Reading

The unpardonable sin in daily emails

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> be me
> get email yesterday
> feel sucked in by the subject line because it’s the same as the name of a paid training i’m thinking to create
> read email
> interesting opening, about how the author wrote something that got a whole lot of reader engagement and replies
> get to the takeaway
> “Vulnerability”
> feel face drop, groan
> close email and vow never to read another of the author’s emails again

An A-list copywriter, Robert Collier, once wrote that the unpardonable sin in nature is stagnation, standing still.

Another A-list copywriter, Jim Rutz, once wrote that the #1 sin in ad mail is being predictable.

It applies to daily emails as well. The #1, unpardonable sin in daily emails is stagnant, predictable content. That’s why a point of my personal philosophy, which may resonate with you, is to do anything but be predictable.

Right now, I’m in the middle of rolling out my new Daily Email Habit service to people who expressed interest and got on priority list.

While I do that, I have no paid offers to promote.

So let me take the next few days, while the rollout is happening, to share some unpredictable pieces of writing.

I mean “unpredictable” both because these pieces of writing contain surprising ideas presented in insightful ways… and because you wouldn’t expect to have them shared inside of a newsletter like this one, about direct marketing and online businesses.

To start with, here’s something I read two years ago that still pops up in my mind pretty much every week.

The title of it is When Magic Was Real.

The idea that sticks with me is that magic — real magic, not stage magic — is real, and is “the product of belief x belief.”

If you want to read something surprising, insightful, and maybe mind-altering:

https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/when-magic-was-real

6 things I’m reading now

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Comes a question from long-time reader Illya Shapovalov, on the trail of my email yesterday:

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Hey John,

Slightly off topic:

You always find some curious and interesting things to share in your emails. Can I ask you what publications do you read or are subscribed to? I really struggle finding just interesting things to read on the Internet, something that’s not sensationalistic or opinionated like most news outlets.

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The only non-work publication I’m subscribed to is the New Yorker. It’s a print magazine that arrives to my physical mailbox with the frequency of a baby panda birth in captivity.

As for interesting things to read on the Internet, I find most of those via Hacker News.

That’s a kind of bulletin- or news-board, curated by lots of smart people and moderated by a few, specifically to not be sensationalistic or opinionated. Much of what’s on Hacker News is tech news and articles that I frankly don’t care about, but there’s other interesting stuff always.

But why limit yourself to things on the Internet?

In my experience, books are the greatest repository of human insight and funny stories, better than courses, better than coaching programs or communities, and certainly better than blogs or websites.

Nobody asked about my book reading habits. But I’ll tell ya.

I read books in four categories, one book at a time in each category:

1. “Something from a previous century.” Currently, I’m finishing up the fourth and final volume of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, which I started back in December 2021, almost three years ago.

2. “Religion.” This can be about actual religion, or about the human mind, or the nature of reality. I just started A Life of One’s Own, by Marion Milner.

3. “Fiction.” I’m reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.

4. “Work.” (Copywriting, marketing, psychology, etc.) I’m reading I’m Okay, You’re Okay by Thomas Harris, since it’s one of the upstream sources of both David Sandler’s sales system and Jim Camp’s Start With No.

Bigger point:

You can combine the enjoyable and the useful.

I read these things because I find them interesting… but also because they can provide fodder for these emails and for other projects I’m working on.

Combine the two, enjoyable and useful, and you can have something you can stick with for the long term.

Smaller point:

There are lots of places to get possible ideas for daily emails.

I personally feel it’s more important to have a way to decide among those many ideas, a litmus test to help you decide if an idea is a good topic for your email today.

If you’d like to find out what my personal litmus test is, the test I recommend to coaching students who have paid me thousands of dollars for the advice, and to hundreds of people who have bought my courses, you can find that inside my Simple Money Emails program. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

The making of a legend

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Today being October 26, 2024, it is the 143rd anniversary of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the most famous gunfight from the mythical Wild West.

The gunfight at the O.K. Corral happened in Tombstone, Arizona, and involved the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday on one side, and a group of cattle rustlers known as the Cowboys on the other.

There’s a ton of legend surrounding this one-minute slice of history, the buildup to it, and the events that followed.

Movies have been made, books have been written. The Wikipedia page about the fight at the O.K. Corral runs to 21,542 words. I spent 3+ hours of my life a couple months ago, napping through Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp at a local movie theater that plays old films.

Today, I had a different idea.

I went on newspapers.com, and I searched.

There was nothing on the day of the fight, but several newspapers reported the event a day later (“A sanguinary shooting affray occurred on Fremont street”).

I also found dozens of articles in the coming weeks and months, reporting how Virgil Earp had called in the military to defend the town of Tombstone against the violence… how Morgan Earp had been shot and killed while playing billiards… how the editor of the Arizona Morning Star wrote that the time is past for courts of justice, and that “hemp is the best code” to deal with the Cowboys.

I gotta tell ya:

I felt a real rush reading these old articles, like I could be there, see history in the making. It felt somehow real — without the layers of interpretation and retelling that soon followed.

Because by next summer, the legend was already forming. Virgil Earp was giving interviews in train cars to news reporters. His description of Doc Holliday will sound familiar to anybody who’s seen one of a dozen movies featuring the man:

“There was something very peculiar about Doc. He was gentlemanly, a good dentist, a friendly man, and yet, outside of us boys, I don’t think he had a friend in the Territory. Tales were told that he had murdered men in different parts of the country, that he had robbed and stolen and committed all manner of crimes, and yet, when persons were asked how they knew it, they could only admit that it was hearsay, and nothing of the kind had in reality been traced up to Doc’s account.”

I bet you’re wondering where all this is going. Let me get to it.

My point for you is simply to go to sources that others don’t go to.

Everybody is talking these days, and most of it is rehashed — the same newsletters, the same “gotta read ’em” books, the same Twitter memes.

Maybe you were truly blessed to have a unique perspective among the 8 billion people on this planet, and maybe, even by looking at the same stuff as everyone else, you have something new to say about it all. “No one I think is in my tree,” John Lennon said once, “I mean it must be high or low.”

But if you’re not John Lennon, there’s a cheat code:

Different inputs, different outputs.

This is not just about creating content, but about business strategies, and about success in life in general. Go where other people don’t go, and you’ll see things that other people don’t see.

So much for inspiration.

But what to promote?

I actually meant to promote newspapers.com as an affiliate because I love the service so well.

I will do so in future and offer a bonus if you give ’em a free try through my link.

But I don’t have any of that set up today.

So let me go back to the world of marketing, and tie into today’s theme of sources nobody else goes to.

If you want to see how A-list copywriters turn boring and dry texts into sexy sales copy that gets strangers to send money… and better yet, if you want to go through this same process yourself, and get a real rush of genuine experience and insight by doing, instead of just hearing other people’s interpretation and retelling, then you might like the following:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

937 days’ worth of email ideas, free

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A couple days ago, after I complained that there’s still a reader on my list, Vivian, who hasn’t bought my Most Valuable Email program, another reader on my list, Bridget, who also hasn’t bought my Most Valuable Email program, wrote in to point out where I’m falling short:

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Key point – where you are falling short is you are not answering the questions:

* Where am I going to get interesting ideas every day?

* How am I going to make the ideas I do have interesting enough to send without making 99% of my current subscribers want to unsubscribe?

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Bridget is absolutely right. I don’t make the “where to get interesting ideas” part clear on the MVE sales page.

It actually is there in the course — I have a little section where I list four sources where I regularly find interesting ideas for Most Valuable Emails.

The reason I don’t make a bigger deal out of it is that I feel interesting ideas are cheap. They are everywhere, and it’s more a matter of how freshly and insightfully they are presented. And that’s what MVE is about.

I wrote back to Bridget to tell her that. And she replied:

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You may believe interesting ideas are cheap. They may well be. But Vivian’s afraid she’ll run out, and that’s more important to her buying decision than objective reality.

===

Again, Bridget is absolutely right. So now what?

Let it never be said that I am more stubborn than Andrew Jackson.

And that’s why, I’d now like to announce I am adding one more bonus to my Shangri La MVE event. I’m calling this bonus the Shangri La Library Of Rare and Priceless Ideas.

For years now, I’ve been collecting interesting ideas I come across, whether in books, newsletters, podcasts, or courses.

For each such idea, I write it down, along with the source of where I got it. Sometimes I also add in my own observations as well.

I checked just now and so far I have 937 such interesting ideas. Here’s a sample:

* “To build fascination and rapport, keep asking deeper, more enthusiastic questions” (from James Altucher via his podcast)

* “Use the same link text as the subject line to get clicks” (something Ian Stanley said somewhere)

* “Toil shared becomes no toil at all” (from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives)

* “Trialibility is the no. 1 factor affecting adoption of an innovation” (from Jonah Berger’s Catalyst)

* “Pick out a fun and relevant theme for email promotion events” (from Travis Sago, on some ancient podcast appearance)

Rare? Priceless? You decide. In any case, it’s my contention you still have to do something to these ideas to turn them into fresh and insightful emails. MVE shows you what to do, and it even gets you doing it.

But so you can say you will never ever run out of ideas for Most Valuable Emails, I’m making available my entire Library Of Rare And Priceless Ideas as part of this Shangri La event.

I collected all these rare and priceless ideas and put them into a type of endless scroll known as a PDF file.

If you have the stamina, you can read through them from beginning to end. If you don’t, you can pick off an idea each day, apply the Most Valuable Trick, and turn that idea into a fresh and insightful email that 1) pulls in readers, 2) builds your authority, 3) makes you just a tiny bit better as a writer and a marketer, 4) maybe even makes a sale or 10.

My Shangri La MVE event ends tonight at 12 midnight PST. If you need a reminder of what it’s about:

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I’m calling this offer the “Shangri La” MVE offer. And that’s because like Shangri La, the two three parts of this offer only appear once every fifty years. Specifically:

1. I normally don’t offer a payment plan for Most Valuable Email. I did offer a payment plan for MVE once, as a joke, for one day only. Well, like Shangri La, the payment plan is back, and not as a joke.

You can get MVE for $99 today and then two more monthly payments of $99. This payment plan is there to make it psychologically easier to get started — in my experience, people take up payment plans not because they cannot afford to pay in full, but simply because it feels like a smaller commitment.

2. I am also offering a bonus, which I’m calling Shangri La Disappearing Secrets.

Over the past years, I have periodically sent out emails where I teased a secret, which I then turned into a disappearing, one-day bonuses for people who took me up on an offer before the deadline.

Inside this Shangri La Disappearing Secrets bonus, I have collected 12 emails that teased 12 secrets — and I have revealed the secrets themselves. These include:

* An email deliverability tip that is so valuable I decided not to share it publicly, but only with buyers of MVE. This tip is something that multiple people have told me I should turn into a standalone course or training — which I most probably will do one day.

* Stage Surprise Success. Step-by-step instructions for creating effective surprise in any kind of performance, whether thieving, magicking, comedy, drama, or simply writing for impact and influence. And no, it’s not just shocking people with something they weren’t expecting. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite of that.

* A daring idea to grow your list and build up your authority at the same time. I have not yet had the guts to put it into practice, even though I have lots of reasons to believe it would work great to build my own authority, and get me more high-quality leads than I’m getting now.

* A persuasion strategy used by con men, pick up artists, salesmen, even by legendary copywriters. I ran a little contest in an email to see if anybody could identify this strategy based on a scene from the movie The Sting. Out of 40+ people who tried to identify the strategy, only 2 got it right.

* An incredible free resource, filled with insightful and proven marketing and positioning advice. This resource comes from a man I’ve only written about once in this newsletter, but who has influenced my thinking about marketing and human psychology more deeply than I may let on — maybe more deeply than anybody else over the past few years.

* Magic Box calls-to-action. Use these if you don’t have a product or a service to sell yet, or if you only have a few bum offers, which your list has stopped responding to every day. Result of a “magic box” CTA when used by one of my coaching clients: the first hand-raiser ever for an under-construction $4k offer.

* A new way to apply the Most Valuable email trick, one I wasn’t comfortable doing until recently. Now that I’ve started using it, it’s gotten people paying more attention… leaning in more… even rereading my emails 3x… and reaching out to reopen dropped business conversations.

* Steven Pressfield (the author of the War of Art and the Legend of Bagger Vance) used to write scripts for porn movies. He once shared two porn storytelling rules. I’ll tell you what they are, and how smart marketers, maybe even me on occasion, use one of these rules in their own sales copy and marketing content.

* A list of 14 criteria of truthful stories. I’m not saying to get devious with this — but you could use these criteria to jelly up a made-up story and make it sound absolutely true. More respectably, you can use these criteria to take your true but fluffy story and make it sound 100% gripping and real.

* Why I drafted US patent application 16/573921 to get the U.S. Government to recognize my Most Valuable Email trick as novel, non-obvious, and having concrete, practical applications.

* Two methods for presenting a persuasive argument, as spelled out by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. I illustrate these two methods with a little public debate that Daniel Throssell and I engaged in via our respective email newsletters. Daniel and I each adopted opposing methods, just as described by Kahneman.

* An infotainment secret I stole from Ben Settle. As far as I know, Ben doesn’t teach this secret in his books or newsletters — I found it by tracking Ben’s emails over a 14-day period and spotting Ben using it in 8 of those 14 emails. And no, I’m not talking about teasing, or telling a story, or stirring up conflict. This is something more fundamental, and more broadly useful, even beyond daily emails.

3. The Shangri La Library Of Rare And Priceless Ideas. 937 interesting ideas I’ve collected over the years from books, podcasts, newsletters, courses. Reach into this library to never again run out of ideas for your Most Valuable Emails.

So there you go. My Shangri La MVE offer:

A payment plan for Most Valuable Email that only appears twice in a century… 12 bonus persuasion secrets… and all the email ideas you will ever need.

This offer is good until tonight, Friday Oct 11, at 12 midnight PST.

If you’re at all interested, the time to act is now. That’s because of that simple certainty I wrote about yesterday — there won’t ever be a better time.

I won’t be running big promo events for Most Valuable Email, because it doesn’t fit my policy of treating previous customers with respect.

On the other hand, if you get MVE now, you will also be eligible for any future disappearing bonuses I might offer with it, or any other special offer or real I will make to new buyers also.

If you’d like to take me up on this Shangri La offer, before it disappears:

​​https://bejakovic.com/mve/​​

P.S. And yes, if you have already bought MVE, you also get the Shangri La Disappearing Secrets and the Shangri La Library Of Rare And Priceless Ideas. No need to write me for them. I’ll add them straight inside the MVE course area.

A hard way to live

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There have been periods of my life — years at a time — when I’ve made a habit of walking up to strange but attractive women on the street, giving them a compliment, and starting a conversation.

It’s surprisingly hard to do.

Not because of the women. The worst that ever happens from their side is a polite thank you and a smile.

The best that ever happens — well, I’ve had two long-term relationships that started in this way.

No, the reason it’s hard is because of my own fears, insecurities, and the stories I tell myself.

For example, if I see an attractive woman walking on an empty street, I will think, “It’s not a great place to go talk to her… she will be freaked out because there’s nobody else around.”

On the other hand, if I see even one other person around, I will think, “It’s not a great place to go talk to her… everybody will be standing around and watching.”

In other words, right is bad, left is bad, and you don’t want to go straight either.

A hard way to live, no?

I’m telling you this because yesterday I wrote an email promoting a new book by Travis Sago. As I said in that email, I’ve listened to Travis and learned more from him this year than from anybody else.

Even though Travis doesn’t sell any courses for less than a few grand, and even though his yearly mastermind costs something like $50k, this book is a $9.99 summary of his best marketing ideas.

And yet, in reply to my email yesterday, I got the following message from a reader:

“It’s only got 42 reviews… not great”

I’m featuring this reader reply because I recognized myself in it. Maybe you can recognize yourself too.

Specifically, maybe you can recognize the part of the brain that likes to make living hard. It says things like:

“It’s only got 42 reviews… not great. It can’t be, if nobody else is reading it.”

Or…

“It’s already got 420 reviews… not great. Everybody else has read this, so I can’t get any advantage from it.”

The fact is, a good idea is a good idea, whether it comes in a new or old package, whether it’s popular or fringe.

I’m currently re-reading the Robert Collier Letter Book, which was published 100 years ago and which has hundreds of 5-star reviews. I’m also reading Travis’s book, which was published a month ago and has 42 5-star reviews.

I could give you more proof to back up Travis’s credibility.

Would more proof matter to you?

Maybe. Or maybe that part of your brain that likes to make living hard would still pipe up with a new story.

One thing I’ve learned over all those years of walking up to women on the street is that you don’t always have to accept all the stories your brain serves up.

Life can be easier, more successful, and actually more pleasant that way.

Also, if you’d like to get Travis’s book, and maybe learn something valuable, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/sandwich

Future Pacing Club

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In 2019, FEMA concluded that there were only two kinds of natural disaster that could bring down the entire system everywhere all at once.

The first is a pandemic.

I’m reading an article about the second one right now.

I’m not sure if there has already been a financial promo around this topic, but it seems custom-made for it:

A small, remote laboratory, filled with elite scientists who all have ties to the U.S. military…

… mysterious, almost supernatural events — “electric fluid” seeping out from appliances, spontaneous fires bursting out, telegraph messages being sent via unplugged equipment…

… and of course, really big consequences. Like REALLY big. This isn’t “End of America” we’re talking about. This is “End of World.”

Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before.

I’m talking about coronal mass ejections and solar flares, or in one term, solar storms.

If you do write financial, and if this isn’t an idea that’s already been exploited, then maybe you can use it as a hook for a promo.

I don’t write financial copy, never have, and imagine never will.

But the article I’m reading did spark excitement and interest in me. Solar storms happen in 11-year cycles, from low to high. We are currently at the high, so you can expect major solar-related snafus between now and 2025.

And if a catastrophic solar storm doesn’t happen now, it might happen in 2035, or really any time between — because just like storms on Earth, solar storms don’t confine themselves just to storm seasons.

All this gave me an idea. I called this idea Future Pacing Club.

I personally enjoy finding out, researching, and thinking about current trends and what the future might bring.

It’s not just idle chin-stroking, either. This kind of info can be valuable – as marketing fodder, in spotting new business opportunities, or simply in knowing to stockpile cans of beans and tuna in anticipation for the hell that’s coming. (Actually, never mind about that last one.)

Of course, there’s only so many trends I will spot, and most of my interpretations of where the future will go will be limited or most likely wrong.

That’s why I had the idea for an exclusive club, to make this an activity shared among a few interested, smart, invested people.

So if 1) you work in marketing, if have your own business, or if you invest, and 2) if you’re interested in a place to get exposed to current trends and what the future might bring, then maybe such a club could be interesting to you too?

I don’t know. But if does sound interesting, reply to this email and let me know.

I definitely won’t create and run something like this just for myself. I would also want it to feel exclusive, intimate, and valuable.

I’m not sure yet how that might work. ​​

But if there’s interest, and the right kind of interest, then maybe something can come of this idea, and maybe it could be valuable and interesting for you too. The only way to know is to reply to this email.

In the words of Robert Collier:

“But remember, in the great book of Time there is but one word — ‘NOW'” — so drop your reply in an email now.

Curious George creates a course

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It’s been three days since I wrote an email about the 40th anniversary of the first broadcast of The Day After, which happened on November 20 1983.

​​A reader wrote in to ask about that:

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Beautiful story…but where do you find this kind of story?

Do you google the events for this day or something else? I’m really curious.

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The short answer is that, like Curious George, I’m a good little monkey, and always curious.

In the particular case of The Day After email, the sequence of events was as follows:

1. A few months ago, I was reading an email by Lawrence Bernstein. Lawrence was talking about how he managed to delete his entire email list. As he put it, “Sunday morning felt like one of my favorite dark films from 1983, ‘The Day After.'”

2. I had never heard of The Day After so I made a note of it in a list of “movies to watch” that I have been keeping for years.

3. Some time later, I watched The Day After, without knowing anything about it except that Lawrence likes it.

4. After watching the movie, I was curious to find out more. So I read up on it. I was impressed to find out all the stuff connecting The Day After to Ronald Reagan and the Soviets and nuclear war averted.

5. A few days later, the thought popped into my mind to check when exactly The Day After was first broadcast. It turned out the 40th anniversary was coming up in a few weeks’ time. I thought it might be cool to write about it on the actual anniversary. So I made a calendar entry telling me to write an email about it on the day of.

6. The calendar notification fired a few days ago. So I wrote down an outline of what I remembered about the movie. I plumped it up with some details taken from Wikipedia and ¡tachán!

The particulars of how I wrote that email are probably completely useless to you.

But there are a few underlying principles which you might profit from. Such as for example:

​​Keeping extensive notes and having lists of everything you might care about…

​Digging in when you come across an unfamiliar reference from somebody you respect…

O​​r using your calendar app to make your life easier and to make sure stuff gets done when it should.

Over the past few years, I’ve come up with a handful of such processes to make sure I never forget a good idea, never fail to draw a valuable connection, never miss out on a profitable opportunity.

Of course, it doesn’t work all the time. Or even much of the time.

​​Even so, these processes have been incredibly valuable to to me for daily email writing, previously for client work, futurely for new projects I am starting up.

This stuff has become such an integral part of how I work that I created a course, Insight Exposed, all about how I keep notes, and write journals, and process all of the ideas and information coming at me so I can turn them into something productive and profitable.

I released Insight Exposed back in February for a few days. But I haven’t been selling it since.

I will release it again soon, after I’ve polished it a bit. But more about that in its own email.

For now, let me just share something valuable that I’ve kept track of thanks to my Insight Exposed system.

It’s an article I came upon back in September. It was published in the lying New York Time, but in the opinion section, so maybe it’s true.

In any case, I found it insightful, so much so that i took note of it, processed the note, and put it into long-term storage, so I could share it with you today. In case you’re curious:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/17/opinion/sports-zen-mental-subtraction.html

How the mosquito built Rome

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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

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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.

Reader asks me how to read faster and retain the information

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I’ve been busy the last few days. Whenever I’m busy, I default to writing these emails in the easiest possible way. In my case, that’s emails about interesting or valuable ideas I’ve read somewhere.

Today, I have a bit more time, so I can indulge in writing an email that doesn’t come so easy to me, the Q&A email. A reader wrote in with a question last night, following my email yesterday:

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This was very insightful, you somehow always send an email related to something I’m trying to improve at the moment, thank you.

In the context of Reading, what strategy would YOU recommend to read faster and retain the information?

Will be trying the mentioned focus on the subtlety and easy to miss. details.

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My 100% serious answer:

If you want to read faster and retain the information, my best recommendation is to read slow.

​​It’s what I do. It helps that I read very slowly by nature, almost at a 5-year-old’s pace. But these days, I even encourage myself in it.

Reading slowly is how I always have lots of interesting ideas that I read somewhere that I can throw into an email if I’m rushed for time. Actually, it’s reading slowly, and taking lots of hand-written notes — of things that surprised me, made me smile, or reminded me of something else I had been reading.

Like the following, said once by a man often called the world’s greatest living copywriter, Gary Bencivenga. Gary was talking about how he researches a book that he will then write a sales package for:

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You almost have to read a sentence, and think about it. Read another sentence. “Is there any possible drop of juice I could squeeze from this orange to turn it into marketing enticement in some way?” Don’t let a single paragraph go by without pausing. You don’t want to just race through it. Give it a lot of time, and think about each thing you’re looking at.

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Gary said that during his farewell seminar, which cost $5k to attend back in 2006, and the same large amount if you wanted to get the recordings.

Gary could charge that much money for a seminar because of his status — the results he had gotten, the endorsements from top people in the industry.

But there was another reason Gary could charge that much for his knowledge and experience. And that’s scarcity.

Gary never attended conferences. He never got up on stage to give talks. He almost never gave interviews.

In fact, I know of only two interviews Gary ever gave. One of those is with Ken McCarthy, and you have to join Ken’s System Club to get it. The other was a 6-part interview with A-list copywriter Clayton Makepeace, which was available for free on Clayton’s website until Clayton died and the website shut down.

If you take a bit of time and trouble, you can go on the Internet Archive and dig up all 6 parts of this interview. Or you can take me up on my offer today.

Because I’ve gone on the Internet Archive previously, and downloaded all 6 parts for my own files. If you’d like me to share them with you, write in, tell me which book or books you’re reading right now, and I’ll reply with the Gary B/Clayton MP interview.