Motivation

The paradox of the long- and short-term view of success

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A couple months ago, former UFC featherweight champ Max Holloway was preparing for a super important fight. Perhaps the most important fight of his career.

Max’s manager, Christopher Daggett, had the following to say about this preparation:

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“Everything with Max — whether it’s finances, his family, brand, partnerships, charity, his health — all of these are long-term things. But when it comes to the fight game, everything is short-term. We’re looking three feet ahead and that’s it. So, to that end, it always feels like everything is at stake. We’re putting everything on the table. At the same time, we know that no matter what, two weeks from now, Max is still Max. That sounds like a contradiction. But really, from a short term, everything is at stake, but everything will be fine two weeks from now and we understand that.”

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The above quote may sound paradoxical, so to recap the essential:

In one instant, Max and his team focus on just the next step (three feet ahead, everything is at stake).

​​In the next instant, they focus on the long-term destination (no matter what happens, everything will be fine, Max is still Max).

​​And they do this over and over.

I bring up this quote to invite you to look at both long term and short term of this email.

In the short term, I want to tell you that:

Looking at your goals both from 3 feet away… and also from 30,000 miles away… is one of the 6 characteristics shared by people who have a positive mental attitude. At least around a specific goal or activity.

Perhaps you think “positive mental attitude” is such a worn-out phrase. Perhaps you are surprised I’m even writing about it.

I’m doing so because read I about positive mental attitude a while back in a book I liked a lot and found very valuable.

But more importantly, I’m doing it because well-worn doesn’t mean well-near-worthless.

​I hope you can see that. And I hope you don’t just jump on every bandwagon passing through town, trying to lure you to the new success and self-help circus that just pitched its tent down at the old horse track.

The fact is, the 6 characteristics of a positive mental attitude have helped athletes recover from serious injuries… star Wall Street traders win at the stock market… and have probably responsible, consciously or unconsciously, for much of the success in this world.

For example, once I found out about these 6 characteristics, I recognized them from my own life. I wasn’t always aware of them. And I didn’t always have them. But when I achieved the things I have achieved in my life, these characteristics were there, whether I knew it or not.

So that’s the short term. ​​T​oday’s email. Where I told you about you one of these characteristics, about the short-term and long-term views to your goals.

As for the the long term, meaning next few days, I will tell you the remaining 5 of 6 characteristics. In case you’d like to read about those characteristics as I write about them, you can sign up for my email newsletter here.

The destructive power of analogy

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Today I’d like to start by sharing an inspirational quote:

“If you feel you’re under-motivated, consider this: the word ‘motivation’ is used only by people who say they don’t have it. People who are ‘motivated’ rarely use such a term to describe themselves. They just get on with the task at hand. ‘Lack of motivation’ is an excuse: it’s giving a name to not just getting the job done.”

I read that in Derren Brown’s book, Tricks of the Mind. Brown seems like somebody I might have become in another life, had I only craved attention instead of shying away from it. And so when I read Brown’s quote, I nodded along and said, “Hmm that’s interesting. Maybe that’s even profound. Hey maybe there’s hope for me!”

Well, it wasn’t really me saying that. It was the little angel who usually sits upon my right shoulder.

“Psst, you there,” said the little devil who usually sits upon my left shoulder. “You wanna go smoke some cigars and drink some hooch? Or do you wanna hear why that D. Brown quote is bunk?”

“Err no,” I said. “This quote is inspiring. Please don’t ruin it for me. I’d like to believe it. Plus it makes sense. After all, if motivated people don’t know the feeling of being motivated, clearly it’s not a real thing.”

“Well let me ask you this,” said the little devil. “Do you know any 9-year-old kids?”

“No.”

“Well pretend like you do. Or just think back to when you were 9. Do you ever remember waking up in the morning after a blessed 10 hours of deep sleep… jumping out of bed… and with a stretch and a big smile on your face, saying, ‘Boy I feel so healthy today!'”

“Oh no…”

“Yeah, that’s right. Kids don’t talk like that, at least not the vast majority, the ones who have been perfectly healthy their whole life. But does that mean that there is no such thing as health? That you can’t be in good health or in bad health? Or by extension, that there’s no such thing as motivation and lack of m—”

“Get thee behind me Satan!” I yelled. But my mood was already spoiled and the quote above was ruined for me.

Maybe I managed to ruin it for you as well. If so, it was all for a good cause. I just wanted to illustrate the destructive power of analogy.

Fact is, Brown might really be right. There might not be any such thing as motivation.

But the fact he tried to prove it in a specific way (“motivated people never use the word”) was easy to spoil with my analogy to kids and health. And maybe, just maybe, your brain made the same leap after that which my brain did.

“Well, health is real… and if health and motivation are alike in this one way… then motivation must be real.”

​​But that’s not proven anywhere.

Anyways, now I’m getting into ugly logic which is really not what persuasion or this email are about.

I just want to point out that, if you want to persuade somebody of something, or if you want to dissuade somebody of something, then the most subtle and often the most persuasive thing you can do is to take two pushpins and a piece of string.

​​Stick one pushpin into an apple. Stick the other into an orange. Tie the string between the pushpins. Make it tight.

And then hold up your creation to the world and say, “Draw your own conclusions! But to me, these two look fundamentally the same! Just look at the string that connects them!”

Anyways, D. Brown does not talk much about analogies in his Tricks of the Mind. That’s his only omission. Because this book really has everything you need to persuade and influence — and from somebody who is both a serious student and a serious practitioner of all this voodoo.

In fact, the last time I mentioned this book in one of my emails, a successful but low-key marketer wrote in to tell me:

John!

Maybe you didn’t get the memo! You can’t tell people about Derren Brown’s “Tricks of the Mind”.

It’s against the rules.

As a friend of mine said, “That’s too much in one book. Don’t give the chimps tools.”

LOL

Well, maybe my mysterious reader is right. So don’t buy a copy of Derren Brown’s book. But if you do want occasional chimp-safe tools from that book, or from other valuable persuasion and influence sources, then you might like my daily newsletter.

I was doing “massive action” all wrong

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I just spent an hour sending out about a dozen emails to random people on random topics.

Some of them were personal.

Some were to connect those who might get value out of knowing each other.

Some had to do with my own little publishing business, of which you are reading the marketing right now.

The total time to send all those emails was under an hour. The total work, in terms of effort and brainpower, was nothing.

I don’t know what’s gonna come out of all those emails.

But I bet that out of those 12 emails, at least one big and positive thing will emerge that’s not anywhere near to the surface today. Perhaps it will be some totally new and fantastical beast, with bat wings, a cat tail, and maybe a donkey head… ready to entertain me, or make me some money, or maybe open up doors I don’t even know exist right now.

All this brought to mind something I overheard once during the Q&A part of a Dan Kennedy seminar. Somebody in the audience mentioned the “principle of massive action.”

I’ve known about “massive action” for a long while.

In fact, at different times in my life, I’ve been a devotee to the idea. But I always took it to mean something in a kind of Grant Cardonish sense – work harder than you’re working now, 10x harder, and quit complaining.

But this person in Dan Kennedy’s audience gave a different meaning to massive action. One that seems to exist within the Dan Kennedy galaxy.

Yes, “massive action” still involves taking action, and maybe even doing work.

But the key thing, according to what I read from Dan Kennedy, is to take action in a bunch of different dimensions.

Think up 12 different ways to solve a problem. And get going on all of them, all at once.

“Err Bejako,” I hear you say, “are you telling me to grind 12 times harder? How is this an improvement over Grant Cardone’s 10x fluff?”

Nope. Grinding is not required.

Of course, some of those 12 possible solutions might be hard to move forward.

But some may be easy.

Some may require you to do real work. Many won’t.

Some might require sitting and thinking, or writing and editing. Others might just require a quick email to someone you know.

You never know which one approach will end up being the one to solve your problem. And if my experience is any guide, it usually won’t be the most difficult and time-consuming one, the one that requires Grant Cardonish grinding. Plus, there’s seems to be some multiplicative magic when you take different approaches to solve a problem, beyond simple addition.

Anyways, I’m not sure if this helps you in any way.

But if you want more ideas like this, ideas I’ve pilfered from people like Dan Kennedy, applied, and benefited from, then sign up for my daily email newsletter.

The one piece of influential writing which molded me above all others

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The one piece of influential writing which molded me above all others – above all the Ben Settle emails, all the Dan Kennedy books, all the Dan Lok Facebook ads — is an old issue of the Gary Halbert newsletter, titled:

The Difference Between Winners and Losers.

I read this issue in the first few weeks after I discovered copywriting, years before I actually became a freelance copywriter.

And I’ll make a dramatic claim:

I don’t know if I would have ever started as a copywriter without this Winners/Losers issue. Without the basic idea I got from it.

One thing I know for sure is that whenever I come back to the core idea from this Winners/Losers issue, big things, transformative things, often happen.

Maybe I’ve made you curious. So here’s the gist, in Gary’s own words:

Non-alcoholics can never truly understand alcoholism. Straight people can never understand what it is to be gay. Gays can’t hope to thoroughly comprehend what it is to be straight. And…

Spectators Can Never Understand
What It Is To Be A Player!

In that newsletter, Gary gave a quick, cheap, and easy exercise that anyone could do to 1000x their chances of becoming rich. It just involved putting out a classified ad and fielding all the calls that would come in.

​​Just follow the simple instructions, and ultimate success is 1000x more likely.

“But most of you are not going to follow these simple instructions,” Gary said. “I know that already from past experience.”

“I won’t be like those people,” I told Gary, who was already dead. “I will do what you tell me, and I will become a success!”

Of course, as you can probably guess, I never did follow Gary’s instructions and I never did put out the classified ad. But the idea, along with a bit of shame, stuck with me.

And that’s how I achieved what I have achieved. Because on occasion, I remember Gary’s Difference Between Winners and Losers.

And rather than saying, “Yeah that’s good advice” or “Pff I’ve heard that before,” I shut up for a minute and actually follow the step-by-step instructions that some smart and successful person has laid out for me.

Because like Gary said, knowing something intellectually is not good enough. You have to do it, apply it, experience it yourself to have a chance of becoming a player.

Perhaps keep that in mind, as I switch to an almost entirely unrelated topic:

My Copy Riddles program is now open for enrollment, until this Sunday at 12 midnight PST.

“Pff I know all about that,” I hear you say. “You haven’t stopped talking about your Copy Riddles program for a century and a half.”

Well, maybe this is the moment when you finally hear me. For two reasons:

First, because Copy Riddles was actually born when I finally followed another bit of Gary’s step-by-step advice. This was advice I had known intellectually for years, but that I had never put into practice. And when I finally did put it into practice, big, transformative things happened.

And second:

B​ecause Copy Riddles is built around the idea that you gotta experience things yourself.

Spectators can never understand what it is to be a player… and copy readers can never understand what it is to be a copywriter.

​​That’s why I built and organized Copy Riddles as a series of practical exercises, simple but powerful, that you do every day to implant copywriting skills into your head — and to actually get the experience of creating effective copy.

But maybe that’s all a little vague for you.

Fortunately, I have written up a quite extensive and exclusive report, with all the details of how Copy Riddles works. In case you’re interested:

https://copyriddles.com/

It was all my fault, and always has been

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A few nights ago, I was lying in my plush bed, smoking a cigar and tossing grapes into my mouth one by one.

Life was good.

I had just sent out my email about the prestigious Dig.This.Zoom event. It was only a matter of time now.

A bit of movement in the corner of my bedroom caught my eye. It was my laptop, open to my Gmail inbox. A new email had arrived. I could just make out the subject line:

“Your form, ‘John Bejakovic consult request’, has a new response”

“Sooner than I expected,” I smirked, “but I’m not surprised.”

In that email about the Dig.This.Zoom event, I had successfully associated myself with heavyweight marketers Aaron Winter and Dan Ferrari. I ended that email with my consulting offer.

Clearly, I thought, some smart business owner, who owns a profitable niche business I would never have even dreamed about, and who reads my daily newsletter religiously, realized he could make much more money with my advice and guidance.

That business owner is now reaching out to offer to pay me in advance… if only he can get a bit of time on my calendar, and the opportunity to have my highly trained eyes locked critically on his email funnels, until I find small changes that can lead to big improvements.

I slid out of bed lazily and made my way to my laptop.

I imagined myself a few months down the line, getting an email from said business owner. The email would say:

“John I was skeptical when we first did the consult. But we made the changes you suggested. And now we’re making 11x what we were before from the same email funnel. I’m over the moon! I’m sure you don’t need yet another glowing testimonial. But if you ever want to use this publicly to let the world know how incredible you are, please go ahead. It would be an honor for me.”

“Well okay, if it would be an honor for you,” I said to my empty bedroom as I clicked the Google Forms link. “Let’s see who the lucky business owner is today. I wonder what mysterious and surprising line of work he is in.”

My ugly Google form opened up. My mouth hung open. My face sank.

There it was. My newest consulting request. The successful business owner from that surprising new niche I had been fantasizing about. The request read, in its entirety,

“I am a Nigerian direct response copywriter. I want to learn from you.”

I wasn’t sure what bothered me more. The fact that my fantasy had been popped, and that this was the polar opposite of the ideal consulting lead I was dreaming about. Or perhaps it was just the utter lack of effort involved in this “consulting request.”

“Learn from me? Learn what? How to write self-deprecating emails like this one? How to make ugly Google Forms? How to approach people in a way that shows you are serious about working with them and respectful of their time?”

I wasn’t sure how I could possibly respond to this request in a sensible way that didn’t waste more of my time. And then I realized I should just do it in a daily email to my list.

I also remembered a bit of philosophy I’ve long held near to my heart:

It’s always your fault.

That might not sound like the healthiest way to go through life. But it’s served me well.

If things ever go in the completely wrong direction, away from where I want to be, then like David Byrne, I always ask myself, “Well, how did I get here?”

Because pianos don’t just fall out of the sky and land on your head. You have to walk under them first, as they are hanging by a fraying rope. You have to stand around, spinning aimlessly from side to side, while that rope gets more and more frayed. And you have to make sure you never look up until finally the rope snaps.

So dear Nigerian direct response copywriter, if you are reading, don’t feel like I am picking on you.

It was my fault for not being sufficiently clear who my consulting offer was for, and what it was about.

If you’d like to learn from me — I assume how to write copy, but who knows — then my suggestion would be to wait another week.

That’s when I will reopen my Copy Riddles program.

​​Copy Riddles is a way to learn copywriting from me, in a very compact and affordable package. Much more affordable than the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars it would take if you want to get the equivalent knowledge from me in a series of one-on-one consults.

But perhaps you are not that Nigerian direct response copywriter looking to learn from me.

And perhaps now you have a clearer idea of my consulting offer is about. And perhaps you even think it might be smart for you, and for your business.

​​If so, fill out the ugly Google Forms form below. No need to go overboard. But give me more detail about you and your business than just saying, “I want to learn from you.”

https://bejakovic.com/consulting

Pretty girl alone in a cafe – where can I go from here?

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Just a few minutes ago, I was walking down the street, my internal radar urgently scanning for a place to sit down and get a coffee, when I saw her:

A pretty girl, sitting by herself, at a shady cafe, and pulling out a laptop.

Now in the megalopolis of Zagreb, Croatia, where I am for the next few days, the laptop in a cafe is a good tell that the girl is not a local, but is a foreigner.

And in my experience, foreign girls, sitting by themselves at a cafe in a foreign land, are sometimes ready to talk and laugh.

So I asked myself, why don’t I marry the necessary (coffee) and the pleasant (talking to this girl)?

And I sat down at the cafe, at a table right next to the girl, but at a nonconfrontationally diagonal angle.

On closer inspection, everything about the girl confirmed she was not a local. A nose ring. A tattoo of a feather on the outside of her wrist. A poofy floral-print shirt and jean shorts.

I started running through a few possible ways to open up a conversation.

The waitress came to take my order. I ordered, nonchalantly looked at the girl again, and got back to my scheming.

Another waiter came, and brought out the girl’s order, a croissant and a coffee. “Oh thank you,” the girl said in English, a big smile on her face.

My scheming intensified. I looked at her laptop, which had an interesting marble-print case.

“Maybe I could ask her about that,” I said to myself. “But first let me go to the bathroom.” I got up, went, came back.

In spite of my secret hopes, the girl was still there. She shifted in her seat and looked at me inquiringly.

I sat back down. A feeling of dread started to settle over me.

My mind ran over familiar gambits for starting a conversation with a girl. Direct compliment? Grandfatherly inquiry about her laptop case? An assumption about where she’s from? “Are you from Boston? You sound like you’re from Boston.”

But hold on. Let me switch gears for a second.

A few days ago, I got a question/comment from a reader. She was encouraging me to write about mindset, specifically the mindset it takes to take action, when action is really the only thing missing for almost certain success.

I don’t know too much about mindset. But I find it a mysterious thing.

Why is it that among two people, equally capable and filled with desire, one will take action and the other won’t?

Equally mysteriously, why will a person take action in one situation in life, but be blocked by some unseen force in another situation?

For example, I have started conversations with literally thousands of strange, unfamiliar, but attractive girls in my life.

And not only started conversations.

​​I’ve had fun interactions with many of these girls, and found many of them ready to talk and laugh. In other words, I have plenty of reference experiences telling me this can be an enjoyable affair for all parties involved.

Any yet, as I’m sure you can guess, I didn’t ask the girl today if she is from Boston. I didn’t make any connoisseur-like comment about her laptop case. And I didn’t tell her she looks very nice.

Instead, I sat there for a few minutes more, my dead, shark-like eyes staring off into empty space… I finished my coffee… I paid, I got up and I left.

So I don’t know too much about mindset. But I do know something about process. And I can tell you one procedural thing I’ve figured out, which helps me take action and get closer to success:

And that’s to never chew myself out.

This might sound counterintuitive. It goes against all the sports hero movies we’ve seen for decades, where a bitter defeat leads to a lot of agonized soul searching, and a new, desperate determination to come back and win, no matter what it takes.

And maybe that really is what it takes for you. But as for me:

I’ve noticed that chewing myself out never does me any good. Either before the big moment. Or after.

So after I got up from that cafe, after a brief moment of irritation with myself, I shrugged my shoulders.

Because I have a process of getting myself back in the groove of talking to girls. It’s a bunch of personal strategies I’ve worked out over years of similar experience, by channeling the energy I would have spent on chewing myself out… into thinking about what I could do differently the next time.

I’ll put that process into action​​ soon. Maybe as soon as I finish writing up this email.

I’m not sure if this is relevant to you in any way.

But if you find yourself blocked by mysterious forces from taking action, in areas of your business or your personal life… and what’s more, if you find yourself agonizing over that fact… then it might be worth remembering to shrug your shoulders, and to transfer your energy from chewing yourself out to something more productive.

Anyways, that’s my free tip for today.

My almost-as-free offer for today is to sign up for my email newsletter. It’s usually about copywriting and direct marketing. With occasional diversions into personal and inspirational topics, like today. If you’d like to sign up, click here and fill out the form.

My ship is sunk

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Yesterday, I invited you to play a little game called Daily Email Battleship.

It was supposed to be a fun way to exchange recommendations for daily email newsletters.

What I didn’t realize is I was getting myself into an unfair fight.

After all, there is only one of me. And my opponents were many.

So last night, after my email went out, alarm sirens started blaring on the HMS Bejako. My sonar system, warning me of incoming torpedos, started beeping faster and faster.

A muffled explosion went off underneath my inbox, and then a second, and then a third.

I looked out towards the horizon. It was dark with opposing battleships. I readied myself for a desperate fight.

But in spite of my valiant defenses and best evasive maneuvers, in the end my flotilla was torpedoed, overwhelmed, and finally sunk by the sheer onslaught of daily email recommendations from readers.

I’m being a tad dramatic.

If you joined me for Daily Email Battleship yesterday, thanks for playing. I will get back to you in person as soon as I get from under water a little.

And I will also be checking out the many interesting recommendations I got. I will share any standouts with you in the coming days and weeks.

Still, I gotta admit I was surprised.

Because in spite of getting something like 80+ different newsletter recommendations, there were plenty of successful people and businesses, sending out interesting daily emails, which were not named by anybody who played Daily Email Battleship with me.

Some of these were email lists I have mentioned in this very newsletter.

Others are one-man bands which have been featured as testimonials in big guru emails.

Perhaps the fact that nobody mentioned any of these newsletters is chance or omission.

But more likely, it’s just an inspiring reminder about the modern world.

Most people — myself included, and perhaps you too — can’t really fathom how many human beings there are on the planet right now.

And the fact is, you can have a business today, and do very, very well, with a tiny audience of just a few thousand people, or even fewer.

A few thousand people is like an eye dropper’s worth of humans in the great ocean of humanity.

But if you can somehow collect that eye dropper’s worth of people… and if you can create something of value and interest for them… and then sell it to them, in a way that’s enjoyable enough that they even look forward your selling, day after day… then you can do very well, while staying under the radar and above the sonar of almost everybody out there.

So that’s my possibly inspiring reminder.

Here’s another:

I have an email newsletter. And if you’d like to learn some hard-won email marketing lessons I learned on board the HMS Bejako, and while serving as a sailor in various other business’s marketing navies, you can sign up for my newsletter here.

Yet another paranormal Bejako email

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“And the copy writer does not create the desire of millions of women all over America to lose weight; but he can channel that desire onto a particular product, and make its owner a millionaire.”
— Gene Schwartz, Breakthrough Advertising

This past January, I sent out an email in which I told the story of how I magically “manifested” a lost license plate from my car.

The point of that email was that, in spite of being a very skeptical and critical person at times, I am also incredibly attracted to the possibility of real magic.

That’s why I often engage in wishful-magical thinking.

​​And that’s why I’ve repeatedly had “magical” things happen in my life.

Today, I want to give you an update on that — some theory of what real magic is. You might find this theory personally inspiring, or you might even find it useful in your own marketing.

The theory comes from an article I read today, titled When Magic Was Real. The article was written by the very interesting Alexander Macris on his Contemplations on the Tree of Woe Substack channel.

In the article, Macris cites the results of a parapsychology experiment:

60 people were split into four groups. Each group was either given chocolate blessed by a priest or ordinary, zero-blessing chocolate.

In addition, each group was told (truly or falsely) that their chocolate was either blessed or unblessed.

In other words, each of the four groups had a different combination of (belief in blessedness) x (actual blessedness) of the chocolate they were eating.

The experiment ran for a week. Participants were tested for effects on their mood.

So what do you think happened?

Did actual blessing create real benefits?

Or did belief in the blessing — aka the placebo effect — create real benefits?

Or was there no effect at all?

It turns out there was an effect. But the result might surprise you:

The only group that had a significant improvement in mood was the group that 1) got the truly blessed chocolate and that 2) was told that the chocolate was blessed.

Yes, this experiment might be bogus. But if like me, you are attracted to the possibility of miracles and magic, then just run with it for a moment.

Based on this experiment, Macris puts forward his theory:

“Magic is the product of belief x belief. It’s the product of my belief that I’ve blessed chocolate and your belief that you’ve eaten chocolate I blessed. And these beliefs must both be positive. If I don’t believe, it won’t work, even if you are a true believer. If you don’t believe, it won’t work, even if I’m a true believer. Belief x zero is zero.”

True? Who knows. But if it is true, I figure it has a couple consequences:

First, you gotta believe, and you gotta surround yourself with other gullible, uncritical people who are willing to believe without bothering to look closely at the evidence.

Your combined success, including the number of real miracles you experience, depends on it.

Second, rather than trying to persuade the people in your audience that your 28-day flat-belly challenge is really transformative, it might be better to make them believe in magic, in possibility, in miracles.

In other words, the ancient marketing dogma that it’s impossible or impractical to create desire is short-sighted, at least if you are trying to create real results for your customers — and to create customers who love to buy from you over and over.

So instead of just channeling existing desire onto your product, like Gene Schwartz says above, it might be better to focus on making your audience more inspired and motivated and hopeful in general.

Maybe you have your doubts. That’s fine. Don’t make up your mind now. Let the idea marinate there for a while.

​​Maybe you too will come to believe in believing. Our joint success hinges on it.

Anyways, on a mainly unrelated point:

Yesterday, I had the launch of my Most Valuable Postcard.

I magically got what I wanted, my first 20 subscribers, spread out across 11 countries.

I then closed down the order page, because 20 subscribers is all I wanted to start.

But I had people try to sign up afterwards (no-go) and even ask whether I have a waiting list.

Well I do now.

I’m not sure when or if will reopen the Most Valuable Postcard to new subscribers. But if I do, it will be a limited number of spots again.

So if you want to get a chance to be the first to sign up, then get on my regular mailing list here. And when you get my welcome email, hit reply and let me know you’d like to be added to the MVP waiting list as well.

An “awful” way to guilt-trip customers into staying subscribed

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A few days ago, I sent out an email trying to sell you the idea that much of the sale happens after the transaction is over. And I asked, how can you keep a customer selling himself on your offer, even after he’s bought it?

I got lots of interesting responses. One business owner, who asked to remain unnamed, wrote in with the following:

We plant a tree for each subscriber every month.

Each week we remind the subscriber of how many trees they’ve planted via their subscription.

The idea being that their subscription is making an ongoing difference by employing locals in areas affected by deforestation.

If they unsubscribe now there will be consequences for others.

This actually sounds kinda awful…

I don’t know about awful… I just thought it was wonderfully guilt-trippy. It also happens to be the exact flip-side of one way I’ve used to inspire people to buy, which is to say that their self-interested drive for success will have beneficial wider consequences.

That idea, about beneficial wider consequences, is one of 7 ways to inspire that I wrote up in an email long ago.

This was in the early days of my newsletter, when I stupidly and shamelessly whole-hogged how-to advice in my emails. The only thing I can say in my defense is that with this particular inspiration email, I at least camouflaged the how-to in with some infotainment (I matched up each how-to-motivate strategy with a pop song).

Anyways, I bring all this up for two reasons:

1. I realized that each of my 7 ways to motivate people to buy can be flipped to motivate people to stay sold. I just gave you one example above of how that works. But with the smallest bit of thought, all the other 6 ways can be flipped in such a way as well.

2. If I were a little smarter, like Ben Settle for example, I would take my “7 ways to inspire” email off my site, flesh it out a bit, and sell it for $97 as part of a paid newsletter.

It turns out I’m not very smart. But maybe I will get smarter one day, maybe one day soon.

As it is, you can still read that inspiration email for free, on my site, at the link below. And who knows. Maybe you can even take one of those ideas, use it to inspire some customers to take action today, and benefit them while also making money for yourself. Or flip that idea, and keep those wayward sheep from making a big mistake and straying from your flock.

In any case, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/99-problems-and-folsom-prison-blues-how-to-write-copy-that-inspires/

Grumble and grow rich

by

I recently decided to stop working with a big new client.

I felt the project wasn’t making any progress. I wasn’t enjoying the work. And perhaps most of all, I didn’t really need the job, because I have other options.

Still, I took some time after it all ended to make a list of good things that came from this experience.

One was that I got turned on to a cool new gadget (the reMarkable tablet).

Another was hearing some good stories about how to build an 8-figure business within a few years.

And a third were some new book recommendations, including Mark Ford’s Automatic Wealth.

As you might know, Mark is a multimillionaire entrepreneur and marketer. He’s one of the guys who helped build up Agora into a billion-dollar company. And he’s a prolific author, best known in copywriting circles for the book Great Leads, and best known in non-copywriting circles for his book Ready, Fire, Aim.

From what I can tell, Automatic Wealth was Mark’s first book. It’s about — maybe you guessed it — wealth. What you need to do to get it. What you don’t need to do. And on that last topic, here’s a quote from Mark’s book:

“But if getting rich and successful were simply a matter of replacing negative thoughts and feelings with positive ones, why are some of the richest, most successful people that I know miserable, grouchy, and gloomy? Not all the time. And not in all circumstances. But as a general rule it seems to me that most of the people out there making the big bucks are more driven than dreamy, more testy than tranquil, and more hard-pushing than easy-going.”

You don’t have to be miserable to grow rich. But based on what Mark’s saying, if you are miserable, it’s not an impediment.

The thing is, as I’ve written before, I really don’t care much about getting rich. I make enough money as is, and my appetites are limited.

That’s not to say I’m not ambitious in my own way, about other things (a topic for another email).

And that’s why I wanted to share this quote with you. Because it applies equally well to achieving anything in life. To achieving moderate success. To just getting started, on any project, or any change you’d like to make.

You don’t have to be miserable, obsessed, or filled with negative thoughts to succeed at what you care about.

​​But if you are negative, a grouch, or even filled with doubts, it’s not an impediment. Not unless your job is to be a greeter at Disneyland or a radio DJ or a head shop owner.

​​Or who knows. Maybe you can succeed even in those careers, if you just get going. And if you just have the will to keep putting the one foot in front of the other, however grumblingly.

So much for inspiration. For practical marketing and copywriting ideas, get on my email newsletter.