Stories

Why the girl-and-python show is a great place to negotiate

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Here’s an intriguing (and for writers, a most instructive) scene from one of the greatest films in Hollywood history:

“Christ what a trip. The whole time I’m thinking, what if somebody knows what I got in here? Can you imagine that? Two million dollars on the seat next to me in that plane? Mikey, what the hell’s going on anyway? I’m totally in the dark.”

Mikey picks up the suitcase and carries it off. “The family’s making an investment in Havana. This is a little gift for the President.”

Maybe you recognize this scene. It’s from The Godfather, part 2. ​​Fredo Corleone, the oldest surviving son of the Godfather, is talking to his younger brother Michael, who now heads the Corleone crime family.

Michael recently survived an assassination attempt. He knows his business partner Heyman Roth and Roth’s henchman Johnny Ola were behind it. What he doesn’t know is who inside his own circle betrayed him and collaborated with Roth.

Fredo puts his hands in his pockets as he watches the suitcase disappear.

“Havana’s great!” he says. “My kind of town. Anybody I know in Havana?”

Michael pours himself a glass of water. “Oh… Heyman Roth? Johnny Ola?”

Fredo stares for a bit, trying to pull out a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket. Finally he manages to get the cigarettes out. He looks away.

​​”No. Never met them.”

A couple weeks ago, I wrote an email about negotiation coach Jim Camp. Camp helped negotiate many billion-dollar deals, but he became famous thanks to his contrarian, oracle-like sayings.

One thing Camp said is that he likes to negotiate in the bathroom. That might sounds contrarian, but it’s not. It’s very literal, and backed by basic human psychology.

For an example, fast forward a bit, to Havana.

​​Fredo isn’t smart or strong enough to run the Corleone family, but he’s a fun guy. He knows all the cool spots. He takes Michael and a few U.S. Senators and judges to a girl-and-python act.

“Watch,” says Fredo, as he pours out glasses of rum. “You’re not gonna believe this.”

A young woman is brought out on stage. She is tied to a kind of ceremonial pillar. Then a man in a silk robe is brought out. Two assistants pull off his silk robe to leave him standing naked in front of the audience.

The guys with Fredo — except Michael, who’s checking his watch — gasp and then start chuckling.

“That thing’s gotta be a fake. Hey Freddie! Freddie! How’d you even find this place?”

Fredo doesn’t take his eyes off the stage. “Johnny Ola told me about this place. He brought me here. I didn’t believe him, but seeing is believing. Old man Roth would never come here, but old Johnny knows these places like the back of his hand.”

Michael doesn’t move. He doesn’t say anything. But he looks like somebody just punched him in the gut. And he turns around, and gives a signal to his man who is standing at the door.

So there you go. The reason to negotiate in the bathroom, or during the girl-and-python act. It’s because barriers come down. Jim Camp explains: “As they go to the bathroom, you ask them a question. They’ll answer. They smile, and they answer the question. It’s a great time to do research.”

I wrote about that in my email couple weeks ago. But then I asked myself, what’s really going on? Is this just a negotiation trick?

Eventually, it dawned on me. It’s not a trick. It’s a bit of very basic human psychology.

Our brain likes to think in discrete events, snapshots, scenes, like a movie. This much is obvious. What’s less obvious and more interesting are the consequences. From a New Yorker article on the topic:

“Walking into a room, you might forget why you came in; this happens, researchers say, because passing through the doorway brings one mental scene to a close and opens another.”

Like I said, a bit of fundamental human psychology.

You can now shrug your shoulders and say, “So what?” That would be a Fredo-like thing to do.

Or you can be more like Michael Corleone, and think about how to adapt, how to use this bit of psychology for your own ends.

That’s what Jim Camp did. That’s what successful magicians do. And successful writers, too. In fact, it’s what I’ve tried to do in this very email.

Let me end there, and point you to an offer you can certainly refuse. It’s my Most Valuable Email training, a kind of man-and-keyboard act. In case you’re a person who likes to take advantage of fundamental human psychology:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

A story about true magic

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If you’re interested in my Most Valuable Email program, you can find that here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

And now, here’s a story about true magic:

Magician Max Malini made his reputation thanks to impromptu performances.

One time, Malini sat down at a restaurant for dinner with company. He spent hours there, talking with his friends, drinking, eating. Fish soup. Lamb chops. Then a slice of chocolate cake.

During the entire time, Malini didn’t get up from the table.

Eventually, he turned to a woman at his table and asked to borrow her hat. This was at a time when women still wore hats. The woman took off hers and handed it to Malini.

Malini set a coin spinning on the table, and asked the woman, lady or eagle? The owner of the hat called out, eagle.

Malini used the hat to cover the still-spinning coin. When he lifted the hat, the coin was flat on the table, tails up, showing the eagle.

Mailini set the coin spinning a second time. He asked a man at his table, lady or eagle? The man said, lady.

Malini covered the coin with the hat again. When he lifted the hat, the coin was flat on the table, heads up, showing the lady.

Malini then set the coin spinning a third time, and covered it with the hat.

And when he lifted the hat, there was no coin at at all.

Instead, there was an enormous block of ice on the table, a cube about one foot to a side, perfectly chiseled, without a single drop of melted ice water anywhere.

And the point? In the words of another magician, screenwriter and novelist William Goldman:

“In a sense, a screenplay, whether a romance or a detective story, is a series of surprises. We detonate these as we go along. But for a surprise to be valid, we must first set the ground rules, indicate expectations.”

And now you can go back to the beginning if you like.

96% done, I knew I had to discard today’s email

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I was gonna write one email today, and it was gonna be solid and possibly fine. But fate didn’t allow me to go down that path.

My original email was about a momentous interview in 1992 when CNN talk show host Larry King interviewed Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire.

With three questions, King managed to convince Perot to run in the 1992 presidential race… very probably stealing the presidency from George Bush… giving it to Bill Clinton… and changing world history for decades to come.

In fact, I wrote that original email, most of it. I’d say I was 96% of the way done.

I’m not sure why — maybe I felt something was missing, maybe I wanted something concrete — but I decided to go on YouTube and see if I could quickly find the actual interview and hear Perot’s exact words.

I tried once, twice.

Lots of other Ross Perot videos, lots of other Larry King videos. But I couldn’t find the actual 1992 interview.

I decided it was time to get back to my email and finish things up but—

​​”Let me give it just one more try,” I said to myself.

I typed in a new search into YouTube.

​​Still no actual 1992 interview.

But a few videos down, almost below the fold, there was a 1 minute, 34 second clip of Larry King reminiscing about the interview.

Turns out, King asked Perot if he would run for president in the very first question of the night. Perot said no. King asked once more, midway through the interview. Perot said no. And then, in King’s own words:

===

Two minutes left of the show. I don’t know what in me — just the way he was talking, the way we were conducting, talking about the economy — I said, “Is there any situation under which you would run?”

He said, “I tell you what. You put me on the ballot in all 50 states, and I’d run.”

And when we left that night, I said, “You think anything’s going to happen?” He says, “I don’t think so.”

And two days later he called me and he said, “I got back to my hotel room and the bellhop gave me $10. This could be a sign.”

And two weeks later, Dan Rather led with it on the CBS Evening News. Ran clips from my show. And the rest is history. We made a candidate.

===

King was known as a master storyteller. Those 133 words above show why. As soon as I heard them, I was struck.

I knew what I had to do.

And the rest is history. I discarded my original email. I wrote this new one. Maybe it will influence you, or help you improve your storytelling. All you have to do is ponder Larry King’s words above a bit. And who knows where could will lead you?

But back to the present:

My offer tonight is my Most Valuable Email course, which is not about storytelling — unless you want it to be.

A part of what you get with MVE is my Most Valuable Email Swipes, 51 of my best emails using the Most Valuable Email trick. I just counted. 19 of the 51 are primarily story-based emails, which also happen to use the Most Valuable Email trick.

This could be a sign:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/​​

We’re in the fiction business

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I was surprised—

Yesterday I polled readers as to what books they are reading right now.

The responses came flooding in. Lots of business books. Lots of marketing books. Lots of self-help books.

What surprised me is that out of the several dozen responses I got, fewer than five came from people who said they are reading fiction.

A few days ago, I mentioned how I’ve watched lots of Dan Kennedy seminars about marketing and copywriting, and how Dan will often poll the room about who reads fiction.

​​A few hands go up, most stay down.

“You gotta read fiction,” says Dan. “Many people make the mistake of thinking we’re in the non-fiction business. Big mistake. We’re in the fiction business.”

So read fiction. Even better, write fiction. Dan did it – a mystery novel. John Carlton did it, too — sci-fi. I guess even Gary Halbert did it, maybe romance.

You don’t have to write a novel or even a short story. An email can be it.

​​I’ve done it before in this newsletter. Sometimes I was serious about it. Lots of times it was a parody. In every case, it was valuable.

​​To read the adventures of Bond Jebakovic, secret agent, go here:

https://bejakovic.com/once-upon-a-time/

I’m good at writing stories, hate writing personal stories, and found a new way to look at it

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I spent a good amount of time just now, thinking up and then discarding 10 alternate angles to start this email about personal stories. The fact it took me so long and I still got nothing proves the point I’m trying to get at:

It’s easy to write stories. It’s hard to write personal stories. At least write ’em well.

But what does that mean?

I’ve written thousands of stories, in the context of this newsletter, in sales emails for clients, in Facebook ads, advertorials, sales letters.

Many of those stories were written well, in the sense that people read them, and were then hypnotized — they became open to suggestion and influence.

Most of those thousands of stories involved my clients, or were retold horror stories I’d found online, and one was about Benito Mussolini, and what happened to his corpse after he died.

But out of those thousands of stories, some were also personal stories, featuring me. Some of those personal stories I managed to write well. Some not. I never knew why.

Because of this, I always felt an extra level of confusion, resistance, and doubt whenever I have to tell a personal story. “Is this a good story? Should I include this bit? Is it relevant? Is it interesting? Am I just including it for the sake of ego? Is it irrelevant to the story but somehow important on another level?”

Today I was reading an old issue of the New Yorker. I came across an article, written by Prince Harry’s ghostwriter, about the challenges of ghost writing a memoir for Prince Harry.

“No thank you,” I said immediately, and was ready to turn the page.

But I have this rule that whenever an article seems utterly repulsive to me, I force myself to read it. And good thing I did. I came across the following passage.

The ghostwriter was fighting with Prince Harry over a detail in a story. The prince wanted the detail included. The ghostwriter didn’t. The prince insisted, because this detail showed an important bit of his character. To which the ghostwriter said, “So what?” And he explained:

===

Strange as it may seem, memoir isn’t about you. It’s not even the story of your life. It’s a story carved from your life, a particular series of events chosen because they have the greatest resonance for the widest range of people, and at this point in the story those people don’t need to know anything more than that your captors said a cruel thing about your mom.

===

I found way of looking at personal stories insightful. I mean, this is what I’ve always done instinctively when writing stories about other people. But it’s something I could never put my finger on when writing stories about myself.

And I’m only telling you I found this insightful because maybe you too have found it frustrating to write personal stories in the past, and maybe you will find this new way of looking at personal stories insightful also.

There were other valuable things that prince Harry’s ghostwriter said, which might be useful to you, whether you’re trying to bring to life your own personal stories, or whether you too work as a ghostwriter. In case you are curious:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/05/15/j-r-moehringer-ghostwriter-prince-harry-memoir-spare

I am wired for story… from a trusted, liked, famous source

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A non-personal but true story:

Late into his career escape artist Harry Houdini started cutting some corners in his stage show.

Houdini was injured and physically exhausted, and it was hard to put in the same level of shoulder-dislocating, suffocating, skin-tearing escapes he used to put on.

Sure, Houdini still did some of that, but he minimized it. Instead, he filled up the empty time on stage with some magic tricks and with talking. About himself.

One viewer was shocked and disgusted.

This viewer was the newspaper critic for the local paper in Nottingham, England. So rather than simply firing off an outraged email to Houdini to say how the show isn’t as good as it used to be and to demand to be unsubscribed, this critic wrote up the following review and published it in his paper:

“Why on earth should Houdini imagine that any audience would be entertained by hearing a long and uncalled-for account of what he has been doing during the past six years… people go to a vaudeville house to see a performance… not to hear a diatribe on the personal pronoun around ‘the story of my life, Sir.”

Truly, who would want to hear a diatribe on the personal pronoun? Certainly not the critic.

​​But the audience?

Turns out Houdini broke all attendance and earnings records that year. He earned the highest salaries of his career, pulling down $3,750 a week — about $60,000 a week in today’s money.

Now at this point your brain might jump ahead and conclude, That’s the power of personal stories and reveals! Almost $60k a week! Let me get on it!”

But I’ve made the point before, and I will make it again:

Nobody cares about your stories and personal reveals. Not unless you already have real authority and even fame.

When Houdini changed up his show to be more personal and story-based, he had already been performing his stage show for decades. He didn’t change the core of his show during that time, and it’s probably a good thing. It’s what the crowds wanted and expected.

But then Houdini went to Hollywood. He made a couple of hugely successful movies, rubbed shoulders with Hollywood celebrities, and became a truly international star himself, beyond just the vaudeville stage.

That’s when people wanted to hear Houdini’s stories and the details of his personal life — and that’s what he was talking about on the stage. As Houdini himself put it, “Blame it all on the fact I have been successfully in the movies.”

So tell your stories and share your vulnerabilities — after you’re known and respected and even admired. People will love it then.

Before then?

Well, before then you might be interested in my Most Valuable Email training.

Most Valuable Emails never required I have any status or authority.

These emails make it 100% clear I know what I’m talking about, even when I don’t harp on about the great results I’ve had for clients or the testimonials or endorsements I’ve gotten.

As a result, Most Valuable Emails helped me build up immediate and unquestionable authority — even when I had no standing in the industry. ​​

And I claim Most Valuable Emails can do the same for you. In case you’d like to find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

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:

===

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!

===

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.

A very likely-sounding story

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This morning, right before starting work on this email, I checked WhatsApp on my laptop. I saw a text from last night that a friend had sent me:

“Kuki [the friend’s cat] broke your glass after all! And was joyfully playing with the glass pieces..”

The background is that last night this friend and I met up to go for a walk. My friend was late – getting her hair done, because she’s traveling today for some business thing — so I walked up the road to meet her.

​​We walked for a while, and I told her about my experiences at the Sean D’Souza Seville meetup a few days ago.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” my friend said. “How about we stop by my place?” We were right next to her house, which is close to the Arc de Triomf in downtown Barcelona.

So we went to her place. Bathroom finished, we sat around in the kitchen for a moment having a glass of water.

My friend has a cat, from what I can tell a Siamese cat, which is deaf and doesn’t have good motor control and which has some other deficits, which I forget — maybe it’s that it can’t read or write.

​​In spite of these handicaps, the cat still maintains some usual endearing cat behaviors. For example, the little bastard kept walking around the kitchen counter, repeatedly nudging my empty water glass towards the edge. “Oh sweetheart,” I said to the cat with menace in my voice, “that’s not okay.” My friend looked at the cat lovingly.

Anyways, eventually we left the cat alone and went outside to finish our walk. Actually, we also stopped to get food.

Even though the first place we stopped at was entirely empty, they told us that without a reservation we couldn’t get a table. So we wound up at some “Argentinian” place, which really just turned out to be the standard tapas fare you get anywhere in Barcelona.

Dinner in stomach, I walked my friend back to her place, wished her a good trip, and then walked home myself. And then this morning I got that text from her about the cat breaking the glass after all. “Actually just as I entered the house,” my friend wrote, “in time for me to witness it.”

So what do you think of my story? Pretty pointless, I know, but does it at least ring true?

It should. I won’t tell you whether the story is actually true or not, but I will tell you that I worked actively to make it sound more credible.

And you can do the same.

I’m not telling you to go all psychopath, and simply study the elements of truthful stories so you can embellish lies and make them sound true.

But — if you do have a true story, and nobody cares, or nobody believes you, then massaging your true story to make it sound more credible — well, maybe there’s money or influence to be gained in that.

In any case, you can study my pointless but likely-sounding story above and try to figure out what I did to make it sound more true.

Or you can take me up on my offer, which is just to sign up to my daily email newsletter. It won’t help you figure out what I did in the story above, but maybe, tomorrow or the day after, I will write more about this topic.

We groaned when she pulled off her boots, but when she propped her feet up on the seat!

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I was on a train a few months ago. A woman sitting across from me was wearing a face mask, even though nobody else on the train was wearing one. Perhaps a sign of things to come?

The woman had wool-lined boots on her feet — way too hot for the warm and sunny afternoon. So as the train rumbled along the Catalan seaside, she pulled off her boots and propped her feet up on the seat opposite, to cool them off.

The other people around her, myself included, started exchanging looks — disgusted, amused, incredulous. And yet the woman kept sitting there, eyes beatifically closed, mask on her face, her sweaty feet drying in the sealed wagon air.

I talked to a budding email copywriter a few days ago. He said he wants to learn storytelling.

I feel there’s been a lot of mystification around that topic. It’s something like the guy who wrote a book all about breathing — you’re not breathing optimally, you need to read this book to find out how to breathe better.

People breathe fine. People tell stories fine. You don’t need a course or even a book on it. You just need to do it.

That said, there is something approaching a “secret” that makes for better stories, particularly in print.

At least that’s how it’s been in my experience. When I first heard this advice, I felt enlightened; I felt the doors of perception opening up. Maybe I’m just very dense because I needed to have this pointed out to me:

I used to think of a story as a timeline, a series of facts that need to be laid out and arranged in some kind of order. Then you pepper in details to make the important parts come alive.

“Once upon a time, I was born, a baby with not very much hair. The date was February 19, 1939. My family stock was originally from England but my ancestors had settled in Gotham City many generations earlier. My father, Thomas Wayne, a kind, gentle, mustachioed man, was a highly respected physician here…”

The secret is that you often don’t need any of this — the timeline, the explanatory facts, the logical order. If anything, they probably make your “story” less effective.

A much better option is to think comic book, to think movie, to think of a story as a series of snapshots. Even one snapshot can be enough — like that thing up top with the woman and her wool-lined boots on the train.

Anyways, that’s really the only big storytelling secret I have to share with you.

Maybe you don’t think it’s much. All I can say is that if you apply consistently, it produces real results.

And this brings me to my current offer, my Horror Advertorial Swipe File. Each of those advertorials starts out with a snapshot — scary, disgusting, outrage-forming.

​​You don’t need this swipe file to learn storytelling. But you might want this swipe file if you have a cold-traffic ecommerce funnel, and you want to squeeze more results from your cold traffic. In case you are interested, you will have to sign up to my list, because this is an offer I am only making to my subscribers. If you’d like to do that, here’s where to go.

Spewing inappropriate things at Kim Krause Schwalm

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A while back, I asked my readers which of my emails first came to mind. One reader (not sure he wants me to share his name) had this to say:

===

The first one that jumped out of my memory was “How Copywriters can avoid ham-handed segues that get them eaten alive.”

The first time I read this email, I printed it out.

And to this day, I read it frequently.

Sometimes even multiple times.

It pretty much shaped the way I write now.

The other day I was reading an email from Kim Krause Schwalm that started with a fascinating story.

It sucked me in and kept me scrolling down, begging for more.

And as you might expect now, she jumped into a straight pitch with no transition whatsoever.

Man, I was spewing…

“No, Kim. No, not you. Why?”

I found myself saying some inappropriate things to a person whom I highly respect.

And gues what? I went to reread your email and laugh like a maniac.

The way I see it… It’s like conducting an instant hypnotic induction, then smacking the sh!t out of the person and forcing him to snap out of it.

===

That “ham-handed segues” email is archived on my website. You can find it and read it if you like.

It talks about how copywriters often perform a clumsy bait-and-switch from their fascinating story to their self-interested sales pitch.

Even the best fall into this trap sometimes.

In my ham-handed email, I told a story of an unnamed A-list copywriter who did this bait-and-switch on me, and had me yelling at my laptop. And my reader above had the same frustrating experience with Kim Krause Schwalm.

So how to avoid ham-handed segues?

Get ready. Because the sales pitch is coming. Let me build it up for you. Here it is:

You can find out about that in my Most Valuable Email training.

Because the “ham-handed segues” email uses my Most Valuable Email trick. (And I’m not using that trick in today’s email, in case you’re wondering.)

If you want an explanation of how and where the “ham-handed segues” email uses the Most Valuable Email trick, you can find that in the Most Valuable Email Swipes. That’s a collection of 50 of my best MVEs, which I give you along with the core training of the course.

Look up #10 in that swipe file, and you get an explanation of the trick in action.

Plus as an added benefit, you will learn how to avoid ham-handed segues that get you eaten alive, or worse, spewed upon.

To get Most Valuable Email now:

https://bejakovic.com/mve