Personal Change

Completing a marathon in 54 years

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You think it’s taking you too long to achieve your goals?

Well, let me tell you the unlikely story of marathon runner Shizo Kanakuri.

Kanakuri represented Japan in the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm.

Unfortunately, things were against him from the start.

The journey from Japan to Sweden took 18 days, and involved taking the exhausting Trans Siberian Railroad.

Upon arriving to the land of meatballs and pickled herring, Kanakuri found he also couldn’t handle the disgusting local food.

And to make things worse, on the day of the race, it was unbearably hot. Many of the runners tried to protect themselves by wrapping towels around their heads, to little effect.

Final outcome?

Kanakuri passed out halfway through the marathon.

And he was so ashamed of his failure to complete the race that he didn’t even notify the Olympic authorities. Instead, he left Sweden and made his way back to Japan.

Fast forward to 1967.

Kanakuri was 75 years old by then.

And the Swedish Olympic authorities, who had treated Kanakuri as a missing persons case across two world wars, finally tracked him down in Japan.

They invited him back to Sweden, so he could complete his half-done marathon.

Kanakuri accepted.

He went to Sweden, jogged across the finish line, and completed the marathon.

His time? A record 54 years, 6 days, 5 hours, 32 minutes and 20.3 seconds. Kanakuri said about his accomplishment:

“It was a long trip. Along the way, I got married, had six children and 10 grandchildren.”

So if your current goals are dragging, take comfort in knowing you probably still have a few decades on Shizo Kanakuri.

On the other hand, don’t use this tale as an invitation to dawdle and delay and drag your feet.

Like in Kanakuri’s case, it makes sense to accept helpful invitations, such as the one he got from the Swedish Olympic Committee. For example, if you are in the ecommerce business, and you’re looking for help in getting customers through advertorials, then here’s an invitation you might like:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorials/

The shiny object psychopath in the mirror

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I read an article once about a neuroscientist who discovered he was a psychopath.

He was conducting a study and examining a bunch of brain scans.

Some of normal people, some of known psychopaths.

Murderers…

Rapists…

Successful Internet marketers.

And then, I think by accident, he also looked at his own brain scan, which was there on his desk as part of another study.

The verdict was clear:

The parts of his brain responsible for empathy and morality showed “significantly decreased activity.” He was a clear-cut psychopath.

“Whaddya know?” he said, and went on with his life as usual. ​​

Well, I had an experience like that a few days ago.

I was doing research on a market that involved a lot of business opportunity seekers, AKA “shiny object junkies.”

These people tend to fly from opportunity to opportunity, never completing a project, always believing that the next course or seminar they buy will finally set them on the path to “financial freedom.”

And while I was reading the various stories and testimonials of these unfortunate souls…

I had an unfortunate realization myself.

I might be a shiny object guy.

Not in everything, of course. I’ve made it work with copywriting, and I’ve been successful in several other areas in my life.

But with business stuff… the promise of the 4-hour work week… the magical idea of passive income… well, there I keep flitting between different projects, getting enthusiastic about the next new idea, and abandoning what I already have.

Maybe that doesn’t sound familiar to you. Or maybe it does. The point is I (and maybe you) can’t keep doing this.

The fix is simple.

You pick a project, build an asset (like a website), and let it accrue value on its own. But you have to build it up to a certain point rather than simply jumping to the next shiny thing.

Awareness of the problem is a good first step.

For example, the neuroscientist psychopath didn’t actually go on with his life as usual. I made that up. In reality, he decided to make a conscious change:

“I’ve more consciously been doing things that are considered ‘the right thing to do,’ and thinking more about other people’s feelings. At the same time, I’m not doing this because I’m suddenly nice, I’m doing it because of pride — because I want to show to everyone and myself that I can pull it off.”

So if you’ve got shiny object addiction, it’s ok. You can choose to move past it consciously. If for no other reason than to prove everybody wrong.

Just don’t be yourself

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“If you want success in whatever industry you are in — obviously find ways to hack it — but by being truly authentic, you do not have to gravitate to the world. The world will gravitate to you.”
— Andrew Schulz

It seems everybody’s talking authenticity.

“Just be yourself. That’s how I got successful.”

Only one problem:

You don’t hear the failures talking about the value of being authentic.

“Yeah man, I’m such a dull, needy, badly dressed guy… and judgmental and sexually timid to boot… but my dating life has NEVER been better. Since I really started to be my authentic, value-sucking self, girls are blowing up my phone each night, asking me to come over and play Mario Kart.”

It just doesn’t happen.

I think the reason why is obvious:

Authenticity only works if you are attractive. Or if you can write winning sales letters. Or whatever the criterion of success is in your field. An authentic potato is still a potato.

But contrary to what you might think, my point is not to rag on authenticity and suggest you should hate yourself or deny your inner drives and instincts.

I just think this talk about authenticity brings up a much bigger and more interesting issue.

And that’s that there are certain questions without a simple, straightforward answer.

So the question of, “How do you get successful?” has a two-part, contradictory answer.

1) Sometimes you gotta trust your gut and be yourself (authenticity).

2) Other times, you need to go against your instincts and respond to external feedback (self-improvement).

​When should you do 1 and when should you do 2? Well, that’s where it gets tricky.
​
This two-sided, yin-yang, beans-and-rice duality explains (to my mind at least) why we haven’t been able to conclusively answer some seemingly simple questions, even though smart people have been racking their brains on them for thousands of years.

In politics. In personal relations. In simple topics such as happiness and how you should live your life.

But anyways, maybe I’m getting too philosophical. I just wanted to point out that people love simple answers, and if you accept that sometimes there are no simple answers, you can actually save yourself a lot of grief and maybe even make better progress than if you continue to dig a deeper hole.

And with that, I’m signing off. ​​

If you need help with advertorials, check out the following:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorials/

And if you need entertainment for the moment, I can recommend going on YouTube and checking out a few minutes of Andrew Schulz’s comedy. He’s very authentic and he’s very funny, if you can get past his jackass stage persona.

The dangers of gratitude rituals

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I just got an email notifying me that today is “World Gratitude Day.”

I’m not buying it.

I think “gratitude” is just another mental virus spread by the overlords who run the Internet.

“But studies! They show that the happiest people all practice some form of gratitude!”

Studies also show that the most swole guy at the gym spends a lot of time mirin himself in the mirror.

Does that mean that a spindly ectomorph should try to put on muscle by a daily “mirroring” ritual?

No.

Without the genetics, the workouts, the diet, and possibly the synthetic hormones, no amount of mirror gazing will turn a skinny guy into Franco Columbu.

What it can do is just make him feel worse about being frail and underdeveloped.

Same thing with gratitude.

You might think I’m exaggerating. I’m not.

​​I tried practicing gratitude some years ago, back when the idea spread like wildfire through all the positive psychology blogs.

A “gratitude ritual” didn’t make me any happier.

It did make me feel like a bit of a hypocrite (“Am I really grateful that I had food to eat today? That beef stew wasn’t very good”) and it also made me feel more anxious than usual (“What’s wrong with me? Why amn’t I more grateful?”).

Conclusion: I’m personally offended by gratitude.

But that doesn’t matter none.

Because “gratitude” is still a massive worldwide trend.

And that’s something all marketers should carefully track.

At least if you want to make money in riding that trend, or in recognizing when it might be coming to a close.

I think the gratitude train is slowly running out of steam.

But if that’s true, something else will come and replace it soon.

Watch out for that and it might make you some money.

In the meantime, if you want to celebrate “World Gratitude Day” by treating yourself to some insightful info on writing ecommerce advertorials, then check out the following:

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Rejection therapy for copywriters

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A couple of years ago, a friend of mine got rich in crypto.

He started with a small investment. And in the space of a couple of months, he turned it into a small fortune. Then, slowly and painfully, he lost most of it as the crypto tide turned.

These days, even though the moment has passed, he can’t let crypto go.

“It’s rewired my reward circuitry,” he says.

So he obsessively continues to listen to crypto podcasts. He keeps checking the news. And he hopes against hope that he will be able to regain that rush he got when he made his fast crypto money.

Reward circuitry.

It’s a messed up thing.

In my personal case, the issue is that I’ve spent much too much time in school. And in school, there’s really only one reward system. Either you get the right answer (pat on the head), or you don’t (disappointed look).

The thing is, that’s not how the world works. It’s certainly not how copywriting works. And yet, because my reward circuitry has been wired up during my decades of formal education, that’s how I think.

So for example, I am writing a new lead for a VSL right now. And I submitted my ideas so far to the copywriting coach I’m working with.

He came back with various bits of feedback. Insightful stuff. Completely fair. And likely to help me write a much better finished product.

But that’s not what my initial reaction was.

My initial reaction was, “Oh no. It wasn’t the right answer. I didn’t get a pat on the head.”

The only way out I can think of is to consciously fight against this, and to try to rewire my reward circuitry by hand.

It’s kind of like that rejection therapy that was popular a few years back. Each day, you try to get somebody to tell you no.

“No, I can’t give you a ride home right now.”

“No, you can’t sit in my lap.”

“No, I won’t pay for your burrito.”

When somebody tells you no, that’s when you win. You’ve just accomplished your goal for the day.

What I have in mind is similar. Except the goal is to find a new takeaway that will help you make your copy better.

“Pat on the head? Thanks, but what I could really use is a pointer on how to tighten up this headline.”

When you do this, you win the game for that day. And over time, maybe even your reward circuitry will adapt. At least that’s what I’m hoping.

Airbnb arbitrage

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Over the past few days, been reading a lot about “Airbnb arbitrage.” It works like this:

You lease a house or an apartment.

You then put it up on Airbnb, with the landlord’s blessing (you might have to try a few landlords before finding one who’ll agree to it).

You outsource all the Airbnb work like cleaning and handling communications…

You pay your lease…

And you keep the difference.

In a typical case, with a couple of hours of work a month and $2k of startup capital, you can create $1k-$2k cash flow each month (the Airbnb earnings are typically 2x-3x what the rent is).

And since it requires practically no work, you can rinse and repeat with a second property, and a third, and fourth. I’ve read case studies of people who have a dozen or more of such cash-cow properties, none of which they own.

I bring this up for two reasons.

First, you might find it interesting to investigate Airbnb arbitrage yourself. It seems like a genuine opportunity right now if you get the details right. But as with all arbitrage, it won’t be around forever.

Second, I find this Airbnb arbitrage kind of inspiring.

I’ve read stories of seasoned property investors who are saying, “I can’t believe how well this works.”

In their mind, there’s no comparison to the traditional route of taking out a mortgage for $300k, buying a house, finding long term tenants, all for a couple hundo a month.

With the Airbnb scheme, you get about 10x the cash flow, with 1/100th of the risk, and you can repeat as many times as you want.

Same thing if you’re a wannabe entrepreneur and your goal is to create “passive income.”

The standard route to this utopia is to create an online business.

And it’s definitely possible.

But it’s unlikely that you’d be collecting $5k a month within 2 months, which is what many of the Airbnb arbitrage people seem to accomplish.

And the point of all this, to me at least, is the power of a change in perspective.

The right change of perspective opens up incredible opportunities, and eliminates a lot of struggle and hard work.

Even if you’re not interested in starting your own Airbnb empire, I think this is something valuable to keep in mind.

Anyways, the reason I’ve been doing all this reading about Airbnb arbitrage is because I’m rewriting a lead for a VSL. ​The VSL sells a course, which lays out all the details about how to do this Airbnb stuff successfully.

I won’t try to sell you on the course itself.

I won’t even try to sell you on hiring me to write a VSL for you. But if you want some advertorial knowledge, which you could use to create traffic that leads to a VSL, then check out the following:

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Nobel-prize winner’s motivational discovery

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In 2016, a Japanese scientist named Yoshinori Ohsumi was given the Nobel Prize in medicine.

His discovery?

The biological processes underlying autophagy.

auto=self

phagy=eating

It’s literally how our own body consumes itself every day, in millions of little ways.

We do this self-eating for lots of different reasons.

When we’re in a state of starvation, autophagy kicks in to give us fuel for energy.

When we’ve had an infection, autophagy cleans up the bacterial or viral mess that’s been left behind.

It’s also a way of quality control, fixing some of the negative effects of aging, such as malformed proteins that could mess you up.

In other words, autophagy is a very important and necessary process. And it’s no surprse that if autophagy goes missing in your body, all kinds of problems can pop up, including Parkinson’s, diabetes, and cancer, too.

But why am I rattling on about autophagy in this newsletter that’s supposed to be about marketing and the business of copywriting?

Well, I heard someone say once that hunger — ie. autophagy — should be considered an essential nutrient for good health.

And I believe the same goes for good health in business and marketing.

And no, I’m not talking about “you gotta want it” kind of hunger.

I’m talking about actual starvation.

As in, being faced with the chance that you will run out of money, your business will be shut down, and you will have to go to your parents, hat in hand, asking for a loan to tide you over until things get better.

Of course, nobody wants to live like this all the time.

But unless you do experience a period like this every so often, you’re probably also not reaching the optimal level of business leanness, health, and success.

So if you are currently starving, take heart that it might be good for you in the long term.

And if you’ve been living the fat life for a while, it might be time to take some bigger risks and see how that improves your own internal cleanup processes.

But maybe I’m just saying all this to comfort myself.

Because right now, I’m taking on some big risks in the hope of big payoffs.

I’ll let you know how it goes, whether it leads to actual starvation or a new level of success.

In the meantime, if you want to see how to write some lean sales copy, especially about a health product, and especially to an audience that cares about the prestige of Nobel-prize-winning discoveries, then you might like the following:

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It takes two to tango with a bear

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After about 5 months of very slow reading, I recently managed to finish Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Honestly, I think this book will become a Bible of sorts for me.

It crystalizes so many vague ideas I’ve had and also gives me new and valuable perspectives.

Such as Kahneman’s concept of “the two selves.” Let me illustrate this with something else that’s meaningful to me, and that’s Werner Herzog’s movie Grizzly Man.

This is a documentary about a guy who traveled up to Alaska summer after summer.

He camped out in the wilderness, living in a tent, and recording hundreds of hours of video of himself, of the tall grasslands, of the beautiful rivers, and of the troupe of grizzly bears that hung out all around him.

The grizzlies and the video guy eventually developed a mutual respect for each other.

He got closer and closer to them, and more and more in touch with nature.

It was becoming quite transcendent. Until one lean summer night, when a hungry grizzly bear came into the guy’s tent and, during a horrific and terrifying few minutes, ripped him apart and ate him.

Shocking story.

And a good illustration of Kahneman’s two selves.

One self is the “experiencing self.”

It’s how we feel, moment by moment. The grizzly man’s experiencing self got many thousands of moments’ worth of peace, beauty, excitement, and self-discovery.

The other self is the remembering self.

​It’s how we evaluate or judge our experience in hindsight, or from a removed perspective.

​​The grizzly man’s remembering self, if it could put the pieces back together, would probably remember the one emotional high point of his Alaska summers — maybe the time he managed to get close to a mamma bear and her cubs — and the tragic end — the late-night bear mauling.

So why am I telling you this?

Well, I personally find I consult my remembering self too much, both when evaluating how I felt, and in making big decision about the future.

There’s no getting around the remembering self — it’s an essential part of all of us.

But it’s only one half of the tango.

The experiencing self should have something to say too.

And as I hope the grizzly man story above illustrates, the two selves can often come to very different conclusions.

Anyways, maybe this philosophical rambling will be useful to you in some way.

Now it’s back to the mundane world of direct response money-making. And if you have a business and you need some help with that, both your remembering and experiencing selves might appreciate the following experience:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorials/

The gruesome productivity secret of “The Star”

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There’s an intersection near my house called “The Star”. A fairly gruesome legend lies behind this sparkly name:

Some 500 years ago, a bunch of pro-socialist peasants decided to revolt against the ruling 1%.

This revolt was soon put down, as tends to happen with these things.

But even after the revolting rabble was scattered back to their villages, the cruel noblemen knew that it was only a matter of time before a new revolt broke out.

So they decided to set an example.

They dragged the shackled, bloodied, and beaten leader of the peasant revolt through the city, to a crossing of four roads.

On each road, there were four snorting stallions.

After putting a red-hot iron crown on the rebel’s head and pinching him with red-hot iron pincers, the noblemen had him tied to the horses.

Each arm and each leg got its own horse.

And then the horses were whipped, until they pulled and strained and ripped the peasant revolt leader in four separate directions.

Hence — The Star.

And you know, metaphorically, I feel a little like that peasant revolt leader these days.

Because I’m being pulled in a bunch of different directions by responsibilities and goals I’ve set for myself:

Completing client work… trying to whip up a social life out of thin air… fulfilling my daily quota of downward dogs and happy child poses… chasing girls… expanding my copywriting business by taking on expensive coaching… writing a couple sets of daily emails… coming up with ideas for lectures I could give at a local school… courting potential new clients… planning an occasional trip to keep myself sane.

I’m not complaining, by the way. I choose to do this to myself. My reasoning is this:

The more work I take on, the more I get accomplished.

Yes, I often don’t get everything done.

And with more responsibilities, the the not-done part increases too.

But by my math, 75% of 200 is bigger than 95% of 100.

Perhaps, if you too are struggling to be fully productive, then this counter-intuitive math can help you in some way.

And if you want advance notice of a copywriting project that’s contributing to my drawing and quartering right now, the consider looking down this path:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorials/

The power of negative thinking

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“Just go talk to her!”

I was walking on the street a few days ago. The sun was shining, there was a cool breeze, and lots of good-looking women were out and about.

Each time one of these monsters passed by, wrapped up in her headphones, masked with her sunglasses, I would tell myself to go talk to her.

Of course, all that happened is that I tensed up.

These women on parade were too intimidating.

​​Or too busy.

​​Or too something.

In the past, I’d tried hyping myself up.

“What’s the big deal?” I would say. “She’d probably be super happy to get a compliment. And maybe you will hit it off. It could be a win-win!”

That would always get me excited. And that was all.

Because more good-looking women would pass by…

And I still wouldn’t go talk to any of them.

So a few days ago, I did the opposite. I told myself the ugly truth:

“Why not just go home? You probably won’t talk to any of these women. It’s too hard. Or maybe you’re just too weak. Or not good enough at problem solving. Whatever the reason, odds are you’re wasting your time. You should probably just head home.”

If you’ve ever read Jim Camp’s Start With No, you might recognize this as a “negative stripline.”

That’s when you’re in a negotiation, and your adversary is having doubts, concerns, or vague bad feelings.

At this point, according to Camp, the worst thing you can do is to paint a sunny and bright picture.

Instead, you want to be honest. Brutally honest.

“You’re probably right,” Camp would say to such an adversary. “This probably won’t work out. It’s probably best if we just cut off this negotiation right now and stop wasting your time.”

What happens when you do this?

Well, all I can say is what happened to me. I finally got to talking to some beautiful, intimidating women. Because the negative stripline works even when your negotiating adversary is yourself.

So if you’re not seeing real results from the power of positive thinking, whether in social situations, or in business…

Then try negative thinking.

And whatever you do, don’t let me know how it works out for you.