Personal Change

Time misers

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I went to college two years late, at age 20 instead of the usual 18. That meant I had had two extra years’ practice with teenage philosophizing compared to my classmates.

So when one of those classic freshman-year, fall-semester, late-night, deep discussion topics came up — “What would you do if tomorrow was the last day on Earth?” — I had a unique take.

The usual answers to that question are sky diving… some kind of wild sex proposal to your old crush… or going to admire the sunset one last time.

“I wouldn’t do anything different than usual,” I said. “I imagine I’d be paralyzed with fear. I’d probably just do the same things as every other day. Or maybe I’d spend the day lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling.”

I proposed a different hypothetical instead.

“What would you do if tomorrow there was an announcement that death has been cancelled, or at least pushed back by a few dozen millennia?”

That’s a question I’ve thought about a few times. I think it’s worth thinking about even today, long after college.

If you could live on, as you are now, or as healthy and as young as you want to be, pretty much indefinitely, what then?

How many more days or hours would you go on doing the job you are doing now? What would you do instead?

Would you try to save money? What for?

Would you stay in the same relationship that you’re in now? How would the prospect of thousands more years together weigh on you?

Of course, this is just a hypothetical. I used to write a weekly newsletter about the latest longevity science, and based on what I’ve read, death will not be cancelled tomorrow, or the day after.

Still, I think the above is a useful thought experiment.

A lot of modern-day gurus out there preach an abundance mindset. “Those who have will be given more,” they say, paraphrasing the Bible, “and those who have not will lead miserable, miserly lives regardless of their actual circumstances.”

This abundance mindset is almost always applied to things like money, achievements, opportunities, stuff in your life.

But then those same gurus — and I can name three off the top of my head — turn around and say, “Life is short.”

The implied message being to use your time wisely and conservatively, not to waste it or fritter it away. In other words, to be a bit of a time miser.

Maybe these abundance gurus are right. Maybe time is different from all the stuff that’s abundant in the universe.

All I can tell you is that personally, I’ve found that thinking that “life is short” is more likely to lock me up with fear and indecision than it is to make me hustle and prioritize.

That’s why I choose to believe I have all the time in the world, specifically, all the time I need, and that everything that needs doing is getting done, or will get done.

Counterintuitively, I find this actually helps me move and get things done now, while urgency and scarcity have the opposite effect.

I’m not sure if you can agree with me, or if this helps you in any way. But perhaps it can give you a different way to look at some familiar things.

In entirely unrelated news:

The last few days, I’ve stopped promoting my Daily Email Habit service because, frankly, I thought I had tapped out demand for the moment.

But then yesterday, a handful more people signed up, “on their own,” that’s to say, even without me promoting the offer in my daily email.

Maybe I was wrong?

So let me remind you of my Daily Email Habit service, which is designed to help you start and stick with sending daily emails to your list.

It’s only the second week this service has been running, but I’ve already had a bunch of results-based testimonials about it. Here’s one from Alex Ko, who is a senior copywriter at edtech company KooBits:

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Thanks for setting up DEH and troubleshooting the streak counter. While the streaks feature is great, I especially love your daily puzzle.

It takes the stress out of finding a topic to write about, and for me, looking back at the body of work I’ve done over the past week feels much better than keeping the streak alive.

It’s already gotten me to write on weekends, something I usually avoid since I treat them as rest days.

Looking forward to sharing more results in the future!

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If you feel that it might be the right time to start a consistent daily email habit (weekends optional), here’s the full info on how I can help you with that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Boredom Therapy

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I remember one time as a kid, I was home alone, sitting in one part of the apartment.

“All right,” I said to myself. “Time to go sit in the other part of the apartment now. Let’s go.”

But nothing happened.

Because I was at home, and alone, it was a very low-stakes situation. So I just kept sitting there, and observed the strangeness of it.

“Let’s go now,” I said again to myself.

Still nothing. So I sat and waited, knowing that eventually something would happen.

And sure enough, at some point a little later, my body, on its own, without any seeming command from me, got up and moved to the other room.

I’m reading a book now called A Life of One’s Own. It records the experiences of one woman, Marion Milner, who decided to keep a close eye on her own mind, what makes her happy, what she really wants out of life, what she can do to get more of it.

Last night, as I was reading this book, I came across the following passage:

“The function of will might be to stand back, to wait, not to push.”

Milner wrote that for much of her life, she thought there were two possible paths through life. One was the path of the whip, of using her will to force and push herself to move. The other path was a kind of negation of the will, a cow-like acceptance of whatever happens.

But in time, Milner realized there might be a third path. That’s what the quote above is about.

Maybe it’s not about sitting around like a cow… or of whipping yourself until you finally act… but of using the will in some other way, to stand back, to wait.

This reminded me of something else I read recently, about “free won’t.”

You might know about neuroscience experiments that show our actions and choices are detectable in the brain a good fraction of a second before we become consciously aware of them — ie. before we consciously “decide” on them.

This has led some people to conclude there’s no such thing as free will.

What you might not know are some equally interesting neuroscience experiments, in fact by some of the same neuroscientists as above. These other experiments show that in that fraction of a second from the time that our brain decides to do something to the time it actually happens, the conscious mind can veto the decision, and stop it from being carried into action.

Hence, even if we don’t have free will… we might still have “free won’t.”

I don’t know what this all neuroscience really means in practical terms. But the first part, about actions and choices coming from somewhere outside our consciousness, meshes with my life experiences, such as the one I had as a kid, telling myself to move, and having nothing happen.

The second part, about the power of the conscious veto, meshes with what Milner is saying, and some of my other life experiences.

In fact, I wrote an email almost two years ago, back on March 23, 2022, about how I’d started taking 7 minutes to do nothing before I got to work.

My 7-minute productivity hack involved just sitting and staring and allowing myself to get antsy. When the seven minutes were up, I found I was ready and eager to start work, instead of having to force and push myself.

At the time, I didn’t make the leap that this could be more broadly useful. But it’s something I’ve realized over the past few months. I call it Boredom Therapy. Here’s an example session:

1. Say I sit down to read a book like Milner’s. It’s going great for a couple minutes. But suddenly I get the idea, “Let me check my email. Maybe there’s something exciting waiting for me!”

2. If I catch that thought early enough, it’s easy to stop myself, at least once, from going and checking my email. But here’s the crucial part.

At this point, I don’t just force myself to go back to reading, even though my thoughts are clearly elsewhere, and even though the email-checking idea is almost bound to pop up again soon.

Instead, I put the book down, and I just do… nothing. I allow my thoughts to run as they will, and I just sit there.

3. In time, my thoughts get spent, and I get eager to read the book again.

I still wait a moment to make sure this is not a trick my thoughts are playing on me — another form of restlessness.

If it is a little trick, then I just keep waiting and doing nothing. Otherwise, I lift the book off my chest (I tend to read lying on the couch), and I pick up reading where I left off.

I used the example of reading a book to show how I use Boredom Therapy. But Boredom Therapy is just as good for getting work done… or for exercising at the gym (when I think, “I’m not feeling it, let’s go home”)… or, if Milner is right, for living your life in general, the way you want to, and enjoying the process.

I realize this might all sound vague or fluffy or even a little suspicious. After all, you’ve probably never heard of Marion Milner before, and you don’t know why you should listen to her. And as for me, I have a long and public track record of magical, impractical, and even nonsensical thinking.

So let me tell you one last story. It has to do with an A-list copywriter, Gene Schwartz.

Schwartz had enough time in his life to write several books about copywriting, including possibly the greatest book in the field, Breakthrough Advertising.

He was also a published biblical scholar.

And of course, he wrote hundreds of sales letters for himself and for his clients, which paid for his Park Avenue penthouse, his world-class art collection, and his Manhattan millionaire lifestyle.

Schwartz did all this by working just three hours a day.

He famously had a kitchen timer that he set for 33 minutes and 33 seconds. He worked in these half-hour blocks, and then he took a break.

These 33:33 time blocks are what people today tend to focus on. But if you ask me, it’s the wrong thing to focus on.

The right thing is exactly what I’ve been telling you, Boredom Therapy, because Schwartz practiced the same. In his own words:

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I have no goals for the next 33.33 minutes except to work on the copy.

Okay, I don’t have to work on the copy. There is absolutely no necessity for me to work on the copy.

I can sit there. I can stare. I can drink the coffee. I can stare some more, drink some more coffee.

I can do anything in the world except… not get up from the desk, not even write my own name. I just sit there.

Sooner or later, I’ll get bored. My boredom comes in one or two minutes.

Then, I begin looking at the copy. As I look at the copy, I begin paging up and down, and as I do that, something reaches out from that computer and grabs me, and says, “Hey, aren’t I beautiful? Hey, aren’t I powerful? Hey, start with me.”

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By the way, that quote is part of a talk that Schwartz gave at Rodale Press.

To my knowledge, Schwartz’s talk is not available anywhere for free. But it is available as a free bonus if you buy Brian Kurtz’s book Overdeliver, which sells for $12.69 in Kindle format on Amazon.

In fact, this Gene Schwartz talk is part of a dozen bonuses, which sold for hundreds of dollars worth of real value in their time, which Brian has been giving away to buyers of Overdeliver.

If you ask me, it’s the absolute best deal in direct marketing land.

Not because you pay $12.69 to get hundreds of dollars’ worth of books, trainings, and courses.

But because the direct marketing wisdom in these books, trainings, and courses, much of it not available anywhere else, like Schwartz’s talk, has directly been worth tens of thousands of dollars to me so far… and will be worth much more in time, as I continue to revisit, rediscover, and apply the ideas in these free bonuses.

if you want to benefit from this incredible collection also, here’s where to go:

https://overdeliverbook.com/

How I use AI in my latest little startup

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Comes a question from a tech-curious reader named Jordan:

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Yo John quick question, is the Daily Email Habit built with the AI tools you mentioned building in the “the death of infoproducts” email?

There seems to be a lot of tech behind this (Especially with the streak stuff) and it only makes me wonder.

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I mainly bring up this question so I can gush about AI. Have you heard about AI? It’s pretty incredible.

At the moment, AI is not doing the content behind the scenes at Daily Email Habit. I write each daily puzzle by hand, and I find the day’s meme or cartoon by hand also.

But as Jordan guessed, AI definitely helped (read: did everything) with the tech.

ChatGPT wrote all the back-end code I’m using to track the streaks for different Daily Email habit subscribers — how many days straight they have been sending a daily email — and to display each user’s streak inside of the Daily Email Habit email (not technically trivial).

And if in the future I decide to add more bells and whistles to Daily Email Habit, you can bet my ragged little AI elf will be the one doing all the work.

The reason why I’m telling you this:

If you’re only offering what you do as courses, or coaching, or really any kind of strict DIY how-to info, it’s worth thinking how to turn some or all of that into a cross-cut saw, or a calculator, or a Wordle-like daily puzzle, or at least how to add in a streak counter.

Because right now, creating tools or devices or games has become shockingly easy and quick, even if you don’t want to write a line of code. And a tool or a device or game can make your customers’ experience much nicer… and it can create a little moat around what you offer, beyond just your personal authority.

And AI does it all. Like I said, it’s pretty incredible.

Except, how do you decide what to tell AI to create?

How do you have cool ideas?

How do you find out what device or tool or game people in your market might want, and might be willing to pay for, so you can command AI to go down to the shed and make it?

Also, how do you develop a sense of taste, so that you don’t just accept the first thing that AI comes back with, but keep going until it matches your vision?

And once you do create something you’re happy with, how do you package it up and sell it?

For all that, my answer is as familiar as it is fundamental:

You write.

Writing gives you a point of view. It gives you a sense of taste. It exposes you to ideas, both your own (which might disappear otherwise) and from other people (which you might ignore otherwise).

Writing puts you in contact with people in your market, so you can get your finger on the pulse of what people are interested in and are willing to pay paying for.

And of course, writing helps you make better decisions — because writing is really an exercise in decision making.

In short, if you want to get the most out of AI, write.

It might sound self-serving when I say that. So let me share a message I got a couple days ago, from Justin Zack, who is the Head of Partnerships at Write With AI, a paid newsletter with 54,000 subscribers, all about how to… write with AI.

I figure if anybody has the inside scoop on getting AI to work for you, it’s Justin. And yet, Justin signed up for my Daily Email Habit service, so he can write and so he can think. Says Justin:

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I’m 2 days into the daily email habit (which means I have a 1-day streak, lol).

BUT, I friggin’ love it.

Exactly what I needed to get me thinking about my list and how to write better emails.

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Actually, I just checked, and Justin’s streak is up to three days now.

Maybe you can start your own streak?

To to find out the daily email puzzle I’m using as a starting point for each of my own emails… the same puzzle that folks like Justin are using to get over the initial hurdle, to write something more interesting, and to write something different than they might write otherwise… take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

“DID IT MAKE SALES???”

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Yesterday, I sent an email with some sort of pulp fiction story, featuring a secret agent named Bond Jebakovic. Reactions were… mixed. Here’s one:

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This email went right above my head. The hook didn’t hook me and I found no place to enter back into the narrative while *gasp* skimming the rest.

I had no idea what you were yapping about…

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Some reviewers were more favorable though:

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This, my friend, is ridiculous. I applaud you! 😆

At first, I was completely befuddled reading your email. (Possibly because I was exhausted and grumpy after a long day.)

I came back and re-read this morning. The metaphor began to emerge… and of course, I clicked the link because. Curiosity.

I celebrate audacious self-expression (it feels like you had great fun writing this — did you?) and being yourself in business. This is work as play, and so delightful.

I don’t know how well it works as “marketing,” but maybe you’ll tell us later. (Hint, hint.)

I personally think it’s worth creating, just because you wanted to.

Thanks for being! 🥰

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A few other people wanted that same question answered. “Did this work as marketing? DID IT MAKE SALES???”

As of writing right now, some 12 hours after yesterday’s email went out, I can say the email did make a few sales, three specifically.

Is that good? Bad? I can only tell you this:

In my experience, the sales for any given email are probably 20% due to actual copy in the email… 40% due to the list, meaning the relationship they have built up with you over time… and the remaining 40% due to the offer (is it exciting, is it new).

The offer in last night’s email was my new Daily Email Habit service.

I opened this offer up to my list 4 days ago, and I’ve been promoting it every day since via daily emails.

I’ve made sales with each email. A few dozen with the first one… and then, predictably, fewer sales with each following email, because there were fewer people on my list for whom this offer is new and exciting. (The ones who found it exciting and new probably already bought.)

But there’s a bigger point:

That is simply autonomy. Doing what you want, how you want, when you want, just because you want.

Autonomy is very important for me. Maybe it’s the same for you.

Like my reader above says, I had fun writing yesterday’s email. And, even though the email might have been unreadable to many, it was valuable to me, because of the idea at the core of the email, which I wanted to present in a dramatic fashion, and which might come back to me in the future in some new and profitable way.

But imagine if I had a full-time job, and imagine if I wrote something like I did yesterday. What kind of careless or indulgent boss would let it slide?

Or imagine if I were working for a client, and I decided to deliver yesterday’s email as copy for him to send out?

At best, I’d get pushback, and I’d have to do some convincing that this is really the best way to proceed.

At worst, I’d get yelled at and told to go read some HubSpot articles to learn how email marketing is really done.

If you’re in either of those situations — a full-time job, or clients — don’t get me wrong. I’m not ragging on you. There are lots of good reasons for both a job and for clients — money, security, experience.

Still, it’s nice to have something of your own as well, something where you can do as you like, something you can fall back on if the job or the clients ever go south.

Of course, autonomy is good for you. But it goes beyond just self-interest.

Autonomy frees up your mind and probably makes you better at your work for your employer or your clients, because you can be more relaxed and honest, since you know you have alternatives.

Autonomy allows you to create stuff you wouldn’t be able to create otherwise. Many times, that stuff won’t work. But sometimes it will, and the world will be a slightly better place for it.

And autonomy inspires others and gives them hope. At least I know I’ve been inspired in the past by seeing others living and working how they want — it’s what pushed me into working for myself, much more than the promise of becoming a billionaire.

All that’s to say… autonomy good. And daily emails, even if they don’t hook everybody every day, are my own little daily step towards autonomy.

Maybe they can be yours as well?

If you want my help with writing daily emails consistently, so you can build something for yourself, and not just for your clients or employer:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Not the kind of testimonial I want

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Last night, I opened up my Daily Email Habit service to my entire list.

Since then, over the past 12 hours, close to two dozen new people have signed up.

Many of those people have written me to say they are excited to get started and develop their skills.

Others, who didn’t sign up for good reasons of their own, wrote to tell me how they like the concept and design of the service.

And then, I got the following “testimonial” from a reader who neither signed up for Daily Email Habit, nor had a good reason for not signing up:

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What a brilliant idea!

This is truly an extremely valuable offer for someone who has any sort of expertise and has his/her offers nailed down to get into the habit of daily writing.

Sadly, I have none of the above 2 things at the moment. Once I do find my ICP for whom I have sufficient expertise, this will be something I’ll definitely come to you for.

Thank you for launching such an amazing offer!

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I didn’t reply to this. I had a sense there’s a game afoot here that I don’t want to play.

I tried to figure out what game that is, and what’s really going on in the message above, in between that compliment sandwich.

I had to translate it to myself to understand. For some reason, I thought of a little olive, looking out at a large tract of land and saying:

“What beautiful, fertile soil! This land would be perfect to support a whole orchard of olive trees, given that they have deep roots and broad branches. But alas, as you can see, I have neither. Just look at me! Do you see any roots or branches on me? No, there are none. It’s quite sad. Beautiful land though.”

There are lots of good reasons not to write daily emails, but lack of expertise is not one of them. You don’t write consistently because you have expertise… you have expertise because you write consistently.

That’s something that I believe on a deep level, and that’s why I put it right on the sales page for Daily Email, at the very start of the deck copy, right after “I’ll help you start a consistent daily email habit that…”

Like I said, there are lots of good reasons why you might not want to write daily emails. There are also lots of good reasons why you might.

If you decide to write daily emails, you most certainly don’t need my Daily Email Habit service to do it. But my service might help you stick with it… be more consistent… save time… or write better emails than you would otherwise. For more info on all that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

My daily email counter goes back in the oven

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I remember one time as a kid, my mom made a cake. It took hours to mix the ingredients, and it took hours more to bake in the oven.

When the cake re-emerged from the oven, it was 10pm already. And something was off— I don’t remember what. Maybe the taste was off, or the appearance, or the consistency.

I do remember my mom sitting on the couch afterwards and muttering to herself about what could have gone wrong, and what she could do in round two to fix it.

She sat there and ruminated, and sat some more. Eventually, she stood up.

“I’m going to try it again,” she said.

By this time, it was probably 11pm. I just shrugged and went to bed.

I found out the next morning that my mom finished round two of the cake at 2am. This time, it turned out exactly how she wanted.

And it was delicious.

This made a deep impression on young Bejako.

At the time, my childish attitude was, “Try, and if at first you don’t succeed, clearly this is not meant to happen, at least not today.”

Well, actually, that’s still my attitude today, though with the years, I’ve also learned some persistence.

One week ago, last Monday to be exact, I released my Daily Email Habit service to the priority list.

Daily Email Habit is at core a daily prompt to get you over the initial hurdle of what to write about each day in a daily email. The prompt is the core of Daily Email Habit, but I also have some extra bits to make the experience more engaging and fun.

One of these is a streak counter at the bottom of each email that shows you how many straight days you’ve been sending a daily email. You update the counter by pressing a button in each Daily Email Habit email, and you have 24 hours to do so — otherwise the counter resets to 0.

It took a surprising amount of backend tomfoolery and jerry-rigging to make this simple counter. (Email is not a very sophisticated technical platform.)

Of course, the counter seemed to be working fine when I released Daily Email Habit last Monday… but by Tuesday I already had a bunch of emails from people saying their streaks were all wrong.

So I went in, debugged, updated the database by hand. Problem confidently solved.

The streak counter has been running smoothly ever since… until this morning, when I got a message from a Daily Email Habit subscriber:

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Hey John,

My streak reset for some reason…

even though I put YES for everything

writing to you at 10:57 EST (I made the time limit)

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… and beneath this was a screenshot of all the daily emails this subscriber has sent to his list over the past week, to back up his claim.

What to do?

The usual. Go to the couch, sit, mutter to myself about what could have gone wrong, and what I can do in round two to fix it. And then get to work, even if it’s getting late in the day.

One thing is for sure. I won’t let this stupid email counter get the better of me.

By the way, I am planning to have an official launch for Daily Email Habit at some date in the future. But before that happens, I want to create a launch bonus, equivalent in value to what I’m charging monthly for Daily Email Habit, and this is taking time. Honestly, I don’t know how long it will take.

But if you think that writing a daily email consistently could be valuable to you, and if you’re interested in seeing if Daily Email habit could help you get there, then hit reply and tell me why this service sounds interesting to you.

Do this, and I’ll get you the details all about how Daily Email Habit works so you can decide if it’s for you or not. Plus, if you do join now, you will still get any bonuses I offer when I have the official launch, per my usual protocol of rewarding early buyers.

Meme and troll your way to success

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Two days ago, I wrote an email about Flat Earthers, and how I get where they’re coming from. I got a reply to that from long-time reader, pro copywriter, and original Crazy Email Lady, Liza Schermann, who wrote:

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Haha I love this! “For much of my life, I’ve had sympathy for Flat Earthers”. Should be the headline on your website.

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In the words of farm boy Westley, “As you wish.”

After Liza’s email, I went into my WordPress settings, and changed the tagline of my site. Any visitor to any page of my site, aside from the optin page, will now see a masthead up top that reads, “Desert Kite: For much of my life, I’ve had sympathy for Flat Earthers.”

Stupid inside joke? Trivial? Trolling?

Perhaps. And yet…

Yesterday, I promised to share an interesting idea that’s been bouncing around my head after I heard it a few weeks ago.

The idea comes from Omid Malekan, who is now a professor of crypto (!) at Columbia University, and who was previously the resident crypto expert at Citibank.

Malekan was writing about memecoins, basically stupid inside joke cryptocurrencies, trivial and trolling shitcoins, which are now having their moment and are currently worth over $100 billion in aggregate.

Malekan thinks memecoins are a bubble bound to pop. But in trying to make that case, he decided to “steelman” the case for memecoins, and argue for the other side as well as he could. And he discovered something interesting:

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I did realize some interesting things. Like historically, a lot of things start out as a joke and then end up becoming really significant and important. This is particularly true in the art world where a lot of what we today consider to be like, ‘Oh this is an amazing genius work of art,’ was just at the time 50 or 100 years ago the artist trolling.

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Malekan gave the example of Don Quixote, which started out with Cervantes trolling the popular form of writing at the time, knightly romances.

In time though, Cervantes’s book took a life on its own. Today, it’s held up as the first novel, and it’s taught as canon and forced down the throats of university students worldwide.

The list gets much wider and more significant if you don’t look at just trolling but also include, play, fun, and aimless games.

I read once that agriculture didn’t arise by the gradual conquering and mastering of plants to produce food. Rather, it grew out of symbolic, playful, or temporary gardens that people grew for no practical purpose, the way Eastern Europeans still plant little pots of wheat before Easter.

What about language?

My personal theory, though I’m sure others have had it before, is that the wide variety of modern languages is there thanks to memeing, trolling teenagers throughout history. And if you want proof of that, look at how new creole languages still emerge today, with new grammar and vocabulary, thanks to the kids of the displaced parents.

But you probably don’t want proof of that. You probably want me to get to the point of this email, if any.

My point is simply that play, fun, aimless games, or even mockery, trolling, and memes, have value in business, beyond simply being a sweetener for your content.

Get ready for the pitch now, because I’m about to give it to you:

If you want an example of memery and trolling turning to gold, take what I call my Most Valuable Email trick. It started out as a joke. It was my own attempt to put a smile on my own face and later on the faces of my readers, once I had a few.

Then the Most Valuable Email trick became a habit.

Later, I discovered this Most Valuable Email trick was actually useful to me.

And today, it’s directly influenced not just my copy, but the design of my website and emails… my personal positioning… and even the business strategy of what I do with this little newsletter.

Plus I’ve shared the MVE trick with others, and this memey or jokey thing has had real concrete benefits for them too.

Here’s Shakoor Chowdhury, a marketer who does performance deals with ecommerce clients (he’s driving $300k+ in sales each month for just one of them). Shakoor wrote about MVE:

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John, this is by far my favorite of your programs and really kickstarted my email marketing.

There were really two parts to MVE that changed my life:

1. Using “the meat” — emails cannot just be all information and value with no entertainment, you have to give people a reason WHY they should listen

2. the use of [the MVE trick] in your copy, what a powerful concept… instead of [doing what everybody else does, if you you use the MVE trick, it] also quickly raises your authority and credibility

When I bought this course I was very inconsistent, but you gave me direction and I started writing daily and grew a list of 470 subscribers in less than a month of implementing

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If you would like to find out how to meme and troll your way to success:

​https://bejakovic.com/mve

Why I can no longer be a Flat Earther

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I was on a plane a few months ago, looking out a window facing west, at sunset, in a perfectly cloudless sky, with the Mediterranean sea below me, all the way to the horizon.

I’m telling you all these details because I believe each one was crucial to a once-in-a-lifetime scientific discovery:

I could clearly see the Mediterranean Sea below me, looking cool and darkened. But there was a line ahead, towards the west, past which the sea gradually became warm-colored and bright, being still lit up by the setting sun.

Like I said, this was once-in-a-lifetime scientific discovery for me. I believe it was the first time in my life I had convincing first-hand evidence that the Earth is in fact round.

For much of my life, I’ve had sympathy for Flat Earthers, the people who insist, today, in 2024, that the earth is or at least might be flat.

I don’t necessarily have the “water can’t cling to a spinning ball” kind of sympathy… or the “Antarctica is a giant ice wall to keep you from falling off and finding out the truth” kind of sympathy.

Rather, I have sympathy with what I feel the Flat Earth movement is really about. Because after I first heard that Flat Earthing is a thing, I asked myself, “How do I know these people are wrong? How can I be sure the Earth is round and not flat?”

I’ve been told that’s how it is…

I’ve also seen pictures, illustrations, and videos, supposedly from space…

I’ve even been given models of the solar system, and arguments about rotation and magnetic fields and gravity…

… but I had zero first-hand experience. At least until that flight across the Mediterranean a couple months ago. I now believe 100%, though I’m certainly not trying to push my strong faith on you, that the Earth is in fact not flat, but round.

And I STILL have sympathy with the Flat Earthers.

Yes, the world is immensely complex.

It’s inevitable that much of what we believe about it gets passed on to us unquestioned. We couldn’t function otherwise.

But there’s still value in proving some things to yourself, regularly.

Not everything — there’s too much of that. But some things.

It can give you confidence when you find proof for yourself, beyond the confidence of being given proof.

It can lead you to insights you might not have otherwise.

And possibly, every so often, more often than you might think, it can help you find extra stuff, which others have swept under the rug.

Which things you choose to question is of course up to you.

But maybe stuff that’s directly connected to your work, success, or professional competence is a good place to start.

And if making sales or writing sales copy comes into what you do, then here’s a way to get first-hand experience and proof, which nobody can take away from you:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Why I’ve been turning away doubting subscribers

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Over the past few days, I launched my Daily Email Habit service to people who raised their hand to get on the priority list. At the end of the sales page, rather than linking to an order form, I asked people to write me to say if they are in, out, or have any questions. Most people who wrote me said they are in, like these folks:

#1. “Yes, I am in!”

#2. “No questions, I’m in!”

#3. “This looks brilliant John, I’m in. Thank you for coming up with such an exciting service!”

#4. “Count me in, please! Looking forward to it…”

#5. “I am IN. Please send me the link to join.”

#6. “Wtf dude you are such a badass. Yes I’m in.”

#7. “Yes absolutely im in. This sounds like an awesome idea”

… but some people had questions. Here’s one that came up a few times:

===

I took a loooong look (plus a night to sit on it), and I want to try it out.

But I’m going to be honest with you:

I’m still debating whether I need prompts like this or random insightful articles to expand my thinking.

(for example, the recent one you shared from Sean got the creative juice flowing)

This means I can’t promise I’m in for the long term yet. I understand that the concept of any subscription is to lower the entry cost in exchange for longer loyalty (like Daniel’s AiC newsletter).

So, if this “test the water mindset” bothers you, I’m okay with putting this one off for now, too.

===

Each time I got this particular question, I’ve been telling people NOT to sign up. Why?

I read once of a study in which people evaluated the attractiveness of a core offer (a bunch of saucers and cups and plates) + a free bonus bundle (more saucers and cups and plates, some in good shape and others a little chipped).

The conclusion of the study was that people evaluated the core offer as more valuable if it were sold on its own, with no free bonuses (perceived value: $33)… than if it were sold with the free bonuses, some of which were good and some of which were chipped (perceived value: $23).

I’m not saying that people who are not sure if they want my Daily Email Habit are “chipped saucers.” I’ve known a few of them for a while, and I know they are good people. Plus, I appreciate their honesty in voicing their doubts.

I just mean to tell you a kind of psychology quirk. The human brain tends to evaluate sets of items by using the AVG function, rather than the SUM function.

That includes my own brain. Yes, maybe it’s not very smart. But the fact is:

1. I don’t need the money from an extra subscriber.

2. I particularly don’t need the money if that subscriber won’t be getting anything out of it. (I can’t say for sure that anybody who expresses doubts on signing up will not get value out of it, but to my mind, the odds jump up dramatically.)

3. There’s an impact on my will to work and my long-term sticktoitiveness if I feel that what I’m doing has some sort of meaning vs. if it’s meaningless.

Maybe that makes perfect sense to you.

Or maybe it makes you a little uncomfortable. After all, aren’t we in business? Isn’t the goal to make money? When and how do you decide to turn away good, hard money today because of something vague like “will to work and long-term sticktoitiveness” tomorrow?

All that, and more, is something I tried to address in my Most Valuable Postcard #1.

Most Valuable Postcard was my short-lived paid newsletter, some two years ago.

And Most Valuable Postcard #1 was about the most important and valuable topic I could find — the most important thing to focus on in your business, whether you sell products or your own services, according to the most successful direct marketers in history.

If you’d like to find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/mvp1/

An old Soviet joke from a modern Russian prison

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Here’s a Soviet joke for you:

A shy, unathletic, bookish boy is walking across a snow-covered courtyard in Moscow, past a group of kids who are playing football.

The ball rolls to the boy’s feet. He decides against habit to join in the game. He kicks the ball awkwardly, and it veers off and crashes through the window of the janitor’s apartment on the ground floor.

The janitor emerges. He’s a huge, bearded man, who has clearly been drinking. He roars and starts to chase the boy.

The boy runs for his life, thinking to himself, “Why do I need football in the cold and the snow? I should be at home, safe and comfortable, reading a book, conversing with my favorite author Ernest Hemingway.”

Meanwhile, Ernest Hemingway is in a Havana bar, drinking rum, with a salsa band playing next to him. It’s hot. Hemingway thinks to himself, “God I’m sick of this heat and rum and salsa. I should be in Paris, the center of the world, drinking Cavalos with my great friend Jean-Paul Sartre, and discussing philosophy.”

Meanwhile, Jean-Paul Sartre is in a Paris cafe, in a cloud of cigarette smoke. He’s taking part in an abstract but heated discussion that means nothing to him. “God how I’m sick of all these cigarettes and cafes and empty discussions,” thinks Sartre. I should be in Moscow, talking to my friend, the great novelist Platonov, about things that are real and mean something.

Meanwhile, back in Moscow, Platonov is running across a snow-covered courtyard. And he growls through his gritted teeth, “God I swear if I ever catch him, I’ll kill the little bastard.”

That’s from the memoirs written by Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. Navalny wrote down the Soviet joke above — “my all-time favorite joke” — while in prison in the Pokrov correctional colony.

You might know Navalny’s story. Back in 2020, he was poisoned by the Russian secret service with a nerve toxin, almost died, but somehow made it to Germany to get medical treatment.

He recovered over the course of months. During this time, he cold-called Russian secret service agents and tricked them into revealing how they had poisoned him (I wrote about the crazy story ​back in December 2020​).

In spite of the assassination attempt, Navalny decided based on his principles to return to Russia.

He was promptly arrested as soon as he landed at the Moscow airport. He was then charged with embezzlement, fraud, and extremism, and was tossed in jail.

That was back in 2022.

Navalny never made it out of jail. He died earlier this year, on February 16, at age 47, under mysterious circumstances in the “Polar Wolf” prison, which sits in Western Siberia above the polar circle. “All necessary resuscitation measures were carried out but did not yield positive results,” the prison statement read.

I’m telling you this because somehow, during all this, Navalny remained cheerful and optimistic, in spite of the fact he was in prison in Siberia, in spite of the fact he had a 19-year sentence, in spite of the fact he knew he was really in for life, one way or another.

All that’s to say, if you think that whatever you’re writing about is too serious for joking, that your audience cannot and will not stand lightheartedness, that certain topics are sacred, well, it might be worth reading some of Alexei Navalny’s posts from prison. They are fascinating, inspiring, and well-written. Plus they might give you a change of mind on some things.

In case you’re curious:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/21/alexei-navalny-patriot-memoir