Learning

I made $1,100 so I decided to spend $6,000 more

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Two weeks ago, I was talking to copywriter Vasilis Apostolou, and he told me of a direct marketing conference that’s happening in May in Poland.

The conference is small but features some people I very much respect, foremost among them A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos and marketer Matt Bacak.

I asked Vasilis how much it costs to get in. He told me. I groaned.

$3,000 just for the ticket. And then there’s travel, a place to stay, plus 3-4 days lost from work.

This past Thursday, I got on a podcast-like interview with Jen Adams from the Professional Writers Alliance. Last December, I wrote some articles for PWA about my 10 Commandments book, and I got paid $1k for those articles. I got paid an extra $100 for this podcast-like appearance.

​​Getting paid $1,100 is a nice way to do self-promotion – but it’s not enough.

Last summer, I paid $1,200 for the Dig This Zoom calls. I found out about the PWA writing opportunity through the Discord channel for people who bought those Dig calls. So far, I’ve made back $1,100 of that $1,200 via this PWA thing. That means I still have $100 to make up somewhere.

I’ve written before how I have made back all the money I’ve paid for specific copywriting and marketing education.

​​Tens of thousands on coaching with Dan Ferrari… thousands on newsletters and books with Ben Settle… $297 for the Parris Lampropoulos webinars back in 2019. That last one, by the way, is my most winning investment. When I add up all the extra money I can directly trace back to Parris’s training, I estimate it to have been about a 300x return.

The thing is, all those returns turned out to be unconscious, after-the-fact, well-would-you-look-at-that results.

​​But I’ve since told myself not to make this into a matter of coincidence or luck. I’ve since made it a matter of attitude. I now put in thought and effort to make sure any investment, regardless of how small or large, has to eventually pay for itself.

That’s an outcome that’s impossible to control if you are buying stocks or bonds or race horses. But it’s quite possible to control if you are buying education, opportunities, or connections.

I will see what happens once those PWA articles get published and once interview goes live. Maybe one of those PWA people will join my list, buy something from me, and pay me that missing $100. Unless I can track $100 of extra sales to that, I will have to think what else I can do to make those Dig Zoom calls pay for themselves.

Likewise with that Poland conference. ​I decided to go. I budgeted $6k total for it — actual groan-inducing cost plus opportunity cost.

​​In other words, I will have to figure out a way to make the event pay me at least $6k. And I set myself the goal to have it happen within the first seven days after conference ends. I’m a little nervous about achieving that, but to me that signals that it’s possible.

So now I have three calls-to-action for you:

1. If you are planning to be there in Poland in May, let me know and we can make a point of meeting there and talking.

2. If you somehow already got on my list via PWA, hit reply and let me know. I’m curious to hear what you’re up to and why you decided to join. And if you’re thinking of writing a book like my 10 Commandments book, I might be able to give you some inspiration or advice.

3. If neither of the above applies to you, then my final offer is my Copy Riddles program. It costs $400. If you do decide to buy it, I encourage you to think of how you can make this investment directly and trackably pay for itself, and then some.

You might wonder if that’s really possible.

​​It is.

​​So today, instead of pointing you to the Copy Riddles sales page, let me point you to an email I wrote last year about a Copy Riddles member named Nathan, who doubled his income as an in-house copywriter, and who credits Copy Riddles for a chunk of that increase. ​​In case you’re curious:

https://bejakovic.com/how-to-bombard-copywriting-clients-with-extra-value-at-no-extra-effort/

Plan Horse brings in a surprising number of sales and a satisfying Matrix analogy

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My email yesterday about “Plan Horse” brought in more sales of Most Valuable Email than any email since the official launch of this course closed, last September. I asked myself why.

Maybe it was just the weather — hurricane winds over the Mediterranean have been blasting Barcelona for the past 14 hours. They almost carried off the potted olive tree that lives on my balcony. Maybe they also forced in extra offshore sales.

But maybe it was something in the email itself. I have an idea what that could be, and I’ll be writing about that in the future.

In any case, some of those new buyers have already gone through MVE – it only takes an hour. One of them, copywriter Anthony La Tour, wrote in this morning to say:

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Whoa…

Just finished your MVE course. 

Meta-level stuff. 

I feel like I’ve just been unplugged from the Matrix.

I’m gonna go through it a few more times.

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I never thought of the Matrix analogy for Most Valuable Email. But I like it, and I’ll be using it going forward. It’s a rich mapping, and it therefore feels satisfying. That’s something to keep in mind if you yourself use analogies to make your point. Here’s what I mean:

Like Anthony says, MVE shows you the Matrix, the underlying reality — what’s going on beneath the surface in some of my most effective emails.

But it goes beyond that.

Because in the Matrix cineverse, once you’re unplugged, you can go back inside and upload new skills into your head — and that’s how applying the Most Valuable Email trick feels to me. Like at the start of the first Matrix movie, after Neo has just been unplugged, and is now beginning his training, Tank sits him down in the jack-in chair and says:

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We’re supposed to start with these operation programs first. That’s major boring shit. Let’s do something a little more fun. How about… combat training?

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Neo sits there in the chair while the upload runs. A moment later, his eyes open wide and he gasps. “I know kung fu,” he says.

Well, uploading skills via Most valuable Email is not as push-button as the process in the Matrix. MVE takes some personal effort. And it takes more than a second or two to write one of these Most Valuable Emails.

But over time, this process uploads new skills into your head — including skills which you might have felt you could never learn to do well. At least it’s been that way for me.

If you’re willing to keep pressing the “Upload New Skill” button, then MVE might be as valuable to you. To get started with it today:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

I tried to make this email light and fluffy and still potentially valuable

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Two weeks ago, I got a check in the mail for $1,000. A real, physical check, landing in a real, physical mailbox, in Baltimore, MD, some 3,750 miles or 6,040 kilometers away from where I actually live now.

The backstory is t​hat last December, I wrote four articles for the Professional Writers Alliance.

​​It was great opportunity — write a few easy articles, promote myself to a list of copywriters, and even get paid for it. ​​​​$1,000 — that’s 42.5 movie nights for a couple, at an average ticket price of $11.75, if I can stay disciplined and not buy any popcorn.

But not just that.

​​I’m even supposed to get an extra $100 — that’s 4.25 more movie nights, no popcorn — after I do a kind of private podcast interview next week with Jen Adams from PWA. ​​Hopefully, it won’t be a check again because that first check is still languishing at a friend’s house in Baltimore, I imagine under a growing pile of magazines and takeout boxes.

I’m telling you all this because of the strange chain of events that led to this $1,000 check.

I wrote those PWA articles about my experience self-publishing my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters on Amazon.

I wrote that book, as I’ve shared many times before, based on James Altucher’s “I plagiarized” blog post, which I read the first time back in January 2020.

I discovered James’s blog a short time earlier because Mark Ford linked to it in his email newsletter.

I signed up Mark Ford’s newsletter maybe back in 2018, because Mark is a big name in the direct response world. I kept reading after I signed up because I in some way identified with Mark, or at least I identified the kind of person I might like to one day to be with Mark.

Maybe the point of the above chain of events is obvious to you. Maybe it’s not.

If not, you can find it explained in section 3.3 of my Insight Exposed training. You might potentially find that explanation valuable, and even enjoyable, at least in the long term. Insight Exposed is only available to people who are signed up to my email list. If you’d like to sign up to my list, you can do that 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.

If this email makes me any money, I still won’t really get it

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I read a story a while back about a man named John Clauser.

Clauser studied physics but he struggled with it. That resonated with me, not because I studied physics, but because I studied math, and I struggled with that.

Anyways, Clauser had to take a grad-level course in quantum mechanics.

He failed. Twice. Eventually he managed to pass but he never really “got” it.

Some time later, Clauser decided to design an experiment to disprove quantum mechanics. His advisors told him not to do it. Clauser insisted. Maybe his ego was on the line.

Clauser carried out his experiment, which was meant to falsify a key prediction of quantum mechanics. Instead, to his disappointment, Clauser demonstrated quantum entanglement, just as the theory predicted.

Last year, Clauser won the Nobel Prize in physics for his work. He said, “I confess even to this day that I still don’t understand quantum mechanics.”

In his book Breakthrough Advertising, Gene Schwartz compared copywriters to atomic scientists. Gene argued that both copywriters and atomic scientists work with primal forces of nature. They cannot create those forces, but they can harness them and use them.

I’d like to extend Gene’s analogy. It’s not just that we can’t create those primal forces. We can’t even understand them, not really, not using our everyday human intuition.

Nobel-winning physicists still don’t understand quantum mechanics. ​​A-list copywriters still don’t understand human desire multiplied.

A few decades into his career, Gary Halbert put a lot of money into a weight loss product with a great proof element — a high school student who lost almost 600 lbs. “Without hunger! Without pills! Without low energy! Without giving up good food!”

Gary flew down to interview and record the guy. He created the product. He wrote and ran the ads. He put in dramatic before-and-after pictures and a money-back guarantee.

The ads bombed.

Nobody wanted this thing. Why? Nobody knows. You would think that a weight loss offer with a strong proof element and copy written by Gary Halbert would be a sure shot.

As screenwriter William Goldman once said — about those other people who cater to human desire, the Hollywood crowd — “Nobody knows anything.”

My point is not to depress you, by the way. Gary Halbert made millions of dollars and lived in Key West and fished all day long. William Goldman won a couple of Oscars. John Clauser got his Nobel prize. All that, in spite of not understanding how the damn thing works on a basic level.

The key of course is to keep generating ideas, to keep working, to keep taking a new step every day. And the day after, and so on until you drop dead. Great things can get accomplished in this way, and small things, and everything in between.

All right. I hope I haven’t inspired you too much.

I now have my Most Valuable Email training to pitch to you. I doubt you will be interested. You have probably heard me talk about this training before, and you have probably decided already it’s not for you.

That’s fine. But in case you want to find out more about Most Valuable Email, and how it can help you keep writing a new valuable email each day — and maybe even make money with it, God knows how — then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

I made a lot of mistakes in my copywriting career, for example:

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1. In my early days, I worked with OH, who loved meetings, pushing me around like his secretary, and telling me how it’s going to be, to the point where I had trouble falling asleep because I was so insulted and angry

2. In my late days, I worked with SA on a commission-only job, which involved a ton of preparation, the frustration of writing daily emails in his voice, and which paid me nothing, in spite of promises of a huge profit share from his million-name-plus email list

3. I wrote cold emails for any business that would pay me, until I figured out no amount of copywriting hacks will compensate for the fact that a generic offer targeted at uninterested leads will not sell

4. I wrote a weak lead for RealDose’s probiotics sales letter, they rightly dragged their feet on it, and it never ran

5. I started a daily email newsletter twice before, and I stopped and deleted all the archives twice before finally starting writing daily emails for good, which you are reading now

6. I spent the first six months of my professional copywriting career thinking I had learned all there is to learn about copywriting, since I had read Joe Sugarman’s Adweek book and Gary Halbert’s Boron Letters. During that time, I didn’t crack open a single copywriting book or listen to a single training, and I made a bunch of screaming mistakes as a result

7. I didn’t formally collect endorsements, testimonials, or client success case studies

8. I worked with WT, who thought the answer to every copywriting and marketing problem is to apply the AIDA formula, and who exploded in anger when I suggested otherwise, and who translated my innocent comment about not having to fit everything into AIDA into an attack on the value of his MBA education (no joke)

9. I wrote a seventh and final batch of emails for a real estate investing fund out of Chicago. They had paid me for all the previous emails, and on time. They never paid me for this final batch. To date, they are the only client who has ever shafted me for anything

10. I did not take a moment every three months to ask myself, “What have I learned to do pretty well over the past three months?” and then package up that new expertise into a presentation or a mini-course or a little report I could sell, both to make a bit of money, and to build up a lot of status

There are many more mistakes I made. No matter. I learned, quickly or eventually.

I stopped working with clients who didn’t suit me. I became obsessive about studying and improving my skills. In time, I even started thinking about how I present myself, and now just what I can do.

All of which is to say, I don’t really regret making any of the mistakes above, or any of the countless other mistakes I made in my freelance copywriting career.

Except one.

There’s one mistake I regret it because I persisted in it for so long.

I regret it because it cost me so much, both in terms of the kinds of work I missed out on, and the piles of money that blew off in the wind.

And really, I regret it because it would have been so easy to fix, had I only kept one thing in mind.

That one thing is the topic of my Most Valuable Postcard #1, which is available for purchase right now.

But I am only making this offer to people who are currently signed up to my email newsletter. To get on my newsletter, so you can take advantage of this offer, click here and fill out the form that appears.

My miserable 2022 reading list

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Back in January 2021, I wrote about an ugly observation that James Altucher once made:

You have maybe 1000 books left in you to read, for the rest of your life. The math checks out.

After facing this ugly realization, I started keeping track of the books I’ve read, and how many per year I’ve read.

​​Turns out my math is even worse because I am such a slow reader. Over the past 12 months, I managed to finish just 18 books:

1. Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Wizard of Earthsea

2. Michael Masterson & John Forde’s Great Leads (re-read)

3. V.S. Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain

4. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic

5. William Shakespeare’s King Lear

6. Claude Levi-Strauss’s Myth and Meaning

7. Eric Hoffer’s True Believer

8. Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina

9. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, vol. 1

10. Claude Hopkins’s My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising (re-read)

11. Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons

12. Michel Houellebecq’s Elementary Particles

13. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

14. Derren Brown’s Tricks of the Mind

15. Joe Vitale’s There’s a Customer Born Every Minute

16. David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything

17. John Cleese’s Creativity

18. William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (re-read)

And that’s it. 12 months, hundreds of hours of daily reading, and yet, a miserable 18 books — and one of those was John Cleese’s Creativity, which weighs all of 90 pages.

At this sorry pace, I will have to live for another 56 years if I hope to reach Altuchers’ 1000 books.

Still, I better stop complaining, and I better keep my nose down and peeled to the inside of a book. I mean, what else is there?

There’s been a lot of agonizing lately whether AI is consuming the world. And it really might be.

It’s genuinely not clear to me whether anything you or I can write will be more interesting to people than what AI will produce, whether today or in a year’s time.

But one thing is clear to me:

And that’s your best shot at security.

If there is any way to prosper and profit, now and in the future, I figure it’s to think and to take action, to find or come up with new ideas, and to put those ideas into practice.

And the best way I know to prime that process is to read interesting books, to take notes of valuable things I come across, and to connect those to projects I’m working on.

Which brings me to my offer. It’s simply to sign up to my email list. I often share interesting ideas I come across in books with my newsletter readers.

Who knows, one of my emails might expose you to a new and insightful book you’d never have heard of otherwise, which might end up changing your life, or at the least, the success of your business.

In case you’d like to get my emails daily, click here, and fill out the form that appears.

$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.