uh, really?”

No, not really.

But there really might be cases where doing just what I suggested actually works.

​​And it might work for you, too, even if you don’t run an airline, but an info publishing business.

​​And as a case study, let me share with you an interesting and quick snippet of an interview. The interview is with a man named Bill Bonner who:

1. Is a famous copywriter

2. Founded and still owns Agora, a huge consortium of direct response brands that employs thousands of people

3. Is worth a few billion dollars thanks to his stake in all those publishing businesses

Here’s the thing though. You might think that a billion-dollar company requires strong and dedicated management. But that’s just the opposite of what Bonner is saying in this interview.

It turns out he has abolished not just the seating assignments inside Agora, but has even vacated the pilot’s seat, and has left it to the stewardesses and the passengers to figure out who does what, and how, including flying the plane:

“In France, for example, we tried telling people what to do — from London, no less. It was a disaster. Then, at the end of our ropes, we told the remaining French employees that they would have to figure it out for themselves. “Who will be in charge?” they wanted to know. ‘Whoever takes charge,’ we replied.”

I’m telling you this because maybe you’re like me, and you have an aversion to the idea of managing people.

Well, maybe you don’t have to manage people, or even really have any management, in order for people to work for you, and to good work for you well, and to make serious money for you.

It sounds risky, or like a pipe dream. I know. But if you’re curious to find out a bit more about Bonner’s “dynamic indifference” way of leading a business, you can read about it here:

https://www.imsrindia.com/single-post/focus-on-the-work-itself-bill-bonner-founder-and-president-of-agora

Do you have a newsletter or FB group?

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A few days ago, I read how my buddy Kieran Drew bought another newsletter to absorb, like a growing metropolis absorbs a quaint village nearby.

The owner of the other newsletter decided to go pursue some other project. He wasn’t interested in running the newsletter any more.

So Kieran paid him per subscriber who stays on after 2 weeks. They did a kind of handoff, where the new subscribers were introduced to Kieran, and given many chances to unsubscribe, and at that point they were merged into Kieran’s list.

As far as I know, the experiment is still ongoing. It’s not clear yet whether Kieran has already made his money back or whether this buy can be considered a success. (In case you’re interested in hearing how this experiment ends, it’s worth getting on Kieran’s list at kierandrew.com.)

This made me wonder.

Do you have a newsletter, a Facebook group, or a Skool group?

Is it made up of an audience of coaches, business owners, or people interested in making money online?

And, in case this group or newsletter is not something you enjoy running and managing, have you thought of trading in the login username and password to the group, or the Excel export of newsletter contacts, for a neat stack of $100 bills?

If you find yourself a little intrigued or curious right now, write me and let’s talk.

I might be interested in buying what you have.

​​And even if it’s not a fit, I might know other people who might want to buy what you have.

​​Just write me now because — well, why not? It doesn’t cost you or oblige you in any way. And it might take this off your mind sooner rather than later.

Email pitches for highly customized service businesses

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The owner of a creative agency signed up to my list a couple weeks ago, and had a question:

===

Would love to learn more about what kind of materials / services you offer in regards to specifically email pitches.

[My industry] is pulling back some right now, so we are having to put a larger emphasis on outbound, which we never really had to do before.

We are services based business and everything is so customized it makes it a challenge to really blanket offers.

However, we do get pretty good responses when we do put stuff out there.

Are you able to share some of what services you offer / any preferred reading that I should check out on your website etc?

===

There’s nothing on my site I would recommend for learning about cold outreach, and there are no cold outreach services I offer at the moment.

But I have been experimenting with cold emails myself, and I have been reading up and listening up on it.

It seems there are two schools of cold emailing:

#1. Carpet bombing, where the bulk of the work goes into setting up the technology for sending dozens or hundreds of automated “personal” emails each day, and feeding that with more or less qualified leads from various databases or from virtual assistants.

​​The idea here is to send out thousands of cold emails and maybe get two or three qualified responses.

#2. Social engineering, where, much like a red team in cybersecurity, you try to find a way into a specific organization by sending just the right message to just the right people.

The idea here is to send out 10 emails and maybe get 10 responses, which you then have to somehow twist and turn into suiting your purpose.

There’s been plenty written and said about the first approach to cold emailing.

There’s no doubt it works, but I’m personally not interested in it. And maybe, if you’re like the agency owner above, it’s not really an option because of the way your business is set up or what you offer.

So what about the second, social engineering approach?

It’s tricky and time intensive.

But if you’re after large accounts or valuable partner relationships, it can make sense to invest that time and to learn the tricks.

Again, this is not something I personally am teaching at the moment. But I do have something to recommend.

The worst part of this recommendation is that it’s free, which will make many people shrug and say, “Oh, I will come back to this later.”

The best part of this recommendation is that it might stop being free or disappear at any minute, particularly if people like me keep linking to it.

If you’d like to get it before it goes away, or before it gets a big price tag stuck on the side of it:

https://bejakovic.com/cold

The light at the end of the tunnel

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“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and the thing is, I love you.”

“What?”

“I love you.”

“How do you expect me to respond to this?”

“How about, you love me too?”

“How about: I’m leaving.”

That’s the start of the last scene of the 1989 romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally. In case you haven’t seen it, the movie goes like this:

The first time Harry and Sally meet, they hate each other. The second time they meet, Harry doesn’t even remember who Sally is. The third time they meet, Harry and Sally become friends. Then they sleep together, and things go south and they stop being friends.

And then one New Year’s Eve, Harry finally realizes he loves Sally, and he runs to meet her, and he declares his love. And she says, “I’m leaving.”

The fact is, screenwriter Nora Ephron and director Rob Reiner both felt that movie should end like this.

​​No way should it end with Harry and Sally winding up together. That’s not how the real world works. People in those kinds of relationships don’t end up together.

That’s how the first two drafts of the movie actually went. The bitter truth.

But in the third draft, Ephron wrote this final scene, and Reiner shot it. After Sally’s “I’m leaving,” Harry delivers a speech about all the little things he loves about her, and they kiss and they wind up together, forever, in love.

And that’s how the movie was released, and it was a big, big hit.

So what’s the point?

Well, maybe it’s obvious, but you can go negative and cynical and sarcastic for the whole movie, but you gotta end on an inspiring, positive note.

​​It’s gotta make sense to people and give them a feeling of hope, at least if you want to create something that has a chance to be a big big hit, something that can appeal to a wide swath of the market.

Or in the words of screenwriter and director David Mamet:

“Children jump around at the end of the day, to expend the last of that day’s energy. The adult equivalent, when the sun goes down, is to create or witness drama — which is to say, to order the universe into a comprehensible form.”

But now I have a problem:

I’ve just pulled back the curtain. And what’s behind the curtain is not so nice. So how can I end this email on an inspiring, positive note?

Well, I can admit to you that the world is a large and complex and often unjust place. But it does have its own structure. And just by reading these emails, you’re finding out bits and pieces of that structure, and that helps you make more sense of the world you live in, and it helps you shape and influence the world for the better.

I can also tell you that the above bit, about Harry and Sally and Nora and Rob, is part of a book I’m working on, the mythical “10 Commandments of Hypnotists, Pick Up Artists, Comedians, Copywriters, Con Men, Door-To-Door Salesmen, Professional Negotiators, Storytellers, Propagandists, and Stage Magicians.”

I’ve been working on this book for a long time. But there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

In the meantime, do you know about my other 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters?

It also collects bits and pieces of the structure of the world, and it can help you understand and shape that world for the better. In case you’d like to find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Agency clients who don’t stay

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Last week, I was talking to the COO at a health clinic.

The CEO of that clinic — the doctor who heads the clinic — has written a good book, with lots of top endorsements and lots of 5-star reviews on Amazon.

But the book is hardly a best seller. I’m guessing it maybe makes a few dozen sales a month.

“You know,” I said in the voice of a precocious 9-year-old child, “you can run ads on Amazon to promote the book.” I’m smart like that, and I know lots of stuff, so I like to show it off.

“Oh yeah we tried that,” the COO said. “We hired an agency a while back to run ads on Amazon for us. But it didn’t drive that many more sales, and we were paying the agency $1k a month just to keep it going. So we stopped.”

Now, here are a few random facts, which I hope to snap together for you like nuclei colliding and fusing to release a tremendous amount of energy:

1. The core offer for this health clinic is a program that costs $50k a year

2. Rich, successful people tend to read books

3. People who read a book all the way through are prime prospects for an upsell, even a ridiculously elastic one ($5 => $50k)

You see where I’m going with this?

It’s quite feasible that, for this particular business, one good extra client a year, attracted via the help of this Amazon ads agency, would pay for the entire year’s services of the ads agency, and then some.

That would be great for the health clinic, for the Amazon ads agency, and presumably, for the patient who had decided to invest in that expensive year-long program.

And yet, it wasn’t happening.

I’m bringing this up because over the past few weeks, along with talking to health clinic COOs, I’ve also been talking to people who offer services and run agencies of different stripes.

I’ve heard a few of them complaining:

“We can’t make clients see the unique value of our services”

“The clients are never permanent, and I seem like a Chinese acrobat juggling many plates at once”

“Clients are comparing my work to much cheaper freelancers”

A part of this really can come down to having bum clients. Not much to do there, except find better clients.

But what if you have — or have had — clients like the health clinic I wrote about above? Somebody with a solid business… a good product… decent marketing… and still they couldn’t see the value in continuing to pay for your services, which should be plugging up a real gap in their business?

Well, in that case, write me and tell me about it.

I’m curious to hear your story.

And maybe we can figure out a way to prevent this from happening again… and even to profit from those clients who already got away.

The highest paid quality on earth

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Last night, I started reading a little book on door knocking.

Door knocking?

Yep, it’s a real skill. And a lucrative one. ​​​

​​​The book was written by a real estate agent who built her entire career by going up to a stranger’s door, knocking on said door, and if somebody opened, asking if they wanted to sell their home.

​​Most of the time, the people inside said no. So the real estate agent would turn around, walk down to the next house, and do it all over again.

The author of the book gives a few good reasons why a sane person might want to live their life like this. Here’s a few that might resonate with you:

===

You will earn more money than most doctors, lawyers, pilots, and professors. You will have more freedom to come and go than almost any other professional, and you will have a saleable product (your business) that will continue to support you after you exit the industry.

===

I love this book so far, and in particular I love what the author says is the number one quality that leads to success as a door knocker, and by extension, to success in opening up any kind of sales conversation.

Can you guess what this quality is?

I’ll give you a hint. In fact I’ll give you a few hints, and tell you what it’s not:

* Persistence. A lot of people persist in spite of not getting any results or making any sales. (Such as, ahem, myself for large stretches of writing this newsletter.)

* Intelligence. Good God no.

* Extroversion. Now we’re getting a little warmer, but in the words of Eddie Murphy, that ain’t it…

* Likeability. Sure, being seen as likeable helps open conversations. But a lot of people, myself included, tend to default to thinking that you’re either likeable or not.

​​Of course, that’s not true.

​​We each morph from moment to moment, and from environment to environment. Our likability goes up and down, because it’s not really inherent to us. It’s in other people’s heads, and not something that we have control over. So likeability ain’t it either.

I’ve now given you some hints. I told you what this magic quality is not. As to what it is?

If you’d like to know that, I’ll tell you. Or rather, I’ll point you to it.

​​This quality makes up chapter one of one of the greatest sales books of all time, where it’s called the “highest paid quality on earth.”

If you’d like to know what this quality is and why it is so valuable and how to get it, read the book.

​​Plus, read the book because no less of an authority than Gary Bencivenga, the A-list copywriter who gets the most love an adulation from other top-level copywriters and marketers, credits his great success to this book.

And by the way, you can cheat. You can find out what this quality is without reading the book.

Somehow, I suspect this will do absolutely nothing for you. But you decide. Here’s the book, with all its sales wisdom:

https://bejakovic.com/highest-paid