Productivity

Energy makes time

by

I signed up for newsletter just now.

It told to go to my inbox and click a link to confirm my subscription.

I felt a drive to go check my email as a result.

Except I have a new rule I am living by, where I only check my email between 12 noon and 2pm.

It’s 10:28am now.

Email is verboten.

So I opened up a notebook I’ve been keeping, where I’m tracking my email-checking urges. I write inside this notebook whenever I feel a drive to go check my email.

I wrote just now: “After signing up for some newsletter which is telling me to confirm my subscription in the email they just sent me.”

Who knows? I might one day realize something about when I feel the drive to pointlessly check email.

But that’s not why I’m writing these email-checking urges down. It turns out the simple act of writing them down is all I need to not check my email, either now or in five minutes from now, without any struggle or Thor-like willpower.

Since I’ve started this “write down when I feel an urge to check email” practice a few days ago, I’ve found it to be a useful hack.

But it’s probably only a hack. In other words, in the absence of other things, there’s a good chance it will work for a few more days, at which point my brain will adjust and the hack will stop working.

Which brings me to what I really wanna share with you in this email.

Because the newsletter I signed up for this morning was by a woman named Mandy Brown.

I signed up because I liked one single article she had written, which I came across a few weeks ago.

The article is titled, “Energy makes time.”

Brown is apparently a coach for “high performers.” These people, says Brown, typically have tried all the possible time-management hacks out there.

Many of these hacks work – until they don’t.

After the last hack has failed, the high performers come to Brown. And she suggests they try something different.

She suggests they realize that, much like money and pizza dough, time is actually a very stretchy substance.

A single day can shrink down to where you can barely get the dishes done before it’s time to go to bed, with nothing else fitting inside the 24-hour window… or a day can stretch so you can travel halfway around the world, meet a bunch of new people, have several great business or personal ideas along the way, and write the outline for a new book, and much of a first draft to boot.

The difference, says Brown, is that we’ve been conditioned to think that everything we do costs time.

And in the conveyor-belt optimization of human productivity, that means that certain things drop away — “There simply isn’t enough time, at least not now!”

That calculus ignores the fact that there are things that actually give you time back. That make more time for you. That stretch out the time you’ve got, so you can fit a boat and a house and maybe a book in there.

Which things give you time back?

Brown gives the example of doing art, if doing art is your thing.

But it really depends on you.

I’m guessing it can equally be going to the aquarium… or taking a day trip to see some place new… or spending a day with friends… or simply sitting down and writing out all the stuff that’s in your head, vague plans and fears included.

Anyways, it’s a kind of time management un-hack that’s been stuck in my mind ever since I read it in Brown’s article. (I read the article a few weeks ago. I re-read it now to write this email.)

Maybe “energy makes time” get stuck in your head as well. Maybe it give you some ideas to actually create time for yourself.

Now on to the topic of daily emails, which is my offer for you today.

Daily emails cost time. Much time.

But they can also create time. Much time. At least they do for me.

Writing daily emails gives me ideas. It gives me motivation. It gives me the satisfaction of accomplishing something every day, which makes it so I am more likely to accomplish something else, like attacking the dirty dishes that are waiting for me in the kitchen.

I don’t know if writing daily emails will make more time for you. Maybe it’s not your thing. Or maybe it is. There’s only one way to find out, and that’s to start, to stick with it for a while, and to see what happens.

And if you want my help starting and sticking with the habit of writing daily emails:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Why all my emails have a Zanzibar address

by

A reader writes in to ask:

===

John–just noticed you’re based in Zanzibar City. How is it over there? Have been curious.

===

I get this question maybe once a month on average. Some people note the mandatory address listed at the bottom of each of these emails, which says I live at “101 Desert Kite Drive” in Zanzibar City, in Tanzania.

The fact is, I’ve never been to Zanzibar or Tanzania.

So why is the address there? The story goes something like this:

During covid I was traveling the world.

Since there were lots of restrictions and lockdowns, I launched a newsletter called Masks On A Plane, about where it was open and attractive to travel.

Tanzania at the time was one of a few open locations. Since you have to put in some kind of physical address for an email newsletter, I used a made-up address in Zanzibar City at the bottom of each Masks On A Plane issue.

I eventually shut that newsletter down, but the address became a kind of running inside joke, including now in this newsletter.

Ok, so what? Well, get ready, for I’m about to share a truth that I live my life by, which might be useful to you too:

I’ve done a lot of traveling in my life. I typically dread it before it happens, and I find it stressful while it’s happening. I still do it, a lot, for the same reasons that I read a lot, not because I love reading, but because I think it’s important.

Specifically:

I have this theory that mindset <<< action <<< environment.

In other words, if you want to change how your life is, right now, the hardest way to go about it is to change how you think and feel, sitting where you are now, with gritted teeth, trying to be all grateful and creative and accepting.

A much better way to change how your life is, right now, is to go do something different than what you’re doing now. Go wash the dishes, or get up and stretch and squat, or go make a castle out of a deck of playing cards.

And the bestest way to change how your life is right now?

Go somewhere else. Go outside your house, your neighborhood, your solar system. A new environment is sure to change how your life is right now, completely.

But is changing your life a good thing?

Definitely not all the time, at least for me. I got completely burned out on travel following my covid-era peregrinations, living out of a backpack, a new town every month or so, over and over for two and half years.

It took me a long time after that, sitting in one place, to even consider taking another trip unless absolutely necessary.

But I’m back to traveling. Again, not because I enjoy it so much, but because I feel it’s so important — for a change of perspective, to learn something new, or simply for the blessed relief of arriving back home and having everything feel easy.

And now, on to business:

You might wonder, if I don’t really like traveling, and if I don’t really like reading, then what do I like?

I personally do like writing. Writing is something I look forward to.

Maybe you feel the same.

Or maybe… you don’t. Maybe you feel about writing the way I feel about traveling, as a “should,” a responsibility rather than something to look forward to.

If that’s the case, you might get value out of my Daily Email Habit. You can think of it as a kind of guided tour of the most attractive and valuable locations in daily email land.

With Daily Email Habit, you still get to do and experience everything yourself, but a lot of the care, work, and thought that normally goes into writing a daily email has been taken care of for you.

In case you’re interested in finding out more:

​https://bejakovic.com/deh​

Faster typing = better writing?

by

A few days ago, recently released Greek soldier GC Tsalamagkakis, who used to write code for CERN (the particle accelerator people) and now writes copy for ecom brands, posted an interesting question in my little Daily Email House community:

===

A lot of times I find myself ready to write my daily email but not starting.

I have all these ideas in my head, I know how I wanna start and I have a brief idea on what it will look like on the middle and end.

But I don’t start immediately. Sometimes I catch myself thinking “I have to type aaaaall that now? It will take so much time 😒“

Or I might write a part of the email in a way that is more brief but also worse.

Now, it might be because I’m lazy or it might be because caffeine can hit me like a truck sometimes and thoughts are zooming too fast.

But either way, I believe that the faster I can type, the less friction will be between the thought and its materialization.

Have you ever thought about it?

What do you think?

===

I never thought about typing speed — maybe because I’m a mediocre typist.

But I do agree with the underlying thought. I find it’s really important to write down ideas quickly. It’s a race against my own short-term memory to capture something that can turn out to be effective or useful before it disappears.

Over the years, I’ve hit upon a number of tricks to write down stuff quick, in spite of my mediocre typing speed:

1. absence of punctuation

2. absence of capitalization

– tricking myself with the “hyphen” trick, using a bunch of hyphens at the start of each line to make it feel like notes instead of proper sentences, so i just write it down instead of agonize over it

4. shorthand w/ lotsa abbrevs

5. placeholders for [sections that i’ll figure out later]

6. using abc in place of names i don’t know and xyz for figures that i’ll have to look up

7. stupid ideas that i will delete later

8. no editing if i make mistakes, i meant even if i make mistakes but whatever

9. phonetic spelling that’s good enuff

10. headings that i write down before i start writing to sketch out the general trend of what i want to say such as:

GC QUESTION

MY STRATEGIES FOR WRITING IDEAS DOWN FAST

OFFER

Speaking of offer:

My offer today would be Daily Email House, the lively community where the GC posted his question, and a number of other daily email writing marketers and business owners chimed in with their thoughts.

However, The House is not yet available as a “front-end” offer, but only as an upsell for those who sign up for my Daily Email Habit service.

Currently, I’m offering people a week’s trial on Daily Email house on me, but again, only if you sign up for Daily Email Habit.

For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Coffee and guilt at 10:40am

by

It’s around 10:40am as I write this, and a beautiful, sunny, warm, Barcelona December morning outside. So far today, I’ve only taken a stroll to Starbucks to buy a new coffee mug — the old one mysteriously shattered last night after I poured some hot water into it.

Now I’m sipping my coffee, from my new mug, sitting at my living room table and getting down to writing this daily email, and I feel…

… really guilty.

A popular routine for many marketers — I’m thinking of one guy in specific, but the sentiment is common — is to hype up the promise of “morning coffee + daily email and my work day is done!”

My guess is that most of the people who sell that dream in their marketing are actually working or thinking about work for much of the day… and if not, then they previously spent decades of their life working or thinking about work all day long, in order to get to where they are now.

The fact is, I have way more autonomy today than I did 10 years ago, the last time I still had a proper job. I have way more autonomy today than I had even a few years ago, when I still regularly worked with clients, had deadlines, meetings, etc.

But the more autonomy I have, the more time I spend working, or thinking about work. And if I catch myself slacking off, or getting to work super late like today, well, I feel guilty. Like a joke in Dan Kennedy’s Time Management For Entrepreneurs says:

GOOD NEWS! You are now your own boss!

BAD NEWS! You are a lousy boss with one unreliable employee!

I’m not sure who needs to hear this or why. The only thing I can tell you to reclaim some of the dream is that I wouldn’t trade the autonomy I have now for the ability I had 10 years ago, to show up to the office, hung over and useless for the day, and not feel guilty about it, because after all, they are just paying for my time.

Plus, I even like I what I do now. Yes, sometimes it takes a bit of prodding to get me to work. But then again, it takes a bit of prodding to get me to stop work also.

If you’re willing to work, and to even enjoy working, but you need some prodding like I do, then you might like my Daily Email Habit service.

Daily Email Habit will help you start and stick with writing daily emails.

No, a daily email is not a business in itself — there’s other things that need doing, and doing regularly, to make it work. What can I tell you? That’s the truth.

But if you still like the idea of writing regularly, of building something for yourself, and in sharing your own insights with the world, so the world can give you something back, then maybe check out Daily Email Habit, before the day runs out on you:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Only open this if you play Wordle

by

For much of his life Fyodor Dostoevsky struggled with a gambling addiction. He played roulette obsessively, and would lose huge sums of money, and be driven into debt and self-loathing as a result.

I’m no Fyodor Dostoevsky, either in terms of writing or in the depravity of my addictions. Where Dostoevsky wrote Crime And Punishment, I wrote an advertorial for a dog seat belt. Where Dostoevsky played roulette, I play… Wordle.

This email is really only for you if you play Wordle as well. If you don’t, or have never even heard of Wordle, then you are a better or luckier man than I.

Wordle has been a daily addiction for me for the past three years or so, pretty much since I discovered it.

I tell myself Wordle is a tool I use to relax and reward myself for a job well done. But the the fact I play Wordle first thing in the morning, when I’m neither stressed nor when I’ve done any job, well or otherwise, exposes my reasoning as a lie.

The fact is, I like word games, puzzles, brain teasers, clues that tell me if I’m on the right path, the brief flash of insight when a solution comes together.

And then the added features of Wordle — the fact that it’s simple and limited in scope, that there’s just one puzzle a day, that it tells you how many days you’ve kept up a streak of guessing the day’s Wordle puzzle right…

Well, you play also. You can understand me.

Really, Wordle is harmless. It’s also useless, at least in any adult view of the world. But in the words of Claude Hopkins:

“The love of work can be cultivated, just like the love of play. The terms are interchangeable. What others call work I call play, and vice versa. We do best what we like best.”

These be profound words.

The same motivations and drives — love of word games, narrowing in on a solution, a flash of insight when it comes together, a streak you don’t want to break — can be put to some adult use.

It’s why I’ve been writing these daily emails even longer than I’ve been playing Wordle.

And unlike Wordle, these daily emails have been very valuable to me, personally, professionally, and metaphysiologically.

My point for you being, see what you already like to do, and see how you can take elements of that and make it a part of something that pays you.

Nobody was ever going to pay me to play Wordle professionally — THE WORLD IS UNFAIR — but writing daily, in a short format, keeping a streak up, getting some kind of feedback always, is the next best thing, and in some ways, even better.

All that’s to say, if like me you play Wordle, you might enjoy writing daily emails.

You might also enjoy my Daily Email Habit service, because I very consciously introduced elements of Wordle into it — the hints, the streak, the unique once-a-day puzzle.

You can see an example of a daily email puzzle at the page below, or you can sign up to start playing the game yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Time misers

by

I went to college two years late, at age 20 instead of the usual 18. That meant I had had two extra years’ practice with teenage philosophizing compared to my classmates.

So when one of those classic freshman-year, fall-semester, late-night, deep discussion topics came up — “What would you do if tomorrow was the last day on Earth?” — I had a unique take.

The usual answers to that question are sky diving… some kind of wild sex proposal to your old crush… or going to admire the sunset one last time.

“I wouldn’t do anything different than usual,” I said. “I imagine I’d be paralyzed with fear. I’d probably just do the same things as every other day. Or maybe I’d spend the day lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling.”

I proposed a different hypothetical instead.

“What would you do if tomorrow there was an announcement that death has been cancelled, or at least pushed back by a few dozen millennia?”

That’s a question I’ve thought about a few times. I think it’s worth thinking about even today, long after college.

If you could live on, as you are now, or as healthy and as young as you want to be, pretty much indefinitely, what then?

How many more days or hours would you go on doing the job you are doing now? What would you do instead?

Would you try to save money? What for?

Would you stay in the same relationship that you’re in now? How would the prospect of thousands more years together weigh on you?

Of course, this is just a hypothetical. I used to write a weekly newsletter about the latest longevity science, and based on what I’ve read, death will not be cancelled tomorrow, or the day after.

Still, I think the above is a useful thought experiment.

A lot of modern-day gurus out there preach an abundance mindset. “Those who have will be given more,” they say, paraphrasing the Bible, “and those who have not will lead miserable, miserly lives regardless of their actual circumstances.”

This abundance mindset is almost always applied to things like money, achievements, opportunities, stuff in your life.

But then those same gurus — and I can name three off the top of my head — turn around and say, “Life is short.”

The implied message being to use your time wisely and conservatively, not to waste it or fritter it away. In other words, to be a bit of a time miser.

Maybe these abundance gurus are right. Maybe time is different from all the stuff that’s abundant in the universe.

All I can tell you is that personally, I’ve found that thinking that “life is short” is more likely to lock me up with fear and indecision than it is to make me hustle and prioritize.

That’s why I choose to believe I have all the time in the world, specifically, all the time I need, and that everything that needs doing is getting done, or will get done.

Counterintuitively, I find this actually helps me move and get things done now, while urgency and scarcity have the opposite effect.

I’m not sure if you can agree with me, or if this helps you in any way. But perhaps it can give you a different way to look at some familiar things.

In entirely unrelated news:

The last few days, I’ve stopped promoting my Daily Email Habit service because, frankly, I thought I had tapped out demand for the moment.

But then yesterday, a handful more people signed up, “on their own,” that’s to say, even without me promoting the offer in my daily email.

Maybe I was wrong?

So let me remind you of my Daily Email Habit service, which is designed to help you start and stick with sending daily emails to your list.

It’s only the second week this service has been running, but I’ve already had a bunch of results-based testimonials about it. Here’s one from Alex Ko, who is a senior copywriter at edtech company KooBits:

===

Thanks for setting up DEH and troubleshooting the streak counter. While the streaks feature is great, I especially love your daily puzzle.

It takes the stress out of finding a topic to write about, and for me, looking back at the body of work I’ve done over the past week feels much better than keeping the streak alive.

It’s already gotten me to write on weekends, something I usually avoid since I treat them as rest days.

Looking forward to sharing more results in the future!

===

If you feel that it might be the right time to start a consistent daily email habit (weekends optional), here’s the full info on how I can help you with that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Boredom Therapy

by

I remember one time as a kid, I was home alone, sitting in one part of the apartment.

“All right,” I said to myself. “Time to go sit in the other part of the apartment now. Let’s go.”

But nothing happened.

Because I was at home, and alone, it was a very low-stakes situation. So I just kept sitting there, and observed the strangeness of it.

“Let’s go now,” I said again to myself.

Still nothing. So I sat and waited, knowing that eventually something would happen.

And sure enough, at some point a little later, my body, on its own, without any seeming command from me, got up and moved to the other room.

I’m reading a book now called A Life of One’s Own. It records the experiences of one woman, Marion Milner, who decided to keep a close eye on her own mind, what makes her happy, what she really wants out of life, what she can do to get more of it.

Last night, as I was reading this book, I came across the following passage:

“The function of will might be to stand back, to wait, not to push.”

Milner wrote that for much of her life, she thought there were two possible paths through life. One was the path of the whip, of using her will to force and push herself to move. The other path was a kind of negation of the will, a cow-like acceptance of whatever happens.

But in time, Milner realized there might be a third path. That’s what the quote above is about.

Maybe it’s not about sitting around like a cow… or of whipping yourself until you finally act… but of using the will in some other way, to stand back, to wait.

This reminded me of something else I read recently, about “free won’t.”

You might know about neuroscience experiments that show our actions and choices are detectable in the brain a good fraction of a second before we become consciously aware of them — ie. before we consciously “decide” on them.

This has led some people to conclude there’s no such thing as free will.

What you might not know are some equally interesting neuroscience experiments, in fact by some of the same neuroscientists as above. These other experiments show that in that fraction of a second from the time that our brain decides to do something to the time it actually happens, the conscious mind can veto the decision, and stop it from being carried into action.

Hence, even if we don’t have free will… we might still have “free won’t.”

I don’t know what this all neuroscience really means in practical terms. But the first part, about actions and choices coming from somewhere outside our consciousness, meshes with my life experiences, such as the one I had as a kid, telling myself to move, and having nothing happen.

The second part, about the power of the conscious veto, meshes with what Milner is saying, and some of my other life experiences.

In fact, I wrote an email almost two years ago, back on March 23, 2022, about how I’d started taking 7 minutes to do nothing before I got to work.

My 7-minute productivity hack involved just sitting and staring and allowing myself to get antsy. When the seven minutes were up, I found I was ready and eager to start work, instead of having to force and push myself.

At the time, I didn’t make the leap that this could be more broadly useful. But it’s something I’ve realized over the past few months. I call it Boredom Therapy. Here’s an example session:

1. Say I sit down to read a book like Milner’s. It’s going great for a couple minutes. But suddenly I get the idea, “Let me check my email. Maybe there’s something exciting waiting for me!”

2. If I catch that thought early enough, it’s easy to stop myself, at least once, from going and checking my email. But here’s the crucial part.

At this point, I don’t just force myself to go back to reading, even though my thoughts are clearly elsewhere, and even though the email-checking idea is almost bound to pop up again soon.

Instead, I put the book down, and I just do… nothing. I allow my thoughts to run as they will, and I just sit there.

3. In time, my thoughts get spent, and I get eager to read the book again.

I still wait a moment to make sure this is not a trick my thoughts are playing on me — another form of restlessness.

If it is a little trick, then I just keep waiting and doing nothing. Otherwise, I lift the book off my chest (I tend to read lying on the couch), and I pick up reading where I left off.

I used the example of reading a book to show how I use Boredom Therapy. But Boredom Therapy is just as good for getting work done… or for exercising at the gym (when I think, “I’m not feeling it, let’s go home”)… or, if Milner is right, for living your life in general, the way you want to, and enjoying the process.

I realize this might all sound vague or fluffy or even a little suspicious. After all, you’ve probably never heard of Marion Milner before, and you don’t know why you should listen to her. And as for me, I have a long and public track record of magical, impractical, and even nonsensical thinking.

So let me tell you one last story. It has to do with an A-list copywriter, Gene Schwartz.

Schwartz had enough time in his life to write several books about copywriting, including possibly the greatest book in the field, Breakthrough Advertising.

He was also a published biblical scholar.

And of course, he wrote hundreds of sales letters for himself and for his clients, which paid for his Park Avenue penthouse, his world-class art collection, and his Manhattan millionaire lifestyle.

Schwartz did all this by working just three hours a day.

He famously had a kitchen timer that he set for 33 minutes and 33 seconds. He worked in these half-hour blocks, and then he took a break.

These 33:33 time blocks are what people today tend to focus on. But if you ask me, it’s the wrong thing to focus on.

The right thing is exactly what I’ve been telling you, Boredom Therapy, because Schwartz practiced the same. In his own words:

===

I have no goals for the next 33.33 minutes except to work on the copy.

Okay, I don’t have to work on the copy. There is absolutely no necessity for me to work on the copy.

I can sit there. I can stare. I can drink the coffee. I can stare some more, drink some more coffee.

I can do anything in the world except… not get up from the desk, not even write my own name. I just sit there.

Sooner or later, I’ll get bored. My boredom comes in one or two minutes.

Then, I begin looking at the copy. As I look at the copy, I begin paging up and down, and as I do that, something reaches out from that computer and grabs me, and says, “Hey, aren’t I beautiful? Hey, aren’t I powerful? Hey, start with me.”

===

By the way, that quote is part of a talk that Schwartz gave at Rodale Press.

To my knowledge, Schwartz’s talk is not available anywhere for free. But it is available as a free bonus if you buy Brian Kurtz’s book Overdeliver, which sells for $12.69 in Kindle format on Amazon.

In fact, this Gene Schwartz talk is part of a dozen bonuses, which sold for hundreds of dollars worth of real value in their time, which Brian has been giving away to buyers of Overdeliver.

If you ask me, it’s the absolute best deal in direct marketing land.

Not because you pay $12.69 to get hundreds of dollars’ worth of books, trainings, and courses.

But because the direct marketing wisdom in these books, trainings, and courses, much of it not available anywhere else, like Schwartz’s talk, has directly been worth tens of thousands of dollars to me so far… and will be worth much more in time, as I continue to revisit, rediscover, and apply the ideas in these free bonuses.

if you want to benefit from this incredible collection also, here’s where to go:

https://overdeliverbook.com/

Meme and troll your way to success

by

Two days ago, I wrote an email about Flat Earthers, and how I get where they’re coming from. I got a reply to that from long-time reader, pro copywriter, and original Crazy Email Lady, Liza Schermann, who wrote:

===

Haha I love this! “For much of my life, I’ve had sympathy for Flat Earthers”. Should be the headline on your website.

===

In the words of farm boy Westley, “As you wish.”

After Liza’s email, I went into my WordPress settings, and changed the tagline of my site. Any visitor to any page of my site, aside from the optin page, will now see a masthead up top that reads, “Desert Kite: For much of my life, I’ve had sympathy for Flat Earthers.”

Stupid inside joke? Trivial? Trolling?

Perhaps. And yet…

Yesterday, I promised to share an interesting idea that’s been bouncing around my head after I heard it a few weeks ago.

The idea comes from Omid Malekan, who is now a professor of crypto (!) at Columbia University, and who was previously the resident crypto expert at Citibank.

Malekan was writing about memecoins, basically stupid inside joke cryptocurrencies, trivial and trolling shitcoins, which are now having their moment and are currently worth over $100 billion in aggregate.

Malekan thinks memecoins are a bubble bound to pop. But in trying to make that case, he decided to “steelman” the case for memecoins, and argue for the other side as well as he could. And he discovered something interesting:

===

I did realize some interesting things. Like historically, a lot of things start out as a joke and then end up becoming really significant and important. This is particularly true in the art world where a lot of what we today consider to be like, ‘Oh this is an amazing genius work of art,’ was just at the time 50 or 100 years ago the artist trolling.

===

Malekan gave the example of Don Quixote, which started out with Cervantes trolling the popular form of writing at the time, knightly romances.

In time though, Cervantes’s book took a life on its own. Today, it’s held up as the first novel, and it’s taught as canon and forced down the throats of university students worldwide.

The list gets much wider and more significant if you don’t look at just trolling but also include, play, fun, and aimless games.

I read once that agriculture didn’t arise by the gradual conquering and mastering of plants to produce food. Rather, it grew out of symbolic, playful, or temporary gardens that people grew for no practical purpose, the way Eastern Europeans still plant little pots of wheat before Easter.

What about language?

My personal theory, though I’m sure others have had it before, is that the wide variety of modern languages is there thanks to memeing, trolling teenagers throughout history. And if you want proof of that, look at how new creole languages still emerge today, with new grammar and vocabulary, thanks to the kids of the displaced parents.

But you probably don’t want proof of that. You probably want me to get to the point of this email, if any.

My point is simply that play, fun, aimless games, or even mockery, trolling, and memes, have value in business, beyond simply being a sweetener for your content.

Get ready for the pitch now, because I’m about to give it to you:

If you want an example of memery and trolling turning to gold, take what I call my Most Valuable Email trick. It started out as a joke. It was my own attempt to put a smile on my own face and later on the faces of my readers, once I had a few.

Then the Most Valuable Email trick became a habit.

Later, I discovered this Most Valuable Email trick was actually useful to me.

And today, it’s directly influenced not just my copy, but the design of my website and emails… my personal positioning… and even the business strategy of what I do with this little newsletter.

Plus I’ve shared the MVE trick with others, and this memey or jokey thing has had real concrete benefits for them too.

Here’s Shakoor Chowdhury, a marketer who does performance deals with ecommerce clients (he’s driving $300k+ in sales each month for just one of them). Shakoor wrote about MVE:

===

John, this is by far my favorite of your programs and really kickstarted my email marketing.

There were really two parts to MVE that changed my life:

1. Using “the meat” — emails cannot just be all information and value with no entertainment, you have to give people a reason WHY they should listen

2. the use of [the MVE trick] in your copy, what a powerful concept… instead of [doing what everybody else does, if you you use the MVE trick, it] also quickly raises your authority and credibility

When I bought this course I was very inconsistent, but you gave me direction and I started writing daily and grew a list of 470 subscribers in less than a month of implementing

===

If you would like to find out how to meme and troll your way to success:

​https://bejakovic.com/mve

The excessive value of writing into the void

by

In my email yesterday, I asked for reader questions and replies. Well, I got ’em. To start, a reader named Kenneth wrote in to ask:

===

Yeah, at this point you are reading my mind.

I’ve always wanted to ask a question, but wondered whether you respond to emails.

Well, the question “How do you get opt-ins to your list?”

I can’t say I know because I got into your list by a strange way.

I am in a copywriting group and a member of the group shared your sales letter as a way to use reverse psychology, I think it was your MVE product.

He didn’t even share a link, I had to copy the link in the screenshot(I think that’s what happened), got on your homepage and got on your list.

===

… and that’s pretty much how I get people to opt-in to my list:

I write stuff… wait until people share that on the Internet of their own accord… then rub my hands in anticipation as others see those shares, google the clues available, search through the Google results, find my website, figure out that I’m actually the guy they were searching for, and then opt in.

I’ve heard this described as “upstream leads” — as in, people who had to swim upstream to find you. I’ve also heard it said these are the most valuable kinds of leads.

Is that true? I don’t know. I can imagine it is… I can also imagine it’s just an excuse by people who like to do it that way.

But that’s less interesting to me than the following:

I’ve gotten variants of Kenneth’s question before. And maybe I’m reading into it, but my feeling is that when people ask “How do you get subscribers” there’s a hidden assumption there.

That assumption is that, if you got no subscribers, no readers, there’s no sense in writing, particularly an email a day, like I do.

Sounds reasonable. But again, is it true?

The answer is no, at least to my mind. Even if nobody is reading what you write, a daily email:

1. Gets you to think about whatever you’re teaching or selling or doing, sharpens your own opinions on the subject, and builds up your expertise

2. Makes you a better writer and a better communicator, in all formats, not just email, without any pressure

3. Builds up a warchest of interesting content, which you can reuse for paid products, for ads, as book chapters, for SEO, for live presentations and trainings, for client work, or as a portfolio

4. Acts as proof of your authority to anybody who does come across you, whether that’s a potential client, customer, or simply fan

5. Can be enjoyable on its own, much how toast with butter is enjoyable on its own

6. Beats Wordle as a daily habit (though you can do both, as I do)

7. Makes you referable, for all the reasons 1-6 above combined, so that in time you do get people subscribing to read what you have to say

I’m telling you this because:

1) I’m grateful to Kenneth for writing in with his question, and I wanted to answer it thoroughly in a newsletter email, and

2) because starting tomorrow, I will be rolling out Daily Email Habit.

Daily Email Habit is my new service to help you be consistent with daily emails. It will give you a daily email prompt/constraint to take away idling over what to write, to keep you on track, and even to help you be more creative.

I will be rolling out Daily Email Habit gradually. But if you like, reply to this email, tell me what like about this service, why it sounds like it might be valuable to you, and I will add you to the priority list, so have a chance to try out Daily Email Habit sooner rather than later.

Mandatory vacation day

by

This morning at 9am Barcelona time, I concluded the White Tuesday event that promoted my almost 4-year-old Copy Riddles program.

I ended up making 20 sales of Copy Riddles over 6 emails and 36 hours.

I offered a payment plan as a key part of the White Tuesday promo, which means I collected $2,848 so far (one person paid in full) and will be getting another $17,056 over the next 10 months as the payments roll in, for a grand total of $19,940.

In my small, modest world, with my small, modest list, this counts as a good result — $9,970 per day, $3,323 per email, when all the money is in.

This, by the way, is not any kind of “HOT: Work Just 2 days A Month!” bizopp pitch. In fact, it’s the opposite.

I always do a review for myself of a completed promo and list 10 conclusions. I did the same this morning.

My key conclusion was about the reason why this promo was a success, and that’s because of perceived real value.

Copy Riddles sells for $997. The $2k Advertorial Consult I gave away as a free bonus I really got paid $2k for.

Except, for either of those to really matter, to feel real, it took constant work over months and years leading up to this promo. Selling and promoting Copy Riddles… selling and promoting and delivering my other offers… doing consulting and coaching and client work (back when I still did)… featuring testimonials… talking about case studies… going on podcasts… dripping out my experiences writing advertorials… writing these daily emails, from home, from airports, and at train stations.

A couple days ago, Kieran Drew wrote the following in a review of his own successful promo:

“Sure, courses have little-to-no fulfillment cost. But I now have over 3,000 customers and let me tell you, there is no free lunch. Products are not ‘true’ passive income—especially if you send thank you videos to every customer and reply to every email (I recommend both).”

Not “true passive income” is not a problem for me any more.

Five years ago, I published my 10 Commandments Of A-list Copywriters book. Commandment VI I got from Claude Hopkins, who wrote that love of work can be cultivated, and that for him work and play are interchangeable.

I put that in the book as an interesting and possibly useful idea. At the time, it definitely was not a belief I had managed to adopt. But over the years, maybe because I wrote it down then, it’s gradually taken hold in my head.

Today I work, don’t mind working, and in fact have slowly turned work into a kind of game that I can actually enjoy.

Except even games need a break now and then — body and brain need to rest and recover.

And so I’m taking a mandatory vacation day today. This email is the only thing I will do, besides replying to previous Copy Riddles buyers who asked for the bonuses I offered as part of the White Tuesday promo.

Meanwhile, I can only recommend you read or reread my 10 Commandments book. Looking back over it after 5 years, all the commandments are still supremely valuable. In fact, I only wish I myself would follow them more regularly. Maybe you too can benefit from reading them or being reminded of them? For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments