Productivity

Where AI really shines (you’re guaranteed to love it)

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I was listening to a podcast recently on a topic I thought I would never ever listen to:

“Asking for a friend… which jobs are safe from AI?”

The reason I thought I would never ever listen to this is that I’m sure nobody knows anything when it comes to the real impact of AI, and so I figured the entire podcast would be bunk.

Fortunately, I went against my sureness. I listened anyways, and I was enlightened.

According to the podcast, the answer to “Which jobs are safe from AI” is:

1. Nobody knows

2. That doesn’t mean we cannot look closer and think about this issue in more detail and maybe draw some new and useful distinctions

For example:

One thing I heard in this podcast was about an internal company study.

Some company, presumably a law firm, took two separate offices and the paralegals working within those offices.

In one office, they instructed the paralegals to “use AI to become more productive.”

In the other office, they instructed the paralegals to “use AI to do the parts of your job that you hate.”

Result:

The first office, the “more productive” office, really got nothing out of AI.

The second office, the “parts of your job that you hate” office, flourished. They beavered away until they got AI to replace many things they hated doing. As a result, the paralegal role in that office changed into something more like junior attorney work.

These workers were by definition happier, by eliminating things from their work that they hate and spending more time doing things they are neutral on or even enjoy.

That’s why I say if you use AI where it really shines — to do the things you hate — you are guaranteed to love it.

On that note:

Starting tomorrow, and ending this Thursday, I will be promoting Gasper Crepinsek’s ChatGPT Mastery, a 30-day, email-delivered course that teaches you how to use AI to eliminate the parts of your job that you hate.

I will have a bonus as part of this promo, which has nothing to do with AI, but which in my mind is complementary to Gasper’s offer, in ways that I will talk about starting tomorrow.

This bonus is equal in real-world value to the price that Gasper is asking for ChatGPT Mastery. (Of course, if you bought ChatGPT Mastery the first time I promoted it, earlier this year, you will also be able to get this bonus.)

I am also thinking to create one or two more bonuses for this promotion.

I have my own ideas on bonuses to create, but often, the best ideas come from my readers and customers.

So if you are considering getting ChatGPT Mastery, or have already gotten it, then hit reply.

Tell me about problems in your life, tell me about things you hate doing but have to do, or simply tell me what I know that you have always wanted to know.

No promises, except I promise that I will read and consider all replies for the bonuses I create as part of my promo this week.

If you cannot persuade yourself to act however hard you try

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This morning, a private detective I know here in Barcelona sent me a screenshot of a trending social media story:

“Couple Who Met On Dating App Rob Bank On First Date”

Can this really be true? I decided to do my own sleuthing.

It turns out yes, the story is roughly true, but with an important detail that’s missing in the headline above.

The man, Christopher Castillo, age 33, and the woman, Shelby Sampson, age 40, agreed to meet for a date.

Castillo asked Sampson to pick him up in her car. Once in the car, Castillo started drinking wine, presumably red. He then asked Sampson to pull over at a bank.

Castillo was gone for a few minutes. He came back sweating, wearing sunglasses and a hat (!), and holding an antique gun and a wad of cash.

He told Sampson to drive, which she did, for a bit, until the cops pulled them over and put the date to an end.

The crucial bit is that Sampson was not charged with anything, because, so the state believes, she had absolutely no knowledge of or participation in any criminal aspect of this first date.

This missing detail is what I found most interesting in the whole story.

I’ve never robbed a bank, but I imagine it’s hard.

The stock joke is that a typical man is unwilling to pull over and ask for directions while driving. Can you imagine how much more unwilling a typical man is to pull over, walk into a bank, hold up a gun, and ask for $1,000 in cash (and five years in prison, it turns out)?

No wonder Castillo was drinking in the car. And no wonder he felt he needed somebody “in his corner,” even if that was an unwitting and unwilling non-accomplice he had met on Tinder.

I found this interesting because, while I’ve never robbed a bank, I have done other, legal, things in my life. Some of these things I found personally very difficult to do, because they challenged my own identity.

There were times when no amount of auto-suggestion, willpower, or even red wine would push me over the threshold.

There were times when the only thing that would help me act would be having somebody “in my corner,” having a feeling of a home base I could come back to, even if that was somebody I had met minutes earlier and had no special relationship with.

I imagine this is all a bit waffly without specific examples. I might give those in another email.

My point today is simply that if you have something you know you should be doing (don’t rob a bank), but you cannot persuade yourself to do it no matter how you try, then having some kind of support or community of other people to rely on, however tenuous, can make all the difference.

Ideally, this is other people in real life. Real life seems to make a big difference.

But if you cannot find people in real life to act as a home base, then people online can sometimes act as a substitute. At least that’s the promise of online communities, groups, and memberships.

I am still keen on spinning up a new online community of my own, but I haven’t yet decided which (legal) things I would like to support people in doing.

While that’s going on, I can only recommend once again a community that I myself am part of, Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin.

If you’re struggling to take the action needed to build your own audience… or to make deals with people who have an audience of their own… or to make your first $5k online… then you might find the support you need within Royalty Ronin. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

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

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It’s 11:07am as I write this.

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

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

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

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

“Gym? Pff. Thank you. That’s not me.”

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

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

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

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

But wait, there’s more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

The Power of Not Now

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I’m reading a book called Straight-Line Leadership. The central message of the book is, “Just Do It.”

Of course, you can’t publish an entire book with just three words, so this three-word idea is developed in lots of different ways across 50 chapters. For example, in chapter 41, “Now Versus Later,” Straight-Line Leadership tells you:

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The only time you can ever do something about anything is now.

The problem with individuals who tolerate mediocrity in their lives is that no matter what good idea for taking action comes up, it’s never going to happen now. It’s an idea for some distant future. People who struggle have great ideas that they will implement “some day in the future.”

Almost everyone, deep down, knows what to do to get whatever result they truly want. It’s just that they are not choosing to do it right now. “Getting around to it” is not leadership.

The future is a terrible place to put an action plan because the future does not exist. Literally.

===

It’s a good message. Clear, simple, powerful. But as with most clear, simple, powerful messages, it’s only half the story, at least the way I see it.

In my experience, some actions are simply too painful or frightening to take now. And no amount of repeating to myself to “just choose to do it now, because it’s either now or never,” changes that.

And yet, those actions become manageable in time. What’s changed? Time has passed. And also, something in my head has changed, due to trying to get myself to act now, and failing at it.

I guess I’m not the only one who feels like this.

I was recently listening to an interview with a wicked smart guy named Michael Levin. Levin is a professor of biology at Tufts. He works on strange topics that sound like the science of the 23rd century rather than the 21st. Stuff like, how do we tap into the electrical language that determines the way organisms determine their shape, so we can get people to regrow, say, an amputated arm?

Anyways, in this interview, which was more philosophical than scientific, Levin said:

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A useful sense of free will is very time-extended. You don’t have, right now, complete control of whatever your next thought is going to be.

And in fact, as you think about it, free from what? Free from past experience? No. And you don’t want to be free from past experience because then you don’t learn.

Free from the laws of physics? No.

So what do you really have in the moment, like within a narrow timeframe? Maybe not much.

But over the long-term, by the application of consistent effort, what you can do is shape your own cognitive structure so that in the future, new things are open to you. Your own structure allows you to do new things.

===

What you have “free will” over is consistent effort. That might not translate into results. It might not even translate into action (this is the point of departure from what Straight-Leadership is saying above).

But consistent effort over the long term will in time change your brain, change your actions, and produce results that change your life. Some time. In the future. Even if it’s not cool to talk about that, because it’s supposedly “either now or never.”

So there you go. A philosophical and counterproductive email, at least from the perspective of selling you something today.

The straightforward message of Straight-Line Leadership, “Just Do It, And Now” is a much better message if you want to sell people stuff.

All I can say in my defense is that I wanted to write today’s email, because this newsletter serves several purposes beyond just selling you stuff.

That said, if you are ready to take action today, specifically around communicating regularly with your clients and prospects, and building up your image as a leader in what you do, then good on you.

And if you want my help with doing that, then take a look here:

​https://bejakovic.com/deh​

Energy makes time

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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

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A reader writes in to ask:

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

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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?

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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:

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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

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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

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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

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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:

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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!

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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