Personal Change

How to get access to the most elite opportunities and most exclusive clubs

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In case you’re the type who wants access to the most elite opportunities and most exclusive clubs, here’s an instructive story:

Carter Burwell is an American film composer. He has scored dozens of big-budget Hollywood movies, including The Big Lebowski, Being John Malkovich, No Country For Old Men, and Twilight.

But Burwell is not just a film composer. He has has a very colorful history.

Even before the age of 20, Burwell was already a trained animator, a would-be rock star, a factory worker, a would-be architect, and a self-taught computer programmer.

And then one day, after seeing a help-wanted ad in the New York Times, Burwell got hired as chief computer scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Lab, working for Nobel prize winner James Watson, codiscoverer of the structure of DNA.

How did Burwell get inside this elite and exclusive club? From an article about Burwell I just read:

“Burwell wrote a jokey letter in which he said that, although he had none of the required skills, he would cost less to employ than someone with a Ph.D. would. Surprisingly, the letter got him the job, and he spent two years as the chief computer scientist on a protein-cataloguing project funded by a grant from the Muscular Dystrophy Association.”

My point is not to write jokey application letters or cold emails.

It’s certainly not to compete on being cheaper than other options.

My point is simply to be immensely lucky, the way Burwell obviously is.

And in case you’re shocked and possibly outraged by that point, then let me rephrase it in a more how-to way:

Figure out how to weigh the odds so heavily in your favor… that you can be sure you’ve won, long before the coin has been tossed in the air.

That’s an idea from A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos.

It’s a bit of personal philosophy that Parris practices. It’s how he keeps getting access to the most elite copywriting opportunities, and working with the most exclusive clients.

Maybe you want some examples of what this means in practice.

You can find those in my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters, specifically chapter two, which is all about Parris’s “stack the odds” idea above. That chapter also ties in nicely to the Carter Burwell story above. Si te interesa:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Looks like I’ve won a $1,000 copywriting gig!

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About two months ago, I found out about an exciting copywriting gig:

An online publication was looking for content writers. The pay was $250 per article of about 750 words. Articles could come in a thematic series of 4.

I came up with an idea for a 4-part series, wrote up a nice little proposal, and sent it off to the editor of the publication.

And then, as nothing seemed to be happening, I forgot all about it.

Fast forward to two weeks ago:

The editor wrote back to me to say my idea sounds wonderful. And if I can get her the first drafts by December 16, my articles could be published as soon as January. And once my articles are published, inshallah, I will get paid $1k!

There once was a time, not even so many years ago, when I would have gladly taken on this kind of work without any ulterior motive.

But today, it takes a little something extra to get me excited.

So here’s the something extra:

This online publication is The Professional Writers’ Alliance. From what I understand, PWA is a paid community of freelance copywriters, somewhere under the umbrella of AWAI.

Are you getting a glimpse of my devious scheme?

I write some interesting and valuable content for PWA, and include a byline and a link to my site…

Some freelance copywriter out there reads my content and decides to get on my email list to read more…

I send him a few more well meaning emails and then—

BAM! I sell him one of my offers that might be interesting to freelance copywriters.

All right, writing guest content as a means of self-promotion is probably not new to you. What might be new to you is the following suggestion:

Look for ways to get paid for your self-promotion.

Of course, it’s not always possible, but it is more possible than you might at first think.

For example, did you know it’s possible to get paid to send out your sales letters to your audience, either online or by mail?

In other words, rather than having to pay either the USPS to deliver your stuffed-and-enveloped sales letter… or having to pay Facebook to get eyeballs that will look at your sales page… you can actually get paid each time a high-quality prospect reads your sales pitch?

It’s true, and it’s actually what I will be writing about for the PWA in January.

If you’ve been reading my emails for a while, you probably know this get-paid-to-advertise trick. And if not, I might write more about it in the coming weeks.

To get on my email list so you can read that (beware, I might try to sell you something), click here and fill out the form that appears.

I’m not worried about my email from last night — really

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My email last night about James Altucher drew a surprising number of thoughtful and emotional responses…

#1 “If that’s what got James Altucher to stop, that’s really sad. I too enjoyed his writing.”

#2 “Great email. I always enjoyed James Altucher’s writing, too. It’s so quirky and off-beat.”

#3 “So… your email couldn’t have had better timing.”

#4 “I appreciate you sharing the email you never sent and hope he finds his confidence again someday.”

… but what my email yesterday did not do is get any sales. And in fact, it also didn’t get almost any clicks to the sales page – not compared to what I’m used to seeing.

To which, all which I can do is give a Gandhi-like smile, shrug gently, and then hiss through clenched teeth:

“Come on people, don’t you realize I’m trying to run a little business here? Buy something or move on.”

But a little more seriously, such is the world of not-really direct response marketing in daily emails.

Last night’s email drew a lot of engagement, but seems to have been worthless for business. But maybe not.

I’ve sent similar emails to this list that made me multiple thousands of dollars. In fact, I might collect all such emails into a course one day, which I will call:

“Multiple-Thousand-$$$ Emails I Sent Right Before A Deadline — And You Can Too”

The truth is, if you have a daily email list, and you’re not just spamming people with random affiliate offers, then it’s often the cumulative effect that makes people buy.

And even when people are mostly “sold” by a single email, it’s often not the email from which they clicked through to the sales page.

So the way I see it, it doesn’t make too much sense to stress over an email that seems to have been worthless for business.

Likewise, it doesn’t make too much sense to celebrate the emails that did make sales (except my “Multiple-Thousand-$$$ Emails I Sent Right Before A Deadline” — more info on that exciting course coming up soon).

So what does make sense?

I can only tell you the four things I do:

1. Keep an eye on sales over a longer time – like a month. Things tend to average out over a month, and hidden effects become less hidden.

2. Do worry if the total sales over that longer period are not going up. (If the total sales are going up, then still worry, but less.)

3. Do make new offers — again, keep your eyes peeled for my “Multiple-Thousand-$$$ Emails I Sent Right Before A Deadline — And You Can Too”

4. Follow Gary Bencivenga’s advice about getting 1% better each day. Except 1% better each day seems like a lot to me. So I aim for more like 1% better each week.

Which brings me to my offer:

It’s not new. And it’s certainly not the only way to get 1% better each week. But maybe it will be the difference that allows you to get better, regularly. Sign up for my email newsletter, and get more emails like this, every day.

The three sweetest sales I made in November

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A few moments before I stood up to write this email, I shut down the cart and disabled the sales page for the Age of Insight live training.

It’s the first time I’m offering a training on the topic of insight, which has been squatting like a demon in my head for the past several years. Now it’s time for people who signed up for Age of Insight to see how I deliver on my promises of:

1. Influencing people without resistance

2. Triggering hope and enthusiasm, which translate into sales

3. Having your ideas and your name spread far and wide by excited audience members and grateful customers

Like I said, I’ve been thinking about insight for years. I’ve been preparing for this presentation for the past month. I’ve been promoting it actively every day for the past two weeks.

And now that the training is live, I will have several all-evening calls to deliver, plus a couple bonus trainings to think up and give, plus a year-long book club to run.

I managed to get the exact number of people to sign up for Age of Insight that I was hoping for. Which is nice.

But as I tried to show you above, it’s taken me quite a bit of work to get here, and it will take quite a bit more work to pay it off.

If I had to describe the flavor of successfully promoting and now delivering Age of Insight, I would have to say it’s a complex and umami-heavy broth.

Compare that to the three sweetest sales I made over the past thirty days.

All were for my Most Valuable Email program.

Three sales might not sound like a lot. And $300, which is what I made in total from these three sales, won’t buy me a fur coat just yet.

On the other hand, all three of these sales came without absolutely any effort on my part, either in promoting or in delivering this program. I haven’t promoted it for over 6 weeks, and the delivery is all automated.

Plus, there’s a bit of sugar on top:

When people go through MVE, they become very likely to buy more trainings from me. So maybe one of these three $100 purchases will turn into a few hundred dollars more down the line.

If that happens, and if you then ask me to describe it as a flavor, I’ll probably have to say it tastes like a raspberry cheesecake.

Anyways, I won’t try to get you to visit my Age of Insight sales page here. All I want to do is to offer you a chance to sign up for my daily emails, where you can see my Most Valuable Email trick in practice, once a week or so. If you are curious, click here to sign up for my daily emails.

$2.5-billion Renaissance man’s advice for how to spend your evenings and afternoons

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Back in August, I wrote about Paul Graham. Graham is worth an estimated $2.5B.

That’s because a part of what Graham does is invest in early-stage startups, such as Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox. But Graham is more than just an investor.

He is also an entrepreneur himself — he started and sold multiple businesses. He is also a computer scientist and somewhat of an inventor — he created his own new programming language. He also paints paintings, writes books and essays, and for all I know, sings opera.

In other words, Graham is as close to a Renaissance man as you can get in 21st century.

Anyways, a couple days ago, Graham wrote a new essay in which he made the following argument:

In the science fiction books I read as a kid, reading had often been replaced by some more efficient way of acquiring knowledge. Mysterious “tapes” would load it into one’s brain like a program being loaded into a computer.

That sort of thing is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Not just because it would be hard to build a replacement for reading, but because even if one existed, it would be insufficient. Reading about x doesn’t just teach you about x; it also teaches you how to write.

Would that matter? If we replaced reading, would anyone need to be good at writing?

The reason it would matter is that writing is not just a way to convey ideas, but also a way to have them.

Cue my Insights & More Book Club.

This is a bonus I am offering with the Age of Insight live training.

With the Insights & More Book Club, you can get exposed to new books that I will choose specifically because they are likely to be insightful and perspective-shifting.

You can also see the kinds of notes I take and ideas I have as I am reading the book — I will share them with you as I go along.

And of course, you can read yourself. ​And then, we can get on a call every two months to discuss what we’ve read and how to use it.

​​In this way, Insights & More is both a book club — with quilts and tea and cookies — and a mastermind where we can talk about ways to apply ideas from the reading to your marketing and content and even offers.

By the way, I’ve realized over the years I am very good at getting info and ideas out of books. But I am also very, very slow. Hence, only one new book for the Insights & More Book Club every two months.

So if you are interested in ideas, writing, or making money, then you might be interested in joining my Age of Insight live training, and the Insights & More Book Club.

Registration closes in three days, on Wednesday 12 midnight PST. But I am only making this training open to people who are on my email newsletter. To get in before the doors close, sign up for my newsletter.

It may be a long time since you read this subject line

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I was standing in the kitchen this morning, making coffee for myself, when I had the idea for this email. I had to stop the coffee making and go write the idea down. Here it is:

A few weeks ago, a science paper went viral on the internet. It was titled, “Consciousness as a memory system.”

The paper gives a new theory of consciousness:

We don’t experience reality directly, the paper claims. We’re not looking out through any kind of window onto the reality outside.

We don’t even experience reality in any kind of real-time but transformed way. We’re not looking at a colorful cartoon that’s generated live, based on what’s going on outside right now.

Instead, we only have conscious experiences of our memories and of our imagined memories.

What you’re really looking at, right now, is a sketchbook, full of shifting drawings and notes of things that happened some time ago, or that never happened at all.

Maybe this new theory turns out to be false or obvious. Maybe it turns out to be profound and true. I personally find it interesting because it speaks to a practical experience I keep having:

If you don’t remember it, it might as well never have happened.

​​That’s why I had to stop the coffee making and go write down my idea for this email.

I’ve been writing newsletter for four years.

It’s more difficult than it might seem to write a 500-600-word email like this every day.

There are lots of stops, starts, discarded sentences and paragraphs.

To make it more complicated, my best ideas don’t happen while standing at my desk and trying to work. My best ideas often happen in a dim flash, while I’m in the shower, while driving, while trying to make coffee. Sometimes entire phrases, arguments, outlines for things I want to say, names, product concepts, inspired analogies, light up in my head. A moment later, that dim flash fades away.

You’ve probably heard the advice that, if you’re trying to make a habit of writing, then take notes all the time of interesting thoughts or observations you have.

It’s good advice, so let me repeat it:

If you’re trying to make a habit of writing, then take notes all the time of the interesting thoughts or observations you have.

And then, figure out a way to organize and store those notes into something that will be useful tomorrow, a month from now, even a year from now.

Now, get ready, because you’re about to have a conscious experience of a memory of a sales pitch:

I write a daily email newsletter. Many people say it’s interesting and insightful.

Search your memory banks right now. See whether you have a conscious experience of a memory of wanting to read more of my writing. If you find the answer is yes, then click here and fill out the form that appears.

Announcing: My new 183-day challenge

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I woke up this morning to an email inviting me to promote a “6-figure challenge” challenge.

From what I understand, the challenge is for an audience of experts to build their own 6-figure challenge funnel.

I have never participated in an online challenge. I do not ever plan on participating in an online challenge. And so, simply as a matter of only promoting dogfood that my own dog has happily eaten in the past, I won’t be promoting this offer.

But this did bring to mind another challenge I read about just last night. You might want to take a deep breath — because it’s the challenge of voluntary poverty. Bear with me for a moment while I tell you about it.

I read about this challenge in a book by “the father of American psychology,” William James. A hundred years ago, James had this to say:

Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition.

Maybe this sounds to you like another classic self-defeating Bejako gambit, promoting the challenge of voluntary poverty to an audience of copywriters, marketers, and business owners. But hold on. James goes on to explain:

It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases.

Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There are thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman.

What James is saying is that in many cases — maybe in most cases — there is a tradeoff between the desire for wealth and the desire for freedom and independence.

​​And freedom and independence — that’s something I bet you care about.

I’m going by my own feelings here. I’ve always cared more about freedom than money. And in fact, I originally got interested in copywriting not because of the promise of sales letters that would pay me millions of dollars in royalties. I got interested because copywriting meant I wouldn’t have to keep sitting in somebody else’s office, day after day, from dark in the morning until dark in the afternoon.

There’s a fair chance you’re like me, and that you also care about being free and independent.

And so, starting today, I would like to announce my 183-day Voluntary Poverty Challenge. ​​For the low, low price of $5,000, you can join my challenge and have my team of certified poverty coaches reorganize your life along lines recommended by William Jam—

Yeah right. My point is simply that there are often tradeoffs among our most fundamental motivating forces. ​​And also, that it’s possible to sell even something hard and mean — voluntary poverty — by appealing to deeper psychological drivers like the desire for freedom.

But really, I have a 183-day challenge for you. Join my email newsletter, and look out for my email each day, waiting for the day when I will fail and not write anything. It hasn’t happened for the past several thousand days, but maybe it will happen in the next 183 days. And then you can gloat. If you’d like to join this exciting challenge, click here to get started.

Money don’t love Spruce Goose

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On a beautiful day exactly 75 years ago, Howard Hughes smiled for the camera, hung up the in-cockpit telephone, and took hold of the controls.

He was piloting the largest “flying boat” ever built.

I’m talking about the Hughes H-4 Hercules, aka the Spruce Goose.

In spite of the nickname, The Goose was mostly birch.

That didn’t stop it from being enormously expensive for the time. And with good reason. As Hughes put it:

“It is over five stories tall with a wingspan longer than a football field. That’s more than a city block. Now, I put the sweat of my life into this thing. I have my reputation all rolled up in it and I have stated several times that if it’s a failure, I’ll probably leave this country and never come back. And I mean it.”

Well, I guess Hughes didn’t mean it all that seriously. Because he didn’t leave the country, even though, by all practical measures, the Goose turned out to be a colossal failure.

After all, once Hughes lifted The Goose above the sparkling waters off Long Beach, CA, it flew for less than a minute, for less than a mile.

That was its one and only flight.

And even this one lousy flight came well after the end of World War II, even though The Goose was designed to be a war transport plane, and even though the whole point of building The Goose out of spruce (or birch) was the wartime restriction on materials such as aluminum.

So yeah, the Spruce Goose remains the best illustration of a massive, drawn-out, and ultimately useless project.

The point being, don’t be like this. Don’t roll “the sweat of your life”, your name and reputation, and possibly your country of residence into one drawn-out project which won’t get a chance for even a test flight until years from now.

Because money don’t love Spruce Goose.

Money loves speed.

I’ve tried to track down who coined that saying, but I don’t have a definitive answer. I’ve heard Dan Kennedy say it often. Joe Vitale has got a book by that title. But I bet it goes back a century or more, in some slightly different phrasing, with the same basic idea. Maybe you can enlighten me.

Anyways, let me take my own advice, and wrap up this post:

My email newsletter is now available for you to join. In case you’d like a chance to get copywriting, marketing, and persuasion ideas into your head — so you can start getting that money that speed promises — here’s where to go.

Play and game are not the same

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Today is October 25, the 58th anniversary of the biggest mistake in NFL history.

Now, I really don’t care about American football, or any other nation’s football, but this mistake was pretty spectacular. Let me tell you about it quickly:

The date, like I said, was October 25.

The year was 1964.

The place was San Francisco.

The teams were San Francisco 49ers and the Minnesota Vikings.

During a play, the 49ers quarterback fumbled the ball.

If you don’t know anything about American football — it’s much like any other football. Each team is trying to advance the ball towards one, and only one, end of the field. A fumble is when one team drops the ball midfield — a bad thing.

But what happened next was much worse.

Jim Marshall, a Vikings player, picked up the fumbled ball, and started running down the field.

The problem was, Marshall was running the wrong way.

He triumphantly ran all the way to the end zone, unopposed by anybody, thinking he had just scored a touchdown for his team. But in fact, he had scored a couple points for the other guys.

A 49ers player was the first to run up to Marshall and say, “Thanks Jim.” Marshall stood there frozen as his teammates stared at him in disbelief, as the opposing team’s players laughed, and as tens of thousands of 49ers fans erupted in cheers around the stadium.

I watched an interview with Marshall about the incident. It was recorded decades later.

Marshall still seemed sheepish. The memory clearly still brought him pain.

But in time, he turned his mistake into something positive. He kept playing the game, and playing well. He said fans and other players have given him a lot of respect for continuing to do his best even after such a colossal mistake.

But hold on.
​​
Colossal mistake? That still stings decades later? Football is just a game, isn’t it?

Here’s why I’m telling you about all this. One idea that’s been rattling around my skull for several years is a quote by Claude Hopkins:

“All the difference lies in a different idea of fun. The love of work can be cultivated just like the love of play.”

The “difference” Hopkins was talking about is the difference between success and failure, riches and poverty. And maybe something more. Maybe the difference between feeling good about how you spend a large part of your life, and feeling miserable.

But even though I’ve done a lot of trying, I have not yet been able to cultivate the idea that work is fun.

​​Sure, there are moments when I enjoy what I do. And sometimes I even find it hard to tear myself away from what it is I’m working on. But never, not once, in the 7+ years of working as a copywriter and marketer, have I woken up in the morning and jumped out of bed because I was so eager to open up my laptop and start working.

Maybe like Hopkins says, this can be cultivated. It certainly seems worthwhile.

And that’s why I’ve been thinking and collecting ideas about what work really is, and what play is, and how the two are different.

​​That’s why I was interested in the Jim Marshall story above. It shines a bit of a light on how consequential and work-like mere games can become, and how perhaps a game is something different from the play that Hopkins was talking about.

I’m not sure if this is of any use to you. It probably isn’t, not unless you’re like me, and you have to force yourself to work each day.

if that’s how you are, well—

You might get some more ideas about how to make your work more play-like, and how to get to riches and success, in other emails and essays that I write. In case you would like to read those as they come out, sign up to my daily email newsletter.

Copywriting is a crazy business, but it’s not unlike any other business

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A few weeks ago, a reader named Ferdinand wrote me to say he has written a book, but he is afraid to advertise it because he’s not sure it’s any good. Would I be kind and selfless enough to take a look and tell him if it’s ok to put out?

I was kind and selfless enough to respond to Ferdinand, saying that I charge people a great deal of money to review copy and content — but good on him for trying.

That was a mistake.

Because yesterday, I got a second email from Ferdinand. He said he didn’t get the precise response he was looking for with regard to the book. And that’s okay. But he still wants to bother me a little bit.

Would I give him a job? Any kind of a job? The pay doesn’t matter, as long as it’s consistent. He knows he can do more than what he’s currently doing, and copywriting is his dream, and he wants to chase it…

This reminded me of a scene in the King of Comedy.

Robert De Niro plays a wannabe standup comedian. He’s a big fan of a late-night talk show host played by Jerry Lewis.

One night, as Jerry is leaving the studio and getting into a cab, De Niro pushes his way through the crowd and jumps into the cab with Jerry.

Jerry is startled, even frightened. But De Niro reassures him. He just needs to talk for a minute. Right now, he’s working in “communications” but by nature he’s a comedian. His stuff is dynamite, it’s his dream, he just needs a break…

Once Jerry’s heart rate comes down a bit from the scare, he gives De Niro some practical advice:

“Look pal, gotta tell you… This is a crazy business, but it’s not unlike any other business. There are ground rules. And you don’t just walk on to a network show without experience. Now I know it’s an old, hackneyed expression but it happens to be the truth. You’ve got to start at the bottom.”

No?

You don’t like that old, hackneyed expression?

You want something a little more “hustle culture”-y, a little more Tim Ferriss-y? Ok, try this on and see if it fits:

In my experience in the direct response industry, it’s always a lousy idea to ask for a job. Even if you’re starting at the bottom. It’s much better to put yourself in a position where people ask you to work with them. In the words of Claude Hopkins, offer a privilege, not an inducement.

Are you still with me? That’s surprising. But in that case, you might get value from other emails and essays I write. In case you want to read them, you can sign up to my daily email newsletter.