Persuasion

How to get drug-dealer levels of cash without selling drugs

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Last Monday, I wrote an email about Pinky Cole, the founder of Slutty Vegan, a fast-food brand with 11 locations, valued at $100M.

I’ve been traveling in the days since, so I didn’t get a chance to finish the New Yorker article where I first read about Pinky Cole.

I was reading that article again this morning. I found out that when Cole first launched Slutty Vegan back in 2018, she did so without a physical location, just on a bunch of food-delivery apps.

The first day, Cole sold exactly one slutty, meat-free hamburger.

Things inched and middled and crawled along at this pace until Cole hired Ludacris’s manager, Chaka Zulu. Zulu helped Cole get a bunch of rappers, including Snoop Dogg, to endorse Slutty Vegan. Result:

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From there, demand exploded. “I felt like a drug dealer,” Cole said. “We had, like, trash bags of money, because we only took cash.”

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Along with reading the New Yorker, today I’ve been preparing intensely for the live training that I will host this coming Monday, about how I write and profit from this newsletter.

I’ve been collecting ideas for that training over the past couple weeks, and today I also made a big brain dump.

I realized I will have to significantly pare back all the valuable ideas I could share, in order to have a training that makes sense and that doesn’t go on forever.

But one thing I’m sure to keep is the point of the Pinky Cole story above.

It should be obvious enough. But if you want me to spell it out, and show you how it fits into making money with a newsletter, particularly if you also work with clients at the same time, then join me for the training on Monday.

This training will be free.

It will happen on Monday January 22, 2024 at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. But you will have to be on my list first. Click here to sign up.

Potentially harmful testimonial

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This morning, my floating guardian angel, Fred Beyer, wrote me a new message.

Over the years, Fred has repeatedly appeared out of the ether and pointed out harmful glitches and technical muckups in my marketing that were costing me thousands of dollars in lost sales.

But this morning, Fred wasn’t pointing out a technical issue. Instead he sent me a warning about my copy, specifically about a potentially harmful testimonial for my Copy Riddles program. He wrote:

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There’s a testimonial on your sales page that mentions the initial $300 you charged for Copy Riddles.

“Probably the best 300 bucks I’ve ever spent”

I’ve come across this before myself and I’ve always felt kind of cheated when I found out the training was now significantly more expensive.

There’s an inner voice that goes: “Sure it was worth 300, but is it worth 1000?”

Obviously You’re the expert.

I just wanted to share, in case this little testimonial drowned in the hubbub of running your biz.

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Fred raises a good point.

That “best 300 bucks ever” is a kind of anti-anchoring. It goes against the smart marketing practice of pegging your price to a drastically higher sum, and then lopping off zeros to your prospect’s relief and joy.

Perhaps the thing to do would be to take that “300 bucks” testimonial down.

But I never miss an opportunity to flirt with sales prevention. So rather than take that testimonial down, I will actually highlight it. Here’s the full version, which came from Robert Smith, who runs his own CRO agency. Robert wrote:

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I’ve spent close to 150k on copy courses and mentors.

John Bejakovic’s Bullet Copy course is probably the best 300 bucks I’ve ever spent.

One word: “source”. He shows you source material — pre twist — and then re-twists it, so you know how the twist works.

Just send him an email and ask him to enroll you in it.

If, after lesson one, you don’t immediately say, “this is the best 300 bucks I’ve ever spent”, then send an email to rob@robertsmithmedia.com and I’ll send you a refund (then, write your name down in my book of “copywriters I’ll never hire.”)

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Robert went through Copy Riddles back in 2021. And yes, the course has gone up in price since.

I first sold Copy Riddles at a low price and I gradually pushed the price up — this made it psychologically easier to sell something of my own.

In the meantime, my own status has grown, the endorsements for Copy Riddles have poured in, and today I can and do sell this course for $1,000.

But that’s about me me me. What about you you you? How is it possibly fair to you that I’m charging $1,000 for Copy Riddles today, when I charged just $300 for it a couple years ago?

First of all, $1,000 is still a fair price and then some.

If you actually go through this course and apply what it teaches in a real marketing endeavor, then the info inside can be worth tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars to you over your career.

You might think that’s exaggeration. But it’s just the nature of copywriting and marketing. Good selling skills, multiplied over a large enough audience, can create a lot of wealth, and quickly.

Second, a high, achievable, but uncomfortable price actually makes it more likely you will profit from the course.

I don’t believe the old chestnut, “If they pay, they pay attention.” I know many people who pay, and still never do anything with what they paid for.

But I do believe that if you pay a lot of money, and that makes nervous, you will push yourself out of your comfort zone and find ways to justify the uncomfortable price to yourself.

If you ask me for proof, I can give you myself as an example.

Some five years ago, I joined the coaching group of A-list copywriter Dan Ferrari. Over the course of about six months, I paid Dan multiple tens of thousands of dollars for this coaching.

This wasn’t money I could easily spare. In fact, I was eating away my savings, because I was paying Dan more than I was making. Each month, when it was time to make a new multi-thousand payment to Dan, I literally had cold sweat on my forehead and electric shocks down my spine.

I’ve written before about my experiences with this coaching:

Dan gave me valuable and practical marketing and copywriting ideas. But the real value was the price I was paying him. It made me so uncomfortable that I worked much harder to apply the ideas Dan gave me, to hustle and make do, simply because I had to.

Result:

In the month after I was done with Dan’s coaching, the floodgates opened. I started making the kind of money I had never made with copywriting before. Within the first two months at this new level, I had fully paid off the tens of thousands of dollars I had paid to Dan.

So to answer the question that was rumbling in Fred’s mind, and that may be rumbling in yours…

“Sure it was worth 300, but is it worth 1000?”

The answer is, it really depends.

Copy Riddles consists of 20 rounds. Each round covers a key copywriting concept.

If you don’t bother to go through all of the rounds, or if you don’t bother to apply them anywhere where they can possibly make you money, then Copy Riddles won’t be worth $1,000 to you, or any fraction of that.

On the other hand, if you go through each of these 20 rounds earnestly… if you do the daily exercises I give you… and if you apply the lessons in your own business or in your clients’ businesses, there’s no doubt in my mind that it will be worth $1,000 to you, and much, much, much more.

So Robert’s possibly harmful testimonial stays up. In case you’d like to see it in its native environment, or get started with Copy Riddles right now, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

The beginning and the end of copywriting

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Today being January 1st, I find it an excellent opportunity to wish you a happy New Year and to point out the surprising significance of January.

As I learned when I was still young and very stupid, January is named after the Roman god Janus, the two-faced deity of doors, gates, and more broadly, beginnings and endings.

I say I was still very stupid when I first learned this, because my reaction was, “A god of doors? How lame. What’s next? A god of faucets?”

It was only later, after I read a book or two, that I found out just how fundamental the idea of a door — an entry point, an exit point — really is to the human mind.

Because all human perception, down at the most basic neurological level, is based on difference, contrast.

Right now, bunches of your neurons are frantically working to determine where they can draw a line, and call everything before it one thing, everything after it another, and convince you these are somehow meaningfully separate, and discard the many other details that don’t fit into that picture of the world.

Without this Januarial work of drawing lines and creating doors to come up with discrete concepts, we couldn’t really have any higher-level thinking.

That’s why it makes sense that January, the month of doors, comes before, say March, named after the Roman god of war, Mars.

“That’s truly fascinating,” I hear you saying. “I had no idea of the depth of your classical learning or your smattering of popsci neuroscience. But what does this have to do with marketing or making money or really anything else I might actually care about on January 1st?”

Everything. It has everything to do with it.

This basic observation, of the outsized importance of beginnings and endings, repeats itself at every level of the sales job.

At the level of entire sales campaigns, where the opening of the campaign and the closing of the campaign bring in almost all the sales…

At the level of individual sales letters, where the headline and lead on the one end, and the offer and close at the other end, represent 80%-95% of the effectiveness or sales pull of that letter…

At the level of individual sales claims or promises, such as the following:

“The simple 12-word-sentence that will make you the #1 candidate more often than you would ever believe.”

That’s a bullet written by A-list copywriter Gary Bencivenga, considered by many to be the greatest of the greats because he won so often against other A-list copywriters.

You might think Gary’s bullet is just a simple, direct response promise. But there’s a surprising amount of subtle psychology that goes into this bullet, with a particular emphasis on what Gary chooses to put first in this bullet, and what to put last.

I won’t explain that subtle psychology here, but I will tell you the following:

Wouldn’t it be nice to start this New Year acquiring a new skill, a truly valuable skill, a skill that few others possess?

Wouldn’t it be nice to acquire one of the greatest skills you can have as a copywriter, whether you write for clients or for your own business?

Wouldn’t it be nice to acquire a skill that ultimately all effective copy comes from?

You probably know what I’m talking about.

But if you’d like to make 100% sure, or if you’d actually like to use this January 1st to get yourself this skill and the associated bump in fortune that this skill can bring, then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Dating and business advice to a needy blackbird

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A few days ago, I was minding my own business, washing the dishes. The weather was warm so I opened the window.

Just as I was in the middle of scrubbing the salad bowl, a little blackbird landed on my windowsill.

“CHEEP,” said the blackbird.

“Oh hello there,” I said. “How do you do?”

The blackbird paced for a moment and then sat down on the windowsill. He seemed to be getting comfortable, which made me frown and pause my dishwashing. And then the blackbird spoke:

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Interesting that you ask that. Very interesting.

Something I am really struggling with at the moment is securing a mate.

I can’t get a mate for my familybuilding services. Even when I catch the eye of female blackbirds, they seem to smell my neediness from a mile away even if I don’t reveal it intentionally.

I wanted to ask:

How would you go about getting a mate if:

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… and then the blackbird listed his unique mate-getting situation, which happens to be the same unique situation faced by all single blackbirds, crows, and seagulls, as well as by all individuals, whether human or avine, who are hoping to go from zero to one in any endeavor that involves selling yourself.

I’ve long ago decided that I don’t want to be in the business of taking people or birds from zero to one.

So I just nodded to the blackbird in understanding, picked him up, placed him on the outside window sill, and closed the window shut.

That said, I do have one piece of advice.

I’m only sharing it because it applies to anybody who is looking to do anything new and frightening, whether they are beginners or much more advanced.

It applies to newbie copywriters looking for their first client… to experienced copywriters looking to send their first email to their own list… to business owners looking to go into a drastically more upscale market and charge 2x or 3x or 10x of what they are charging now.

It also applies to securing a mate. In fact, this piece of advice is something I heard from the infamous pick-up coach Owen Cook, aka RSD Tyler, the villain in Neil Strauss’s book The Game.

Owen was talking about the horrifying prospect of flying up to an attractive and unfamiliar female blackbird, in the middle of a park with lots of other blackbirds around, and striking up a fun and natural interaction.

Perfectly easy if you have total belief in yourself and your worth.

Perfectly impossible if you are overwhelmed by fear and self-doubt.

So here’s Owen’s observation:

“The halfway point between fear and total belief is indifference.”

You can’t go from fear and neediness to total belief and confidence.

But you can go from fear and neediness to indifference.

One way to do it is repeat exposure in a short enough period of time.

Go and cheep at seven attractive and unfamiliar blackbirds today. Each of those interactions might go horribly, though they probably won’t.

But whatever the outcome of the interactions, by the end of the seven, you will realize you are still alive. In fact, you are perfectly fine.

Do this a few days in a row, and those innate survival mechanisms, which underlie both fear and neediness, will begin to get habituated and calm down. You will start to get indifferent. And that’s the halfway point to total belief and confidence.

In other words, if you think you have a neediness problem… what you really got is an activity problem.

That’s all the free advice from Bejako’s windowsill for today.

If you’d like to buy something from me, I can recommend my Simple Money Emails training.

​​No, Simple Money Emails won’t replace the need to actually write and send emails, whether for your own business or for a client business.

But Simple Money Emails can teach you my effective one-two system for writing emails, much like this one, that make sales, keep readers reading, and keep birds chirping. If that’s an outcome you’d like as well:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Unsexy, neglected, mistreated email lists

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Yesterday I was listening to a Dan Kennedy seminar where Dan says, in his typically tactful fashion:

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There is no magazine out there — you can check the newsstand — there is no magazine called, Wives In Sweatpants and Sneakers.

There’s all sorts of unimaginable fetishes. But that is not one of them. There’s just not a lot of interest in that.

That’s their business.

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Dan’s point is that what business owners have gotten used to, they no longer find exciting. It also means they also don’t notice the bad stuff any more.

The past week, I was promoting a done-for-you newsletter service.

I figured no qualified leads would respond, since I write so much about email marketing and making money from email. If there’s one thing I’m known for, it’s probably that.

Surely, business owners who manage to track down my email list — in spite of my best efforts to hide it — surely such business owners also think email marketing is sexy and are already doing sophisticated email stuff in their own businesses.

I was wrong.

I got readers reaching out to me who have large, successful businesses.

Some of them have email lists of tens of thousands of people, made up of customers, who have never been mailed.

Others send out an email here and there… make good money each time they send out that lonesome email… and don’t think or know to do it more often.

And one person, who wasn’t replying to the done-for-you newsletter service, but who did take me up on the Newsletter Consult I did last month, followed up yesterday to say:

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Thought I’d follow up after our recent discussion, which was much appreciated.

So went ahead and ran a one-month birthday sale for a 2-YR subscription at a $1K discount. Don’t think we have done a sale in 5 years, nor one for a 2 year sub duration.

With 4 days yet to run, we have so far generated $18K in sales with 4 people subscribing for the 2-YR plan and 1 other taking up a (full priced) annual sub.

Not bad considering I only mentioned it as a PS in the twice a week email alerts, plus December is historically a slow month for sales here. This has been our best December to date!

I plan to send two more such alerts this week and have been pondering what to write in case we might be able to tip one more cheerful soul over the edge.

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The results above are clearly not common.

The person who wrote me offers a yearly subscription costing multiple thousands of dollars… has lots of credibility built up over a long time… and can now make an extra $18k with an “oh by the way” casual throwaway in a PS, after a 5-year promo hiatus.

But uncommon details aside, the point still stands:

You might have that beautiful email list, wearing sweatpants and sneakers around you. Maybe you’ve been looking at it for years, and maybe you’ve stopped appreciating how just how sexy it really can be.

I figure that’s as much my fault as yours.

Clearly, I’m not doing a good job putting forward offers to help you get more value out of your email list.

I’ll work on fixing that in 2024.

Meanwhile, it’s mid-December. It’s almost the holiday season. Who the hell wants to work?

I do. So I have a quick, band-aid offer for you right now:

If you have a business and are making sales… if you have an email list and have been neglecting and mistreating it for too long… then I offer you my 1-hour “Extreme Makeover For Email Lists” session.

One hour, to hear what your business is about, who your customers are, what you offer them, how you currently mail them.

I will then tell you the quickest and easiest buttons to push to make money from your list, in the future as well as now. Maybe I can even help you pull out some thousands of dollars from your email list by the end of this month.

I’m limiting this offer to three people, the first three qualified people who reply.

Price is $300.

I will not be offering this again, at least not at this price.

In case you are interested, hit reply, tell me who you are, and I can send you the payment link.

Two main chain cutters that delink price from product

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The past few days, I’ve been reading the eye-opening “No B.S. Marketing To The Affluent” by marketing coach Dan Kennedy.

​​​​As you can imagine, one of Dan’s main points is that you should charge a lot, and that you can, because with a bit of thought and preparation, it’s easy to break the heavy chain that links product to price in most people’s minds.

Dan suggests two main ways to do it:

“The two biggest chain cutters that delink price from product are 1) who is buying and 2) the context in which the product is presented, priced, and delivered.”

There’s a lot in that one sentence. So let’s get specifical. Let me tell you just one specific way to create a high-price selling context.

It’s to assume authority.

In the olden days, this meant getting a soapbox… walking to the the northeast corner of Hyde Park… putting your soapbox down on the ground among the chestnut leaves… stepping onto the soapbox… and starting to talk.

The modern-day version of this is creating your own digital platform of any kind and using it to communicate.

Because there’s some shortcut in the human brain, so that when you speak from a platform, the rest of us listen.

Sure, some of those listening will walk away after a time. But others will continue to stand there, transfixed, nodding their heads.

And if you, the speaker, ever deign to directly address me, the transfixed audience member, I’ll get a flush of excitement. I’ll look around to make sure others saw it too. “Did you catch that? He spoke to me! He made me an offer, directly! It’s expensive, but what else would you expect? He’s an authority!”

I know I react like this. I imagine that if you are honest with yourself, you will find you react like this too.

All that’s to say, get your own soapbox if you haven’t got one yet. Or get me to create one for you. ​​

And on that note, today is the last day I’ll be talking about my done-for-you newsletter service.

​​Your own newsletter is good for business, good for authority, and great for delinking price from product.

So if you have a business, but you haven’t got a newsletter, then take a look here for more information on this service:

https://bejakovic.com/announcing-done-for-you-newsletter-service/

Shockingly illegal and stupid opportunity to make a lot of money

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A few days ago, I was at the gym, taking a break and looking at the squat rack with hate. I picked up my phone in the hope that some interesting bit of news would keep me from going back to exercise. And sure enough, I found it:

“Spain expels two US spies for infiltrating secret service”

The short and long of it is that the U.S. is spying on Spain, an ally country. Two American spies, associated with the U.S. Embassy in Madrid, convinced two Spanish counterparts — agents of the CNI, Spain’s equivalent of the CIA — to secretly hand over classified info.

The Spanish are confused. “What do Americans have to pay for if we give them everything they ask for?”
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I’m sure there are details I don’t know of this bizarre story. But from the outside, it looks so immensely stupid.

Let’s ignore the part about the U.S. pointlessly spying on a friendly and accommodating ally.

Let’s just look at the two Spanish CNI agents who made it possible. One was an area chief, head of one of the sections that make up the CNI. The other was his assistant.

The area chief was a veteran of the agency. He was well-known. His colleagues were shocked.

Why? How? You can probably guess.

As per the article I read at the gym, this area chief risked freedom, career, and self-respect “in exchange for a large sum of money.”

It’s hardly the first time someone has done stupid things for a large sum of money. But this case is an example of uniquely and immensely stupid.

First off, this area chief must be a person who was vetted and selected over a number of years for loyalty, intelligence, and trustworthiness.

And yet, not only did the area chief steal classified data from within the Spanish CIA, which you can imagine has all kinds of really complex and high-tech safeguards to prevent the detection of leaks…

… but apparently he was so careless that he was caught during a routine security check, when it became obvious he was accessing data that he didn’t need to perform his duties.

Now that the treason has become known, both the area chief and his assistant face 6 to 12 years in prison… the contempt of all their former colleagues and friends… and lifelong shame to carry around, which I estimate weighs as much as a baby rhinoceros.

Point being:

Greed.

​​Never underestimate how it warps people’s minds and how appealing to this motive can get people — including smart, upright, and self-possessed people — to do shockingly improbable, stupid, and even treasonous things.

Now I’ve gotta take a step back. Because I’m not telling you to tempt others to treason. Nor to engage in anything criminal.

But if you think that people in your marketplace are too this or too that to be tempted by pure greed… then remember the CNI area chief and that baby rhinoceros around his neck.

Remembering this image might just be a legal and quite smart opportunity to make a large sum of money.

All right, on to my offer:

My days of “done-for-you newsletter service” continue.

Like I’ve been saying for the past few thousand emails, a newsletter can be an easy, profitable, prestige-building way to get more people into your world, to get more of them to buy what you sell, and to keep them around until you sell the next thing.

And with my new done-for-you newsletter service, I’m offering to take all the work off your plate. In case you’re interested, you can get the full details below:

https://bejakovic.com/announcing-done-for-you-newsletter-service/

One word, out of 495, that drew a bunch of replies

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Last week I sent out an email, “Write 10 books instead of 1,” that got a good number of replies. The curious thing was the replies split neatly into two camps.

One camp was people who liked the core message in the email and felt inspired to start or finish their own book or books.

But the other camp, in fact the majority of people who replied to that email, had nothing to say about the core message.

Instead, this second group replied because of a single word of that email. A single word that was hidden, between two commas, in position 408 in an email of 495 words.

Would you like to know what that word was?

​​Good, then I’ll tell ya.

That word was inshallah.

Inshallah, as you might know, is a saying used in Muslim societies. It means “God willing.” It expresses both hope for a future event and resignation that the future is not in our control.

But why??? Why would I use this word in the tail end of my email?

Is it because I myself am Muslim?

Is it some kind of incredibly clever personalization based on the reader’s IP address?

Was it a joke or irony?

Readers wanted to know. And from my religious profiling based on these readers’ names, almost all the people who wrote me to ask about inshallah were either Muslim or came from Muslim societies.

I’ll leave the mystery of why I used inshallah hanging in the air. Instead, let me tell you a story that this reminded me of, from legendary marketer Dan Kennedy.

Dan used to travel the country on the Peter Lowe Success Tour, a modern-day speaking circus that featured former U.S. presidents and Superbowl quarterbacks as speakers.

Dan would go up on stage at the end of the night and deliver a rapid-fire comedy routine/sales pitch to sell his Magnetic Marketing program.

I highly recommend tracking down Dan Kennedy’s Magnetic Marketing speech and listening to it. ​​I’ve listened to it multiple times myself.

But one thing I never noticed, in spite of the multiple times listening, is that Dan somewhere mentions that he used to stutter as a kid.

Again, this speech is rapid-fire. It lasts maybe 50 minutes. It contains thousands of words. And among those words, there are a few — maybe a dozen, maybe a half dozen — that refer to the fact that Dan Kennedy stuttered as a kid.

It’s very easy to miss. Like I said, I’ve listened to this speech multiple times and I’ve never caught it.

But there’s a group of people who don’t miss it.

And that’s people who themselves stutter or who have kids who stutter.

Dan said somewhere, in one of his seminars, how he’d regularly finish his speech and try to get out of the room, only to be faced with an audience member, holding a brand new $197 copy of Magnetic Marketing in their hands, and ready to talk about stuttering and how Dan overcame his stutter and how he now performs on stages in front of tens of thousands of people.

That’s something to keep in mind, if you’re missing a word to put into the 408th position in your sales message… or if, like me, you suffered from epileptic seizures as a kid.

All right, moving on.

I got nothing to sell you today. But I do have something to recommend.

Well, I recommended something already, and that’s Dan Kennedy’s Magnetic Marketing speech. Dan has said that this speech is the best sales letter he’s ever written.

It’s worth listening to if you want to learn how to write an interesting, indirect, and yet effective sales message.

On the other hand, if you want to learn how to do marketing that gets you really rich — who to target, how to reach them, what offers to create — then I can recommend a book I’m reading right now. It’s also by Dan Kennedy. It’s more relevant now than ever before. You can find it here:

https://bejakovic.com/reallyrich

The third-hottest release of 2023 closes after just one night

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Last night, with crowds of paparazzi pushing outside the velvet rope, and a few stars making their way from their limos down the red carpet to the doors of the classy old theater, my Influential Emails show had its grand opening.

The show ran for exactly one night.

And then this morning, I locked and chained the theater doors, removed the “INFLUENTIAL EMAILS” letters from the marquee, and took out an ad in the local paper to announce this show is now over.

As I announced in the lead up and during the grand opening of Influential Emails, this promotion would go until Sunday at the latest, and I might close it down sooner.

Well, that sooner is today, about 12 hours after the initial grand opening. I would have closed it earlier but I was asleep.

The reason why I did this is that made up my mind, before I launched this promo, what a nice sum of money would be to make from it.

I’ve now made that money and more. And so the cart is now closed.

If you managed to squeeze in to the Influential Emails show, I hope you will get value out of it in a way pays for itself, and soon.

If you wanted to get in but didn’t manage to, then all I can say is — if you’re not too angered by this experience, then maybe you will have better luck next time.

And if you were not interested in buying Influential Emails, then I can share the following valuable truth with you:

You can choose who you sell to, and how much of something you sell. There’s no law against it. And it’s ultimately good for business, in many different ways.

Now here’s a little sneak peek behind the scenes:

This promo didn’t really run for 12 hours.

It ran for about 36 hours.

I opened it up a day earlier for a private showing, just for people who were on the waiting list and who had already bought something from me in the past.

I also gave them an inducement to buy within the first 24 hours.

Many did.

That’s how I managed to make more money with this one-and-a-half-day promo than I used to make in a whole month, the first few years of my copywriting career.

Some of the folks who were invited for this private showing had bought pretty much all of my offers in the past.

Some had bought just one of my courses.

And some only bought my little $5 Kindle book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

It didn’t matter.

They are all valued and ongoing customers, and I wanted to say thanks with this special opportunity.

All that’s to say, if you have not yet bought my 10 Commandments book, then consider doing so.

It might teach you a thing or two about copywriting. And it might just prove to be a ticket to an exclusive future show, and a walk down the red carpet. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Incurable bachelor discovers a reality-bending mistake in human computational neurology

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I read today about a bride-to-be in the UK who took an eerie “spirit photograph” of herself trying on a wedding gown.

The woman was standing with her back to the camera. Facing her were two mirrors, one in front of her, one to her side.

The spirit photo, as captured by an iPhone, showed the following:

The woman in reality (ie, not reflected by a mirror) stood with one arm hanging by her side and other across her chest.

But the mirror in front of her showed a slightly different figure. In that front mirror, both the woman’s arms were clasped together in front of her chest.

And the mirror to her side showed a still different figure. In this mirror, neither of the woman’s arms was across her chest. Instead, both arms were down by her sides.

It’s like three slightly different different versions of the woman were all there in one room, looking at each other.

Maybe the iPhone captured a living human being and two spirits, who somehow looked exactly like each other?

Maybe it was the woman’s great-grandmother in the front mirror, and that great-grandmother’s grandmother in the side mirror, all coming together to convene with the bride-to-be at this crucial moment in her life?

T​​hat would be a good spectacle and a demonstration of the occult.

But the trick behind this bizarre photo is more modern and more technical.

As you might know, your phone camera, particularly if you got yerself a fancy iPhone, is not simply capturing “reality” as it exists out there in the world.

Instead, your camera is actually doing quite a bit of processing, selecting, and splicing to produce a final photo that looks good, and that makes the most satisfying visual presentation to you as the viewer.

That’s what happened with the bride-to-be.

​​Her poor iPhone got tricked into thinking it was seeing three different persons in one frame.

So the phone stitched together three slightly different visual moments to represent each of those three persons in the final shot.

​​If these were three different people, this would probably be undetectable. But since these were mirrored versions of one person, the iPhone’s mistake was glaring and unsettling.

“Haha stupid iPhone,” you might say. Except the reason why I clicked to read this article in the first place was the intriguing headline:

“A bride to be discovers a reality bending mistake in Apple’s computational photography”

This headline got my interest because I, an incurable bachelor, have learned, both by direct experience and by reading up on the matter, that what we see in our mind’s eye is not “reality” as it exists out there in the world.

The fact is, our brains work in a similar way to a modern iPhone camera.

Sure, the underlying “stuff” of our minds is different to what an iPhone is made of, as are the algorithms we use to create the final results.

But like an iPhone, our minds are also sampling from different points in the data stream… filling in the gaps… and stitching together and even inventing stuff to create a final, coherent result.

That final result is not 100% “true,” or even close to it. Instead, it’s what makes the most satisfying image, story, or interpretation to us as viewers.

You might find that hard to accept. I know I did when I first read about it.

But if you start paying attention, you can catch yourself in the act of conjuring up reality.

Anyways, if you want a storytelling tip for how to take mundane events and turn them into something more fun or interesting… then keep in mind the image of the bride-to-be in front of her imperfect doppelgangers across two mirrors.

​​Remember the three slightly different women in wedding gowns facing each other, remember the explanation for it, and then do something similar when you are writing your story.

In entirely related news:

I’ve decided once again offer my Influential Emails training. ​I only offered this once before, live, two years ago.

​​In this training, I shared several advanced email copywriting techniques I used then, and continue to use, to make my own emails stand out in people’s minds.

I’ve noticed that two years later, some of my long-time readers and customers still feed back ideas and names to me that I only shared during that training. That’s to say, maybe these folks really did find the training impactful, useful, and even insightful.

I’ll offer the recordings of this training next week, between Thursday December 6th and Sunday December 10th. But I will do something different than usual.

Rather than making this training available to everyone, I will only make it available to people who get on a waitlist first.

​​If you’re curious why, I’ll explain that in my email tomorrow.

​​Meanwhile, if you want to get on the waitlist, you’ll first have to get onto my email list. Click here to do so.