Persuasion

God I hate marketing

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I was at the gym yesterday, listening to a Spanish-language podcast — two likeable and chill Mexican guys, Hector and Beto, having a conversation in Spanish about ordinary things.

Halfway through the episode, Hector said the Spanish equivalent of, “And now we have to tell you about our new sponsor.”

I ran to my phone in desperation so I could skip ahead before hearing anything about the sponsor. I still heard the guys continuing the conversation for a bit, now about a new language-learning app.

After I skipped past the sponsored content, I thought, how odd. I mean, I listen to this podcast for the comprehensible input, and because I like these two guys. What does it matter if they’re talking about the traffic in Mexico City versus some new language-learning app?

I recently had a conversation with my friend Sam. Somehow that conversation veered to the 90s TV drama My So-Called Life, which was supposed to represent the lives of teenagers at the time.

I remember the cool, hot guy in that show, played by Jared Leto, casually mentioning in one episode that he was going to a Dinosaur Jr. concert. That made my teen self dismiss Dinosaur Jr. for the next 15 years. I figured if they were being plugged on TV, they must be shit. (Later, I somehow rediscovered Dinosaur Jr. and thought they were amazing.)

The point is, I hate marketing. I use the word “hate” because it’s adequate to represent the strength of my feeling here. I hate having somebody step into my life and tell me what to think or do, or worse yet, helpfully “suggest” it in a way that seems altruistic but that is of course self-interested.

And yet…

I have frequently bought stuff because I was marketed to. I have bought courses, subscriptions, clothes, food, shoes, and books because of marketing.

I’ve also bought experiences — hotel rooms, trips, rental cars, conferences, and one time, a hot-air-baloon ride — because somebody marketed it to me.

I’ve probably made even more fundamental choices in life — universities to apply to, cities to live in, careers to choose, attitudes to believe in — based on marketing.

In each of those cases, had I thought about the marketing at all, I would have been grateful for the guidance and help, at least at the moment of purchase, and if the actual product or service turned out to be good, later as well.

Aaron Sorkin once talked about good manipulation vs. bad manipulation. “There’s no difference,” said Sorkin. “It’s only when manipulation is obvious, then it’s bad manipulation.”

I used to think Sorkin was right. I don’t think so any more.

I don’t think it’s about obvious vs. non-obvious.

Good manipulation is simply the manipulation that ends up working. At least that’s what I can see in myself.

When somebody successfully manipulates me, I backwards rationalize and justify and tell myself that I am grateful and this person is cool for cluing me in and guiding and taking me to some place better or at least new.

Bad manipulation, on the other hand, is the kind that ends up not working.

No matter how helpful, funny, cute, informative the manipulation aims to be, I end up interpreting it at best as a distraction, at worst as an insult to my intelligence and self-sovereignty.

All that’s to say, if you want to influence others — and unless you’re a Carmelite nun, who lives according to a vow of total obedience, then you try to influence others most of the time — you might as well become effective at it.

It’s not only a matter of getting what you want in life more often, but also of being seen as a cool, helpful person more often, rather than as a distraction or a “manipulator.”

And with that, I’d like to remind you of my new 10 Commandments book. Much of the book deals with techniques to overcome people’s natural tendency to resist and react being moved — even though they will end up happy and grateful if you do succeed in moving them.

Specifically, Commandments I-V, Commandments VIII-IX, and the apocryphal 11th commandment that I give away as a bonus at the end of the book, are all one way or another about this tricky and inevitable conflict in human nature.

In case you haven’t gotten a copy of my new book yet:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Somebody has beat me to the 10 Commandments of Con Men

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As you might know, I have been working, toiling, grabulating for the past two years on my new book, full title:

10 Commandments of Con Men, Pickup Artists, Magicians, Door-to-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand Up Comedians, and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters

I had a minor heart attack earlier when I discovered that somebody has already beat me to the core concept. An Austrian con man named Victor Lustig, who lived and scammed in the early 20th century and who apparently sold the Eiffel Tower twice (!), apparently kept a list of 10 Commandments of Con Men. Here’s old Victor’s list:

1. Be a patient listener

2. Never look bored

3. Wait for the other person to reveal any political opinions, then agree with them

4. Let the other person reveal religious views, then have the same ones

5. Hint at sex talk, but don’t follow it up unless the other person shows a strong interest

6. Never discuss illness, unless some special concern is shown

7. Never pry into a person’s personal circumstances (they’ll tell you all eventually)

8. Never boast – just let your importance be quietly obvious

9. Never be untidy

10. Never get drunk

Are you impressed? Yes? No?

All I can tell you is that, after I read Lustig’s 10 Commandments, I personally took a big sigh of relief. I found his 10 Commandments rather dull and uninspiring, and fortunately, I found that there’s zero overlap (well, minus the hinting at sex talk) between his commandments and the 10 Commandments I have in my new book.

Most importantly, I was reminded once again that the value is almost never in the ideas (ie. commandments) themselves, but in how those ideas are presented, illustrated, and made to shine.

That’s why it took me so long to complete my book. And complete it I did.

I can tell you that, following two years of ups and downs, missed deadlines, and a few dozen readers writing me messages to the effect of “done is better than perfect,” I am proud and a little nervous to announce that my book will finally be published.

When?

Tomorrow.

Why not today?

Well, maybe Lustig was on to something. Don’t pry into my personal circumstances (I’ll tell you all eventually). Meanwhile, I have nothing to promote to you today — but I will tomorrow.

Platform is magic

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I went for a walk this morning and as I was dodging the puddles from last night’s rain, I listened to a podcast, a conversation between James Schramko and Dean Jackson.

In case those names are not familiar to you, both belong to Internet marketers who have been in the business a combined 50+ years.

Both James and Dean have made many millions of dollars for themselves and many more for their clients and customers.

Whatever. The point is simply that, in the little corner of the Internet where I live, these guys are influential and established and respected. I’ve known about each for many years, and I’ve been paying attention to both intensely over the past year.

This morning, while listening to the podcast, James Schramko talked about changes he had made to his business following the advice of his friend, a guy named Kory Basaraba.

That caught my attention and maybe made me step into a puddle.

The fact is, I’ve known Kory for years. A few years ago, back when I was still doing freelance copywriting stuff, I even worked with him.

Through this experience, I know Kory is smart, successful, and established. But on hearing his name being mentioned on a podcast, by two people I follow, I felt some sort of electric jolt.

I don’t know how wide of a reach this Schramko/Dean podcast episode might get. Maybe a few thousand people, maybe tens of thousands? In any case it’s not Joe Rogan.

It doesn’t matter. My opinion of Kory, while it was positive before, suddenly jumped. He got the warm bright glow of a star in my eyes.

Of course, I’m a hardened cynic and a bit of a wizard when it comes to knowing influence spells. So I quickly shook my head to clear my mind from this strange persuasion.

But I wanted to share this story with you, such as it is, for a bit of motivation.

I don’t understand what it is about having a platform. Maybe I’ll figure it out one day.

Right now, my best answer is that having a platform is simply magic.

A few hundred or a few thousand people around the world listen to you. It’s not a tremendous amount of reach or power. But it doesn’t matter.

The very fact of having a platform, of speaking to a group of people, gives you status and authority and charisma, and even the power to transfer that to others, simply by mentioning their name. That’s magic.

The motivating part is that, if you haven’t done so already, you can do this same thing for yourself.

Nobody’s stopping you from starting a podcast, or writing an email newsletter, today.

Like I said, you don’t need a tremendous overall audience to have a tremendous influence on the people who do listen or read to what you have to say. I can vouch for that from personal experience, having been both on top of the platform at certain times, and in the audience, looking up, at other times.

I know nothing about podcasting. But I know something about newsletters. Such as for example, that the more often you send emails, the greater your influence over the people in your audience.

And with that in mind, let me point you to a service that can help make it easier to send something every day, so you can work your magic quickly:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Солярис

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Last night, I went to the movies. By myself. At 10pm, which is pretty much my bedtime.

First came one trailer — some Iraq war thriller with Matt Damon as a solider yelling at other soldiers and lots of explosions and jets swooping in and rapid-fire editing between more yelling and explosions and gunfire.

Then came another trailer — a horror movie about vampires in the deep south, with bloody mouths and fangs and a vampire banging his head on the door of a wood cabin, asking to be let in, while the non-vampires inside cower and transfer their fear to the audience.

And then, after about six total minutes of this adrenaline-pumping overstimulation, the screen got dark. A Bach piece on organ started playing and a barebones title card showed the name of the movie:

Солярис

… or Solaris, if you can’t read that. A three-hour-long science fiction movie from 1972. In Russian, which I don’t speak. With Spanish subtitles, which I can barely read before they disappear. The movie opens up with a five-minute sequence of a man walking next to a lake, without any dialogue.

I’ve seen Solaris twice before, years ago. A few days ago, I finished reading the science fiction novel on which it’s based. When I saw it was playing at the local old-timey movie theater, I decided I would violate my usual bedtime and go see it again, and on the big screen.

I’m not trying to sell you on Solaris. All I really want to highlight is the contrast that was so obvious between those new Hollywood trailers and the start of the 1972 Russian movie. It reminded me of something I read in William Goldman’s Adventures In The Screen Trade:

“In narrative writing of any sort, you must eventually seduce your audience. But seduce doesn’t mean rape.”

Goldman was writing in a different era. He was contrasting movie writing to TV writing.

At the beginning of a movie, Goldman said, you have some time. You can seduce. Things are different in TV land — you gotta be aggressive, right in the first few seconds. Otherwise the viewer will simply change the channel.

Things have changed since Goldman wrote the above. Today, all Hollywood movies have become like TV. That doesn’t eliminate the fact that different formats allow you to do different things, and that not every movie needs to start with a heart-pounding sequence of bloody vampires banging their heads on the door.

The bigger point is, just because you know a trick, this doesn’t require you to use it at every damn opportunity. Holding back can in fact can make the show better.

A year ago, I read a book titled Magic And Showmanship, about… magic and showmanship. The author of that book, a magician named Henning Nelms, kept coming back to a principle he called conservation.

Conservation is keeping from overselling what you’ve got, and from making yourself out to be more skilled or powerful than absolutely necessary for the effect in question.

It’s a lesson that can apply to a lot of showmanship, including showmanship in print.

Anyways, I suspect nobody will take me up on a recommendation to read Nelms’s Magic And Showmanship, but recommend it I will. In order to sell it to you, I can only say that last year, I was even thinking of taking the ideas from this book and turning them into a full-blown course or training about running email promos, because I found the ideas so transferable.

In case you’re a curious type, or in case you simply want new ideas for running email promos:

https://bejakovic.com/nelms

The dark side of social proof

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Here’s a story of a lovely refund:

Some time ago, I promoted an affiliate offer. As with all affiliate offers I promote, I made sure it’s a great offer I can fully get behind.

A guy from my list, somebody who regularly replied to my emails but never bought anything, bought this offer via my affiliate link. Then a few days later, he refunded it.

That’s part of the deal. Sometimes people buy, and if you offer a money back guarantee, sometimes they refund.

The following however is not part of the deal:

That refunding customer started writing me emails. First he explained that the course he bought didn’t have that “wow factor” and that’s why he refunded. He also asked what I would have done in the same situation?

In a future email, he complained that the course creator wasn’t replying to emails and inquiries quickly enough.

And finally, once the refunding reader got his refund, he claimed he couldn’t see the money landing in his bank account (even though the money was refunded as per ThriveCart). He kept writing me updates about the supposedly pending refund for a couple months.

Maybe the point of my story is not really clear, so let me spell it out:

The point is social proof.

People take an action or make a decision.

They then have to create the reality for themselves that this was the right thing to do.

And since we are social animals, that means getting others to agree with us and feed that back to us, otherwise it’s not really real.

That’s what I felt was going on here. This refunding customer seemed to have no rancor for me for promoting an offer that he decided to refund. Quite the opposite. He was writing me messages for months, trying to get me in some way to agree that either the course or the course creator were to blame, and that he was right in his decision.

Maybe you know the famous story of a UFO cult who was expecting a UFO to land in Chicago on Dec 21 1954, and whisk away the believers before a huge tidal wave wiped out the face of the Earth.

December 21 came and went. No UFO came. No tidal wave came either.

The UFO cult was headed by a woman named Dorothy Martin. She was in contact with the aliens via automatic writing (and sometimes over the phone).

In the hours after the supposed UFO arrival failed to materialize, Martin got the message that the aliens had decided to spare the Earth because of the good work of the UFO cult in spreading the word.

But here’s the really curious thing:

The UFO cult, which until then had been very secretive, very hostile to publicity, very closed to outsiders, suddenly went on a PR blitz, announcing to the world the good news. It was no longer enough for the cultists to be in direct contact with powerful aliens who had decided to spare the Earth from destruction — everybody else had to know about it too.

So that’s the dark side of social proof. We don’t just rely on others’ experiences to help guide our beliefs and decisions. We also seek to convince others that our beliefs and past experiences are right.

That’s all I got for you today. I realize it’s a somehow nasty thing to talk about, a bit destabilizing and inhuman. A positive way to spin it is that our reality is co-created with others, and that you have the opportunity to impact and guide that.

Anyways, if you want to see social proof in action, I’ve got about six pages’ worth of it below in the form of testimonials, creating a reality that my Daily Email Habit is a wonderful service, maybe the best service in the world, at least if you have an email list. I believe it, and I really want you to believe it too, so please click through and start reading:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Operation Mincemeat

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Today being April 30th it’s a particularly good day to tell you about Operation Mincemeat. Here’s a debrief I read about it a few weeks ago:

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Early on the morning of April 30, 1943, a floating body was discovered off the southern coast of Spain. Retrieved by a fisherman, it was brought to the city of Huelva and identified as Captain William Martin, of the British Royal Marines. A briefcase chained to the corpse contained documents indicating that the Allies planned to advance on Greece and Sardinia — intel that the Nazi-sympathizing Spanish authorities passed on to the Germans.

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The Germans decided to act on the intel, and shifted their troops to Greece and Sardinia. But the allies attacked neither Greece nor Sardinia.

Instead, the Allies attacked and easily took unguarded Sicily, which was their plan all along. The taking of Sicily in turn opened the door to mainland Italy… which led to the overthrow of Mussolini… which fractured the Axis… which shifted the balance of World War II.

As you might have guessed, Operation Mincemeat was a fakeout all along.

The corpse of “Captain William Morris” was really that of Glyndwr Michael, a London tramp who had died some days earlier by eating rat poison.

Michael’s corpse was transported by submarine to the waters off southern Spain, dressed up in a Royal Marines uniform, and left to float. The documents in the briefcase chained to the corpse were all forged by British military intelligence to make the Germans think they had stumbled onto something real.

I’m sharing this with you because 1) it’s curious and was new to me, so maybe it’s new to you too, and 2) because it’s applicable in your business as well, even if you don’t have a corpse at hand and even if you’re not engaged in a historic struggle with the Nazis.

In fact, this story ties in great to a lead magnet I have devised to go with my new 10 Commandments book, which is an extra, apocryphal 11th Commandment I’ll be giving new readers who sign up to my list. (If you’re an existing reader, you’ll be able to get it too.)

Some of the early reviewers of my book have gotten back to me. I’m eagerly integrating their feedback into the final draft of the book. I’m both excited and relieved to hear that, in spite of niggles here and there, the overall impression of the book has been very positive so far.

And so, it looks like, after a years-long and grueling struggle with this book, the balance has shifted. May 2025 will finally see the publication of this new book, full title:

10 Commandments of Con Men, Pickup Artists, Magicians, Door-to-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Professional Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand Up Comedians, and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters

Speaking of, I have an offer to make you, or maybe a favor to ask.

Do you have an audience of your own? A newsletter, an online community, a local book club or bingo group?

What I want is for you to promote my book when it comes out. Of course, that means nothing to you and does nothing for you. I don’t know what I can offer you to make it worth your while to promote my book when it comes out, but I am open to all kinds of ideas, from straightforward to outlandish.

If you are open to it as well, at least in theory, hit reply. Let’s talk, and maybe we can figure something out that works for both of us.

Top 3%

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I just finished playing today’s Which Year puzzle. I wrote about Which Year yesterday:

A new puzzle game, currently trending on, or speeding along, the digital superhighway.

Which Year shows you photos, and you try to guess the year the photo was taken. The closer the better.

Yesterday, I made the claim that the main reason Which Year has quickly gained popularity is not the core idea (solid, even if it’s nothing magical), but the tweak, taken from Wordle, that new puzzles are only available once a day, and everybody gets the same.

But there’s another big reason for Which Year’s fast success, and it’s again taken from Wordle:

After you finish puzzling today’s Which Year puzzles (5 separate images), you see your score compared to everyone else in the world.

I placed in the top 3%, and am very proud to tell you so, which is really the point of meh email today. The point goes all the way back to one of the founders of psychotherapy, Alfred Adler.

Adler disagreed with Freud that sex is the basis of man’s struggle in life. Instead, Adler believed that a feeling of inferiority was the core human experience and drive.

You might think I’m really stretching this email, having started out with a trending puzzle game 10 sentences ago and now telling you about psychotherapy and inferiority as the basis of human experience.

But that’s kind of Adler’s point. Wanting to not feel inferior — not wanting to be first necessarily, but definitely not wanting to be last, or close to last — is a key driver of everything we do, all the time. It’s the reason for the clothes we choose, the vacations we take, and the games we play, whether hidden (such as Mine Is Better Than Yours) or overt (Which Year).

Translate that to marketing and business, and you get:

If you wanna motivate people, then appeal to what’s already motivating to them. Bolt a bit of scarcity or inferiority-avoidance onto your core idea — solid, even if nothing magical — and you can create a global hit. Or at least something that’s not in last place, or close to last.

So much for motivation. In other news:

This morning, I’ve shipped off the draft of my new 10 Commandments book to a few friends for feedback. While that’s happening, I would like to remind you of my own daily puzzle game, which integrates some fundamental human motivators that I cribbed from Wordle. You can find out more about it here:

​https://bejakovic.com/deh

P.S. Yesterday, I asked three “Which Year” text puzzles. Here are the answers:

1. The first (and so far only) killer swamp rabbit attack on a U.S. president happened on April 20, 1979. (The president was Jimmy Carter.)

2. Nutella debuted on Italian store shelves on April 20, 1964.

3. Oil prices dropped below zero (if you could buy a lot, and have somewhere to put it), on April 20, 2020.

Which year?

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I opened up Hacker News today to find a trending website, Which Year, that shows you a photo and then you try to guess what year the photo was taken.

“Ok,” I thought, “but why so popular?”

For reference, Hacker News is a kind of link-sharing site where thousands of nerds congregate every day and upvote for the links they like best and downvote the rest.

Most links shared on Hacker news get a few dozen summed-up points, some get up to 100. Which Year, which was posted just 9 hours ago, currently has 349 points, which is by far the most of any link posted today.

I clicked through to Which Year out of idle curiosity, and it was immediately obvious to me why this simple concept has proven so popular. Right up top, it says:

“Which Year DAILY CHALLENGE”

In other words, whoever made this site took a page out of Wordle’s playbook.

While the core idea of Which Year — see picture, guess year — is fine but nothing groundbreaking, limiting how often you can play to once a day, and serving up the same puzzle to everyone in the world at the same time, immediately ups the desirability, coolness, and engagement factor of this puzzle game.

(That’s a page I’ve taken out of Wordle’s playbook myself, and applied to my Daily Email Habit service.)

Anyways, there’s clearly a marketing lesson in there, but rather than hit you over the head with that on this Easter Sunday, let’s play a game.

Today being April 20, I thought we could play a game called, Which Year, Email Edition.

Can you guess in which years the following curiosities happened?

Of course, you can get ChatGPT to answer for ya. Or you can simply wait 24 hours, when I will reveal the answers and give you a new round of puzzles. Here are your puzzles:

1. A killer swamp rabbit attacked a U.S. president (won’t say which one) while the man was trying to fish and relax

2. Nutella was first introduced in stores

3. The price of oil turned negative for the first time in history

Again, come up with your best guesses for which years these events happened, and I’ll share the answers tomorrow.

Oh, and if you want to play another daily challenge, one which isn’t just fun but can also make you money, then you can still sign up to get the next Daily Email Habit puzzle. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Bitter prediction

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Derek Johanson is apparently running a launch of CopyHour this week. I say “apparently” because there was some mixup with Derek’s emails, and they only arrived to my inbox today. I opened one this morning to read the following bitter prediction:

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Back in the 1960s, researchers were looking at the productivity improvements computers were about to bring – and sounded the alarm because it looked like humans were soon going to only be working 2 hours a day with the same output.

What would we do with all that free time!? What will happen to the economy!?

Obviously that’s not what happened. Instead of working less, we just started outputting a lot more in the same amount of time.

I have a feeling we’re going through a similar cycle now.

AI is about to replace a lot of the work we’re doing now – not just copywriting, but everything. But, instead of not working, we’re likely just all going to start outputting 10x-100x what we used to because of those advances in AI.

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If you wanna lose money, put your chips on “But this time it’s different!” In other words, the Lindy Effect backs up Derek’s bitter prediction.

We’ve had breakthroughs in labor-saving technology for hundreds of years. At each point, the Powers That Be started worrying, “If people aren’t working, what the hell are we gonna do with them?”

The result was that, with each new labor-saving technology, some way was devised to keep people as busy are before, or busier, while simply making their output 100x greater.

But, and I realize I’m most likely going to shoot myself in the foot here, this time it’s different, at least the way I see it.

It’s not so much because the latest crop of AI is such a powerful labor-saving tool, though that’s certainly a requirement.

Rather, I think it’s because other parts of society have changed from the days of mainframe computers and rotary presses and spinning jennies.

Maybe I’m biased, but I see more and more people working for themselves, or with a range of clients or customers or followers, rather than with one single boss. This makes it more likely that people can work from where they want, as much or as little as they want, rather than 40+ hours, take it or leave it, from our office in downtown Baltimore, exclusively on the employer’s terms.

Or if you want to get more dark, I also think the Powers That Be are fine to let us have our leisure today because they now have other ways of controlling the world that they didn’t have before. That could be monetary, technological, or simply via TikTok propaganda.

All that’s to say, my prediction is that this time it really is different.

We genuinely are entering an era where unprecedented numbers of people free up leisure time for themselves, and work only on things they choose to do, in moderation, rather than obsessively running on the hamster wheel because it’s either run or die.

AI is an inevitable part of this transformation. And you can get started with it today. Which brings me to the offer I am promoting nowadays, ChatGPT Mastery.

I wrote an email about ChatGPT Mastery yesterday that did surprisingly well.

Direct marketing dogma says if something is working, don’t touch it.

So here is my email from yesterday, reprinted word for word, in case you want to automate some of your work and free up some of your time:

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Today I’d like to recommend to you a 30-day program called ChatGPT Mastery, which is about… mastering ChatGPT, with the goal of having a kind of large and fast horse to ride on.

Here’s a list of exciting facts I’ve prepared for you about this new offer:

#1. ChatGPT Mastery is a cohort course — it kicks off and ends on a specific date — that helps you actually integrate and benefit from AI.

The idea being, things in the AI space are changing so fast that anything that came out even a few months ago is likely to be out of date.

And rather than saying “Oh let me spend a few dozen hours every quarter researching the latest advice on how to actually use this stuff” — because you won’t, just like I won’t – you can just get somebody else to do the work of cutting a path for you through the quickly regenerating AI jungle.

#2. I myself have gone through through ChatGPT Mastery, from A-Z, all 30 days, during the last cohort.

I didn’t pay for it because I was offered to get in for free.

I did go through it first and foremost for my own selfish interests — I feel a constant sense of guilt over not using AI enough in what I do — and only then with a secondary goal of promoting it if I benefited from it enough. So here I am.

#3. ChatGPT Mastery is created and run by Gasper Crepinsek. Gasper is an ex-Boston Consulting Group guy and from what I can tell, one of those hardworking and productive consulting types, the kind I look upon with a mixture of wonder and green envy.

But to hear Gasper tell it, he quit his consulting job to have more freedom, started creating info products online like everybody else, realized he had just bought himself another 70 hr/week job, and then had the idea to automate as much of it as he could with AI.

He’s largely succeeded — he now spends his mornings eating croissants and sipping coffee while strolling around Paris, because most of his work of content creation and social media and even his trip planning have been automated in large part or in full.

#4. Before I went through the 30 days of ChatGPT Mastery, I had already been using ChatGPT daily for a couple years. Inevitably, that means a good part of what Gasper teaches was familiar to me.

Other stuff he teaches was simply not relevant (I won’t be using ChatGPT to write my daily emails, thank you). The way I still benefited from ChatGPT Mastery was:

– By having my mind opened to using ChatGPT for things for things I hadn’t thought of before (just one example: I did a “dopamine reset” protocol over 4 weeks, which was frankly wonderful, and which ChatGPT designed for me, and which I got the idea for while doing ChatGPT Mastery)

– By seeing Gasper’s very structured, consulting-minded approach to automating various aspects of his business, and being inspired to port some of that to my own specific situation

– With several valuable meta-prompts that I continue to use, such as the prompt for generating custom GPTs

#5. The way you could benefit from ChatGPT Mastery is likely to be highly specific to what you do and who you are.

The program focuses on a different use case every day. Some days will be more relevant to you than others. The previous cohort covered topics like competitor analysis, insights based on customer calls or testimonials, and of course the usual stuff like content and idea generation, plus hobuncha more.

If you do any of the specific things that Gasper covers, and if you do them on at least an occasional basis, then odds are you will get a great return on both the time and money and that ChatGPT Mastery requires of you, before the 30 days are out.

Beyond that, ChatGPT Mastery can open your mind to what’s possible, give you confidence and a bunch of examples to get you spotting what could be automated in what you do, plus the techniques for how to do it (I’ve already automated a handful of things in what I do, and I have a list of next things to do).

#6. The time required for ChatGPT Mastery is about 15-20 minutes per day for 30 days. The money required is an upfront payment of $199.

I can imagine that one or the other of these is not easy for you to eke out in the current moment.

All I can say is that it’s an investment that’s likely to pay you back many times over, in terms of both time and money. And the sooner you make that investment, the greater and quicker the returns will come.

#7. If you’d like to find out the full details about ChatGPT Mastery, or even to sign up before the cohort kicks off:

https://bejakovic.com/gasper

Eureka! The opposite of a humblebrag

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In this newsletter, I have a questionable habit of dissecting jokes to find out what their digestive and pulmonary systems look like. I’m about to do it right now as well, and I honestly think the result is gonna be amazing.

A couple days ago, I wrote about an interview I’d listened to with a Dublin barman, Brian Wynne. Here’s how Wynne introduces himself at the start of the podcast:

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As Michael Crichton said, I do sometimes suffer from a “deplorable excess of personality.”

I’m a friendly kind of an outgoing chap. I become friends with people easily. That’s what makes me, um, fit the bar trade so well is that, uh, I’m extremely likable… I’m incredibly handsome, intelligent, witty… you know? I am the most humble man in Ireland.

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Now here’s a riddle for ya:

If you ask people what characteristics they hate most in others, the top 2 Family Feud responses are likely to be 1) Arrogant and 2) Fake.

And yet, here is Wynne being either arrogant (“I am the most humble man in Ireland”) or fake (maybe he’s just saying he’s the most humble man in Ireland, but he doesn’t really mean it).

Of course, you probably don’t agree with either of those negative diagnoses of Wynne.

I can tell you that when I listened to him introduce himself in this way, I certainly didn’t get irritated by his supposed arrogance or repulsed by his supposed fakeness. In fact, he put a smile on muh fehs. I imagine this effect comes through in the transcript as well.

So the riddle for ya is:

What is Wynne doing/saying to make his message come across as it does?

I don’t have a good name for the effect he’s creating, but it’s kind of the opposite of a humblebrag. Maybe it could be called a boastful bond.

In any case, I have my own insightful ideas about what exactly Wynne is doing to achieve this effect.

My insightful ideas take advantage of my experience of 5+ years of running this daily newsletter, plus of course my own native intelligence, which truly is… something spectacular. An intelligence to behold. In fact, I might be the most brilliant man to ever write an email newsletter of middling reach and questionable influence.

If you’d like to get my immense insights on this topic, all I can really recommend is that you be signed up for my Daily Email Habit service before tomorrow, because I will have a daily puzzle and accompanying hints that allow you to do a “boastful bond” in your own emails as well.

After all, there’s no sense in just knowing how to do something without actually putting in in practice. And putting in practice is what Daily Email Habit is all about. If you’d like to sign up for it in time:

https://bejakovic.com/deh