Personal Change

Last chance to send $1000, plus a free spot in my upcoming Write-Your-Advertorial workshop

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On April 30, 1961, Leonid Rogozov gave himself a jab of Novocaine. He struggled forward in his hospital bed and told one of his “assistants” to shift the mirror a little. He picked up the scalpel, and started cutting into his own side.

It took Rogozov about an hour or so. He had to take frequent breaks due to weakness and fainting spells.

But eventually, he managed to cut out his own inflamed appendix… sew himself up… and presumably, drink a bunch of vodka to celebrate.

Leonid Rogozov was the only doctor at the Soviet Antarctic station. He had to operate on himself, because nobody else at the station could. He survived, and a year later, when he got off Antarctica and his story became known, he became a national hero.

I’d like you to keep in mind this image of a doctor operating on himself… while I tell you about something I heard in Dan Kennedy’s Wealth Attraction Seminar.

“Don’t make decisions for other people,” says Dan.

The fact is, we are all full of what Dan calls secular religious beliefs. These are “facts” about our businesses we firmly believe without any proof. Things like, how much people in our market are willing to spend… what they are willing to buy… and how best to sell them.

Dan says those secular religious beliefs reflect more what’s going on internally in our (the marketers’) heads… rather than the true state of the market.

Dangerous stuff. You might even call it a poisonous inflammation. One that only you can surgically cut out from your own body, in a heroic operation, with the sharp scalpel of real-world testing.

And now that I’ve given myself a shot of Novocaine by sharing this valuable idea with you, let me get out my own scalpel and start cutting:

A few days ago, I got an email from the affiliate manager behind Steal Our Winners. She’s pushing people to promote the lifetime subscription to Steal Our Winners, because the price is going up.

“Nope,” I said. “I won’t do it.”

As you might know, I regularly promote Steal Our Winners. It’s Rich Schefren’s monthly video thing, where he interviews a bunch of successful marketers, and they each share one inside tip on what’s working for them right now.

I think it’s a great product. That’s why I’m happy to promote it each month.

Except, what I always promote is the $1, one-month trial of Steal Our Winners. I think it’s an easy sell, both because Steal Our Winners is a product I personally like… and because, come on, it’s $1.

But this lifetime subscription is not $1. It’s orders of $$$$ more. Plus it’s a lifetime subscription. It sounds so final, like marriage.

That’s why I said I wouldn’t promote this offer. And yet, here we are. So let me make a confession:

I myself have bought the lifetime subscription to Steal Our Winners.

For me, it was absolutely worth it, at the price I got it at. Not just because of the great monthly content… but because of the free bonuses you get, which you can’t get anywhere else.

Like Joe Schriefer’s Copyboarding Academy.

And the Agora Financial Media Buying Bootcamp.

And Rich Schefren’s Mystery Box. (What’s inside? You gotta open up and see.)

Plus about a dozen other bonuses… along with all the back issues of Steal Our Winners.

But if you have no interest in this offer, there’s no sense in me pushing it more on you.

And if you do have some interest, this post isn’t space enough to tell you all the many things you get in the lifetime subscription to Steal Our Winners… and why it might be worth grabbing before the price goes up.

For that, I recommend checking out the link at the end of this post.

Phew.

​​I guess I’ll manage to sew this up after all, after an hour of weakness and fainting spells. So here’s one final thing:

If you do decide to get the lifetime subscription to Steal Our Winners, forward me your confirmation email. Along with your mailing address.

As my own bonus, I’ll give you a free spot in my upcoming Write-Your-Advertorial Workshop. This workshop will happen later this year, and it will cost more than the lifetime Steal Our Winners subscription costs now. (More details about this workshop to follow.)

But what about the mailing address? Why do I want that?

Because I will also mail you a bottle of Belvedere vodka. That way we can celebrate this successful and heroic operation, together, somewhere in virtual space. Na zdorovye.

Operation complete. So here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/sow-lifetime

A hare-brained idea for getting more done faster and better

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Since I was a kid, I’ve loved Looney Tunes cartoons. One I love in particular is The Rabbit of Seville, where Bugs Bunny plays a barber, and his victim is Elmer Fudd.

Bugs throws Elmer into a barber’s chair.

He makes a crown of shaving cream on Elmer’s bald head.

And he starts tossing fruit in there.

(By the way, that’s the way most of us solve problems. We complicate more and more, and toss pears and oranges and a pineapple on top of the mess that’s already there. And at the end, like Bugs, we examine our work… then add another round of shaving cream, and a cherry on top.)

I bring up The Rabbit of Seville because it’s one of the greatest cartoons of all time. And also because it has to do with the idea of cutting.

And that’s a quick but powerful idea I want to share with you. Often, when I am stuck on a project, the best thing I can do is to ask myself:

“What can I cut out and still have the end result come out better and stronger?”

I don’t just roll a few possible answers around my head.

Instead I force myself to write down 10 ideas, even if they are impractical. For example, I am currently building up a niche email newsletter to promote affiliate offers.

I’ve been lagging with it. So today I made a list of 10 things I could cut out. One of them was making sales.

Now that’s a terrible idea. But writing it down gets it out of my head, and makes space for other, maybe better ideas. And who knows, somewhere down the line, even this stupid idea might morph into something totally new and unexpected and great. Like the end of The Rabbit of Seville:

Elmer has an ax and is chasing Bugs.

Then Bugs has a bigger ax and is chasing Elmer.

Next Elmer has a revolver.

Then Bugs has a shotgun.

Elmer has a cannon.

Bugs has a bigger cannon.

Finally Elmer has a huge cannon. And then he screeches to a halt, befuddled.

Because Bugs gives him a bouquet of flowers.

Then a box of chocolates.

Then a diamond ring.

Suddenly, Elmer is wearing a wedding gown.

The two get married. And Bugs carries Elmer up to the rafters of the opera house… and drops him down into a wedding cake.

Bugs nibbles on his carrot. And to end, he says the same thing you can say when you cut down and finally ship your project…

“Nyaah… next!”

Next… is another idea about business, marketing, and copywriting. It arrives in my email newsletter tomorrow. If you’d like to read it, you can join my newsletter here.

Harmful coping behaviors for smart people

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Bear with me for just a moment while I try to write a bit of empathy copy. In fact, bear with me for just four personal and probing questions:

1. Do you often cover up what you really think and feel, and instead hde behind the ideas of people who are your superiors, or who have more authority than you do?

2. Do you regularly put in extra work on projects you care about, fiddling and futzing forever because you’re afraid to have a single mistake present when the work is delivered or made public?

3. Do you sometimes rely on charm and social sensitivity, listening with attention to important people… or feigning interest in their ideas and their lives… so you can win their approval?

(… and when that approval comes, do you find that it’s hollow? Either because you used charm and guile, rather than relying on your true self… or because people who are really worth a damn don’t have to seek others’ approval to begin with?)

And one final question:

4. Do you have some negative beliefs about the high cost of success? And do you find that that high cost of success is ultimately ok… because you yourself are NOT successful, not really, even in spite of what others might think of you?

If you answered yes to one of these questions… and in particular, if you answered yes to more than one of these questions… then I would like to offer you a diagnosis:

Imposter syndrome.

Because the four questions above describe coping behaviors I dug up in the original science paper that described imposter syndrome. Clance and Imes, 1978.

And here’s something else I got from that paper:

People who come down with a bad case of imposter syndrome tend to fall into two groups:

Group A, the sensitive group. These are people who had a sibling that the parents praised for being smart… while they themselves were praised for being sensitive or socially adept.

Group B, the smart group. People in this group heard from their parents that they can achieve anything they want in life… and that they can achieve it with ease and without effort.

“All right,” I hear you saying, “so what’s with the psychology lesson?””

For one, it’s because Google says there’s been explosion in interest in imposter syndrome. Almost exponential since 2000.

Which makes it possible that you suffer from imposter syndrome yourself. And maybe by reading what I’ve just written, you can understand what’s really going on in your head and in your life.

But this is also a newsletter abut cold-blooded persuasion and marketing. So let me tie it up:

It’s powerful to have your prospects believe that bad things in their life are not their fault. That’s why most every sales letter these days jams that phrase somewhere around the middle. “I’m here to tell you… it’s not your fault.”

But as marketer Rich Schefren says, that’s weak on its best day.

Because if the prospect is not to blame, then who is? Most marketers have no answer to that, or they have an unconvincing answer only.

But I just gave you one option, which is other people in your prospect’s environment or past. Parents, for example. But you probably knew that already.

So I gave you another option, too. I won’t spell it out, but you can find it in this post. And with almost no effort. Because I know you’re smart like that.

And whether you smart or merely very sensitive, I think the cure for imposter syndrome is simple. I reveal it in the pages of my email newsletter. You can sign up for it here.

“Why don’t you ever whip me?”

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“Why don’t you ever whip me?” the colonel’s wife asked. She had already slept with the colonel’s entire brigade, but she was still eager for a little attention from the colonel himself.

“Because I’m busy,” the colonel snapped back.

That’s from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. The colonel is busy because he is obsessed with putting on parades — parades that nobody watches, parades that the soldiers hate, parades that have no practical value.

Almost as little practical value as the time you waste, polishing and pondering a project that should have shipped in one-tenth the time.

Because, like sex, money loves speed.

I once tried to track down where this phrase comes from. I got as far back as copywriter Joe Vitale, but then the trail went cold.

I always assumed money loves speed because you get more time to keep working on other projects. More work, more money.

And I’m sure that can be a part of it.

But there can be a second part also.

And that’s that money, like sex, doesn’t like desperation.

And if you act busy, even if your other project is your own parade that nobody watches, money might come around and say, “Why don’t you ever pick me up?”

“Because I’m busy,” you can then snap back. “But we can schedule something for next Friday evening.”

Oh, and I once figured out a third way in which money loves speed. It’s something practical I heard in a conversation between marketers Rich Schefren and Kim Walsh Phillips. If you’d like to hear it also:

https://bejakovic.com/the-aggressive-other-meaning-of-money-loves-speed/

Boredom is a necessary nutrient

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Yesterday, I came across an article which compared media consumption to eating. The real problem, the article claimed, is that we are consuming the media equivalent of junk food. But I’m not buying it.

Because here’s another food-related claim I once heard:

Hunger is a necessary nutrient.

That was somebody’s clever way of summarizing what’s now a pretty accepted medical idea. When you don’t eat, your body does some housekeeping which ends up being good for you, and which you cannot get done otherwise.

In other words, hunger, occasional but regular hunger, is just as needed as salt or vitamin C.

And now let me extend that idea to media consumption:

Boredom is a necessary nutrient. Or rather, a necessary ingredient, for any kind of creative work or actual thinking.

For example, today I spent three hours in the car, driving from one town to another.

As soon as I got in the car, my hand reached out to turn on the radio.

“Get thee behind me, Satan” I said to my hand, and I stopped myself from turning on the radio. Because I had a feeling what would happen if I kept the radio off.

For a while after that, my mind roiled inside my skull. “This is so boring!” it said. “I’m getting nervous! Let’s put on some music, it doesn’t even have to have words!”

But eventually, the mind gave up. And some time later, without me doing anything, it happened:

An idea for a new book jumped out at me. The title, the concept, everything. I’m not sure I will ever write this book, but right now I think it’s pretty cool.

Then a few minutes after that, an outline formed in my head for a project I’m working on.

“That outline seems too linear,” I said. “Not integrated enough.”

So a few minutes later, while I braked and navigated some tricky curves high above the sea, a better outline formed in my head.

Eventually, I pulled over at a gas station. I took out my phone, and I wrote down the results of all this hard work I had done.

Maybe the same stuff would have happened in my head had the radio been playing. Or had I been listening to an audiobook. Or had I had somebody in the car to entertain me.

But I doubt it. And that’s why I’d like to suggest:

If you’re looking to get healthy, lean, and fit, creatively speaking, it might be worth turning off your TV. Hiding your phone under the couch. Even putting away that valuable book you are reading.

And then, just sitting there, hungry for stimulation and bored out of your mind…. until something cool happens.

Oh, and stop subscribing to so many email newsletters. Even the entertaining and valuable ones. Like mine.

Early success

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The gangly young man stepped inside the office and froze. He took a step to the side and pressed up against the wall.

His eyes darted from desk to desk. But nobody took notice of him.

Finally, he spotted somebody even younger than himself at one of the desks. He walked over.

“Hey buddy,” he said. “Maybe you can help me. My company has an account with you guys. They sent me down here because we just got some new business. I’m supposed to buy more ads. Can you tell me who I should talk to?”

The even younger man at the desk blinked a few times. “Actually,” he said, “that’s something I can help you with.”

The year was 1900. The place was the Lord & Thomas advertising agency in Chicago.

The young man who came looking to buy more ads worked for Collier’s Publishing. And the even younger man he approached was a 19-year-old Albert Lasker.

Perhaps you’ve heard of Lasker already. At 18, he started work as an office boy at Lord & Thomas. At 19, he became an accounts man. At 23, he became partner. At 32, he became CEO.

Under Lasker’s tenure, Lord & Thomas ran breakthrough campaigns, building brands like Palmolive, Pepsodent, Sunkist, Kotex, and Lucky Strike. And today, Lasker is known as one of the greatest advertising men of all time.

Lasker had natural talents that made him such a success in advertising, and at such a young age. But none of it would have happened — so Lasker claimed later — were it not for a few early successes. Like that Collier’s account, which landed in his lap thanks to his look of inexperience.

Early success.

I recently looked at the areas of my life where I’ve persevered and achieved something. This includes copywriting.

I made a list of common elements. There turned out to be three crucial things.

The first was an experience of early success. It gave me the belief to persevere when things got hard.

And vice versa. When I look at things where I failed… I find I didn’t have any early successes. Maybe I was following a process that was supposed to work. But without a signpost to tell me I was on the right path, it felt like wandering in the wilderness. So I gave up.

My point is that an experience of early success can be transformational.

Keep this in mind when you’re trying to retain customers or clients… or manage yourself.

An early success can come from blind luck and land right in your lap, like it did for Albert Lasker.

But with a bit of preparation, scheming, and maybe downright fakery, you don’t need luck. You can create an experience of early success with near certain probability. For your clients or customers or yourself. And once that happens… who knows how far you will go?

By the way, would you like to know about the other two crucial ingredients I found for long-term success in copywriting?

It’s something I haven’t written about before. But if and when I do, it will go into my email newsletter. You can sign up for that here.

Outrage in the inbox

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I apparently misled a bunch of people yesterday.

At the end of the email I sent out to my newsletter subscribers, I promised a copy of a free book on how to get rich as a repositioning consultant.

People wrote in to ask for their copy.

But unfortunately, there is no book. My offer was supposed to be a demonstration of the idea in the email (“If it’s not selling, reposition it as a business opportunity”).

But I wasn’t clear enough or tongue-in-cheek enough about it. So people took my offer at face value.

I wrote back to everybody who responded to explain what had happened.

Most people shrugged, and said that if I ever do write anything on this topic, they hope to get their promised copy. Which they will.

A few people said they had a kind of a-ha moment after re-reading the email. A guy named Nathan put it this way:

I sat there for around 5 minutes debating whether it was sarcastic or not.

Everything in me said, “there is no book”…

FOMO got the better of me though.

I’ve been there myself. And it’s kind of the point of what I wrote yesterday.

This direct response stuff works. And a cocktail of “opportunity” mixed with “FREE” is powerful and heady.

Anyways, the two types of reactions above cover all the responses I got…

Except one.

It came from a guy who’s responded a few times before to my offers and emails. And a few times before, he upset my evening equilibrium with his entitled and loaded comments.

This time, after I explained what had happened, he sent back a highlighted copy of my promised offer from yesterday, along with,

“So… you lied?”

Perhaps I’m overly sensitive.

But I don’t like to create outrage. And I don’t like outrage directed at me. Even passively. Even if it’s supposed to be good for business.

So this became the first time I proactively unsubscribed somebody from my list. It felt good.

Because my thinking is, if you’re planning to be at something for a long time, the way I do with these emails, you have to be happy to come into work every day.

So let me just say thank you. For reading. For being understanding. For not being outraged. And tomorrow, we will be back to our usual marketing topics… along with, who knows, maybe another hidden demonstration.

And by the way:

If you’d like to sign up to my email newsletter so you can read tomorrow’s email and not be outraged by it, here’s where to go.

3 ways for freelancers to lose less

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A few days ago, I wrote a post about loser’s games:

Situations in life where the outcome is all about what the loser does… rather than what the winner does.

I wrapped up that post with advice given to amateur tennis players. “Lose less. Avoid trying too hard. And keep the ball in play.”

To which a freelance copywritress wrote in to ask:

“How do you lose less in freelancing? Not trying too hard and keeping the ball in the game is straightforward. But I wasn’t able to figure out how I could lose less. Any insights or tips would be much appreciated by this seasoned loser.”

My answer was that losing less is about all the stuff that’s really 100% within our control, but we muck up for reasons of our own. Like…

There’s a great job that you want to apply to, but you convince yourself not to do it, or you don’t do it in time.

Or…

Client comes to you and says, “Here’s what I need” and you say, “Yes boss” instead of saying, “What’s the ultimate goal you’re looking to achieve by doing this?”

Or…

You hear 50k times that you’re charging too little and yet you still don’t raise your rates.

Basically, losing is self-sabotage and mistakes that we really can’t blame on anybody else. And losing less is not doing that.

Of course, maybe that’s just deflecting the question. How exactly do you not make mistakes and avoid self-sabotage, whatever form it takes?

I’ve got three unsexy but true ideas for you:

1. Habit. Start small and low risk. Build from there.

2. Willpower. Sleep. Eat. Drink your orange juice. Grit your teeth.

3. Self-awareness.

Because those three losing behaviors above, those are all things I did and sometimes still do. But maybe they aren’t exactly your own.

Whatever yours are, identify them. In the spur of the moment those losing behaviors just happen. You shrug them off, either blaming circumstance or yourself.

But if you take time and identify them… that can sometimes be all you need to change when loserliness threatens next.

I’ve got my own homebrewed journaling system for this. In fact I’ve got close to 30 separate journals, for different aspects of my life.

In each journal, I ask myself, what happened? What did I do right? What could I have done better?

This doesn’t always mean I never act like a seasoned loser. But when I do act like a loser, that goes into a journal, and maybe reduces the chance of it happening again. And if you sometimes play loser’s games… this might be worth a try for you too.

By the way, one of the journals I keep is all about interesting and novel ideas for emails. Because I write a daily email newsletter. If you’d like to read some of the ideas I write about, you can sign up for it here.

Entrepreneurship: A loser’s game

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A couple nights ago, I stayed up two hours past my bedtime to watch TV and witness a miracle.

Well, a sports miracle:

Novak Djokovic beating Rafael Nadal at the French Open.

In case those names mean nothing to you, I’m talking tennis. And what Djokovic did is the hardest thing in that sport.

After all, Rafael Nadal has won the French Open 13 out of the past 15 years.

The only times he lost, it was in the early rounds, because he was crippled, hobbled, or hamstrung. Whenever he made it to the end stages, like this year, he was unbeatable. Until this past Friday.

It took an incredible effort. In fact, both Djokovic and Nadal played at the highest levels.

They made tennis look like ping pong, because of how they moved each other around, with crazy angled shots, delivered from far off the court and from seemingly impossible positions.

Other pros and commentators gushed afterwards that it was one of the greatest matches in history, and probably the greatest clay court match ever. Nadal and Djokovic are from another world, they said.

Well. Contrast that to my real-life experiences with tennis.

I started playing when I was a kid. If you saw me play, you might think I have skills. But I don’t.

In fact, I have such an extreme lack of skills that two years ago I vowed never to play again. It was just too painful.

I’d play a match against somebody who I should be able to easily beat. And I’d still end up losing.

Double faults… routine balls dumped into the net… attempts at winners that sailed a foot wide.
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Each mistake-filled loss would set off a binge of self-hate that lasted for days, until it was time to play (and usually lose) the next match. So I decided to give it up.

And that’s my point for you for today.

It turns out that the sport played on tennis courts is actually two entirely different games.

That’s according to a Dr. Simon Ramo, who analyzed the data. Ramo’s research can be summed up simply:

Professional tennis players win points. The rest of us lose points.

In the pro game, outcomes are determined by the actions of the winner, like in the Djokovic-Nadal match.

In the non-pro game, the amateur rarely beats his opponent. But he beats himself all the time.

It’s two opposite games. And Ramo’s data bear it out. Pros win 80% of points. Amateurs lose 80% of points.

Of course, tennis is not the only loser’s game.

So is campaigning for political office… warfare… and modern dating.

In all these fields, outcomes are determined more by our own mistakes and self-sabotage, rather than anything the other side did.

And from what I’ve seen, entrepreneurship fits into this mold too.

We look to the highest performers, like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. We see how they run laps around the competition and create daring offers that wow customers.

But that’s not the game the rest of us play.

For the rest of us, competition is largely irrelevant and potential customers usually never even see our offers.

Instead, the outcomes we get (typically not good) are really the result of our own mistakes and self-sabotage.

If that’s the case, then what’s the fix?

I don’t have a good answer for you. But I can leave you with the advice that Simon Ramo gave to tennis players:

Lose less. Avoid trying too hard. And keep the ball in play.

But let me take my own advice:

I have an email newsletter. I write an email about persuasion, marketing, copywriting, and occasionally business, every day. Keep the ball in play. In case you want to sign up, click here and fill out the form.

Why you’re not getting anything done

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“What do you want me to say?” I snapped.

My mom gave me a call yesterday. “What’s your plan for today?” she asked.

“I’m trying to work,” I said, “but I’m not being very productive.”

That was a mistake. Because it was really an invitation for my mom to ask me the worst possible question:

“Why do you think that is?”

I’ve written before about Tony Robbins. I’ve learned a lot from the guy. Perhaps the most valuable thing was the power of asking the right questions.

It really works.

By asking myself the right questions, I’ve made my way out of seemingly impossible situations, by doing less and by having more fun than I would ever have believed possible.

And vice versa.

By asking the wrong questions, I just agitate and muddle the mess I am already in. It starts to feel hopeless.

“Why do I think I’m not being productive? Let’s see… because I’m lazy? Because I’m frustrated with the project I’m working on? Because I feel the deadline looming… because I worry that I will miss it… and because I’m not strong enough to control my own brain, so this is turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy? What do you want me to say?”

Well. I didn’t say most of that stuff. But I was thinking it, while biting my lip. So I told my mom I would talk to her later, and I got back to staring at my half-complete, frustrating project, head in hands, wondering where it all went wrong.

Because asking WHY primes your brain to focus on failure and shortcomings. And while that might sound smart, it’s actually a bad way to spend your energy, and unlikely to do anything to move you forward. So don’t do it if you’re trying to be productive.

BUT!

Focusing on WHY is a great thing to get your prospect to do. Particularly if you have a new answer to that question.

As I’ve written before, a new answer to “WHY do I always fail” can allow you to “get one up” on jaded, hostile prospects who think they are too smart to fall for your marketing. And if you do it right, you can even become a star in your niche.

I won’t lay out the whole case for you here. That’s because I’ve written about this topic in detail already. You can find it as Commandment VII of my short book, The 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters. In case you’re interested:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments