Personal Change

My top 7 marketing books

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I heard once that reading lists make for great lead magnets.

Is that true? I don’t know.

But it got me to put together a recommended reading list of my own.

I started with a goal of 10 books — but though I’ve read many more than 10, I couldn’t honestly recommend 10. That’s a good thing for you — less reading to do.

So here are my top 7 marketing books, for you to enjoy, learn, and profit from:

1. The Robert Collier Letter Book, by Robert Collier

This book has it all — wagons of coal, silk stockings, genies in the lamp, free pens, rattlesnakes, dinosaurs. If you only ever read one book about direct marketing, this is my number-one recommendation.

2. Positioning, by Al Ries and Jack Trout

Tons of other good marketing advice beyond, “Get yourself into a niche of one.”

3. My Life In Advertising, by Claude C. Hopkins

All the wisdom in Hopkins’s vaunted Scientific Advertising, but presented with stories and detail that make it go down more easy.

4. The Adweek Copywriting Book, by Joe Sugarman

Very accessible, usable, and current, even if you never write a full-page magazine ad selling a calculator or UV-blocking sunglasses.

5. Influence, by Robert Cialdini

I wish I had written this book. What more can I say?

6. Start With No, by Jim Camp

You may have seen this negotiation book recommended before by online marketers. It happens a lot. What is it about Camp’s negotiation strategies that could be useful to sales and marketing online?

7. Made To Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath

I read this book only once but it’s stuck. That’s because the authors know what they’re talking about, and because they apply it to their own writing.

Like I said, I’ve heard that reading lists make for great lead magnets.

Do they also make for effective email copy? I don’t know.

But I’m willing to test it out.

If you haven’t already clicked away to Amazon to get one of the books above, maybe you will click below to the sales page for my Daily Email Habit service. It sometimes forces even me to write emails I would never write otherwise. Here’s the link if you’d like to find out more about it:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

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

Energy makes time

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I signed up for newsletter just now.

It told to go to my inbox and click a link to confirm my subscription.

I felt a drive to go check my email as a result.

Except I have a new rule I am living by, where I only check my email between 12 noon and 2pm.

It’s 10:28am now.

Email is verboten.

So I opened up a notebook I’ve been keeping, where I’m tracking my email-checking urges. I write inside this notebook whenever I feel a drive to go check my email.

I wrote just now: “After signing up for some newsletter which is telling me to confirm my subscription in the email they just sent me.”

Who knows? I might one day realize something about when I feel the drive to pointlessly check email.

But that’s not why I’m writing these email-checking urges down. It turns out the simple act of writing them down is all I need to not check my email, either now or in five minutes from now, without any struggle or Thor-like willpower.

Since I’ve started this “write down when I feel an urge to check email” practice a few days ago, I’ve found it to be a useful hack.

But it’s probably only a hack. In other words, in the absence of other things, there’s a good chance it will work for a few more days, at which point my brain will adjust and the hack will stop working.

Which brings me to what I really wanna share with you in this email.

Because the newsletter I signed up for this morning was by a woman named Mandy Brown.

I signed up because I liked one single article she had written, which I came across a few weeks ago.

The article is titled, “Energy makes time.”

Brown is apparently a coach for “high performers.” These people, says Brown, typically have tried all the possible time-management hacks out there.

Many of these hacks work – until they don’t.

After the last hack has failed, the high performers come to Brown. And she suggests they try something different.

She suggests they realize that, much like money and pizza dough, time is actually a very stretchy substance.

A single day can shrink down to where you can barely get the dishes done before it’s time to go to bed, with nothing else fitting inside the 24-hour window… or a day can stretch so you can travel halfway around the world, meet a bunch of new people, have several great business or personal ideas along the way, and write the outline for a new book, and much of a first draft to boot.

The difference, says Brown, is that we’ve been conditioned to think that everything we do costs time.

And in the conveyor-belt optimization of human productivity, that means that certain things drop away — “There simply isn’t enough time, at least not now!”

That calculus ignores the fact that there are things that actually give you time back. That make more time for you. That stretch out the time you’ve got, so you can fit a boat and a house and maybe a book in there.

Which things give you time back?

Brown gives the example of doing art, if doing art is your thing.

But it really depends on you.

I’m guessing it can equally be going to the aquarium… or taking a day trip to see some place new… or spending a day with friends… or simply sitting down and writing out all the stuff that’s in your head, vague plans and fears included.

Anyways, it’s a kind of time management un-hack that’s been stuck in my mind ever since I read it in Brown’s article. (I read the article a few weeks ago. I re-read it now to write this email.)

Maybe “energy makes time” get stuck in your head as well. Maybe it give you some ideas to actually create time for yourself.

Now on to the topic of daily emails, which is my offer for you today.

Daily emails cost time. Much time.

But they can also create time. Much time. At least they do for me.

Writing daily emails gives me ideas. It gives me motivation. It gives me the satisfaction of accomplishing something every day, which makes it so I am more likely to accomplish something else, like attacking the dirty dishes that are waiting for me in the kitchen.

I don’t know if writing daily emails will make more time for you. Maybe it’s not your thing. Or maybe it is. There’s only one way to find out, and that’s to start, to stick with it for a while, and to see what happens.

And if you want my help starting and sticking with the habit of writing daily emails:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Inspiration in case everybody else is doing better than you

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A couple days ago, I wrote an email about an idea from Dave Sandler’s book You Can’t Teach A Kid To Ride A Bike At A Seminar.

It seems many readers found that email unusually inspiring, and wrote in to say so.

So I will shamelessly go back to the same well, and tell you another anecdote from Sandler’s book to try to inspire you.

Here goes:

Sandler didn’t start out as a salesman. He had inherited his father’s profitable business. But then, through a combination of entitlement and stupidity, Sandler lost that business.

He turned to sales because he hoped to once again afford the kind of lifestyle he was used to.

Sandler started selling self-help materials. He struggled and sucked.

In the first year of his miserable new sales career, he went to an awards show for the star salesmen of his company.

Of course, awards were given out at the awards show. Of course, Sandler, who struggled and sucked, won no awards. Of course, he felt inferior, and even doubly bad about struggling and sucking as a salesman.

But through some combination of gnawing insecurity, personal drive, and a lack of better options, Sandler stuck to it. And he made a vow to improve.

Sandler started visiting the salesmen who had won the top awards at the the awards show. His plan was to interview them, learn from them, soak in their skills and mindset by osmosis. Except, that’s not what ended up happening.

In Sandler’s own words:

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One by one I was disappointed by what I discovered. They were all struggling. I went from Dallas to Denver, from Washington to Virginia, and interviewed every distributor who agreed to spend time with me. Most of them were starving. There was nothing consistent about their lives. A year of success was easily followed by a year of failure, but they faked their way through it, just as they had been taught to do. These were the stars of the distributor network, and most of them were miserable.

===

That’s it. That’s the anecdote. The end.

Yeah, of course the book goes on to describe how Sandler developed his own sales system, and how he eventually started consistently making sales, and winning awards, and how he became the star salesman for his company, year after year, etc.

But you’ve probably heard enough rags-to-riches stories in your life.

That’s why the end of the Sandler anecdote, if you ask me, should really fall where he goes to talk to all these industry stars, who seem to be doing great, making tons of sales, getting awards and kudos, and the reality is they’re struggling and experiencing all kinds of volatility and scarcity.

I don’t know what your specific situation is.

But I imagine you have certain insecurities. We all have them.

Maybe you’re insecure about something objective and measurable — you’re not making enough money, you have no kind of audience.

Or maybe you’re insecure about something less measurable but still real — your experience and status.

It’s bad enough to deal with such insecurities and the underlying realities on their own.

But it’s doubly bad when you look around, and spot people who appear to be doing amazing and inevitably compare yourself to them. 7-figure this! 4-hour that! A newsletter with 250 million readers!

I’d like to suggest to you — as in Sandler’s time, so today.

There’s no reason to feel doubly bad comparing your situation to the 7-figure, 4-hour superstars. Because there’s an excellent chance they are struggling behind the scenes. If you could really talk to them, it would be obvious enough.

As for the realities you might be facing — whether income, or influence, or your experience and status — my stock answer is to start writing daily emails. And it will fix itself.

You’ve probably gotten used to hearing me say that, and maybe you’ve gotten deaf to it.

So let me share a message I got a couple days ago from Chavy Helfgott, who is a copywriter and brand strategist for consumer brands.

Chavy signed up to my Daily Email Habit service on day one, back in November. She was looking to bring her career back into focus after a couple years off due to personal reasons.

She started writing first daily, then weekday emails. 66 emails so far since November.

Chavy wrote me a couple days ago to report the result:

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Hi, just wanted to share a daily email win. After 66 emails, I just closed my first sale which I directly attribute to daily emails, and that client is already expressing interest in another package.

Additionally, writing the daily emails has helped me become more confident about pitching myself in other places. I responded to a question on a WhatsApp community of business owners, and it led to two calls with potential clients.

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I’m not making any promises that daily emails will sort out your life in 66 days.

But if you have the right combination of gnawing insecurity, personal drive, and a lack of better options, might as well get started daily emailing today? One thing I’m sure of, the results will surprise you.

And if you want my help along the way, here’s more info on Daily Email Habit:

​https://bejakovic.com/deh​

I believe you’re a 10

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Last night, I finished my second reading of Dave Sandler’s book, You Can’t Teach A Kid To Ride A Bike At A Seminar.

As you might know, Sandler was a sales trainer. His book is about his sales system, which Sandler developed after having something close to a nervous breakdown, day after day, trying to make sales using the old-fashioned approach of tried-and-tested sales techniques — “Would you prefer it in red or in blue?”

Curious thing:

The first real teaching Sandler does in his book is not about the initial step of his sales system, but something he calls I/R theory.

Sandler sets it up with a little exercise. You can try it yourself, right now.

Imagine you’re on a desert island, and you’ve been stripped of all your roles.

In other words, imagine yourself without any professional skill or accomplishment… without family relations and responsibilities… without local, national, and religious affiliation… without all your hobbies, talents, and memberships.

Imagine yourself completely isolated and stripped down to just your identity — your sense of being you.

On a scale from 1 to 10, how do you evaluate that identity?

Many people, says Sandler, rebel at this exercise, and claim that without their roles, they are nothing. Zero!

Many others give their identity a 3 or a 4, or maybe a 5 or a 6.

And yet, Sandler insists that everybody’s identity, yours and mine included, is always a 10, regardless of the roles we play and how well we play them that day.

Sandler gives some sort of argument to make his case. A baby supposedly has a “10” identity… and by induction, it must hold for adults as well. “How could it be otherwise?” Sandler asks, waving his arms a little.

Now, Bejako bear being a particularly skeptical species of bear, chances are good I would have simply rolled my eyes the first time I read this.

But it just so happened that at the same time I was first reading Sandler’s book, I was reading another book also, called The Will To Believe, by American philosopher and psychologist William James.

James gives a rational argument why believing stuff — even without any rational argument for believing it — can make a lot of sense in a lot of situations.

I won’t repeat James’s argument. It doesn’t matter tremendously. Just for me personally, it reminded me something I had realized before.

If you ask me, belief is not something that happens to you. It’s not done to you from the outside, by somebody putting facts and arguments into your head like they put leis around your neck when you arrive to Hawaii.

Rather, believing stuff is a personal, creative act, much like seeing is a personal, creative act.

Remembering this in the context of Sandler’s I/R theory was enough for me to honestly say, “Fine. Let me choose to believe I’m a 10.”

I choose to believe you’re a 10 too.

But why does it matter? Numbers are kind of arbitrary. Why 10? Why not 11, like the guitar amplifier in Spinal Tap?

You can label the numbers how you will. The important thing, says Sandler, is that you will find ways to make your role performance — in his case, sales success — fit your identity, your self-image.

So if have a self-image of, say, 6 out of 10, and if things in your life go bad, down to 2, you will find a way to get back to normal, back to 6.

On the other hand, if things go too well — a 9 or a 10 — you will find a way to get back to normal, too.

And if you’ve ever wondered why things never stay too good for you — why they never stay at a 9 or a 10 — maybe this is an explanation why.

Maybe try imagining yourself on a desert island, just you without any roles you play, and choose to believe you are in fact a 10.

If you do give it a go, let me know how it works out.

And as for making sales, and connecting with people, and writing day after day without quitting because things have gotten too uncomfortably good, you might like my Daily Email Habit service. For more info on that:

​https://bejakovic.com/deh

Another customer I like

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Yesterday, I wrote about an ex-subscriber of my Daily Email Habit service.

Even though this guy decided to unsubscribe, he’s still the kind of customer I like, simply because he took something I was teaching and actually put it to use.

Of course, I have other customers I like too, including some who keep being subscribed to Daily Email Habit, and keep putting it to use.

A couple days ago, I heard from one such customer, business coach Steph Benedetto, who is subscribed to Daily Email habit.

I want to share Steph’s message with you both because it serves my purpose, and because it might be valuable to you. In Steph’s own words:

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I wanted to send you a little message to share an unexpected side effect of the daily emails.

Many of these daily emails are prompting me to think about things, like the one that said, “Share the coming attractions. What are you working on? What offers do you have coming up? Share them.”

When I do, I go, “Oh! I guess I have to know what I’m doing next then.” So I look and go, “Ok, this is what I’m doing… and this is what I’m doing… and this is what I’m doing.”

And it creates it through the writing.

As I’m writing about something, whatever the prompt is, and then tying it into whatever offer I have, the offers themselves are evolving and becoming clearer.

And new things are showing up. And I had no freaking idea that was available.

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Most the Daily Email Habit puzzles are not “creative writing” prompts. Many of them are exercises that anyone with an online biz should be doing regularly, like figuring out who you want to work with… or what offers you’re putting out next… or what of business you actually want to run.

Now here’s the possibly valuable part I promised you:

You might not have the time and willpower to sit down and think about those things, and even less time and willpower to think about them regularly, over and over, as things adapt and change.

I know I don’t, not when it’s simply a todo item on my already-infinite todo list.

But like Steph says, with daily emails, you can two things at once. You can create content and make sales, on the one hand, and think about the big picture of your business and the next steps, on the other.

In other words, you can work IN the business… while at the same time working ON the business, just by taking the daily action of writing and sending a daily email.

And if you’d like to do that — to create offers, clarity, a plan — just by writing, then my Daily Email Habit might be a help for you. For more info:

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

Want to write a book?

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Last fall, marketer Sean Anthony launched a new offer that really took off.

For the few years prior, Sean was on the “sell coaching via Google Docs about how to sell coaching via Google Docs” bandwagon.

But now he had something new. He started selling “book writing” as a hot new bizniss opportunity. He called it the “1 Hour Book.”

I’m no longer on Sean’s email list, but it seems like this new bizopp was a big seller for him, because he went all in on it for a few months.

From what I could understand, the 1 Hour Book concept was 1) find client, 2) interview client on the phone for an hour, and 3) use that to produce a book for client.

I don’t know whether Sean’s customers were getting clients with this offer, or whether the clients were getting books that actually did anything good for them.

All I know is that books have unmatched impact and power. For example:

Last year, I read a book titled How To Make A Few Billion Dollars.

The book was written by Brad Jacobs, who had founded and then built up 5 separate billion-dollar businesses.

5!

In 5 different industries!

The curious thing is, in spite of Jacobs’s incredible track record, I had never heard of the man, not until he wrote his book and went around on podcasts to promote it.

This morning, I was walking around the beach near my house and thinking how many billionaires I could name.

I could definitely name 5. I couldn’t name 10.

And yet, there are 815 or so billionaires in the U.S. alone.

These are people who have all the money in the world. They have enormous power too. They might have even incredible insights, knowledge, and perspectives that few others have.

And yet, who knows them?

My point is not to bemoan the hard life of the anonymous American billionaire.

My point is simply to give you a kind of extreme counterargument, if you think that your own accomplishments, expertise, and credentials are enough to get you known and appreciated.

It doesn’t work for billionaires. The billionaires who do want to get known find they have to teach what they know… or entertain an audience… or frankly make a spectacle of themselves.

You might think this is where I tell you to write daily emails, because that’s your shot at teaching, entertaining, and making a spectacle of yourself.

But no!

I’m telling you to write daily emails because you can reuse much or all of your daily email collection to write a book. And an interesting, worthwhile book, a book you won’t simply get by waffling for an hour on the phone and having somebody transcribe and edit that for you.

Plus, as you go do along and write those daily emails, which can then turn into an interesting and worthwhile book, you can build up an audience that will snap up your book when it comes out… and will likely give it 5-star reviews because they already like you and what you write… and will probably even recommend your book to others.

So if you want to write a book, my immodest and self-interested suggestion to you is to start writing daily emails.

And if you want my help with doing that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Why all my emails have a Zanzibar address

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A reader writes in to ask:

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John–just noticed you’re based in Zanzibar City. How is it over there? Have been curious.

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I get this question maybe once a month on average. Some people note the mandatory address listed at the bottom of each of these emails, which says I live at “101 Desert Kite Drive” in Zanzibar City, in Tanzania.

The fact is, I’ve never been to Zanzibar or Tanzania.

So why is the address there? The story goes something like this:

During covid I was traveling the world.

Since there were lots of restrictions and lockdowns, I launched a newsletter called Masks On A Plane, about where it was open and attractive to travel.

Tanzania at the time was one of a few open locations. Since you have to put in some kind of physical address for an email newsletter, I used a made-up address in Zanzibar City at the bottom of each Masks On A Plane issue.

I eventually shut that newsletter down, but the address became a kind of running inside joke, including now in this newsletter.

Ok, so what? Well, get ready, for I’m about to share a truth that I live my life by, which might be useful to you too:

I’ve done a lot of traveling in my life. I typically dread it before it happens, and I find it stressful while it’s happening. I still do it, a lot, for the same reasons that I read a lot, not because I love reading, but because I think it’s important.

Specifically:

I have this theory that mindset <<< action <<< environment.

In other words, if you want to change how your life is, right now, the hardest way to go about it is to change how you think and feel, sitting where you are now, with gritted teeth, trying to be all grateful and creative and accepting.

A much better way to change how your life is, right now, is to go do something different than what you’re doing now. Go wash the dishes, or get up and stretch and squat, or go make a castle out of a deck of playing cards.

And the bestest way to change how your life is right now?

Go somewhere else. Go outside your house, your neighborhood, your solar system. A new environment is sure to change how your life is right now, completely.

But is changing your life a good thing?

Definitely not all the time, at least for me. I got completely burned out on travel following my covid-era peregrinations, living out of a backpack, a new town every month or so, over and over for two and half years.

It took me a long time after that, sitting in one place, to even consider taking another trip unless absolutely necessary.

But I’m back to traveling. Again, not because I enjoy it so much, but because I feel it’s so important — for a change of perspective, to learn something new, or simply for the blessed relief of arriving back home and having everything feel easy.

And now, on to business:

You might wonder, if I don’t really like traveling, and if I don’t really like reading, then what do I like?

I personally do like writing. Writing is something I look forward to.

Maybe you feel the same.

Or maybe… you don’t. Maybe you feel about writing the way I feel about traveling, as a “should,” a responsibility rather than something to look forward to.

If that’s the case, you might get value out of my Daily Email Habit. You can think of it as a kind of guided tour of the most attractive and valuable locations in daily email land.

With Daily Email Habit, you still get to do and experience everything yourself, but a lot of the care, work, and thought that normally goes into writing a daily email has been taken care of for you.

In case you’re interested in finding out more:

​https://bejakovic.com/deh​

Reinforcement training

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I thought I was saved:

Age 20, I was lurking around the university library like all normal college freshmen do on a Saturday afternoon.

I flipped over a book that somebody had left on a table. It turned out to be an instructional manual for cognitive behavioral therapists.

As night started to fall, I read it. It blew my mind.

I recognized all the distorted patterns of thinking that the book described, which lead to anxiety and depression. I knew them all from my own head. Now I had labels to identify them, and techniques to challenge and redirect them in the future.

For a day or two after, I walked around on a cloud, feeling my life was transformed. I had finally found a way out of the gloom that had formed around me in my teenage years.

Except it didn’t last.

Within a couple days, the CBT stuff had largely slipped from my mind. So it was back to catastrophizing, and black-and-white thinking, and overgeneralization.

Apparently, I’m not unique in this. A few days ago, I was reading an article about the promise of AI for treating mental illness. The article mentioned CBT, and how effective and popular it still is — IF. From the article:

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When [Alison Darcy, a psychologist at Stanford] was in graduate school, she treated dozens of hospitalized patients using C.B.T.; many experienced striking improvements but relapsed after they left the hospital. C.B.T. is “best done in small quantities over and over and over again,” she told me.

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I’m telling you this because in my still-catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, and overgeneralizing head, this connected to another thing I was reading a few days ago.

This other thing was a book by sales trainer David Sandler.

Sandler had came up with this amazing and low-stress sales system. He wrote it up in his book. He taught it to beaten down, despondent salesmen during live seminars.

The salesmen went out of the seminar walking on clouds, certain they had been saved from ever again being bullied by prospects or ashamed of selling.

Except it didn’t last.

That’s why Sandler’s book is called You Can’t Teach A Kid To Ride A Bike At A Seminar. From that book:

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Of course, people want instantaneous impact change. They want to see positive, enduring changes immediately. But our experience is that that kind of change is going to be sustainable over time only if you create a solid ongoing reinforcement program to back up the learning.

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Maybe this is true of all really effective but unnatural systems.

You hear such a system described. It makes sense. You get energized, follow through for a couple days.

Eventually though, you revert back to the mean.

The solution: small doses, over time, with regular reinforcement.

Yes, I know this is the exact opposite of what typical direct response offers promise (Gene Schwartz’s publishing company was called Instant Improvement).

But this reinforcement learning approach has its appeals as well:

It’s easy to get started with something when you know it only requires small doses, rather than a drastic change.

And with reinforcement training, it’s easier to get committed to starting today, rather than starting later AKA never. That’s because since change will take time, and reinforcement, rather than a one time big bang that you can get with the flick of a credit card, every minute that you delay ends up costing you down the line. Best start today.

It holds for CBT… for sales training… and for the effective but unnatural habit that is writing a daily email for your business.

For CBT reinforcement, you now have AI apps to talk to you and offer to correct your distorted thinking day in and day out.

For sales training, you have David Sandler’s President Club, which reinforces his sales system during weekly meetups for a modest $12,000 a year.

And as for daily emails, you have my Daily Email Habit service, which nudges you to write a daily email every day, and gives you a puzzle to mull over, and even some hints to make sure what you write is effective.

Daily Email Habit doesn’t use AI, and it doesn’t quite cost $12,000 a year, at least yet. If you’d like more information on it, today, when it’s best to get started:

​https://bejakovic.com/deh​