Personal Change

The Trump-Fauci money mystery

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I read a fascinating story a few days ago about an interaction between Donald Trump and Anthony Fauci during Trump’s first administration.

It happened well into the covid era. The first vaccines were being released, and the country was ready to get back to business.

Fauci then made a public statement about the possible need for booster shots in order for the vaccines to be effective.

Here’s what happened next, in Fauci’s own words:

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The president was irate, saying that I could not keep doing this to him. He said he loved me, but the country was in trouble, and I was making it worse. He added that the stock market went up only six hundred points in response to the positive phase 1 vaccine news and it should have gone up a thousand points and so I cost the country “one trillion fucking dollars.”

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Stories like this make my head spin. If Trump was right, and it’s very possible he was, then where did that “one trillion fucking dollars” go?

Had Fauci not said anything, would that trillion really be there in the world in any meaningful way?

How can a trillion dollars of actual “value” just appear and disappear, on command, with a few words by the right person in the right place at the right time?

I’ve long been fascinated by the topic of money. Not in the sense of getting my hands on as much of it as I can, but simply understanding what it is.

I have never found a good explanation. Whenever somebody gives me their own explanation, it always seems inadequate.

From what little I understand, money is so confusing because it’s a mix of different things. Hope about the future… willingness to cooperate… built-up knowledge… information about the physical world… information about personal values and preferences, as in, “Do you value this beautiful house? Or do you value the plot of land underneath it more, and you’d be willing to pay to have the house demolished?”

If you have a comprehensive theory of what money is, or a good analogy, or you can point me to some insightful book on the matter, I will be grateful to you.

Meanwhile, one thing is clear to me:

We live in a world of ideas and feelings, which have tremendous real-world influence, even when the physical reality remains almost entirely unchanged, as in the Trump-Fauci story above.

It might be worth thinking about, learning about, getting informed about how to influence those ideas and feelings, including for your own money-getting ambitions.

And on that note, I’d like to remind you I’m making one final, desperate, almost-certain-to-fail-but-possibly-will-succeed push to finish my new 10 Commandments book, full title:

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

As the very long title suggests, this book will be about 10 techniques or “commandments” used by some of the most effective communicators and influencers in the world, across all history and space, both for good and evil, in their quest to change feelings, plant ideas, and motivate action.

My goal is to finish and publish this book by March 24.

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

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

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

Small list, big win

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

===

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

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

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

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

Great, each of those is a victory to celebrate.

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

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

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

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/deh

The maple syrup theory of influence

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Fascinating fact about me:

I studied math in college.

Like I said, fascinating. And it gets even more so, because I was never good at math.

Not in elementary school. Not in high school.

Somehow though, when college came, and I could choose to study what I wanted, and I never again had to take any math classes, I wound up taking math classes, and lots of them.

I think I was trying to prove something to myself. I managed it, too, because it turns out you can get a lot done with just curiosity and internal motivation, even in the absence of talent.

Anyways, one time I was taking a math class about “complex analysis” — about how to work with complex numbers, which have both a real and an “imaginary” component (ie, involving the square root of -1).

Whatever. Don’t worry about the math.

The important thing is simply that complex numbers have their own bizarre rules for how they are multiplied and divided, how you take a derivative, how you do integrals.

I never understood complex numbers, not really. But I diligently worked through the course.

I remember a specific homework problem, and the epiphany that came with it.

I was struggling to apply the rules in the textbook. But with some derring-do and with a few leaps of logic, I managed to finally solve the problem and reach the answer.

The answer was simple and elegant.

I remember a feeling of understanding washing over me. I got it, whatever this particular section was about. It made sense to me now. All the struggle and confusion and work had paid off.

Then, as a proper diligent student, I double-checked my answer in the back of the textbook.

It turned out I was 100% wrong. Not just that I’d made some screwup in the calculation, but that I was completely off track. I had misapplied and misunderstood the rules. My feeling of understanding, which had washed over me and given me such relief, corresponded to nothing in reality.

When I was a kid, like 9 years old, I had a feeling I understood myself and the world perfectly.

It was pretty late in life, in my late teens or maybe my early 20s, when I started to notice cracks in my confident understanding of the world.

Gradually, I started to develop a theory that emotions like certainty, understanding, and insight are like maple syrup.

Maple syrup can be poured over whatever you want — pancakes, French toast, waffles.

Likewise, emotions can be poured over ideas that are true, ideas are not true, or even ideas that are complete waffles, meaning some kind of undefined nonsense, like my understanding of complex analysis rules.

On the one hand, it doesn’t get more unsettling than this. I realized my most basic, certain feelings of rightness are not actually reliable.

On the other hand, it was a powerful realization.

For one thing, it was liberating.

It meant that, even if I’m sure — if it cannot, will not, won’t work, if it’s black and not white, if I am right and not wrong — I don’t really know for a fact. It pays to go get some real-world data — the equivalent of checking the right answer in the back of the textbook.

For another, I’m not the only person whose emotions work like this. I find it’s pretty universal.

And it turns out there are ways to get other people to pour their own emotional syrups — whether of desire, or of insight, or of trust — over pancakes, French toast, waffles, donuts, rice, hot dogs, sponge cake, and pretty much any basic foodstuff you may have to offer them.

You can make hot dogs sweet and sponge cake delicious, even irresistible, if you pour enough maple syrup on them.

And you can make honest, dry, uninspiring information exciting and eye-opening and urgent, much in the same way.

Perhaps you’d like some specific techniques of influence, which you can apply to get your audience to pour out their own emotional maple syrups over your offers?

You can find such techniques, delivered daily to your inbox, inside my Daily Email Habit service.

You even double-check your own answers against my answers, which like today, tend to be based on the day’s Daily Email Habit prompt.

In case you’d like to prove something to yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

My top 7 marketing books

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I heard once that reading lists make for great lead magnets.

Is that true? I don’t know.

But it got me to put together a recommended reading list of my own.

I started with a goal of 10 books — but though I’ve read many more than 10, I couldn’t honestly recommend 10. That’s a good thing for you — less reading to do.

So here are my top 7 marketing books, for you to enjoy, learn, and profit from:

1. The Robert Collier Letter Book, by Robert Collier

This book has it all — wagons of coal, silk stockings, genies in the lamp, free pens, rattlesnakes, dinosaurs. If you only ever read one book about direct marketing, this is my number-one recommendation.

2. Positioning, by Al Ries and Jack Trout

Tons of other good marketing advice beyond, “Get yourself into a niche of one.”

3. My Life In Advertising, by Claude C. Hopkins

All the wisdom in Hopkins’s vaunted Scientific Advertising, but presented with stories and detail that make it go down more easy.

4. The Adweek Copywriting Book, by Joe Sugarman

Very accessible, usable, and current, even if you never write a full-page magazine ad selling a calculator or UV-blocking sunglasses.

5. Influence, by Robert Cialdini

I wish I had written this book. What more can I say?

6. Start With No, by Jim Camp

You may have seen this negotiation book recommended before by online marketers. It happens a lot. What is it about Camp’s negotiation strategies that could be useful to sales and marketing online?

7. Made To Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath

I read this book only once but it’s stuck. That’s because the authors know what they’re talking about, and because they apply it to their own writing.

Like I said, I’ve heard that reading lists make for great lead magnets.

Do they also make for effective email copy? I don’t know.

But I’m willing to test it out.

If you haven’t already clicked away to Amazon to get one of the books above, maybe you will click below to the sales page for my Daily Email Habit service. It sometimes forces even me to write emails I would never write otherwise. Here’s the link if you’d like to find out more about it:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

The Bejako starter pack

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You might be familiar with the concept of a starter pack. It’s a kind of meme format.

In a starter pack, people put together a few images or phrases or whatever, which are representative of something — a gym bro, a local Mexican restaurant, a 1980s heavy metal video.

New Yorker magazine does its own variant, where it asks people they profile to create a starter pack for themselves, consisting of a movie, a TV show, a book, and an album, which are somehow representative.

I had to try it. So here goes:

Bejako starter pack ingredient #1 (movie): The Princess Bride

If you’ve been a reader of this newsletter for a while, this should be no surprise.

My optin page literally says:

“I write a daily email newsletter about direct marketing, copywriting, and my love for the books and screenplays of William Goldman.”

Well, Goldman wrote the screenplay for The Princess Bride, based on his book of the same title.

(He also wrote the famous line, “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” On my website, that morphed into, “Hello. My name is John Bejakovic. You found my website. Prepare to decide.”)

The fact is, I saw The Princess Bride for the first time when I was 11. It was the perfect mix of adventure, romance, and self-aware humor for 11-year-old Bejako.

I guess I’ve never really matured past 11.

The only thing that’s changed for me over the years, as I’ve continued to re-watch this movie, is that I appreciate how it doesn’t talk down or moralize to you.

“Life is pain,” is the core message of the story. In the end, the bad guy goes free. And the main character, Westley, dies. Though ok, miracles do sometimes happen, as do happy endings.

Bejako starter pack ingredient #2 (TV show): Twin Peaks

David Lynch, who made Twin Peaks, died a couple weeks ago. There aren’t many celebrities whose deaths I care about… but I cared about Lynch. He was hinting there might be a season 4 of Twin Peaks, and now it will never happen.

Season 2 of Twin Peaks, which came out in 1990, was largely atrocious.

Season 3 of Twin Peaks, which came out 25+ years later in 2017, was surprisingly good.

But the best is still the original season 1, which Lynch directed and co-wrote.

It has the usual Lynch blend of mystery, sex, horror, weirdness, and quaintness. Plus beautiful shots of wind blowing through the trees.

Bejako starter pack ingredient #3 (book): Dune

I had the most trouble choosing a book for my starter pack.

That’s because, as I wrote a few weeks ago, I don’t particularly enjoy reading, even though I’ve read a lot my whole life.

I also wasn’t sure how to choose a book here. A book that influenced me? Or that I enjoyed reading? Or that I thought was particularly well written?

I ended up going with enjoyment, and picked Frank Herbert’s Dune.

I first read Dune when I was 20, and then a couple more times since.

The story is familiar enough after all the TV shows and movies made based on it in recent years.

I guess what I like in it, beyond the familiar but rousing story of the arrival of “The One,” are the elements of religion… the formation of legend… plus simply the promise of a drug you can take, which makes you so smart you can literally predict the future by seeing all possible outcomes in parallel.

Bejako starter pack ingredient #4 (album): Station To Station by David Bowie

I like a lot of Bowie albums. This one is my favorite. I like the style, sound, strangeness of it, all mostly fueled by cocaine and paranoia.

By the way, coked-up Bowie from this period has inspired the central tenet of this newsletter. In an interview with Playboy, Bowie said:

“Nothing matters except whatever it is I’m doing at the moment. I can’t keep track of everything I say. I don’t give a shit. I can’t even remember how much I believe and how much I don’t believe. The point is to grow into the person you grow into. I haven’t a clue where I’m gonna be in a year.”

Maybe in a year, I’ll have to do another, different starter pack.

For now, this one will give you more insight into me than most people who know me in person have.

As you can probably guess, today’s email was based on the Daily Email Habit “puzzle” I sent out today.

Sometimes it’s good to write emails like this, to surprise people, and to simply let them a bit into your own world.

But other times, entirely different emails are called for. And that’s what I make sure Daily Email Habit puzzles do, day in and day out.

If you’d like to get started with your own daily email habit, starting with tomorrow’s puzzle, which is entirely different and much more difficult to guess at than today’s, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Energy makes time

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I signed up for newsletter just now.

It told to go to my inbox and click a link to confirm my subscription.

I felt a drive to go check my email as a result.

Except I have a new rule I am living by, where I only check my email between 12 noon and 2pm.

It’s 10:28am now.

Email is verboten.

So I opened up a notebook I’ve been keeping, where I’m tracking my email-checking urges. I write inside this notebook whenever I feel a drive to go check my email.

I wrote just now: “After signing up for some newsletter which is telling me to confirm my subscription in the email they just sent me.”

Who knows? I might one day realize something about when I feel the drive to pointlessly check email.

But that’s not why I’m writing these email-checking urges down. It turns out the simple act of writing them down is all I need to not check my email, either now or in five minutes from now, without any struggle or Thor-like willpower.

Since I’ve started this “write down when I feel an urge to check email” practice a few days ago, I’ve found it to be a useful hack.

But it’s probably only a hack. In other words, in the absence of other things, there’s a good chance it will work for a few more days, at which point my brain will adjust and the hack will stop working.

Which brings me to what I really wanna share with you in this email.

Because the newsletter I signed up for this morning was by a woman named Mandy Brown.

I signed up because I liked one single article she had written, which I came across a few weeks ago.

The article is titled, “Energy makes time.”

Brown is apparently a coach for “high performers.” These people, says Brown, typically have tried all the possible time-management hacks out there.

Many of these hacks work – until they don’t.

After the last hack has failed, the high performers come to Brown. And she suggests they try something different.

She suggests they realize that, much like money and pizza dough, time is actually a very stretchy substance.

A single day can shrink down to where you can barely get the dishes done before it’s time to go to bed, with nothing else fitting inside the 24-hour window… or a day can stretch so you can travel halfway around the world, meet a bunch of new people, have several great business or personal ideas along the way, and write the outline for a new book, and much of a first draft to boot.

The difference, says Brown, is that we’ve been conditioned to think that everything we do costs time.

And in the conveyor-belt optimization of human productivity, that means that certain things drop away — “There simply isn’t enough time, at least not now!”

That calculus ignores the fact that there are things that actually give you time back. That make more time for you. That stretch out the time you’ve got, so you can fit a boat and a house and maybe a book in there.

Which things give you time back?

Brown gives the example of doing art, if doing art is your thing.

But it really depends on you.

I’m guessing it can equally be going to the aquarium… or taking a day trip to see some place new… or spending a day with friends… or simply sitting down and writing out all the stuff that’s in your head, vague plans and fears included.

Anyways, it’s a kind of time management un-hack that’s been stuck in my mind ever since I read it in Brown’s article. (I read the article a few weeks ago. I re-read it now to write this email.)

Maybe “energy makes time” get stuck in your head as well. Maybe it give you some ideas to actually create time for yourself.

Now on to the topic of daily emails, which is my offer for you today.

Daily emails cost time. Much time.

But they can also create time. Much time. At least they do for me.

Writing daily emails gives me ideas. It gives me motivation. It gives me the satisfaction of accomplishing something every day, which makes it so I am more likely to accomplish something else, like attacking the dirty dishes that are waiting for me in the kitchen.

I don’t know if writing daily emails will make more time for you. Maybe it’s not your thing. Or maybe it is. There’s only one way to find out, and that’s to start, to stick with it for a while, and to see what happens.

And if you want my help starting and sticking with the habit of writing daily emails:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Inspiration in case everybody else is doing better than you

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

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

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

Here goes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Sandler’s own words:

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t know what your specific situation is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

===

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

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

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

​https://bejakovic.com/deh​

I believe you’re a 10

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

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

Curious thing:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I choose to believe you’re a 10 too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

​https://bejakovic.com/deh

Another customer I like

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Yesterday, I wrote about an ex-subscriber of my Daily Email Habit service.

Even though this guy decided to unsubscribe, he’s still the kind of customer I like, simply because he took something I was teaching and actually put it to use.

Of course, I have other customers I like too, including some who keep being subscribed to Daily Email Habit, and keep putting it to use.

A couple days ago, I heard from one such customer, business coach Steph Benedetto, who is subscribed to Daily Email habit.

I want to share Steph’s message with you both because it serves my purpose, and because it might be valuable to you. In Steph’s own words:

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I wanted to send you a little message to share an unexpected side effect of the daily emails.

Many of these daily emails are prompting me to think about things, like the one that said, “Share the coming attractions. What are you working on? What offers do you have coming up? Share them.”

When I do, I go, “Oh! I guess I have to know what I’m doing next then.” So I look and go, “Ok, this is what I’m doing… and this is what I’m doing… and this is what I’m doing.”

And it creates it through the writing.

As I’m writing about something, whatever the prompt is, and then tying it into whatever offer I have, the offers themselves are evolving and becoming clearer.

And new things are showing up. And I had no freaking idea that was available.

===

Most the Daily Email Habit puzzles are not “creative writing” prompts. Many of them are exercises that anyone with an online biz should be doing regularly, like figuring out who you want to work with… or what offers you’re putting out next… or what of business you actually want to run.

Now here’s the possibly valuable part I promised you:

You might not have the time and willpower to sit down and think about those things, and even less time and willpower to think about them regularly, over and over, as things adapt and change.

I know I don’t, not when it’s simply a todo item on my already-infinite todo list.

But like Steph says, with daily emails, you can two things at once. You can create content and make sales, on the one hand, and think about the big picture of your business and the next steps, on the other.

In other words, you can work IN the business… while at the same time working ON the business, just by taking the daily action of writing and sending a daily email.

And if you’d like to do that — to create offers, clarity, a plan — just by writing, then my Daily Email Habit might be a help for you. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

It’s not an OPEN loop, it’s an OPENED loop

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A while back, marketer Daniel Throssell wrote an email pointing out the nonsense of the term “open loop.”

An open loop, as you might know, is a technique in copywriting where you start a story and then cut it off to talk about other stuff, basically leading the reader on and sucking him deeper and deeper in.

I was a tad irritated by Daniel’s calling out “open loop” as nonsense, because I always thought the term sounded somehow poetic. But really, I had to admit I couldn’t make sense of how an “open loop” makes sense.

Well, I found out yesterday where “open loop” actually comes from and what it actually is — a corruption of a term from computer programming.

Computer programs have constructs known as loops — “for” loops, “while” loops etc. – where an instruction is executed over and over while some condition holds true. So you open, say, a “for” loop within a computer program, and then you specify what happens next. (What happens next can actually include opening a new “for” loop — so you end up with a hierarchy of embedded “for” loops, one within the other.)

This analogy between computer program loops and a technique of communication was first made by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the creators of neurolinguistic programming or NLP.

In the 1970s, Grinder and Bandler were at the University of California Santa Cruz (my alma mater), a school that combined such interests as computer programming, linguistics, and dropping acid. It was natural that Bandler and Grinder would make the loop analogy, not only because it was in the water at UCSC, but because of the nested nature of both kinds of structures.

Ultimately, Bandler and Grinder got the idea for this technique from psychotherapist and hypnosis innovator Milton Erickson, one of the most effective therapists of all time. Bandler and Grinder sat at Erickson’s feet and recorded Erickson’s unique patterns of communication, which then became formalized as NLP techniques.

This really gets to the core of this email. The core is my answer to the daily puzzle from my Daily Email Habit service, which you can sign up for at the link at the bottom. Because one thing that Bandler and Grinder noticed was that Erickson would often embed suggestions in the middle of a story.

Embedded suggestions supposedly work better than if you just tell people to do something outright. And if you tell a bunch of nested stories, and embed a suggestion at the center of them all, it supposedly works even better.

Who knows though? Maybe it just worked for Milton Erickson, because the guy was unusually skilled, observant, and charismatic.

Besides, Erickson enjoyed constantly experimenting and inventing new techniques and new means of allowing people to make the changes that they wanted to make. He didn’t seem to be particularly wedded to any one technique, which is something I admire him for, and a credo I live by myself.

Grinder and Bandler, on the other hand, took Erickson’s improvised, free flowing, one-time experiments and formalized them into set rules and templates with catchy names.

Rules and templates with catchy names tend to sell well, which is why NLP ideas, effective or not, have become so widespread and influential, from corporate training, to copywriting, to pick up artists.

Along the way, of course, a lot has been lost, and even more has become corrupted. Which brings me back to the term “open loop.”

Now that we know where the term comes from, it’s clear it’s not really an “open loop.” Rather, it’s that you “open a loop,” or maybe you have an “opened loop.”

In Ericksonian hypnosis as in computer programming, you eventually have to close your loop to have a program that’s syntactically valid. (And if you’ve nested multiple loops, one within the other, you have to close each one, in reverse order to how you opened them.)

All that’s to say, I have to admit that Daniel Throssell was right and that the term “open loop,” poetic though it sounded to me, doesn’t really make sense. And now you know what term really does make sense — an OPENED loop — and maybe you’ve learned something else along the way.

And as for that link I promised you, it’s below. Maybe it could be valuable for you to take a look at it now:

https://bejakovic.com/deh