Learning

You are most probably a cat person

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Yesterday at 3:55pm, I stacked two books under my laptop for a more flattering camera angle, did one final check of my hair, and fired up Zoom.

I was doing a call with Kieran Drew for people who bought his High Impact Writing course.

​​This part of Kieran’s birthday bash series, where he interviewed five people who make their living by writing, including 8-figure course creator Olly Richards, email marketer Chris Orzechowski, and A-list copywriter David Deutsch. And me. ​​

The conversation with Kieran ran for more than an hour. I really enjoyed it.

I will tell you one bit that came up early, and kept coming up in various guises, because it’s probably relevant to you.

Kieran said how social media, in spite of the success it’s given him, drives him crazy.

​​I said how I, in spite of managing my little email business without the help of social media, get pangs of envy when I see how well Kieran’s doing thanks to Twitter and LinkedIn.

And so it goes.

I know agency owners who want to become high-ticket coaches. High-ticket coaches who want to become course creators. Course creators who want to start up an agency.

Legendary curmudgeon Dan Kennedy once summed it up by saying, “People are like cats. They always want to be in the other room.”

At this point, you might expect me to get all preachy and say, ​​”You gotta be happy with whatchu got… you gotta keep your nose down and persist at what you’re doing… you gotta stop yourself from getting distracted by the greenness of your neighbors lawn…”

But like another famous curmudgeon, William Shakespeare, once said, “There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

There’s nothing inherently bad about the fact we’re always looking for new opportunities, improvements, or simply a change from what we already have.

It’s just a part of life.

And rather than saying that’s not how it should be, it makes more sense, to me at least, to accept it adjust to it. To be aware of the drive to go into the other room, to be selective about when you respond to that drive, and to realize that the same drive will most probably crop up even in that other room.

And if you want, you can start practicing that right now.

Because until tomorrow, Saturday, at 12 midnight PST, I have a special, free, other-room bonus if you buy my Simple Money Emails course.

The bonus is the “lite” version of Matt Giaro’s $397 course Subscribers From Scratch. It will show you how Matt grew his email list, with high-quality subscribers who paid for themselves, via little newsletter ads.

I’ve tried this strategy myself in the past, and it worked great for me. I got hundreds of new subscribers, and most often they paid for themselves on day zero.

So if you are sick of social media as a means of growing your list, or if you never wanted to get on social media to start with, then Matt’s course can show you a real alternative.

That said, this newsletter ad approach has its own downsides as well.

Like all other means of growing your list, it will require some work to set up.

Like all other means of growing your list, it will require some work to keep going.

And unlike many other means of growing your list, say Facebook ads or even social media, newsletter ads won’t ever get you tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

But if you want to get a few dozen or a few hundred new subscribers at a time, and you want to get subscribers who actually read your stuff and buy your offers, then newsletter ads can be a good option.

And Matt’s course will show you how to do it.

Again, you get it as a free bonus if you get Simple Money Emails by the deadline, tomorrow, Saturday, at 12 midnight PST. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/​​

P.S. ​​If you bought Simple Money Emails previously, this offer applies to you as well. So does the deadline.

​​You should have gotten an email from me with instructions on how to claim Matt’s Subscribers From Scratch Lite. If you didn’t get the email, then write me and I will sort it out.

Far ahead of the pack

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It’s Sunday today, and since I live in Spain, that means the world wakes up slowwwwly. But not this morning.

This morning, around 9am, I was in my living room when I heard whistling downstairs. Angry, insistent whistling.

This wasn’t some preteen girls — in my experience, the usual whistlers in my neighborhood. It didn’t sound like them, and it was too early. I went out on the balcony to investigate.

It turns out there was a race to be run. I’m guessing a 10K.

My building is right on the corner of Avinguda Diagonal, the main avenue that cuts across Barcelona. The runners were supposed to run down Diagonal.

The whistling appears to have been a police officer who had spotted a parked car trying to sneak onto the avenue and into the race course.

As I stood on the balcony, a pace car passed by. A few moments later, two cops on motorcycles followed, with their sirens flashing. And then came the front runner.

He zoomed by.

​​After him, there was a minute or two of absolutely nobody.

Then, finally, a couple more runners in second and third place. I’m guessing the rest of the field was far behind.

This reminded me of last year’s Barcelona marathon, which I also witnessed from my balcony.

At around 10am, a small group of Kenyans and Ethiopians ran by my building. After them, there was nobody.

I lost interest and went back inside. I read for a while. I got dressed. I went for a walk to the beach. I came back. It was around noon by this time.

And as I was coming back to my building, I saw the rest of the field — thousands of people, wearing funny costumes, pushing wheelchairs, getting cheered on — jogging along where the Kenyans and Ethiopians had sprinted by, almost two hours earlier.

All that’s to say, most of us can run. But there’s levels to it.

There’s me, trotting along for about 200 yards before saying, screw this.

There’s recreational joggers.

There’s serious hobbyists who do triathlons.

There’s professional runners.

And then, there’s the small group of Kenyans and Ethiopians, far ahead of the pack, winning the biggest races and setting records.

Mmmm… maybe it’s the same with your chosen profession?

I don’t know what you do. But I can tell you I did direct response copywriting as a profession for a number of years.

I thought I was pretty good at it. In fact, I know I was. Still am. Pretty good. But there’s levels to it.

I’ve never competed at the highest levels, against the best-of-the-best copywriters, for the biggest prizes. And maybe that’s a good thing. Statistically speaking, odds are good I would get my ass handed to me.

Because there’s levels to it.

The good news is, unlike marathon running, writing copy can be a slowwww and deliberate activity.

Yes, there is creativity and talent involved. That’s a part of what sets the A-list copywriters apart from everyone else who might just be pretty good.

But there are also learnable strategies. Tricks. Even hacks, which the A-listers use that you don’t use.

But you could use them. If you only knew them. And you could profit from them.

Because unlike in marathon running, the prizes from sales copy don’t just go to the top three Kenyans or Ethiopians.

If you can take one or two strategies from the very best copywriters, and apply them to what you’re doing, it could be worth hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to you.

That might sound like hype and exaggeration. But it’s just the nature of direct marketing, where a small advantage, multiplied over a large number of prospects, can produce a lot of wealth quickly.

So would you be interested in owning the strategies, tricks, and hacks of the very best A-list copywriters, the ones who are far ahead of the pack?

​​If so, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/academy/cr/

How CopyHour changed my life (no joke)

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This week, until Thursday at 8:31pm CET, I am promoting Derek Johanson’s CopyHour program. I’ve never gone through CopyHour myself. And yet it changed my life.

By the time I found out about CopyHour, around 2017, I had already been handcopying successful ads and sales letters on my own.

That’s what CopyHour is about, and it’s a worthwhile exercise.

Maybe I can say more about hand copying ads in a future email. But not now, because that’s not how CopyHour changed my life.

Back in 2017, there was not the the glut of copywriting courses and education that there is now. So I eagerly joined the CopyHour group Facebook group to see if I could maybe learn something on the sly.

Back then, the Facebook group was where Derek delivered the trainings that go with the handcopying work. I could see Derek was legit, had experience and expertise, and had put in time and effort to make CopyHour a really great program.

For example, this group was where I first got exposed to the book Great Leads. It’s a valuable book. But more importantly, it turned on some light in my dim brain and turned me on to the idea that maybe I should find some classic books about copywriting and read those.

This led me down a deep rabbit hole of reading and research which helped make me a drastically better copywriter in time.

But that still not how CopyHour changed my life.

How CopyHour changed my life is that I got on Derek’s email list.

During the next launch of CopyHour, Derek sent a bunch of emails to promote the program. One of those emails was actually not written by him but by a copywriter named Dan Ferrari.

At the time, Dan was a star copywriter at financial publisher Motley Fool. Dan’s story is classic bizopp rags to riches — from subsisting on four teaspoon of olive oil for breakfast because that’s all he could afford, to writing a control with his second sales letter at Motley Fool and soon pulling in millions of dollars in copywriting royalties.

“Hm,” I said, “maybe I should see if this dude has his own email list.”

I found Dan’s site. I signed up to his list. And what followed was… nothing. No emails. Not for almost two years.

Long story even longer, one day in 2019, Dan finally sent out an email asking his list if anyone was in the Baltimore-Washington area at the moment. As luck would have it, I was there at the time.

That email led to me joining Dan’s small coaching group a few months later… learning directly from Dan… hitching my wagon in part to Dan’s rising star… and making, as a direct consequence of a few words of Dan’s advice inside that coaching program, some hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But let’s wrap this story up:

The program that Dan credits for taking him from the olive oil subsistence breakfast to being a control-beating star copywriter at Motely Fool is — CopyHour.

The reason I found Dan and ended up learning copywriting from him is — CopyHour.

That’s my story.

Yours, I don’t know? Maybe it can start today.

Derek has opened the doors to CopyHour today. He will close them on Sunday because CopyHour is a real-time program.

But while Derek’s doors will stay open until Sunday, I will give you a reason to act now. If you join CopyHour before this Thursday at 8:31pm CET, and you do so using my affiliate link below, I will give you the following five free bonuses:

#1. Copy Zone (price last sold at: $100). My 175-page, A-Z guide on the business side of copywriting, from getting started with no experience or portfolio, all the way to becoming an A-list copywriter. Only ever sold once before, during a flash 24-hour offer in March 2023.

#2. Most Valuable Postcard #2: Ferrari Monster (price last sold at: $100). A deep dive into a single fascinating topic — code named Ferrari Monster — which I claim is the essence of all copywriting and marketing. Get the Ferrari Monster right, and almost everything else falls into place.

#3. Copy Riddles Lite (price last sold at $99). A slice of my Copy Riddles program, proportionately priced. Try yourself against legendary A-list copywriters like Gene Schwartz, David Deutsch, and Clayton Makepeace — and in the process, implant new copywriting skills into your brain.

#4. Horror Advertorial Swipe File (price last sold at: $100). A zip file with 25 PDFs, featuring the original copy for 25 of my horror advertorials. These advertorials pulled in millions of dollars on cold Facebook and YouTube traffic, and sold everything from fake diamonds and dog seat belts, to stick-on bras and kids’ vitamins.

#5. 9 Deadly Email Sins (price last sold at: $100). 9 lessons distilled from my expensive and exclusive one-on-one coaching sessions with successful business owners and marketers.

In the past, I’ve sold each of these trainings at the prices listed. When you add all those prices up, you get a total of $499 in free bonuses. This happens to be more than CopyHour currently sells for.

That said, don’t join CopyHour just to get my free bonuses. Join because you decide that you will do the work involved in CopyHour, and that you will benefit from it.

For more info on that, take a look at Derek’s writeup of how CopyHour works:

https://bejakovic.com/copyhour

About all those idiots who are more successful than you…

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A reader writes in reply to my email yesterday:

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Yep I’ve been seeing pro copywriters getting away with mid copy — functional but not exceptional, well done but nothing I couldn’t have done, just basics well executed. Yet they are raking it in.

Still I’m more drawn to innovative copywriters like Daniel Throssell and you, who have the potential to produce 95-99% outcomes (as opposed to 80% outcomes). However if I’m seeking profit maximisation (not always the case…) perhaps I should consider going darkside.

===

My email yesterday wasn’t about the light side vs dark side, exceptional vs mediocre. It was about fundamental, proven, and often simple approaches… vs novel, risky, and often complex approaches.

That said, my reader’s comment above is still valuable.

It expresses a feeling that’s pretty much universal in human beings.

And that’s the feeling that “all these idiots are running around, way more successful than me. They must have some kind of angle. They have a secret, a trick, a shortcut. It’s either they have access I don’t, or they do things I won’t because I’m better than that.”

I’m not judging. I regularly feel this feeling bubble up inside me as well.

All I am telling you is that if you write sales copy, then this feeling is almost certainly there in your audience. It makes sense to use it as a sales point.

On the other hand, this belief is not useful to have yourself, not long-term.

It’s a much better to look at people you’re competing with, and figure out what you can admire about them.

This little habit alone can help you succeed. Because when you find things to admire about your competition, you will often end up adopting those characteristics. And you will improve as a result.

I did this once. I even wrote it up as an email. In case you’d like to read that:

Things “worthy of compliment” in 12 of my competitors

Ooooo, child!

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Last weekend, my friend Sam and I went to Savannah. On the drive there, we started started listening to an audiobook of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

That was a 1994 non-fiction book that stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for a remarkable 216 weeks.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil consists of a bunch of character studies of various eccentrics who lived in Savannah in the 1970s and 80s. The book cuts through Savannah society, from the rich and established to the poor and fringe.

Among the poor and fringe was Miss Chablis, “The Empress of Savannah.”

Chablis was a black drag queen.

The narrator of the audiobook, who normally speaks with a neutral accent, voiced Chablis, like all other Savannah locals, with a kind of southern drawl.

Except that in the case of Miss Chablis, the narrator, who sounded solidly white and male otherwise, also had to awkwardly act out dozens of draq-queeny, Black-English phrases such as:

“Ooooo, child!”

“Oh, child, don’t you be doin’ that!”

“Y-e-e-e-s, child! Yayyiss… yayyiss… yayyiss!”​​

I had flashbacks to this earlier today.

I got back to Barcelona yesterday. I checked my mailbox and found a stack of New Yorkers waiting for me.

This morning, I sat on my balcony and flipped open the latest one. The first feature story is about Ru Paul.

“Ooooo, child!” I said, “No more drag queens, honey, please!”

But as I often do, I forced myself to read something I had no inclination to read. I often find valuable things that way.

Today was no exception. I found the following passage in the first page of the article. Jinkx Monsoon, a 36-year-old drag queen who won two seasons of Ru Paul’s reality competition TV show, explained the power of drag:

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It’s armor, ’cause you’re putting on a persona. So the comments are hitting something you created, not you. And then it’s my sword, because all of the things that made me a target make me powerful as a drag queen.

===

If you have any presence online, this armor-and-sword passage is good advice. It’s something that the most successful and most authentic-seeming performers out there practice.

I once saw a serious sit-down interview with Woody Allen. I remember being shocked by how calm, confident, and entirely not Woody-Allen-like he was.

Closer to the email world, I remember from a long time ago an email in which Ben Settle basically said the same thing as Jinkx Monsoon above. How the crotchety, dismissive persona he plays in his emails is a kind of exaggeration and a mask he puts over the person he is in real life.

So drag is good advice for online entrepreneurs.

But like much other good advice, It’s not something I follow in these emails.

I haven’t developed an email persona, and I’m not playing any kind of ongoing role to entertain my audience or to protect me from their criticism.

That’s because I don’t like to lie to myself. Like I’ve said many times before, I write these emails for myself first and foremost, and then I do a second pass to make sure that what I’ve written can be relevant and interesting to others as well.

This is not something I would encourage anybody else to do. But it’s worked out well enough for me, and allowed me to stay in the game for a long time.

That said, I do regularly adopt various new and foreign mannerisms in these emails.

I do this because i find it instructive and fun, and because it allows me to stretch beyond the person/writer I am and become more skilled and more successful.

I’ve even created an entire training, all about the great value of this approach.

In case you’d like to become more skilled and successful writing online, then honey, I am serious! You best look over here, child:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

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.

===

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

AI expert tells you how to learn copywriting

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I’m preparing for the live presentation I’m supposed to give at The Copywriter Club London event on Wednesday.

My flight is tomorrow, and then Wednesday afternoon I’m supposed to perform.

While I’m not yet at full-blown levels of panic, there is still a lot more I would like to do to prepare. I hope that with preparation I can minimize the shock and horror and chance of humiliation when I actually do get up in front of people and talk on Wednesday.

All that’s to say, don’t expect any involved Bejako Baggins emails today. I have to keep today’s email short and to the point.

So let me pull out a bit of credibility I’ve been sitting on for a few weeks.

This bit of credibility comes from Steve Raju, who has transformed himself over the past year from your run-of-the-mill genius into a high-paid corporate AI whisperer.

Though it’s worth noting that, previous to this new AI career, Steve was a direct response copywriter. He even taught copywriting, both on his own trainings and inside Stefan Georgi’s thing.

Anyways, in the middle of a characteristically charming email a few weeks ago, Steve got serious for a moment to give some advice to those who want to learn copywriting:

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Write every day. I never knew a single writer who got better about writing, without umm… writing. Write headlines, leads and closes. Write emails. Write ads. Launch your own offers. Learn what works. And of all the things to learn to write well, learn to write bullets. Best person to learn from? John Bejakovic and his Copy Riddles course. The best course of them all. I’m really not joking.

===

I am also not joking when I say that, during the few minutes it’s taken me to put together this email, a wave of nausea has washed over me, caused I suppose by that impending presentation in London.
​
So if you don’t mind, I’ll go now and pull my hair a bit and then get back to work on that presentation.

Meanwhile, if you would like to learn to write bullets, so you can learn to write better copy in general, and who knows, maybe even better presentations, then here’s what Steve calls the best course of them all:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

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

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

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

===

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

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

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

But on to business:

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

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

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

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Very smart man: The unconscious is not what you think it is

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I came by the following inspiring idea via Justin Murphy’s Other Life newsletter.

The idea itself comes from Bertrand Russell. Russell was what you might call an all-around very smart man. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature — he did write some 70 books and 2,000 articles — but he was really a philosopher and mathematician.

I’m telling you this because the idea in the following quote is not provable, but is the result of introspection. The fact that Russell was very smart might give it some extra weight when you read it. Anyway, here’s Russell’s idea:

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My own belief is that a conscious thought can be planted into the unconscious if a sufficient amount of vigour and intensity is put into it. Most of the unconscious consists of what were once highly emotional conscious thoughts, which have now become buried.

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Like I said, I found this inspiring.

In this view, your unconscious is no longer some dark ocean, which has its own impulses that toss you about like a little raft on the surface.

Your unconscious is not even some bizarre supercomputer that you can tap into via visualization, NLP, or psychocybernetics.

Instead, your unconscious is just what went on in your head previously — experiences and thoughts deposited, compressed, perhaps fused together via pressure and time.

The reason to be inspired is that what you think about today will be with you in the future. This gives you both power and responsibility, like Peter Parker, regarding what you’re doing and thinking right now.

Incidentally, a great way to think about worthwhile stuff and to do so with intensity is to write.

​​When you’re writing, you will come up with distinctions and observations you wouldn’t come up with if you try to hold on to a few thoughts in your head.

And if you’re already writing, you might as well publish it, and send it out into the world. If you figured out or discovered something good, others will benefit from it too. And that comes back to you in time. ​​Besides, writing to others will make you try harder.

All of these are are reasons why personal daily emails, like what you’re reading right now, are a great format.

And if you do decide to write daily emails, with a view to power and responsibility, then you might as well do it in the most valuable way using my most Valuable Email trick.

I’m tiptoeing the line here of giving away too much of what this training is about.

So let me just say Most Valuable Email is about putting vigor and intensity into thinking about marketing or copywriting or influence.

​​It’s about writing a fun and often shareable email about it.

​And it’s about having new skills and attitudes planted deep into your unconscious, from where they can emerge, months or years down the line, exactly when you need them.

For more on Most Valuable Email, or to get started right now:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

The comeback secret of a humiliated Major League pitcher

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I read an interesting article this week about Colorado Rockies pitcher Daniel Bard, who was infected multiple times with the yips.

Bard started out a baseball prodigy. Even in his teens, he could throw at close to 100 miles per hour.

In one famous, high-pressure situation, while pitching for the Red Sox, Bard came on with the bases loaded.

He struck out Hall of Famer Derek Jeter with three pitches. Then All-Star Nick Swisher came to bat.

Bard first threw two strikes. But it was Bard’s third pitch that made history.

​​It was later called by Sports Illustrated “one of the nastiest, most unhittable pitches that the world has ever seen,” a 99-mph fastball that went straight at the center of the plate only to wildly dip into the dirt at the last millisecond.

Swisher swung through empty air and tossed his arms up in frustration. “It’s not supposed to move like that,” he said later.

All good — until one season, when Bard completely lost control where the ball was flying. He started to hit players. He sailed the ball high and hit the back stop. He threw to first base but instead the ball landed in the dirt.

The technical term for this condition is the yips. Nervousness, anxiety, whatever.

Bard had gotten tight, and no amount of deep breathing, meditation, or top-level sports psychology could help him.

That’s the inevitable intro I had to give you just to set up the following paragraph, which was the most practical and valuable I found in this interesting article.

Bard cured his yips eventually, and made it back to the Major Leagues after quitting. He even became a star pitcher once again. But the yips started to creep back in. Then the following happened:

===

In the off-season, a friend who coaches at U.N.C. Charlotte suggested that he throw a two-seam fastball from an arm slot two inches higher than his usual position. Bard had spent years tinkering with his arm slots, to disastrous effect. But he understood his body and his mind better now. Instead of instructing his body, he tried imitation, thinking of pitchers with higher arm slots and mimicking them. The ball hissed out of his hand and sank. That fastball became his best pitch.

===

In case it’s not clear, what I found interesting was this idea to mimic and imitate successful people, rather than tinker with your technique.

This can apply to whatever you’re doing.

Say copywriting.

One option is to sit down and say,

“All right, what’s the level of sophistication in this market? Should I use the if-then headline formula here? Or the how-to? Or the case-against? Or maybe it’s best to lead off with authority, to diffuse the readers’ skepticism?”

That’s the tinkering option.

The other option is mimicry. You set aside all the talk about sophistication and headline formulas and authority. Instead, you sit down, rub your hands together and say,

“Right. Say I’m John Carlton. In fact, let me put on a Hawaiian shirt. What would I focus on here? What kind of headline would I write if I were John?”

Is mimicry the optimal way to learn?

I don’t know. It prolly depends on your own psychological makeup.

But it’s almost sure that most skills are taught and learned via the tinkering approach, with almost no thought given to mimicry. That’s a shame, because mimicry can be a great way to get better, and fast, and painlessly.

But on to work:

It’s true, my Copy Riddles course does break down copy into component parts, and instructs you on what to do. It even gives you a tinker-y checklist of how to write good copy, from alfalfa to zucchini.

But the real strength of Copy Riddles is the mimicry part.

Write copy… see what A-list copywriters like John Carlton did with the same prompt… then do it all over, while mimicking, imitating, or channeling those A-list copywriters.

For more info on this approach, which has been endorsed by Major Leaguers like Gary Bencivenga, Parris Lampropoulos, and Gary Halbert, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/