Writing

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?

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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

What now?

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Back when I used to watch TED talks — what happened to them? — I saw one by Elizabeth Gilbert, the Eat Pray Love woman.

Gilbert’s talk came soon after she had published the book, which immediately went on to became a raging, runaway, international bestseller-to-be-made-into-a-movie-starring-Julia-Roberts.

Gilbert’s TED talk was about what now. What does she do now that she’s gotten everything she ever worked for? She seemed nervous, and she admitted to being afraid.

Weird, right?

Gilbert was probably set with money for the rest of her life. She had achieved more than 99.9% of people who ever dream of being a writer will ever achieve. She had endless amounts of praise and recognition.

And yet, what now?

This is a common thing. It happens whatever you’re after, not just with writing but whatever achievements you’re working towards, even with small goals.

Trivial though it sounds, it happens to me whenever I end up concluding a launch.

What now?

Usually I’ve been working on this thing for a while, building the actual product, preselling it, then there’s the climax of the launch promo. If it all goes well, I feel elated. For a bit. And then, what now?

I’ll tell ya.

I learned a long time ago that the answer is, now you get to work on the next thing, which is really where the satisfaction lies. As business coach Rich Schefren says, goals are there to get you excited to take action. That’s really their only purpose.

So this email is for you if you have recently completed a project or achieved a goal, and you’re wondering, “What now?”

Since I help getting people started with writing a daily email, maybe your next project could be writing, building a personal brand, or simply seeing what happens if you consistently send an email out each day into the world.

Because in my experience, the process of writing and publishing something every day is a micro-goal in itself.

It takes some work to do it. It’s satisfying to have done it. And then it starts all over again tomorrow. But again, that’s really where the satisfaction lies.

In any case, if you’d like my help with daily emailing as your new project:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Announcing: Writer MBA

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Today, I’d like to skip the infotainment and get you thinking about attending a live, in-person event called Writer MBA Conference.

I’m not personally going. I’m also not an affiliate for it. I really have no stake in it other than:

Reason #1: I know a segment of my audience is made up of writers — “writer” writers, not writers who, like me, are always fishing for a sale.

Maybe you’re in this “writer” writer group. If so, this conference could be valuable to you.

Reason #2. I know the guy behind Writer MBA. His name is Russell Nohelty.

Russell is a bestselling author of fantasy books and comics. He also writes about the business of writing, and he runs Writer MBA, a membership program to help writers make more money. And that’s what’s the conference will be about.

When I say I know Russell, I mean I know he’s a good guy.

The best proof is that Russell’s been around for a couple of decades, writing, for real, and writing about the business of writing.

Other people in the writing space work with Russell. They like him. They want to keep working with him, after all these years.

That’s because Russell pretty selflessly offers to help and contribute, without asking anything in return. Example:

When I was promoting a course this past fall, about using paid ads for building up your list, Russell wrote me and suggested we get on a call.

He could share his experiences spending close to $30,000 this year on building up his Substack audience to 70,000 readers.

He suggested we record the call, and then I could give it away as a free bonus to the course I was promoting.

So we did, and I did.

I then asked Russell if anything of his I could help him promote.

He said the Writer MBA Conference, because from what I can tell, it’s his baby. He takes it seriously. He wants to make it something really different to all the other conferences out there.

So here I am, telling you about the Writer MBA Conference.

The most bare-bones details are that it’s happening live and in person, in mid-March, in New Orleans.

As for the full details of why you might want to go, or why you might want to go to this particular conference, I’ll let Russell tell you about that. If you’re a “writer” writer, and you want to meet people who can help you succeed in what you do, take a look here:

https://writermba.com/

How I use AI in my latest little startup

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Comes a question from a tech-curious reader named Jordan:

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Yo John quick question, is the Daily Email Habit built with the AI tools you mentioned building in the “the death of infoproducts” email?

There seems to be a lot of tech behind this (Especially with the streak stuff) and it only makes me wonder.

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I mainly bring up this question so I can gush about AI. Have you heard about AI? It’s pretty incredible.

At the moment, AI is not doing the content behind the scenes at Daily Email Habit. I write each daily puzzle by hand, and I find the day’s meme or cartoon by hand also.

But as Jordan guessed, AI definitely helped (read: did everything) with the tech.

ChatGPT wrote all the back-end code I’m using to track the streaks for different Daily Email habit subscribers — how many days straight they have been sending a daily email — and to display each user’s streak inside of the Daily Email Habit email (not technically trivial).

And if in the future I decide to add more bells and whistles to Daily Email Habit, you can bet my ragged little AI elf will be the one doing all the work.

The reason why I’m telling you this:

If you’re only offering what you do as courses, or coaching, or really any kind of strict DIY how-to info, it’s worth thinking how to turn some or all of that into a cross-cut saw, or a calculator, or a Wordle-like daily puzzle, or at least how to add in a streak counter.

Because right now, creating tools or devices or games has become shockingly easy and quick, even if you don’t want to write a line of code. And a tool or a device or game can make your customers’ experience much nicer… and it can create a little moat around what you offer, beyond just your personal authority.

And AI does it all. Like I said, it’s pretty incredible.

Except, how do you decide what to tell AI to create?

How do you have cool ideas?

How do you find out what device or tool or game people in your market might want, and might be willing to pay for, so you can command AI to go down to the shed and make it?

Also, how do you develop a sense of taste, so that you don’t just accept the first thing that AI comes back with, but keep going until it matches your vision?

And once you do create something you’re happy with, how do you package it up and sell it?

For all that, my answer is as familiar as it is fundamental:

You write.

Writing gives you a point of view. It gives you a sense of taste. It exposes you to ideas, both your own (which might disappear otherwise) and from other people (which you might ignore otherwise).

Writing puts you in contact with people in your market, so you can get your finger on the pulse of what people are interested in and are willing to pay paying for.

And of course, writing helps you make better decisions — because writing is really an exercise in decision making.

In short, if you want to get the most out of AI, write.

It might sound self-serving when I say that. So let me share a message I got a couple days ago, from Justin Zack, who is the Head of Partnerships at Write With AI, a paid newsletter with 54,000 subscribers, all about how to… write with AI.

I figure if anybody has the inside scoop on getting AI to work for you, it’s Justin. And yet, Justin signed up for my Daily Email Habit service, so he can write and so he can think. Says Justin:

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I’m 2 days into the daily email habit (which means I have a 1-day streak, lol).

BUT, I friggin’ love it.

Exactly what I needed to get me thinking about my list and how to write better emails.

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Actually, I just checked, and Justin’s streak is up to three days now.

Maybe you can start your own streak?

To to find out the daily email puzzle I’m using as a starting point for each of my own emails… the same puzzle that folks like Justin are using to get over the initial hurdle, to write something more interesting, and to write something different than they might write otherwise… take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/deh