Personal Change

Last call for Get A Raise

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This is the last email I will send to promote Shaina Keren’s course Get A Raise. The promise behind this course is straightforward and is right there in the title.

The background, in case you missed it, is that Shaina is a highly paid career coach and consultant.

She has helped lots of clients get major raises for the work they were already doing, from $15k on the low end all the way up to $250k on the high end.

Now here’s an unrelated fact:

When the 1,037-page book Gone With The Wind was published, some ankle-biter wrote, “Well, people may not like it very much but nobody can deny that it gives a lot of reading for your money.”

Shaina’s course doesn’t give you a lot of reading for your money.

It’s short — you can go through it in an under an hour.

It’s also stress-minimal. It’s easy to put into action, without causing you sweaty, sleepless nights as you anticipate the salary conversation you’re supposed to have with your boss. None of that. Just put together a doc, the way Shaina advises, and deliver it to your boss along with a 55-word script, which Shaina gives you.

How much can this be worth to you? I can’t say for sure. But as I’ve been saying all week, I believe Shaina’s course offerst the surest and biggest ROI of any course have bought, sold, or even seen.

And if you act by 12 midnight PST tonight, you can get $50 off the usual price, so you can get still more value for your money. If you’d like to do so:

1. Head on over to ​https://bejakovic.com/raise​ and get Shaina’s course. There’s no sales page for this baby, just an order form with a few testimonials (eg, “I still can’t believe I get to keep the job I love and feel well compensated.”)

2. Put in the code BEJAKOVIC50 at checkout. Make sure the price drops from $197 to $147 before you buy.

3. Go through the 1 hour or so of training, then apply it in the next few days or weeks, and profit, hopefully to the tune of tens of thousands of new dollars in salary.

The case against Get A Raise

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This week, I’m promoting Shaina Keren’s course Get A Raise. It’s only relevant to you if you’re actually working a 9-5 job and are getting paid a salary.

If you’re a business owner, a freelancer, or are simply retired and living on Tim Ferris’s palm-tree-and-hammock island and are reading this only because you’re bored out of your mind from not working, then clearly this course is not for you.

Still with me?

Good. I will assume you are working a 9-5.

In that case, as I’ve been saying all week, Shaina’s Get A Raise is the clearest and surest ROI of any course I have sold, bought, or even seen.

Shaina has gotten people salary increases from $60k to $250k, and pretty much everybody — or literally everybody — Shaina has coached on this has gotten a significant raise.

I got on a call with Shaina before agreeing to promote her course. I asked her how she got such consistent and large salary increases for her clients.

And… the dark secret came out. Shaina explained:

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I would vet people, and if I thought you could get a raise, and where your desk is positioned, what the dynamics are in the workforce, I was very confident. I don’t think I ever worked with anyone who didn’t get it. I turned a lot of people away and I said, “You don’t deserve a raise, or where you’re working you do deserve it, but you’re simply not gonna get it.”

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Aha. So it’s a case of selection bias. I followed up to ask more specifically about the kinds of people she turned away. She explained:

– any government job — there are rules and they would rather fire you than break them

– medical industry or similar, with non-negotiable pay grades

– if you work for a very small business, which simply doesn’t have the budget

So if you have a job where your salary is literally non-negotiable — because you work in a highly regulated industry or field — or if there’s not enough money in the entire business to pay you what you deserve, then this course cannot help you, and you shouldn’t buy it.

Otherwise, buy this course. Apply it. And write me to tell me about the many thousands of extra dollars you are getting paid as a result.

Except, hold on.

If you are a careful reader, you might have spotted that Shaina also said she turned away people who did not deserve a raise. In other words, Shaina turned away people who were doing work that job simply wasn’t worth paying more for, even if there was money and opportunity in the business to do so.

If that’s you, you should still buy this course. Apply it. And write me to tell me about the many thousands of extra dollars you are getting paid as a result.

The only difference is, you won’t be able to apply this course by the end of this week.

If you don’t deserve a raise today, it will take up to six months for you to put together a list of convincing reasons — like Shaina teaches in the course — that you can then show off to your boss, and that you can use to legitimately ask for a raise, typically worth tens of thousands of dollars.

I won’t push much more. Again, I think this course is a complete no-brainer if you work a 9-5, when you compare what you can get out of it to what you have to put in.

Shaina’s coaching, the one that got people salary increases of $60k to $250k, cost $1,500, and it was a steal at that price.

Shaina had enough of doing those coaching calls, and she created the Get A Raise course with the same templates, scripts, and process she used in the coaching.

Get A Raise normally sells for $197. But because you’re a reader of this newsletter, you can get it for $50 off before tomorrow, so it’s just $147. At that price, it’s likely to be 1/100th of what you can stand to make with this info in the next year.

Plus, the course is quick to go through (less than an hour), and painless to apply, at least if you deserve a raise.

(If you don’t yet deserve a raise, again, it will take some work to start deserving a raise. I won’t sugarcoat it. But time is passing anyhow.)

In any case, the deadline for this offer is tomorrow, Thursday, June 26, at 12 midnight PST. If wanna take advantage of the current discount, here’s what to do:

1. Head on over to ​https://bejakovic.com/raise​. There’s no sales page for this baby, just an order form with a few testimonials (eg, “I still can’t believe I get to keep the job I love and feel well compensated.”)

2. Put in the code BEJAKOVIC50 at checkout. Make sure the price drops from $197 to $147 before you buy.

If you got questions or doubts, write me and I will address them either in private or, if appropriate, under the bright lights of this newsletter.

But as I wrote yesterday, I’ve never sold, bought, or even seen a course that offers such clear and direct ROI.

If you’re working a 9-5 job, and if you believe you’re not worth firing, then you are likely being underpaid, and Shaina’s course can help fix that.

Announcing: Get A Raise

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This week, I’m promoting Shaina Keren’s course Get A Raise.

Shaina is a career coach and counselor.

She has offered coaching previously to a small and select group of clients, on how to get a raise at their existing job. Results included salary raises of tens of thousands of dollars up to an extra $100k a year, for jobs ranging from non-profit work to sales.

I imagine there are not a lot of of non-profit people on my list. But I do know a good number of my customers work as in-house copywriters or have other 9-5 jobs.

If that’s you, and you wanna get paid more for the work you’re already doing, then here’s the deal:

1. Shaina’s course gives you the step-by-step, in under an hour. I’ve gone through the course myself, and basically, it tells you how to prepare your case and how to present it to your boss. It gives you templates and scripts for what exactly to say.

Like I wrote yesterday, this process is stress-minimal – it completely eliminates any tense haggling, fumbled presentations, or emotional staredowns.

Instead, you take a bit of time to prepare your case using Shaina’s proven approach, and you then deliver it to your boss along with a little 55-word script that you deliver AS-IS (don’t improvise).

2. Shaina’s coaching, where she walked people through this same process by hand, cost $1,500. It was a no-brainer for the people she worked with because, like I said, the results were salary increases in the tens of thousands of dollars or more.

Shaina’s Get A Raise course has the same information without the hand-holding. The course normally sells for $197, a fraction of what the coaching sells for.

Plus, as a special deal for you and you alone, because you happen to be a reader of this newsletter, you can now get an extra $50 off the regular price.

That means the current deal on Get A Raise makes the course just $147, 1/10th of Shaina’s coaching, which itself was 1/10th (or even less) of the salary increases that people who apply this process typically get.

This offer is good until this Thursday, June 26, at 12 midnight PST. If you wanna get it:

1. Head on over to ​https://bejakovic.com/raise​. There’s no sales page for this baby, just an order form with a few testimonials (eg, “I still can’t believe I get to keep the job I love and feel well compensated.”)

2. Put in the code BEJAKOVIC50 at checkout. Make sure the price drops from $197 to $147 before you buy.

If you got questions or doubts, write me and I will address them either in private or, if appropriate, under the bright lights of this newsletter.

But as I wrote yesterday, I’ve never sold, bought, or even seen a course that offers such clear and direct ROI.

If you’re working a 9-5 job, and if you believe you’re not worth firing, then you are likely being underpaid, and Shaina’s course can help fix that.

If you work at a 9-5

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Last month, I asked my readers if have they have amazing courses that they would love to have me promote to my audience.

Several people replied. But for various reasons, there was no course I was enthusiastic about promoting. All except one.

The background:

Career coach Shaina Keren, among her other services, helps people who have 9-5 jobs get paid more for the work they are already doing.

Shaina does this in one-on-one coaching sessions that cost $1,500.

It’s an easy sell for her, because pretty much anybody she chooses to work with gets a salary raise of multiple tens of thousands of dollars a year.

Eventually, Shaina put together the process inside her coaching sessions into a course, with the tantalizing title, “Get A Raise.” She proposed that I promote this course to my list.

Now, I happen to know that some of my best customers work as in-house copywriters, basically doing 9-5 (or more) office jobs.

Other of my readers are working 9-5 in other positions, and have no plans to exchange that life for the glamorous insecurity and grind of the self-employed.

In other words, I realized there’s a fair section of my audience who could benefit from what Shaina’s got.

After Shaina reached out to me with the idea I promote her course, I of course went through her course.

No, I wasn’t looking for a raise. I just wanted to know what Shaina’s process is to get these results for her clients, and if it’s something I could do a good job promoting to you.

I can tell you this:

Shaina’s process is simple. You can go through the course in less than an hour and know exactly what to do.

Shaina’s process is also stress-minimal.

I imagine, having worked once upon a time at a 9-5, that most people in that position don’t relish the idea of salary negotiation.

Well, Shaina’s system is as stress-free as I can imagine it being. All that’s involved is typically a 5-minute meeting, with minimal talking involved, and in fact, all the talking that’s required is a scripted 55 words.

And final point:

Shaina’s course costs significantly less than the $1,500 she charges to take people through the same process in her consulting calls.

And yet, even though I live and swim in the direct marketing world, where courses and info supposedly come with a clear and incontestable ROI, I have never sold, bought, or even seen info that has as clear or as incontestable an ROI as Shaina’s “Get A Raise” course.

All that’s to say, it was an easy decision to say yes to promoting Shaina’s course.

I will be promoting it starting tomorrow, with a special deal, available just during this promo, and just because you’re reading this newsletter. But more about all that in my next email.

Pain diary

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My brain no workie so good today. Like Ben Franklin wrote, “Late to bed, late to rise, makes for dull thoughts and for sleepy eyes.”

When I have to write an email on days like today, I go to my default and ask myself, “What interesting thing did I learn lately?” Here’s one I read in an article a few days ago:

“Patients in clinical trials are sometimes asked to keep a pain diary, and it turns out that the keeping of the diary itself can diminish the intensity of pain and improve one’s mood.”

A pain diary, btw, is just what it sounds like — a daily entry of where it hurts, of how bad it hurts, of how you feel as a result of it, etc. Back in 2018, scientists at McGill University used this as a treatment for 72 patients with chronic pain. And like the article above says, just writing about the pain reduced the pain and made life better.

This was interesting to me, for one, because it seems to go against the prevailing wisdom, about the importance of gratitude journals, focusing on the good etc.

For two, this was interesting to me because I have lately noted the strange effect I feel from writing down random thoughts that come into my head. Not necessarily painful thoughts, on the one hand, or pleasant thoughts, on the other. Just thoughts.

Somehow, writing a thought down allows it to go away instead of continuing to cling to my brain or taking up valuable neural real estate.

Often, after writing down what seemed to be an irrelevant or inconsequential thought, I find myself in a better mood, looking around the world and noticing things I had never noticed before, or having new, surprising, more fun ideas pop up.

So maybe there’s not such a conflict between pain diaries and gratitude journals.

Maybe what you write about is less important than that you just write, and get thoughts down and out of your head, so other, better thoughts can pop up, or so your brain can simply be free to enjoy the day instead of holding on to what it’s got.

That’s another argument to write daily emails. Like a pain diary, daily emails can be therapeutic, but unlike a pain diary, daily emails have other benefits too — connections formed, assets built up, money made.

If you want to start writing daily emails, I told you above one thing you can always write about — something interesting you’ve learned lately.

But maybe you want something a little more specific, a little different, a little more exciting to write about from day to day. In that case, I’ve got just the thing to help you:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

The inspiration for my concluded “Buy 5 paperbacks” promo

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This morning at 9am Central Europe Time, I concluded my Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle promo, which has been running since Monday.

As a result of this promo, I sold a couple hundred paperback copies of my original 10 Commandments book. I had multiple people who bought tell me they will use the books as giveaways to their own lists. I got a big jump in Amazon rankings.

Altogether, I call it a success.

I did this promo as a bit of an experiment. I wanted to see if it would work for me. I’m happy with how it went, so I will repeat it, some time down the line, with new bonuses, for my new 10 Commandments book.

Over the past few days, a few people wrote me to say this was an original and interesting promo and offer. And one reader wrote in to ask, “Are you doing a version of Daniel Throssell’s book launch?”

No, Daniel was not the inspiration for this promo. For one thing, it was hardly a book launch — my original 10 Commandments book has been out for 5+ years. More importantly, I don’t even know what Daniel’s book launch strategy is.

That said, my book promo/offer was not original. I copied it exactly from what I saw another marketer doing.

I knew odds were excellent it would to work for me also, because I saw it worked very well for this other marketer.

In fact, this other marketer got me to buy five paperback copies of his book, which are still sitting in their Amazon box, collecting dust, on a shelf right across from the couch where I’m writing this email right now.

I bought those five copies in exchange for a bonus that the marketer was offering, which got me intrigued and which I wanted to get.

And that’s my meta-lesson for you today:

Lots of people are out there sharing marketing how-tos and tutorials and ideas, including in free newsletters like this one.

Maybe all those tutorials and ideas are proven advice. Or maybe they’re not.

But there is a whole other class of marketing and money-making education, which is 100% proven, and which you’ve already paid for, so you might as well get use out of it.

I’m talking about all the offers — books, courses, back scratchers — that got you to buy, and the process by which some marketer or business owner got you to buy them.

Keep a track of those offers and those sales processes. And ask yourself, what did it? Get to the core. Then apply it to what you do. Odds are excellent it will work for you as well.

In case you’re curious, I can tell you that the marketer I imitated for my Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle was Travis Sago.

Some time last year, Travis made people an offer to buy five paperback copies of his book Make ‘Em Beg To Buy From You on Amazon. In return, he would give you a bonus called Shogun Traffic Method, about a source of traffic that converts for any niche or offer, starting at $50 or less.

I had a pretty good idea already of what the Shogun Traffic Method was. But I’ve learned a ton from Travis before, and I decided it was a worthwhile investment. Plus, he piled bonuses on top of his bonuses — including some that were even more intriguing than the core Shogun Traffic Method itself.

As far as I know, Travis ran this promo only within his Royalty Ronin community.

It’s another good reason to be inside Royalty Ronin. Not only is this a community of 500+ Internet marketers who are doing creative deals, often starting from nothing… not only do you get Travis’s ongoing education and inspiration and advice in the community… not only is there a library of Travis’s expensive courses and bonuses (including the Shogun Traffic Method)… but you get to see Travis running creative new promos himself.

The bad news is, that means Travis might get you yet again, so you pay him for something on top of the already expensive $299 that Royalty Ronin costs each month.

The good news is, if you do find yourself paying Travis for something new, you’ve likely just learned a valuable new way to sell (most of Travis’s promos are creative and new in some form or another). You now have a new strategy you can profit from, if you only apply it to what you do.

That’s likely to pay for that new offer you just bought, and maybe even for a few months of Royalty Ronin itself.

If you want to find out more about Royalty Ronin, or maybe give it a try yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

How to push-pull prospects on your list

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A few days ago, long-time reader and personal development coach Miro Skender sent me a message with a highlighted passage from my new 10 Commandments book which says:

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Expose human beings to anything constant — even incontestably good things like compliments, security, or money — and people soon stop responding. Like Macknick and Martinez-Conde say, we need contrast to see, hear, feel, think, and pay attention. Otherwise the world becomes literally invisible.

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Miro then said how he knows this fact of human psychology well. He knows how to apply it in his work with coaching clients. But he doesn’t know how to put it to use with prospects on his list. Do I have any ideas?

It’s a good question.

Prospects get bored and leave if you expose them to a constant stream of the same — even if it’s good, valuable, well-written same. But not only that. You make fewer sales with the prospects who stay, because your emails are simply less persuasive than they could be.

I thought of how best to answer Miro’s question in an email. Should I give an example from my own previous emails? Or from a sales letter written by an A-list copywriter? Or would a metaphor be needed to really get the point across?

There are benefits to doing each, I thought. So why choose among them and risk doing a sub-optimal job?

I soon realized that answering Miro’s question properly would involve a ton of work, way too much for a daily email.

Fortunately, I remembered I had done it all already, and more, inside my now-retired Most Valuable Postcard #2, code name “Ferrari Monster.”

The background on the Most Valuable Postcard is that it was a short-lived, paid, monthly newsletter I ran back in the summer of 2022.

It was short-lived because I found it was way too much work and stress to write up something as in-depth and researched as I wanted to make each of these monthly guides to be.

I pulled the plug on Most Valuable Postcard after the second issue, but not before I got glowing reviews from a group of initial subscribers that I let in.

For example, email marketer Daniel Throssell, who was one of those early subscribers, wrote me to say after the first issue:

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Seriously though, dude, I know it’s issue #1 but this program you’ve created is amazing. You’ve honestly made me pause and reconsider some ideas about how I want to do my own newsletter because this is just so excellently executed. I love pretty much everything about how you’ve done this, from the format to the content to the value you deliver in your insights. Really impressed.

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I don’t make back issues of Most Valuable Postcard available regularly. Most Valuable Postcard #2 wasn’t available yesterday. It won’t be available tomorrow. But it is available today.

If you’d like to find out more about what’s inside, and how you can use it to push-pull the prospects on your list:

https://bejakovic.com/mvp2/

Conditioning vs. shaping

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Robin Timmers, “the largest copywriter in the Netherlands,” writes in to say:

“I do wanna say I really enjoyed your new book, while reading it on holiday. (Left you a review on Amazon.)”

… and sure enuff, Robin’s review is now showing up on the Amazon page for my new 10 Commandments book (“Great lil’ book with lots of funny, weird and most of all valuable principles of persuasion”).

Robin’s is the 10th 5-star review my new book has gotten in the couple of weeks since being published. It’s important to me to mark and celebrate the occasion.

But what about you? I make a habit of including some tidbit in each email which is either fun or valuable, whether you choose to buy or not.

So let me tell you something interesting but entirely unrelated, which might be valuable to you.

I’m reading a book about neuroplasticity called The Brain That Changes Itself. One story in that book is of a scientist named Edward Taub, who experimented on monkeys to simulate the effects of stroke.

The long and short of it is, Taub worked to get monkeys that were effectively paralyzed in say, their left arm, to regain use of that arm.

Taub tried giving the monkeys rewards for performing regular monkey actions with their left arm, such as reaching for food. Behaviorists call this approach conditioning. Conditioning didn’t work. Paralyzed monkeys stayed paralyzed.

But then Taub started a different approach known as shaping, which involved rewarding the monkeys for even very small steps along the way to the big movement. (I’m guessing here, but imagine rewarding the monkey for just wiggling his left pinky finger at first.)

The effect of shaping was the monkeys eventually regained full function of their previously paralyzed arms.

On the one hand, this is kind of Obvious Adams — of course you want to break up a big task into component pieces and master the component pieces one by one.

On the other hand, people have been having strokes for thousands of years, and many have been paralyzed for life as a result.

Taub translated this monkey shaping research into a simple and structured program for humans, which relies on no fancy modern equipment, that has allowed stroke victims to regain use of paralyzed limbs, often years after their stroke.

Obvious yes, but somehow nobody else thought to follow this basic idea to this powerful conclusion, for thousands of years, until a few decades ago.

This distinction of conditioning vs shaping is something to keep in mind whether you’re in the business of teaching people stuff, or encouraging behavior (eg. buying and consumption), or simply trying to manage the primate known as yourself better, so you can get yourself to accomplish stuff you cannot accomplish now.

Break up the big action into tiny component pieces, often so tiny as to seem useless or irrelevant to task at hand. Master each of those tiny components. Reward yourself for doing so.

And that, in a way, does tie into the top of my email, about celebrating my 10th testimonial. And now, if you haven’t yet read my “funny, weird, and most of all valuable” new book, you can find it here:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

“I’m not the kind of person who” vs. “I hate this”

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It’s 11:07am as I write this.

I’ve just come back from the gym down the road form the Airbnb in which I’m staying.

I’ve gone to the gym today even though I’m traveling — I packed my gym clothes and found a local place to go.

I’ve been going to the gym regularly, 3-4 times a week, sometimes more, for the past 15 years, without break or faltering. It’s become one of the most important things I do for my health and sanity and of course my striking good looks.

And yet, for the first few decades of my life, I knew for a fact that I’m not a gym person, that I only like “real” physical activity such as playing tennis or going for a swim, rather than a contrived workout like deadlifts and squats.

“Gym? Pff. Thank you. That’s not me.”

A long time ago, I read a book called Stumbling On Happiness by a Harvard psychologist named Daniel Gilbert. I don’t remember a lot from the book except the central thread of it.

We are terrible at remembering the past, says Gilbert. As an example, ask people who they voted for the in the last election, and a lot of people will actually, honestly claim that they voted for the winning party, even if they didn’t.

It’s not that these people are lying. Like George Costanza, they fully believe what they’re saying.

You might think it’s just some particularly weak-willed people who fool themselves and others like this. But this is something we all do all every day, to some degree, and are never aware of.

But wait, there’s more.

As bad as we are at remembering the past, says Gilbert, we are even worse at imagining the future.

Ask people how they will feel and what they will do if, say, they win the lottery or if their now-happy marriage ends in bitter divorce, and people will tell you lots of stuff, again honestly. Trouble is, it’s wrong, spectacularly wrong, and it has nothing to do with how they will actually feel or what they will do. And yet, this is how we live our lives all the time.

But back to the gym and to the idea of “I’m not the kind of person who…”

Says Gilbert, if you want to find out what something is like, say raising a child, then don’t ask people who have raised a kid 10 or 20 years ago. They will remember wrong, and they will effectively tell you lies, even though they don’t mean to.

Also, don’t ask people who haven’t raised a kid but who are either looking forward to it or dreading it — their predictions mean nothing.

The only kind of person you can ask if you want to get an honest sense of what raising a kid is like is somebody who is doing it right now. Somebody who is not hallucinating about the future, or making up a fairy tale about the past.

And that, I would like to suggest to you, is something that holds even if the person you are asking for advice and opinions is yourself.

Over and over I’ve asked myself, “Will I like this? Can I do this? Am I the kind of person who can be successful here?”

Over and over I’ve told myself, no no no.

Over and over I’ve tried doing the thing nonetheless.

Sometimes it really turned out I wasn’t successful even after putting in a good try. More importantly, sometimes it really turned out I hated the thing, and how it made me feel.

Other times, though, it was just like the gym. The thing became an important part of my life, a part of my identity, something I stuck with for years or even decades, even though I previously knew for a fact it would never be for me.

In the end, I’ve summed it up for myself by saying, “I’m not the kind of person who ever tells himself, ‘I’m not the kind of person who…'” The only way to know how you look and feel with a mohawk is to shave your head and walk around town like that for a few weeks.

And now let me remind you of my new 10 Commandments book, about con men and door-to-door salesemen and pickup artists.

This entire email has been grooming you in a way, in case the mention of those disciplines makes the hackles on the back of your neck stand up.

I’m not suggesting — it would be foolish to do so — that you go against your own deeply held moral values.

But if a part of you says, “I’m not the kind of person who can sell, seduce, confidently and smoothly persuade,” well, you might surprise yourself.

And if you want some tips and pointers on how to do sell, seduce, and persuade, as well as some psychology to help you make the identity leap easier, then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Pay close attention

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Several years ago, I saw a grainy but mindblowing video from the 1970s:

A tennis coach took an out of shape 45-year-old woman and had her go from never having held a racket at minute 0, to playing serviceable tennis at minute 45, running around, getting forehands over the net and into the court, even serving.

If you’ve ever played tennis — as I have, for years, before I gave up the sport in frustration — you know this is almost miraculous. It takes months to learn what this woman was doing with such ease, particularly at her age.

The coach in that video was Tim Gallwey, who wrote a book called The Inner Game of Tennis. The book is well-worth a read even if, like me, you are naturally averse to ideas like “inner game” and “mindset.”

Gallwey’s technique for teaching tennis involved getting the student to pay close attention — to the sound of the ball as it hits the racquet, or to the rotation of the seams as the ball travels through the air, or to the exact spot that the ball crosses the net.

And that was it. Just pay attention, to one thing, closely.

Magically, inner-gamingly, this was somehow enough to get people like that 45-year-old woman to learn to play tennis in a single sessions of not trying very hard.

I found this very interesting at the time. It has stuck with me ever since. But as often happens, I never really dug much deeper.

And then, a couple days ago, I was reading a 2007 book about the discovery of neuroplasticity, titled The Brain That Changes Itself. From that book:

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Finally, Merzenich [the scientist who conclusively proved neuroplasticity exists] discovered that paying close attention is essential to long-term plastic change. In numerous experiments he found that lasting changes occurred only when his monkeys paid close attention. When the animals performed tasks without paying attention, they changed their brain maps, but the changes did not last.

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Why do kids pick up skills and languages and social norms so easily and thoroughly, without seeming effort?

A part of the brain, known as nucleus basalis, is turned on in kids’ brains. All the time. The nucleus basalis makes it so kids pay attention to everything.

Eventually, the nucleus basalis gets turned off, or at least stops being on all the time, or even most of the time. Attention becomes more of a thing you have to do consciously, like Gallwey instructed his tennis students to do. But the results seem well worth it.

So if you want to master a skill, internalize a new belief, or learn Korean, pay attention — to something, anything. Don’t just go through the motions. Don’t do it automatically. Don’t just rote repeat. The results — so say neuroscientists and real life practitioners like Gallwey — will be rapid and almost magical acquisition of new skill and knowledge.

On the flip side:

If a stranger tells you to pay close attention — not me, but a stranger, particularly one in a tuxedo, with slicked back hair, and speaking in a heavy Italian accent — then beware.

You’re likely about to get fooled, and badly.

The topic of attention makes up a large part of my new 10 Commandments book. The fact is, nothing gets done in the world of influence, persuasion, comedy, magic, or hypnosis, without attention.

The difference is that influence professionals — the magicians, door to door salesmen, hypnotists — guide the attention of their audience or prospect or patient to achieve a specific outcome. Sometimes that’s aligned with what the audience or patient or prospect wants. Sometimes it’s not.

If this is a topic that interests you, click through to the following page, and pay close attention to the description of Commandment VII:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments