Motivation

What good will that do you?

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A new subscriber wrote in yesterday to ask:

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How would you start over if you’d lost everything right now? Including your friends and connections that you acquired over the years, only you, your knowledge and your skill.

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I paused at this, because I had recently been thinking about the same question, for my own reasons.

For a moment, I considered writing up my thoughts, and sharing them in an email. But then I asked myself, why?

What good will it do you to know what I would do if I lost everything but MY knowledge, MY skill, and MY good looks?

The fact is, my knowledge (of stuff like marketing principles and tactics) and my skill (in things like copywriting) took years to develop.

The same is true of my mindset, if by that we mean my ability to choose projects… to drive them to the end even when I’m feeling uncertain and dispirited… to tweak my approach and try again when I lay an egg… and to recognize when it’s time to cut my losses and move on.

Because of all this, it would be useless for me to tell you what I would do, unless you have my knowledge and skills and mindset.

(It would also be close to useless if you do have my knowledge and skills and mindset, because in that case you’re prolly not thinking of getting rid of everything you’ve got and starting from zero.)

Here are a few things I think are worth doing in general:

– Selling

– Writing

– Having an audience and maintaining a good relationship with that audience

If you do all three of these on a decent level — not “world class” level, not “so good they can’t ignore you,” simply decent — you will have work and money, as long as work and money are to be had.

Now please just give me a second. Let me go to my closet and dig it out… ah yes, here it is. My favorite hobby horse:

Daily emails.

The fact is, writing a daily email will, bit by bit, get you better at selling, at writing, and in time, even if you do absolutely nothing else, it will build up a small but dedicated audience for you (that’s how it happened for me at least).

Where daily emails will eventually take you, nobody knows. But I’m willing to bet it will be a good destination, better than where you’re at now. Plus, you might even enjoy the journey along the way.

If you want help starting and sticking with the habit of writing daily emails:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

10 things people have copied from me

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1. My “Hello my name is” optin page. (A copywriter I know recently set up a new list and wrote to tell me about it, along with, “I swiped your landing page”)

2. “Announcing” as the subject line to kick off every promo or new offer

3. “Down payment + the rest contingent on success” pricing plans

4. Turning my own current project into a mid-ticket cohort I can sell (I did it with my project of implementing the 1-Person Advertorial Agency program back in May, several people have followed me since)

5. The Most Valuable Email trick (ok, I created a course on that, so little wonder)

6. Using the “Can you do me a favor?” strategy in emails

7. “Bejakovic’s crooked line” (a specific storytelling technique I used in advertorials, which Sam Bradbury-Butler used in his own advertorials and then integrated in his 1-Person Advertorial Agency program, while naming it after me)

8. My personal journaling and notetaking system (ok, I created a course on that too, called Insight Exposed, so little wonder again)

9. “Magic box” CTAs (if you don’t know what those are, then reply and ask)

10. My opening line of copy in emails where the subject line and the body don’t match (you gotta create a bridge)

There’s more, too. I’m possibly the most ripped-off daily emailer south of the Seine and north of the Nile.

Am I bitter about this? You bet your sweet—

No, I’m not bitter. The fact is, few if any of the above ideas are actually mine.

My optin page copy is taken from William Goldman’s Princess Bride. The “announcing” subject line I got from Sean D’Souza who got it from Vic Schwab. The “down payment + rest contingent on success” I picked up from Jeff Walker.

And so on.

All these 10 things people have copied from me I have copied from others as well, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Frankly, there is nothing new under the sun.

Yes, it can be fun to buy and sell secrets and secret opportunities, and that’s part of the game of direct response, both for the customers and the merchants.

At the same time, good ideas are cheap and abundant. You have to apply them, and keep applying them, and not get too distracted by the shiny and the new, in order to achieve success.

The good news is, if you apply and keep applying, success comes. It might take a while, but it comes.

Perhaps you KNOW the value of writing daily emails. Perhaps you even KNOW how to write daily emails.

But in case you’re not actually writing daily emails regularly, and applying that knowledge, I have a service that can help motivate you, keep you accountable, and make your job easier.

For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

How to get your audience to engage after years of passive lurking

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In this email, I will tell you how to get your audience to engage after years of passive lurking. Or rather, I will tell you how modern Renaissance man Tom Grundy done it.

Tom, as you might know if you are a careful reader of my emails, is a high-powered London banker.

Tom is also the father of someone I only know as “Baby Grundy” (now “Toddler Grundy”)… a half-marathon runner… a semi-professional poker shark… a competitive chess player… a card magician… an avid book collector… and the author of a great daily email newsletter, on topics of self development and happiness and career satisfaction.

Earlier this year, Tom took part in a Most Valuable Offer cohort I ran, where I offered to help list owners plan, sell, and run a paid live workshop to their list. After it was all said and done, Tom wrote me to report on the results:

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I ran Reclaim Your Evening last night. I had eleven people buy the offer so $1k in total which I’m counting as a big win. Every email I sent made at least one sale, which was very cool, and I also had people buying who’d been on my list a couple of weeks and others who’d been on my list a couple of years (and this was the first time they’d interacted with me/bought something from me) so also very cool. So thank you!

 

One thing I realised was that I probably needed the accountability more than I thought I did ☺️

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Like I wrote last week, you can write the engagingest, fascinatingest content in the world, and it still won’t matter much, not unless you have an exciting offer to lead into.

Tom’s case study above is proof for that.

Tom writes great daily emails. Has been for years.

For a long time, Tom was promoting a “waiting list for his coaching program” at the end of his emails. That’s better than nothing, but it was not reason enough for folks on his list to actually take any action.

But one exciting and relevant Most Valuable Offer later, and Tom had 11 sales, new buyers, and engagement from people who have been on his list for years, but who never interacted or bought anything from him before.

Since running his Most Valuable Offer, Tom has launched a group coaching program as well as a 1-1 coaching.

I don’t know if these are directly tied to the Most Valuable Offer he ran and to the leads/buyers he got from that. But to my mind, there’s little doubt that the momentum of a successful Most Valuable Offer can be motivating and can juice you into activity and open up opportunities that were completely unimaginable just weeks before.

This coming Wednesday, September 2, I will hold a live paid workshop, a Most Valuable Offer of my own, about how to plan, sell, and host Most Valuable Offers.

In his message above, Tom mentions accountability, which was part of the Most Valuable Offer cohort I ran in April.

If you like, at the end of Wednesday’s training, I will give you an opportunity to get my direct support and help and accountability for running your own Most Valuable Offer, if you want ’em.

Whether or not you take me up on that, I will give you the essence of what I have learned so far about running successful and client-pleasing Most Valuable Offers, based on my own experiences and my work with coaching clients.

Wednesday’s training happens at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST, and again, the date is September 2.

Yes, there will be a recording if you cannot make it live. But you’re sure to get more out of it if you can join me on the actual call.

Your investment, should you choose to join me, is $97 today and $2/month ongoing, because, as moons pass, I will be continuously updating the Most Valuable Offer SOP and sharing my Most Valuable Offer results and the results of clients I am helping on this.

If you’d like to sign up and learn how I run Most Valuable Offers, to engage both my readers and myself, and how you can too:

https://checkout.bejakovic.com/most-valuable-offer/

The opportunity seeker’s way to success

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I’m a bit stressed as I write this. It’s Saturday morning. Tomorrow and Monday I’m going on a mini-vacation. Also on Monday, I have a deadline for the advertorial I promised to deliver to my first client/partner in years.

The advertorial that’s due Monday is, err, 75% of the way done?

I have a bunch of research, a bunch of notes, and a bunch of very rough AI drafts. Still, I’m far from having something I can give to the client. And I have today to finish it.

In moments like this, I ask myself, “Why do I do this to myself?”

And the answer comes, “Because I would never get anything done otherwise.”

I have long had this theory that everybody who succeeds in direct marketing is an opportunity seeker at heart.

Opportunity seeker = somebody who chases bright shiny objects, much like a bee that flits from flower to flower.

I think the business owners and the copywriters and everybody else who somehow makes it in direct marketing are first and foremost opportunity seekers, meaning that they get sucked in by marketing that promises you hot new riches now, even if you have no time or money to invest and cannot count past 5.

I myself am a veteran opportunity seeker.

It started in high school when I responded to a direct response ad in the back of a newspaper, which promised a lucrative and enjoyable new career (forestry service), without any qualifications, presumably even without finishing high school.

I have since spent tens of thousands of dollars buying various stuff that promises to be a hot new opportunity.

You might think I’d know better by now. I don’t know better.

Anyways, here’s my point for you:

If, like me, you are an opportunity seeker, then make it work for you. Take the psychological levers that you know can be pulled to make you act, and pull them yourself.

At the heart of every opportunity pitch are three words:

1. NEW

2. OPPORTUNITY

3. NOW

The NOW is why this opportunity wasn’t available yesterday, and why it won’t be available tomorrow. It’s enforced in opportunity marketing via scarcity and, more typically, urgency.

You can enforce NOW on yourself in the same way, by setting deadlines for yourself, like I did with that advertorial I told you about.

(Of course, for a self-imposed deadline to be meaningful, you need some kind of public accountability, like clients or customers who are expecting stuff to be delivered.)

The OPPORTUNITY part boils down to the idea of SOMETHING FOR NOTHING.

The fact is, we will all have to work in some way until the day we die. Even if you make all the money in the world, you will still have to invest and manage and secure that money.

But nobody wants to hear that. I certainly don’t.

So I embark on projects that promise to be bolt-on opportunities, things I can work on for a bit, get up to speed, and then simply profit from for the rest of my life, without sacrificing anything I’ve already got. Of course, it never really works out that way, but so what? It gets me moving.

And the NEW, of course.

If you’re an opportunity seeker like me, the familiar and old hat becomes invisible to you quickly.

This is where the danger lies, because the familiar and old hat is really what works, while something genuinely new is very likely to fail, or at least to fail when you try to set it up.

The way I deal with this is to introduce novelty WITHIN familiar and old-hat structures. Such as for example, daily emailing.

I’ve been doing this daily email every day for almost 8 years now.

Commitment and discipline, right? No. Novelty.

I never know what I’m gonna write about. It kind of stresses me out and excites me each morning. Today’s idea came (of course) during the shower.

So there you go:

1. Look at the marketing that’s working on getting you to move.

2. Figure out what done it.

3. Then apply it yourself in some way, to achieve whatever success you want to achieve in life.

Are you an opportunity seeker like me?

Do you want novelty? Do you want something for nothing? Do you want a reason to do it now?

If so, then daily emails might be for you. Like I told you, they work for me.

There’s public accountability. There’s the excitement of something new each day. And there’s something for nothing in the form of all the collateral content that gets produced, which you can feed into courses, books, paid newsletters, templates, apps, IP, which you can sell forever, without ever touching it again!

If you wanna get started with daily emails, today, I got a hot new opportunity for you:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

PSA: I failed, and nobody noticed

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A few days ago, I ran a poll inside my Daily Email House community that went… nowhere.

A member, Neil Sutton, had suggested creating little 3-4 person accountability groups. I somehow called them “pods” and ran a poll to see if people would want to participate. The results, from a group of 480 members:

6 people voted “Yes! I love the idea, please make it happen!”

2 people voted “No! Other people are just barnacles slowing down the gleaming ship that is my life”

7 people voted “Ew? I mean, maybe? It would depend on who exactly I’m matched with in my pod”

I’d call that a fail, and I blame the “pods” naming misstep. Some more failures i’ve had in the past couple weeks:

– Psych Psundays. I introduced this series of Sunday emails, ran it for 3 weeks, ran out of ideas and apparently reader interest, called it quits

– Vitriol Wednesday. Based on another Daily Email House member suggestion. Designated a day to pile on hate on a guru in the industry. Lukewarm hate at best. Called it a fail that I won’t repeat.

– Auction for Svet Dimitrov. I had the idea for copy chief Svet Dimitrov to run an auction to help people get copywriting clients. Svet floated the idea to his list and I floated it to mine. Again, lukewarm interest. Call it a fail (though Svet did get a number of coaching clients out of the exercise nonetheless)

– Auction for Copy Riddles resell rights. I floated the idea to my list and inside Monetization Nastermind, another Skool group I run. Again, not enough interest to run an auction. Fail.

Did you notice any or all of these failures? If you did noticed, did you remember any of them until now that I brought them up? And if you did, did you gloat and cackle at at any of these failures of mine?

I doubt it.

In my experience, nobody notices your failures, and if they do notice, nobody remembers.

And yet, I can tell you that each time I start a new project, particularly one that will be out in the open like a poll or a launch or an auction, each time the thought comes to me:

“What if it’s a big old failure? And what if a bunch of people see me fail?”

In other words, all I’ve really developed, in place of a thick skin, is a moderate ability to act in spite of feeling stressed about what will happen if I fail.

The feeling has never really gone away.

And that’s important to remember.

If you’re waiting to stop feeling nervous in order to act, odds are you will never act.

On the other hand, if you act, and if it produces a success, you’re almost sure to be filled with excitment and even confidence.

And if you act, and it produces a failure, the feeling will be much less stressful than the expectation of that failure… plus, like I said, few people will noticed and nobody will remember.

And while I’m on the topic of public service announcements, a reminder that the kickoff of my tour de commandments event is happening in 4 days

To celebrate the 1-year anniversary of this book, and possibly, my 100th review, I will be kicking off a Tour de Commandments event on May 11th.

I’ll have more details about this exciting, unique, spectacular, historic, one-time, never-to-be repeated event over the next few days, as the countdown to the start gets closer and closer to zero.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t yet gotten your copy of my 10 Commandments book, your copy is waiting for you here:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

2022 in review

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There’s a tradition around these parts:

Every January 1, I write an email reviewing my previous year, and publicly setting some new goals or themes for the coming year.

I will do that tomorrow. Today, though, I want to review 2022, and 2021, and maybe 2012.

Because in my life, I’ve noticed the following keeps happening over and over:

1. I set a new goal for myself

2. I work intensely on reaching that goal

3. I don’t reach the goal in any reasonable amount of time, and I gradually stop working to reach it

4. I forget all about the goal

5. Some time later, possibly years later, I realize that, somewhere along the way, through foggy or indirect means, I’ve actually reached my goal and got what I wanted so long ago.

This has happened over and over, starting in my 20s. It’s happening still today.

Maybe you want examples.

This very newsletter, which I believe I first dreamed about in 2012, is one.

There have been many more, a lot of them too personal to share even in this therapy-like email, including goals or “themes” I set in 2022 and 2021, some of which have come true over the past year or two.

But maybe you don’t want examples. Maybe you’re just wondering how this might possibly be relevant to you. So lemme tell ya.

The ultimate experience or breakthrough in Bejako’s Method for Producing Results is:

“It just happened! I don’t know what I did in the end, and most likely I did nothing, but the result is finally here!”

I’m a serious dabbler in self-help literature, and I’ve read from gurus who have experienced or witnessed the same. They extrapolate those kinds of experiences to conclude that:

1. Effort is not needed

2. Effort can in fact be counterproductive

After all, you weren’t trying and striving when you got the big result. Instead, you were relaxing and forgetting that you even had a goal. So you might as well relax and forget the goal, all the time, and “all these things shall be added unto you.”

I believe that’s a fundamental error. I have no proof for that, other than what I’ve experienced and achieved in my life, both personally and business-wise.

I believe all 5 steps of Bejako’s Method for Producing Results are necessary.

In particular, I believe that step 2, effort, often intense, dogged, frustrating effort, is necessary.

But that’s no kind of a conclusion to make, especially in a newsletter like this one, about direct marketing. Instead, let me tell you the more inspiring flip side.

If what I say above is true not just for me, but more generally, and I believe it is, then it applies to you too.

Right now, you might be in steps 1 and 2 above, working towards a goal but not yet seeing results.

Or you might be in steps 3 and 4, having given up on your goal and maybe even forgotten the goal altogether.

I’d like to propose that, if you see nothing happening, or you’ve concluded you never will, you have already done the work, or are doing work now, even if you’re not aware of it, to get to the goals you care about.

If you find yourself in 2026 getting to one of those goals, magically and seemingly without effort, write in and let me know. I’d love to hear about it. Because there is magic in the world, at least in my experience. It just doesn’t work on a 365-day schedule.

The sneaky Christmas legend of THE ONE

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Today being December 25, let me tell you a story that happened on today’s date, supposedly.

The year was some time long ago, or thereabouts.

The place was London, though whether at St. Paul’s or not the French book doesn’t say.

Merlin had told the Archbishop of Canterbury to summon all the barons to London, for a sign would appear, showing who should become king and bring the realm out of lawless jeopardy.

And sure enow, during morning mass, right around the time that I’m writing this, specifically 11:02am, a great stone appeared in the churchyard, and an anvil atop that stone, with a sword, naked to the point, stuck inside the anvil. On the sword was an inscription in gold letters, which read:

“Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is rightwise king born of all England.”

Maybe you know this story.

Lots of great knights tried to pull out the stone. They all failed.

Then on New Year’s day, a young boy named Arthur pulled out the sword, kind of by accident, and the sign was shown and the prophecy was fulfilled:

HERE WAS KING ARTHUR, NEW RULER OF THE REALM, KING OF ALL ENGLAND.

Good story, right? Right???

I don’t know whether this legend taps into something fundamental in the human psyche, or if it’s just that we’ve all been told it a million times over, in various forms.

One way or another, it’s snuck into our subconscious, where it does its damage. Because it’s not how reality works.

A few weeks ago, a member of my Daily Email House community, DTC copywriter and brand strategist Chavy Helfgott, posted a question in the group:

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I recently put a new page on my website called “Client Love”, which features screenshots of feedback I’ve gotten from clients.

And I noticed that there was a lot of really, really enthusiastic feedback there. Like multiple “wows”, “I’m amazed,” and “blown away.”

Here’s my problem: despite this great feedback, there’s this niggling little worm in my brain constantly whispering, “You’re not really good enough.”

This is problematic because it’s difficult to sell myself as THE answer to my ideal client’s problem… if I myself doubt that it is true.

I guess my question is – anyone have any ideas how to get past this hump? Why is feedback from my own clients not convincing me? How do I convince myself that my work is valuable, so I can more successfully convince others of this, so that they hire me?

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Lotsa House members chimed in with great suggestions and ideas.

The one I want to highlight today came from speechwriter and trainer Alexander Westenberg. Alexander wrote:

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I agree with pretty much everything already said, but here’s an additional two cents: You say it’s difficult to sell yourself as THE answer, but to me I don’t see why you have to?

The way I like to look at it for myself (and pretty much everything else in life) is that you don’t have to be THE answer, just AN answer.

So for me, I’m a speechwriter and trainer. I have my way of doing things, and I honestly believe in it and in the value I bring. But a) there are other speechwriters out there, and b) some people prefer AI.

I provide AN answer to the problem of how to be a powerful and persuasive speaker. I’m even happy saying I’m one of the better answers — but I’m also happy saying that people can answer that problem in other ways.

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Arthur legend notwithstanding, you don’t need to be THE ONE.

You can be ONE OF and still live a heroic life — a life where you take on great challenges that excite you, and get rewarded handsomely for your effort.

There are lots of ways you can be announce to the world you are ONE OF the better answers to whatever problem you are solving.

I think that having an online personal brand is one of the better ways to do that, though there certainly are other options.

I also think that, for having an online personal brand, an email newsletter is particularly attractive, and much easier to succeed with, though other platforms and formats can certainly work.

And if you do write an email newsletter, then I think a daily, personal-sounding email like what you are reading right now is a great way to go about it, though dailyish or weekly or occasional emails can work, and are certainly better than nothing.

And if you do choose to write daily emails, then one of the better ways to stick with it and be effective is to use daily prompts or topic categories for yourself, which keep your emails fresh and your mind focused, though of course using no structure and relying on inspiration each day is also an option.

You see where I’m going with this?

It’s an old story, one that I’ve told hundreds of times in these emails. But maybe you still don’t know how it ends? For that, take a look here, and see if you are willing to start on the journey that you are being invited upon:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Become an investigative reporter with high-level salesmanship skills

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A bit of Bejako background:

I went to high school in a rich suburb of Baltimore, Maryland (we weren’t rich, but ok).

All the other kids in my class were ambitious and smart (one girl’s dad later won the Nobel Prize in chemistry). They worked hard their entire high school days. They ended up going to schools like Princeton and Stanford, and became lawyers and doctors and architects.

Meanwhile, 17-year-old Bejako had zero drive to go to college, and had no idea what kind of work he might ever want to do.

His best guess — the only option that kind of turned him on – was the idea of moving down to Annapolis, Maryland’s small, quaint, maritime capital, and becoming a reporter on some local newspaper that covered state politics.

Fast-forward to the present, and switch back to the first person:

While I never became a small-town reporter, the same lack of ambition and non-entrepreneurial nature I had in high school has stuck with me throughout life, now into middle age.

I am really not motivated by money, try as I have to change that. I’ve also never thought of myself as an entrepreneur or online business owner. And yet, that’s kind of what I’m doing now, and what’s more, I’m not really qualified to do anything else.

I’m telling you all this because a couple nights ago, I was reading a book about direct marketing. It said the following:

“Understanding your ultimate prospect has nothing to do with creativity. It requires relentless, investigative salesmanship. You need to become an investigative reporter with high-level salesmanship skills.”

“Hm,” I said to my pillow. “An investigative reporter on the salesmanship beat? That’s something I can imagine myself doing.”

And in fact, the very next day, I told myself to treat what I’m doing as investigative reporter. I started collecting data about offers I had made, successful or unsuccessful. I came up with theories about why things turned out as they did. I started trying to write up a story that makes sense that fits the data to the theory.

It’s been fun and it’s getting me to do things I should have been doing all along.

My point is not that you specifically should start treating your business as an investigative reporter.

My point is that, if “value-creating entrepreneur” or “small business owner” doesn’t really feel like a suit that fits you, there lots of other suits you can put on, including ones that you like the look of. And it will still be you inside the suit.

You gotta do certain things to see success if you have an email list and want to make money with it. Selling is one of them. Understanding your audience is another. Creating new offers is still another. But there are lots of ways to get yourself to do those things, including things that align with your own natural motivations and ambitions.

Or in the words of Internet marketer Rich Schefren, “Put your business goals of your self-development goals.” It’s much more likely you will see success if you work with your own psychology, rather than trying to change it.

So much for Monday Morning Mindset.

For some specific strategies on how to take your existing skills and interests and turn them into money, enough to pay for a house:

https://bejakovic.com/house

If you cannot persuade yourself to act however hard you try

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This morning, a private detective I know here in Barcelona sent me a screenshot of a trending social media story:

“Couple Who Met On Dating App Rob Bank On First Date”

Can this really be true? I decided to do my own sleuthing.

It turns out yes, the story is roughly true, but with an important detail that’s missing in the headline above.

The man, Christopher Castillo, age 33, and the woman, Shelby Sampson, age 40, agreed to meet for a date.

Castillo asked Sampson to pick him up in her car. Once in the car, Castillo started drinking wine, presumably red. He then asked Sampson to pull over at a bank.

Castillo was gone for a few minutes. He came back sweating, wearing sunglasses and a hat (!), and holding an antique gun and a wad of cash.

He told Sampson to drive, which she did, for a bit, until the cops pulled them over and put the date to an end.

The crucial bit is that Sampson was not charged with anything, because, so the state believes, she had absolutely no knowledge of or participation in any criminal aspect of this first date.

This missing detail is what I found most interesting in the whole story.

I’ve never robbed a bank, but I imagine it’s hard.

The stock joke is that a typical man is unwilling to pull over and ask for directions while driving. Can you imagine how much more unwilling a typical man is to pull over, walk into a bank, hold up a gun, and ask for $1,000 in cash (and five years in prison, it turns out)?

No wonder Castillo was drinking in the car. And no wonder he felt he needed somebody “in his corner,” even if that was an unwitting and unwilling non-accomplice he had met on Tinder.

I found this interesting because, while I’ve never robbed a bank, I have done other, legal, things in my life. Some of these things I found personally very difficult to do, because they challenged my own identity.

There were times when no amount of auto-suggestion, willpower, or even red wine would push me over the threshold.

There were times when the only thing that would help me act would be having somebody “in my corner,” having a feeling of a home base I could come back to, even if that was somebody I had met minutes earlier and had no special relationship with.

I imagine this is all a bit waffly without specific examples. I might give those in another email.

My point today is simply that if you have something you know you should be doing (don’t rob a bank), but you cannot persuade yourself to do it no matter how you try, then having some kind of support or community of other people to rely on, however tenuous, can make all the difference.

Ideally, this is other people in real life. Real life seems to make a big difference.

But if you cannot find people in real life to act as a home base, then people online can sometimes act as a substitute. At least that’s the promise of online communities, groups, and memberships.

I am still keen on spinning up a new online community of my own, but I haven’t yet decided which (legal) things I would like to support people in doing.

While that’s going on, I can only recommend once again a community that I myself am part of, Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin.

If you’re struggling to take the action needed to build your own audience… or to make deals with people who have an audience of their own… or to make your first $5k online… then you might find the support you need within Royalty Ronin. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

Interesting psychological effect of making it easy on yourself

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Get ready for a bit of inspirational massage:

I’m reading the autobiography of a guy named Bill Veeck, who was the last person to ever own an major league baseball team — in his case, Chicago White Sox and Cleveland Indians — without having an independent fortune.

At the time when Veeck got to Cleveland, the Cleveland Stadium had the biggest playing field in the majors.

(For all my non-baseball-loving readers: a baseball field consists of two parts, an infield and an outfield. The dimensions of the infield are strictly prescribed by the rulebook. The dimensions and shape of the outfield are not.)

Veeck found that his Cleveland players were discouraged by the size of their home stadium. They would hit a baseball 450 feet — a good ways by any standard — only to have it caught because the field was so large.

So Veeck installed a new fence which shrank the field.

Hitters started hitting better, because they thought they now had a chance to hit a home run.

So far, so normal.

But here’s the curious bit, which is both true and fit for one of those corporate office inspirational posters. From Veeck’s book:

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There is an interesting psychological effect in bringing the fences within reach. After we put up the wire fence there were almost six times as many balls hit over the wire fence and into the old stands.

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In case this isn’t 100% clear due to all the sports analogizing, the point is that:

1. Veeck’s players had convinced themselves they cannot hit a certain distance, say, 500 feet

2. Veeck changed the field so they only had to hit a shorter distance, say, 420 feet, to hit a home run

3. Within that smaller new field, six times as many players ended up hitting home runs of, say, 500 feet or more, which they thought they couldn’t do when the field was bigger

I’m not 100% sure what hte psychological term or explanation for this is.

Removing stress and pressure? Or finding a way around the players’ learned helplessness?

Whatever it is, I thought it’s a curious thing, possibly inspiring, and so I wanted to share it with you. Maybe it’s something you can find a way to apply in your own life and business, if there’s a fence, metaphorical or real, that has been unreachable for you, in spite of your best trying.

In other news:

In less than an hour from now, mentalist-turned-marketer Kennedy will go live on Zoom to share email copywriting and marketing secrets that took him from selling $27k of his flagship info product… to selling $544k of the same, to the same audience.

This is a live training that Kennedy is doing exclusively for readers of this newsletter.

If you have an email list, there might be valuable techniques you can pick up on this training which you can implement in your own list tomorrow.

Or who knows, maybe simply hearing Kennedy’s story in detail, and seeing that it is possible to go from selling $27k of an info product (quite common and manageable) to selling $544k of the same info product to the same audience (rare and frankly puzzling) is a doable thing.

Maybe not just for Kennedy, but maybe for others too. Maybe even you? I wouldn’t want to put that kind of pressure on you.

But if you want to hear Kennedy’s training, and get inspired, then a bit of time still remains for you to sign up:

https://bejakovic.com/kennedy