Copywriting

The next era for freelancers, full-time writers, and solo creators

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I woke up this morning, the sun shining into my eyes, an eager French bird chirping outside my window because it was almost 7am.

I groaned and realized it’s time to get up and get to work. In a few hours’ time, my friends, still asleep in various bedrooms around this cave-like Paris AirBnb, will wake up too. And by then, I will have to have this email finished.

I can tell you now, it won’t be easy.

I struggled during the night with a comforter that was too hot, a mosquito that wouldn’t shut up, and the effects of the first glass of alcohol I’ve had in months. The result is I’m tired this morning, and my brain is more foggy than usual.

“Let me read some stuff on the Internet,” I said. “Maybe that will help.” And lo — the email gods rewarded me with an article full of valuable and relevant ideas I can share with you today.

The article came from Simon Owens, somebody I’ve written about before in these emails. Owens is a journalist who covers the media landscape in his Substack newsletter.

Two interesting bits from Owens’s article:

1. The recent collapses of new media companies like Buzzfeed and Vox have left thousands of journalists, writers, and clickbait creators without a job. It’s not unlike the situation in the direct response space a few years ago, after Agora got into legal trouble and it put a chill on the whole industry.

2. The owners of media outlets and info businesses are realizing that freelancers just aren’t worth it. From Owens’s conversation with one such business owner: “Not only were they expensive to hire, but he also had to waste a lot of time editing their work so it met his quality standards.”

So if traditional employee-based companies that pump out content are failing… and if entrepreneurs are starting to realize that freelancers are a bum deal… where does that leave us?

You might say it leaves us with the creator economy — with all those unemployed journalists, writers, and clickbait creators going out and starting their own Substack or TikTok or OnlyFans.

​​Maybe so. But it’s harder to make that work than your Twitter feed might make you believe. From Owens’s article again:

“I’m on record as being an optimist about the future of the Creator Economy; I think we’re at the very early stages of an entrepreneurial media explosion. But at the same time, I’m a realist about how damn hard it is to launch and build a sustainable bootstrapped media business, especially as a solo operator. Not only can it require years of financial runway, but it’s also difficult for a single person to juggle a variety of tasks that include content creation, marketing, and business development.”

So? Where does all this really leave us?

Owens says it leaves us in a brave new world of partnerships, cooperatives, and jointly-created products. He gives examples of how each of these is already being done by people who create content and have an audience, and who are trying to monetize that content and audience, beyond just the work they can do themselves.

If you are running or want to run an info publishing businesses, or your own creator studio, then Owens’s article is worth a read. It might give you an idea that might mean the difference between failure and success in what you do.

And if you are currently a freelancer, or even a full-time employee at a marketing-led business, then Owens’s article is worth a read also, if only for an uncomfortable but possibly life-saving glimpse into what the future might bring unless you adapt.

In either case, if you are interested, here’s the link to Owens’s piece:

https://simonowens.substack.com/p/the-next-era-for-bootstrapped-media

“There’s magic in the structure itself”

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[Clayton Bigsby removes his KKK hood to reveal he’s black. The white-supremacist rally attendees are stunned. One woman throws up. A man’s head explodes.]

There’s a reliable way to make a joke and it’s to put things in threes. You can make each subsequent thing more exaggerated, starting with normal, then moving to exaggerated, then moving to absurd.

Alternative: You can simply make the first two things straightforward, and then the third thing somehow unusual or unexpected.

Jerry: So we go into NBC, and we say we have an idea for a show about nothing?
George: Exactly.
Jerry: They say, “What’s your show about?” I say, “Nothing.”
George: There you go.
Jerry: I think you may have something here.

My point is not this triple thing. Instead, my point is something I heard marketing guru Dan Kennedy say.

Back in the 90s, Dan used to tour the country giving a rapidfire speech/sales pitch in front of tens of thousands of people in a different arena every night. As part of this speech/sales pitch, Dan said the following about his patented Magnetic Marketing 3-letter campaign:

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Our response was letter number one 7%, letter number two 8%, letter number three 3%. Total response 18%.

Now there’s two things you have to know. Number one, nobody gets 18% response from direct mail. 1.8% yes. Maybe my people, but nobody else does.

But what’s more important, if they stopped where everybody stops with letter number one, in their case, they leave 11% behind, they don’t get it. They don’t know it was there to get. Maybe they have an unsuccessful instead of a successful experience.

There’s magic in the structure itself.

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So that’s my point for you. There’s magic in the structure itself. Speaking of which, here’s another comedy triple:

“Mawwage. Mawwage is what bwings us togeva today. Mawwage, that bwessed awwangement, that dweam within a dweam.”

I’m traveling over the next several weeks. In fact, I’m writing this at the airport, while boarding is going on. I keep glancing over my shoulder, checking whether they will close the gate before I get a chance to finish and schedule this email.

Because I’m traveling, I’ll have limited time to write emails over the next few weeks, and no time to release or prerelease new offers during that time.

And since I forever closed down my Copy Riddles program last month, the only offer I have ready to go is my Most Valuable Email. If you read my newsletter regularly, you can expect to see it at end of emails where it belongs and where it doesn’t belong.

But today it belongs. Because my Most Valuable Email course is about the structure of some of my own most effective and valuable emails.

If you look over the emails I’ve sent over past several weeks, and you look at the structure, will find my Most Valuable Email trick used a dozen or more times.

There’s magic in the structure itself. In case you want my step-by-step explanation of this powerful Most Valuable Email structure, you can find it here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Conservative Professor X’s secret to getting money from strangers

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I read an article recently about controversial Hillsdale College.

I no longer live in the U.S., and I avoid places online that talk about culture wars, so I’d never heard of Hillsdale before.

It appears to be a kind of Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, except “gifted” in this case means conservative-leaning, Christian, and proudly American.

Even though Hillsdale was founded in 1844, its influence has expanded dramatically over the past 20 years. Just one example:

Ron DeSantis, Florida governor and the non-Trump face of the Republican Party, said he would not hire somebody from his own alma mater, Yale, but would hire somebody from Hillsdale.

Hillsdale is not the only conservative-leaning college in the U.S. There are dozens or maybe hundreds of others.

So why did Hillsdale become it, rather than any of the other places?

The article I read says it was all down to the guidance of Professor X himself — real name, Larry Arnn, the President of Hillsdale College. It’s Arnn’s vision and his tactics and his strategies that have made Hillsdale the new conservative cultural beacon.

It took different measures to get there. But money of course was important.

During Arnn’s tenure, annual contributions to Hillsdale have increased sevenfold, including from many people who never went to Hillsdale. ​​And it’s on this topic that Professor X revealed his secret for getting money from strangers:

“You don’t get money by asking for it. You get money by showing them what you do.”

Perhaps you say that’s obvious. And I’m sure the deans of all those other conservative-leaning colleges, which were left behind in the dust by Hillsdale, think it’s obvious also.

Anyways, the topic of my email today ties in intimately to the topic of my Most Valuable Email course.

If you have gone through MVE, the connection will be obvious. It might be obvious even if you have not gone through MVE.

But if want to make sure, or simply would like to hear me explain in more detail how I write Most Valuable Emails and show you how you too can write this type of email yourself, then you can find my “pull back the curtain” offer below:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

A book that changed how I think about life, death, and pretty much everything around me

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At the start of this year, a friend turned me on to the BLUEPRINT.

To me, anything with the word BLUEPRINT in it sounds like an outdated 2011 info product. But no, that’s not what that is.

The BLUEPRINT is a project by Bryan Johnson.

Once upon a time, Johnson was a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He founded Braintree, a mobile payment startup which later acquired Venmo. In 2013, Johnson sold Braintree/Venmo to PayPal for $800 million.

And then, two years ago, reclining on his piles of gold coins and sacks filled with $100 bills, Johnson decided on a whim to become immortal.

So he assembled a team of longevity scientists who devised an optimal daily protocol for him — the BLUEPRINT — including diet, 101 pills every day, training, sleep, blood testing, gadgets and widgets and non-stop optimization.

The cost? $2 million so far. The result?

Johnson says he has slowed down his pace of aging to that of an average 10-year-old. He has managed to reverse 5 years off his biological age (he is 45) and many of his organs now test as functioning at the level of 20-year-old. He says he feels better than he ever has, he’s more positive, has zero anxiety, sleeps perfectly every night, overflows with energy, and the quality of his ideas is better.

Of course, not everybody is sold. Johnson gets a lot of hate and mockery online.

It doesn’t help that Johnson vaguely resembles the T-1000 android from Terminator 2: Judgment Day, just with longer hair.

But I guess the real reason for the hate is that people see Johnson as a rich kook, a kind of modern-day Howard Hughes, on an eccentric, selfish, and self-absorbed chase.

And so I thought also. But I heard Johnson speak a while back. It turned out he’s very normal, very reasonable, and very altruistic-sounding.

His goal, he says, is to prove that it’s possible, so others believe and do it too. And while figuring out the BLUEPRINT cost Johnson $2m, it won’t take others nearly as much to implement it themselves, or to implement the 20% that gets the 80% of the value.

Whatever. I’m not here to sell Bryan Johnson to you. I just want to share something that struck me from that interview. Johnson said:

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We are accustomed to our technology improving systematically. With ourselves, we do not improve systematically. We improve a little bit, but we commit a self-destructive behavior here, we have a rise, we have a fall, we decay.

We accept that we humans decay and are eventually going to die and we become martyrs for our technology to move forward. We basically are trying to give birth to immortality through our work because we are demising. We are going to demise. And that technology is then used against us to make us addicted to all the things in the world to make us even worse.

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One thing that struck me from the above is the idea that we are trading one kind of longevity — our personal bodies — for another kind of longevity — our work.

It reminded me of a book I’d read a long time ago. This book changed how I look at the world and how I think about life, death, and pretty much everything around me.

As you might know if you’ve been reading my newsletter for a while, I make a habit of re-reading books that I found worthwhile.

And even though I read this book 10+ years ago, and even though I already had it change my mind once, I decided to make it the next book for the Insights & More Book Club.

For one thing, this book is a great illustration of insight techniques in action. For another, the core ideas in this book are genuinely novel and mind-changing. What more can I ask for in a book club focused on insightful writing and ideas?

If you’re interested in finding out what this book is, in reading it, and in participating in the Insights & More Book Club, then you’ll have to be on my email list first.

I only open the doors to the Insights & More Book Club every two months at the start of a new book. The doors are open now. But they will close again tomorrow, Sunday night, at 12 midnight PST. If you’re interested in getting in before then, sign up to my email list today, and watch out for my email tomorrow.

Trust lessons from a professional fraudster

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Several times in this newsletter, I’ve mentioned a tiny book I’ve been reading, Leading With Your Head, by Gary Kurz. Really, it’s a pamphlet more than book, just 40-odd pages. But I’m still not done with it.

Leading With Your Head talks about the misdirection part of magic, all the other psychological stuff besides the sleight-of-hand. ​​How to focus the attention of your audience. How to direct that attention. How to make people believe and trust you, even though you are known to be a professional fraudster whose job it is to mislead and trick them.

So how do you do it? Lotsa techniques. Here’s one:

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One of John Ramsey’s favorite techniques for creating the moment was to create suspicion and then dispel it. The audience’s surprise that their suspicions were unfounded created the moment he needed to do the move for real.

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I don’t know who John Ramsey is. But I do know something else — and that’s the value of reading widely.

Now at this point, you might expect me to launch into a mentalist-like pitch for my Insights & More Book Club. But no. I would never.

Instead, I just want to give you a real example, right here, for free, of the value of reading widely. Here’s an effective opening and an interesting fact I found by reading a newsletter called Contemplations On The Tree Of Woe:

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The Chinese curse their enemies with the phrase “may you live in interesting times.”

Or, rather, Americans think that Chinese curse their enemies like that; according to Infogalactic, “despite being widely attributed as a Chinese curse, there is no equivalent expression in Chinese.”

Fortunately, there’s an actual Chinese phrase that’s much more interesting. It’s found in a 1627 short story collection…

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And now in this brief moment, let me slide my Insights & More Book Club into view.

This elite club is open to a select, small group of new members right now. But the heavy front doors of the club will be sealed again soon, on Sunday, April 30, at 12 midnight PST.

If you’re curious to find out more about this club, or even to join, then the first step is to get on my email list. That’s the only place I recruit members. To take that first step, click here and fill out the application form that appears.

“Experts are scoffing”: How to manufacture proof out of thin air

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This past January, I kicked off the Insights & More Book Club. Every two months, we read a book specifically because it’s likely to be insightful and offer a change of perspective.

After I announced ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛, the first book club book, Insights & More member Folarin Madehin wrote me to say:

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I don’t know if you know about this already, but here’s one relevant thing that came to mind… I think will interest you (certainly fascinated me):

The mass community response to the archeology community response to the Netflix show Ancient Apocalypse.

Here’s an article that reps the archeologists’ side. [link to an article on Artnet]

Here’s a twitter thread that reps the “masses” side. [link to a thread by the show’s producer]

Basically–the ‘experts’ say “thing wrong!” … and the ‘masses’ say “experts say thing wrong? Proves thing right!” … and of course–the show producer does a great job aligning himself with the masses and using this to his marketing advantage.

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So there you go. That’s how to manufacture proof out of thin air. “If they’re trying to suppress it, it must be valuable, and it must be true, regardless of what it is.”

Tonight, as this email goes out, I and the other members of the Insights & More Book Club will have our bimonthly book club call, to discuss the second book we’ve been reading, ⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛, and to just have an exchange of ideas and questions in a kind of easy and low-pressure mastermind.

After tonight, we will get going with the next Insights & More book. For reasons of proof and intrigue, I won’t publicly reveal the title of that book, but I will tell you it maps to ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛.

I only open up the Insights & More Book Club to new members every two months, as we are starting a new book.

I figure it doesn’t make sense to have somebody join mid way, when they won’t have time to actually read the book.

Right now, and for the next four days, as we are starting a new book, the doors to the Insights & More Book Club are slightly ajar.

If you’d like to join, you will have to be on my email list first.

Expert marketers and copywriters scoff and say my list is all fake. But maybe you can make up your own mind. To try it out, click here and fill out the form that appears.

Counterpoint to the screwing

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I was at gym not long ago. Instead of working out, as I should have been, I was listening to a particularly interesting episode of the James Altucher podcast.

This particular episode was particularly interesting because James was interviewing Steven Pressfield, the author of the War of Art and some other books.

It turns out James plagiarized a valuable ideas from one of those books. I later plagiarized the same idea from James.

But I’ve written about that before.

What I haven’t written about is that I recently contacted Brian Kurtz, the former Boardroom VP and current marketing mastermind organizer.

I wanted to see if Brian would like me to give some kind of presentation to Titans XL, his virtual mastermind/community.

Several people who are in Titans XL are also customers and readers of my newsletter. In fact, one such reader suggested the idea that I present at Titans XL.

I’m grateful to that reader. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this myself. After all, I’ve been reading Brian’s stuff for years, and I often refer to his stories and experiences in my own emails. I’ve learned a ton from the guy, both directly and indirectly.

All that’s to say Titans XL and me might be a good fit.

They might be almost as good a fit as Steven Pressfield and porn. Because as I found out listening to that interview:

After Pressfield moved to Hollywood, hoping against hope to become a screenwriter, he got a gig rewriting a screenplay — for a porn movie.

At the time, Pressfield had worked a number of odd jobs, including as an advertising copywriter. He knew how to write.

But could he write a good screenplay? And more importantly, could he write porn?

The producer of the porn movie, a “really nice family man” according to Pressfield, took Pressfield out to breakfast at the start of the project.

Sitting in a restaurant in Santa Monica, with the sun shining in his eyes, the producer leaned in. “Here’s what I want you to do, kid,” he said. And he gave Pressfield two rules of effective porn storytelling. Here’s one of ’em:

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Whenever there’s a screwing scene, always have something else going on at the same time.

For instance, if it’s the wife and the pool repair guy, and they’re in the bedroom, have the husband coming home unexpectedly in the middle of the day, unbeknownst to his wife. Then we can cut back and forth from the couple in bed to the husband coming home, and now you got something interesting going on!

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Speaking of which:

After I wrote Brian Kurtz about that Titans XL idea, I got an automated email saying Brian is mostly unavailable until April 24th. He’s planning and then hosting his final in-person Titans mastermind event.

April 24th has passed. I’m still waiting to hear back from Brian for real. Maybe he’s taking a break after the big event. Maybe he’s just busy. Maybe he’s ignoring me. Maybe he silently decided that I am not a good fit to present to his community, even though I think I am.

But I continue to be hopeful, though with each passing day, I’m getting more unsure. I’ll let you know how it goes.

And as for Steven Pressfield, he applied the two rules of porn storytelling in that script rewrite. He realized how important and valuable these rules were, so he kept applying them later in his other screenplays and even his novels. As he says, the “principles of storytelling I know are all movie principles.”

I told you one of the two storytelling rules above. And if you’re curious about that second one, you can dig up that James Altucher episode, and listen to it yourself.

Or you can just take me up on the following offer:

Sign up to my newsletter. Once you get the welcome email, hit reply and tell me about any paid communities or masterminds you are currently in.

​​If you’re in Titans XL, that’s fine. If it’s another marketing mastermind or community, that’s fine too. If it’s not marketing, but some kind of other paid community or mastermind, that works also.

If you do that, then in return, I’ll write you back and tell you the second of Pressfield’s two porn storytelling rules. I’ll also tell you how Pressfield used those rules in other non-porn scripts he wrote. And I’ll even tell you how smart marketers, maybe even me on occasion, use the same storytelling rule in their own sales copy and marketing content.

Sexy firefighters running around for nobody’s entertainment

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It’s 8:45am as I start writing this email. Right now, off my balcony, I can see a tremendous show.

I live next door to a fire station, and the firemen are doing a public demonstration on the street in front of the station.

​​They are dressed up in their sexiest firefighting suits and they are running around two smashed up cars, one of which is burned to a crisp. The cars were placed there earlier in the morning, inside of a fenced-in area, so the firemen could show how they cut a car open and rescue somebody inside.

Like I say, it’s a tremendous show. Spectacular. My 6-year-old self would have given up a year of eating KitKats in order to see it.

And yet, as I watch this show off my balcony, there’s a total audience of about a dozen adults gathered on the street.

I mean, it’s 8:45am. People are either at home or on their way to work or stuck in the prison of school. Besides, it’s not a busy street. And as far as I know, this demonstration was not advertised anywhere — again, I live right next door.

You’ve probably heard the words of the godfather of modern advertising, Claude Hopkins. Hopkins said, “No argument in the world can ever compare with one dramatic demonstration.”

True, but:

The most famous example of a dramatic demonstration was Elisha Otis. Otis changed the landscape of American cities when he demonstrated his crash-proof elevator — to the masses milling about the New York Crystal Palace Exposition, which attracted 1.1 million visitors.

When Claude Hopkins himself created the world’s largest cake to promote Cotosuet, a kind of early margarine, he made a deal with a giant new department store which had just opened in Chicago.

​​The cake would go smack dab in the middle of the grocery department on the fifth floor. ​​Hopkins then ran big ads in all the Chicago newspapers to advertise the fact.

​​Over the course of a week, 105,000 people climbed the four flights of stairs to see that cake.

And when master showman Harry Houdini did his straitjacket escapes, while hanging upside 150 feet in the air, with only his feet tied to a pulley on the roof of some building, he made sure to hang off the building of the town’s main newspaper, guaranteeing a front page story the day before his show. Houdini did all these public escapes at exactly 12 noon, when lunchtime crowds could assemble.

Point being, as Gary Halbert might put it:

Advertise your advertising.

But maybe you say, “Yeah yeah but how? How exactly do I advertise my advertising?”

I gave you three examples right above. If that ain’t enough, here’s a fourth:

The waiting list for my future group coaching program on email copywriting. The waiting list serves as a waiting list, for sure. But it also serves as advertising for the actual advertising I will do when I do make that group coaching available. Very meta.

If you are interested in writing emails that people actually like reading and that they actually buy from, then you might be a good fit for my future group coaching. Or you might not. ​​In case you’d like to find out more about it, the first step is to get on my daily email list. Click here to do that.

How to spot a lie

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Four days ago, I sent out an email inviting readers to reply with one truth and one lie about themselves. It turned out to be both fun and informative.

I got hobuncha responses.

Inevitably, a few people didn’t follow the instructions I gave. Not much I can do there.

Others followed the instructions perfectly but then went one further, and told me which of their statements was the lie and which was the truth. That’s my fault. I forgot you can never be too specific in your CTA.

But the vast majority of people played the game as intended. As a result, I found out some interesting and true stuff about my readers. A curated selection of the most intriguing:

“In a small town in Thailand, a monkey on top of a tree threw a stump which hit my forehead and crushed part of my teeth.”

“Last April I appeared on the UK TV quiz show Countdown, 24 years after first applying as a 12-year-old and being told to wait for my vocabulary to develop.”

“I was almost bitten alive by a poorly-anesthetized tiger in an animal photoshoot session in Thailand when I was just a high-school student.”

“As a senior in high school, at a small, private day school in Harrisburg, PA, I set 2 school records in basketball. At 5’7”, I scored 44 points in one game and 309 points for the season.

So how did I do? Could I distinguish the true statements like the ones above, and separate them from the lies, like the following:

“I met Kevin Costner at the premiere of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and he was quite rude.”

“My daughter packed her own school lunch today and it was only waffles and syrup.”

“I got hit over the head with a stray chair at a pro wrestling show, and got to go backstage afterwards to meet the roster.”

I will tell you honestly, I dug myself into a hole at the start. I made a lot of wrong guesses. But I slowly realized two things kept happening over and over:

#1. When one statement was hyper-specific and the other was vague, it was more likely that the vague statement was true and the hyper-specific was false

#2. When one statement was outrageous and the other was bland, it was more likely that the outrageous statement was true and the bland statement was false

The common element to both of these realizations is “persuasion knowledge.” It’s kind of like the battle of wits between the Dread Pirate Roberts and Vizzini the Sicilian in the Princess Bride.

Bejacco the Croatian: “Only a great fool would not look to specific details to verify a statement. But I am not a great fool, and you know that I am not a great fool, therefore I can clearly not choose the hyper-specific statement in front of me!”

Spoiler alert:

In The Princess Bride, the Dread Pirate Roberts wins the battle of wits because he has developed immunity to iocaine powder, a deadly, odorless, tasteless poison that he puts into both cups, the one in front of him, and the one in front of Vizzini.

Likewise, over the course of playing this truth/lie game, I developed immunity to the persuasion knowledge of my readers. I then went on a tear, guessing almost all of the last two dozen truths/lies right, using the two realizations above and a few more like them. In spite of the bad start, I eventually ended up in the black, with more right guesses than not.

My ultimate point for you is a fundamental truth, something I heard a very great copywriter say once.

As a marketer, you have no power. Your only power is anticipation — knowing how your prospects are likely to think and behave, and adjusting for that.

And with that, let me end this email with a tease. I won’t tell you which great copywriter said the above. But I will tell you it is one of the A-list copywriters I built my little 10 Commandments book around.

​​If you haven’t gotten that yet, and you would like to see who is inside, and maybe unravel the riddle of who said that anticipation is the only power marketers have, you can find the book below:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandment

My diagnosis is that you’re trying to normalize rather than pathologize

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I first wrote about Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in this newsletter in August 2021. Clance and Imes are the two psychologists who, back in 1978, wrote a paper in which they defined something called imposter phenomenon.

The interesting thing is they called it imposter phenomenon, not imposter syndrome. From a recent article in The New Yorker:

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Every time Imes hears the phrase “impostor syndrome,” she told me, it lodges in her gut. It’s technically incorrect, and conceptually misleading. As Clance explained, the phenomenon is “an experience rather than a pathology,” and their aim was always to normalize this experience rather than to pathologize it.

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It might seem like a trivial difference, phenomenon rather than syndrome. It’s not trivial. Like Clance says in that quote, their goal was just to point out, normalize, say, “it’s okay that you feel like a faker, because others do too.”

But that’s not what the public wanted.

The public wanted a concrete disease, a disorder, or at least a syndrome — something unique and special they can point to and explain why they feel uncertain or uncomfortable or why their life is not how they imagine it. The pathological imposter syndrome does that, the wishy-washy, normal, everyday imposter phenomenon does not.

So the public took Clance and Imes’s idea, and they made it their own. Imposter syndrome.

But my real point for you is not the word choice of phenomenon vs syndrome. Sure, it is important, but it’s also the only part that Clance and Imes didn’t get right in their original paper, at least from a persuasion perspective.

My point for you is that difference between concrete vs. wishy washy, unique vs. everyday, pathological vs. normal, all of which Clance and Imes, whether they wanted to or not, definitely did get right in their paper.

People are looking for answers. They want to know to why their life is the way it is, and now the way they want it to be.

If, like Clance and Imes, you give people a satisfying answer to that eternal question, it can literally make you a star in your field, and can have your ideas spread on their own, like fire among dry brush that hasn’t seen water for years.

Maybe this entire email speaks little or not at all to you.

In that case, my diagnosis is that you’re being too nice, and you’re trying to normalize your prospects’ experiences, to give them small incremental improvements and understandings, rather than a total change in perspective in how they view their world.

My prognosis in that case is that you will struggle to be heard, and struggle to make sales. It could even be fatal to your business.

If you want a fix for that unfortunate and dangerous condition, then there’s a pill you can take. I even named it for you above.

But enough of playing doctor.

Back in my own house, the fact remains that I’m still in the process of spring cleaning. I’m throwing out old furniture and old courses, dusting off wardrobes and sales letters, and planning out how to redecorate my living room and my newsletter.

While that’s going on, I will just point you to my only book that’s currently available for sale, and also the only offer I have that doesn’t cost $100 or more. If you’re curious:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments