Personal Change

10 of my email ideas you are free to use

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I’ve spent the past hour preparing and attempting to write this email. Here are some of the ideas I approached and then discarded:

1. The strange, 100-year-old, menage-a-trois history that inspired Wonder Woman

2. How even classic comic books like Superman had woke politics behind them

3. A demonstration of an idea I heard during a Dan Kennedy seminar, that the opening of your writing should set the emotional tenor even if everything else is discarded

4. An email in which I pretend to promote the Brent Charleton offer that’s currently being promoted by Ian Stanley, Dan Ferrari, and Justin Goff, but then I come clean that I am in fact not promoting it (there was a point there, really)

5. Something like in the movie Fight Club, where they splice in a frame from a porn movie, but where I would do something similar but in an email? (I have no idea how)

6. Running a lottery within the actual email, with money bets and money prizes (I realized this is probably illegal)

7. Kicking off a P.T. Barnum-like hoax

8. Telling a personal story about myself and purposefully holding back key information

9. Writing up an email using the FREE framework I devised during my Age of Insight training (FREE is my alternative to the AIDA framework)

10. Thinking up some way to illustrate the following quote by legendary music producer Rick Rubin, who said, “Never judge an idea based on the description of the idea, show it to me”

I played around with all 10 of these ideas. Somehow, they didn’t come together. Maybe they will in the future. But even if they don’t, that’s fine, because at least I have my email for today.

The point I want to make to you today is something I read in John Cleese’s book Creativity.

​​Cleese, as you might know, was one of the members of comedy sketch troupe Monty Python. Later he had one of the most successful British sitcoms of all time, Fawlty Towers. He also made some very funny movies, including A Fish Called Wanda.

All that’s to say, Cleese is a creative guy. And in his book Creativity, about creativity, Cleese writes:

“You can’t have a new idea until you’ve gotten rid of an old one.”

That might seem obvious, but maybe seeing my discarded ideas above will make it stick in your head better. And the next time you are struggling to come up with one good idea, maybe will remember to quickly discard 10 bad ideas first, so you don’t end up taking an hour+ to write an email like I just did.

Anyways, all this was really just a build up to a little promotional plug I am about to make.

It’s for my Most Valuable Email course. What might not be obvious is that each of those 10 discarded ideas above was my unsuccessful attempt to put the Most Valuable Email trick in action.

It normally doesn’t take that long. But even if it does, it’s almost always worth it, at least in my experience.

In any case, if you would like to find out Most Valuable Email trick, and even start putting it in action (you can use any of my 10 ideas above if they work for you), here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Become a snowflake newsletter owner

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I’ll tell you what a snowflake newsletter is in a moment. But let me set it up first, with something surprising that happened to me last night:

I got in a taxi last night. I’m in Croatia, and my driver was local, and very white.

“Good evening,” he said. “Where are we going?” In just those few words, it was obvious he was from the coast town of Split, one of the strongholds of Croatian national identity.

I told the man where to drive. As he took off, he put on some music — that was the surprise.

It was some kind of solo stringed instrument. The only way my western ears could describe it was “oriental.” After a few moments, I leaned forward and asked the driver what music he was playing.

“It’s Persian,” he said. “If you’d prefer, I can put on some jazz.”

I’m visiting family for a few days and jumping around town all day long. I’ve taken a cab probably 15 times in the past 5 days. Each cab ride I’ve taken has featured an entirely different kind of soundtrack:

Romantic 1960s crooners from Yugoslavia… James Brown humping and groaning… Croatian folk music with little mandolins and bass fiddles… generic 2023 pop music… techno.

Last December, a guy unsubscribed from my list. I often check the “unsubscribe reason,” hoping to find something good. This time I was rewarded. The guy wrote as he unsubscribed:

“I’m getting too many emails overall… I get 50+ per day so I’m only going to stay on the lists that I want to read daily”

Too many emails today, right? Too crowded? Too late to get in?

I’ll make the exact opposite claim. Right now is the best time to get in.

Previously, I’ve called this snowflake positioning.

The classic marketing book Positioning is all about how great it is to be unique, how great to be first. But you don’t need to be either, not globally. You just need to be unique and first to a small number of people. And that’s very doable.

The fact is, there’s an unimaginable tonnage of humans in the world today. They are all easy to reach. What’s more, all of them have slightly quirky and unique tastes, even if, for example, they all fall into the broad category of taxi drivers. Or direct marketers. Or online business owners.

Here’s what I’ve found:

With a little bit of luck, and simply by showing up today, tomorrow, and the day after, some of the 8+ billion people in the world will join my newsletter. And of those, some will become customers, for a long time, worth hundreds of dollars, or maybe thousands of dollars, or maybe even tens of thousands of dollars. That’s started adding up to a nice sum of money for me each month.

The same can be true for you. Assuming you can muster a little bit of luck, and you can manage to show up today, tomorrow, and the day after.

The sooner you get started, the sooner you can turn this into a nice living. That’s why I say right now is the best time to get in.

Anyways, since you are on my email list, there’s a good chance you are interested in marketing and copywriting topics.

Maybe you’d also like to write about those topics, and not just read about them. In that case, let me remind you of my Most Valuable Email training.

I only recommend you get Most Valuable Email if you are writing, or want to write, about marketing and copywriting.

By the way, I wouldn’t necessarily suggest you write to an audience of copywriters, but that’s a topic for another day.

Still, if you do want to write about marketing and copywriting for an audience of marketers, business owners, or maybe curious taxi drivers — then this course can show you one type of email that has been most valuable to me.

Most Valuable Emails have given me all kinds of hard benefits — including sales and list growth and valuable endorsements. But the greatest benefits of writing these Most Valuable Emails have been soft — the fact that they make me better each time I write them, and that they make it fun and easy for me to stay motivated today, tomorrow, and the day after.

My Most Valuable Email is available today, and will be available tomorrow, and the day after. ​​But you’ll get most value out of it if you get it today, and if you start applying it today.

In case you’d like to get started:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Take “selling your own knowledge” off its pedestal

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Last Friday, while I was selling my Most Valuable Postcard #2, I got a message from a new buyer, Joseph Robertson. Joseph is a marketer and copywriter who, for more than a decade now, has also been publishing Extracted, a magazine for coffee fanatics.

Joseph’s message was very thoughtful. I am reprinting it in full below because it might be useful to a few people, especially to copywriters working with clients:

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Thanks for this opportunity. My first purchase from you. Impressive work.

Several realizations for me…

I’ve come to the point in my personal copywriting-as-career journey where I finally feel like I know myself and what I’m doing, to the point where I don’t feel moved to understand the secret… I’m not searching for a new way to do something, or a new answer, but rather looking for insightful perspectives to augment/enhance my own understanding and work.

And seeing your work has given me the odd realization that there is indeed great value in productizing one’s own understanding of fundamentals, if that presentation helps bring valuable new perspective/ideas to someone else.

I say odd because I think until this point I put “selling my own knowledge” on a pedestal, and just settled into good consistent client work (I haven’t needed a new client in a long time). But that client work has given me an enormous amount of context for developing my way of doing and understanding.

Before you announced this new offer, I’d been thinking deeply and incorporating a new understanding/perspective on structural tension. What you share here fits right in with that very well, naturally, but in a way and with a perspective I don’t think I’d come across on my own. Maybe in time (i’ve been finding the longer I let myself sit with an unknown or a question, the more MY interpretation of the understanding emerges, which is quite valuable).

Anyway. Just felt like I ought to share and express my thanks for your work.

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Here are my two added shekels:

If you’re a copywriter working with clients, but you don’t yet have your own email list, start one today.

If you have your own list but you haven’t sold anything to it, do like Joseph says above. Productize your own knowledge, and sell that to your list.

There’s little new under the sun. But if you present proven ideas in a way that manages to reach someone, that they resonate with, that they finally benefit from even if they might have heard the idea 1001 times before, then there’s real value in that.

And beyond the money:

I’ve personally found that whenever I sit down to put together a course or a training, I do so because I feel I know that subject fairly well. But by the end of the process, I realize how confused or shallow my previous understanding was, and how much cool stuff I figured out simply by forcing myself to put the course together.

All that’s to say, if you do package up and sell your own knowledge, the benefit can often be way beyond the actual money people might send you.

But of course, the money. Always the money. I gotta get back to work:

Today, I’m still promoting my coaching program on email marketing and copywriting. I include offer creation in that.

In fact, I previously called this coaching program Income at Will, because that’s the ultimate pleasure island that I want this coaching program to take people. But after I wrote an email a few weeks ago about taking out the poetry from what you’re doing, I decided to be more blunt and and simply call this “coaching on email marketing and copywriting.”

The goal of my coaching program is to help you sell more and more easily via email, and who knows, maybe even deepen your understanding of things you thought you knew well.

This coaching program is only right for two kinds of people:

1. Business owners who have an email list and want to use email to both build a relationship with their customers and to sell their products (or their productized knowledge)

2. Copywriters who manage a client’s email list, and who have a profit-share agreement for that work

If you fit into one of the two categories above and you’re interested in my coaching program, write me an email and say so. Also tell me who you are and what your current situation is, including which category above you fit into. We can then talk in more detail, and see if my coaching program might be a fit for you.

A mystery about people who willingly live in hell

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A few months ago, I was reading a New Yorker article about foreign nationals — Americans, Frenchmen, Kiwis — who volunteered to fight in Ukraine.

I found the article fascinating. I mean, ask yourself:

What makes someone willing to go halfway around the world, into a war zone, to live in a basement and crawl through mud and huddle in icy trenches, as constant explosions blow out his eardrums and traumatize his nervous system?

What makes a person willing to expose himself to getting shot at and wounded and possibly killed? And what makes him willing to shoot and wound and possibly kill others, who have never done any harm to him or his kind?

Most incredibly, what makes a person do all this voluntarily, without any promise of reward or even any real chance at glory, and without the usual government coaxing or propaganda or impressment?

“Maybe,” you say, “these foreign fighters are fighting for freedom, for justice, for the right thing. Maybe they feel they are doing their duty, as soldiers and as human beings.”

No doubt.

​But taking a page from Frank Bettger’s book, let me ask you one further:

In addition to doing the right thing, what other reason might these foreign fighters have to willingly put themselves in what most people would consider a living hell?

Take a moment to think about that. And when you’re done, read about it from the horse’s mouth, or rather, from the Turtle’s mouth. Here’s a bit from the New Yorker article, about a New Zealander fighting in Ukraine, code name Turtle:

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In New Zealand, he’d been “planning out the rest of my life with a girl.” Before coming to Ukraine, he’d ended the relationship, quit his job, and sold his house and car. “In hindsight, it was very selfish,” he acknowledged. Although he may have suggested to his friends and relatives that Russian atrocities — in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha and elsewhere — had instilled in him a sense of obligation, such moral posturing had been disingenuous. “It was just an excuse to be in this environment again,” Turtle said.

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Turtle had spent a large and formative part of his life fighting in war zones — he was first sent to Afghanistan in 2002, when he was 17.

Today, a generation later, he’s left his house, his car, his job, and Mrs. Turtle back in the Shire, and he’s decided to trade all that in for an environment he is more familiar with — an army unit in Mordor.

​​“In the end, it’s just that I love this shit,” Turtle said. “And maybe I can’t escape that — maybe that’s the way it’s always gonna be.”

All that’s to say:

Never underestimate how powerful the pull of the familiar, the known, the status quo is on people, even if that status quo is hell on earth.

And that’s it. That’s my possibly sobering psychological insight for you for today. Think about how it might apply to you and the people you deal with regularly, and maybe you can get some value out of it.

As for me, the time has come for my once-in-a-blood-moon pitch for my coaching program on email marketing and copywriting.

It might seem tacky to put a sales pitch at the end of an email about extreme self-sacrifice, or extreme self-immolation. I do it because extreme cases uncover the everyday cases. In any case, here’s my pitch.

I’ve only let in two kinds of people into my coaching program so far:

1. Business owners who want to use email to build a stronger, longer-lasting relationship with their prospects and customers, in order to sell more and to sell more easily

2. Copywriters who have a profit-share agreement with a client to manage an email list, allowing a large degree of control and an upside when things go well

There are multiple reasons why I restrict my coaching program to only those two groups of people. If you’re curious, I’ll tell you one reason, which is that my coaching program is expensive. I only want the kinds of people to join who can quickly get much more out of this coaching than what they pay me.

So if you fit one of the two categories above, and if you’re interested in my coaching program, then hit reply, tell me about yourself, and we can talk in more detail.

And in case you’re wondering whether a coaching program is something you possibly need:

I can tell you that personally, in most areas of life where I’ve had success, I didn’t have and didn’t need any kind of coach. Instead, I either figured it out myself, or I followed a book or a course to the letter, and got results that way.

On the other hand, there have been a few areas where I hired a coach, and even paid that coach lots and lots of money.

As I’ve written before, some of the value I got from coaching was genuine technical feedback. Some of the value was added confidence, via getting an experienced second pair of eyes to look over what I was doing.

But the majority of the value I got from expensive coaching — I would say 75% — came from having to justify the price to myself. From finally being forced to abandon the status quo, and to do things I should have been doing already, but found excuses not to do.

Maybe you say that’s stupid or illogical. All I can say is that this get-out-of-the-status-quo motivation made coaching absolutely worth it to me, and made it pay for itself many times over.

So do you need coaching?

Only you can decide if you’re stuck in the status quo, and if you find that unacceptable. If you decide the answer is yes, then like I said, write me an email, and we can talk in more detail to see whether my coaching program and you could be a good fit.

First-cousin marketing incest

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A little over 100 years ago, on June 2, 1919 to be specific, a rather shabby-looking man named Albert took the hand of a fairly unattractive woman named Elsa. They looked deeply into each other’s eyes, and after a few moments of nervous calculation, each of them said “ja.”

The shabby-looking man was Albert Einstein. The rather unattractive woman was Elsa Einstein, Albert’s first cousin and second wife.

Einstein wasn’t the only famously smart person to marry his first cousin. H.G. Wells, author of some 50 books and best known today as the “father of science fiction,” also married his first cousin, Isabel Mary Smith. So did Charles Darwin, who married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood in 1839.

What’s my point?

Marketer Dan Kennedy has this routine about “marketing incest.” Here’s how Dan puts it:

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Whatever business you’re in, whatever product, service, profession — what do you pay most attention to? Everybody else in that business. If you don’t read anything else, you read your trade journal. If you go to no other meeting once a year, you probably go to your convention. If you’re traveling to another city, you look at your category in the Yellow Pages. You pay attention to everybody else who’s in your business. It’s like being Amish.

What happens with this kind of thinking — it’s a “closed” kind of thinking. It works just like real incest. Everybody gets dumber and dumber and dumber until the whole thing just grinds to a halt, and they just stand there looking at each other and nothing happens.

You’ve got to pay attention outside your little Amish community of jewelers or carpet cleaners or whatever it is that, up until tonight, you thought you were. You’ve got to pay attention to other stuff because you ain’t going to find any breakthroughs in the five other people standing in a circle looking at you. They aren’t any smarter than you are. They’re probably dumber than you are.

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My point is, “consanguineous” incest is universally reviled, and for good genetic reasons. You don’t want to marry your sister or brother — bad things happen if you do it, and that’s why most societies around the world find the practice disgusting.

On the other hand, “affinal” incest, marrying between first and second cousins and more distant relatives — well, I won’t say it has a long and glorious history, but it definitely does have a history, and much of it, including some very smart people.

I might be digging myself into an unnecessarily deep hole here, so let me state clearly that I am not advocating incest of any kind.

Well, except maybe in the marketing sense. Like Dan says, you don’t want to practice consanguineous marketing incest — copying what the five other guys who are most like you are doing. That’s likely to only produce worse and worse results with time.

On the other hand, going into a cousin industry, and copying ideas from there — well, that might just be another issue altogether. But I will write more about that in my email tomorrow, and tell you my experiences in paying a visit to a cousin industry lately.

If you’d like to read that email when it comes out, sign up to my email newsletter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You might wonder if that’s really possible.

​​It is.

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

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

Maybe this email will finally melt away your resistance

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I was talking to a girl a few days ago, and she was complaining about an annoying guy who had hounded her at a club.

The guy stopped her on the way out of the bathroom. Then he came up to her at the bar. Later he sidled up to her on the dance floor.

“Why are some guys annoying like that?” she asked me.

I shrugged. “Because it works.”

My ex-girlfriend once told me her perspective on why she decided to go out with me. I’d gotten her phone number once, during a brief interaction. And then, for about 6 weeks, I texted her every few days. Each time, she had some reason not to meet. She never said no flat out, so I kept texting her. “You were very persistent,” she mused later.

“Yeah sure,” you might say, “but there’s a big difference between being persistent and hounding somebody in an annoying way.”

Maybe so. But based on what I’ve seen, that’s a line that’s often drawn after the fact — after somebody decides either to give you a hard “no” or to take you up on your offer.

In the second case, the person who took you up on your offer will often say that it was your persistence that really won them over, that they found most attractive.

I took a break just now to check Google Analytics. Right now, as I write this, somebody’s on the third and final page of my Copy Riddles sales letter, and two more people are on the first page.

I don’t know if any of these people will decide to buy in the next few minutes. But I have noticed a trend.

I usually promote my existing offers in one-week stretches. For example, last week it was my Most Valuable Email, this week Copy Riddles.

Early in those week-long stretches, I get some sales. But I’ve noticed it takes a few days to get the wheel rolling, to get momentum built up, to get sales coming in unexpectedly and at odd hours and in bunches.

Today is day six of my Copy Riddles promo period. I’ll see if my theory about sales bunching up will be borne out.

In any case, the basic idea stands. As copywriter Gary Bencivenga said once, persistence melts away resistance.

Incidentally, this is something that ties into the very first big a-ha moment I got while following the road that eventually led me to creating Copy Riddles. In case you’d like to read more about that a-ha moment, you can find it on the sales page bwlo, which I’ve shared previously many times, and which I will continue to share:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Going where no one has gone before?

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I have this unfortunate flaw in that I wake up every day, thanks to some internal alarm clock, which always rings earlier than I want.

Today it was 6am. I sat around in the dark for a while and then, at around 7, I went out for my morning walk.

At 7am on a Saturday in Barcelona, two worlds overlap.

I walked down the street, turned a corner, and saw a flash of naked ass. A girl was pulling up her leather pants, on the curb next to a small tree and some recycling containers. I guess she had just peed. Her friend stood guard but was facing in the wrong direction, away from where I and a few other people were coming and witnessing the shame. Pants up, the two oblivious girls staggered off drunkenly towards home.

That world, of people who hadn’t yet gone to bed by 7am, is one world.

I kept walking and the beach opened up before me. And the second world, the world of early-rising people, was already busy at work there.

A woman was holding her dog on a leash and yelling at her other dog to stop fooling around because it was time to go home. Two boys were kicking around a ball in the sand. And in the water, thanks to the large and rolling waves — not a common sight in Barcelona — there were some surfers.

Maybe you’re wondering whether there will be any hard “point” to today’s email. The point is this:

Down by the concrete pier that juts out into the Mediterranean, there was a clump of maybe a half dozen surfers. They were all bunched up. The waves were steady there and every 30 or so seconds, one of the surfers would catch a wave.

Meanwhile, further away from the pier, there was another surfer by himself. Every few minutes a small wave crested where he was waiting. The surfer would make an effort at catching it, but it was too small. As far as I saw, he never caught a wave, but he made a show at it.

And then further still, in the middle of the beach, there was yet another solitary surfer. He was bobbing up and down as the sea swelled underneath him. But he didn’t even have a wave to pretend to catch.

I think my point is clear, but if not:

It’s good to be different and distinct. It helps people make up their minds quickly about you. But if you rely on natural forces for motion — waves, money, desire — then you want to put yourself in a place where those things are moving.

It might seem clever and easy to go where nobody else has thought to go. Maybe you will get lucky. More likely, you will just bob around stubbornly in the cold water, while others, just a few feet away from you, have all the fun.

That’s most of my motivational message for you for today. And then there’s still the following promotional material:

My offer for you today is my Copy Riddles program. As I have said before, this program is really about going where the waves are:

– It’s about a proven way to write winning copy that’s been endorsed by A-list copywriters like Gary Halbert, Parris Lampropoulos, and Gary Bencivenga

– It features a bunch of examples from sales letters written to perennial markets, including finance, health, and personal development

– It gets you working alongside some of the top copywriters of all time who, whether by instinct or by design, knew how to tap into human desire where it was flowing

If any of that moves you:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

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

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

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

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

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

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Whoa…

Just finished your MVE course. 

Meta-level stuff. 

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

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

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

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

But it goes beyond that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/mve

How to make your content eternally interesting even if it’s not very “good”

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During my 11 years living in Budapest, Hungary, I walked up and down Nagymező street perhaps a thousand times. Each time, I looked up at the Robert Capa museum and I told myself, “I should really go there.”

As you might know, Robert Capa was one of the most famous and influential photographers of the 20th century. What you might not know is that the man’s real name was Endre Friedmann, and he was Hungarian – hence the museum on Nagymező utca.

I did eventually make it to that museum, and I did eventually find out some curious Robert Capa facts. They might be useful to you if you write or take photos or build elaborate Lego creations.

​​For example:

Capa published his first photo as a freelance journalist in 1932. The photo showed Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky giving a speech in Copenhagen.

The photo is a little blurry and Trotsky’s hand is in front of his face. But there is an undeniable energy in the shot — you can almost hear the dogmatic and impassioned Marxist on stage.

Capa really made his name a few years later, in 1936. His photograph of a loyalist soldier during the Spanish civil war, falling after being shot, has become one of the most famous photos of the 20th century.

During World War II, Capa took pictures of the Allied landing in Normandy, and he took photos of the liberation of Paris.

After WWII, Capa hung out with and photographed famous and celebrated artists — Henri Matisse, John Steinbeck, Alfred Hitchcock.

There’s a photo from the summer of 1948 that Capa took, which shows an old man grinning as he holds a baby on the beach. It could be any old photo of any old grandpa with his grandson — except that old man is Pablo Picasso, and the grandson is actually Picasso’s son, Claude.

The point is this:

Capa made a point of going to out-of-the-way places, meeting important and influential people, being at the right spot at the right moment. Many of his photographs are not technically great or even very good. But they are inherently interesting — even today, almost a hundred years later — because of their content.

The past few days I’ve been promoting my Insight Exposed training. That training talks about the tools to capture snapshots, and the process for developing those snapshots into something valuable.

But what’s the content of those snapshots? If the content is plain, familiar, or uninteresting in itself, you will have to work hard to turn those snapshots into something interesting and insightful.

On the other hand, if you make a point of going to out-of-the-way places, meeting important and influential people, being at the right spot at the right moment, you won’t have to be technically great or even very good. Your work will be inherently interesting because of the content. So I talk all about that in the final section of Insight Exposed.

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