Journals

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:

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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.

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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

Clicks of the dial

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Another day, another Airbnb.

​​Today I am in Warsaw, Poland because it was one of the few places in central Europe that won’t be raining for the next five days. And five days is how much time I have until I go to Gdansk for my first-ever live event to do with marketing and copywriting.

This morning, I woke up, carefully stepped down the circular staircase from the second floor of the apartment to the ground floor, located the inevitable Nespresso machine, popped in a capsule, and made myself a coffee.

And you see where this is going, don’t you?

If you have anything to do with marketing, you should. It’s a basic topic, so basic that I in fact wrote about it in the first month of this newsletter, back in September 2018.

The same marketing model is shared by Nespresso, by King Gillette’s safety razors-and-blades empire, and by info publishers like Agora and Ben Settle. They all promise you almost-irresistible sign-up premiums in order to get you paying for a continuity offer.

You almost certainly know this. Many people have talked about the same. It’s obvious. I won’t belabor the point.

Yesterday, I promised to tell the bigger point behind such models — models which might seem obvious, when somebody else points them out to you.

There’s a document floating around the Internet, legendary marketer Gary Halbert’s “Clicks of the Dial.”

It’s a collection of Gary’s “Most Treasured ‘First-Choice’ Marketing Tactics.”

I read this document once. I even shared a link to it in this newsletter last year.

But I never really got much out of Gary’s “Clicks of the Dial” list. I doubt the hundreds or thousands of my readers who downloaded Gary’s “Clicks of the Dial” got much out of it either.

That’s because there’s a big difference between, on the one hand, reading, nodding your head, and saying “hmm good idea”… and, on the other hand, observing, thinking a bit, and writing down your own conclusions.

So my point to you today is to open a new text file on your hard drive. Title it “Clicks of the Dial.” Break it up into three columns to start.

Name one column “traffic.” Name the second “conversion.” Name the third “consumption.”

And then, each time you go for a coffee, or a bagel, or a haircut, observe an obvious business or marketing practice you’re exposed to. Odds are, it’s been proven in hundreds or thousands of different situations. “Chunk up” that practice to make a model out of it. And write it down in your list in the appropriate column.

Gary Halbert’s entire “Clicks of the Dial” list was something like 20 items.

In other words, it won’t take you long to fill up your own “Clicks of the Dial” document to full.

​​Very soon, you can have a list of core business and marketing strategies, that you can cycle through, and solve pretty much any marketing problem by clicking the dial.

​​And since you put this list together yourself, based on your own experiences, it will actually mean something to you. Eventually, you might even appear to others to be a marketing jeenius like Gary himself.

As for me, it’s time to go get a brownie. I have a long list of food recommendations for what to eat in Warsaw, but only a limited amount of time and stomach space to do so.

Meanwhile, if you have no more interest in reading anything from me, because you’ve determined to learn all of marketing and copywriting by observation and thinking, there is nothing more I can tell you, except farewell and good luck. On the other hand, if you do want to hear from me every day, with more ideas and occasional inspiration, you can sign up for my daily email newsletter here.

I bet you already knew what I’ll write about in this email

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Last night I went to see Air, the new Ben Affleck movie about how Nike signed Michael Jordan.

Air is a typical rousing Hollywood stuff — a scrappy underdog does what it takes to win. It was fun to watch, but as the movie neared its emotional climax, I started to feel a kind of gnawing in my stomach.

I kept thinking, “This is it? This is what life is all about?”

A bunch of overworked, overweight, aging people in an office, hollering and high-fiving each other and gazing knowingly into each others’ eyes after their one triumph — getting a 21-year-old basketball player to agree to wear one kind of shoe instead of another kind of shoe?

But the movie is set in the 1980s. Maybe it reflects the corporate ideals of that era.

Anyways, let’s get back on track:

At the start of the movie, a convenience store clerk chats with the main character, played by Matt Damon. The clerk obviously knows a lot about basketball, and is sure Jordan won’t turn into anything big. The Matt Damon character is the only one who believes.

By the end of the movie, thanks to Matt Damon’s dogged believing, Nike signs Jordan in spite of impossible odds. Jordan immediately becomes a huge star. Nike goes on to sell a hundred million pairs of Air Jordans in the first year alone.

Matt Damon goes back to the convenience store and chats up the clerk again. The clerk nods his head. “I always knew Jordan would be a big thing,” he says.

“We all knew,” the Matt Damon character chuckles as he walks out the store.

As I’m sure you already knew, human memory is fallible. We forget, misremember, and flat-out make up stuff if it suits us and matches our sense of self.

You might think this only happens over the span of months or years, like it did with that convenience store clerk in Air.

But maybe you saw — and failed to remember — a new scientific study that went viral earlier this month. Scientists managed to show that people misremember stuff that happened as recently as half a second ago. And if the scientists stretched it out just a bit longer before asking — two seconds, three seconds — people’s memory became still worse and more inaccurate.

So my point for you, specifically for how you deal with yourself, is to write stuff down. Because you sure as hell won’t remember it.

And my point for you, specifically for how you deal with your prospects, is to keep reminding them, nudging them, and telling them the same thing you told them a million times before.

You rarely have people’s full attention. And even when you do have their full attention, they forget. Even if you just told them a second ago.

The only way your prospects are sure not to forget, and to maybe do what you want, is if you remind them today, tomorrow, the day after, and so on, hundreds of millions of Air Jordans into the future.

Which brings me to the group coaching I am planning. I first wrote about it yesterday. Now that I mention it, I’m sure you remember.

This planned group coaching is about email copywriting for daily emails — so you can remind your prospects of your offer over and over, in a way that they actually enjoy.

If you’re interested in this coaching, the first step is to get onto my email list. Click here to do that.

I was shamed this morning by Dan Kennedy’s disembodied voice

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I went for a walk this morning before starting work, and as I was stepping out onto the sunny street, I felt a flash of guilt.

“You won’t amount to much this way,” I heard a disembodied but familiar voice say to me.

I shrugged it off. I told myself that I was doing the right thing for me. Still, for a moment, that voice, and that tiny cloud of guilt covered up the Barcelona morning sun.

The voice belonged to marketer, copywriter, and prolific content machine Dan Kennedy, who was speaking somewhere in my head.

Dan’s voice was talking to me because I’d gotten up around 7:45am, it was now around 8:30am, and I was going out for a walk, which meant I wouldn’t get back to the apartment and to work before 9:15am.

On the other hand, as that disembodied voice reminded me, Dan trained himself to get up in the morning, go to the bathroom, and shuffle to his writing desk, all within 15 mins.

That’s one part of why Dan has been able to write dozens of books, hundreds of newsletters, thousands of “Weekly faxes” and probably millions of words of sales copy to promote his own business and the businesses of the wagonfuls of clients he has worked with — all finished each day before 4pm.

Like I say, skipping a morning walk and getting to work right away is one part of why Dan has been able to do so much. But thankfully, it’s not the only part.

Dan once said that he wrote his No B.S. Time Management book in a weekend — Saturday, Sunday, and a bit of Monday.

244 pages… fifteen chapters… hundreds of personal stories, business case studies, metaphors and analogies… all done in two-and-a half days.

How?

Turns out Dan had most of the stuff already written, either as rough chunks of content, or as stories he had used earlier, or as elements from other books, newsletters, and faxes. But not only that.

He had all this stuff organized in boxes with labels on them. I don’t know the specifics of Dan’s boxing and labeling system. It doesn’t particularly matter, since I don’t work mainly on my laptop, and I want stuff I can search and store digitally.

What does matter is that Dan’s boxes of content, and the labels on those boxes, allowed him to pull out all this material on Saturday morning… look over it… glue it all together… tweak some transitions here and there… and produce a book by Monday afternoon.

And not just any book. A career-defining book. A book that’s gone on to sell tens of thousands of copies, that has led to millions in client and product sales, and that has become Dan’s most influential, and cult-building book, if Amazon reviews are anything to go by.

It might sounds impossible, but you can do this too.

It won’t be automatic, and it will take time and work. But if you’ve decided that writing is for you, that you want to influence people, that you want to make good money doing so, then this kind of organization — whether you use a system of text files or a bunch of cardboard boxes — can make you drastically more productive. Miraculously so.

I’ve been crowing about my Insight Exposed system for the past few days, because it can help you get to this level of organization more quickly than you might do otherwise.

Insight Exposed lays out my own system for labeling, organizing, retrieving, and gluing together ingredients for written content and sales copy. There are no cardboard boxes and no post-it notes in my system. It’s all digital, but you can adapt it to whatever “technology” you like.

Insight Exposed is only available to people who are signed up to my email list. In case you are interested in it, you can sign up for my list here.

An “eery dejà vu feeling” from my Fight Club email last night

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Last night, I sent out an email about going to see Fight Club at a local movie theater. To which I got the following reply from copywritress Liza Schermann, who has been living the “barefoot writer” life in sunny Edinburgh, Scotland. Liza wrote:

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Seeing this email in my inbox provoked an eery dejà vu feeling. I had just gone over the part of Insight Exposed where you have a screenshot of this note from your journal. For a split second, I had no idea where I’d seen this before. Then I remembered.

Like an open kitchen restaurant, only for email. The email that was getting cooked right before my eyes a few minutes ago is now served. Thank you, Chef Bejakovic! 👨‍🍳

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I remember hearing marketer and copywriter Dan Kennedy say once that you shouldn’t ever let clients see you writing copy, because it’s not impressive work and it spoils the mystique.

That might be good advice, but I definitely don’t heed it Insight Exposed, my new training about how I take notes and keep journals.

Like Liza says, Insight Exposed is like an open kitchen. I smile from beneath my chef’s hat, I explain the provenance of a few recent emails, and I show you the various animal bits and pieces from which the email sausage was made.

Let me be clear:

Insight Exposed is not a copywriting training. But it shows you something that may be more important and valuable than copywriting technique. It shows you how I go from a bit of information I spotted somewhere and expand it into something that makes people buy, remember, share, and maybe even change their own minds.

I am only making Insight Exposed available to people who are signed up to my email list. In case you are interested in Insight Exposed, you can sign up for my list here.

I am not dangerous, but I am interested in dangerous people

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This past September, I went to the Barcelona Martial Arts Academy for my third-ever attempt at training Brazilian jujitsu.

My second-ever attempt was 10 years ago, in the gym of an elementary school in Budapest, Hungary. My first-ever attempt was freshman year of college, in Santa Cruz, California, in the school of a proper Brazilian-born BJJ champion.

On each attempt, I didn’t last more than a few months. But obviously there’s something that appeals to me about the sport, since I keep thinking about it and coming back to it decade after decade.

All that’s to say, I am not in any way dangerous, in spite of multiple attempts to become so. But I am interested in dangerous people. And I’d like to tell you something surprising I just learned from a very dangerous man.

A few days ago, while at the gym, I got to listening to an interview with Frank Shamrock. Shamrock was the first UFC Middleweight Champion. He was the No. 1-ranked pound-for-pound fighter in the world during his reign. He retired undefeated from the UFC.

At the start of that interview I listened to, Shamrock matter-of-factly said he achieved all this by becoming the world’s first “superathlete.” I don’t have an exact definition of what a “superathlete” is, but I do get the gist of what Shamrock means.

So the question then becomes, how did Shamrock become the world’s first “superathlete”? From the interview:

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I was the only guy with a notebook, for years. That’s one of the reasons I figured it out. Cause I wrote it down, asked questions, created a theory. Practice, apply, if it works, put it in stone.

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I felt quite dangerous after hearing this. Frank Shamrock keeps a notebook, and so do I.

Of course, my notebook is not about the best ways to break people. But I do have a notebook about the best ways to persuade people. It works the same way. Find a new idea, write it down, apply it. Review the results, if it works, put it in stone.

I’m currently promoting my Insight Exposed training. It talks about the system I’ve devised for keeping notebooks, journals, keeping track of good ideas, reflecting to get better.

​​This system has made me exponentially better at copywriting, at marketing, at persuasion. But it’s done much more than that as well. I use the same journaling system for everything. Enjoying life… a project I call “religion”… even the process of journaling itself.

Which brings up an anti-sales point:
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The fact is, nobody needs my Insight Exposed training. You can take Frank Shamrock’s approach above and apply it to become the world’s first “supernotetaker.” That’s what I did, and in time, it worked out just fine.

The only reason you might want my Insight Exposed training is that it can tell you the lessons I’ve learned, so you can save hours or days of your time along your journey. Even more importantly, getting Insight Exposed today might get you working on your own “superhuman” system now, instead of in a year from now.

I’m only making Insight Exposed available to people who are signed up to my daily email newsletter. In case you’d like to get on my email list, click here and fill out the form that appears.

“How is being clever working out for you?”

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A few months ago, I went to a local old-school movie theater and queued in a line that stretched around the block. In the entire line, there were maybe three women. The rest were all guys, mostly young guys, under 25.

The movie being shown was Fight Club.

I got several valuable snapshots from that experience. The most valuable was an exchange from the actual movie, a scene in which the main character, “the Narrator,” played by Ed Norton, meets Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt.

The two are sitting next to each other on a plane. Tyler starts telling the Ed Norton character how you can make all kinds of explosives using simple household items. And then the following exchange goes down:

NARRATOR: Tyler, you are by far the most interesting single-serving friend I have ever met. [Pause.] See I have this thing, everything on a plane is single-serving—

TD: Oh, I get it. It’s very clever.

NARRATOR Thank you.

TD: How is that working out for you? Being clever?

NARRATOR [a little unnerved, shrugs his shoulders.] Great.

TD: Keep that up then. Keep it right up.

I read an article a few months ago, The Impotence of Being Clever. It’s one of a few related blips on my radar. Another was a second article, Beware What Sounds Insightful.

Both articles circle around the growing mass-realization that things that sound clever and insightful often aren’t — that “insightful” is a brand of shiny varnish that can be applied to any cheap furniture.

Last fall, I put on a live training called Age of Insight. It was all about exactly this brand of shiny varnish. About presentation techniques that take any idea and make it sound profound.

I’ve done a ton of thinking about this topic, and as a result, Age of Insight is the most in-depth treatment of it that anybody has created, at least to my knowledge.

Like I wrote back when I was putting on that training, I believe insightful presentation techniques will become mandatory in coming years. You will have to know them and use them, just like you have to know copywriting techniques to effectively sell a product, at least if you want to do it in writing.

There’s a deeper parallel there:

You can use copywriting techniques to sell a mediocre product. And you will sell some of it, definitely more than if you didn’t use proven copywriting techniques. But you are unlikely to sell a lot of it, or sell it for very long.

On the other hand, you can use copywriting techniques to sell a good or even great product. You can make a fortune doing that, feel good about it, and even enjoy the process for the long term.

The same with this insight stuff.

You can use insightful presentation techniques to sell a mediocre idea. And you will do better than if you didn’t use them at all.

But if you also find a genuinely novel, surprising, even mind-blowing idea, and then use insight techniques to sell that — well, the result can be explosive, and it can survive for the long term.

I’m not sure when will I re-release Age of Insight, which deals with the presentation side. But right now, I’m releasing Insight Exposed, which is about good or great “insight products” — meaning novel, surprising, even mind-blowing ideas.
Insight Exposed is only available to people who are on my email list. If you’d like to get on my list, click here and fill ou the form that appears.

Announcing: Insight Exposed

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Today, I’m launching a new course, Insight Exposed. It reveals the secret weapon behind my ability to write insightful content: my own home-brewed journaling, note-taking, and archiving system.

The launch will run through this Saturday. I have a lot more to say about Insight Exposed, but since this course is only available to people who are signed up to my email list, there’s no sense in sharing all that publicly.

In case you are interested in Insight Exposed, or in developing your own journaling and note-taking system, one that could save you hundreds of hours of work, you might want to get on my email list. Click here to do that.

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.

3 ways for freelancers to lose less

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A few days ago, I wrote a post about loser’s games:

Situations in life where the outcome is all about what the loser does… rather than what the winner does.

I wrapped up that post with advice given to amateur tennis players. “Lose less. Avoid trying too hard. And keep the ball in play.”

To which a freelance copywritress wrote in to ask:

“How do you lose less in freelancing? Not trying too hard and keeping the ball in the game is straightforward. But I wasn’t able to figure out how I could lose less. Any insights or tips would be much appreciated by this seasoned loser.”

My answer was that losing less is about all the stuff that’s really 100% within our control, but we muck up for reasons of our own. Like…

There’s a great job that you want to apply to, but you convince yourself not to do it, or you don’t do it in time.

Or…

Client comes to you and says, “Here’s what I need” and you say, “Yes boss” instead of saying, “What’s the ultimate goal you’re looking to achieve by doing this?”

Or…

You hear 50k times that you’re charging too little and yet you still don’t raise your rates.

Basically, losing is self-sabotage and mistakes that we really can’t blame on anybody else. And losing less is not doing that.

Of course, maybe that’s just deflecting the question. How exactly do you not make mistakes and avoid self-sabotage, whatever form it takes?

I’ve got three unsexy but true ideas for you:

1. Habit. Start small and low risk. Build from there.

2. Willpower. Sleep. Eat. Drink your orange juice. Grit your teeth.

3. Self-awareness.

Because those three losing behaviors above, those are all things I did and sometimes still do. But maybe they aren’t exactly your own.

Whatever yours are, identify them. In the spur of the moment those losing behaviors just happen. You shrug them off, either blaming circumstance or yourself.

But if you take time and identify them… that can sometimes be all you need to change when loserliness threatens next.

I’ve got my own homebrewed journaling system for this. In fact I’ve got close to 30 separate journals, for different aspects of my life.

In each journal, I ask myself, what happened? What did I do right? What could I have done better?

This doesn’t always mean I never act like a seasoned loser. But when I do act like a loser, that goes into a journal, and maybe reduces the chance of it happening again. And if you sometimes play loser’s games… this might be worth a try for you too.

By the way, one of the journals I keep is all about interesting and novel ideas for emails. Because I write a daily email newsletter. If you’d like to read some of the ideas I write about, you can sign up for it here.