I saw a funambulist yesterday and I suspect I can do what he does

Yesterday, I found myself in the middle of a hushed crowd. Everyone was looking up.

Then the crowd collectively gasped, started clapping, and cheered. My girlfriend turned around and started to jokingly shush the people closest to her. “Let the man concentrate!”

Yesterday, a funambulist — a tightrope walker — made his way some 200 meters from one corner of Plaça de Catalunya, the central square in Barcelona, across Passeig de Gracia, the main shopping street in Barcelona.

Halfway across, about 120 feet in the air, the man stopped. He sat down cross-legged on the tight-rope. After a few moments of what looked like comfortable meditation, with the his shirt rippling in the wind, he stood up and kept walking.

Instead of stopping at the end, he turned around and decided to walk back to the start. The crowd underneath was following him like a shadow on the ground.

The funambulist came back to the midpoint of the tight-rope. Slowly and carefully, he lay down on his back on the rope, his arms out to the sides.

This lying down, and the bit of cross-legged sitting before it, looked kind of tricky.

The rest of the time though, the guy was just walking.

He didn’t have one of those balancing poles. Instead, he just kept his arms up and used them to balance. He steadily put one bare foot in front of the other, occasionally shifting his weight a bit, moving his arms a little. That’s it.

I wouldn’t like to be up that high in the air. But really, this tight-rope walking, which I’ve never attempted in my life, looks pretty easy.

Of course, that’s because I know nothing about it. Odds are, if I ever tried to walk on a tight-rope slung two feet off the ground between two trees, I would find it very hard to pull off, very tiring, requiring enormous balance. I would probably find myself falling off over and over, after just a step or two.

Still, it looks easy.

In my email yesterday, I made an unusual offer. I’m trying to get rid of my Copy Riddles course. I’m no longer selling it myself, so I’m looking to find a person who would like to take it from me, along with all the rights to it, and sell it, change it, do whatever with it.

Copy Riddles ties into that tightrope walker’s act. A-list level sales copy looks easy. A bit of intrigue, balanced with a benefit or two, steadily marching towards the order form.

If, like me when I first started writing copy, you think you can do what A-list copywriters do, then you should try to do it yourself.

That’s what Copy Riddles is all about. You get to write copy, starting from the same prompt that A-list copywriters started from. And you find out very quickly how much skill and effort and tricks are involved in producing what they produce.

Surprisingly, I got multiple serious responses to my offer yesterday. I got back to everyone. We will see if any of these negotiations bear fruit.

But I’ve found that, whenever I get several responses to a new offer with just one email, there are inevitably people who didn’t see that email, or meant to reply but didn’t get to it. Plus, since this is an unusual sale, the final details of it are likely to be fluid — depending on who the eventual buyer is and what his or her goals and current situation are.

For all those reasons, I’m writing you again with the same offer. If you are interested in owning the rights to Copy Riddles, so you can sell it and profit from it, then write me, and we can start talking about how that might work.

How the mosquito built Rome

In my email yesterday, I wrote about my home town’s curious plan to stop the coming mosquito hordes by importing a hundred thousand sterile mosquito males. To which I got a mosquito-themed reply from an Insights & More member named Jordan (not sure he wants me to share his last name):

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The talk about mosquitoes and books reminds me of the… mosquito book.

The Mosquito – Timothy Winegard

It’s actually very very interesting and showcases:

How the mosquito Built Rome
How the mosquito bested one of the greatest conquerors
How the mosquito ended slavery

(hows that for bullet point build out)

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I found this intriguing so I looked it up and yes — it turns out there’s a credible case to be made for the mosquito having built Rome.

​​In its early days, Rome was surrounded by hundreds of square miles of wetland, called the Pontine Marshes. Perfect for mosquitos. Perfect for malaria. Perfect for dying. Says Winegard:

“Armies coming to attack Rome — beginning with Hannibal and the Carthaginians, and then the Visigoths, Attila and his Huns, and the Vandals — couldn’t essentially either take or hold Rome because of this malarial shield.”

Based on a quick search, it seems Winegard’s Mosquito book gives you:

1. Lots of surprising or even contrary ideas like the one above

2. A credible, well-researched reinterpretation of history

3. A new context for familiar things

… all of which means it might make a perfect choice for the Insights & More Book Club in the future.

Speaking of, the same Jordan who wrote me about the Mosquito book earlier wrote me about the last Insights & More book, the one we just finished. He said:

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The book was mind blowing (even thought I havent finished it yet)

Can’t wait for my first call experience and the next book

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It’s unfortunately too late to join for the next round of the Insights & More Book Club, because the doors have closed. But if you’d like to have the chance to join in the future, get on my email list. It’s the only place where I actually advertise and open up my book club.

1 mosquito summer lover ~ 3-4 books

Yesterday, I was at the gym in my home town of Zagreb, Croatia — and for a brief moment, I was amused.

The gym is the daily break in my monk-like life, where I make a bit of contact with the outside world and find out what’s going on.

And so it was yesterday. The radio was blasting. In between the parade of 80s hits — Duran Duran, Guns N’ Roses — a newswoman came on the radio with the following announcement:

“NEWSFLASH: The city of Zagreb will be importing 100,000 mosquitos this summer. From Italy. All males. And all sterile.”

Apparently this is the best idea the local authorities have to control the rampant mosquito population in this crowded, marshy city.

And it’s not such a crazy idea:

The males mate several times throughout the season. The females mate only once. If a female happens to mate with a sterile male, she will still lay her evil mosquito eggs, but those won’t develop into buzzing, bloodsucking, sleep-destroying future monsters. Checkmate, mosquito bitches.

I remember a similar story some twenty years ago, after Neil Strauss published his book The Game.

The Game brought the secret world of pick up artists out of dark and sticky Internet bulletin boards and exposed it to the light of the mainstream.

I remember the outrage that many women expressed upon finding out that there’s a population of men who are gaming the signals of social status and sexual attractiveness.

And who can blame these women?

If you invest in something, and invest big, you want to make sure that investment will be fertile.

That applies to mates, human and mosquito… to business partners… to clients… to employers… to employees… and to teachers your learn from.

Maybe you see where I’m going with this.

I personally believe books are the best teachers in the world. Unfortunately, as James Altucher once calculated, we each have at most 1,000 books left to us for the rest of our lives.

Some of us, like me, read very slowly, and our number is significantly less than 1,000. That translates to 3-4 books each summer.

So you better make sure that each of those 3-4 interactions counts, and each of those learning opportunities is fertile, rather than sterile.

Which brings me to my Insights & More Book Club. The doors are currently open. They will close tomorrow at 12 midnight PST.

The promise of the Insights & More Book Club is top-quality books, filled with surprising ideas. As for all the other details, well, you will have to sign up to my daily email newsletter to find those out. You can do so here.

Insights & More Book Club now open to new members looking for a new perspective

Tonight being the last Thursday… of a month that’s divisible by 2… with the moon’s phase being waxing gibbous… it can only mean one thing:

It’s time for the bimonthly bonfire meeting in the middle of a dark pine forest, also known as the Insights & More Book Club call.

I’ve been running this book club since the start of the year. So far, the other Insights & More members and I have read three books:

1. A cranky philosopher’s 100-year-old prediction of how the world will evolve (prediction turned out pretty much spot on)

2. A biography of a showman, packed full of practical how-to advice

3. A cultural history that attempts to explain all the world’s civilizations as a quest for one thing, which I won’t trouble you with here

Those three books might all sound very different from each other. But in some ways, they are also quite similar. For example, they all non-fiction books, written in the past 100 years, by men.

To change that somewhat, the fourth book of the Insights & More book club will be a novel, written by a woman.

And that’s my point for you for today:

Computer genius Alan Kay famously said that a change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

The whole point of the Insights & More Book Club is to read things that can give you that change in perspective.

But the change in perspective won’t come on its own, or at least not often enough. It’s something you have to force and press and cultivate consciously.

So if you’ve been reading just nonfiction books, read some fiction. If you’ve been reading only books published since 2020, read something old. If you find you only read books by men, read something by a woman.

Or just come and join the Insights & More Book Club, and have me do the worrying work of book selection for you.

I only open the doors to the Insights & More Book Club every two months, as we finish one book and start another. It doesn’t make sense to have people join midway.

The doors are currently open. They will close this Sunday July 2, at 12 midnight PST.

In case you’re curious about this club, you will have to be on my email list first. Click here to sign up for that.

Mysteries of the mind

Yesterday I started listening to a four-and-a-half hour long presentation titled, Best Life Ever. I did it because the guy speaking, Jim Rohn, has been billed, by no less an authority than genius marketer and influence expert Dan Kennedy, as being a master storyteller.

Dan says that Jim Rohn built his long and very successful career on zero practical content, great stories only.

So that’s what I expected to find. Fantastic fluff. Zero real substance.

And yet I was surprised. In the first twenty minutes, I already found the content genuinely insightful. I felt that Dan was underselling it. Take for example the following. With a smile, Rohn says:

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The day the Christian Church was started, a magnificent sermon was preached. A great presentation. And if you’re a student at all of good communication, it was one of the classic presentations of all time.

And this sermon, this presentation, was given to a multitude. Meaning a lot of people. But it was interesting.

The record says, when the sermon was finished, there was a variety of reaction to the same sermon. Isn’t that fascinating? I find that fascinating.

It said some that heard this presentation were perplexed.

Now I read the presentation. It sounded pretty straightforward to me. Why would somebody be perplexed with a good, sincere, straightforward presentation?

Best answer I’ve got: They are the perplexed. What other explanation is there? It doesn’t matter who’s preaching.

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Rohn’s point is that there are some mysteries of the mind.

Why are some people inspired to take action? Why do others never take action? Why are some people perplexed? Why do others mock and laugh?

You can try to figure it out. So did Rohn, once upon a time.

“I don’t do that any more,” he says in his talk. “I’ve got peace of mind now. I can sleep like a baby. Not trying to straighten any of this out any more.” It’s just mysteries of the mind.

Did you find that insightful?

I did. But maybe I’m just very easy to dupe into feeling like I’ve had an epiphany. Doesn’t matter who’s preaching.

Or who knows. Maybe Rohn is such a good storytellers that even in those first 20 minutes, he managed to prime me for being easily influenced.

In case you’re a student at all of good communication, this guy was one of the classic presenters of all time. To see why, watch a few minutes of the following:

 

“The one thing all my mentors have in common”

This past Sunday, Novak Djokovic won the French Open and his 23 Grand Slam title — a big deal in the tennis world.

​​On Monday, in an off moment, I decided to check if there were any interesting news or interviews with Djokovic following the French Open.

I automatically headed to the r/tennis subreddit on Reddit. But in place of the usual page with tennis links and videos, I was hit with a blank page and the following notice:

“r/tennis is joining the Reddit blackout from June 12th to 14th, to protest the planned API changes that will kill 3rd party apps”

Perhaps you’ve heard:

Reddit the company, which is basically thousands of different news boards, is experiencing a kind of strike. Special Reddit users — mods — who control the different news boards are protesting Reddit’s proposed policy changes. As a result, they’ve basically made the site unusable for hundreds of millions of users.

I haven’t been following the drama. But apparently, as of yesterday, Reddit’s CEO said he plans to go ahead with the policy changes. To which many mods decided to extend the strike from 2-3 days, as originally planned, to indefinite.

All this reminded me of email conversation I recently had with Glenn Osborn.

​Glenn is a curious creature. Once upon a time, Glenn attended 15 of Jay Abraham’s $15k marketing seminars by bartering his way in.

​​He also went to one of Gary Halbert’s copywriting seminars in Key West, and watched Gary go up on stage with that “Clients Suck” hat.

​​These days, Glenn writes an email newsletter called “Billionaire Idea Testing Club” about influence tricks he spots from people like Taylor Swift and James Patterson and J.K. Rowling.

For reasons of his own, Glenn likes to reply to my emails on occasion and send me valuable ideas. A few weeks ago, Glenn wrote me with some things he had learned directly and indirectly from Clayton Makepeace and Gary Halbert and Jay Abraham.

​​Good stuff. But then, in a PS, Glenn added the following:

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P.S. -For Consulting Clients I Do ALL THE Work F-O-R them – MYSELF and thru staffers.

CONTROL is the one thing all my Mentors Have in Common. If You Don’t CONTROL what you do You Cannot Make Munny.

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That last idea definitely stood out to me.

There are so many ways to be successful in any field. And contradicting strategies will often produce equally good results.

But a very few things are non-negotiable. You could call those the rules of the system. Perhaps CONTROL is one of them.

At this point I would normally refer you to Glenn’s newsletter in case you want to read it yourself. ​​But as Glenn himself says, “My ARCHIVE Is By-Referral-Only – Too ADVANCED to Toss Strangers into.”

If you are determined, then a bit of Googling, based on what I’ve told you above, will lead you to Glenn’s optin page and his unusual but valuable newsletter.

And in case you yourself want to want to write an unusual but valuable newsletter, the following can help:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

My #1 takeaway from a $3k conference

I went to a $3k copywriting conference 4 weeks ago. Since then, my impressions have settled.

What’s left? What ideas did I really get from the high-powered speakers at this conference?

What’s left today is the same as what struck me while I was still sitting in the freezing-cold conference room.

All the speakers kept repeating the word “simple.” Simple business model. Simple deliverables. Simple promises.

But here’s what I realized while listening to all these speakers:

Getting to simple isn’t simple. It takes time and thought and work to figure out what’s essential. It takes discipline and more work to eliminate what’s not essential. And there’s layers to it, so once you’ve made things simple once, you will probably realize that it’s still not really there, and there’s more that you can do.

Mark Ford wrote a post yesterday about how he loves to teach. And he wrote about physicist Richard Feynman, who believed that teaching is the best way to understand anything.

It’s easy to think you understand something, Feynman believed, until you try to explain it simply. And an audience gives you real feedback. Was it simple? Do they understand? Or are they lost?

If they’re lost, it’s because you lost them somewhere along the way.

Writing is a great way to make things simple. And writing to an audience is even better. Then tomorrow, you can do it all again, at a new level of understanding. Does that make sense? Write in and tell me, because it will help me figure things out also.

Easy way to go from a bit of a failure to a big-time success

I have an offer for you at the end of today’s email. But first, I have a sexy marketing story that might make you want that offer. The story goes like this:

Back in the early 2000s, a guy named Andrew Wood ran an info publishing business, teaching marketing to karate schools. Wood knew what he was talking about, because he had previously created and then sold a chain of 400 karate schools.

Wood’s info publishing business was pulling in good money, around $30k each month. The trouble was, Wood’s expenses — business, car, wife — totaled $40k each month. In other words, he was losing blood like a harpooned whale.

So in a moment of desperation, Wood got in touch with Jay Abraham. The two met.

Over the course of a morning, Jay Abraham grilled Wood all about his business. After each question, Abraham came up with suggestions. And Wood replied he was already doing that — or he had tried it before but it didn’t work.

As the meeting wore on, Jay Abraham grew more and more frustrated. Eventually, he stood up from the table.

“You’re so fucking smart,” Abraham said, “figure it out for yourself.” And he walked out.

Wood sat there stunned. But before he had a chance to do anything, Jay Abraham came back and apologized. And he asked Wood to run through the numbers one more time.

“What are you taking in each month?”

“$30k.”

“How much are you spending?”

“$40k.”

“And how much do you want to make?”

“$60k would be great.”

“Okay,” Jay Abraham said. “That’s easy. Just double your prices! Find something you can add to the program to increase the value and double the price.”

And with that, Jay Abraham said goodbye.

Silence. Do you think Andrew Wood sat there thinking, “What a great insight!”

Of course not. He thought it was a total lack of advice. But on his way home, he stopped for a beer. A few of his employees joined. After the third beer, they started kicking around the “just double your prices” idea.

A couple weeks later, Wood stood on stage in front of his two hundred customers. And he announced a new monthly program.

It would cost $200, twice as much as what they were already paying. The contents were not much more than what they were already getting.

Result?

Wood says that in three months, he went from taking in $30k a month to $100k a month. More importantly, he went from losing $10k each month to making a profit of $60k. By Christmas, he was entirely debt-free and owned his first Ferrari.

So that’s the sexy story. Now here’s the offer:

A couple weeks ago I sent out an email asking who would be interested in a training about increasing your prices.

​​I got a fair number of yeses in response to that email, but not enough to make me want to put that training on. Lately been saying no to middling opportunities and putting my effort only in near sure shots.

At the same time, your first Ferrari — or whatever the equivalent moonshot proof of success might be in your own mind. That’s what can happen if you double your prices.

​​And yet people don’t double their prices.

Why? And what can you specifically do about it?

That’s what I want to address on this training. And if it’s something you’d be interested in hearing about and profiting from, then hit reply, and let me know. If it enough people say yes, then I’ll put this training on.

Kitten doesn’t blink, scientists not surprised

Imagine the following:

Two scientists and a kitten. The scientists are wearing white lab coats. The kitten is not.

One of the scientists holds the kitten tight.

The other scientist asks, “You ready?”

The first scientist nods.

Scientist two takes a big swing and rushes his large man-hand towards the kitten’s face. He stops right before hitting the kitten.

The kitten doesn’t even blink.

The scientist stares hard at the kitten, then picks up a clipboard, and notes down the results. “Just as we thought,” he says.

The annals of science are filled with strange experiments designed to answer strange questions. Perhaps none is more strange than an experiment performed in 1963, by two cognitive scientists at MIT.

The experimenters took a bunch of newborn kittens. Put them in pairs. Kept them in total darkness. Only occasionally exposed them to light, under very specific conditions.

When it was time for the light, the scientists put a box around the kittens’ heads. This was so the beasts couldn’t see their paws.

One kitten, kitten A, then got to walk around freely.

The other kitten, kitten P, couldn’t control where it was walking. But thanks to a clever mechanism designed by these MIT scientists, kitten P was moved around the floor in a little basket in exactly the same way as kitten A was moving.

Result?

After 21 sessions of this bizarre treatment, all A kittens learned to control their paws properly, and to judge depth properly.

All P kittens on the other hand — well, you can guess. Bring a P kitten to the edge of a table, and the poor thing didn’t know to stretch its little kitten paws out. Take a swing at a little P kitten’s face, and it didn’t even know to blink.

The P kittens were Passive. The A kittens were Active.

The P kittens ended up Pathetic. The A kittens ended up Athletic.

There may be something in there that applies to humans also.

Read, study, observe what others are doing — you may learn something. Or you may not.

Practice, do, apply it yourself — and you are guaranteed to develop.

The choice is yours.

​​For specific opportunities to apply, go here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

We’re in the fiction business

I was surprised—

Yesterday I polled readers as to what books they are reading right now.

The responses came flooding in. Lots of business books. Lots of marketing books. Lots of self-help books.

What surprised me is that out of the several dozen responses I got, fewer than five came from people who said they are reading fiction.

A few days ago, I mentioned how I’ve watched lots of Dan Kennedy seminars about marketing and copywriting, and how Dan will often poll the room about who reads fiction.

​​A few hands go up, most stay down.

“You gotta read fiction,” says Dan. “Many people make the mistake of thinking we’re in the non-fiction business. Big mistake. We’re in the fiction business.”

So read fiction. Even better, write fiction. Dan did it – a mystery novel. John Carlton did it, too — sci-fi. I guess even Gary Halbert did it, maybe romance.

You don’t have to write a novel or even a short story. An email can be it.

​​I’ve done it before in this newsletter. Sometimes I was serious about it. Lots of times it was a parody. In every case, it was valuable.

​​To read the adventures of Bond Jebakovic, secret agent, go here:

https://bejakovic.com/once-upon-a-time/