Insight Marketing

Marketers are from Mars, prospects are from—?

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John Gray catches a lot of flak for his 1992 best-seller, Men are from Mars, Women are from Wenus.

But I’ve personally gotten a lot of use out of this short idea from Gray’s book:

“The most frequently expressed complaint women have about men is that men don’t listen. Either a man completely ignores her when she speaks to him, or he listens for a few beats, assesses what is bothering her, and then proudly puts on his Mr. Fix-It cap and offers her a solution to make her feel better. He is confused when she doesn’t appreciate this gesture of love. No matter how many times she tells him that he’s not listening, he doesn’t get it and keeps doing the same thing. She wants empathy, but he thinks she wants solutions.”

The thing is, it’s not just men who prematurely jump to solutions. And it’s not just women who will ignore offered solutions, even when they are perfectly good.

We are all like this, much of the time.

When we are frustrated, most of us hate having suggestions tossed at us. “Don’t you think I’ve thought of that? It would never work in my case! Why don’t you just listen for a second?”

I know I’ve reacted like this, at least internally, while keeping up a stoic front. And I’ve seen plenty of other guys — some of them manly, practical-minded men – nervously shrugging off good solutions to their ongoing problems.

The question to me is why? Why do women and men both choose not solve problems for which there are good solutions?

I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about this.

My conclusion is this isn’t a trivial human quirk, or like Gray says, just a hysterical cry for a bit of empathy.

Instead, my feeling is it goes back to fundamental human needs, like those I talked about yesterday.

Specifically, the need for uniqueness… and the need for meaning.

​​It might not seem very rational from the outside, but it makes perfect sense from the inside:

People will hold on to their problems just so they can keep feeling unique. “I might not have much… but I’ve got trouble like nobody’s ever seen.”

Or they will cling to pain and failure, even when there’s an easy way out. Because if there really is an easy way out, then what was the purpose of all that suffering they’ve experienced in the past?

In other words:

You might be selling your prospect a shiny new chrome pipe. And your prospect might desperately need it — the old pipe is rusted out and the basement is filling up with water. But what you don’t realize is that installing that new pipe might undermine the very foundations of your prospect’s house.

So that’s the problem that you face.

It’s tricky.

And it’s definitely unique.

But don’t worry. I won’t irritate you with any pigheaded suggestions for how you can solve this problem. At least I won’t do it here.

I’ll save that for an upcoming paid product. Maybe I will call it Marketers Are From Mars, Prospects Are From— but where exactly? I still have to work that part out. In case you want to get notified when this mansplaining guide comes out, sign up for my email newsletter.

I’m sorry Ms. Jackson

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This one right here goes out to all the email copywriters… the business owners who write their own emails… maybe even those with a YouTube channel.

Here’s the story:​​

A few weeks ago, a music industry insider named Ted Gioia made a big splash by writing an article with the title:

“Is Old Music Killing New Music?”

Gioia had a bunch of stats and anecdotes to prove that old music — stuff that came out 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago — is crowding out the new music being produced today.

Gioia has his theory for why this is.

Basically, he says, record company execs just wants to get a piece of the American pie to take their bite out. So they keep giving people tried-and-true stuff. They’re not willing to take risks.

It’s short-term thinking, Gioia says. Because ironically, the execs are making themselves irrelevant in the process. But one way or another, the fact remains, in Gioia’s words:

“Never before in history have new tracks attained hit status while generating so little cultural impact.”

In my own uninformed yet subjective opinion, this is part of a bigger trend.

It’s not only music that’s getting old. I think it’s movies also, and perhaps other pop culture too.

This matters for marketers.

Because from what I’ve seen writing approximately a billion sales emails… pop culture always gets a great response.

Pop culture references turns you into a magician who can abracadabra a sales point… get people to enjoy it… and maybe even get them to buy.

So what exactly am I telling you?

Well, it’s the same thing that some 40 years ago, A-list copywriter Gene Schwartz said:

“If a movie does a hundred million dollars or more, especially a movie that does two hundred or three hundred million dollars or more, I would go to it two or three times.”

This is a good idea today just as it was in Gene’s time.

Go see blockbusters. But make sure you see the same ones that Gene was talking about, like Lethal Weapon and Home Alone and Pulp Fiction.

In other words, don’t take risks with any of this new stuff. Give people the tried-and-true. And keep doing it. Forever. Forever-ever. For-EVER-ever.

“Whoa there Bejako,” you say. ​”You’ve been handing out a lot of careless and maybe even harmful advice lately.”

Oh yeah, like what?​

“Well, like ​first you said to bet on the Bengals for the Super Bowl. We know how that turned out. Then a couple days ago you almost got me sucked into QAnon.”

That was an honest mistake.
​
“Whatever. The point is, now you’re telling me to pander to my audience with references to Fleetwood Mac and Kill Bill. But isn’t this the same short-term thinking as those record company execs? Won’t I be making myself irrelevant in the process?”

I don’t know. You might be right. I might be wrong. So all I can say is:

I’m sorry dear reader. I am for real. Never meant to send you bad advice. I apologize a trillion times.

But I’ll do more than apologize.

I’ll tell you how to avoid pandering and talk about pop culture your audience isn’t familiar with, without taking much of a risk. That’s in my email tomorrow. I hope you’ll read it. You and your mama.

How to de-cult your mom (or any other QAnonized family member)

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How careless and maybe even harmful was my email yesterday. I just didn’t realize what I was getting you into.

I’ll explain everything.

But first, let me tell you about a 72-year-old Florida woman I’ll call Susan.

Starting in 2019, Susan fell deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole that is QAnon.

Each day, she spent many hours binging on conspiracy videos and scrolling through that freedom-figthing app, Telegram.

Susan’s daughter, Karen, watched all this in horror.

Now, I’m personally not sure what the harm is in a retired, 72-year-old lady thinking that Hilary Clinton is harvesting adrenochrome from the living bodies of young children.

But Karen and Susan live together. And I guess it can get exhausting if all your mom ever wants to talk about is Satanic pedophiles.

So Karen tried everything to get her mom to snap out of her QAnon haze.

Karen tried listening patiently. She got angry. She threw facts and reason in her mom’s face.

Nothing worked.

But then Karen got lucky.

She found something that’s completely snapped her mom out of her QAanon habits…

… a safe, positive, apolitical alternative:

Wordle.

I talked about Wordle yesterday. It’s a little word game that’s been going viral over the past few months.

I even casually recommended you check it out.

I should have been more careful.

Because as the story of Susan above shows, Wordle and QAnon have lots in common. I’m not kidding.

Both QAnon and Wordle are fundamentally puzzles.

They feature clues, and with work, reveal more clues.

Both create an atmosphere of tension, of uncertainty, of consequence.

Both allow you to feel progress as you work to resolve that tension.

And finally, both offer a simple, clear solution… one that takes all the clues and snaps them together in a perfect fit.

The result at the end is an addicting emotional payoff. And the urgent desire to go for another spin.

Like Susan above:

​​”Now she spends as much as 2 to 3 hours per day,” her daughter Karen said, “playing bootleg Wordle on another site that lets you play as much as you like. I’m not even joking.”

So my point is, be careful when you play Wordle. If the New York Times ever decides to shut it down or put it behind a paywall, you might find yourself craving a fix and getting sucked into QAnon…

… or maybe even something worse.

Like getting obsessed with my Gospel of Insight Marketing book.

Because you can create the same feeling that Wordle and QAnon create with your own writing.

You can flood people with satisfaction… give them the feeling it all makes sense… and create a need for more of the same.

That’s what that my Insight book is about, or at least that’s the promise of it. And as usual, I’ll use the ideas I’m writing about to write the actual book itself.

That’s all in the future though. But if you’re into this puzzle stuff, then keep your antenna up. I’ll drop more clues in the coming days and weeks. Sign up here if you want to be in on the comms.

Let’s see if I can make you watch the SuperBowl

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A few days ago, I was listening to an old episode of the James Altucher podcast, and I learned this curious fact:

A person who bets any amount of money on a game is 11x more likely to watch the game.

I’m not sure if this means that you can get people to watch a game, just by getting them to bet. But I’m willing to find out.

Because there’s an old marketing idea that I’ve long thought is super clever.

As far as I know, nobody today in the DM world is using it, at least not online. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you can correct me.

Here’s the idea. It comes from direct marketing legend Joe Sugarman, the guy who made BluBlocker sunglasses into a $300M brand.

Joe once wrote an ad promoting a computer. He ran it around the time of the SuperBowl.

The ad basically said, if the Bears win the SuperBowl, you get this computer at 50% off. If they lose, the price stays as it is. And here’s the outcome, in Joe’s own words:

“There was a lineup of people — we had a retail store — there was a literally a lineup of people all the way around the block waiting to pick up their computer that they were getting for 50% off. The funny part about it was that we were making a nice profit on that as well.”

Like I said, I’m willing to test this idea out.

So I just checked. The Superbowl is in 8 days.

And I happen to be working on a new offer. It’s called Copy Zone. It’s about succeeding in the business part of copywriting — getting started, finding clients, managing clients, performance deals, upleveling.

I am planning to get Copy Zone out by the end of this month. And I’m planning to sell it for $150 to start. But I’ll make you a wager:

If you pick the winner of this Superbowl right — Bengals or Rams — you get my Copy Zone offer for 50% off, or for $75, during the launch window.

Of course, you gotta buy a ticket if you want a piece of this action.

Fortunately, the ticket to play this game is free. But it is time-limited.

So if you want to play this game of chance, you’ll need to get on my email list first. Then just hit reply to my welcome email and pick this year’s SuperBowl Winner.

Bengals. Or Rams.

You have time to enter until I send out my email tomorrow, Monday, Feb 7 2022, at 8:24 CET.

​​Call — or rather, email — now. Our bookies are standing by.

The power of sitting and not taking action

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Yesterday, I found myself reading a promising article titled:

“Buy Things, Not Experiences”

“Wow!” I said, as a gust of wind shook my window. “That’s the opposite of that tired phrase everybody’s always preaching, ‘Buy experiences, not things.'”

A little smile spread across my face. I couldn’t wait to see how the writer would pay off this shocking, denialist headline.

But woof, what a disappointment.

The article sounded like a speech prepared in 15 minutes by a high school debater. Three unrelated, undeveloped, unconvincing arguments. I won’t retell them here, but I’ll tell you the upshot:

The controversial headline got my attention. But the actual content didn’t make me want to read more by the same writer.

In fact, it put me on guard. In case I ever see another link to this guy’s content, I will think twice — Oh, that’s the high school debater, it’s probably not worth wasting my time.

That’s a fate I would like to avoid for the things that I write. Perhaps you want the same for yourself, too.

In that case, I can tell you a little secret which goes against much conventional wisdom in the marketing space:

There’s a lot of value in just sitting on things. Well, at least that’s what I’ve personally found.

For example, this newsletter. I don’t “execute” these emails fast. I don’t write at breakneck speed or jump on good ideas as they come to me.

Instead, I often get an idea for a subject line, topic, angle… and then it sits there, for days, weeks, sometimes months. I have things I wrote down two years ago which have still not matured.

But on occasion, something will click. A second good idea, or illustration, or whatever, will come my way. And I’ll remember — boy, this would go great with that other thing I thought of months ago.

Of course, it doesn’t always click. But in general, by sitting on ideas, like a mother goose on her eggs, I’ve written some of my most effective, interesting, and influential emails.

And maybe, you will find the same with your own writing. By sitting, and not taking action fast. In spite of that tired phrase everybody’s always preaching, “Money loves speed!”

But really, all this has just been a buildup to the thing I really wanted to show you.

Because a few weeks ago, I found a funny clip on YouTube. ​​It was part of a sketch show that ran on the BBC between 2006 and 2010.

​​All the clips I found from this show were clever and well-written, and they often had direct application to persuasion and influence.

Such as the clip I’m about to share with you.

It’s a satire of Richard Dawkins, looking for a new topic after his blockbuster book, The God Delusion.

Maybe you will enjoy the sketch. And maybe, it will give you some good ideas for controversial content that delivers… rather than disappoints. You can find it below.

But before you click to watch it, sign up for my email newsletter. Or don’t, and sit on it for a while. Here’s the video:

Deeply and irrevocably intimate

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Be warned:

Today’s email is long and intimate. I saw no other way to make the point I wanted to make.

But if you stick with me, I hope to make it worth your while with a deep truth about persuasion and belief.

So if you’re still here, let me tell you a personal story, which I’ve only told a few people:

One evening when I was 15 years old, I was sitting at the dinner table. And then things started to go wrong.

My mom was sitting across from me at the same table. She was speaking — I could see that and I could hear the sounds. But I could no longer understand a word she was saying.

She must have realized something was wrong with me. She stood up.

But before she could walk over to my side of the table, a buzzing built up in my ears, and then the world went black. I keeled over and fell to the floor.

Turns out, I’d had a grand mal seizure. Basically, an electrical storm built up in my brain, and all my neurons started firing at once.

My mom called 911 and I wound up at the hospital. Over the next few days, I stayed in the hospital and had a few more seizures. Eventually, they put me on some meds and sent me home.

“We’ll keep an eye on it,” the neurologist said a few days later. “But it’s nothing to worry about. These kinds of seizures are frequent in adolescents, and they usually go away on their own.”

And that’s how it was for me. I was on that anti-seizure medication for a couple years. Eventually I got off it.

And it was all fine, just like the neurologist said. During my medicated time and ever since, I never had any more seizure episodes. I was sure of that (a bit of foreshadowing there).

Fast-forward to age 20. I was attending college in beautiful Santa Cruz, California.

The campus is on top of a hill in the middle of a redwood forest. So while walking between class and dorm, you go among these monumental, swaying, 300-foot-tall coastal redwoods.

And because there are natural gullies and canyons in the Santa Cruz hills, you also get to walk across wooden Ewok bridges that make you feel like you’re flying 80 feet up in the air.

It was summertime and the campus was empty. I was walking on the path through the redwoods and there was no one else around.

I reached one of the Ewok bridges. And as soon as I stepped onto the first plank, it washed over me:

A 100% real, eyes-wide-open, religious epiphany.

I am not joking or making this up. It was hard to describe it then, and it’s even harder now, years later. But the essence of it was an absolute certainty — coupled with a vision — of the oneness and total rightness of everything in the universe.

Like I said, the epiphany came on suddenly. It faded gradually, over the course of what I guess was about a minute. The whole time, I didn’t stop walking, though I probably slowed down a bit in wonder of it all.

So what happened to me that day? Who the hell knows.

Had I been brought up in a religious environment, I might have interpreted it as a revelation from God.

But I wasn’t brought up like that. So I filed this epiphany away as a mysterious one-time experience.

I still think of it often but I almost never talk about it. In fact, until today, I only told two people about it.

And this brings us to last night.

Last night, I was reading a book about the human brain and all the unusual things that can happen to it. Such as, for example, focal seizures — seizures that don’t engulf the whole brain.

Some of these seizures happen in the temporal lobe, the part of the brain that’s in charge of emotion.

These temporal lobe seizures don’t cause fits or fainting. But they can cause “deeply moving spiritual experiences, including a feeling of divine presence and the sense of direct communion with God.”

“Hmm,” I said to myself, as a buzzing started to build in my ears. The book went on:

“The seizures — and visitations — last usually only for a few seconds each time. But these brief temporal lobe storms can sometimes permanently alter the patient’s personality so that even between seizures he is different from other people. This process, called kindling, might permanently alter — and sometimes enrich — the patient’s inner emotional life.”

“Well that sounds nice,” I said, “but it definitely doesn’t apply to me.” Still I kept reading:

“Patients see cosmic significance in trivial events. It is claimed that they tend to be humorless, full of self-importance, and to maintain elaborate diaries that record quotidian events in elaborate detail — a trait called hypergraphia.”

At this point, I almost fell out of my chair. Instead, I just laughed in my usual humorless way. “Haha! And all this time, I thought I was just writing long-winded daily emails about persuasion!”

But I shouldn’t try to joke, because I was dead serious about this. This book was describing me. It listed other common traits of this “temporal lobe personality”:

“Argumentative, pedantic, egocentric, and obsessively preoccupied with philosophical and theological issues.”

Confession time — I don’t know how well I manage to hide it in these daily emails… but these traits all fit me to a tittle. As just one example:

The reason I was reading this brain book in the first place is because it’s part of my big and so-far secret research project. That project has been mushrooming on my computer desktop for years — in a folder labeled, “RELIGION.”

But I feel I’ve forced you to read my elaborate diary for long enough. So let me bring this around to persuasion and make it useful for you.

I don’t know for sure whether I really had a seizure that day in Santa Cruz. I certainly don’t know whether I have “temporal lobe personality” or really, whether such a thing even exists (neurologists are not in agreement).

But last night, as I read the book that seemed to describe me to exactly, I felt both enlightened and depressed.

Enlightened… because these few paragraphs made a jumble of moments, behaviors, and tendencies in my life snap together into a single, easy-to-understand, unitary diagnosis.

But it also made me depressed… because who wants to be diagnosed as a self-absorbed, argumentative blowhard?

In other words, had somebody offered me a magic pill… and promised to rid me of my “temporal lobe personality” and the “rich inner emotional life” it’s supposed to bring… well, I would have paid good money for that pill.

(The fact is, such a magic pill does exist. It’s cheap and it’s usually sold in liquid form. It’s called alcohol.)

Anyways, that’s the truth about marketing I promised you at the start. If it’s not clear, let me evangelize:

You might not be able to trigger a seizure in your prospect’s brain. But you can get your prospect on the path to an epiphany.

And all it really takes is a disease name (“temporal lobe personality”)… a bagful of symptoms (hypergraphia, humorlessness, interest in religion)… and, optionally, an etiology (seizures in the limbic system).

Perhaps you get what I’m saying. But perhaps you want more explanation of how to use this to make sales.

In that case, you might like to know I’m working on a book about it. Predictably, the title of it is The Gospel of Insight Marketing.

But that’s all in the future. My plan is to get that book out in March.

For now, the only offer I have for you is the much less religious, potentially much more useful Niche Expert Cold Email training.

I’m been harping on about this for a few days. But in case you managed to ignore me until now, here’s where you can enlightened on the details of this free offer:

https://bejakovic.com/free-offer-niche-expert-cold-emails/

People think for emotional reasons and then justify with logic

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Today, I’d like to tell you the most mindblowing and unsettling idea I’ve been exposed to over the past six years… and how you can use the insight gained from this in copywriting and persuasion.

The idea comes from neuroscientist Donald Hoffman.

Hoffman studies vision and is convinced — based on all the research he’s done at his lab at UCI — that what we “see” in our minds is nothing at all like the world out there.

In other words, what you think of as reality is anything but. Schrodinger’s cat is neither dead nor alive. Instead, there is no cat.

This conclusion of Hoffman’s work is not a new idea. There are thousands of years of philosophy and about a century of hard science that say much the same thing.

But even with all the science and logic, most people still find this idea pretty hard to accept, or even absurd.

Hoffman knew this. And he knew that if he wrote his pop science book, The Case Against Reality, relying on science and logic, his message wouldn’t get through. So instead, he argued like this:

Imagine a blue rectangular file icon in the lower right corner of your computer desktop.

This icon allows you to interact with the file in a way that matters to you.

But does this mean the file itself is blue, rectangular, and lives in the lower right corner of your desktop? Of course not.

You can probably accept that the innards of your computer aren’t just slightly different from what you see on the screen.

​​Instead, the reality is completely different… immensely more complex… and pretty much unknowable if all you do is interact with the desktop interface.

But that’s just how it is with human consciousness, Hoffman argues.

The fact that you see letters on a screen right now doesn’t mean there are really letters on a screen in front of your eyes. What’s more, it doesn’t even mean that there are such things as a screen… or your eyes… anywhere, outside of your own consciousness. Your “reality” doesn’t “really” exist.

Like I said, I found this unsettling and yet mindblowing. Perhaps you do too. If so, let the feeling linger for a moment. And in the meantime, let me get to the copywriting and persuasion:

Thanks to a reader named Lester, I found out a cool new term, “guided apophenia.” It was coined by Reed Berkowitz, who is an augmented reality game designer.

Apophenia, by the way, is “the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.”

And guided apophenia is how Berkowitz described the similarity between augmented reality games and the phenomenon of QAnon.

This similarity is also not a new idea. But the following bit in Berkowitz’s article was new to me:

Recently, a report published in 2018 in the journal Human Brain Mapping found that Aha! moments also activate the brain’s reward systems.

Basically, that “A Ha!” moment when puzzle solving (even when incorrect) is extremely pleasurable and also may help encode what we learn in a new way.

In other words, solving puzzles is extremely rewarding from a biochemical standpoint and the thoughts we gain from them are special to us.

In case it’s not clear:

This is scientific proof for something I’ve believed for a while – that insight is a feeling, much like desire, fear, or curiosity. And the same way that desire, fear, or curiosity can put us in a trance and make us susceptible to suggestion… so can the feeling of insight.

This newish science is really all I wanted to tell you today.

But had I said just that, then like Donald Hoffman, I doubted my message would get through.

So instead, I tried to flood you with the feeling of insight, by telling you the most powerful analogy I could think of.

Because, like other feelings, insight is transferable. If you feel insight because you successfully connected two unrelated things in your mind — say, computer desktops and human consciousness — then that feeling rubs off on other things nearby.

In my email newsletter, I spelled out exactly what this means for copywriting and persuasion. But unfortunately, you missed out on that, because you’re not signed up for my email newsletter.

So let me make a suggestion:

Consider signing up. Your marketing savvy — and perhaps your consciousness — might open up as a result.

“Sign of the Elephant Guarantee”

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Right now, the top seller in the competitive “manifestation” niche on Clickbank is an offer called the BioEnergy Code.

The VSL for this offer tells the story of Angela Carter, a woman on a journey to find wealth, health, and a feeling of connectedness… by following the golden thread of the elephant.

Elephant?

Yes, elephant.

First, Angela walks into a bookstore in her home town. She closes her eyes and prays for guidance. And she spots a travel guide with an elephant on it.

Next thing you know, Angela’s traveled to Nepal. A boy on the street tugs on her shirt. “Go see the elephants,” he says, and he points across the street.

This leads Angela to a guru who tells her the secret of manifesting anything she wants.

She manifests a new and amazing life for herself. She’s ready to head back home. And she wants to make the guru’s secret public, so others could benefit also. But the guru balks.

“This knowledge stays in Nepal!”

But our hero is prepared. “What if we contribute a portion of each sale to a save-the-elephants charity?”

The guru mulls this over for a second. “Deal!”

This explains why you can now buy the BioEnergy Code for $37 on Clickbank. Pretty standard stuff and not particularly inventive. But this next part is.

When it’s time to close the sale on the set of guided meditation mp3s and chakra-release PDFs, Angela makes the following guarantee:

I call it the “Sign of the Elephant Guarantee”.

Here’s how it works.

Within 24 hours of saying “yes” to The BioEnergy Code…

I guarantee you’ll receive an unmistakable “sign” that you’re on the right path.

It’ll feel like something just got unblocked so you can see your path more clearly than ever.

It may not be an “elephant” like it was for me in Barnes & Noble and the tea shop in Kathmandu…

But it WILL be so clear and so unmistakable, it will be the “Elephant in the Room” – a sign that your fields of BioEnergy are about to be cleared and unleashed.

All I ask is that you give your source 24 hours to manifest this elephant in the room sign.

And if you don’t experience this elephant size sign, simply email me and I’ll promptly refund every penny.

I thought this was genuinely clever. This short bit of copy does so much.

I sat down, and off the top of my head, I wrote 7 good things that come out of this guarantee. I was going to highlight the most valuable of these 7 things in this email, but I realized they are all too important.

So I will make you an offer with a 100% no-questions-asked money-back guarantee… for a full 24 hours.

I call it the “Sign of Clickbank Insight.”

Here’s how it works:

Within 24 hours of reading this email, I guarantee you will receive an unmistakable sign having to do with Clickbank.

Oh, it might not be a big Clickbank logo on a sales page that you visit. But it will be there if you watch for it.

It might be some email newsletter mentioning Clickbank… or it might be an online run-in with a copywriter or marketer, such as Stefan Georgi or Ian Stanley or Chris Haddad, who has been closely tied to Clickbank in the past.

Once you see the sign, you will feel a clear and unmistakable lightbulb moment. “Aha! So this is what that Bejakovic guy was talking about!”

I guarantee this will happen. All I ask is that you give the universe 24 hours to organize this moment of insight for you.

And when it happens, then sign up to my email newsletter.

Reply to my welcome email and tell me about the sign that you saw… and I will spell out the 7 chakras of the “Sign of the Elephant guarantee.”

I mean, I will tell you what I thought was so good about this guarantee… and how you can use this in your own marketing and copy to one day make it to the top of your own Clickbank category.

Or… your money back.

Shock and delight at a celebrity funeral

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On December 3 1989, a memorial service was held at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital at the University of Cambridge. The deceased was one Graham Chapman, aged 48, who had died two months earlier from tonsil cancer.

At various times during his life, Chapman was a homosexual, an alcoholic, a member of the Dangerous Sports Club, and one of the six members of the sketch comedy troupe Monty Python.

All the other members of Monty Python were there at the service. Several of them got up to give eulogies. One of eulogizers was John Cleese, the guy behind my favorite comedy of all time, A Fish Called Wanda.

“I guess that we’re all thinking how sad it is,” Cleese started, “that a man of such talent, of such capability for kindness, of such unusual intelligence should now be spirited away at the age of only 48, before he had achieved many of the things of which he was capable, and before he’d had enough fun.”

The camera zoomed around the large hall. It settled on the other Pythons — Michael Palin, Eric Idle — looking serious and proper.

“Well I feel that I should say… nonsense,” Cleese said. “Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard. I hope he fries.”

Yep, this really happened. During a eulogy, John Cleese said about the deceased, “I hope he fries.”

Last night, I had the second call of the Influential Emails training. Throughout this training, I’ve been talking about the similarities between comedy and email copy.

Not because you want to make your emails funny necessarily.

But because you want to surprise, shock, and even outrage people at the start. And then, pay it off in a credible and pleasing way, where the only people who leave are the ones who are either slaves to mindless good taste… or who genuinely disagree with you.

In my life, I’ve never seen a better illustration of this “surprise and delight” combination than John Cleese’s eulogy.

I won’t tell you how Cleese got out of the shocking hole he had dug for himself. But he did it, and he did it in a sweet, credible, thoughtful way.

You can see it all in the short two-minute clip below. It might prove very instructive if you want to write emails that people will 1) read day after day… 2) look forward to… 3) feel a bond with… and 4) allow themselves to be influenced by.

But be warned. This clip contains two profanities, one of which had never been spoken on television before. If that doesn’t shock you too badly, then prepare to be delighted here:

Still here? Maybe you’d like to be surprised and delighted tomorrow as well. In that case, sign up for my email newsletter.

The fascist cokehead who raised me

by

How foolishly inconsistent of me.

On April 7 of this year, I wrote an email promoting the idea that you should give your prospects a menu of options. I quoted from Jonah Berger’s book The Catalyst:

But give people multiple options, and suddenly things shift.

Rather than thinking about what is wrong with whatever was suggested, they think about which one is better. Rather than poking holes in whatever was raised, they think about which of the options is best for them. And because they’ve been participating, they’re much more likely to go along with one of them in the end.

Reasonable, right?

Except, only a short while earlier, on February 28, I sent out an email with the exact opposite message. The subject line for that was “The best copywriting tactic ever.” It was inspired by an article I’d read in Scientific American by neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran. The email concluded:

The world is complicated. Too many choices. Too much information. That’s why we seek out extremes, to make our lives easier. And that’s something you can use to make your copy not better, but best.

So one email is basically telling you to give your prospects a choice… the other email is telling you to give them no choice.

How to reconcile these two ideas?

I don’t know. Maybe you can do it. I haven’t tried. And I won’t, because I’ve got better things to do. Like preparing for the second call of my Influential Emails training.

The first call was all about writing and persuasion techniques that I use regularly — and that anybody else can use and profit from as well.

But this second call is more personal. It will include some of my own writing and thinking quirks.

Such as for example, the contradiction in my two emails above. The reason I’m ok with this contradiction is because of a third email I wrote.

That third email was about David Bowie and an infuriatingly inconsistent interview he gave to Playboy magazine in 1976. (1976 was the height of Bowie’s cokehead era. A big brouhaha emerged after the interview because Bowie said during it, “I believe very strongly in fascism.”)

This Bowie email is the most influential thing I’ve ever written.

Not because it got me any sales… or any interest from important people in the industry… or even any engagement from readers on my list. In fact, as far as I remember, nobody even commented on this email.

But the ideas in that email had the biggest influence on how I personally write. And not just emails, but influential writing more broadly.

You might think I’m just advocating being provocative in your thinking and writing. It goes deeper than that, at least in my mind.

In any case, if you want to read that short email about David Bowie, so you can see if it will have any influence on you, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/being-authentic-is-overrated/