Positioning

Become an investigative reporter with high-level salesmanship skills

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A bit of Bejako background:

I went to high school in a rich suburb of Baltimore, Maryland (we weren’t rich, but ok).

All the other kids in my class were ambitious and smart (one girl’s dad later won the Nobel Prize in chemistry). They worked hard their entire high school days. They ended up going to schools like Princeton and Stanford, and became lawyers and doctors and architects.

Meanwhile, 17-year-old Bejako had zero drive to go to college, and had no idea what kind of work he might ever want to do.

His best guess — the only option that kind of turned him on – was the idea of moving down to Annapolis, Maryland’s small, quaint, maritime capital, and becoming a reporter on some local newspaper that covered state politics.

Fast-forward to the present, and switch back to the first person:

While I never became a small-town reporter, the same lack of ambition and non-entrepreneurial nature I had in high school has stuck with me throughout life, now into middle age.

I am really not motivated by money, try as I have to change that. I’ve also never thought of myself as an entrepreneur or online business owner. And yet, that’s kind of what I’m doing now, and what’s more, I’m not really qualified to do anything else.

I’m telling you all this because a couple nights ago, I was reading a book about direct marketing. It said the following:

“Understanding your ultimate prospect has nothing to do with creativity. It requires relentless, investigative salesmanship. You need to become an investigative reporter with high-level salesmanship skills.”

“Hm,” I said to my pillow. “An investigative reporter on the salesmanship beat? That’s something I can imagine myself doing.”

And in fact, the very next day, I told myself to treat what I’m doing as investigative reporter. I started collecting data about offers I had made, successful or unsuccessful. I came up with theories about why things turned out as they did. I started trying to write up a story that makes sense that fits the data to the theory.

It’s been fun and it’s getting me to do things I should have been doing all along.

My point is not that you specifically should start treating your business as an investigative reporter.

My point is that, if “value-creating entrepreneur” or “small business owner” doesn’t really feel like a suit that fits you, there lots of other suits you can put on, including ones that you like the look of. And it will still be you inside the suit.

You gotta do certain things to see success if you have an email list and want to make money with it. Selling is one of them. Understanding your audience is another. Creating new offers is still another. But there are lots of ways to get yourself to do those things, including things that align with your own natural motivations and ambitions.

Or in the words of Internet marketer Rich Schefren, “Put your business goals of your self-development goals.” It’s much more likely you will see success if you work with your own psychology, rather than trying to change it.

So much for Monday Morning Mindset.

For some specific strategies on how to take your existing skills and interests and turn them into money, enough to pay for a house:

https://bejakovic.com/house

If you move your tail for clients, but they don’t appreciate it enough

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Yesterday, because I am thorough in my research, I was watching old TV commercials from the 1970s, including one for the long-gone Continental Airlines.

It featured a bouncy jingle that’s still playing in my head:

We live to make you happy

We’re out to make you pleased

You’re flying Continental

Your flight will be a breeze

We’ll hop to make you happy

We’ll skip to prove it’s true

On Continental Airlines

We MOVE OUR TAIL FOR YOU…

… and then the refrain comes in, with a cross-section of all Continental employees — pilots, stewardesses, luggage handlers, admin personal, even the chefs who prepare the delectable meals — bleating “WE MOVE OUR TAIL FOR YOUUUU” over and over.

I looked it up, and back in 60s and 70s Continental really moved their tail to make their customers happy —  larger, cushier seats, full meals (the commercial shows a chef preparing a giant salad), and complimentary drinks (alcoholic and soft), as well as additional perks like amenity kits, pillows, and blankets, all for free, all at no extra cost.

Today, of course, that’s unimaginable. So many of the things that airlines offered for free back in the 60s and 70s are now available and then some on a flight – but you gotta pay:

– checked baggage

– meals

– alcoholic drinks

– seat selection

– pillows and blankets

Continental Airlines no longer exists, at least under its own name (it was gradually absorbed into United). I guess Continental’s customers didn’t sufficiently appreciate all the tail moving to make this a viable long-term strategy.

Maybe there’s a lesson there? Maybe? In any case, I will share my idea, and you can decide if it could possibly be useful:

You can charge for what you offer for free now, or for what everybody else offers for free.

This doesn’t mean offering worse customer service, or turning yourself into the RyanAir of your industry.

But the fact is, “FREE” is a norm — whether it’s checked baggage or “free strategy sessions” or simple “let’s talk and see if we can benefit each other calls.”

Maybe that norm is one that’s working out for you. But if not, it’s one you can change, because norms are not rules of nature, but simply habitual ways of doing things.

I’m gonna write a new book one day, expanding on this idea.

For now though, I’ll just point you to my latest book, the “10 Commandments of Con Men, Pickup artists, Magicians, etc.” This book is not free, but I really did move my tail to make it both fun and valuable for you. If you haven’t read it yet:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

If nobody wants your profit-making offer, give it away

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Yesterday I organized a Zoom call for a few list owners.

One of these, a successful copywriter and marketer, was asking how to price, or how to persuade businesses to take him up on, his newfangled sales machine.

“Is $15k a year a good offer? The sales machine is super valuable, and has produced great results for the businesses who have used it. But it’s been a hard sell.”

I thought it was instructive that a successful copywriter and marketer was asking this question.

My answer was, if this thing produces sales so well, why not package up the results into a nice gift box, and sell that gift box instead?

In other words, instead of persuading business owners to buy a gizmo that costs $15k a year and promises to produce sales… why not persuade them to accept new money in the bank, which they can pay you a finders fee for?

In the words of marketing legend Claude Hopkins, who became the modern equivalent of a billionaire using little more than a typewriter:

“In every business expenses are kept down. I could never be worth more than any other man who could do the work I did. The big salaries were paid to salesmen, to the men who brought in orders, or to the men in the factory who reduced the costs. They showed profits, and they could command a reasonable share of those profits. I saw the difference between the profit-earning and the expense side of a business, and I resolved to graduate from the debit class. “

“Yes,” I hear someone saying in the back, “but business owners should already know that a sales gizmo isn’t really an expense, because it will help them make money. They should be smart enough to see a profit-generating solution when they see one. They should they should they should.”

Yes, they should.

But they don’t, just in the same way that the successful copywriter above should have remembered the century-old lesson that turned Claude Hopkins into a billionaire, but he didn’t.

The fact is, we have limited time and attention and energy, and doing the work of translation — of turning what we have into what we could possibly have, of what we buy into what it could do for us, of what we sell into what people really want — requires time and effort.

You can argue against this aspect of reality. Or you can work with it, and simply translate what you sell into a result that people care about, and that they can take you up on without risk.

Moving on.

I recently got a bunch of feedback from my readers, and I found that a large number of people list, as their #1 goal, getting consistent with emailing daily.

Maybe you too feel you should should should be writing consistent daily emails. But you still don’t do it.

If it’s not happening, and if it’s important to you, maybe it’s time for to take a different tack:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

How to stop making your job “five times more difficult”

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Yesterday, I was listening to a podcast by Joe Polish and Dean Jackson — not one of their “I Love Marketing” podcasts, but a new one that Dean recorded for his More Cheese Less Whiskers brand.

By the way, if you don’t know Joe and Dean, both are direct marketers with decades of experience, who have taught and brought up generations of other marketers, including some famous names.

For example, yesterday on the podcast, Joe and Dean reminisced about a podcast guest they’d had on a long time ago, a young man named Tim Ferriss, and how after the interview, they spent 40 minutes trying to convince Tim to start his own podcast.

Tim in the end became convinced. As a result, he now has over 1 billion podcast downloads, and 800 interviews with people like Jerry Seinfeld, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Anyways, Joe and Dean were talking yesterday about events, as in, promotional events, but also specific physical events, with chairs and a podium and dessert:

How to make such events work… how to make them good so people get what they paid for and more… how to get people to actually buy tickets.

Joe talked about the first event he ever put on, about mindset, and the following lesson learned, which he has applied to every event since:

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What I learned is it is a lot easier to run an event where people perceive it’s gonna teach them how to make more money and build their business than it is how to fix their head. This one was about mindset. It was about psychology. And it was an amazing event! It was really transformative to everyone there. But it was five times more difficult to put people in the room than it was if you’re selling “money at a discount,” as they call it.

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The key thing here is where Joe says “where people perceive.”

Fact is, mindset matters for making more money, and making more money content often talks about mindset. The two aren’t entirely interchangeable, but there’s a lot of overlap.

But how do you present such a shifting and moving bundle of information, products, or services? What single aspect of it do you trumpet for all the world to hear… and what do you quietly deliver in addition, without any fanfare, just because you are trying to do right for your customers or clients?

Getting that right or wrong means the difference between regular work, on the one hand, and making your job “five times more difficult,” on the other.

And on that note, I would like to remind you of the offer I shared yesterday, Justin Blackman’s Different On Purpose. This is an 8-week cohort to spread into the world new and different positioning for your service- or client-based businesses, if you happen to be a copywriter, coach, or agency owner.

Justin doesn’t have big income claims on his sales page for this offer. That’s because it’s the first time he’s running Different On Purpose, and big income claims are hard to make credibly before you have had the first batch of people go through the program and report on their results.

But if you are selling something woolly like “copywriting services” or “coaching” or “consulting,” there’s no doubt that a different client perception of what you do could help you work drastically less and yet make drastically more money.

If you’re curious about Justin’s Different On Purpose, I wrote up a summary of the offer yesterday, including why you might want to join now, in this very first-ever cohort. If you’d like to read that:

https://bejakovic.com/announcing-live-personal-positioning-cohort/

Announcing: Live personal positioning cohort

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Yesterday, inside a small group of list owners that I have set up to help with affiliate deals, marketer Justin Blackman posted, as a kind of afterthought, that he has an exciting and cool new offer, that, by the way, it’s live now, and, oh, that it’s only available until the end of this week, or maybe not even that long.

The offer is called Different On Purpose.

You can find the full details of it at the sales page below. But in the interest of getting you to click through to that sales page, here are some intriguing facts about Justin’s “now you see me, now you don’t” new offer:

# Who it’s for

Freelancers, coaches, and service-based business owners who feel they’ve lost their mojo — thanks to AI, competition, and simply stuff that used to work not working any more.

(No judgment here, by the way. As Justin says on sales page, he himself has been wrestling with these issues for the past year and a half.)

# What it is

A live cohort that runs from September 25 – November 19. Small groups that Justin will be heading, with frankly a crazy list of 15 guest trainers to add in unique expertise, including Todd Herman, Daniel Throssell, and Chris Orzechowski.

Deliverables and outcomes are both new and different personal positioning… plus assets to support and communicate that… and, thanks to the guest trainers, strategy to get those assets and message out into the world, so as to regain that lost mojo.

# Why you might wanna sign up now

Two reasons:

First is that this is the first time Justin is offering Different On Purpose, and his strategy is to underprice it and overdeliver on it. (See the complete list of 15 guest trainers if you don’t believe the “overdeliver” bit.)

Second is that, this being a live cohort which Justin will head, it’s limited to 30 people.

I don’t know how many of those spots are already taken.

I do know Justin is promoting Different On Purpose to his list… I’m guessing at least some of the guest speakers who have lists totaling hundreds of thousands of names will promote it as well to their lists… and maybe others in that group I set up will promote it too.

All that’s to say, if you worry about where your service or client business is going… if you feel like your personal positioning is taking on the nice ochre color of a brick in the wall… and if you wanna do something about it now rather than in 2035… then Different On Purpose is something to consider.

To find out more about it, before those 30 spots are filled and the decision is no longer yours:

https://bejakovic.com/different

The foundation that personal positioning is built on

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Back when I was researching my new 10 Commandments book, about con men, pick up artists, and among others, door-to-door salesmen, I came across a 10-minute documentary titled, “The Bronzer.”

The Bronzer is about a door-to-door salesman named Stu Larkin, who has been selling bronzed baby shoes his whole life.

(The movie came out 10+ years ago, but Larkin is still at it as far as I know.)

There weren’t any useful door-to-door selling techniques in this documentary. But there was a kind of wake-up call.

Bronzed baby shoes are nice. I guess they sell for $50 a pair? or $100? or $200? In any case, Larkin had this to say:

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The thing about selling that I’m kind of disturbed about, because I know that I’m so good at what I do, is that I think I missed my calling in something else. That I could have made millions and millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars selling something else. Like someone would be going, “We know that guy. He’s the most renowned salesman in the world.”

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There are good techniques for positioning yourself at the top end of your market, and I want to write my next book about those.

But those good techniques are like the blueprints for building a skyscraper. The foundation of that skyscraper, without which even the most sound blueprints will result in a janky leaning tower that nobody wants to live in, is choosing which market you will be in to begin with.

Fact one:

It takes as much skill to sell to people who aren’t interested in buying or who have no money… as to sell to people who both are eager to buy and who have the money to do so. Often, it takes more skill and more work, far more, to sell to the first group.

Fact two:

If you’re selling something right now, then there’s sure to be another market where your exact skills, and maybe even your exact offers, could sell for 5x or 10x or 100x of what you’re selling for now.

Of course, it’s not an easy or light decision to switch markets and to basically set sail in an unfamiliar and possibly shark-infested sea. But it’s worth thinking about, or at least that’s what I tell myself, as I’ve been thinking about it too.

I’ll leave you with that seed for today.

Meanwhile, as that seed germinates, if you wanna see what valuable techniques of door-to-door salesman I did find, and how those tie into related fields like copywriting, standup comedy, and con games:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

The guy who sold the Brooklyn Bridge (lights)

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A long time ago, in a chair very very near away, I read a story about a guy who bought the Brooklyn Bridge.

Well, he bought the lights of the Brooklyn Bridge, which were due to be replaced with new, brighter, more energy-efficient lights.

And then, some time later, one by one, the same guy sold the same lights, at a profit.

This guy, name Joe Pilato, flips random stuff for fun, because the business is not really all that great.

Pilato bought 123 of the Brooklyn Bridge lights for about $4.3k, and and he “made in total” between $13k and $14k. It’s not clear if that’s profit or revenue because it took Pilato a year to offload the lights — and along the way he had to pay for storage, transportation, cleaning, and even marketing.

But do the numbers really matter?

That snippet, “the guy who sold the Brooklyn Bridge (lights),” was good enough to get Pilato featured in a national magazine (one of a few still left with circulation of millions).

It will be a tagline he can use for the rest of his natural life to sell himself and his “flipping insider” knowledge if he were to create a bizopp course out of it, or a book on the matter, or if he wanted to get featured on podcasts or when Oprah does a segment on flipping (yeah right).

The point being:

A notable, simple, fascinating tagline, which is actually based on a pretty lousy reality (the numbers again are maybe $5k in profit, over the course of a year, and are completely unscalable), is worth more in positioning gold than an unremarkable, complicated, unglamorous summary of a genuinely successful project (“I flipped a beat-down house in Towson, MD, in just 4 months and made a profit of $67k, and that was just one of five such projects in the last year”).

He who has ears, let him hear.

Meanwhile, one thing I didn’t realize until pretty recent (I’m a slow learner, and much isolated from the world) is that “the guy who sold the Brooklyn Bridge” is such an effective tagline because it’s actually been used to describe a number of famous con men over the past century.

Con men have legitimately been selling the Brooklyn Bridge, often for cheap, to very gullible newcomers to New York, who were hoping to get something for nothing, but who ended up getting nothing for something.

That’s a bit of research that that didn’t make it into my new 10 Commandments book.

But there is a lot in that book about con men, and about valuable and even legal marketing and business and persuasion lessons that can be extracted from their sneaky and deceiving ways.

If that’s something you can imagine finding interesting:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

A billionaire’s personal positioning test

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A few days ago, a new reader and Copy Riddles member named Tim wrote me an email with the subject line, “a billionaire’s bullet idea.” Tim’s email said:

“This guy, Jason Cohen, founded a few billion dollar companies. Anyways, he wrote an article you might like and seems relevant to Copy Riddles.”

Tim linked to Cohen’s article, “The Opposite Test,” the gist of which was the following:

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So here’s my Opposite Test: For each feature/benefit bullet point, construct its negative and see if that statement is ridiculous. Would anyone be able to construct a rational strategy with that negative? Perhaps a competitor already has! If the negative is indeed ridiculous, if it would be impossible to have a product or positioning or strategy that included the negative, it means this bullet point is trivial, obvious, mandatory, or at least undifferentiating from the competition.

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This one of those ideas that is not 100% true but is 100% useful. Try it yourself and see. Take any well-established promise or positioning idea in your industry, even one that seems unassailable, and turn it around:

“Get rich quickly” => “Get rich slowly” [worked for Gary Bencivenga]

“How to Win Friends and Influence People” => “Winning Through Intimidation” [worked for Robert Ringer]

“Getting to Yes” => “Start with No” [worked for Jim Camp]

The underlying psychology here is that we don’t just align ourselves to certain people and ideas. Just as often, or probably more often, we align ourselves in opposition to certain people and ideas. The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t… unless you’ve really grown to hate the devil you know, in which, case any other devil, no matter how bad, will do.

I’m telling you this because I’m thinking of the next book I want to write, about personal positioning, and I’m testing out ideas for that.

In the meantime, I can point you to my new 10 Commandments book in case you still haven’t read that. My book has been on sale since May and has slowly accumulated 26 reviews, all of them 5 star. Here’s one from the same Tim who wrote me about the Opposite Test:

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“A new favorite”

You know, I’ve read a lot of books in this space and this is one of my favorites. He skips over the common knowledge and dives into really eye opening insights.

He condenses lots of research into a really fun book. I’ll be rereading this one soon.

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If you want to read probably the best thing I’ve written to date, in a fun and small package, for just $4.99:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

How cool are you?

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If you’ve ever wondered if you’re cool, I mean really cool, you don’t have to wonder any longer. You can now know with absolute certainty, thanks to a group of scientists who have conclusively studied, analyzed, and answered this question, from here to eternity.

Based on a worldwide study of 600 people, published a few weeks ago, the scientists say coolness breaks down into the following six characteristics:

1. Extroverted

2. Hedonistic

3. Powerful

4. Adventurous

5. Open

6. Autonomous

So you just gotta look at yourself honestly, decide how you measure up on each of these traits, add up the scores, and ta-da!

I did this exercise myself. And if you’re curious about how cool I am, I’ll tell you:

I’m as extraverted as a late-stage Howard Hughes… as hedonistic as Greta Thunberg… as powerful as Steven Seagal… as adventurous as Fred Rogers… and as open as Winston Churchill.

In other words, on the first five measures of coolness, I score a cool, hard ZERO.

All that’s left to me is trait six, autonomous.

I do pretty well there.

I live where I want, I do what I want, when I want and with who I want. I have enough money to satisfy my appetites and then some, without a boss to answer to, a constituency to appease, or a strict to fulfill.

If I want to change where I am or what I do or how much time I spend doing it, I can — I have done so in the past and I might do it again.

No man is an island, entire of itself, but I am autonomous enough to score myself as a 10 on the autonomy scale, giving me a solid 16.6% overall coolness rating.

The thing is, 16.6% is as good as 100%, at least when it comes to having a personal brand online.

In fact, once upon a time, I wrote a daily email with the hidden goal of communicating how I value autonomy over all kinds of other goods. I got a shocking number of “that’s right!” replies from long-term readers and customers, or people who have since become such.

I wrote that very deliberate email after hearing Dan Kennedy say how autonomy is the core appeal that underlies his popularity and standing and authority as a marketing guru.

That might be a valuable something to consider if you are trying to sell people stuff online.

And on that note, as I wrote yesterday, if that’s a world you’re looking to get into, then Kieran Drew is launching a new offer, called Productize Your Knowledge.

The end result of Productize Your Knowledge is you take what you already know or are already doing for clients as service work, and package a part of that into a product that sells, just for you, without making more demands on your time or lifeblood.

Like I wrote yesterday, Kieran’s Productize Your Knowledge is not a collection of “secrets” on how to create a course.

Instead, it’s both a process to help you go from where you are now to having a info product that actually sells and makes money.

It’s process that Kieran himself has followed, and also a process 7 private clients each paid Kieran $2,997 to help them implement, earlier this year.

Kieran lays out the process on the sales page below. And while you can read the sales page and then follow the process and try to do all this yourself, it’s worth considering paying Kieran for Productize Your Knowledge now. Three reasons why:

1. The launch price of $297, which will go up to $497 after the launch

2. The “Product Summer Bootcamp” community — basically an 8-week implementation and support group kicking off after the launch, with Kieran leading, giving feedback, and possibly cracking the whip (though don’t hold me to that last one)

3. Two free bonuses which I am adding in:

BEJAKO BONUS #1: 3rd conversion (last sold for $197)

Kieran’s Productize Your Knowledge guides you how to making a great info products people wanna buy. But the fact is, you can sell great info, and have people excited to pay you for it, and yet won’t consume it and won’t implement it.

3rd conversion shows you how to take care of that next step, and dramatically incraeses the odds people consume and implement the info you sell.

Not only does this make it more likely that one-time buyers buy the next thing from you and turn into long-time customers, but it makes it so you feel good continuing to sell info products instead of wanting to hang yourself (ask me how I know).

BEJAKO BONUS #2: Most Valuable Postcard #1: Nota Rapida (last sold for $100)

… all about the most important number to focus on in your business, whether you sell info products or services.

The fact is, I never cottoned on to this until I started selling info products. And out of the many mistakes I made while working as freelance copywriter, not focusing on this number is the only one I truly regret.

Whether you’re planning to completely shift to selling products or you want to sell a mix of products and services, I belive the info in this Most Valuable Postcard will keep you happy, wealthy, and wise.

These two bonuses I’m offering add up get a real-world value of $297, which is what Kieran’s PYK sells for during the launch.

If you want to get PYK but you already have both my 3rd Conversion and MVP #1:

Then write me and I will give you something of equivalent or greater value as a bonus.

Kieran’s launch, including the special launch price and the Product Summer Bootcamp, runs until next week.

However, if you want to also get the free bonuses I am offering, there’s a tighter deadline, tomorrow, Sunday July 6, at 12 midnight PST.

The sales page for Kieran’s offer is below.

If you have knowledge or expertise… if you’ve been thinking about turning that into products you can sell… if you want Kieran’s guidance and even personal feedback on what you’re doing so can get this product done in the next eight weeks instead of the next eight months or the next eight years… then take a look at Kieran’s page below, and decide if Productize Your Knowledge is for you.

If you do decide to join, forward me your receipt. I will then get you hooked up with 3rd Conversion or Most Valuable Postcard #1 — or if you already have those, with something of equivalent or greater value.

Here’s the sales page:

https://bejakovic.com/pyk

Get low

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Some time ago, I was browsing through the list of Recommended Creators on Kit, basically other newsletter owners I could do a list swap or cross-promotion with. Among the million and one marketing ones, there was a standout:

Lil Jon’s Wellness Newsletter

It turns out that rap star Lil Jon is now “on a journey of wellness and enlightened.” And if you like, he will send you “simple wellness tips each Wednesday.”

I gotta say this made me chuckle.

All I really knew of Lil Jon is his 2002 megahit, Get Low.

The video for that song showed Lil Jon as a kind of king of the ghetto club, holding a chalice and a glass cane that looked like a scepter, and with his mouth full of gold teeth. The video also featured the usual women grinding and twerking on stripper poles, while the refrain of the song ran:

“To the window/to the floor/till the sweat drop down my balls/till all these bitches crawl”

After I saw that Lil Jon is now enlightened and willing to send me wellness tips each Wednesday, I got curious.

What happened? I had to read about the man.

“Well I’ll be damned,” I said after Wikipedia hit me. It turns out that the “king of the ghetto club” thing was just an act.

I don’t know how much you care to know about Lil Jon, but here are a few facts that can be enlightening:

1. Lil Jon’s dad was an aerospace engineer and his mom an army nurse.

2. He grew up in a middle class neighborhood and attended a magnet school.

3. As a teenager he was heavily into skating culture and his favorite bands included the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

4. He’s been described as a “high achiever” and a “passionate reader.”

You might think this email is just about how your public persona can be vastly different from who you really are. But it’s more than that.

I’ve been going on lots of first dates lately. Inevitably the girls ask me what I do. To which I say, “Not much. Mostly I sit around. I watch TV. I play a LOT of video games.” Then I look the girl straight in the eye and smile to make it clear I am rather proud of what I just said.

One girl so far has been confused and shocked. The rest were first amused and then pleased.

Because what’s the alternative? A boring conversation about work, or worse yet, digging myself deeper and deeper into the quicksand of trying to impress the girl. That’s not good for me or her.

I think this whole topic is worth developing more, and maybe I will do that in a future book on personal positioning. I could call the chapter about this “Idiot Positioning,” or with a hat tip to Lil Jon, maybe “Crunk Positioning.”

But maybe I’m running ahead of myself. Maybe I haven’t sold you on this whole idea yet. Maybe you are skeptical that making yourself out to look dirty or stupid or like a loser is actually a good strategy.

What can I tell you? Effective communication is not always what it seems. Insults can work as glue between friends. Assurances can be veiled warnings. And making yourself out to be an idiot, and smiling about it, can work in your favor.

And if you want to understand why, and how to make this work for you, I suggest consulting Commandment VI of my new 10 Commandments book. In case you haven’t gotten your copy yet:

​https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments