Personal Change

I tried to cover up my failures, but a loyal reader caught me

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In reply to my January 1st email, which had little to say about New Year’s resolutions, goals, or themes, I got a reply from long-time reader, occasional co-hostess of my live trainings, and infamous Crazy Email Lady, Liza Schermann. Liza wrote:

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What happened to your annual New Year’s email where you look back at the old year and set goals for the new one? I always look forward to reading it, especially this year.

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As Liza says, the past four years, on January 1, I always sent some kind of email about how my past year has been, what I managed to accomplish, what I am planning for the next year — all fit inside the latest personal development hack I’d fallen in love with.

But this year, I quietly decided to skip it.

The fact is, I had three themes for the past year.

A theme is like a vague and fuzzy goal, a general direction to move in rather than a destination to arrive to and a time to arrive there by.

Themes worked well for me in years past.

​​But in 2023, even with fuzzy themes in place of hard goals, I found that I had only made any meaningful progress in one half of one of my three themes. And that’s in spite of regularly revisiting those themes, and putting in thought and work into pushing each of them forward.

One half of one out of three is not something I particularly wanted to crow about. And I was sure nobody would notice, until Liza called me out on it.

Now, here’s a bunch of personal stuff that you may or may not want to read. It explains how I got to where I am, and what I’m thinking for the future.

I started as a freelance copywriter in 2015.

I worked for years with the aim of building up my skills, creating a name for myself in the industry, and making the kind of money that AWAI sales letters promise you.

And the crazy thing is, I got there. It took me about five years.

Then I decided that really, I don’t like to work with copywriting clients. Wouldn’t it be great if I could just do something on my own like create courses or do coaching and consulting?

And I managed to do that as well. It took me about two years.

Last year, back in March 2023, I had my best-ever month in terms of income.

Over the course of the entire calendar year of 2023, I also had my second-best-ever year in terms of income, only following 2020, when I was neck-deep in client work, and when obscene amounts of money were flowing in to me via commissions and royalties.

But last year, I had practically no client work. I was free to do what I want, when I want, with who I want, and I still made good money.

And yet, in spite of my apparent success in reaching my goal of independence…

… a few months ago, around September or so, I found myself working for much of the day, every day, and not getting a lot of work done.

It wasn’t because I was overwhelmed with the heavy burdens of the online solopreneur.

All I really had to do was to write a daily email, do a bit of research and work for my health newsletter, and do something to actually make money — put together some sort of new training, or course, or promotion.

And yet, the work stretched from morning to night, and projects barely inched forward.

To make it worse, it felt like things had been that way forever, and would go on forever.

I believe the technical term for this condition is boredom, or maybe aimlessness, or sloth.

Perhaps it was initiated by my actually achieving what I was working towards for so long.

I tried to fight it via willpower, and that’s how I ended up working pretty much the whole day, without getting much done.

And then, some time in late November, I was listening to Dan Kennedy’s Opportunity Concepts, where Dan talks about the hidden psychology of the people he sells to. Says Dan:

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Most small business owners are doing enough not to go out of business. That’s where their level of ambition has settled.

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I realized that’s exactly where I am. I also realized that it was the cause of my feeling of malaise, my struggle to move things forward in spite of working.

And I realized the fix for it, which is simply — ambition.

Because it’s more fun and enjoyable to have ambition, rather than to do just enough to not go out of business.

So in case you’re curious, that’s my theme for 2024. Ambition.

I invite you to keep reading my future emails to see how exactly this will play out over 2024, and then in a year’s time I can have another recap.

For now, I can tell you that things have already started moving. New offers, new partnerships, new sources of income — and most importantly, a new feeling of being motivated and optimistic.

This email is getting overly long. The only reason I allowed myself to write this much and this intimate is because 1) it helps me sort out my thoughts and 2) as business coach Rich Schefren likes to say, what’s most personal is most general. ​​So maybe you’ve found some worthwhile ideas in what I just wrote.

A few weeks ago, I said I would create a page on my site where I collect all my current offers for sale. I’ve done that.

In the future, I might even create a Dean Jackson-style “super signature” where I link to this in every email.

But for now, if you’re wondering what I have for sale, and why you might want it, and how it can help you in 2024, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/showroom/

Dating and business advice to a needy blackbird

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A few days ago, I was minding my own business, washing the dishes. The weather was warm so I opened the window.

Just as I was in the middle of scrubbing the salad bowl, a little blackbird landed on my windowsill.

“CHEEP,” said the blackbird.

“Oh hello there,” I said. “How do you do?”

The blackbird paced for a moment and then sat down on the windowsill. He seemed to be getting comfortable, which made me frown and pause my dishwashing. And then the blackbird spoke:

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Interesting that you ask that. Very interesting.

Something I am really struggling with at the moment is securing a mate.

I can’t get a mate for my familybuilding services. Even when I catch the eye of female blackbirds, they seem to smell my neediness from a mile away even if I don’t reveal it intentionally.

I wanted to ask:

How would you go about getting a mate if:

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… and then the blackbird listed his unique mate-getting situation, which happens to be the same unique situation faced by all single blackbirds, crows, and seagulls, as well as by all individuals, whether human or avine, who are hoping to go from zero to one in any endeavor that involves selling yourself.

I’ve long ago decided that I don’t want to be in the business of taking people or birds from zero to one.

So I just nodded to the blackbird in understanding, picked him up, placed him on the outside window sill, and closed the window shut.

That said, I do have one piece of advice.

I’m only sharing it because it applies to anybody who is looking to do anything new and frightening, whether they are beginners or much more advanced.

It applies to newbie copywriters looking for their first client… to experienced copywriters looking to send their first email to their own list… to business owners looking to go into a drastically more upscale market and charge 2x or 3x or 10x of what they are charging now.

It also applies to securing a mate. In fact, this piece of advice is something I heard from the infamous pick-up coach Owen Cook, aka RSD Tyler, the villain in Neil Strauss’s book The Game.

Owen was talking about the horrifying prospect of flying up to an attractive and unfamiliar female blackbird, in the middle of a park with lots of other blackbirds around, and striking up a fun and natural interaction.

Perfectly easy if you have total belief in yourself and your worth.

Perfectly impossible if you are overwhelmed by fear and self-doubt.

So here’s Owen’s observation:

“The halfway point between fear and total belief is indifference.”

You can’t go from fear and neediness to total belief and confidence.

But you can go from fear and neediness to indifference.

One way to do it is repeat exposure in a short enough period of time.

Go and cheep at seven attractive and unfamiliar blackbirds today. Each of those interactions might go horribly, though they probably won’t.

But whatever the outcome of the interactions, by the end of the seven, you will realize you are still alive. In fact, you are perfectly fine.

Do this a few days in a row, and those innate survival mechanisms, which underlie both fear and neediness, will begin to get habituated and calm down. You will start to get indifferent. And that’s the halfway point to total belief and confidence.

In other words, if you think you have a neediness problem… what you really got is an activity problem.

That’s all the free advice from Bejako’s windowsill for today.

If you’d like to buy something from me, I can recommend my Simple Money Emails training.

​​No, Simple Money Emails won’t replace the need to actually write and send emails, whether for your own business or for a client business.

But Simple Money Emails can teach you my effective one-two system for writing emails, much like this one, that make sales, keep readers reading, and keep birds chirping. If that’s an outcome you’d like as well:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

How to enjoy the holidays and be inspired by your own creativity and smartness

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Today being Christmas, of course I thought it would be a perfect time to book a ticket to fly home. Empty airports… friendly fares… friendlier cabin crew.

And so I did it.

It was a beautiful and sunny morning as I took off from Barcelona today around 9am. The sky was perfectly clear so I could see every gleaming little house as we edged along the Mediterranean coast, by Marseilles and Cannes, and then as we turned inland over the Alps.

The plane flew over thousands of sunny and snowy peaks, and down into the Bavarian flatlands. We landed in Munich.

45 mins later, another plane lifted me up again. More snowy peaks — Germany, Austria, Slovenia, then into Croatia.

The winter clouds finally started to gather as we reached the smoggy grey fortress that is my hometown of Zagreb. But even here, there was still some sunlight — magical for central Europe in December.

Like Little Red Riding Hood, I took the shortest path to my grandmother’s place. What followed was a typically overwhelming Christmas lunch — an appetizer made up of minced pork meat wrapped in sauerkraut, then some sort of beef soup, then a greasy duck with the local mlinci, then a chocolate cake which was the only part of the feast I was allowed to skip as I cited medical and psychological reasons to avoiding sugar.

Now as I write this, I am on the couch recovering from the travel and the food.

It would be easy to shrug, say I don’t have anything more to share with you, and just tell you to enjoy your Christmas.

But the fact is this:

Since I was deprived of Internet in general and email in particular the whole day until just now, I actually found my brain bursting with bunches of ideas as I looked down onto the Alps.

I will share one of those ideas with you tomorrow — a way to grow my health newsletter via paid ads, while not paying nothin’ for the ads.

I don’t know whether this idea will work, but I plan to test it out starting right after the holidays. And you can try it too if you find out tomorrow what I have in mind.

For today, I will simply say that good things happen when you cut off the stupid Internet, including that social media channel known as your email inbox.

Try it. You might be inspired by the ideas that you invent in the absence of constant digital input. Plus you might enoy the holidays much more.

And if you find yourself bored and craving stimulation while you go into airplane mode with the Internet, then try reaching for a book.

I have one I wrote that I keep recommending. You can find it below. Whether or now you choose to get it, merry Christmas.

My book 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters

Ramit Sethi: Brave or stupid?

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I recently listened to an interview with Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a data scientist who is perhaps most notorious for discovering, through Google Trends data, that the country of India has a unique and unholy interest in adult breastfeeding.

Less well-known is that Stephens-Davidowitz was also college roommates with Ramit Sethi, the best-selling “I Will Teach You To Be Rich” finance guru who currently has his own Netflix show.

I don’t follow Ramit, so I don’t know if the story below is well-known. But it was new to me. Stephens-Davidowitz said of Ramit and their time as roommates:

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He announces he’s going to teach everyone personal finance. So he starts plastering around the whole dorm, “RAMIT SETHI’S PERSONAL FINANCE CLASS.”

I’m just like, “Ramit, you don’t know anything about personal finance. What the hell are you talking about? Nobody’s going to show up to your stupid class on personal finance.”

He puts on this class.

​​I think two people showed up. One of them had a big crush on him.

And I felt so bad. I’m like, this poor guy has no sense of what the world wants from him. He’s making a fool of himself. What a loser.

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I read somewhere that, “Courage is knowing it might hurt, and doing it anyway. Stupidity is the same. And that’s why life is hard.”

Ramit Sethi persisting in spite of total initial failure is courage.

But we’ve never heard of the millions of unsuccessful morons who persisted and maybe persist still, in spite of clear signs telling them to stop.

And that’s why life is hard.

Except then I thought a bit more. I realized that you can make the odds better in your favor, and make life a little less hard.

It comes down to asking, does persistence here give me any meaningful accumulation?

There are fields where, if you continue to stick to it, your odds get no better, and maybe they even get worse.

Me winning the lottery is no more likely tomorrow even if I play the lottery today.

​​And me becoming a professional tennis player… that’s impossible today, and even with practice and dedication, it would only become more impossible tomorrow, as I get older, slower, and less likely to take even a point off a highly promising 14-year-old prospect.

But there are other areas where persistence does give you meaningful accumulation.

An email list is one. If you don’t do much of anything but stick around and keep emailing, your list will grow, however slowly. Eventually, you’ll cross some threshold where you have real influence.

Another area is money-making skill. You might have zero or negative money-making skills today. You might be an actual anti-talent. So was I, once upon a time.

But if you persist in learning and practicing a money-making skill, then the knowledge accumulates. Eventually, it crosses over a threshold where you have real skill at making money, first for others, then maybe even for yourself.

Life is hard if you don’t choose wisely, and if you keep investing in things that cannot or will not give you a return.

But invest in things that are almost guaranteed to pay you back, and you can wind up with your own version of the Ramit Sethi story above. Maybe some smartass who knows you today will be telling the story tomorrow of how, unbelievable but true, you weren’t always the huge success everybody now knows you as.

Anyways, enough Eat Pray Ramit.

I’ll now point you to my Most Valuable Email course today. For one, because it can help you keep emailing day after day (I personally find Most Valuable Emails most fun to write).

For another, because Most Valuable Email can help you build up an audience by doing nothing more than creating content (people will start recommending you on the strength of your emails alone).

But most importantly, because each time you write a Most Valuable Email, it accumulates a bit of money making skill in your brain. And eventually, that accumulation becomes meaningful.

If you’d like to get started today:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

How to take trivial, possibly made up facts and turn them into influential emails

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“So what did you learn today?”

My ex (still living together) was sitting on the couch, arms crossed, looking at me sternly.

“Err…” I said, my eyes darting around as I tried to remember some new fact. “Today I learned that… supposedly you’ll be twice as productive if you block off your time for specific tasks.”

Background:

Last week, I was listening to an interview with Codie Sanchez. Codie is a newsletter operator and boring business investor. But at this point in the interview, Codie was not talking about either of those topics.

Rather, she was talking about how she makes her marriage work.

One of Codie’s tricks is that, each day, she and her husband share one thing that they’ve learned that day.

I mentioned this to my ex (still living together). She liked the idea so much that now she grills me at unexpected times about what I’ve learned during the day. I then have to think up something in a panic.

Yesterday, when she asked me this, I had been watching a video by Cal Newport of Deep Work fame. Newport now sells a notebook for planning your workday and blocking off time for various tasks.

​​Newport says — and he’s an authority so why question him — that if you block off your time for specific work tasks, you’ll be twice as productive.

I told my ex this. She again liked the idea. And it developed into a conversation about day planners and productivity and places in Barcelona to go shopping for notebooks.

Here’s the point of all this:

That thing about [time blocking = 2x productivity] is a small, trivial bit of information. I’m not even sure if it’s true. But it was enough of a kernel to start a natural and free-flowing conversation there on the couch. I guess that’s why Codie Sanchez recommends the practice.

It’s not just marriages or exes that this works with.

If you’re ever struggling for daily email ideas, then just ask yourself, “What did I learn today?” ​​Pick something small, concrete, even trivial. Then secrete a bit of personal context or opinion around that, like an oyster around a grain of sand, and within a few minutes, you’ll have something that your audience will enjoy reading and might even get value from.

That’s kind of a micro class in influential email writing.

For the macro version, you’ll have to get my Influential Emails training, which I’ll make available later this week, starting Thursday.

​​You’ll have to be on my email list to have a chance to get Influential Emails. If you’d like to learn something new on Thursday, click here to get on my list.

Ancestral Recall testimonial open

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How many words can you write in a day? How many words can you write consistently, day after day? Without AI?

Dan Ferrari, the A-list copywriter who was my copywriting coach in a different decade, once wrote that “most writers, when they put their ego aside and just get to work, can knock out about 3,000 words per day.”

I’ve never tried measuring it, but I have my doubts. I do know that today I’ve already written about 1,500 words. I still have this email to write, and my brain has already turned to mush, and is in danger of leaking out of my ears.

So let me take the easy path to the offer, and tell you about a valuable message I got a few days ago from copywriter Jesús Silva Marcano.

Jesús wrote in response to an email where I compared unprompted testimonials to the Black Lotus card in Magic The Gathering. To which Jesús wrote:

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Reading the reference to Magic: The Gathering transported me several years into the past, and I loved it.

Also, I agree with Jakub that I learn a lot from your daily emails.

Several months ago, I was reading, enjoying and learning from them.

However, since I bought MVE, I can guarantee that you learn, easily 5 times more.

And although I can’t use the “most valuable trick” with all the clients that come and go into “my (copywriting) world”….

What you teach in Simple Money Emails definitely does.

Maybe this email is not a Black Lotus, but I hope it can be at least an Ancestral Recall.

I hope all is well and keep it up. A big hug.

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It’s very nice to get message like this, and to hear that people are getting some real-world value from my courses and emails.

Plus, I’m now almost all the way to the offer. So:​​

If you want to learn a bunch of email copywriting tricks that you can use for clients who come and go into your copywriting world, then you can find those in my Simple Money Emails training.

If you want to discover a method to easily learn 5x more about marketing and copywriting by writing emails to your own list — or by reading the emails I write to my list — then you can find that in my Most Valuable Email course.

And if neither of those interests you, then you can always just write in and tell me how many words you can write consistently, day after day. I’m curious how I stack up, and maybe you can teach me something valuable. Thanks in advance.

Chargeback inspiration

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In my email yesterday, I wrote about a chargeback I’d gotten earlier in the day. I asked for advice.

And I got it.

I got advice about possible ways to handle the current chargeback better.

I got good advice on how to prevent it in the future.

I got personal stories and experiences and consolation from others who have been there before me.

I can say I’m honestly grateful to everyone who wrote in. I can also say it’s reminder of something important:

People start email lists to do marketing. To sell stuff. Perhaps to become seen as an authority at whatever it is they do.

But if you do it right, it ends up going way beyond that.

I heard Codie Sanchez talking on a podcast a few days ago. As you might know, Codie runs Contrarian Thinking, a newsletter with some 250,000 subscribers, about buying and selling businesses. She’s built an eight-figure info business off the back of that newsletter, plus maybe several other 7-figure businesses also.

But it goes way beyond that. Codie said that via her newsletter, she’s automatically and without any extra effort also gotten:

– Unique business opportunities
– Financing
– Business partners
– Employees
– Advice and guidance
– Access and connections

My experience has been similar.

I’ve had direct job offers from people reading my newsletter. I’ve had business partnership offers.

People have shared their personal stories with me. I’ve gotten good business advice, from people who are qualified to give it.

I’ve hired people via my list, and I’ve been hired by people on my list.

I’ve gotten insider tips and tricks from people at the very top of the game.

I’ve met some of my readers in real life. We’ve gone to conferences together. I’ve even gotten nice stuff in my physical mail box from people who read these emails.

All of that fell out automatically, as a side-effect of relentlessly, mercilessly, unfailingly writing a 400-500-word email every day, and sharing something I have learned, or something unnerving that happened to me, or a bit of inspiration, or a bit of frustration, like I did yesterday.

I guess you see where this is going. But since this is a marketing newsletter, I will force myself to spell it out:

Start an email list.

Write to it regularly.

Preferably daily.

Good things will happen as a result. And if bad things happen also, you will have a powerful resource in your email list to deal with it.

I have a course about how to relentlessly, mercilessly, unfailingly write a 400-500-word email every day, and to make it interesting for yourself and valuable for your readers. If that’s something you’d like to do:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Curious George creates a course

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It’s been three days since I wrote an email about the 40th anniversary of the first broadcast of The Day After, which happened on November 20 1983.

​​A reader wrote in to ask about that:

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Beautiful story…but where do you find this kind of story?

Do you google the events for this day or something else? I’m really curious.

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The short answer is that, like Curious George, I’m a good little monkey, and always curious.

In the particular case of The Day After email, the sequence of events was as follows:

1. A few months ago, I was reading an email by Lawrence Bernstein. Lawrence was talking about how he managed to delete his entire email list. As he put it, “Sunday morning felt like one of my favorite dark films from 1983, ‘The Day After.'”

2. I had never heard of The Day After so I made a note of it in a list of “movies to watch” that I have been keeping for years.

3. Some time later, I watched The Day After, without knowing anything about it except that Lawrence likes it.

4. After watching the movie, I was curious to find out more. So I read up on it. I was impressed to find out all the stuff connecting The Day After to Ronald Reagan and the Soviets and nuclear war averted.

5. A few days later, the thought popped into my mind to check when exactly The Day After was first broadcast. It turned out the 40th anniversary was coming up in a few weeks’ time. I thought it might be cool to write about it on the actual anniversary. So I made a calendar entry telling me to write an email about it on the day of.

6. The calendar notification fired a few days ago. So I wrote down an outline of what I remembered about the movie. I plumped it up with some details taken from Wikipedia and ¡tachán!

The particulars of how I wrote that email are probably completely useless to you.

But there are a few underlying principles which you might profit from. Such as for example:

​​Keeping extensive notes and having lists of everything you might care about…

​Digging in when you come across an unfamiliar reference from somebody you respect…

O​​r using your calendar app to make your life easier and to make sure stuff gets done when it should.

Over the past few years, I’ve come up with a handful of such processes to make sure I never forget a good idea, never fail to draw a valuable connection, never miss out on a profitable opportunity.

Of course, it doesn’t work all the time. Or even much of the time.

​​Even so, these processes have been incredibly valuable to to me for daily email writing, previously for client work, futurely for new projects I am starting up.

This stuff has become such an integral part of how I work that I created a course, Insight Exposed, all about how I keep notes, and write journals, and process all of the ideas and information coming at me so I can turn them into something productive and profitable.

I released Insight Exposed back in February for a few days. But I haven’t been selling it since.

I will release it again soon, after I’ve polished it a bit. But more about that in its own email.

For now, let me just share something valuable that I’ve kept track of thanks to my Insight Exposed system.

It’s an article I came upon back in September. It was published in the lying New York Time, but in the opinion section, so maybe it’s true.

In any case, I found it insightful, so much so that i took note of it, processed the note, and put it into long-term storage, so I could share it with you today. In case you’re curious:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/17/opinion/sports-zen-mental-subtraction.html

The psychology of being an idiot

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In reply to my email yesterday, a puzzled reader wrote in to ask:

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How did you initially start your list? Like to get those first few people in the door. I feel like we’ve never been told your origin story to how this list became to be what it is.

Maybe I’m wrong, I’ve only been reading for 2 years, though your list is older then that. And I don’t even know how I got here.

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I’ve been reading a lot about newsletter growth lately, and the above is a frequent question that comes up.

“How did you get your first few subscribers? Your first 100? Your first 1,000?”

The most common answer I’ve read is, “Oh, at the start, I just asked people in my network if they’d like to sign up.”

That is not what I did. For one, I don’t have a network. For another, I don’t like asking anybody for anything. (They might say no, and then what!)

I started my list over 5 years ago.

​​I checked just now, and it took me 18 months and 5 days from starting daily emailing to my get my first 100 subscribers.

The background of why it took me that long is that I’m an idiot, or just very stubborn, depending on your moral compass.

For the longest time, the only thing I did was write my daily emails, and post them to my website.

I did on a few occasions post something smart and professional in copywriting groups on Facebook. I believe I managed to get two, maybe even three new subscribers that way.

But mainly, I was just grinding away, because like I said, I’m an idiot, or just very stubborn.

My plan was never really to build this email list into anything.

My only vague goal was to get better at writing emails, and to have something to show potential clients as a demonstration of my skill. That was back when I still did client work, which is something I don’t do any more.

And yet, I continue to write daily emails today.

I’m currently reading a book, The Psychology of Money.

It was published a little over three years ago. Today, it has over 43k reviews on Amazon, 32k of them being five-star.

Basically, the book tells you how your own psychology gets in the way of your making money, growing money, and keeping whatever money you’ve managed to make or grow.

None of those are topics I’m interested in at all. But I realized I could make this book more interesting to myself by switching out “money” and switching in “business” or “project.” Suddenly, the lessons became familiar and dear:

– Think long term, and let the power of compounding work for you

– Be okay with a wide range of outcomes

– Realize that you will change — what you think you will value in the future is probably not accurate

So that’s kind of the Bejako origin story, and the explanation of my motivations in driving this newsletter onwards in the way that I do, well into my 6th year with it.

Now, I can imagine that my origin story sounds entirely uninspiring. It’s kind of the opposite of wandering into the wrong room, lingering just a second too long, and getting bitten by a radioactive spider that dropped from the ceiling.

To make up for my uninspiring email today, tomorrow I will tell you a way that, while I still had practically nobody reading this newsletter, I grew another newsletter to a few thousands readers in a matter of weeks, and filled it with quality subscribers.

That’s on tomorrow’s episode of the Bejako Show.

Meanwhile, if you want lessons on success with any long-term project, consider Morgan Housel’s Psychology Of Money, and it’s 32,000 5-star reviews.

​​If you’d like to take a look, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/housel

10% success vs. 100% success

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Once upon a time, I found myself in a frightening environment — a night club. ​​I was there with a friend. Let’s call him Dave.

​​Dave is not a remarkably beautiful man. If anything, he’s rather physically unattractive.

Now, as you might guess by my opening sentence, a nightclub is not my kind of place.

But from what I understand, the one I was in with Dave was typical. There was a stage, people dancing, music, lights.

Dave started dancing in place next to me.

He then danced his way over to a girl in the crowd.

​​He continued to dance, all the way around her, like some kind of bird of paradise.

When the girl showed no interest, Dave danced his way back to me at the edge of the dance floor.

He shrugged his shoulders and explained his philosophy. “If I go out, and only one out of ten girls likes me, that’s not a 10% success rate. That’s a 100% success rate.”

This message has stuck with me ever since.

Incidentally, today Dave is a highly paid lawyer, working when he wants and from wherever he might feel like. He also happens to be married to and have a kid with a beautiful girl who initially wouldn’t give him the time of day.

I thought of this story today after I got a message from long-time reader Logan Hobson.

Logan is an email copywriter. He writes emails for big-time real estate investing gurus who have audiences of 80k+ people. He repeatedly does 5-figure email-based launches for these guys.

Logan was writing in response to my email yesterday, in which I explained my simple, 5-minute way to come up with 2-3 good email ideas each day — no writer’s block required. To which Logan wrote:

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I like the idea that writer’s block doesn’t really exist – it’s more just idea block.

Once you have a good idea, the words just write themselves. If one of your 10 ideas stands out a good one, then the words just flow.

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In other words, if you sit down to write… and only one out of ten ideas flows well and turns out to be something that makes you money… then that’s not a 10% success rate. That’s a 100% success rate.

Seamless transition alert:​​

If you want more help coming up with email ideas, specifically ones that flow well and make you money, then check out my Most Valuable Email course.

Logan got that course a year ago. And after he went through it, here’s what he wrote me to say:

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After going through MVE, it feels like the veil has been lifted off some of your writing in the most enjoyable way.

Like a magician who is about to do a trick, but winks at those who know and revealing exactly what he’s about to do, leaving those who aren’t in the know none the wiser.

However in this case, it doesn’t ruin the magic, it just makes it even more enjoyable.

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For more info on Most Valuable Email, and how it can help you grow an audience and make money:

https://bejakovic.com/mve