Personal Change

The uncertain result of my Newsletter XP promo

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Yesterday, ex-Agora copywriter Thom Benny, who I met up with in Barcelona last month, texted me and asked,

“How is the Newsletter XP promo doing?”

I threw up my arms at this. “How am I supposed to know? There’s a deep fog around the Bejako household, and I can’t see past my own nose.”

The Beehiiv people don’t normally do affiliate deals for this course. I had to ask them over and over to let me promote it.

When they finally agreed, it was a bit of a technical kludge to make it happen. So there’s no affiliate portal. There’s no direct way for me to know how many sales I’ve made.

I saw a buncha clicks. Two people wrote me to say they bought. I wrote my contact at Beehiiv now to ask what the final result was.

But if I had to bet, I would bet I made 3x-4x the money for writing these 7 emails than I ever made for any equivalent campaign I wrote back in my freelance copywriting days.

So let me repeat the core idea I was selling during this whole promo, even though I won’t get paid anything for it now. It’s this:

Start a newsletter. Or start growing a list. Or find another little asset that you can invest into regularly.

It might bear no fruit today. But keep watering it. And you will be pleased and surprised one day soon.

This concludes the first of three affiliate promotions I promised to do over the next few weeks.

The next affiliate promo I will do involves a writing course for business owners who want to build an audience on social media.

I’m going through this course myself right now. And I find myself repeatedly surprised by how well-done and insightful it is.

To make this offer even sweeter, I will add in my own free bonus. It will be equal in price to the actual course I am promoting.

This bonus is a rare training I once put on, after years of research. Several people told me this training has influenced their own writing a lot. But more about all that soon.

Collapse the time

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Later today, I will host the first call of my Write & Profit coaching group.

I launched that on the back of the “How I do it” live presentation did a couple weeks ago.

I had the idea for that presentation in the middle of January, and I tacked on the group coaching offer simply because I have a policy to put an offer at the end of everything I do.

I’ve been thinking about a change I’ve made recently to how I work.

I simply started starting things faster.

I don’t put as many ideas in a todo list. I don’t ponder as much. I don’t prepare. My default has become, just do it now.

Lots of things have been happening for me over the past couple months. I believe this change in behavior is a big reason why.

Yesterday, I got an email from direct marketing coach Dan Kennedy, who expressed the same idea. Dan wrote:

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I taught myself the habit of collapsing the time between each idea and acting on it. This has created a lot of messes and a few catastrophes but also made possible a lot more successes than occur at a normal pace.

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So that’s my bit of advice for today. Collapse the time. Messes will happen. Maybe catastrophes, too. But overall, you will still come out way ahead of where you would have been otherwise.

Time to go.

I still have things to prepare for tonight’s coaching call. Meanwhile, since I have a policy to make an offer at the end of everything I do, consider my Simple Money Emails course. It can help you collapse the time between wishin’ and hopin’ to write daily emails and actually writing them regularly.

For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

How to fix bad habits

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Yesterday, I was ellipting on the elliptical and to make the process less maddening, I listened to a podcast, which turned out to be surprisingly valuable.

It was a health podcast. The guest was a psychotherapist, a certain Dr. Glenn Livingston, PhD.

That name was familiar to me.

Turns out it was the same Dr. Glenn Livingston, PhD, who was also a successful direct marketer a while back.

​​I checked for his name in my inbox just now. He has at different times partnered with or been named-dropped by direct marketing rhinos and mammoths like Terry Dean, Ryan Levesque, Ken McCarthy, and Perry Marshall.

But back to the podcast. Like I said, it was a health podcast, about how to quit overeating.

Turns out Dr. Glenn is an expert on the matter.

Not only has he battled overeating his whole life, but he has written a bunch of books on the topic. The best selling one, Never Binge Again, has 19,224 reviews on Amazon.

Perhaps you’re wondering whether this email will ever get to a point. The point is this:

For years, Dr. Glenn used his psychotherapeutic training to try to quit overeating.

Never worked.

After years of therapy, introspection, and digging into his family history, Dr. Glenn finally unearthed the surprising root cause of why he was overeating his whole life (mommy issues).

And it still didn’t fix a damn thing. If anything, it made his overeating worse, because he now had a legit excuse, where he didn’t have one before.

And yet, Dr. Glenn did manage to get his eating under control.

​​I’ll tell you how:

He isolated, named, and in fact shamed the part of his mind that was craving and reaching for chocolate, for chocolate was his weakness.

Dr. Glenn told himself, “That is my Inner Pig talking. The Inner Pig wants its slop. But I am not one to be ruled by farm animals.”

The effect wasn’t immediate — few things outside direct marketing promises are. But the effect was there, and after a bit of time, this inner-piggization cured Dr. Glenn Livingston, PhD, of his overeating habit, making him a healthier, happier, better person.

The bigger point, as Dr. Glenn says on the podcast, is that identity is stronger than will power.

You can use this truth if you’re trying to influence and persuade others.

Or you can use it to fix your own bad habits.

I’ve just told you the main highlight of this surprisingly valuable podcast with Dr. Glenn Livingston. But there are more good things inside that podcast. And there’s more development of that core idea, that identity is stronger than will power, in a way that might help it actually sink into your head.

If you want to influence and persuade others better… or if you want to improve your own life and control your mind better, this podcast is worth a listen. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/bad-habits

If you want to learn to pray, raise your prices

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I live in Barcelona, have been for almost two years now. In order to find out a little about this city, I picked up a book, called Barcelona. It talks about the history and the architecture of the place.

Since Barcelona is on the sea, the culture has been influenced big time by sea and sailing.

​​One of the oldest churches in the city is Santa Maria del Mar.

​​The patron saint of Barcelona is St. Eulalia, also the patron saint of sailors.

​​And according to the book I’m reading, the locals have a saying:

“If you want to learn to pray, learn to sail.”

I wrote that down when I read it. It’s very practical advice, even if you don’t want to learn to pray.

It reminded me of my attitude from day zero of my copywriting career, back in 2015.

I started out charging $15/hour.

I told myself that after five jobs completed at that rate, I would raise my rate to $20/hr.

And I did so.

Then I repeated the process, over and over. $20, $25, $40.

While I was still on Upwork, around 2018, I eventually got to $150/hr.

Then I got off Upwork, and started charging clients still higher effective fees for the work I was doing.

At every step of the way, my mindset was lacking. I had zero inner game. I was emotionally sure that the work I was doing would not be worth the new price I wanted to charge.

And yet I raised my prices. My mindset and my skills and my deliverables caught up. They had to. I was working with clients who were suddenly paying me lots more money.

So if you want to learn to pray, learn to sail. And if you want confidence and the skills to back it up, raise your prices.

This applies beyond copywriting, and beyond client work. ​​

That’s why pricing will be something I will talk about on the free presentation I will host tomorrow, about how I write and profit from this newsletter that you are reading now. But that training is only open to people who are signed up to my list. If you’d like to get on there, click here.

Wherever you go, there you are

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Earlier today, I found myself at Europa Point at the tip of Gibraltar.

It was a sunny afternoon, with a few clouds rolling across the sky.

The massive rock of Gibraltar was to my back.

In front of me, to the south, across the Strait of Gibraltar, I could see Africa.

To the right was the Atlantic with a breeze blowing across to the left, where the Mediterranean started.

There was almost nobody at Europa Point today, except for one American couple walking a small black Scottish terrier.

As the three of them passed by, the woman looked down, smiled, and said hello. Her guy, who had the dog on the leash, paused for a moment. He grinned and said, “Where you guys from?”

“I’m from Croatia,” I said. I gestured to the girl next to me. “She’s from Ukraine.”

“Ukraine!” the guy said in shock. “We’re giving you a lot of money!”

The Ukrainian girl stared at him for a moment. “We appreciate it,” she said.

But he didn’t seem to hear her. “… billions of dollars! Billions!” The dog started pulling on the leash. They walked off into the breeze, but I could still hear the guy muttering to himself. “All my tax money!”

That made me chuckle and then think. And what popped into my head was, “Wherever you go, there you are.”

That’s the title of a book on meditation. The author of that book wanted to point out that the present moment is all you really have.

But it’s true the other way around also.

Most people go through their lives thinking, feeling, and reacting in the same automatic ways. Wherever they go, there they are. Nothing ever changes. Of course, it doesn’t have to be that way.

You might wonder what this has to do with copywriting or marketing. I won’t try to stretch it there. But I can tell you this:

Even though copywriting and marketing are why most people sign up to my list, I find the most response I get is when I write about topics that have little or nothing to do with making money. Such as the reply I got to yesterday’s email from a reader named Vivian:

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I just finished rereading your SME course, jotting down notes, and planning my own newsletter in these few days.

As I read more and more emails daily, I’m really getting all these vibes that I’m learning new stuff from you, not just copywriting wise.

And this email, along with other emails, make me so excited and anticipated for your free training. Even though I can’t make it live, because it’ll be 3am here in Malaysia, but I know for sure that I will instantly watch the whole recording and jot down the notes, and do everything I did about SME as to this training.

Can’t wait!

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That training that Vivian mentions will cover how I write and profit from this newsletter that you are reading now.

It will also talk about some fluffier, less tangible stuff that’s allowed me to stick with my newsletter for years, and to get to a place where I can pretty much write about whatever interests me, and still have people reading my writing and taking me up on my offers.

This training will be free. It will happen on Monday, January 22, 2024, at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. But you will have to be signed up to my email list first. Click here to do so.

Matrix Denier rejoins my list and is promptly fired

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A couple days ago, I wrote an email in which I used the Matrix as a pop culture illustration. To which I got a reply from a guy who said, yea that’s great and all but “what if your reader hasn’t seen the movie and therefore doesn’t have a clue what the h*ll you’re talking about?”

A reasonable question… but something about the tone of it — it’s amazing how that comes through — made my terrier ears perk up.

I looked up this Matrix Denier to see if I’d had any previous email interactions with him.

And oh boy. Here’s the sorry story:

Two years ago, I ran a launch for my Copy Riddles program.

The Matrix Denier was signed up to my list at the time.

​​He replied on the last day of the launch to tell me that I name-drop famous copywriters a lot… that he wouldn’t be buying my course because my emails aren’t good enough to impress him… and that, rather than create my own offers, I should go back and study the work of people like Andre Chaperon and Ben Settle.

I shrugged, and I used this reply for a new email that I sent out to my list to promote my Copy Riddles course.

The Matrix Denier didn’t like this, and he wrote me in an offended and hurt tone to say so. Which I again turned into an email, and sent it out to my list as part of a sequence of emails about the different types of denial we all engage in.

This was the straw that broke the Denier’s back. He unsubscribed from my list, and as the reason why, he fired this farewell shot:

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“You’re simply too dumb to be helped. I tried twice & you can’t tell the difference between a troll & someone with advice. Good luck. You’ll need it.”

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Like I said, now he’s back on my list. Well, he was, until yesterday, when I unsubscribed him. No sense in wasting perfectly good Matrix analogies on someone who would rather complain than go see a movie I specifically recommended as great marketing fodder.

The point of this being that a couple years have passed.

I’m still writing… my status in the industry has grown… and so has the number of people who recommend me and point new readers to my newsletter.

Meanwhile, I don’t know what the Matrix Denier has gained in those two years. Going by the tone of his replies, and by the fact he even took the time to write me, just so he could complain and say “But what about me?” makes me think he hasn’t gone far from where he was two years ago.

In other words, you might as well get going now.

Time passes unstoppably. It’s a trite observation, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Whatever it is that you’re doing or want to do, if you start now, and start accumulating a bit of something valuable every day — whether of skills or money or subscribers — then you can be in much better position in a couple of years, while those around you are left standing still.

And on that note, my Copy Riddles was and remains a great program, the best thing I sell. If you’d like to find out more about it or use it to start accumulating your copywriting skills, starting today:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

I tried to cover up my failures, but a loyal reader caught me

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In reply to my January 1st email, which had little to say about New Year’s resolutions, goals, or themes, I got a reply from long-time reader, occasional co-hostess of my live trainings, and infamous Crazy Email Lady, Liza Schermann. Liza wrote:

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What happened to your annual New Year’s email where you look back at the old year and set goals for the new one? I always look forward to reading it, especially this year.

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As Liza says, the past four years, on January 1, I always sent some kind of email about how my past year has been, what I managed to accomplish, what I am planning for the next year — all fit inside the latest personal development hack I’d fallen in love with.

But this year, I quietly decided to skip it.

The fact is, I had three themes for the past year.

A theme is like a vague and fuzzy goal, a general direction to move in rather than a destination to arrive to and a time to arrive there by.

Themes worked well for me in years past.

​​But in 2023, even with fuzzy themes in place of hard goals, I found that I had only made any meaningful progress in one half of one of my three themes. And that’s in spite of regularly revisiting those themes, and putting in thought and work into pushing each of them forward.

One half of one out of three is not something I particularly wanted to crow about. And I was sure nobody would notice, until Liza called me out on it.

Now, here’s a bunch of personal stuff that you may or may not want to read. It explains how I got to where I am, and what I’m thinking for the future.

I started as a freelance copywriter in 2015.

I worked for years with the aim of building up my skills, creating a name for myself in the industry, and making the kind of money that AWAI sales letters promise you.

And the crazy thing is, I got there. It took me about five years.

Then I decided that really, I don’t like to work with copywriting clients. Wouldn’t it be great if I could just do something on my own like create courses or do coaching and consulting?

And I managed to do that as well. It took me about two years.

Last year, back in March 2023, I had my best-ever month in terms of income.

Over the course of the entire calendar year of 2023, I also had my second-best-ever year in terms of income, only following 2020, when I was neck-deep in client work, and when obscene amounts of money were flowing in to me via commissions and royalties.

But last year, I had practically no client work. I was free to do what I want, when I want, with who I want, and I still made good money.

And yet, in spite of my apparent success in reaching my goal of independence…

… a few months ago, around September or so, I found myself working for much of the day, every day, and not getting a lot of work done.

It wasn’t because I was overwhelmed with the heavy burdens of the online solopreneur.

All I really had to do was to write a daily email, do a bit of research and work for my health newsletter, and do something to actually make money — put together some sort of new training, or course, or promotion.

And yet, the work stretched from morning to night, and projects barely inched forward.

To make it worse, it felt like things had been that way forever, and would go on forever.

I believe the technical term for this condition is boredom, or maybe aimlessness, or sloth.

Perhaps it was initiated by my actually achieving what I was working towards for so long.

I tried to fight it via willpower, and that’s how I ended up working pretty much the whole day, without getting much done.

And then, some time in late November, I was listening to Dan Kennedy’s Opportunity Concepts, where Dan talks about the hidden psychology of the people he sells to. Says Dan:

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Most small business owners are doing enough not to go out of business. That’s where their level of ambition has settled.

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I realized that’s exactly where I am. I also realized that it was the cause of my feeling of malaise, my struggle to move things forward in spite of working.

And I realized the fix for it, which is simply — ambition.

Because it’s more fun and enjoyable to have ambition, rather than to do just enough to not go out of business.

So in case you’re curious, that’s my theme for 2024. Ambition.

I invite you to keep reading my future emails to see how exactly this will play out over 2024, and then in a year’s time I can have another recap.

For now, I can tell you that things have already started moving. New offers, new partnerships, new sources of income — and most importantly, a new feeling of being motivated and optimistic.

This email is getting overly long. The only reason I allowed myself to write this much and this intimate is because 1) it helps me sort out my thoughts and 2) as business coach Rich Schefren likes to say, what’s most personal is most general. ​​So maybe you’ve found some worthwhile ideas in what I just wrote.

A few weeks ago, I said I would create a page on my site where I collect all my current offers for sale. I’ve done that.

In the future, I might even create a Dean Jackson-style “super signature” where I link to this in every email.

But for now, if you’re wondering what I have for sale, and why you might want it, and how it can help you in 2024, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/showroom/

Dating and business advice to a needy blackbird

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A few days ago, I was minding my own business, washing the dishes. The weather was warm so I opened the window.

Just as I was in the middle of scrubbing the salad bowl, a little blackbird landed on my windowsill.

“CHEEP,” said the blackbird.

“Oh hello there,” I said. “How do you do?”

The blackbird paced for a moment and then sat down on the windowsill. He seemed to be getting comfortable, which made me frown and pause my dishwashing. And then the blackbird spoke:

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Interesting that you ask that. Very interesting.

Something I am really struggling with at the moment is securing a mate.

I can’t get a mate for my familybuilding services. Even when I catch the eye of female blackbirds, they seem to smell my neediness from a mile away even if I don’t reveal it intentionally.

I wanted to ask:

How would you go about getting a mate if:

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… and then the blackbird listed his unique mate-getting situation, which happens to be the same unique situation faced by all single blackbirds, crows, and seagulls, as well as by all individuals, whether human or avine, who are hoping to go from zero to one in any endeavor that involves selling yourself.

I’ve long ago decided that I don’t want to be in the business of taking people or birds from zero to one.

So I just nodded to the blackbird in understanding, picked him up, placed him on the outside window sill, and closed the window shut.

That said, I do have one piece of advice.

I’m only sharing it because it applies to anybody who is looking to do anything new and frightening, whether they are beginners or much more advanced.

It applies to newbie copywriters looking for their first client… to experienced copywriters looking to send their first email to their own list… to business owners looking to go into a drastically more upscale market and charge 2x or 3x or 10x of what they are charging now.

It also applies to securing a mate. In fact, this piece of advice is something I heard from the infamous pick-up coach Owen Cook, aka RSD Tyler, the villain in Neil Strauss’s book The Game.

Owen was talking about the horrifying prospect of flying up to an attractive and unfamiliar female blackbird, in the middle of a park with lots of other blackbirds around, and striking up a fun and natural interaction.

Perfectly easy if you have total belief in yourself and your worth.

Perfectly impossible if you are overwhelmed by fear and self-doubt.

So here’s Owen’s observation:

“The halfway point between fear and total belief is indifference.”

You can’t go from fear and neediness to total belief and confidence.

But you can go from fear and neediness to indifference.

One way to do it is repeat exposure in a short enough period of time.

Go and cheep at seven attractive and unfamiliar blackbirds today. Each of those interactions might go horribly, though they probably won’t.

But whatever the outcome of the interactions, by the end of the seven, you will realize you are still alive. In fact, you are perfectly fine.

Do this a few days in a row, and those innate survival mechanisms, which underlie both fear and neediness, will begin to get habituated and calm down. You will start to get indifferent. And that’s the halfway point to total belief and confidence.

In other words, if you think you have a neediness problem… what you really got is an activity problem.

That’s all the free advice from Bejako’s windowsill for today.

If you’d like to buy something from me, I can recommend my Simple Money Emails training.

​​No, Simple Money Emails won’t replace the need to actually write and send emails, whether for your own business or for a client business.

But Simple Money Emails can teach you my effective one-two system for writing emails, much like this one, that make sales, keep readers reading, and keep birds chirping. If that’s an outcome you’d like as well:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

How to enjoy the holidays and be inspired by your own creativity and smartness

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Today being Christmas, of course I thought it would be a perfect time to book a ticket to fly home. Empty airports… friendly fares… friendlier cabin crew.

And so I did it.

It was a beautiful and sunny morning as I took off from Barcelona today around 9am. The sky was perfectly clear so I could see every gleaming little house as we edged along the Mediterranean coast, by Marseilles and Cannes, and then as we turned inland over the Alps.

The plane flew over thousands of sunny and snowy peaks, and down into the Bavarian flatlands. We landed in Munich.

45 mins later, another plane lifted me up again. More snowy peaks — Germany, Austria, Slovenia, then into Croatia.

The winter clouds finally started to gather as we reached the smoggy grey fortress that is my hometown of Zagreb. But even here, there was still some sunlight — magical for central Europe in December.

Like Little Red Riding Hood, I took the shortest path to my grandmother’s place. What followed was a typically overwhelming Christmas lunch — an appetizer made up of minced pork meat wrapped in sauerkraut, then some sort of beef soup, then a greasy duck with the local mlinci, then a chocolate cake which was the only part of the feast I was allowed to skip as I cited medical and psychological reasons to avoiding sugar.

Now as I write this, I am on the couch recovering from the travel and the food.

It would be easy to shrug, say I don’t have anything more to share with you, and just tell you to enjoy your Christmas.

But the fact is this:

Since I was deprived of Internet in general and email in particular the whole day until just now, I actually found my brain bursting with bunches of ideas as I looked down onto the Alps.

I will share one of those ideas with you tomorrow — a way to grow my health newsletter via paid ads, while not paying nothin’ for the ads.

I don’t know whether this idea will work, but I plan to test it out starting right after the holidays. And you can try it too if you find out tomorrow what I have in mind.

For today, I will simply say that good things happen when you cut off the stupid Internet, including that social media channel known as your email inbox.

Try it. You might be inspired by the ideas that you invent in the absence of constant digital input. Plus you might enoy the holidays much more.

And if you find yourself bored and craving stimulation while you go into airplane mode with the Internet, then try reaching for a book.

I have one I wrote that I keep recommending. You can find it below. Whether or now you choose to get it, merry Christmas.

My book 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters

Ramit Sethi: Brave or stupid?

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I recently listened to an interview with Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a data scientist who is perhaps most notorious for discovering, through Google Trends data, that the country of India has a unique and unholy interest in adult breastfeeding.

Less well-known is that Stephens-Davidowitz was also college roommates with Ramit Sethi, the best-selling “I Will Teach You To Be Rich” finance guru who currently has his own Netflix show.

I don’t follow Ramit, so I don’t know if the story below is well-known. But it was new to me. Stephens-Davidowitz said of Ramit and their time as roommates:

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He announces he’s going to teach everyone personal finance. So he starts plastering around the whole dorm, “RAMIT SETHI’S PERSONAL FINANCE CLASS.”

I’m just like, “Ramit, you don’t know anything about personal finance. What the hell are you talking about? Nobody’s going to show up to your stupid class on personal finance.”

He puts on this class.

​​I think two people showed up. One of them had a big crush on him.

And I felt so bad. I’m like, this poor guy has no sense of what the world wants from him. He’s making a fool of himself. What a loser.

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I read somewhere that, “Courage is knowing it might hurt, and doing it anyway. Stupidity is the same. And that’s why life is hard.”

Ramit Sethi persisting in spite of total initial failure is courage.

But we’ve never heard of the millions of unsuccessful morons who persisted and maybe persist still, in spite of clear signs telling them to stop.

And that’s why life is hard.

Except then I thought a bit more. I realized that you can make the odds better in your favor, and make life a little less hard.

It comes down to asking, does persistence here give me any meaningful accumulation?

There are fields where, if you continue to stick to it, your odds get no better, and maybe they even get worse.

Me winning the lottery is no more likely tomorrow even if I play the lottery today.

​​And me becoming a professional tennis player… that’s impossible today, and even with practice and dedication, it would only become more impossible tomorrow, as I get older, slower, and less likely to take even a point off a highly promising 14-year-old prospect.

But there are other areas where persistence does give you meaningful accumulation.

An email list is one. If you don’t do much of anything but stick around and keep emailing, your list will grow, however slowly. Eventually, you’ll cross some threshold where you have real influence.

Another area is money-making skill. You might have zero or negative money-making skills today. You might be an actual anti-talent. So was I, once upon a time.

But if you persist in learning and practicing a money-making skill, then the knowledge accumulates. Eventually, it crosses over a threshold where you have real skill at making money, first for others, then maybe even for yourself.

Life is hard if you don’t choose wisely, and if you keep investing in things that cannot or will not give you a return.

But invest in things that are almost guaranteed to pay you back, and you can wind up with your own version of the Ramit Sethi story above. Maybe some smartass who knows you today will be telling the story tomorrow of how, unbelievable but true, you weren’t always the huge success everybody now knows you as.

Anyways, enough Eat Pray Ramit.

I’ll now point you to my Most Valuable Email course today. For one, because it can help you keep emailing day after day (I personally find Most Valuable Emails most fun to write).

For another, because Most Valuable Email can help you build up an audience by doing nothing more than creating content (people will start recommending you on the strength of your emails alone).

But most importantly, because each time you write a Most Valuable Email, it accumulates a bit of money making skill in your brain. And eventually, that accumulation becomes meaningful.

If you’d like to get started today:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/