Motivation

My Royalty Ronin money breakdown

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In my experience, if you promote a new offer diligently for a few days, questions start to arrive from the heavens that make the promo easier and more effective.

For example, the following bit of manna landed in my inbox yesterday:

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John — you said a lot about the Royalty Ronin, except how or if it made you money?

May I ask — aside from affiliate fees — how did this membership make you money?

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The background is that I’ve been doing an affiliate promotion for Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin for the past few days.

The first day of the promo, I recorded a video and actually talked inside that about money that being inside Ronin myself has made me over the past year.

But I understand not everyone will have watched that video. So lemme give you the gist.

I directly attribute about $60k of income over the past year to being inside Royalty Ronin. That breaks out like this:

#1. Last autumn, I ran two two-day promos — the White Monday campaign for Copy Riddles, and the Shangri-La event for Most Valuable Email.

The core idea for both of those promos came from Travis’s teachings that come as bonuses for being inside Royalty Ronin — specifically, an idea he shares in his Millionaire Math training (inside his Phoneless Sales Machine program).

In total, those two promos made me a little over $30k.

#2. Last summer, I started going through Travis’s Passive Cash Flow Mojo course (another course that used to cost a few thousand dollars, but is now free as a bonus if you sign up to Royalty Ronin).

I went through PCFM a couple of times and followed it pretty much to the “T” (short for Travis) when coming up with the idea for, launching, and then marketing my Daily Email Habit offer.

I haven’t checked the numbers this month yet, but that offer has definitely made me over $25k in the few months it’s been running.

#3. Via lurking in Travis’s Royalty Ronin Skool community, I got clued into an under-the-radar media buyer named Travis Speegle, who is also inside Ronin and is also a Travis Sago acolyte.

Travis Speegle has a course on media buying for growing your email list called MyPeeps, which at some point was being promoted in Ronin.

I bought MyPeeps, went through it, saw it was a great course.

I then reached out to Travis (Speegle) via DM on Skool and proposed I promote his course to my list. He agreed. We did the promo last September.

The result was about $25k in sales, and my cut was somewhere between $10k and $12k (it wasn’t an even 50%, because Travis created the course with Ryan Lee, and I guess has to pay out Ryan some residuals for each new sale).

Add all up all three of the above — and you get over $60k I attribute directly either to ideas I got from Travis, or through being inside the Royalty Ronin community, however mole-like my behavior there might be.

Would I have made some of this money in other ways had I not been in Travis’s world?

Sure. But there’s no doubt in my mind that I have made much more as a result of being in Travis’s Royalty Ronin, and of having gone through his courses — some several times — than the amounts I’ve paid Travis for that access. In fact, I’ve made many times more. Probably 10x, if not 20x.

And that’s why I keep promoting Royalty Ronin to my list.

In fact, that’s why I promoted it to my list last year as well, even before there was an affiliate program — when I had no self-interest in promoting it, other than being the first to clue in my readers to a valuable resource.

And now for your money breakdown, or the lack of it:

Over the past year, I paid Travis Sago $3k for access to Ronin and the associated high-ticket courses. A few weeks ago, I paid him another $1k to renew my access for another year, early.

You, on the other hand, don’t have to make any such dramatic leap. That’s because of two changes that Travis introduced recently to how he charges for access to Royalty Ronin.

The first change is that Travis has started offering the option to sign up to Ronin monthly for $300, instead of yearly for $3k.

$300 is still very expensive if you don’t do anything with the info, or the connections, or with the inspiration available inside Ronin.

On the other hand, if you do apply it, it can be an investment that pays for itself — and quick.

But there’s also the second thing:

To make the decision even easier, and actually entirely risk-free, there’s now a week’s free trial if you’d like to join Ronin, look inside, and see if it’s for you.

If you think of Royalty Ronin like a fancy gym — where the equipment is world-class and trainers are very knowledgeable, but the real value is in the connections you make and motivation you get — then you can think of this week’s free trial as a guest pass you can take advantage of, thanks to my being a member already.

If you’d like to take advantage of your guest pass:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

P.S. If you’ve already signed up for a trial of Royalty Ronin via my link above, forward me Travis’s welcome email — the one with “Vroom” in the subject line. I have a small but growing bundle of bonuses that’s waiting for you as a way of saying thanks for taking me up on my recommendation.

Inspire readers to take action using what you’ve already got

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A bit of background:

I once had a copywriting client who was a real estate investing guru in Australia.

The guy was dyslexic or illiterate, I don’t know which. Whenever he wrote me an email to communicate something about the project to be done, the email was borderline illegible, with weird grammar mistakes, terrible spelling, and just a general aura of “this was written by a not very precocious four-year-old.”

And yet, the REI guru was an incredible speaker.

In front of crowds of hundreds, he was fluent and dramatic. He hypnotized his audience and moved them to change their lives and get that financial freedom they had been lusting after, which meant working with him and paying him thousands of dollars for his REI knowledge. He had thousands of customers and clients.

That’s the background.

The story starts when I got one of those misspelled and misgrammared emails from that REI guru. This was about 2–3 years into my copywriting freelance career.

He wanted me to rewrite a sales letter. He thought the previous copywriter had made it too factual and bland, and he wanted me to make it more “inspiring.”

Now I’m a factual and bland person by nature, and because of that, I was 100% certain I could not inspire, hype up, or goose anybody, in print or in words.

So I wrote the REI guru an email, perfectly proofread and 100% grammatically correct, to say I appreciate the offer, but that inspirational copy is really not my strong suit, and therefore I will have to turn the job down.

The end? Almost.

I was ready to live out the rest of my life as a bland and uninspiring entity.

But I happened to listen to a podcast back in 2019 by a certain marketer, a guy I had never heard of before.

This guy was making about $3M a year, taking a cheap and widely available resource — copywriters like me — and turning that resource into a “back-end agency,” where he’d help existing businesses promote their existing offers in new ways via email marketing.

Now here’s the point of this email, the takeaway to the long story and background above:

This very successful marketer said that if you can inspire people, the world is really yours. And here’s the crucial part — he said that there are 1,001 ways to inspire people.

He then gave just one example: “Show people that they already have the resources needed to succeed.” He gave a few examples, I think something to do with mommy bloggers, and how their experience running a family and household would translate into the online business world.

This blew my mind.

For one thing, I had always thought of inspirational copy as the equivalent of a Tony Robbins event — lots of hand clapping and yelling and jumping up and down.

For another, I hadn’t ever occurred to me that a logical argument — “Let me show you how you already have the resources you need to succeed” — could be inspiring.

This changed everything.

Because after this simple realization, I started keeping track of copy that I personally found inspiring.

And now that I had the realization that there might be a structure to it, I started looking out for what it was that had inspired me.

After identifying such inspiration structures, I started using them in my own copy.

The first few times, it came a little ham-handedly, but then more naturally and unselfconsciously.

Today, I also find that inspirational copy is some of the most effective copy that I write — both for getting sales today and for keeping people reading tomorrow.

I’ve even baked it into my public image a bit — people will often reply to my emails to tell me how they loved or were inspired by a particular story I shared.

All that’s to say, you too can inspire, even if you are as bland and factual by nature as I am.

The fact is, there’s a structure to inspiration, just as there is a structure to desire. And now that you know that, you can look out for that structure, and copy it and mimic it, and make it your own.

By the way, the marketer who first turned me on to the structure behind inspiration, the guy in that podcast who was making $3M a year running a back-end agency, was Travis Sago.

I’ve been promoting Travis’s Royalty Ronin community for the past few days, because I myself have been inside this community for more than a year now, and have renewed my subscription for an extra year just a few weeks ago.

And even though I am promoting Royalty Ronin as an affiliate now, I actually promoted it last year as well, for free, simply because I think it’s of genuine interest to you, in case you find my own emails interesting and valuable.

Travis is now running a 7-day free trial for Royalty Ronin, which gives you full access to both the community and to several of his biggest and most expensive courses (including BEAMER, the one on running a back-end agency).

If you’d like to try out Ronin risk-free for a week, take a look here:

​https://bejakovic.com/ronin​

P.S. If you’ve signed up for RR before, I’ve just added a new bonus into your Ronin bonus bundle in the members-only area of my site. This new bonus is a presentation I gave last year inside Brian Kurtz’s Titans XL mastermind, all about various inspiration structures I’ve identified over the years, along with examples from my own copy and from the copy of several copywriters I admire.

And if you haven’t gotten access to the Ronin bonus bundle but you’ve taken me up on the Ronin trial, forward me your confirmation email from Travis, the one with “Vroom” in the subject line. I’ll get you access to the Ronin bundle with the inspiration training above and a few other goodies as a way of saying thanks that you took me up on my recommendation.

“The best joke in the world”

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“Thanks very much. I just wanted to recommend a documentary to everyone, and then I’m gonna go.”

That’s the beginning of a six-minute comedy routine that standup comic Gary Gulman delivered on the Conan O’Brien show back in 2016.

That routine has since been called the “best joke in the world,” “beyond ballsy,” and “perfectly written.” That’s coming from other comedians.

The public liked Gulman’s routine too. The recording of it has racked up millions of views over the years across various platforms.

Gulman says this six-minute routine has became the biggest thing he’s ever done. At the end of his live standup comedy sets, he sometimes asks for requests. Inevitably, people ask for this joke.

Gulman’s joke is about a documentary on the men and one woman who were responsible for abbreviating all state names down to two letters.

I won’t try to retell the joke here. I will tell you that even if it’s one six-minute joke, it gets a laugh every 10-15 seconds. Even that opener, about just recommending a documentary and then going, gets the audience laughing.

Now here’s something extra I wanted to share with you:

In an interview, Gulman was asked about this “state abbreviations” routine. How long did it take him to write?

The answer is pretty shocking.

Gulman said he first wrote down the joke in 1994, about 6 months after he started doing standup. The Conan O’Brien spot was in 2016.

In other words, 20+ years passed before Gulman’s “state abbreviations” joke was ready for prime time, and not just because Gulman was polishing it.

“The entire world had to change,” says Gulman, “in order for me to convince people that there was a documentary about something as unusual as abbreviating the states.”

I’m not encouraging you to sit on your hands for 20 years because “the time for your idea” hasn’t come yet.

Gulman was very active from 1994 to 2015. He built out an entire career in the meantime… became a star among comedians… and managed to get on Conan and Letterman and wherever else.

All I’m really suggesting is the value of being both productive AND patient. Of putting lots of ideas out there… and of having the sense that some of those are promising but not quite good enough yet, and simply waiting while something else clicks, or conditions change just enough, or a new wrapper comes that you can wrap your solid but unpolished lump of coal in.

I realize my message today probably sounds wooly and not practical, so I won’t try to sell you anything on the back of it.

Like I said, I just wanted to recommend a comedy clip, and then I’m gonna go. Here it is:

Competition contradiction

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A paradox? A contradiction?

As part of the research for my new book, I’ve been going through a book by Sam Taggart. Taggart is the founder of D2D Experts, an online education company for door-to-door salesmen.

Taggart has a long but distinguished career selling door-to-door, everything from knives to solar panels to security alarms. His door-to-door selling career started at age 11, and culminated around age 35, when he finished as the #1 salesman in a company of 3,000 reps.

Anyways, grok this, if you can:

On page 44 of his book, Taggart’s top recommendation for motivating yourself is to look at all the other salesmen around you, to start tracking their results, and to start thinking of them as competition you have to beat.

And then on page 64, Taggart says how the best salesmen only view themselves as real competition.

Huh?

It’s easy to dismiss this as just contradiction or fluff inherent in a lot of sales material.

But I don’t think so.

A while back, meaning 3 years ago, I wrote about 6 characteristics of people who manage to do the seemingly impossible.

These 6 characteristics came out of a study of pro athletes who came back from devastating injury to compete at the highest level again… as well as star Wall Street traders who managed to beat not only all other traders, but the randomness inherent in the market as well.

One of the common characteristics of such people was that they simultaneously had a short-term view of the task to be accomplished, as well as a long-term view.

In other words, these folks looked at their situation from both 3 feet away, and from 3,000 feet up in the air. They did so the same time, or at least switching constantly between the two.

And so I think it is with Taggart’s advice — and so it is in many other situations in life.

We all want the “one thing” to cling to.

But quite often, particularly in the most important things in life, you gotta hold two opposing thoughts in your head, and you gotta live by both of them.

Of course you don’t really gotta. You don’t gotta do anything. But if you are currently worried by competition, whether that’s other businesses who target same audience as you, or other solutions or trends that tend to wipe out what you’re doing, or simply people within your own company who try to outperform you, then it might make sense to:

1. Make a list of all these villains, to keep track of their activity, and to start viewing them as competition to be beaten

2. To ignore them and to focus on doing the best you can

Anyways, I’ll have Taggart’s advice — not this, but something less contradictory — in my new book, full title:

10 Commandments of Con Men, Pick Up Artists, Magicians, Door-to-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Professional Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand Up Comedians, and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters

My goal is to finish and publish this book by March 24. The way things are going, I might have to shave half my head, like Demosthenes, to keep myself from leaving the house until the book is finished.

In any case, I will be writing about this book and how it’s progressing, plus what I’m thinking about doing to make it a success when it comes out.

If you are interested in the topic of this book, and you’re thinking you might wanna get a copy when it comes out, click below. I’m planning some launch bonuses and I will be dripping them out early to people on this pre-launch list:

​​Click here to get on the bonus-dripping pre-launch list for my new 10 Commandments book​​

Small list, big win

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We interrupt our scheduled programming of teasing the launch of my new 10 Commandments book to bring you an important and inspiring message.

This message was posted in my Daily Email House community by one of the members, Vanja Kovacevic.

Vanja went from a high-powered IP lawyer career to being a life and career coach. As part of building up that new venture, Vanja realized she had to do some marketing for herself.

A couple weeks ago, she decided to start sending daily emails. And the result, in Vanja’s words:

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I started DEH with a small list of mostly family and friends that had been inactive for about three years. Two months into DEH, I finally started sending daily emails to this list.

None of these people use email or content marketing in any way, and I know that some of them are allergic to receiving emails too often. Three emails in, I asked them to opt into daily emailing. I got 4 opt-ins. And my mom.

So far, I only have a subscribe link on my LinkedIn, and my microlist grew to 18 people.

Yesterday, I sent my 16th email since then, and someone on my microlist bought my energy healing session I was writing about the other day. Yay!

I’m just now realizing that this is actually possible for me too. Feeling super motivated to keep going and get better at it.

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I once made a list of common elements in all the areas of my life where I’ve actually gone on to have success.

I found three common elements. One of them was an experience of an early win.

Since then, I’ve been recommending to people to orchestrate an early win for themselves. Do whatever you can to make sure it will happen. Usually, that means celebrating the stuff that you’ve accomplished, that’s under your own control.

Did you set up your email software? Did you write up your first email? Did you send it out?

Great, each of those is a victory to celebrate.

Such small, reachable, but important milestones give you a sense of control and progress. Marking them makes it drastically more likely you will keep taking the subsequent steps that lead to eventual big success.

At the same time, sometimes fortune smiles on you. Sometimes you get a big early win that would make even an established expert smile.

As Vanja’s case shows, it’s possible to get a proper sale, even with a “microlist” of only 18 people (including mom), and after just 16 days of daily emails. (And yes, I followed up with Vanja, and it wasn’t her mom who bought.)

Is something similar possible for you too? That’s really for you to decide and to prove.

One thing’s for sure. It will only happen if you take those first initial steps, however small. And if you want my help and guidance along the way:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Inspiration in case everybody else is doing better than you

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A couple days ago, I wrote an email about an idea from Dave Sandler’s book You Can’t Teach A Kid To Ride A Bike At A Seminar.

It seems many readers found that email unusually inspiring, and wrote in to say so.

So I will shamelessly go back to the same well, and tell you another anecdote from Sandler’s book to try to inspire you.

Here goes:

Sandler didn’t start out as a salesman. He had inherited his father’s profitable business. But then, through a combination of entitlement and stupidity, Sandler lost that business.

He turned to sales because he hoped to once again afford the kind of lifestyle he was used to.

Sandler started selling self-help materials. He struggled and sucked.

In the first year of his miserable new sales career, he went to an awards show for the star salesmen of his company.

Of course, awards were given out at the awards show. Of course, Sandler, who struggled and sucked, won no awards. Of course, he felt inferior, and even doubly bad about struggling and sucking as a salesman.

But through some combination of gnawing insecurity, personal drive, and a lack of better options, Sandler stuck to it. And he made a vow to improve.

Sandler started visiting the salesmen who had won the top awards at the the awards show. His plan was to interview them, learn from them, soak in their skills and mindset by osmosis. Except, that’s not what ended up happening.

In Sandler’s own words:

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One by one I was disappointed by what I discovered. They were all struggling. I went from Dallas to Denver, from Washington to Virginia, and interviewed every distributor who agreed to spend time with me. Most of them were starving. There was nothing consistent about their lives. A year of success was easily followed by a year of failure, but they faked their way through it, just as they had been taught to do. These were the stars of the distributor network, and most of them were miserable.

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That’s it. That’s the anecdote. The end.

Yeah, of course the book goes on to describe how Sandler developed his own sales system, and how he eventually started consistently making sales, and winning awards, and how he became the star salesman for his company, year after year, etc.

But you’ve probably heard enough rags-to-riches stories in your life.

That’s why the end of the Sandler anecdote, if you ask me, should really fall where he goes to talk to all these industry stars, who seem to be doing great, making tons of sales, getting awards and kudos, and the reality is they’re struggling and experiencing all kinds of volatility and scarcity.

I don’t know what your specific situation is.

But I imagine you have certain insecurities. We all have them.

Maybe you’re insecure about something objective and measurable — you’re not making enough money, you have no kind of audience.

Or maybe you’re insecure about something less measurable but still real — your experience and status.

It’s bad enough to deal with such insecurities and the underlying realities on their own.

But it’s doubly bad when you look around, and spot people who appear to be doing amazing and inevitably compare yourself to them. 7-figure this! 4-hour that! A newsletter with 250 million readers!

I’d like to suggest to you — as in Sandler’s time, so today.

There’s no reason to feel doubly bad comparing your situation to the 7-figure, 4-hour superstars. Because there’s an excellent chance they are struggling behind the scenes. If you could really talk to them, it would be obvious enough.

As for the realities you might be facing — whether income, or influence, or your experience and status — my stock answer is to start writing daily emails. And it will fix itself.

You’ve probably gotten used to hearing me say that, and maybe you’ve gotten deaf to it.

So let me share a message I got a couple days ago from Chavy Helfgott, who is a copywriter and brand strategist for consumer brands.

Chavy signed up to my Daily Email Habit service on day one, back in November. She was looking to bring her career back into focus after a couple years off due to personal reasons.

She started writing first daily, then weekday emails. 66 emails so far since November.

Chavy wrote me a couple days ago to report the result:

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Hi, just wanted to share a daily email win. After 66 emails, I just closed my first sale which I directly attribute to daily emails, and that client is already expressing interest in another package.

Additionally, writing the daily emails has helped me become more confident about pitching myself in other places. I responded to a question on a WhatsApp community of business owners, and it led to two calls with potential clients.

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I’m not making any promises that daily emails will sort out your life in 66 days.

But if you have the right combination of gnawing insecurity, personal drive, and a lack of better options, might as well get started daily emailing today? One thing I’m sure of, the results will surprise you.

And if you want my help along the way, here’s more info on Daily Email Habit:

​https://bejakovic.com/deh​

I believe you’re a 10

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Last night, I finished my second reading of Dave Sandler’s book, You Can’t Teach A Kid To Ride A Bike At A Seminar.

As you might know, Sandler was a sales trainer. His book is about his sales system, which Sandler developed after having something close to a nervous breakdown, day after day, trying to make sales using the old-fashioned approach of tried-and-tested sales techniques — “Would you prefer it in red or in blue?”

Curious thing:

The first real teaching Sandler does in his book is not about the initial step of his sales system, but something he calls I/R theory.

Sandler sets it up with a little exercise. You can try it yourself, right now.

Imagine you’re on a desert island, and you’ve been stripped of all your roles.

In other words, imagine yourself without any professional skill or accomplishment… without family relations and responsibilities… without local, national, and religious affiliation… without all your hobbies, talents, and memberships.

Imagine yourself completely isolated and stripped down to just your identity — your sense of being you.

On a scale from 1 to 10, how do you evaluate that identity?

Many people, says Sandler, rebel at this exercise, and claim that without their roles, they are nothing. Zero!

Many others give their identity a 3 or a 4, or maybe a 5 or a 6.

And yet, Sandler insists that everybody’s identity, yours and mine included, is always a 10, regardless of the roles we play and how well we play them that day.

Sandler gives some sort of argument to make his case. A baby supposedly has a “10” identity… and by induction, it must hold for adults as well. “How could it be otherwise?” Sandler asks, waving his arms a little.

Now, Bejako bear being a particularly skeptical species of bear, chances are good I would have simply rolled my eyes the first time I read this.

But it just so happened that at the same time I was first reading Sandler’s book, I was reading another book also, called The Will To Believe, by American philosopher and psychologist William James.

James gives a rational argument why believing stuff — even without any rational argument for believing it — can make a lot of sense in a lot of situations.

I won’t repeat James’s argument. It doesn’t matter tremendously. Just for me personally, it reminded me something I had realized before.

If you ask me, belief is not something that happens to you. It’s not done to you from the outside, by somebody putting facts and arguments into your head like they put leis around your neck when you arrive to Hawaii.

Rather, believing stuff is a personal, creative act, much like seeing is a personal, creative act.

Remembering this in the context of Sandler’s I/R theory was enough for me to honestly say, “Fine. Let me choose to believe I’m a 10.”

I choose to believe you’re a 10 too.

But why does it matter? Numbers are kind of arbitrary. Why 10? Why not 11, like the guitar amplifier in Spinal Tap?

You can label the numbers how you will. The important thing, says Sandler, is that you will find ways to make your role performance — in his case, sales success — fit your identity, your self-image.

So if have a self-image of, say, 6 out of 10, and if things in your life go bad, down to 2, you will find a way to get back to normal, back to 6.

On the other hand, if things go too well — a 9 or a 10 — you will find a way to get back to normal, too.

And if you’ve ever wondered why things never stay too good for you — why they never stay at a 9 or a 10 — maybe this is an explanation why.

Maybe try imagining yourself on a desert island, just you without any roles you play, and choose to believe you are in fact a 10.

If you do give it a go, let me know how it works out.

And as for making sales, and connecting with people, and writing day after day without quitting because things have gotten too uncomfortably good, you might like my Daily Email Habit service. For more info on that:

​https://bejakovic.com/deh

Why all my emails have a Zanzibar address

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A reader writes in to ask:

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John–just noticed you’re based in Zanzibar City. How is it over there? Have been curious.

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I get this question maybe once a month on average. Some people note the mandatory address listed at the bottom of each of these emails, which says I live at “101 Desert Kite Drive” in Zanzibar City, in Tanzania.

The fact is, I’ve never been to Zanzibar or Tanzania.

So why is the address there? The story goes something like this:

During covid I was traveling the world.

Since there were lots of restrictions and lockdowns, I launched a newsletter called Masks On A Plane, about where it was open and attractive to travel.

Tanzania at the time was one of a few open locations. Since you have to put in some kind of physical address for an email newsletter, I used a made-up address in Zanzibar City at the bottom of each Masks On A Plane issue.

I eventually shut that newsletter down, but the address became a kind of running inside joke, including now in this newsletter.

Ok, so what? Well, get ready, for I’m about to share a truth that I live my life by, which might be useful to you too:

I’ve done a lot of traveling in my life. I typically dread it before it happens, and I find it stressful while it’s happening. I still do it, a lot, for the same reasons that I read a lot, not because I love reading, but because I think it’s important.

Specifically:

I have this theory that mindset <<< action <<< environment.

In other words, if you want to change how your life is, right now, the hardest way to go about it is to change how you think and feel, sitting where you are now, with gritted teeth, trying to be all grateful and creative and accepting.

A much better way to change how your life is, right now, is to go do something different than what you’re doing now. Go wash the dishes, or get up and stretch and squat, or go make a castle out of a deck of playing cards.

And the bestest way to change how your life is right now?

Go somewhere else. Go outside your house, your neighborhood, your solar system. A new environment is sure to change how your life is right now, completely.

But is changing your life a good thing?

Definitely not all the time, at least for me. I got completely burned out on travel following my covid-era peregrinations, living out of a backpack, a new town every month or so, over and over for two and half years.

It took me a long time after that, sitting in one place, to even consider taking another trip unless absolutely necessary.

But I’m back to traveling. Again, not because I enjoy it so much, but because I feel it’s so important — for a change of perspective, to learn something new, or simply for the blessed relief of arriving back home and having everything feel easy.

And now, on to business:

You might wonder, if I don’t really like traveling, and if I don’t really like reading, then what do I like?

I personally do like writing. Writing is something I look forward to.

Maybe you feel the same.

Or maybe… you don’t. Maybe you feel about writing the way I feel about traveling, as a “should,” a responsibility rather than something to look forward to.

If that’s the case, you might get value out of my Daily Email Habit. You can think of it as a kind of guided tour of the most attractive and valuable locations in daily email land.

With Daily Email Habit, you still get to do and experience everything yourself, but a lot of the care, work, and thought that normally goes into writing a daily email has been taken care of for you.

In case you’re interested in finding out more:

​https://bejakovic.com/deh​

Reinforcement training

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I thought I was saved:

Age 20, I was lurking around the university library like all normal college freshmen do on a Saturday afternoon.

I flipped over a book that somebody had left on a table. It turned out to be an instructional manual for cognitive behavioral therapists.

As night started to fall, I read it. It blew my mind.

I recognized all the distorted patterns of thinking that the book described, which lead to anxiety and depression. I knew them all from my own head. Now I had labels to identify them, and techniques to challenge and redirect them in the future.

For a day or two after, I walked around on a cloud, feeling my life was transformed. I had finally found a way out of the gloom that had formed around me in my teenage years.

Except it didn’t last.

Within a couple days, the CBT stuff had largely slipped from my mind. So it was back to catastrophizing, and black-and-white thinking, and overgeneralization.

Apparently, I’m not unique in this. A few days ago, I was reading an article about the promise of AI for treating mental illness. The article mentioned CBT, and how effective and popular it still is — IF. From the article:

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When [Alison Darcy, a psychologist at Stanford] was in graduate school, she treated dozens of hospitalized patients using C.B.T.; many experienced striking improvements but relapsed after they left the hospital. C.B.T. is “best done in small quantities over and over and over again,” she told me.

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I’m telling you this because in my still-catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, and overgeneralizing head, this connected to another thing I was reading a few days ago.

This other thing was a book by sales trainer David Sandler.

Sandler had came up with this amazing and low-stress sales system. He wrote it up in his book. He taught it to beaten down, despondent salesmen during live seminars.

The salesmen went out of the seminar walking on clouds, certain they had been saved from ever again being bullied by prospects or ashamed of selling.

Except it didn’t last.

That’s why Sandler’s book is called You Can’t Teach A Kid To Ride A Bike At A Seminar. From that book:

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Of course, people want instantaneous impact change. They want to see positive, enduring changes immediately. But our experience is that that kind of change is going to be sustainable over time only if you create a solid ongoing reinforcement program to back up the learning.

===

Maybe this is true of all really effective but unnatural systems.

You hear such a system described. It makes sense. You get energized, follow through for a couple days.

Eventually though, you revert back to the mean.

The solution: small doses, over time, with regular reinforcement.

Yes, I know this is the exact opposite of what typical direct response offers promise (Gene Schwartz’s publishing company was called Instant Improvement).

But this reinforcement learning approach has its appeals as well:

It’s easy to get started with something when you know it only requires small doses, rather than a drastic change.

And with reinforcement training, it’s easier to get committed to starting today, rather than starting later AKA never. That’s because since change will take time, and reinforcement, rather than a one time big bang that you can get with the flick of a credit card, every minute that you delay ends up costing you down the line. Best start today.

It holds for CBT… for sales training… and for the effective but unnatural habit that is writing a daily email for your business.

For CBT reinforcement, you now have AI apps to talk to you and offer to correct your distorted thinking day in and day out.

For sales training, you have David Sandler’s President Club, which reinforces his sales system during weekly meetups for a modest $12,000 a year.

And as for daily emails, you have my Daily Email Habit service, which nudges you to write a daily email every day, and gives you a puzzle to mull over, and even some hints to make sure what you write is effective.

Daily Email Habit doesn’t use AI, and it doesn’t quite cost $12,000 a year, at least yet. If you’d like more information on it, today, when it’s best to get started:

​https://bejakovic.com/deh​

Arguing with the Dalai Lama

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One time while I was attending university in Budapest, Hungary, the Dalai Lama came and gave a talk.

He sat on stage in a comfortable armchair, smiled beatifically, and spoke for an hour in front of the packed auditorium.

Afterwards, the Dalai Lama took questions.

There was an American guy in the audience I knew well, named Brendan. Brendan was studying environmental sciences, and he was infamous for being loud and argumentative.

Brendan immediately stood up to ask the Dalai Lama a question. It had something to do with environmental policy.

The Dalai Lama nodded assent while Brendan worked his way through his long question. Once Brendan finished, the Dalai Lama started to speak softly once again, sharing his vision.

Brendan listened for a few seconds. Then he got restless. Then he stood up again.

I don’t remember exactly what he said, but he started arguing with the Dalai Lama, in front of the entire auditorium, clarifying his own question, and highlighting important points that he wanted the Dalai Lama to be aware of.

I remember my face getting hot and my arms and legs getting heavy as I sank deeper into my seat, overcome with embarrassment on Brendan’s behalf.

Except of course, that’s not what it was. Brendan wasn’t embarrassed, and he didn’t need my embarrassment on his behalf.

Instead, I was just embarrassed by imagining myself in his situation — getting up to ask my self-important question in the middle of a packed auditorium, and then interrupting to pursue my point further, of the Dalai Lama no less.

It’s a curious thing.

I’ve always hated asking questions in seminars, participating in other people’s talks, groups, and discussions, being put on the spot. Like I said, always get hot, uncomfortable, and embarrassed. Regardless of what I say or what happens next, I come out of it feeling somehow dirty or defeated.

But that part’s not the curious part. I guess that part is common enough.

The curious part is that I’ve actually gone up on stage myself, both literally and figuratively, many times. And I loved it.

I used to do competitive debating. I’ve given talks at conferences. I’ve organized my own trainings and presentations online where I had hundreds of people listening (I hope?) to what I was saying in real time.

That’s the curious part.

Yes, these “stand up and command attention” situations always had my heart beating, my face flushed, and my body preparing to flee.

But inevitably, in every case, I came out of them feeling elated rather than defeated, purified rather than dirty.

What’s the difference?

Why is my instinct to be embarrassed and quiet in other people’s groups and talks and seminars… and to be willing to get up and speak when it’s something of my own, and to even be proud of the fact afterwards?

I don’t know.

Whatever the psychology behind it, the fact remains. I wanted to share it with you.

If you think you are not the kind of person who would ever stand up and command other people’s attention, maybe it’s because you have always tried doing it (or imagining doing it) within the context of other peoples talks, agendas, groups, whatever.

Organize something on your own, with your own initiative… and suddenly that same physical arousal gets interpreted in a positive rather than a negative way.

So much for unlocking the giant within.

Now I’d just like to remind you of my Daily Email Habit service. It helps you start and stick with writing daily emails.

Because yes, an email newsletter is a form of standing up and commanding of attention.

The good news is, it’s something you do for own ends… in a way that you control… and that you benefit from.

To find out more about Daily Email Habit:

https://bejakovic.com/deh