Personal Change

Groundhog Day book club?

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Ok campers, rise and shine! And don’t forget your booties cause it’s COOOLD out there today. It’s cold out there every day.

I just watched the behind the scenes of my favorite movies of all time, Groundhog Day.

Turns out, I’m not special in liking Groundhog Day.

Over the years, yogis, Hasidic Jews, and psychotherapists, along with many others, have all latched on to Groundhog Day and used the film to mean something for them, at that exact moment.

Groundhog Day director Harold Ramis put it this way:

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Films are really interesting because of the fact that they’re frozen.

It’s not like going to see the same play over and over where the actor may change his performance. The film is the film. It’s done.

It’s like Jews reading the Torah every year. The Torah doesn’t change. We change.

So every time people come to Groundhog Day, they are coming to it at a different age and time of life, their circumstances may have changed and they may find something different in it.

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That’s always been my argument for rereading books. I change, and find something new in the book that simply didn’t see before. That’s why rereading a few particularly valuable books, year after year, has been a very valuable habit for me.

I realized this morning that it’s been years since I’ve picked up one of the copywriting classics that I used to read and reread regularly.

I feel my life and my emails are suffering for it.

I’m gonna get back into rereading some classic copywriting and marketing books… but I was thinking, maybe turn it into some kind of group activity? A book club? A naked book club? A naked book club in a bathtub?

I have no idea. Maybe you can tell me if you are currently or have previously been in a book club? If so, what did you like and what did you not like?

Advice I’ve given people

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Yesterday, I got on two coaching-like calls.

These calls were coaching-like because they are a mix of coaching and partnerships. I have agreements with both of the folks I talked to yesterday to help them reach an outcome, and I have an incentive in doing so.

These are not weekly calls, but on demand.

I don’t have to whip the guys, or shame them, or beg them to take action.

Instead, I give them my suggestions, they go off and do, and at some point in the future we reconvene and talk next steps. The guys are making progress with a minimum of wasted time and effort for either side. It’s a wonderful system.

Anyway, I have long taken to heart Sean D’Souza’s idea that, if you wanna solve your own problems, go solve somebody else’s. Meaning, we all give other people better advice than we can give ourselves.

So give other people advice, write it down, and then think about how to apply the same yourself.

Here’s some of the advice I gave my two coaching/partnership guys yesterday:

* Feed the recordings of your intensives/coaching calls to an LLM, extract all the advice you’ve given, and turn it into a lead magnet, ebook, or sellable course. This can also become a partnership asset you give to someone who already has the attention of your ideal audience so they send you more such clients.

* Stop trying to help people get started. People who haven’t started, haven’t started for a reason.

* Copy the proven group-coaching model: recorded training (videos + Google Docs), a Skool group for questions, weekly or biweekly hot seats that double as new content. Clean up your existing call transcripts into SOPs/how-to docs as the course content. Price it at $3k/$5k/$8k per year instead of as a monthly subscription.

This is advice I will be applying myself.

One of the guys I talked to yesterday has a sizeable email list. At the start of this year, he was only making about 30 cents per subscriber each month.

I have been coaching/partnering with him for the past 7 or so months, and each of the past three months he has made $1/subscriber or more.

So I will take the advice I’ve given him to get him that result and package that advice up, or rather, get Claude to package it up. I will then put it in front of my list… in front of other people’s lists… in front of the entire Wall Street Journal readership (well maybe not, but I will probably run cold traffic to it).

I’m also thinking of creating a group-coaching layer to my Skool group, like I advised the other guy yesterday. This group coaching would be there to help folks who have email lists monetize their list better, if for any reason it’s not a fit for us to do the kind of 1-1 partnership/coaching I am doing with the guys I talked to yesterday.

And finally, I’ve learned, but I have to keep relearning, to stop trying to help people get started.

People who haven’t started have their own reasons for not starting — whether that’s the timing is bad, or it’s a conflict with their identity, or they simply have better options and don’t want to put in the effort it would take.

Clearly, I’m not saying that everybody who hasn’t started will never get started. Saying that would be kind of… dumb. But people get started for their own reasons, in their own time.

If you haven’t yet gotten started sending daily emails and building a little personal brand online, which can support you through thick and thicker, then get started, in your own time.

Maybe that’s today, or maybe not.

Like I’ve written recently, it takes several ingredients to make a little daily email business work, among them a small audience, good offers you can promote, and of course the emails themselves.

If you’re just getting started today, then my advice is to start with the emails.

I say that because it’s the way I did it and I know it to work, and also because writing emails can get you a lot of the way to creating an offer, and it can even slowly but steadily build your list, via word-of-mouth or search traffic if you have a public email archive.

If you wanna get started today building your own little personal empire, here’s my stream of daily advice on what to put in your daily email to keep it both interesting for your readers and valuable for you:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

What good will that do you?

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A new subscriber wrote in yesterday to ask:

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How would you start over if you’d lost everything right now? Including your friends and connections that you acquired over the years, only you, your knowledge and your skill.

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I paused at this, because I had recently been thinking about the same question, for my own reasons.

For a moment, I considered writing up my thoughts, and sharing them in an email. But then I asked myself, why?

What good will it do you to know what I would do if I lost everything but MY knowledge, MY skill, and MY good looks?

The fact is, my knowledge (of stuff like marketing principles and tactics) and my skill (in things like copywriting) took years to develop.

The same is true of my mindset, if by that we mean my ability to choose projects… to drive them to the end even when I’m feeling uncertain and dispirited… to tweak my approach and try again when I lay an egg… and to recognize when it’s time to cut my losses and move on.

Because of all this, it would be useless for me to tell you what I would do, unless you have my knowledge and skills and mindset.

(It would also be close to useless if you do have my knowledge and skills and mindset, because in that case you’re prolly not thinking of getting rid of everything you’ve got and starting from zero.)

Here are a few things I think are worth doing in general:

– Selling

– Writing

– Having an audience and maintaining a good relationship with that audience

If you do all three of these on a decent level — not “world class” level, not “so good they can’t ignore you,” simply decent — you will have work and money, as long as work and money are to be had.

Now please just give me a second. Let me go to my closet and dig it out… ah yes, here it is. My favorite hobby horse:

Daily emails.

The fact is, writing a daily email will, bit by bit, get you better at selling, at writing, and in time, even if you do absolutely nothing else, it will build up a small but dedicated audience for you (that’s how it happened for me at least).

Where daily emails will eventually take you, nobody knows. But I’m willing to bet it will be a good destination, better than where you’re at now. Plus, you might even enjoy the journey along the way.

If you want help starting and sticking with the habit of writing daily emails:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

10 things people have copied from me

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1. My “Hello my name is” optin page. (A copywriter I know recently set up a new list and wrote to tell me about it, along with, “I swiped your landing page”)

2. “Announcing” as the subject line to kick off every promo or new offer

3. “Down payment + the rest contingent on success” pricing plans

4. Turning my own current project into a mid-ticket cohort I can sell (I did it with my project of implementing the 1-Person Advertorial Agency program back in May, several people have followed me since)

5. The Most Valuable Email trick (ok, I created a course on that, so little wonder)

6. Using the “Can you do me a favor?” strategy in emails

7. “Bejakovic’s crooked line” (a specific storytelling technique I used in advertorials, which Sam Bradbury-Butler used in his own advertorials and then integrated in his 1-Person Advertorial Agency program, while naming it after me)

8. My personal journaling and notetaking system (ok, I created a course on that too, called Insight Exposed, so little wonder again)

9. “Magic box” CTAs (if you don’t know what those are, then reply and ask)

10. My opening line of copy in emails where the subject line and the body don’t match (you gotta create a bridge)

There’s more, too. I’m possibly the most ripped-off daily emailer south of the Seine and north of the Nile.

Am I bitter about this? You bet your sweet—

No, I’m not bitter. The fact is, few if any of the above ideas are actually mine.

My optin page copy is taken from William Goldman’s Princess Bride. The “announcing” subject line I got from Sean D’Souza who got it from Vic Schwab. The “down payment + rest contingent on success” I picked up from Jeff Walker.

And so on.

All these 10 things people have copied from me I have copied from others as well, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Frankly, there is nothing new under the sun.

Yes, it can be fun to buy and sell secrets and secret opportunities, and that’s part of the game of direct response, both for the customers and the merchants.

At the same time, good ideas are cheap and abundant. You have to apply them, and keep applying them, and not get too distracted by the shiny and the new, in order to achieve success.

The good news is, if you apply and keep applying, success comes. It might take a while, but it comes.

Perhaps you KNOW the value of writing daily emails. Perhaps you even KNOW how to write daily emails.

But in case you’re not actually writing daily emails regularly, and applying that knowledge, I have a service that can help motivate you, keep you accountable, and make your job easier.

For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Transformative power of catastrophic thinking

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These days, I’m reading a 50-year-old book called How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, by a libertarian guy named Harry Browne.

In spite of Browne’s absolute trust in markets and the infallible human ability to rationally choose what we most want, the book gives a bunch of good and practical advice on how to live life more happily. Here’s one bit:

“If your lover is going to spend an evening with someone else, imagine the situation you’re afraid will happen. Imagine the worst. Picture them talking, laughing, kissing, making love – whatever it is you fear will happen. Keep doing it over and over again until it no longer affects you emotionally.”

I haven’t tried this with a wayward lover, but I have tried it when I was thinking to quit my office job, back in 2014, to start writing online.

On the one hand, I never wanted an office job. I didn’t particularly enjoy the one I had, even though it was as good as I could ever hope for. I wanted to control my own time and be productive rather than simply filling a seat.

But what if I quit my job to write online, and it didn’t work out? I would be leaving behind this sure thing for something unknown and unlikely to succeed… but I also didn’t want to stay at my job… but I also couldn’t commit to quitting… but the current job was unsupportable…. but the alternative could be even unsupportable!

I had read Tim Ferriss’s 440-Hour Workweek some time earlier, and Tim advocated pretty much the same thing that Browne suggests above — imagining the worst case scenario in detail, when faced with an uncertain and out-of-control life situation.

So I did what Tim Ferriss advocates for business, and what Harry Browne advocates for cheating, and I imagined the worst.

In my case, the worst meant I’d quit my job… try to make it online… fail… eventually burn through all my savings… have no money to even support myself while I looked for a job… have to move back to Croatia to live in my dad’s spare apartment… and look for a job there, without pressure.

When I faced up to the “worse than unsupportable” worst outcome, my anxiety and indecision vanished. Honestly, the worst really wasn’t that bad. And I could see now there was a fair chance it wouldn’t happen. I quit my job soon after, and I’ve been jobless ever since.

So that’s my bit of advice for you.

Here’s another bit of advice:

If you would like to take advantage of the above psychology to influence people — not by scaring them, but by getting them excited and encouraging them — then go ye and get my Copy Riddles program.

Because the same psychology that makes the unexamined “worst outcome” so scary also makes the unexamined “secret” or “blind opportunity” so exciting and tempting.

In both cases, we are standing outside the temple, with only a childish sense of all the wonders and terrors that must be hidden inside.

Copy Riddles guides you and imprints on you all the fine and delicate ways that A-list copywriters have discovered to play with this bit of human psychology. Owning these skills will be the most valuable skill, or thereabouts, you possess if you too write online.

For more info on Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

My “chicken sexer” argument for why you should pay me

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If you teach anything worthwhile, here’s my 4-part “chicken sexer” argument to persuade people to pay you for what you teach:

#1. In the poultry industry, there is a profession known as a “chicken sexer.”

A chicken sexer’s job it is to classify newly hatched chicks as either male or female. A chicken sexer will typically classify 1,000 chicks per hour, in only half a second per chick.

#2. An expert chicken sexer is accurate 98% of the time.

#3. A naive chicken sexer is no better than random.

4. There is a “critical cloacal structure” on a newly hatched chick that is slightly different in males and female (“convex vs. concave or flat”).

This structure is tiny (the whole chick is tiny), and odds are that most people would never notice the difference even after repeat viewings of male and female chicks.

But after having just this one distinction pointed out, a novice chicken sexer’s accuracy will rise from “no better than random” to a level comparable to that of experts.

I’ve been reading William James’s Principles of Psychology. Says James:

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Men have no eyes but for those aspects of things which they have already been taught to discern. Any one of us can notice a phenomenon after it has once been pointed out, which not one in ten thousand could ever have discovered for himself. The only things we commonly see are those which we expect to see and the only things which we expect to see are those which have been labelled for us, and the labels stamped into our mind.

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So if you teach people anything worthwhile, that is your argument to get people to pay you for what you teach.

The fact is, people might go out and try to do what you teach on their own.

The fact is, they will most probably fail to see the “convex or concave critical cloacal structure” that spells the difference between success and failure.

They might spot it with repeated tries, or they might not. Because like James says, “not one in ten thousand could ever have discovered it for himself.” But you have discovered it — however that happened — and you’re willing to share it, for a modest investment, of say, $97.

Which brings me to my Most Valuable Offer training, happening live this Wednesday, just two days from now.

The basic idea of a Most Valuable Offer is:

1. Pick a topic for a live paid training, and announce a date to your list when you will hold the training

2. Promote this offer to your list over the course of a few days and a few emails

3. Hold the live training when the date comes

Simple enough. But several “critical cloacal structures” about which topic to choose, about how to sell, about what to deliver and what not to deliver, can make the difference between a successful Most Valuable Offer and a Most Valuable Offer that lays an egg.

I’ve discovered these “critical cloacal structures” because of an enormous amount of Most Valuable sexing education and experience. I’ve paid for and attended live trainings by other course sellers… I’ve bought and studies courses on teaching and info product design… I’ve studied influence, copywriting, and email marketing… I’ve run a dozen or more Most Valuable Offers myself… plus I’ve coached a bunch of coaching clients to run their own successful Most Valuable Offers.

If you want to learn the most important distinctions when it comes to running a successful Most Valuable Offer, I will cover those on Wednesday’s training.

The Most Valuable training happens at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST, this Wednesday, September 2.

Yes, there will be a recording if you cannot make it live. But you’re sure to get more out of it if you can join me on the actual call.

Your investment, should you choose to join me, is $97 today and $2/month ongoing, because, as moons pass, I will be continuously updating the Most Valuable Offer SOP and sharing my Most Valuable Offer results and the results of clients I am helping on this.

If you’d like to sign up and learn how I run Most Valuable Offers that won’t lay an egg, and how you can too:

https://checkout.bejakovic.com/most-valuable-offer

How to get your audience to engage after years of passive lurking

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In this email, I will tell you how to get your audience to engage after years of passive lurking. Or rather, I will tell you how modern Renaissance man Tom Grundy done it.

Tom, as you might know if you are a careful reader of my emails, is a high-powered London banker.

Tom is also the father of someone I only know as “Baby Grundy” (now “Toddler Grundy”)… a half-marathon runner… a semi-professional poker shark… a competitive chess player… a card magician… an avid book collector… and the author of a great daily email newsletter, on topics of self development and happiness and career satisfaction.

Earlier this year, Tom took part in a Most Valuable Offer cohort I ran, where I offered to help list owners plan, sell, and run a paid live workshop to their list. After it was all said and done, Tom wrote me to report on the results:

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I ran Reclaim Your Evening last night. I had eleven people buy the offer so $1k in total which I’m counting as a big win. Every email I sent made at least one sale, which was very cool, and I also had people buying who’d been on my list a couple of weeks and others who’d been on my list a couple of years (and this was the first time they’d interacted with me/bought something from me) so also very cool. So thank you!

 

One thing I realised was that I probably needed the accountability more than I thought I did ☺️

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Like I wrote last week, you can write the engagingest, fascinatingest content in the world, and it still won’t matter much, not unless you have an exciting offer to lead into.

Tom’s case study above is proof for that.

Tom writes great daily emails. Has been for years.

For a long time, Tom was promoting a “waiting list for his coaching program” at the end of his emails. That’s better than nothing, but it was not reason enough for folks on his list to actually take any action.

But one exciting and relevant Most Valuable Offer later, and Tom had 11 sales, new buyers, and engagement from people who have been on his list for years, but who never interacted or bought anything from him before.

Since running his Most Valuable Offer, Tom has launched a group coaching program as well as a 1-1 coaching.

I don’t know if these are directly tied to the Most Valuable Offer he ran and to the leads/buyers he got from that. But to my mind, there’s little doubt that the momentum of a successful Most Valuable Offer can be motivating and can juice you into activity and open up opportunities that were completely unimaginable just weeks before.

This coming Wednesday, September 2, I will hold a live paid workshop, a Most Valuable Offer of my own, about how to plan, sell, and host Most Valuable Offers.

In his message above, Tom mentions accountability, which was part of the Most Valuable Offer cohort I ran in April.

If you like, at the end of Wednesday’s training, I will give you an opportunity to get my direct support and help and accountability for running your own Most Valuable Offer, if you want ’em.

Whether or not you take me up on that, I will give you the essence of what I have learned so far about running successful and client-pleasing Most Valuable Offers, based on my own experiences and my work with coaching clients.

Wednesday’s training happens at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST, and again, the date is September 2.

Yes, there will be a recording if you cannot make it live. But you’re sure to get more out of it if you can join me on the actual call.

Your investment, should you choose to join me, is $97 today and $2/month ongoing, because, as moons pass, I will be continuously updating the Most Valuable Offer SOP and sharing my Most Valuable Offer results and the results of clients I am helping on this.

If you’d like to sign up and learn how I run Most Valuable Offers, to engage both my readers and myself, and how you can too:

https://checkout.bejakovic.com/most-valuable-offer/

Don’t write like you talk or write

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I am sitting right now, on a leather couch, on top of a blanket. In front of me is a glass door, through which I can see a green hill on the horizon, a highway with cars and trucks going from left to right, a bridge, and some utility poles.

I am telling you what I can see because I want to activate two neural pathways in your brain.

That first paragraph, with the “green hill” and “blanket,” does something different inside your head than the second paragraph, with its “activate” and “neural pathway.”

I read an interesting article today. You can find it linked below if you are the curious kind. The gist:

In 1953, an English teacher created a list of 2300 essential English words that cover everyday word use, both in speech and writing. The words were intended for teaching students of English as a second language, and cover around 90% of spoken speech and about 80% of written speech.

In 2023, the list was updated. It was expanded (2800 words)… some 1953 words (“butter”) were taken out because they are not common any more… other words that weren’t common in 1953 (“budget”) were put in because they are common now.

The article I read today asked, what changed? What’s different between essential English words in 1953 and 2023?

In short, impersonal and abstract words (“judgment,” “concept”) became more common. On the other hand, concrete and immediate words (“towel,” “wrist”), which stand for things that can be seen, heard, smelled, eaten, worn, smelled, touched, or felt in your body, have become less common.

So what? As the article says:

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This shift matters because abstract and concrete words are processed by our brains in different ways. When you read “axe,” your brain doesn’t just decode letters, it reaches for something: an image, a weight, or a gesture. The word activates both a verbal label and a sensory trace. Psychologists call this dual coding: Concrete words travel through two channels, verbal and sensory; abstract words travel through one. Two channels mean two retrieval pathways, which is why concrete words are “stickier,” easier to hold in a line of thought and faster to recall. Abstract words, on the other hand, are purely verbal, and have to be understood through language alone.

To put it another way: Concrete words are easier for us to process because they are bundled with a web of associations, tactile experiences, and memories that anchor their meaning.

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So don’t write how people talk or write, today, in 2026. Instead, write like they talked and wrote back in 1953, or better yet, in 1853, with more images and concrete verbs and nouns that people can feel or see or touch.

Do this and your words will affect readers more dramatically.

Actually, scratch that. “Affect” and “dramatically” are both new fluff from the 2023 list.

What I meant to say was, your words will amuse, annoy, disgust, needle, offend, puzzle, shame, and tempt readers more. (All those are 1953 verbs that didn’t make it into the expanded 2023 list.)

If you’re curious about the article I read, and the towels and wrists we’ve lost, and the concepts and judgments we’ve gained:

https://pudding.cool/2026/07/essential-words/

Last call: Save yourself 20+ hours of copywriting work a week

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“An uneasy, necessitous, busy, rich man seems to me more miserable than he that is simply poor.”
– Michel de Montaigne

Consider this my last warning, threat, and statement of opportunity to grab Dawn Apuan’s time-saving offer for copywriters who write for coaches and consultants.

Dawn’s offer is about saving yourself time, and delivering more copy to more clients in less time.

Dawn says her AI gizmo, to which she is selling the blueprints until tonight, has saved her 30-40 hours a week. Other copywriters say Dawn’s system has save them “at least 20 hours per week” and “cut my work time in half.”

Because, as Montaigne says, an uneasy, necessitous, busy copywriter is even more miserable than a copywriter who simply has no clients.

Dawn’s offer can help you stop being uneasy, necessitous, and busy.

This offer ends tonight, I’m presuming at 11:59 PST, since dawn lives around Seattle.

If you want to get this before it disappears, go here for more details before time runs out:

https://bejakovic.com/if-youre-a-copywriter-and-you-write-for-coaches-and-consultants

P.S. I recently recorded a call with Dawn, grilling her about her strategies for becoming the resident copy guru in half a dozen masterminds and communities so she can get clients easily and in bunches. If you buy or have bought Dawn’s time-saving AI offer before the deadline tonight, write me an email and I’ll share the interview with you.

Return of “if you’re a copywriter and you write for coaches and consultants”

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Four days ago, I sent an email with the subject line:

“If you’re a copywriter and you write for coaches and consultants”

In that email, I was promoting a timesaving AI offer by copywriter Dawn Apuan. Dawn has built an AI gizmo that she says has cut 30-40 hours from her workweek, and other copywriters that Dawn has shared her system with say it’s cut their working time in half or saved them 20 hours a week.

I sent that email out as a test. I like Dawn, I know she’s legit, and the offer sounded good to me. Would my list agree?

I checked my affiliate sales dashboard the next day. Zero sales. Oh well.

I have this policy, the “No Spinach” policy.

I no longer try to shove anything down my audience’s throat just because I think it’s good for them. Sure, I’ll test things out. But I’ll only keep promoting something to my list if it’s good for them AND it does something good for me, like make me sales.

And so, since I figured I had made zero sales of Dawn’s offer, I moved on, to shinier and more opportunityish pastures. And then this morning, I got a message from Dawn:

“Hey John! Not sure when your promo wraps but you’ve got 4 sales so far plus bumps and 2 upsells :)”

I checked the affiliate dashboard to see what exactly that means.

$700+ in affiliate commissions so far.

All right, fine. Here I am again, promoting Dawn’s timesaving, spinach-free, AI system for copywriters who write for coaches and consultants.

It was a good offer 4 days ago. It is still a good offer. And it seems that at least some people on my list want it.

Maybe you would want it too? If you are curious, you can find my writeup of this offer below. But fair warning. Thanks to my dawdling and carelessness, the deadline for this offer is nigh, exceedingly nigh.

If you want to get in before this offer disappears, head over here for more details:

https://bejakovic.com/if-youre-a-copywriter-and-you-write-for-coaches-and-consultants