Structure Of Copy and Content

Inspire readers to take action using what you’ve already got

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A bit of background:

I once had a copywriting client who was a real estate investing guru in Australia.

The guy was dyslexic or illiterate, I don’t know which. Whenever he wrote me an email to communicate something about the project to be done, the email was borderline illegible, with weird grammar mistakes, terrible spelling, and just a general aura of “this was written by a not very precocious four-year-old.”

And yet, the REI guru was an incredible speaker.

In front of crowds of hundreds, he was fluent and dramatic. He hypnotized his audience and moved them to change their lives and get that financial freedom they had been lusting after, which meant working with him and paying him thousands of dollars for his REI knowledge. He had thousands of customers and clients.

That’s the background.

The story starts when I got one of those misspelled and misgrammared emails from that REI guru. This was about 2–3 years into my copywriting freelance career.

He wanted me to rewrite a sales letter. He thought the previous copywriter had made it too factual and bland, and he wanted me to make it more “inspiring.”

Now I’m a factual and bland person by nature, and because of that, I was 100% certain I could not inspire, hype up, or goose anybody, in print or in words.

So I wrote the REI guru an email, perfectly proofread and 100% grammatically correct, to say I appreciate the offer, but that inspirational copy is really not my strong suit, and therefore I will have to turn the job down.

The end? Almost.

I was ready to live out the rest of my life as a bland and uninspiring entity.

But I happened to listen to a podcast back in 2019 by a certain marketer, a guy I had never heard of before.

This guy was making about $3M a year, taking a cheap and widely available resource — copywriters like me — and turning that resource into a “back-end agency,” where he’d help existing businesses promote their existing offers in new ways via email marketing.

Now here’s the point of this email, the takeaway to the long story and background above:

This very successful marketer said that if you can inspire people, the world is really yours. And here’s the crucial part — he said that there are 1,001 ways to inspire people.

He then gave just one example: “Show people that they already have the resources needed to succeed.” He gave a few examples, I think something to do with mommy bloggers, and how their experience running a family and household would translate into the online business world.

This blew my mind.

For one thing, I had always thought of inspirational copy as the equivalent of a Tony Robbins event — lots of hand clapping and yelling and jumping up and down.

For another, I hadn’t ever occurred to me that a logical argument — “Let me show you how you already have the resources you need to succeed” — could be inspiring.

This changed everything.

Because after this simple realization, I started keeping track of copy that I personally found inspiring.

And now that I had the realization that there might be a structure to it, I started looking out for what it was that had inspired me.

After identifying such inspiration structures, I started using them in my own copy.

The first few times, it came a little ham-handedly, but then more naturally and unselfconsciously.

Today, I also find that inspirational copy is some of the most effective copy that I write — both for getting sales today and for keeping people reading tomorrow.

I’ve even baked it into my public image a bit — people will often reply to my emails to tell me how they loved or were inspired by a particular story I shared.

All that’s to say, you too can inspire, even if you are as bland and factual by nature as I am.

The fact is, there’s a structure to inspiration, just as there is a structure to desire. And now that you know that, you can look out for that structure, and copy it and mimic it, and make it your own.

By the way, the marketer who first turned me on to the structure behind inspiration, the guy in that podcast who was making $3M a year running a back-end agency, was Travis Sago.

I’ve been promoting Travis’s Royalty Ronin community for the past few days, because I myself have been inside this community for more than a year now, and have renewed my subscription for an extra year just a few weeks ago.

And even though I am promoting Royalty Ronin as an affiliate now, I actually promoted it last year as well, for free, simply because I think it’s of genuine interest to you, in case you find my own emails interesting and valuable.

Travis is now running a 7-day free trial for Royalty Ronin, which gives you full access to both the community and to several of his biggest and most expensive courses (including BEAMER, the one on running a back-end agency).

If you’d like to try out Ronin risk-free for a week, take a look here:

​https://bejakovic.com/ronin​

P.S. If you’ve signed up for RR before, I’ve just added a new bonus into your Ronin bonus bundle in the members-only area of my site. This new bonus is a presentation I gave last year inside Brian Kurtz’s Titans XL mastermind, all about various inspiration structures I’ve identified over the years, along with examples from my own copy and from the copy of several copywriters I admire.

And if you haven’t gotten access to the Ronin bonus bundle but you’ve taken me up on the Ronin trial, forward me your confirmation email from Travis, the one with “Vroom” in the subject line. I’ll get you access to the Ronin bundle with the inspiration training above and a few other goodies as a way of saying thanks that you took me up on my recommendation.

The Bejako starter pack

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You might be familiar with the concept of a starter pack. It’s a kind of meme format.

In a starter pack, people put together a few images or phrases or whatever, which are representative of something — a gym bro, a local Mexican restaurant, a 1980s heavy metal video.

New Yorker magazine does its own variant, where it asks people they profile to create a starter pack for themselves, consisting of a movie, a TV show, a book, and an album, which are somehow representative.

I had to try it. So here goes:

Bejako starter pack ingredient #1 (movie): The Princess Bride

If you’ve been a reader of this newsletter for a while, this should be no surprise.

My optin page literally says:

“I write a daily email newsletter about direct marketing, copywriting, and my love for the books and screenplays of William Goldman.”

Well, Goldman wrote the screenplay for The Princess Bride, based on his book of the same title.

(He also wrote the famous line, “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” On my website, that morphed into, “Hello. My name is John Bejakovic. You found my website. Prepare to decide.”)

The fact is, I saw The Princess Bride for the first time when I was 11. It was the perfect mix of adventure, romance, and self-aware humor for 11-year-old Bejako.

I guess I’ve never really matured past 11.

The only thing that’s changed for me over the years, as I’ve continued to re-watch this movie, is that I appreciate how it doesn’t talk down or moralize to you.

“Life is pain,” is the core message of the story. In the end, the bad guy goes free. And the main character, Westley, dies. Though ok, miracles do sometimes happen, as do happy endings.

Bejako starter pack ingredient #2 (TV show): Twin Peaks

David Lynch, who made Twin Peaks, died a couple weeks ago. There aren’t many celebrities whose deaths I care about… but I cared about Lynch. He was hinting there might be a season 4 of Twin Peaks, and now it will never happen.

Season 2 of Twin Peaks, which came out in 1990, was largely atrocious.

Season 3 of Twin Peaks, which came out 25+ years later in 2017, was surprisingly good.

But the best is still the original season 1, which Lynch directed and co-wrote.

It has the usual Lynch blend of mystery, sex, horror, weirdness, and quaintness. Plus beautiful shots of wind blowing through the trees.

Bejako starter pack ingredient #3 (book): Dune

I had the most trouble choosing a book for my starter pack.

That’s because, as I wrote a few weeks ago, I don’t particularly enjoy reading, even though I’ve read a lot my whole life.

I also wasn’t sure how to choose a book here. A book that influenced me? Or that I enjoyed reading? Or that I thought was particularly well written?

I ended up going with enjoyment, and picked Frank Herbert’s Dune.

I first read Dune when I was 20, and then a couple more times since.

The story is familiar enough after all the TV shows and movies made based on it in recent years.

I guess what I like in it, beyond the familiar but rousing story of the arrival of “The One,” are the elements of religion… the formation of legend… plus simply the promise of a drug you can take, which makes you so smart you can literally predict the future by seeing all possible outcomes in parallel.

Bejako starter pack ingredient #4 (album): Station To Station by David Bowie

I like a lot of Bowie albums. This one is my favorite. I like the style, sound, strangeness of it, all mostly fueled by cocaine and paranoia.

By the way, coked-up Bowie from this period has inspired the central tenet of this newsletter. In an interview with Playboy, Bowie said:

“Nothing matters except whatever it is I’m doing at the moment. I can’t keep track of everything I say. I don’t give a shit. I can’t even remember how much I believe and how much I don’t believe. The point is to grow into the person you grow into. I haven’t a clue where I’m gonna be in a year.”

Maybe in a year, I’ll have to do another, different starter pack.

For now, this one will give you more insight into me than most people who know me in person have.

As you can probably guess, today’s email was based on the Daily Email Habit “puzzle” I sent out today.

Sometimes it’s good to write emails like this, to surprise people, and to simply let them a bit into your own world.

But other times, entirely different emails are called for. And that’s what I make sure Daily Email Habit puzzles do, day in and day out.

If you’d like to get started with your own daily email habit, starting with tomorrow’s puzzle, which is entirely different and much more difficult to guess at than today’s, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

It’s not an OPEN loop, it’s an OPENED loop

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A while back, marketer Daniel Throssell wrote an email pointing out the nonsense of the term “open loop.”

An open loop, as you might know, is a technique in copywriting where you start a story and then cut it off to talk about other stuff, basically leading the reader on and sucking him deeper and deeper in.

I was a tad irritated by Daniel’s calling out “open loop” as nonsense, because I always thought the term sounded somehow poetic. But really, I had to admit I couldn’t make sense of how an “open loop” makes sense.

Well, I found out yesterday where “open loop” actually comes from and what it actually is — a corruption of a term from computer programming.

Computer programs have constructs known as loops — “for” loops, “while” loops etc. – where an instruction is executed over and over while some condition holds true. So you open, say, a “for” loop within a computer program, and then you specify what happens next. (What happens next can actually include opening a new “for” loop — so you end up with a hierarchy of embedded “for” loops, one within the other.)

This analogy between computer program loops and a technique of communication was first made by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the creators of neurolinguistic programming or NLP.

In the 1970s, Grinder and Bandler were at the University of California Santa Cruz (my alma mater), a school that combined such interests as computer programming, linguistics, and dropping acid. It was natural that Bandler and Grinder would make the loop analogy, not only because it was in the water at UCSC, but because of the nested nature of both kinds of structures.

Ultimately, Bandler and Grinder got the idea for this technique from psychotherapist and hypnosis innovator Milton Erickson, one of the most effective therapists of all time. Bandler and Grinder sat at Erickson’s feet and recorded Erickson’s unique patterns of communication, which then became formalized as NLP techniques.

This really gets to the core of this email. The core is my answer to the daily puzzle from my Daily Email Habit service, which you can sign up for at the link at the bottom. Because one thing that Bandler and Grinder noticed was that Erickson would often embed suggestions in the middle of a story.

Embedded suggestions supposedly work better than if you just tell people to do something outright. And if you tell a bunch of nested stories, and embed a suggestion at the center of them all, it supposedly works even better.

Who knows though? Maybe it just worked for Milton Erickson, because the guy was unusually skilled, observant, and charismatic.

Besides, Erickson enjoyed constantly experimenting and inventing new techniques and new means of allowing people to make the changes that they wanted to make. He didn’t seem to be particularly wedded to any one technique, which is something I admire him for, and a credo I live by myself.

Grinder and Bandler, on the other hand, took Erickson’s improvised, free flowing, one-time experiments and formalized them into set rules and templates with catchy names.

Rules and templates with catchy names tend to sell well, which is why NLP ideas, effective or not, have become so widespread and influential, from corporate training, to copywriting, to pick up artists.

Along the way, of course, a lot has been lost, and even more has become corrupted. Which brings me back to the term “open loop.”

Now that we know where the term comes from, it’s clear it’s not really an “open loop.” Rather, it’s that you “open a loop,” or maybe you have an “opened loop.”

In Ericksonian hypnosis as in computer programming, you eventually have to close your loop to have a program that’s syntactically valid. (And if you’ve nested multiple loops, one within the other, you have to close each one, in reverse order to how you opened them.)

All that’s to say, I have to admit that Daniel Throssell was right and that the term “open loop,” poetic though it sounded to me, doesn’t really make sense. And now you know what term really does make sense — an OPENED loop — and maybe you’ve learned something else along the way.

And as for that link I promised you, it’s below. Maybe it could be valuable for you to take a look at it now:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

The light at the end of the tunnel

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

“What?”

“I love you.”

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

“How about, you love me too?”

“How about: I’m leaving.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what’s the point?

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

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

Or in the words of screenwriter and director David Mamet:

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

But now I have a problem:

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

How to stop readers from skimming your emails

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I’m working on my new 10 Commandments book, and so I’ve been going through the archive on my website, in search of old emails that I could use in the new book as-is.

There are literally hundreds of these old emails.

Most I skim across without reading at all. But from time to time, some of the emails catch my eye.

I noticed that there’s one characteristic among the emails in my archive that do make me stop, read more carefully, nod my head.

The emails that made me do that are clear.

Being clear goes beyond getting a good Hemingway-app score.

You can write at a 3rd-grade level and still not have a clear message. If you don’t believe me, think of former U.S. President George W. Bush, who said:

​​”I’m looking forward to a good night’s sleep on the soil of a friend.”

The key thing for a clear email isn’t the word choice. It’s actually having something clear to say.

I’ve personally started forcing myself to write each of my emails in just three bullet points. Here’s an example for today’s email:

1. been reading my old emails
2. good ones are clear
3. sme: don’t need quirks or style

Which brings me my Simple Money Emails training. As I say inside that training:

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Your email doesn’t need to be perfectly written or polished. It doesn’t need to use clever language or have your own “unique voice.” It doesn’t need to have any particular character or surprising, breakneck transitions.​​

Just because you saw some unique quirk in an email guru’s personal email, don’t think you have to do the same to make sales.

You don’t. I know because I have written super basic emails, without any “flair” to them other than an interesting story that I dug up somewhere online, and they did well. In fact, simple, clear, interesting emails will often do better that clever, unusual, or flowery emails.

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You can write clearly. And you can write in an interesting way. And you can write in a way that makes you sales today, and tomorrow, and the day after.

Simple Money Emails can help you get there. ​​For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Do you know the flip side of this famous historical anecdote?

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Everybody and his monkey knows the story of how, back in 1903, some smug realist at the New York Times wrote that heavier-than-air flight won’t be possible for another “one million to ten million years.”

And then, several weeks later, the Wright brothers took off and flew for the first time.

Like I say, you probably know that.

But what you might not know is the flip side of this story, how little anybody cared about that first flight, or the second flight, or the third, then or for years afterwards.

​​Here’s an excerpt from a book I just finished reading:

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Several years went by before the public grasped what the Wrights were doing; people were so convinced that flying was impossible that most of those who saw them flying at Dayton in 1905 decided that what they had seen must be some trick without significance — somewhat as most people today would regard a demonstration of, say, telepathy. It was not until May, 1908 — nearly four and a half years after the Wright’s first flight — that experienced reporters were sent to observe what they were doing, experienced editors gave full credence to these reporters’ excited dispatches, and the world at last woke up to the fact that human flight had been successfully accomplished.

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That’s an interesting historical anecdote.

I had never heard it before.

It can be saved and used effectively in lots of different contexts. I would like to pass it on to you if you write and need lots of sticky messages to make your points more effectively.

I also want to clue you in to a resource that’s full of such sticky messages.

​​I already wrote about it in a recent email.

I’m talking about Morgan Housel’s Psychology of Money. I finished reading it a few days ago. It’s where I got the passage above, even though Housel didn’t write it — he’s just citing yet another book in his own book.

The Psychology of Money was published just over three years ago. And yet, it has over 30,000 5-star reviews on Amazon.

That’s not because the advice in the book is so new or so inspiring (“Save more”).

Rather, Housel’s Psychology of Money is so popular because it’s so effectively written, using lots of historical illustrations and novel metaphors and personal stories.

If you want to see how to write a book that keeps selling itself based on its content alone, then The Psychology of Money is worth a skim, read, or even some careful reverse engineering. To get your own copy:

https://bejakovic.com/housel

What it’s like to be… faced with AI eating your job

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Question:

What’s the worst thing you can ever say to a TV weather woman?

Answer:

“That’s not what my app says…”

I’ll tell you in a second how I found out that riveting bit of information. But first:

At a recent gathering of copywriters in London, I saw several attendees hang their heads and say, “As we all know, it’s been a rough year for many copywriters.”

I kept quiet because I didn’t want to expose my ignorance and absence of rough year.

​​I don’t work with clients any more. And my year has been fine.

What exactly has been rough on copywriters who do work with clients?

Is it the economic climate? AI taking copywriting jobs? Too much competition from the glut of would-be copywriters who entered the field over the past few years?

I felt it would be tactless to ask. So I kept quiet.

But back to the weather woman. I found out that the best way to piss off such a one is to say, “That’s not what my app says.”

I found that out because I’m dipping my toes into a new podcast, called What It’s Like To Be.

The podcast features interviews with people in different professions, so you can find out what it’s like to do their job. The last episode was TV weather woman Lacey Swope, who works for News 9 in Oklahoma City, the world epicenter of extreme weather.

I had no particular interest in hearing what it’s like to be a TV weather woman. But I’m glad I listened.

Because in many ways, weather womaning turns out to be a profession very similar to copywriting.

For example:​​

The job of being a TV meteorologist requires two separate skills — the technical skill of divining the weather, and the presentation skill, you might even say sales skill, of being friendly and cute on TV.

But wait, there’s more.

Weather meteorologists have for years been under threat by apps and websites that give the masses by-the-minute weather info. And the TV weather people who are surviving and thriving in spite of it are all—

… well for that, I will point you to the podcast itself.

You can find the podcast episode at the link below.

It’s worthwhile listening if you’re working as copywriter, and wondering what the future might bring, and how you can best prepare for it.

TV weather men and weather women been there, maybe a decade earlier. You can lean surprisingly practical stuff by listening to Lacey Swope and thinking how to apply her experiences and attitudes to your career.

And if that’s not enough to get you to click through and listen, then I will tell you the reason I started listening to What It’s Like To Be in the first place.

It’s because it’s the new podcast of Dan Heath, who is one half of the Heath brothers team that wrote the book Made to Stick.

​​So if you want to hear how somebody who literally wrote the book on effective, viral, long-lasting communication organizes and structures his content, then here ya go:

https://www.whatitsliketobe.com/2246914/13858315-a-tv-meteorologist

PS. Thanks to everyone who joined me and Kieran for the the storytelling presentation earlier today. I feel it went well. But I honestly never know when I’m presenting. If you were there live, I’d love to know what you thought of it. Write in and let me know.

A peek behind the curtain of my “mesmerizing” Copy Riddles sales letter

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It’s strange times around the Bejako household. There’s a Copy Riddles promotion going on, but I’m not the one furiously typing it up.

Instead, I’m looking on as Daniel Throssell sends out email after email to sell Copy Riddles. I’m watching the resulting sales coming in. And I’m feeling a little guilty that I’m not somehow supporting the effort.

So let me share a third-party opinion on Copy Riddles that might help change some minds.

This opinion comes from Carlo Gargiulo, an Italian-language copywriter. Carlo is a star copywriter at Metodo Merenda, a Switzerland-based info publishing business. He also has his own list where he writes to entrepreneurial dentists and doctors and marketers, and he is a bit of an LinkedIn influencer in the Italian copy space.

Carlo had the following to say about Copy Riddles:

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Copy Riddles is the best copy course of all time.

I have spent a lot of money studying and learning so much useful information from copywriter courses such as Stefan Georgi, John Carlton, David Deutsch, etc. (all great courses that I have enjoyed), but I feel that Copy Riddles was the COURSE that allowed me to become a good copywriter.

I hope you will create courses similar to Copy Riddles in the future.

My dream is a course of yours on writing sales letter-landing pages (Your writing style is completely different from that of most copywriters I see around.). Indeed, Copy Riddles’ landing page is the only one I have read in its entirety over and over again. You literally mesmerized me with that landing page.

Anyway, congratulations and thanks again for creating and making Copy Riddles available.

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Here’s a quick copywriting lesson, specifically about how I structured the multi-page Copy Riddles sales letter, which Carlo says he found mesmerizing.

Each of the three pages of that sales letter is designed to get you to believe one and only one thing, specifically:

Page 1’s belief is that bullets are one of the most valuable copywriting skills you can ever own.

To do that, I refer to authorities such as John Carlton, Gary Halbert, Gary Bencivenga, Parris Lampropoulos, David Deutsch, Stefan Georgi, and Ben Settle, all of whom have gone on record to say that — yes, bullets are one of the most valuable copywriting skills you can ever own, and maybe the most valuable.

Page 2’s belief is that the best way to own bullets is to follow what Gary Halbert once recommended in his newsletter — and what people like Gary Bencivenga, Parris Lampropoulos, and Ben Settle have put in practice — namely, to look in parallel at both the source material and the finished bullet.

Page 3’s belief is that Copy Riddles is a fun and effective way to implement that Gary Halbert process…

… without spending months of your time and hundreds of hours of your mental effort to do what I’ve already done for you, which is to track down a bunch of winning sales letters… buy or borrow or steal the books or courses they were selling… and go bullet by bullet, comparing the source to the finished product, figuring out how exactly the A-list copywriters turned lead into gold.

And that’s pretty much the entire sales letter.

If I manage to convince the reader of all three of those points, then making the sale is easy, which is why I don’t have a big and dramatic scarcity-based close for the Copy Riddles sales page.

Of course, it does help that I have a bunch of great testimonials, like Carlo’s, right before the final “Buy now” button.

Maybe you would like to see how this mesmerizing sales letter looks in reality.

I won’t link to it directly in this email. Instead, I will remind you that Daniel Throssell is promoting Copy Riddles right now.

Daniel has gotten me to offer a one-time, sizable discount from the current Copy Riddles price, exclusively to people who come via his list.

So if you’re curious what my mesmerizing Copy Riddles sales page looks like, check out Daniel’s next email, because it will have a link to that page at the end.

And if you’re at all interested in buying, then act before tomorrow, Wednesday at 12 noon PST, because that’s when Daniel and I agreed to end this special offer, which will never be repeated again.

In case you’re not yet on Daniel’s list, here’s where to go:

https://persuasivepage.com/

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

“There’s magic in the structure itself”

by

[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:

===

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.

===

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