Change Of Perspective

$100 for your failing idea

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Yesterday, I wrote about one idea from Jon Spoelstra’s book Ice To The Eskimos.

Well, brace yourself, because today, I got… another. Says Spoelstra:

“Pay bonuses for failure”

Spoelstra believed that the best companies any business could imitate were high-tech companies, because high-tech companies have to constantly innovate.

How do you innovate?

You gotta have ideas.

How do you have ideas?

You gotta get over the notion that’s been beaten into so many of us — via previous jobs, via decades of being at the mercy of professional teachers who accomplished nothing in life except a teaching diploma, and via that smarty-pants girl named Lydia, who always raised her hand in class, and was so smug about it — that there is always a right answer and a wrong answer, and while it’s good to have the right answer, it’s catastrophic to have the wrong answer.

In other words, people are afraid of failure.

​​Of sounding and looking dumb.

Deadly afraid of it.

Not good for coming up with new ideas.

So you gotta coax them out of their hardened protective shell.

Spoelstra’s method was to actually pay people extra for failing ideas. If somebody on his team tossed out an idea that went on to be a proven failure, the tosser-outer would get a monetary prize.

This is how the Nets (the NBA team Spolestra was working with) came up with innovations of all kinds — some small, others worth millions of dollars to the franchise, all of them previously unimaginable to anyone.

I read this. And I told myself, “I should try doing the same.”

Then I told myself, “No, that would be crazy. It would never work.”

Then I told myself, “Perfect. Sounds like a great experiment to try.”

So here’s my offer to you today:

Send me an idea. If it fails, I’ll send you $100.

A few added rules to give some structure to this offer:

1. Let’s limit the scope to ideas about how I could make more money, specifically via this newsletter, or the courses and trainings I’ve created for it, or the coaching I offer on and off.

2. I will pay you $100 if I actually put your idea in practice and find it does NOT work.

​​For that to happen, your idea has to be credible enough and tempting enough that I actually want to give it a try.

​​As a negative example, “Sell meth via email” sounds vaguely criminal, and I would not want to attempt it, even if it’s to prove you wrong.

As a second negative example, ​​”Start a YouTube channel” is so broad, open-ended, and intimidating-sounding that I would not choose to tackle it, even though there might be a perfectly failing idea hiding there.

3. What do you get if I try out your idea and it turns into a smashing success? You get the pleasure of seeing your intelligence manifested in the world. Plus, I will put you on the throne of the kingdom of Bejakovia for a day, and all the happy citizens will know your name, and the great deeds you have accomplished.

So there you go.

$100 for your failing idea.

Take a bit of time. Think about what you know about my newsletter, my assets, my skills. Think about what you know about internet marketing in general.

Come up with an idea how I could do better. Send it to me. And if it fails, it pays.

How to fix bad habits

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Yesterday, I was ellipting on the elliptical and to make the process less maddening, I listened to a podcast, which turned out to be surprisingly valuable.

It was a health podcast. The guest was a psychotherapist, a certain Dr. Glenn Livingston, PhD.

That name was familiar to me.

Turns out it was the same Dr. Glenn Livingston, PhD, who was also a successful direct marketer a while back.

​​I checked for his name in my inbox just now. He has at different times partnered with or been named-dropped by direct marketing rhinos and mammoths like Terry Dean, Ryan Levesque, Ken McCarthy, and Perry Marshall.

But back to the podcast. Like I said, it was a health podcast, about how to quit overeating.

Turns out Dr. Glenn is an expert on the matter.

Not only has he battled overeating his whole life, but he has written a bunch of books on the topic. The best selling one, Never Binge Again, has 19,224 reviews on Amazon.

Perhaps you’re wondering whether this email will ever get to a point. The point is this:

For years, Dr. Glenn used his psychotherapeutic training to try to quit overeating.

Never worked.

After years of therapy, introspection, and digging into his family history, Dr. Glenn finally unearthed the surprising root cause of why he was overeating his whole life (mommy issues).

And it still didn’t fix a damn thing. If anything, it made his overeating worse, because he now had a legit excuse, where he didn’t have one before.

And yet, Dr. Glenn did manage to get his eating under control.

​​I’ll tell you how:

He isolated, named, and in fact shamed the part of his mind that was craving and reaching for chocolate, for chocolate was his weakness.

Dr. Glenn told himself, “That is my Inner Pig talking. The Inner Pig wants its slop. But I am not one to be ruled by farm animals.”

The effect wasn’t immediate — few things outside direct marketing promises are. But the effect was there, and after a bit of time, this inner-piggization cured Dr. Glenn Livingston, PhD, of his overeating habit, making him a healthier, happier, better person.

The bigger point, as Dr. Glenn says on the podcast, is that identity is stronger than will power.

You can use this truth if you’re trying to influence and persuade others.

Or you can use it to fix your own bad habits.

I’ve just told you the main highlight of this surprisingly valuable podcast with Dr. Glenn Livingston. But there are more good things inside that podcast. And there’s more development of that core idea, that identity is stronger than will power, in a way that might help it actually sink into your head.

If you want to influence and persuade others better… or if you want to improve your own life and control your mind better, this podcast is worth a listen. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/bad-habits

How to come up with 2-3 good email ideas each day

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Last night, I was sitting on the couch when my ex-girlfriend came over from the kitchen.

It’s an odd situation. We’re broken up. But we still live together. And we’re on good terms.

“Are you writing your email?” she asked.

I looked at her like she’s crazy. “No, I did it this morning. I’m done for today.”

She nodded. “What’s tomorrow’s email going to be about?”

“Who knows,” I said.

“So how will you write it then?”

“It will be very, very hard,” I said with mock sadness.

​​But like I explained to my ex last night, it’s never really very, very hard, because I have a large and growing list of email ideas in my BEJ journal.

If I ever don’t have something fresh to write about, I can always reach into my journal. I find this resource so valuable that I even created a course once, Insight Exposed, all about my obsessive note-taking and journaling system.

But that’s not what I want to share with you today.

Because today, I didn’t reach into my journal for this email’s topic.

Instead, I did what I often do when I don’t have a clear idea of what to write.

I opened a new text file and started a list. I titled it daily10. Under that title, I came up with 10 possible ideas for today’s email, without discarding even ones that are not really good.

It took me all of 5 minutes.

Not all the ideas were ones that I will turn into an email. But of the ten, one was promising and three were good.

A couple of these possible email ideas I liked better than telling you about my ex and my daily10 process.

​​But since the reason I came up with those ideas in the first place was that daily10 process… I thought I would put those better ideas on hold and tell you about this valuable way to quickly come up with 2-3 good ideas for your daily emails.

So now you know.

And if you ever thought you suffered from “writer’s block”… well, now you also know that it’s really just an excuse not to sit down and write down 10 possible ideas, even if all of them are bad.

But enough inspiration. On to sales:​​

In a convoluted way, my email today is an example of my Most Valuable Email trick in action.

I hope I haven’t given too much away. Maybe I have.

​​But if there is still something that you think you can learn about the Most Valuable Email trick, then you can get educated via the link below:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

This might be the first sales email in history to reference Pico della Mirandola… but probably not

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Yesterday, I wrote an email about Bertrand Russell’s idea of what the unconscious is really made of. Reader Matt Perryman wrote in to tell me this idea ain’t nothing new:

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Not a coincidence by any stretch, but the idea behind Russell’s take on the unconscious is much older than his quote (and much older than Freud, who supposedly “discovered” it). It dates back to at least the Renaissance, when a few writers like Ficino and Pico della Mirandola rediscovered Plato and ancient magical traditions. Today, you have “chaos magicians” and all sorts of Law of Attraction people using this idea. Kind of funny that it dates back to antiquity, and possibly long before that.

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I was grateful to Matt for writing me this, because I love this kind of history of ideas stuff.

It always turns out somebody’s had a bright new idea today — but it actually goes back hundreds or thousands of years, when some tunic-and-sandal-wearing ancient thought about it on a much deeper level.

All that’s to say, there’s value, even practical value, in going back and reading what smart people from other ages have said and written.

But on to business:

I do not know the intellectual history of what I call the Most Valuable Email trick. But if I had to bet, I’d bet that the first time it was applied was thousands of years ago, in ancient Greece or maybe before, in some ancient email written on a wax tablet.

I’d bet on that because the Most Valuable Email trick is based on fundamental human psychology. And I’d bet on it because this trick creates the rare and unique feeling of insight, particularly in “teachy” situations, like daily emails can be sometimes.

Since the MVE trick is based on fundamental human psychology, it has persisted through the ages and will always persist, as long as humans communicate with each other in some form.

But for whatever reason, the Most Valuable Email trick is not used broadly, at least in the daily email space.

That’s both a shame, and an opportunity. In case you’d like to start taking advantage of that opportunity today:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Insights & More Book Club now open to new members looking for a new perspective

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Tonight being the last Thursday… of a month that’s divisible by 2… with the moon’s phase being waxing gibbous… it can only mean one thing:

It’s time for the bimonthly bonfire meeting in the middle of a dark pine forest, also known as the Insights & More Book Club call.

I’ve been running this book club since the start of the year. So far, the other Insights & More members and I have read three books:

1. A cranky philosopher’s 100-year-old prediction of how the world will evolve (prediction turned out pretty much spot on)

2. A biography of a showman, packed full of practical how-to advice

3. A cultural history that attempts to explain all the world’s civilizations as a quest for one thing, which I won’t trouble you with here

Those three books might all sound very different from each other. But in some ways, they are also quite similar. For example, they all non-fiction books, written in the past 100 years, by men.

To change that somewhat, the fourth book of the Insights & More book club will be a novel, written by a woman.

And that’s my point for you for today:

Computer genius Alan Kay famously said that a change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

The whole point of the Insights & More Book Club is to read things that can give you that change in perspective.

But the change in perspective won’t come on its own, or at least not often enough. It’s something you have to force and press and cultivate consciously.

So if you’ve been reading just nonfiction books, read some fiction. If you’ve been reading only books published since 2020, read something old. If you find you only read books by men, read something by a woman.

Or just come and join the Insights & More Book Club, and have me do the worrying work of book selection for you.

I only open the doors to the Insights & More Book Club every two months, as we finish one book and start another. It doesn’t make sense to have people join midway.

The doors are currently open. They will close this Sunday July 2, at 12 midnight PST.

In case you’re curious about this club, you will have to be on my email list first. Click here to sign up for that.

What everybody should know about this fixing problems business

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Going back to the imposter phenomenon article I wrote about a couple days ago:

Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes are two psychologists who first coined, defined, and publicized the idea of imposter phenomenon, which later grew in the public mind into imposter syndrome.

What can you do if you want to get rid of those feelings of being a fake? The Internet is full of advice. Here’s what Clance and Imes themselves found to work in their clinical practices:

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Clance has seen clients healed not by success but by the kind of resonance she found with Imes. Bolstered and sustained by group therapy with other women — it’s easier to believe other women aren’t impostors — they can then bring this recognition of others’ delusion back to themselves.

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In other words, if you feel like a fake, and you don’t want to feel like a fake no more, then the answer is not to push on even harder. The answer is— well, let me get into the marketing and business advice now.

Last week, I went to a meetup in Seville hosted by Sean D’Souza. The meetup lasted for three hours and lots of ideas came up. At the end of it all, I decided to take just four of those many ideas and remember them. One of those four is exactly that Clance and Imes realization, but applied to your business.

If you have a problem in your business, says Sean, don’t work on fixing it. Instead, work on fixing somebody else’s business.

This isn’t a matter of being altruistic, or of “serving” others as a means to getting what you want.

It’s simply a fact of human psychology: There are different pathways in our brains that go into thinking about ourselves and what belongs to us, and thinking about others and their stuff. We know this because some unlucky bastard in 19th-century America got a metal stake driven through his eye socket, taking out a large chunk of his brain. He lived on without seeming harm. But he became terrible at making decisions in his own life — all while still being able to give perfectly sane advice to others.

It also works without the metal stake in your eye socket.

Like Clance and Imes found, so has Sean D’Souza found – it’s easier to see what other businesses could do better — and then bring this recognition of others’ opportunities back to your own business.
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So try that.

And now, since I’ve already referred to two topics I’ve written about over the past week, let me end with a third such topic:

Three days ago, I ran a little poll in this newsletter. I asked readers which of three group coaching/workshops they might be most interested in.

The results are in. And the winner, both in terms of the total number of votes, and in terms of being most in line with what I want to do with this newsletter, is a group coaching/workshop on email copywriting.

I’m not offering this group coaching/workshop yet. I also haven’t decided when I will.

But if this is something you are interested in, then the only way to get in, once I do offer it, is to be on my email list. To do that, click here and sign up.

One more day

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I had today’s email 90% written this morning before I went to for the meetup organized by Sean D’Souza. ​​Now, after the meetup, my head is swimming so I decided to put finishing that email on hold. Instead, let me share just one surprising idea I heard today.

“When are you traveling back to Barcelona?” Sean asked me. I told him, tomorrow night.

Sean explained. “The value of a meet up or conference is in the plane ride home. There are always people who leave right after the event and I always tell them it’s such a waste. Better to take an extra day, stay in that place, walk around.”

Sean’s point is that when you go to a conference or a meetup or an in-person course, you get exposed to dozens or hundreds of ideas.

It’s possible you knew many of these ideas before, but somehow they have more impact now. They are presented in a new setting, when you’re out of your routine, when you’re paying more attention, when you’re more able and willing to be influenced.

But which one or two of the hundreds of new ideas should you focus on? And how to make them relevant in what you specifically are doing?

That’s work for your brain to figure out, while you enjoy and relax and sight-see and keep yourself out of your routine for one more day.

And then, on the plane ride home, something emerges, like Excalibur in the hand of the Lady of the Lake, rising above the surface that separates your conscious awareness from all the dark and deep brain processes underneath.

So that’s what I’m gonna do. Maybe tomorrow, on my flight home, I will experience some sort of breakthrough or moment of insight. Or maybe not. In any case, Seville is very cute, almost unbelievably so. I’m going to go enjoy it today.

Meanwhile, if by chance you need or want copywriting skills, you might be interested in what I offer inside my Copy Riddles course. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

First-cousin marketing incest

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A little over 100 years ago, on June 2, 1919 to be specific, a rather shabby-looking man named Albert took the hand of a fairly unattractive woman named Elsa. They looked deeply into each other’s eyes, and after a few moments of nervous calculation, each of them said “ja.”

The shabby-looking man was Albert Einstein. The rather unattractive woman was Elsa Einstein, Albert’s first cousin and second wife.

Einstein wasn’t the only famously smart person to marry his first cousin. H.G. Wells, author of some 50 books and best known today as the “father of science fiction,” also married his first cousin, Isabel Mary Smith. So did Charles Darwin, who married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood in 1839.

What’s my point?

Marketer Dan Kennedy has this routine about “marketing incest.” Here’s how Dan puts it:

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Whatever business you’re in, whatever product, service, profession — what do you pay most attention to? Everybody else in that business. If you don’t read anything else, you read your trade journal. If you go to no other meeting once a year, you probably go to your convention. If you’re traveling to another city, you look at your category in the Yellow Pages. You pay attention to everybody else who’s in your business. It’s like being Amish.

What happens with this kind of thinking — it’s a “closed” kind of thinking. It works just like real incest. Everybody gets dumber and dumber and dumber until the whole thing just grinds to a halt, and they just stand there looking at each other and nothing happens.

You’ve got to pay attention outside your little Amish community of jewelers or carpet cleaners or whatever it is that, up until tonight, you thought you were. You’ve got to pay attention to other stuff because you ain’t going to find any breakthroughs in the five other people standing in a circle looking at you. They aren’t any smarter than you are. They’re probably dumber than you are.

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My point is, “consanguineous” incest is universally reviled, and for good genetic reasons. You don’t want to marry your sister or brother — bad things happen if you do it, and that’s why most societies around the world find the practice disgusting.

On the other hand, “affinal” incest, marrying between first and second cousins and more distant relatives — well, I won’t say it has a long and glorious history, but it definitely does have a history, and much of it, including some very smart people.

I might be digging myself into an unnecessarily deep hole here, so let me state clearly that I am not advocating incest of any kind.

Well, except maybe in the marketing sense. Like Dan says, you don’t want to practice consanguineous marketing incest — copying what the five other guys who are most like you are doing. That’s likely to only produce worse and worse results with time.

On the other hand, going into a cousin industry, and copying ideas from there — well, that might just be another issue altogether. But I will write more about that in my email tomorrow, and tell you my experiences in paying a visit to a cousin industry lately.

If you’d like to read that email when it comes out, sign up to my email newsletter.

My best recommendation for books that are sure to give you a change of perspective

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Back in 2019, I started reading an obscure non-fiction book called The Land Beyond the Forest. I got the idea to read it because I heard that it was a source for Bram Stoker, when he created the modern character of Count Dracula.

The Land Beyond the Forest was written by Emily Gerard, a Scottish woman who lived in Transylvania, modern Romania, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Gerard wrote up a kind of sociological character study of the Germans, Romanians, Hungarians, and Gypsies who lived around her.

At that time, Transylvania, with its deep forests and high mountains, still had pockets of medieval life in quickly modernizing, industrializing, urban Europe. The people Gerard wrote about truly lived with different traditions and beliefs to what’s become dogma in the past century or so. I guess that’s what Bram Stoker was latching on to when he used Gerard’s book for inspiration.

For example, Gypsies in Gerard’s time were a forest-dwelling, pot-mending, violin-playing elf people. This is how Gerard describes the three tenets of their half-pagan, half-Christian religion:

1. The Gypsy fears God without loving him

2. The Gypsy believes in the devil but thinks him silly and weak

3. The Gypsy scoffs at the idea of immortality: “We’re already wretched enough in this life. Why begin it anew?”

I read Gerard’s book and I really found myself experiencing a fresh change of perspective. I found the experience so enjoyable that I started going back, century by century, and reading a book for each century. If you’re looking for a change in perspective, or a moment of insight, that’s my best recommendation to you as well.

Also, here’s a notice you may or may not need. Tonight was the last night to join my Insights & More Book Club, at least for a while. At the stroke of midnight tonight, as wolves howled, and owls hooted, and an icy black shape moved in the shadows under the pine trees, I closed the doors to the Insights & More Book Club, to keep everyone inside safe, and to lock any werewolves, ghouls, and vampires out.

I will reopen the Insights & More Book Club in two month’s time. But in order to have the chance to get in, you have to be signed up to my email newsletter. If that’s something you aren’t willing to do, no problem. Otherwise, click here and fill out the form that appears.

Joy instead of failure, hope instead of humiliation

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For the past 14 months, ever since December 2021, I have been patiently going through Parallel Lives. That’s a heavy, dusty, four-volume e-book, equivalent to some 1,900 print pages, of biographies of famous Romans and Greeks.

I’ve been patiently going through Parallel Lives so I can bring you insights that have stood the test of time.

Take Lycurgus, the legendary lawgiver of Sparta. He did such a good job training his populace that they became bees, ready to sacrifice themselves fully for the collective good of the hive. And not only physically, by sacrificing their bodies.

Lycurgus got the Spartans to gladly sacrifice their honor and burn their egos, while being told to sit down and shut up.

Example: A noble Spartan named Paidaretus was rejected when he tried to join the Three Hundred, the Spartan royal guard of honour.

Paidaretus went away rejoicing. “Wow!” he said. “I am a good man, and yet the city has 300 men better than myself. What good fortune!”

You might say this anecdote shows the power of identity. It does that, but it shows something else also.

It also shows the power of a change of perspective.

Paidaretus did not just sacrifice his ego and his honor to the welfare of his city. He did not just do it willingly. He actually felt joy over it.

That’s the power of giving somebody a change of perspective. A different way of looking at the exact same situation. Failure becomes joy, humiliation is transformed into hope.

If you’re wondering where I’m going with this, it’s to sell you something. Well, to give you a new perspective on gladly opening up your wallet.

Six days ago, I got a message from a marketer named Adrian Chann, who had recently bought my Copy Riddles program. Adrian wrote:

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I realized why your emails (and sales pages) are addicting: they are packed with a-ha moments. It’s more entertaining and enriching to read your emails then watching uninspiring Youtube videos marketers who rehash the same advice without any additional insight.

I’m a huge Ben Settle fan and open up nearly every single one of his emails, yet I ended up buying something from you rather than him (not that it is a competition). The a-ha moments you created are what got me to gladly open up my wallet!

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Maybe you got no a-ha moments from today’s email. Or maybe you did.

In any case, if you’d like to get Copy Riddles yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/