Change Of Perspective

Why I shouldn’t be allowed near a toaster

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A couple days ago, I started promoting a free trial of a Skool group as an affiliate… or so I thought.

At first, I figured Skool doesn’t let me see who had signed up via my affiliate link, since it’s a free-trial offer.

It turns out Skool is happy to show me this information. The problem was that I didn’t use the affiliate link when linking to this offer. Instead, I used the bare link.

Strike one.

A few days before that, I wrote an email and scheduled it for my usual sending time between 8 and 9 o’clock.

Except it only turned out the next morning, after several dedicated readers wrote to ask me where my email is, that I realized I had scheduled my email for the wrong day, and for “am” instead of the usual “pm.”

Strike two.

A few days before that, I did a list swap with Jason Resnick.

I gave Jason a link for the lead magnet I was offering… and then a day later, I airheadedly used the same URL, as a redirect on my site, to link to Jason’s landing page from my own email.

If that URL chicanery doesn’t make any sense to you, don’t worry. It takes a special kind of genius to understand.

The end result of all that genius was that a bunch of Jason’s readers, who clicked on the link in Jason’s email in order to get my lead magnet, were redirected to Jason’s optin page instead.

That meant that not only did I miss out on a bunch of new subscribers, but I created a hassle and a headache for my JV partner.

Strike three.

The honest-to-woodheadedness truth is that I really should not be allowed anywhere near a computer, smart TV, or toaster.

Because if there’s a chance to harebrain some setting, to forget to push some button or to push the wrong button that shouldn’t be pushed, and to cause the toast to burn as a result, then I am sure to find that button.

And yet, I keep living. In fact, I keep living quite well. Which brings me to an idea I’d like to share with you.

That idea is the Casino of Life.

Unlike in a normal casino, when you play inside the Casino of Life, you don’t need to have a winning hand to win.

Because in the Casino of Life, you can walk around all the tables, see which hands other people have, and you can bet on their hands. And not only that.

In the Casino of Life, if you yourself happen to have just one good card, for example, the Ace of Copy, or the Queen of Traffic, or maybe the King of Offers, you can find somebody who is missing just your trump card to form a royal flush, and to win a bunch of gold doubloons, which you can then split.

The Casino of Life is a reframe I got a long while ago from Internet marketer Travis Sago.

Not very coincidentally, the Skool group I am promoting as an affiliate is Travis’s Royalty Ronin, which I myself happily pay for, and have done for the past year.

In fact, the reason I screwed up the affiliate link in the first place was that I promoted Royalty Ronin some time last year, for free, before Travis had an affiliate program for it. I simply thought Royalty Ronin would be interesting and valuable for people on my list.

I still think so.

Because Royalty Ronin isn’t just about getting access to a bunch of Travis’s unique and powerful marketing ideas (including via a suite of Travis’s $3k-$6k courses, which come as bonuses for Royalty Ronin).

It’s also about steady exposure to Travis’s brain-shifting insights and inspiration, like the Casino of Life idea, which have made all the difference for me at the right moments.

Plus, Royalty Ronin is also about joining a community of 500+ motivated, skilled, and yet imperfect people, all of whom are holding unique hands, some of them very powerful, and some missing exactly the card you may be holding.

I’m not much of a networker. I haven’t been taking much advantage of the community aspect of Royalty Ronin. Altogether I’ve connected with fewer than 5 people there.

Even so, just one connections I made in Ronin last year, with media buyer Travis Speegle, paid for yearly subscription for Royalty Ronin for the next few years.

I bet that in the next year, I will make at least one more connection which will pay for a few more years.

Like I said, Travis is now offering a week’s free trial to Royalty Ronin.

If you’d like to check out this unique casino, see who else is inside, or even form a connection or two that can pay for many years of being a member, maybe in just the next week:

​​https://bejakovic.com/ronin​ (yes, the link has been fixed)

P.S. If you already signed up for a trial of Royalty Ronin via the link above, even though it wasn’t my affiliate link until now, then send me the confirmation email you got from Travis, the one with “Vroom” in the subject line.

I’ll honor my end of the deal, and send you my Heart of Hearts training, about how to discover what the people in your market really want, so you can better know what to offer them and how to present it, as a way of saying thanks for taking me up on my recommendation.

Wisdom and perspective shift from 2,000 years ago

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A few days ago, I finished reading a book I had started back on December 8, 2021.

All in all, it took me 1,185 days to finish this book.

In part, that’s because I was reading other stuff during that time as well.

In part, it’s also because this book comes in four volumes, each of which is about 500 pages long. Put together, the four volumes could kill you if they fell out of a third-story window and landed on your head as you strolled on the sidewalk below.

The book in question is Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. It’s a bunch of biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, told, as per the title, in parallel, comparing and contrasting the lives of two similar men from two different times and places.

I read Parallel Lives because I like to get a shift in perspective. And one of the best ways to get a shift in perspective is to get away from current Amazon bestsellers, and go read something written 2,000 years ago.

I took hundreds of notes of interesting bits and pieces while reading Plutarch.

I went through them all after I finished, and I pulled out just 7 which I want to share with you today, because they relate to influence or simply because they are inspiring or funny. Here goes:

#1. No beginnings should be considered too small to be capable of quickly becoming great by uninterrupted endurance and having no obstacle to their growth by reason of being despised. [speaking about the rise of Julius Caesar in Caesar’s youth]

#2. “Indulgence is for slaves, but labor for princes.” [supposedly spoken by Alexander the Great]

#3. The most fundamental law is that which makes men in need of help follow him who can save them.

#4. He seemed to think victory over the enemy was merely a subordinate incident in the great work of disciplining his fellow-citizens. [about Aemilius Paulus, a Roman general who kept driving the Romans into various major wars]

#5. “The husband of an heiress should approach her at least thrice in each month. For even if no children are born, still this is a mark of respect to a good wife, and puts an end to many misunderstandings, preventing their leading to an actual quarrel.” [said by Solon, the Athenian lawgiver and philosopher, famous for his wisdom]

#6. It is a strange and unworthy feeling that prompts a man not to claim that to which he has a right, for fear that he may one day lose it; for by the same reasoning he might refuse wealth, reputation, or wisdom, for fear of losing them hereafter.

#7. With all the necessary acts of life, Lykurgus mingled some ceremony, which might enkindle virtue or discourage vice. [about Lycurgus, the legendary lawgiver who instituted Spartan society as we know it]

I think this last bit is particularly interesting. In fact, it’s why I’m writing today’s email.

I find reading to be one of the necessary acts of life, at least if you want to write for influence.

Since it is necessary, I might as well mingle some ceremony with it, such as marking momentous occasions like finishing a 3-year book-reading project.

Of course, it’s not only endings that can be celebrated with ceremony, but beginnings too.

Which is one reason why I’m making such a ceremony of announcing my upcoming book, full title:

10 Commandments of Con Men, Pick Up Artists, Magicians, Door-to-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Professional Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand Up Comedians, and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters

My goal is to finish and publish this book by March 24… or some time after that?

In any case, I will be writing about this book and how it’s progressing, plus what I’m thinking about doing to make it a success when it comes out.

If you are interested in the topic of this book, and you’re thinking you might wanna get a copy when it comes out, click below. I’m planning some launch bonuses and I will be dripping them out early to people on this pre-launch list:

​​Click here to get on the bonus-dripping pre-launch list for my new 10 Commandments book​​​

Competition contradiction

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A paradox? A contradiction?

As part of the research for my new book, I’ve been going through a book by Sam Taggart. Taggart is the founder of D2D Experts, an online education company for door-to-door salesmen.

Taggart has a long but distinguished career selling door-to-door, everything from knives to solar panels to security alarms. His door-to-door selling career started at age 11, and culminated around age 35, when he finished as the #1 salesman in a company of 3,000 reps.

Anyways, grok this, if you can:

On page 44 of his book, Taggart’s top recommendation for motivating yourself is to look at all the other salesmen around you, to start tracking their results, and to start thinking of them as competition you have to beat.

And then on page 64, Taggart says how the best salesmen only view themselves as real competition.

Huh?

It’s easy to dismiss this as just contradiction or fluff inherent in a lot of sales material.

But I don’t think so.

A while back, meaning 3 years ago, I wrote about 6 characteristics of people who manage to do the seemingly impossible.

These 6 characteristics came out of a study of pro athletes who came back from devastating injury to compete at the highest level again… as well as star Wall Street traders who managed to beat not only all other traders, but the randomness inherent in the market as well.

One of the common characteristics of such people was that they simultaneously had a short-term view of the task to be accomplished, as well as a long-term view.

In other words, these folks looked at their situation from both 3 feet away, and from 3,000 feet up in the air. They did so the same time, or at least switching constantly between the two.

And so I think it is with Taggart’s advice — and so it is in many other situations in life.

We all want the “one thing” to cling to.

But quite often, particularly in the most important things in life, you gotta hold two opposing thoughts in your head, and you gotta live by both of them.

Of course you don’t really gotta. You don’t gotta do anything. But if you are currently worried by competition, whether that’s other businesses who target same audience as you, or other solutions or trends that tend to wipe out what you’re doing, or simply people within your own company who try to outperform you, then it might make sense to:

1. Make a list of all these villains, to keep track of their activity, and to start viewing them as competition to be beaten

2. To ignore them and to focus on doing the best you can

Anyways, I’ll have Taggart’s advice — not this, but something less contradictory — in my new book, full title:

10 Commandments of Con Men, Pick Up Artists, Magicians, Door-to-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Professional Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand Up Comedians, and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters

My goal is to finish and publish this book by March 24. The way things are going, I might have to shave half my head, like Demosthenes, to keep myself from leaving the house until the book is finished.

In any case, I will be writing about this book and how it’s progressing, plus what I’m thinking about doing to make it a success when it comes out.

If you are interested in the topic of this book, and you’re thinking you might wanna get a copy when it comes out, click below. I’m planning some launch bonuses and I will be dripping them out early to people on this pre-launch list:

​​Click here to get on the bonus-dripping pre-launch list for my new 10 Commandments book​​

The maple syrup theory of influence

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Fascinating fact about me:

I studied math in college.

Like I said, fascinating. And it gets even more so, because I was never good at math.

Not in elementary school. Not in high school.

Somehow though, when college came, and I could choose to study what I wanted, and I never again had to take any math classes, I wound up taking math classes, and lots of them.

I think I was trying to prove something to myself. I managed it, too, because it turns out you can get a lot done with just curiosity and internal motivation, even in the absence of talent.

Anyways, one time I was taking a math class about “complex analysis” — about how to work with complex numbers, which have both a real and an “imaginary” component (ie, involving the square root of -1).

Whatever. Don’t worry about the math.

The important thing is simply that complex numbers have their own bizarre rules for how they are multiplied and divided, how you take a derivative, how you do integrals.

I never understood complex numbers, not really. But I diligently worked through the course.

I remember a specific homework problem, and the epiphany that came with it.

I was struggling to apply the rules in the textbook. But with some derring-do and with a few leaps of logic, I managed to finally solve the problem and reach the answer.

The answer was simple and elegant.

I remember a feeling of understanding washing over me. I got it, whatever this particular section was about. It made sense to me now. All the struggle and confusion and work had paid off.

Then, as a proper diligent student, I double-checked my answer in the back of the textbook.

It turned out I was 100% wrong. Not just that I’d made some screwup in the calculation, but that I was completely off track. I had misapplied and misunderstood the rules. My feeling of understanding, which had washed over me and given me such relief, corresponded to nothing in reality.

When I was a kid, like 9 years old, I had a feeling I understood myself and the world perfectly.

It was pretty late in life, in my late teens or maybe my early 20s, when I started to notice cracks in my confident understanding of the world.

Gradually, I started to develop a theory that emotions like certainty, understanding, and insight are like maple syrup.

Maple syrup can be poured over whatever you want — pancakes, French toast, waffles.

Likewise, emotions can be poured over ideas that are true, ideas are not true, or even ideas that are complete waffles, meaning some kind of undefined nonsense, like my understanding of complex analysis rules.

On the one hand, it doesn’t get more unsettling than this. I realized my most basic, certain feelings of rightness are not actually reliable.

On the other hand, it was a powerful realization.

For one thing, it was liberating.

It meant that, even if I’m sure — if it cannot, will not, won’t work, if it’s black and not white, if I am right and not wrong — I don’t really know for a fact. It pays to go get some real-world data — the equivalent of checking the right answer in the back of the textbook.

For another, I’m not the only person whose emotions work like this. I find it’s pretty universal.

And it turns out there are ways to get other people to pour their own emotional syrups — whether of desire, or of insight, or of trust — over pancakes, French toast, waffles, donuts, rice, hot dogs, sponge cake, and pretty much any basic foodstuff you may have to offer them.

You can make hot dogs sweet and sponge cake delicious, even irresistible, if you pour enough maple syrup on them.

And you can make honest, dry, uninspiring information exciting and eye-opening and urgent, much in the same way.

Perhaps you’d like some specific techniques of influence, which you can apply to get your audience to pour out their own emotional maple syrups over your offers?

You can find such techniques, delivered daily to your inbox, inside my Daily Email Habit service.

You even double-check your own answers against my answers, which like today, tend to be based on the day’s Daily Email Habit prompt.

In case you’d like to prove something to yourself:

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

Why all my emails have a Zanzibar address

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A reader writes in to ask:

===

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

===

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​

Time misers

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I went to college two years late, at age 20 instead of the usual 18. That meant I had had two extra years’ practice with teenage philosophizing compared to my classmates.

So when one of those classic freshman-year, fall-semester, late-night, deep discussion topics came up — “What would you do if tomorrow was the last day on Earth?” — I had a unique take.

The usual answers to that question are sky diving… some kind of wild sex proposal to your old crush… or going to admire the sunset one last time.

“I wouldn’t do anything different than usual,” I said. “I imagine I’d be paralyzed with fear. I’d probably just do the same things as every other day. Or maybe I’d spend the day lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling.”

I proposed a different hypothetical instead.

“What would you do if tomorrow there was an announcement that death has been cancelled, or at least pushed back by a few dozen millennia?”

That’s a question I’ve thought about a few times. I think it’s worth thinking about even today, long after college.

If you could live on, as you are now, or as healthy and as young as you want to be, pretty much indefinitely, what then?

How many more days or hours would you go on doing the job you are doing now? What would you do instead?

Would you try to save money? What for?

Would you stay in the same relationship that you’re in now? How would the prospect of thousands more years together weigh on you?

Of course, this is just a hypothetical. I used to write a weekly newsletter about the latest longevity science, and based on what I’ve read, death will not be cancelled tomorrow, or the day after.

Still, I think the above is a useful thought experiment.

A lot of modern-day gurus out there preach an abundance mindset. “Those who have will be given more,” they say, paraphrasing the Bible, “and those who have not will lead miserable, miserly lives regardless of their actual circumstances.”

This abundance mindset is almost always applied to things like money, achievements, opportunities, stuff in your life.

But then those same gurus — and I can name three off the top of my head — turn around and say, “Life is short.”

The implied message being to use your time wisely and conservatively, not to waste it or fritter it away. In other words, to be a bit of a time miser.

Maybe these abundance gurus are right. Maybe time is different from all the stuff that’s abundant in the universe.

All I can tell you is that personally, I’ve found that thinking that “life is short” is more likely to lock me up with fear and indecision than it is to make me hustle and prioritize.

That’s why I choose to believe I have all the time in the world, specifically, all the time I need, and that everything that needs doing is getting done, or will get done.

Counterintuitively, I find this actually helps me move and get things done now, while urgency and scarcity have the opposite effect.

I’m not sure if you can agree with me, or if this helps you in any way. But perhaps it can give you a different way to look at some familiar things.

In entirely unrelated news:

The last few days, I’ve stopped promoting my Daily Email Habit service because, frankly, I thought I had tapped out demand for the moment.

But then yesterday, a handful more people signed up, “on their own,” that’s to say, even without me promoting the offer in my daily email.

Maybe I was wrong?

So let me remind you of my Daily Email Habit service, which is designed to help you start and stick with sending daily emails to your list.

It’s only the second week this service has been running, but I’ve already had a bunch of results-based testimonials about it. Here’s one from Alex Ko, who is a senior copywriter at edtech company KooBits:

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Thanks for setting up DEH and troubleshooting the streak counter. While the streaks feature is great, I especially love your daily puzzle.

It takes the stress out of finding a topic to write about, and for me, looking back at the body of work I’ve done over the past week feels much better than keeping the streak alive.

It’s already gotten me to write on weekends, something I usually avoid since I treat them as rest days.

Looking forward to sharing more results in the future!

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If you feel that it might be the right time to start a consistent daily email habit (weekends optional), here’s the full info on how I can help you with that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Not the kind of testimonial I want

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Last night, I opened up my Daily Email Habit service to my entire list.

Since then, over the past 12 hours, close to two dozen new people have signed up.

Many of those people have written me to say they are excited to get started and develop their skills.

Others, who didn’t sign up for good reasons of their own, wrote to tell me how they like the concept and design of the service.

And then, I got the following “testimonial” from a reader who neither signed up for Daily Email Habit, nor had a good reason for not signing up:

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What a brilliant idea!

This is truly an extremely valuable offer for someone who has any sort of expertise and has his/her offers nailed down to get into the habit of daily writing.

Sadly, I have none of the above 2 things at the moment. Once I do find my ICP for whom I have sufficient expertise, this will be something I’ll definitely come to you for.

Thank you for launching such an amazing offer!

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I didn’t reply to this. I had a sense there’s a game afoot here that I don’t want to play.

I tried to figure out what game that is, and what’s really going on in the message above, in between that compliment sandwich.

I had to translate it to myself to understand. For some reason, I thought of a little olive, looking out at a large tract of land and saying:

“What beautiful, fertile soil! This land would be perfect to support a whole orchard of olive trees, given that they have deep roots and broad branches. But alas, as you can see, I have neither. Just look at me! Do you see any roots or branches on me? No, there are none. It’s quite sad. Beautiful land though.”

There are lots of good reasons not to write daily emails, but lack of expertise is not one of them. You don’t write consistently because you have expertise… you have expertise because you write consistently.

That’s something that I believe on a deep level, and that’s why I put it right on the sales page for Daily Email, at the very start of the deck copy, right after “I’ll help you start a consistent daily email habit that…”

Like I said, there are lots of good reasons why you might not want to write daily emails. There are also lots of good reasons why you might.

If you decide to write daily emails, you most certainly don’t need my Daily Email Habit service to do it. But my service might help you stick with it… be more consistent… save time… or write better emails than you would otherwise. For more info on all that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Why I can no longer be a Flat Earther

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I was on a plane a few months ago, looking out a window facing west, at sunset, in a perfectly cloudless sky, with the Mediterranean sea below me, all the way to the horizon.

I’m telling you all these details because I believe each one was crucial to a once-in-a-lifetime scientific discovery:

I could clearly see the Mediterranean Sea below me, looking cool and darkened. But there was a line ahead, towards the west, past which the sea gradually became warm-colored and bright, being still lit up by the setting sun.

Like I said, this was once-in-a-lifetime scientific discovery for me. I believe it was the first time in my life I had convincing first-hand evidence that the Earth is in fact round.

For much of my life, I’ve had sympathy for Flat Earthers, the people who insist, today, in 2024, that the earth is or at least might be flat.

I don’t necessarily have the “water can’t cling to a spinning ball” kind of sympathy… or the “Antarctica is a giant ice wall to keep you from falling off and finding out the truth” kind of sympathy.

Rather, I have sympathy with what I feel the Flat Earth movement is really about. Because after I first heard that Flat Earthing is a thing, I asked myself, “How do I know these people are wrong? How can I be sure the Earth is round and not flat?”

I’ve been told that’s how it is…

I’ve also seen pictures, illustrations, and videos, supposedly from space…

I’ve even been given models of the solar system, and arguments about rotation and magnetic fields and gravity…

… but I had zero first-hand experience. At least until that flight across the Mediterranean a couple months ago. I now believe 100%, though I’m certainly not trying to push my strong faith on you, that the Earth is in fact not flat, but round.

And I STILL have sympathy with the Flat Earthers.

Yes, the world is immensely complex.

It’s inevitable that much of what we believe about it gets passed on to us unquestioned. We couldn’t function otherwise.

But there’s still value in proving some things to yourself, regularly.

Not everything — there’s too much of that. But some things.

It can give you confidence when you find proof for yourself, beyond the confidence of being given proof.

It can lead you to insights you might not have otherwise.

And possibly, every so often, more often than you might think, it can help you find extra stuff, which others have swept under the rug.

Which things you choose to question is of course up to you.

But maybe stuff that’s directly connected to your work, success, or professional competence is a good place to start.

And if making sales or writing sales copy comes into what you do, then here’s a way to get first-hand experience and proof, which nobody can take away from you:

https://bejakovic.com/cr