Creativity

I’ve caught James Bond stealing, and I would coach him to do it all over again

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I recently watched several old Bond movies, including the first one, Dr. No.

I was surprised by the scene that introduces the debonair Bond, which only happens 10+ minutes into the movie.

Of course, it’s at a high-end casino, at a baccarat table surrounded by women in gowns and men in tuxedos. A beautiful, aristocratic brunette is playing against a man not yet shown on camera. She keeps losing, getting more and more angry, and insisting on playing again.

Her off-camera opponent drawls with a Scottish accent. “I admire your courage, miss…?”

“Trench,” she says with a touch of irritation. “Sylvia Trench. I admire your luck, mister…?

The camera finally shows the handsome secret agent. He’s lighting a cigarette and looking immensely bored. “Bond. James Bond.”

Did you catch that?

“Bond. James Bond.” The most iconic item of Bond legend, along with the 007 designation and the stupid martini.

But even though it’s the main catch phrase people have associate with Bond for decades, it wasn’t his in the first place.

Mister Bond, James Bond, was simply mirroring what he had just heard from miss Trench, Sylvia Trench. You can even say he stole the cool introduction from the poor woman, along with her heart, and then made it his own.

And why not?

Over the past week, I’ve been lucky to draw the attention of a very successful and accomplished business owner, investor, and marketer.

He replied to one of my emails and gave me surprising encouragement and advice, including about creating high-ticket offers. $5k. $10k. $25k. Here’s a bit of what he wrote me:

“High-ticket copy offers are everywhere. I say the best artists steal from everyone to create completely new things that bring great value to the world. You might do just that as you create your value ladder, which I hope you are doing as you read this now.”

I read that yesterday morning, thought about it through the day, and started to apply it last night.

Today, I want to share it with you, in case you too have a list, and maybe even some offers, but nothing yet in what you might consider the high-ticket range.

Maybe like me, you’ve been thinking and waiting to create an offer in those higher price ranges. But like that very successful business owner wrote me, such offers are everywhere. You can mirror them, model them, and make them your own. Starting right now.

And if you want my help with that:

I offer coaching. I promote it as being coaching on writing daily emails. I do that because there’s something sexy to people about the idea of copywriting and email.

But the fact is, with the people I’ve coached so far, the coaching has been as much about creating new offers, or lead magnets, or ads, as it has been about writing emails. But don’t tell anybody that, because for some reason, email copywriting is really the thing that people want to be sold, and anything else might distract them.

I don’t often advertise this coaching program. I don’t often take on new students. I also don’t accept most people who express interest in this coaching.

But in case you are interested, reply to this email. Tell me a bit about yourself — who you are, what you do, who you do it for.

I’ll tell you if I think you’re in a place to benefit from the coaching. And if I think you are, we’ll get on a call to see if it’s a fit. A real fit.

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/

10 of my email ideas you are free to use

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I’ve spent the past hour preparing and attempting to write this email. Here are some of the ideas I approached and then discarded:

1. The strange, 100-year-old, menage-a-trois history that inspired Wonder Woman

2. How even classic comic books like Superman had woke politics behind them

3. A demonstration of an idea I heard during a Dan Kennedy seminar, that the opening of your writing should set the emotional tenor even if everything else is discarded

4. An email in which I pretend to promote the Brent Charleton offer that’s currently being promoted by Ian Stanley, Dan Ferrari, and Justin Goff, but then I come clean that I am in fact not promoting it (there was a point there, really)

5. Something like in the movie Fight Club, where they splice in a frame from a porn movie, but where I would do something similar but in an email? (I have no idea how)

6. Running a lottery within the actual email, with money bets and money prizes (I realized this is probably illegal)

7. Kicking off a P.T. Barnum-like hoax

8. Telling a personal story about myself and purposefully holding back key information

9. Writing up an email using the FREE framework I devised during my Age of Insight training (FREE is my alternative to the AIDA framework)

10. Thinking up some way to illustrate the following quote by legendary music producer Rick Rubin, who said, “Never judge an idea based on the description of the idea, show it to me”

I played around with all 10 of these ideas. Somehow, they didn’t come together. Maybe they will in the future. But even if they don’t, that’s fine, because at least I have my email for today.

The point I want to make to you today is something I read in John Cleese’s book Creativity.

​​Cleese, as you might know, was one of the members of comedy sketch troupe Monty Python. Later he had one of the most successful British sitcoms of all time, Fawlty Towers. He also made some very funny movies, including A Fish Called Wanda.

All that’s to say, Cleese is a creative guy. And in his book Creativity, about creativity, Cleese writes:

“You can’t have a new idea until you’ve gotten rid of an old one.”

That might seem obvious, but maybe seeing my discarded ideas above will make it stick in your head better. And the next time you are struggling to come up with one good idea, maybe will remember to quickly discard 10 bad ideas first, so you don’t end up taking an hour+ to write an email like I just did.

Anyways, all this was really just a build up to a little promotional plug I am about to make.

It’s for my Most Valuable Email course. What might not be obvious is that each of those 10 discarded ideas above was my unsuccessful attempt to put the Most Valuable Email trick in action.

It normally doesn’t take that long. But even if it does, it’s almost always worth it, at least in my experience.

In any case, if you would like to find out Most Valuable Email trick, and even start putting it in action (you can use any of my 10 ideas above if they work for you), here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Creativity for sticky, literal-minded, non-creative types like me

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I remember a negotiation I once had with a business owner, Mr. M. We were discussing a host-parasite relationship.

Mr. M organized conferences and masterminds composed of other business owners in his industry.

I provided a service that was of interest to those business owners — sales letter copy.

Mr. M offered to repeatedly refer people in his sphere of influence to me — for a 10% fee of what I made from his referrals.

“It’s a good deal,” he shrugged. “You wouldn’t ever have to hunt for new clients or negotiate fees. I know you must hate that since you’re a creative type.”

I just kept quiet. The fact is, I never minded hunting for clients or negotiating fees. And the other fact is, I’m far from a creative type. But why argue?

You might think it’s false modesty when I say I’m far from a creative type. After all, I write this newsletter, and I’ve done it every day for the past four years. Fine. Let me give you a snapshot from last night to illustrate:

Last night, I went to my Spanish class. We had a task to write a “Wanted” ad for our ideal roommate.

After a few minutes of creative idea generation, we went around the room sharing what we had come up with. Everybody had fun and surprising roommate criteria. I want a roommate who…

“Won’t organize parties without inviting me!”

“Knows how to cook food from around the world and is willing to share!”

“Is the same height as me so I can wear her clothes!”

My turn came. I looked down at my notes. “I want a roommate who can pay the bills.”

This isn’t about Spanish knowledge. It’s an example of something I’ve notice about myself over and over.

I’m extremely literal. My mind is sticky. It often jumps to the most immediate association and refuses to budge from there.

I’m telling you all this to maybe get you to budge.

I’ve repeatedly been told that what I write is creative, unique, surprising. And maybe it is. It’s certainly made good money for both my clients and for myself. Some of what I’ve written has even stood the test of time – if by time you are willing to accept months and years, instead of decades and centuries.

So here’s my bit of advice to get you to budge:

The secret is to recognize how your brain operates, and to work with it.

Business coach Rich Schefren likes to say, “Don’t put self-growth goals before business goals.” Meaning, don’t wait until you fix your laziness, procrastination, lack of money-motivation, fear of managing employees, flakiness, or distaste at self-promotion.

You will never fix those things, or it will take decades. If you want to start a business, start one now, and figure out how to make that business work in spite of all your faults.

Same thing with creative work. If you want to make a living off your ideas, insights, or just plain content, figure out a system that works with your brain. A system that allows you to consistently come up with creative, unique, surprising stuff, in spite of your natural literalness and mental stickiness.

I figured out a system that works for me. I will be describing it in my upcoming Insight Exposed training. If you like, you can get that training when it’s out, and it might give you one or two or three good ideas that allow you to be more creative, more consistently.

Insight Exposed is not released yet, but I will release it before the end of this month. So it makes sense to start seeding the idea in your head now.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking to create, start now. Write something.

And if you want a constraint, one that helps you be more creative instead of hindering you, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

One roadway to success as a copywriter and marketer

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This morning I found out that Active Campaign has this spreadsheet view of campaign results.

It allows you to sort and compare previous campaigns rather than just looking at the results for each campaign individually.

So I looked at the past three months of my emails. I was curious to see my most unsubscribed-from email over that time.

It turns out I sent this toxic email only last week. The subject line read, “The secret spider web of money and love opportunities.” It had more unsubscribers — both in actual number and as a percentage of the people who got the email — than the other 90+ emails I sent over that period.

Why was this email so reviled?

Maybe the subject line was too good, and it sucked in people who wouldn’t normally open.

Maybe the content was truly awful.

Maybe my unsubscribed readers didn’t like my tone. Maybe they felt I didn’t deliver on promise of love opportunities (all the unsubscribers were women, judging by names). Or maybe they just realized my list is not for them (several came from a classified ad I ran a few days prior).

So what’s my point?

I’m not sure. I don’t really have a smart conclusion to draw from this experiment.

Instead, let me share an interesting idea with you that I read in Jack Trout’s and Al Ries’s book Positioning:

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For many people or products today, one roadway to success is to look at what your competitors are doing and then subtract the poetry or creativity which has become a barrier to getting the message into the mind. With a purified and simplified message, you can then penetrate the prospect’s mind.

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Maybe I should take Ries & Trout’s advice. Let me try it right now:

If you want one roadway to success as a copywriter and marketer, then you can find that inside my Copy Riddles program.

Copy Riddles is based on an exercise devised by legendary copywriter Gary Halbert. Top marketers and copywriters, including Ben Settle and Parris Lampropoulos, have praised this exercise and said it’s how they got good at the craft and how they started writing winning ads and making lots of money.

If you’d like to find out what this exercise is, or even start practicing it yourself, click on the link below and start reading the page that opens up:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

The secret to better pizza, better emails

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Back in 2020, I reported on a saucy story involving Jack Trout.

Trout is one half of the team that wrote Positioning, which I still think is one of the best and most interesting books on marketing.

Once upon a time, Trout was in meeting with John Schnatter, the “papa” in Papa John’s Pizza.

Schnatter’s chain already had 1,000 locations around the country. But I guess he wanted more, and so he was talking to Trout.

Schnatter explained how Papa John’s makes pizza. “… and then we put the tomato sauce, which we get from Dino Cortopassi…”

“Hold up,” said Trout. “I know Dino. He doesn’t sell to chains. He only sells to small mom-and-pop shops. His stuff is fresh-packed and there’s not enough for chains. You’re telling you get your sauce from Dino?”

Schnatter nodded. A call to Dino himself confirmed it.

And so was born Papa John’s positioning:

“Better ingredients, better pizza.”

Is Papa John’s Pizza truly better? I can’t say. I’ve never had it. But the company grew five-fold in the years following the positioning change, and is worth some $3 billion today.

So let’s see how many billion I can make with the following positioning statement:

Better ingredients, better emails.

My claim is that, as for pizza, so for long-term marketing.

More interesting stories and more valuable ideas make for better emails. Independent of the copywriting pyrotechnics you invest in. Independent of the rest of your public persona, which builds you up into a legend worth listening to.

Maybe the fact that you are reading my email now, or have been reading my emails for a while, is proof of that.

But you gotta pay the piper somewhere.

Better ingredients for your emails are not free — free as in just sitting there in your head, right now, ready to be used.

The good news is, better ingredient are not hard to come by, and are not expensive.

They have been collected and sorted, organized and prepared for you, in low-cost receptacles known as books.

If you read the right books, you’re likely to find lots of interesting stories and lots of valuable ideas.

I had more to say on this topic. But I reserved that for people who are signed up to my email newsletter. If you are able to read, including books, then you might like to join my email newsletter as well. Click here to do so.

$2.5-billion Renaissance man’s advice for how to spend your evenings and afternoons

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Back in August, I wrote about Paul Graham. Graham is worth an estimated $2.5B.

That’s because a part of what Graham does is invest in early-stage startups, such as Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox. But Graham is more than just an investor.

He is also an entrepreneur himself — he started and sold multiple businesses. He is also a computer scientist and somewhat of an inventor — he created his own new programming language. He also paints paintings, writes books and essays, and for all I know, sings opera.

In other words, Graham is as close to a Renaissance man as you can get in 21st century.

Anyways, a couple days ago, Graham wrote a new essay in which he made the following argument:

In the science fiction books I read as a kid, reading had often been replaced by some more efficient way of acquiring knowledge. Mysterious “tapes” would load it into one’s brain like a program being loaded into a computer.

That sort of thing is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Not just because it would be hard to build a replacement for reading, but because even if one existed, it would be insufficient. Reading about x doesn’t just teach you about x; it also teaches you how to write.

Would that matter? If we replaced reading, would anyone need to be good at writing?

The reason it would matter is that writing is not just a way to convey ideas, but also a way to have them.

Cue my Insights & More Book Club.

This is a bonus I am offering with the Age of Insight live training.

With the Insights & More Book Club, you can get exposed to new books that I will choose specifically because they are likely to be insightful and perspective-shifting.

You can also see the kinds of notes I take and ideas I have as I am reading the book — I will share them with you as I go along.

And of course, you can read yourself. ​And then, we can get on a call every two months to discuss what we’ve read and how to use it.

​​In this way, Insights & More is both a book club — with quilts and tea and cookies — and a mastermind where we can talk about ways to apply ideas from the reading to your marketing and content and even offers.

By the way, I’ve realized over the years I am very good at getting info and ideas out of books. But I am also very, very slow. Hence, only one new book for the Insights & More Book Club every two months.

So if you are interested in ideas, writing, or making money, then you might be interested in joining my Age of Insight live training, and the Insights & More Book Club.

Registration closes in three days, on Wednesday 12 midnight PST. But I am only making this training open to people who are on my email newsletter. To get in before the doors close, sign up for my newsletter.

It may be a long time since you read this subject line

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I was standing in the kitchen this morning, making coffee for myself, when I had the idea for this email. I had to stop the coffee making and go write the idea down. Here it is:

A few weeks ago, a science paper went viral on the internet. It was titled, “Consciousness as a memory system.”

The paper gives a new theory of consciousness:

We don’t experience reality directly, the paper claims. We’re not looking out through any kind of window onto the reality outside.

We don’t even experience reality in any kind of real-time but transformed way. We’re not looking at a colorful cartoon that’s generated live, based on what’s going on outside right now.

Instead, we only have conscious experiences of our memories and of our imagined memories.

What you’re really looking at, right now, is a sketchbook, full of shifting drawings and notes of things that happened some time ago, or that never happened at all.

Maybe this new theory turns out to be false or obvious. Maybe it turns out to be profound and true. I personally find it interesting because it speaks to a practical experience I keep having:

If you don’t remember it, it might as well never have happened.

​​That’s why I had to stop the coffee making and go write down my idea for this email.

I’ve been writing newsletter for four years.

It’s more difficult than it might seem to write a 500-600-word email like this every day.

There are lots of stops, starts, discarded sentences and paragraphs.

To make it more complicated, my best ideas don’t happen while standing at my desk and trying to work. My best ideas often happen in a dim flash, while I’m in the shower, while driving, while trying to make coffee. Sometimes entire phrases, arguments, outlines for things I want to say, names, product concepts, inspired analogies, light up in my head. A moment later, that dim flash fades away.

You’ve probably heard the advice that, if you’re trying to make a habit of writing, then take notes all the time of interesting thoughts or observations you have.

It’s good advice, so let me repeat it:

If you’re trying to make a habit of writing, then take notes all the time of the interesting thoughts or observations you have.

And then, figure out a way to organize and store those notes into something that will be useful tomorrow, a month from now, even a year from now.

Now, get ready, because you’re about to have a conscious experience of a memory of a sales pitch:

I write a daily email newsletter. Many people say it’s interesting and insightful.

Search your memory banks right now. See whether you have a conscious experience of a memory of wanting to read more of my writing. If you find the answer is yes, then click here and fill out the form that appears.

Breaking News: I have an email surplus

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Yesterday, I was sitting on the couch trying to work.

The girl who was sitting next to me had her phone out. Suddenly, it started blaring with an English woman’s voice:

“I came into office at a time of great economic and international…”

I waited for a second, hoping that the noise would die down. The phone continued to blare:

“… instability. Families and businesses were worried about how to pay their…”

I frowned, both at the level of noise and the level of fluff. “What is this?” I asked the girl.

“It’s breaking news,” she said. “The UK’s Prime Minster just resigned.”

“Who cares?” I asked, hoping she would get the hint and turn the noise down.

“It’s breaking news!” she repeated.

I’m telling you this not to highlight how little I care for breaking news, though that’s certainly true.

I’m telling it to you to set up the fact that yesterday, when the UK’s Prime Minister resigned, was Thursday October 20.

Today, as I write this email, is Friday October 21.

And tomorrow, when this email will actually be sent out so you can read it, will be Saturday October 22.

In other words, I am a day ahead in my emails. I have an extra email written and scheduled — for the first time in something like 18 months.

The last time this happened was during my trip to Colombia in January 2021.

​​I was traveling with friends, and I was unsure that I’d have time each day to sit down and write a new email. So when I did find time to sit down, I’d write several emails at a time. By the end of that trip, I ended up with a surplus of a few days’ worth of emails.

The same thing happened this time.

​​I was traveling to London with a friend this past weekend. ​​Again, I was unsure when I might have time to sit down and write. Again, as a result of this, I wound up with an email surplus.

Which brings me to the paradoxical mathematics of email copywriting:

I find it’s often easier to write two, three, or 10 emails than to write one.

I can think of a few diff reasons why this is:

* More time spent on research…

* Less time spent on fiddling…

* And an overall tighter, clearer, faster structure for the emails in a batch of 10 than for a lone, lonely, and possibly bloated single email.

So my takeaway for you is, if you’re having a hard time writing a single email, set yourself the goal to write 10. Paradoxically, you might have an easier time of it.

And now, here’s some real breaking news:

Next week, I will be releasing my amazing Copy Riddles program for all the world to marvel at. I’m planning to throw a big and loud launch party in this newsletter, starting next Thursday and ending next Sunday. Maybe it will be a costume party, and if it is, I’ll dress up as Po the Kung Fu panda.

In case you’d like to be invited to that party, you can sign up for my daily email newsletter. Click here for the application.