Creativity

The excessive value of writing into the void

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In my email yesterday, I asked for reader questions and replies. Well, I got ’em. To start, a reader named Kenneth wrote in to ask:

===

Yeah, at this point you are reading my mind.

I’ve always wanted to ask a question, but wondered whether you respond to emails.

Well, the question “How do you get opt-ins to your list?”

I can’t say I know because I got into your list by a strange way.

I am in a copywriting group and a member of the group shared your sales letter as a way to use reverse psychology, I think it was your MVE product.

He didn’t even share a link, I had to copy the link in the screenshot(I think that’s what happened), got on your homepage and got on your list.

===

… and that’s pretty much how I get people to opt-in to my list:

I write stuff… wait until people share that on the Internet of their own accord… then rub my hands in anticipation as others see those shares, google the clues available, search through the Google results, find my website, figure out that I’m actually the guy they were searching for, and then opt in.

I’ve heard this described as “upstream leads” — as in, people who had to swim upstream to find you. I’ve also heard it said these are the most valuable kinds of leads.

Is that true? I don’t know. I can imagine it is… I can also imagine it’s just an excuse by people who like to do it that way.

But that’s less interesting to me than the following:

I’ve gotten variants of Kenneth’s question before. And maybe I’m reading into it, but my feeling is that when people ask “How do you get subscribers” there’s a hidden assumption there.

That assumption is that, if you got no subscribers, no readers, there’s no sense in writing, particularly an email a day, like I do.

Sounds reasonable. But again, is it true?

The answer is no, at least to my mind. Even if nobody is reading what you write, a daily email:

1. Gets you to think about whatever you’re teaching or selling or doing, sharpens your own opinions on the subject, and builds up your expertise

2. Makes you a better writer and a better communicator, in all formats, not just email, without any pressure

3. Builds up a warchest of interesting content, which you can reuse for paid products, for ads, as book chapters, for SEO, for live presentations and trainings, for client work, or as a portfolio

4. Acts as proof of your authority to anybody who does come across you, whether that’s a potential client, customer, or simply fan

5. Can be enjoyable on its own, much how toast with butter is enjoyable on its own

6. Beats Wordle as a daily habit (though you can do both, as I do)

7. Makes you referable, for all the reasons 1-6 above combined, so that in time you do get people subscribing to read what you have to say

I’m telling you this because:

1) I’m grateful to Kenneth for writing in with his question, and I wanted to answer it thoroughly in a newsletter email, and

2) because starting tomorrow, I will be rolling out Daily Email Habit.

Daily Email Habit is my new service to help you be consistent with daily emails. It will give you a daily email prompt/constraint to take away idling over what to write, to keep you on track, and even to help you be more creative.

I will be rolling out Daily Email Habit gradually. But if you like, reply to this email, tell me what like about this service, why it sounds like it might be valuable to you, and I will add you to the priority list, so have a chance to try out Daily Email Habit sooner rather than later.

When ROUS were real

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If you’re a fan of The Princess Bride the way that I am, then you’ll know the fire swamp.

The fire swamp is a place in the kingdom of Florin, where The Princess Bride is set. Nobody has entered the place and lived to tell the tale.

That’s because the fire swamp holds three perils.

The first is sudden bursts of flame from the ground. Those aren’t so bad, because they make a deep popping sound right before they explode.

The second is Lightning Sand. It swallows you up and sucks you in, like you’re falling through a cloud. Lightning Sand is very dangerous but rare.

The third is ROUS. In the words of Westley, the protagonist of The Princess Bride:

“Rodents Of Unusual Size? I don’t think they exist.”

… but of course they do. Right as Westley says that ROUS are just a matter of legend, a giant, pig-sized rodent launches itself at him and a deadly struggle ensues.

I thought this was all just a wonderful bit of fantasy. But like Westley, I thought that ROUS don’t exist, not really.

It turns out they do. For real. William Goldman, who wrote The Princess Bride, was a compulsive researcher. He probably found out decades ago what I found out just a few days ago.

There’s a place in the Amazon where ROUS live, right now.

The locals call these beasts ariranha, and Spanish-speakers call them lobos del río. They grow up to 1.5 meters in length, with an additional 70cm for the long and thin tail. While they aren’t technically “rodents,” they are carnivorous, they look very much like the ROUS in The Princess Bride, and for all I know, they love the taste of human flesh.

At this point, it would be wise to tie this into some lesson about copywriting and marketing.

The fact is, I really just wanted to share this fact, that ROUS really exist. I think it’s wonderful that there are large mammals I have never heard of, and that fantasy and wonder still exist in the world.

But let me work a little, and try to make this relevant to you too.

Yesterday, I wrote an email in which I tied in a snippet I had heard from marketer Ryan Lee into my own offer, which was looking for a partner for my longevity newsletter.

A bunch of people wrote me about the partner offer.

But a couple people also wrote me about the email itself. They liked how I had managed to connect the Ryan Lee quote with my own offer. How to do that? And do I have a system for it?

I actually do have a system. I even created a training out of it, called Insight Exposed. But I only rarely sell that training because I suspect that, while this Insight Exposed system has been tremendously useful and valuable to me, it’s not something that I can actually transfer to other people. At least that’s the my sense, based on the feedback (or lack of it) I’ve gotten for Insight Exposed, compared to my other trainings like Copy Riddles and Most Valuable Email.

So I decided to do something different.

Next Tuesday, August 20 at 8pm CET/2pm EST/9am PST, I will hold an AMA — Ask Me Anything — about the topic of research, notetaking, and “creativity.”

The AMA will be live on Zoom. You can register for it simply by clicking the link below.

There won’t be a free replay. If you cannot make it live, I can give you the first step of my system, which is simply to keep an eye out on your own reactions. “ROUS? Are real? That’s wonderful!” Write that down, and you never know when you might be able to use it.

Maybe that’s enough to get you going. But maybe you sitll have questions. If you, you can get me to answer them on the AMA. Here’s the link. Click it, and I’ll let you into the Zoomery when the time comes:

[Get real, you gotta be on my list for this. If you wanna sign up: https://bejakovic.com/]

Why do I keep linking to Amazon???

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I got a question from a reader last week, which I didn’t realize until just now had a slight dig at me towards the end:

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I noticed that you linked to Amazon quite a lot in recent weeks … curious about your rationale?

Engagement, commission, or simply being unpredictable (ultimately become predictable)?

===

How’s this for predictable:

It is well known, by anybody who knows anything about Internet marketing, that linking to Amazon, particularly to books on Amazon, particularly to books on Amazon that feature word “eskimo” in the title, increases Gmail deliverability. This in turn translates to higher engagement and greater retention on expensive continuity programs like the ones I don’t sell.

No. Of course not. It’s nothing like that.

There’s no kind of tactical reason for why I’ve linked to a few Amazon books over the past few weeks.

I did it because the books were valuable and useful to me, and I thought they could be valuable and useful to you.

But beyond that, there is another, more personal reason.

I could explain that reason in my own words.

But the fact is, somebody has already explained it for me, in words that are so good thath they have stuck with me for 6+ years now, and that come ringing back in my head at certain key moments in my life.

If you’d like to find out those words, and maybe learn something that can help you run your business and your life better for the long term, then read the following, which is not an Amazon book:

https://www.psychotactics.com/greater-profits/

Inadequate performance

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Yesterday, my friend Sam wrote me that he had downloaded the presidential debates so he could watch the bloodshed.

This morning, my friend Peter forwarded me a New York Times editorial that’s calling for Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race after his “inadequate performance in the debate.”

And then this afternoon, I met my friend Olga, who spent much of the day in bed, and who said the only thing she has done today is to watch the presidential debate.

Olga told me her impressions of the debate. And then she said, “Maybe the debate’s something you could write about in your newsletter.”

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, the following will not be any kind of shock:

I am completely out of the loop. Permanently. Always.

I didn’t even know there was a presidential debate until friends started chattering to me about it via text and in real life.

I most definitely have not watched it.

And as for writing about the top news of the day in this newsletter… as I told Olga, I would never do that.

Well, obviously I’ve broken that vow with this email. But I didn’t know how else to get the following point across.

My theory is that you gotta pay the piper somewhere.

If you decide to talk about the immediately available stuff, the stuff that hundreds of millions of people are talking about right now on TV, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Reddit, among your friends and family, then you gotta try really really hard to have something unique and clever and hot-takey to say.

And even if you try really hard, and even if you expose yourself to looking like a tryhard, odds are good that most days you will fail to say something that hasn’t already been said, better, by a hundred other people, just a few minutes ahead of you.

That to me is an inadequate performance.

On the other hand, if you choose to spend your time and effort reading and watching less available stuff, stuff that’s not being talked about today, or yesterday, or last week, then you have a green, untrammeled field to play in.

For example:

Did you know that the problem of bloody, hateful, two-party elections was solved 2,500 years ago?

Two opposed tribes lived together inside one city’s walls.

They were highly suspicious of each other.

​​Each had a strong us vs. them mentality.

The city was ruled by a king from one tribe, who favored his own and harmed those from the other tribe.

​​Then the king died, or more correctly, he was made to disappear after he showed signs of serious cognitive decline.

How to choose a new king without devolving into civil war?

It didn’t look promising.

Each of the two parties was horrified by the leader of the other side.

Each party absolutely refused to accept the other side’s leader as the new king.

Tensions were rising. Weapons were starting to jangle.

​​So what to do?

Simple. It was the old, “you cut, I choose.”

Specifically, it was decided that the Romans, the party that had just lost its king, would choose a new king from the other tribe, the Sabines. The Sabines could not veto or influence the Romans’ choice.

The Romans chose a quiet, reserved man from the Sabine tribe, named Numa Pompilius.

At first, Numa refused to take command of the city. He liked his quiet life. But after being persuaded that Rome would devolve into civil war without him, he agreed to become king.

Numa reigned for 43 years in peace and prosperity. He founded some of Rome’s most important institutions, such as the pontifex maximus, the 12 month calendar, and the cult of the Vestal Virgins.

Two thousand years later, a clever politician, Niccolo Machiavelli, said Rome owed a greater debt to its second king, Numa, then it did to its first king, Romulus.

Good Lord this has turned into a long email.

​​Don’t write emails like this. Or do. It’s up to you.

If you do choose to write emails like this, I have something that might help. It’s my Insight Exposed course, about my notetaking, journaling, and media-consumption process.

I don’t normally sell this course, for reasons of my own.

But since I’ve already broken one law today, I might as well break two?

If you want Insight Exposed, the order form is below. I will close it down in exactly 24 hours, tomorrow, Sunday, at 8:31pm.

And if you have questions or doubts if this course is right for you, write me before you buy.

​​Here’s how to read stuff others are not reading, and make it useful for your marketing and your life:

https://bejakovic.com/ie/

Last call for Water Into Wine

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Tomorrow evening, at 8pm CET, I’ll put on the Water Into Wine workshop with a few people.

This is the last email I will send about this workshop. I’ll take the remaining time to talk to people who’ve expressed interest and any who might still do so.

One thing I’ve heard in these conversations is that people default to a few set ways of positioning their offers.

Sometimes those default, set ways work.

​​Other times they don’t, or they fatigue after a while.

​​But people are stuck with their existing positioning ideas, and cannot see new opportunities.

This reminded me of the most popular TED talk of all time, by Sir Ken Robinson, a British expert on education.

Robinson used to live in Snitterfield, England, the birthplace of John Shakespeare, the father of William Shakespeare. Says Robinson:

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Are you struck by a new thought? I was. You don’t think of Shakespeare having a father, do you?

Because you don’t think of Shakespeare being a child, do you?

Shakespeare being seven?

I never thought of it. I mean, he was seven at some point. He was in somebody’s English class, wasn’t he?

[the crowd laughs]

How annoying would that be?

[more laughter]

===

Robinson’s point in that TED talk was that we all have loads of creativity, but we have it beaten out of us in school.

Well, maybe not beaten out of us, just beaten into hiding.

So yes, you had ample creativity once, and you probably have ample creativity still.

​​And creativity is one option for repositioning your offers like I’ll be describing during tomorrow’s workshop.

But creativity is not required.

I’ve gruesomely dissected this method of repositioning to take the creativity out, and to make this a step-by-step process you can follow.

It will still require testing and some work, but it won’t require superhuman creativity — just the right knowledge of magic, and that’s what I’ll give you.

Assuming that is, that you’re on the workshop call tomorrow.

Again, this is the last email I will send about it.

If you’re interested, the only way to get in is to first write me an email and express interest.

It might make sense to hit reply right now, so we can talk and see if this workshop is a good fit for you.

$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.

Back 7 years in time, to my lean and hungry freelancing days

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Day 3 in Lisbon. Yesterday, I ambled to a factory area outside the center, which has been converted into a bunch of restaurants and design shops. As soon as I stepped into this area, a strange feeling swept over me…

I had been here before.

I had been to Lisbon one time before, for two days, seven years ago, back in 2017.

Back then, I still drank alcohol and much of the trip was a blur — either horribly hung over, or drinking more to try to cope with the hangover.

This time, when coming to Lisbon, I tried remembering where I had been and what I had done during those two days back in 2017. I couldn’t remember. But yesterday, I knew at least one thing I had done. I had been to this factory area before.

“And there’s a Mexican restaurant somewhere around here,” I said to myself.

Sure enough, there was a Mexican restaurant right where I suspected it should be. I walked inside. It had a boxing ring right in the middle of it, with a dining table in the middle of the ring, and lucha libre decoration on the walls. I recognized this place. I had eaten here before.

Somehow, out of about 50 million restaurants in Lisbon, I had managed to accidentally stumble into the same restaurant I had been in seven years earlier.

And now for some entirely different news:

Yesterday, I asked my readers what frustration they are currently having.

I got a good number of responses including some unexpected ones:

“… son is now talking about having a PS5 despite only having had a Nintendo Switch for a matter of days.”

“Right now, I’m in Warsaw, and I’m shocked by how nice and kind the girls here are. As a result, I hate the idea of going back to [home town] and trying to date there.”

​​​”My greatest frustration is watching people who have never opened a book in their lives create million-dollar companies.”

On the other hand, many of the reported frustrations were not a surprise. They came from both business owners and copywriters, and were some variant of “I’m looking for more clients or customer or leads.”

Somehow, not very accidentally, by asking this question, I managed to stumble back into the same worry-cloud I had been in seven years earlier, back in 2017, when I was only two years into working as a freelance copywriter.

I managed to make a living from month one of starting to work as a copywriter, back in August 2015.

But it was always a hunt, and there was always a fair chance of going to bed hungry. Not literally — I could always afford food to eat and a place to sleep, and I could even take a trip now and then and waste some money on alcohol.

But I never knew quite how much money I would make by the end of the month. Half the time, it was less than I would have been okay with.

Back then, my interpretation of the problem was the same as the interpretation of a lot of the people who replied to me yesterday.

“I’d like to have more consistent money coming in… so what I need is more good leads… some new source of leads… or maybe an improved way to convert leads I already have.”

Reasonable enough. But wrong, at least in my case.

I realized something only years later, around 2021 or 2022. It’s the only regret I have with regard to my entire copywriting career, and the only thing I would change if i could go back. It’s this:

I spent way too much time looking for new clients and even working with new clients… rather than simply getting more out of the clients I already had.

And that’s my suggestion to you as well.

If you would like to make more consistent money, focus less on looking for more clients or customers. Get more out of the ones you’ve already got.

And if you say there’s nothing more to be had out of them:

You’re creative. That’s why you’re working as an entrepreneur or as a copywriter. So use that creativity.

I guarantee you there are ways, often easy and quick ways, to make new money from old customers or clients. You have everything you need already. It’s just a matter of putting together the pieces.

Of course, if you don’t want to put together the pieces, and if you actually have an email list of previous customers or clients, then write me. Maybe I can put the pieces together for you.

Your kiss is on my list

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I have this quirk of the brain where if I’ve heard a song some time in the past few days, I will often wake up in the middle of the night with that song playing on full blast in my head.

Last night, around 3am, I woke up. What I clearly heard in the darkness was the refrain to Hall and Oats’s Kiss On My List:

“Because your kiss is on my list… of the best things in liiiiiiiiife…”

The reason Kiss On My List played in my head is that I recently listened to a lot of 80s hits. And that’s because I used several 80s hits to illustrate parts of the presentation I gave to Brian Kurtz’s Titans XL group this past Thursday.

Overall, the presentation went very well. This was a surprise to me, because I was a bit desperate in the lead-up to it.

I had tried running through the presentation a couple times before the actual call. ​It seemed like a disaster each time — “these stupid songs, what was I thinking?” But apparently, I managed to pull it off at the last minute because lots of people who watched have written me to say how much they liked it.

But!

What I want to share with you today is not a bit from my presentation.

Instead, what I want to share with you is a bit that came from the other presentation inside Thursday’s Titans call. That presentation was by a guy named Charley Mann. Charley runs a coaching business for law firm owners.

I’m not sure Charley wants me to share publicly how much money he’s making. But on the call, he shared his numbers. He’s doing very well, and he will do even better soon.

Anyways, towards end of his presentation, Charley said:

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One last thing I’ll say real quick, which is the idea of making money — trying to make it boring for myself.

I have plenty of things that I love in the rest of my life. I love building the business. But fundamentally, I want the fundamentals. And so that’s the way I think about the business. The fundamentals executed in a really sound, even spectacular way, over time.

===

That felt like a gentlemanly slap across the face to me. Because it made me realize I do get my kicks, or at least some fun and expression, via my work — via doing things like creating an 80s-music-themed business presentation, which refuses to come together until the very last minute.

The trouble is, such creative experiments 1) rarely make for optimal business solutions and 2) demand much more time and work than simply focusing on the proven fundamentals and performing those very well.

I’m sharing this in case you too might be like me.

If you are, then maybe it’s time to consider taking up skydiving or high-stakes roulette or perhaps drag racing as a way to get your kicks in the real world, outside your business. Or at the very least, perhaps it’s time to consider, like Charley says, focusing on just the fundamentals, and executing those very well over time.

And now, if you want the fundamentals of email copywriting, then I have a course for you.

I’m not sure I would ever have been able to prepare such a course had I only ever written emails for this newsletter, where I feel compelled to say something new and creative every day to get my small kick of excitement.

Fortunately, I’ve also worked extensively with clients, including a few clients where I had to write multiple daily emails every day for years at a time, along with tons of other copy, and where real money was on the line – $4k-$5k of actual sales coming in with each email.

If you want to learn what I learned while writing all those emails and pulling in all those sales, and if you want to implement something similar in your business, then here you go:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

How to enjoy the holidays and be inspired by your own creativity and smartness

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Today being Christmas, of course I thought it would be a perfect time to book a ticket to fly home. Empty airports… friendly fares… friendlier cabin crew.

And so I did it.

It was a beautiful and sunny morning as I took off from Barcelona today around 9am. The sky was perfectly clear so I could see every gleaming little house as we edged along the Mediterranean coast, by Marseilles and Cannes, and then as we turned inland over the Alps.

The plane flew over thousands of sunny and snowy peaks, and down into the Bavarian flatlands. We landed in Munich.

45 mins later, another plane lifted me up again. More snowy peaks — Germany, Austria, Slovenia, then into Croatia.

The winter clouds finally started to gather as we reached the smoggy grey fortress that is my hometown of Zagreb. But even here, there was still some sunlight — magical for central Europe in December.

Like Little Red Riding Hood, I took the shortest path to my grandmother’s place. What followed was a typically overwhelming Christmas lunch — an appetizer made up of minced pork meat wrapped in sauerkraut, then some sort of beef soup, then a greasy duck with the local mlinci, then a chocolate cake which was the only part of the feast I was allowed to skip as I cited medical and psychological reasons to avoiding sugar.

Now as I write this, I am on the couch recovering from the travel and the food.

It would be easy to shrug, say I don’t have anything more to share with you, and just tell you to enjoy your Christmas.

But the fact is this:

Since I was deprived of Internet in general and email in particular the whole day until just now, I actually found my brain bursting with bunches of ideas as I looked down onto the Alps.

I will share one of those ideas with you tomorrow — a way to grow my health newsletter via paid ads, while not paying nothin’ for the ads.

I don’t know whether this idea will work, but I plan to test it out starting right after the holidays. And you can try it too if you find out tomorrow what I have in mind.

For today, I will simply say that good things happen when you cut off the stupid Internet, including that social media channel known as your email inbox.

Try it. You might be inspired by the ideas that you invent in the absence of constant digital input. Plus you might enoy the holidays much more.

And if you find yourself bored and craving stimulation while you go into airplane mode with the Internet, then try reaching for a book.

I have one I wrote that I keep recommending. You can find it below. Whether or now you choose to get it, merry Christmas.

My book 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters

Curious George creates a course

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It’s been three days since I wrote an email about the 40th anniversary of the first broadcast of The Day After, which happened on November 20 1983.

​​A reader wrote in to ask about that:

===

Beautiful story…but where do you find this kind of story?

Do you google the events for this day or something else? I’m really curious.

===

The short answer is that, like Curious George, I’m a good little monkey, and always curious.

In the particular case of The Day After email, the sequence of events was as follows:

1. A few months ago, I was reading an email by Lawrence Bernstein. Lawrence was talking about how he managed to delete his entire email list. As he put it, “Sunday morning felt like one of my favorite dark films from 1983, ‘The Day After.'”

2. I had never heard of The Day After so I made a note of it in a list of “movies to watch” that I have been keeping for years.

3. Some time later, I watched The Day After, without knowing anything about it except that Lawrence likes it.

4. After watching the movie, I was curious to find out more. So I read up on it. I was impressed to find out all the stuff connecting The Day After to Ronald Reagan and the Soviets and nuclear war averted.

5. A few days later, the thought popped into my mind to check when exactly The Day After was first broadcast. It turned out the 40th anniversary was coming up in a few weeks’ time. I thought it might be cool to write about it on the actual anniversary. So I made a calendar entry telling me to write an email about it on the day of.

6. The calendar notification fired a few days ago. So I wrote down an outline of what I remembered about the movie. I plumped it up with some details taken from Wikipedia and ¡tachán!

The particulars of how I wrote that email are probably completely useless to you.

But there are a few underlying principles which you might profit from. Such as for example:

​​Keeping extensive notes and having lists of everything you might care about…

​Digging in when you come across an unfamiliar reference from somebody you respect…

O​​r using your calendar app to make your life easier and to make sure stuff gets done when it should.

Over the past few years, I’ve come up with a handful of such processes to make sure I never forget a good idea, never fail to draw a valuable connection, never miss out on a profitable opportunity.

Of course, it doesn’t work all the time. Or even much of the time.

​​Even so, these processes have been incredibly valuable to to me for daily email writing, previously for client work, futurely for new projects I am starting up.

This stuff has become such an integral part of how I work that I created a course, Insight Exposed, all about how I keep notes, and write journals, and process all of the ideas and information coming at me so I can turn them into something productive and profitable.

I released Insight Exposed back in February for a few days. But I haven’t been selling it since.

I will release it again soon, after I’ve polished it a bit. But more about that in its own email.

For now, let me just share something valuable that I’ve kept track of thanks to my Insight Exposed system.

It’s an article I came upon back in September. It was published in the lying New York Time, but in the opinion section, so maybe it’s true.

In any case, I found it insightful, so much so that i took note of it, processed the note, and put it into long-term storage, so I could share it with you today. In case you’re curious:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/17/opinion/sports-zen-mental-subtraction.html