Claude Hopkins

Budapest, Hopkins, cold outreach

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Three mildly connected things for you today, to pick and choose from as you like:

#1. Budapest

I’m just finishing my visit to my former home town, Budapest, where I spent 11 years of my life. I reconnected with friends I’ve known for decades. The weather was perfect. The city was more beautiful than ever. All in all it was a great trip.

One thing that stood out during this trip:

Hungary, of which Budapest is the capital and by far the biggest town, had a big change of government earlier this year. The political party that had ruled for 16 years, and that had become infamous for corruption and undemocratic consolidation of power, finally lost the elections.

Ever since, foreign investment that had been frozen and kept out of the country has started flowing back in… Hungarians who had moved abroad, because they found the local situation hopeless, have been moving back… and the locals here just look optimistic and happy (ok, as happy as Hungarians can ever look).

This brings me to…

#2. Claude Hopkins

Claude Hopkins, author of Scientific Advertising, which is a sort of Bible in the field of direct advertising, once wrote:

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“People are like sheep. They cannot judge values, nor can you and I. We judge things largely by others’ impressions, by popular favor. We go with the crowd. So the most effective thing I have ever found in advertising is the trend of the crowd. That is a factor not to be overlooked. People follow styles and preferences. We rarely decide for ourselves, because we don’t know the facts. But when we see the crowds taking any certain direction, we are much inclined to go with them.”

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Hopkins was talking about advertising, about picking and choosing products to sell and copy to run based on the trend of the crowd. Sure. But the idea applies more broadly.

The most effective thing in business, and maybe in life, is the trend of the crowd.

Yes, it’s possible to get rich and be happy during depressions and wars.

But a much more effective way to get rich and be happy is to work in industries and live in places that are going through periods of growth or rebirth of expansion. I thought of this during this trip to Budapest.

I hadn’t seriously considered moving back here ever since I had moved away almost 8 years ago. I’ve been thinking about it for the past few days, because of the trend of the crowd. I feel like this will be a place of excitement and growth over the coming years.

#3. Cold outreach

Yesterday I sent out an email to my list, asking folks if they’ve tried getting clients via cold outreach.

I got two classes of responses. Class 1:

1A. “Yes, I hate it. I hired an agency multiple times and every time I hated it.”

1B. “So far, 17 days in, 70 prospects approached, 0 clients, countless menty b’s.”

1C. “No, and wouldn’t ;)”

Then there’s class 2:

2A. “That is my primary method for getting clients.”

2B. “Yes, John. Works very well for me. No fancy cold email stack. Just a 3-liner email with a very relevant problem that they’d wanna get rid of. Brings me every month $12K to $18K!”

2C. “I’m using cold outreach to get clients, and I’m doing very well with it. Personally, one of the best methods, especially if we are talking about cold email outreach.”

Quite the difference between Class 1 and Class 2.

I started a discussion about this in my Daily Email House community.

If cold outreach is not something you hate or are fundamentally opposed to, you can join in the discussion below.

It’s an opportunity to share your experiences, and maybe learn from the experiences of some people who have been very successful with cold outreach. Here’s the link:

https://www.skool.com/daily-email-house/cold-outreach

Last call and then it’s gone

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Today is the last day to sign up for Mike Samuels’s ABP cohort. As I wrote yesterday, this is a certification program to turn you into a “scheme man” — a marketing consultant who devises new ways for companies to sell their old stuff.

Maybe you read my email yesterday, and while you enjoyed learning that the term “scheme man” has a long, illustrious history — famous copywriters like Claude Hopkins and Robert Collier were primarily scheme men — maybe you don’t see how this would actually work today. So lemme tell you.

This is the second time Mike is running the ABP cohort. The last time, one student:

1. Reached out to client he had written some ads for, 8 months prior. The outreach message took all of 20 seconds to write.

2. He then followed up with a single 5-minute Loom video, putting to work some of the behavioral psychology insights that Mike covers in ABP and applying them to the client’s business.

3. Result: A 7,500 GBP contract to help the client find more such opportunities in the business over 90 days. The plan after that is a 2500 GBP/month consulting retainer, just for providing diagnostics.

At 1297 GBP — over $1,700 — ABP is neither cheap nor expensive, considering the results it can get you.

If the price is not something you can swing right now, regardless of the results you can get, then Mike offers a 3-month payment plan as well. I’m telling you about that because of the following bit from Mike’s sales page:

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By the time your final payment leaves your account, most people on this programme have already had their first paid client conversation. Some have already signed one.

Which means ABP has a habit of paying for itself before you’ve finished paying for it.

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If you’re a copywriter and you wanna get paid more, and you wanna do more interesting work, then ABP might be your ticket to ride.

Again, today is the last day to sign up for the current cohort.

It’s not clear when or if Mike will run this program again. What is clear is that if he does run it again, the price will be higher, and the current bonuses, which deal with finding clients, will be gone.

If you wanna at least check out Mike’s offer, before the deadline takes the choice out of your hands:

https://bejakovic.com/scheme

Get expert training in Scheming, raise your income

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I once read a book called The Man Who Sold America and in it I came across the term “scheme man.”

Once upon a time, a scheme man was a legitimate and even highly coveted and paid profession.

Scheme men were basically marketing consultants who could devise new selling “schemes” — ideas, concepts, breakthroughs. As master direct marketer Robert Collier put it, “It’s not the copy so much as the scheme back of it.”

Claude Hopkins, often thought to be the first A-list copywriter, was the premier scheme man (he was the one discussed in that book I read).

Hopkins didn’t really use clever copywriting to turn his clients and himself into billionaires (in today’s money).

Instead, he did it by devising new selling schemes.

As an example, Hopkins’s first big marketing job was to sell “carpet sweepers.” His innovative scheme was to start offering these carpet sweepers in a dozen different fancy wood casings, rather than the single drab choice available previously.

Stupid, right? Who cares about the casing?

This was a completely impractical and unnecessary new development. And yet, it resulted in 250,000 carpet sweepers being sold in 3 weeks.

After that, some of Hopkins’s schemes involved the “world’s biggest cake” (100,000 people came to see it)… the “paid free sample” scheme for Liquozone (which took the company from bankruptcy to making $60 million in profit the next year)… and the “engraved with your name” pen that doubled response when added as a bonus to an ordinary offer.

Point being:

Become a skilled Scheme Man, then or now, and your future is settled.

If you can devise new ways for a company to sell what they’ve already got, your services will ALWAYS be in demand, and you will get paid BIG MONEY IN BIG CHUNKS. Plus, the work can be exciting and challenging and even fun.

Except how? How do you become a skilled Scheme Man, today, in 2026?

For that I’d like to point you to Mike Samuels, and his 6-week ABP cohort.

Mike’s cohort is currently open for signups. The signup window closes tomorrow. After that, you won’t be able to get in, and also the bonuses disappear, and if this program is ever opened again, the price will go up.

Like I said, Mike’s cohort program is called ABP, which stands for Action Based Psychology. I don’t think that name does justice to what Mike is offering here.

What Mike is offering is a full-on certification program for Scheme Men, though he calls them “ABP Consultants.”

Mike’s program first gets you trained on the relevant underlying psychology and translates that into specific marketing techniques, so you can own these ideas yourself and turn them into new selling schemes for specific businesses.

Mike then gives you “audits” so you don’t have to count on remembering all these ideas and schemes, but can simply refer to the audits when the time comes.

And then finally, there’s a client-getting section so you can actually turn your new Scheming skills into profits for clients and income for yourself.

Like I said, the signup for this cohort closes tomorrow. If you’re interested in the full details before this opportunity goes away:

https://bejakovic.com/scheme

If nobody wants your profit-making offer, give it away

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Yesterday I organized a Zoom call for a few list owners.

One of these, a successful copywriter and marketer, was asking how to price, or how to persuade businesses to take him up on, his newfangled sales machine.

“Is $15k a year a good offer? The sales machine is super valuable, and has produced great results for the businesses who have used it. But it’s been a hard sell.”

I thought it was instructive that a successful copywriter and marketer was asking this question.

My answer was, if this thing produces sales so well, why not package up the results into a nice gift box, and sell that gift box instead?

In other words, instead of persuading business owners to buy a gizmo that costs $15k a year and promises to produce sales… why not persuade them to accept new money in the bank, which they can pay you a finders fee for?

In the words of marketing legend Claude Hopkins, who became the modern equivalent of a billionaire using little more than a typewriter:

“In every business expenses are kept down. I could never be worth more than any other man who could do the work I did. The big salaries were paid to salesmen, to the men who brought in orders, or to the men in the factory who reduced the costs. They showed profits, and they could command a reasonable share of those profits. I saw the difference between the profit-earning and the expense side of a business, and I resolved to graduate from the debit class. “

“Yes,” I hear someone saying in the back, “but business owners should already know that a sales gizmo isn’t really an expense, because it will help them make money. They should be smart enough to see a profit-generating solution when they see one. They should they should they should.”

Yes, they should.

But they don’t, just in the same way that the successful copywriter above should have remembered the century-old lesson that turned Claude Hopkins into a billionaire, but he didn’t.

The fact is, we have limited time and attention and energy, and doing the work of translation — of turning what we have into what we could possibly have, of what we buy into what it could do for us, of what we sell into what people really want — requires time and effort.

You can argue against this aspect of reality. Or you can work with it, and simply translate what you sell into a result that people care about, and that they can take you up on without risk.

Moving on.

I recently got a bunch of feedback from my readers, and I found that a large number of people list, as their #1 goal, getting consistent with emailing daily.

Maybe you too feel you should should should be writing consistent daily emails. But you still don’t do it.

If it’s not happening, and if it’s important to you, maybe it’s time for to take a different tack:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

10 reasons you might want to buy 5 paperback copies of my original 10 commandments book

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This morning, I made a rather outrageous offer, inviting people to buy five (5) paperback copies of my original 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

Why might you ever want to buy multiple physical copies of this 5-year-old book?

I tried to do the work for you, so here ere are 10 possible reasons why:

1. You want to support me in some modest way, and you want something concrete in return.

2. You make a habit of rereading books if you find them valuable. I know i do, and it’s served me very well. And a symbolic way to make rereading easier is to read a new copy each time.

3. So you can give give away copies to friends, family, colleagues, mentees who could benefit from it. (For example, marketing legend Matt Bacak recommends my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters to mentees in his Secret Email System mastermind.)

4. One of the A-list copywriters I profile in the book, Gene Schwartz, got so rich through writing copy that he lived in a Manhattan penthouse, kept a separate Manhattan office, and presumably sometimes went back to visit his parents in Montana and work there.

If, like Gene, you apply the ideas in this book diligently and you end up becoming the owner of multiple houses and work locations, you will need multiple copies on hand in different location.

Errr…. wait. If you think that’s stretching it, try the next one:

5. For ballast. Another of the A-list copywriters in my book was Claude Hopkins. Hopkins hated the sea but owned an ocean-going yacht, because when you’re effectively a billionaire, the way he was thanks to copywriting, you gotta spend your money somehow. But yachts need to be weighted down for stability, and what better way with a few extra copies of 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters?

A little more seriously:

6. As prizes for a giveaway. In fact, Robin Timmers, “the largest copywriter in the Netherlands,” has took me up on this offer earlier today. When he sent me his receipt, he said that he’s thinking of using copies of my book as giveaways, presumably in some kind of contest or game with his audience.

7. As a coffee table talking point. The physical dimensions of my book are small and if you put one copy on your coffee table, it might get ignored.

But if you lay out five copies, all next to each other, that’s sure to elicit questions from guests. “What’s that about? Why five copies of the same book?”

Good thing is, the book is filled with interesting anecdotes so you can have a ready in to become the eloquent and fascinating host for a few moments.

8. To serve as a doorstop, paperweight, kindling, or a stable platform to put your laptop on when you do Zoom calls, particularly copywriting client calls, which you are likely to have many more of when you start religiously following the commandments outlined in this book.

9. So you can rip up a few copies and take out particularly significant passages and pin them on your pinboard so they remind you while you write copy… and still maintain a fresh copy or two to sit in your library.

10. Because buying five (5) paperback copies of the 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters is my condition to get the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle, which currently includes everything listed below.

Tomorrow I will add something else to this bonus bundle. If you’ve already bought your five paperback copies and sent me your receipt, the extra stuff will appear automagically in the course area where the bonuses are hosted.

And if you haven’t yet taken me up on this offer, here are the details of what’s inside the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle, and how exactly to get it:

#1. Copywriting Portfolio Secrets ($97 value)

In this training, I show you how to build up your copywriting portfolio in the fastest and most efficient way, so you can start to win copywriting jobs even today. I show you the best way I’ve found to win 4- and 5-figure jobs I REALLY wanted, even when I wasn’t qualified for them, and how you can do it too.

I previously sold this training for $97. But it’s yours free inside the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle, which also includes my…

#2. No-Stress Negotiation For Well-Paid Copywriters ($100 value)

This guide outlines my 7-part negotiating system, which I adapted from negotiation coach Jim Camp. This system kept me sane while I still regularly interviewed and worked with copywriting clients. Follow these seven principles, and you will end up making more money, working with better clients, and being able to stick to it for the long term.

I only offered this information before as part of the $100 Copy Zone guide, which also featured….

#3. How To Get Set Up On Upwork

This free bonus is an excerpt from a short self-published book I wrote once, How to Become a $150/Hr Sales Copywriter on Upwork: A Personal Success Story that Almost Anyone Can Replicate. It tells you how to actually get set up on Upwork — the details of your profile page, your description, your title.

If you combine this bonus with the two bonuses above — Copywriting Portfolio Secrets and No-Stress Negotiation — you have a great shot of winning a job on Upwork by the end of this week, or even today.

And finally, this first part of my Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle also includes…

#4. Dan’s Timeless Wisdom (priceless, or $25k+)

Between August of 2019 and March 2020, I was in Dan Ferrari’s coaching group. As you might know, Dan started out as a star copywriter at The Motley Fool, and went on to become one of the most successful, most winning, big-money direct response copywriters working today.

Inside his coaching group, Dan dispensed copy critiques, marketing advice, and mystical koans to help his coaching students get to the next level.

At some point, I had the bright idea to start archiving the best and most valuable things that Dan was saying. I got 25 of them down, and they are all included in this document.

(By the way, I never tallied up the exact and rather painful amount of money I paid Dan for the coaching. It was north of $25k. I do know I made it all back, and then some, in just the first two months after I stopped with the coaching, thanks to just one tip I got from Dan.)

So there you go. $197 in real-world value if you count what people have paid me for these bonuses previously… or $25,000+ in value if you count the blood, flesh, and hair it took for me to get this information to you… or ∞ in value, if you actually take these ideas and apply them, and keep applying them.

And if that’s not enough for you, my Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle will have several other bonuses as well. I will announce those over the coming days, and they will be automatically added to the bonus area if you get my offer before Thursday at 12 midnight PST.

As for what that offer is:

Like I said, it costs $50.

And it’s to get five (5) paperback copies of my original 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

Put in your order on Amazon, forward me your Amazon receipt, and I will set you up with Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle. If you’d like to do that now, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

A tabloidy factoid about Dan Ferrari and Ning Li

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A few weeks ago, copywriter Tom Baines wrote me to say:

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Anyway, I’m excited for your new book, and here’s an interesting tabloidy factoid you may already be aware of: Dan Ferarri and Ning Li have both talked openly about how they first connected in a pickup artist subreddit, where Dan initially mentored Ning as a pick-up artist before eventually bringing him over into copywriting and helping him build his career here… I think it’s a fun little overlap.

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I’m sharing this as a bit of gossip in case you have connections to the copywriting industry. Ning and Dan are both well-known figures there. I never knew the background of how they met, even though I was in Dan’s small and intimate coaching program 5+ years ago.

Beyond gossip, anything worthwhile here?

I heard direct marketing legend Dan Kennedy say on multiple occasions how the top copywriters he knows all have years of “nose to nose, toes to toes” sales experience. And if you look at the famousest copywriters, from Claude Hopkins to Gary Halbert on down to Dan Kennedy himself, all started out in direct or door-to-door sales.

But I think today the “nose to nose, toes to toes” connection has weakened, in large part because door-to-door sales has become a much rarer endeavor.

On the other hand, I know more successful copywriters who have experience with pickup than I can count on my two hands and 10 sticky fingers.

In part, that’s because equivalent social shifts — things like the Internet — which caused d2d selling to drop have also made info about pickup and seduction available to a large pool of eager men.

But it’s more than that.

There are ideas, skills, and attitudes that translate from pickup to copywriting, and vice versa, same as from copy to d2d sales, and vice versa.

All to say:

1. You might have valuable skills and experiences you are not aware of right now.

2. If you want to find out some of the connections between copywriting and d2d sales and pickup, and also seemingly unrelated but deeply connected fields like hypnosis and stage magic and standup comedy, then you might like:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

It drops out the bottom of every sales funnel

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Last summer, I listened to an old sales training by a guy named Fred Herman. Says Fred:

“I believe every sale sort of funnels down this way. You need to have a product or a service. You need to have a customer, of course, to talk to. Then you need to find out what his dominant buying motive is. And then the picture he will buy will drop right out the bottom of the funnel, because people don’t buy products or services, they buy pictures of the end result of that product or service, playing a part in their life.”

This echoes something that the great Robert Collier wrote a hundred years ago in his Letter Book:

“Thousands of sales have been lost, millions of dollars worth of business have failed to materialize, solely because so few letter-writers have that knack of visualizing a proposition — of painting it in words so the reader can see it as they see it.”

And of course, if you need something a bit more modern, there’s negotiation coach Jim Camp, who summed it up in his pithy and dramatic way:

“No vision, no decision.”

“Sure sure,” you say. “Words, words, more words. I need pictures though! Isn’t that what you’re trying to sell me on?”

All right, let’s see if you can picture this:

Yesterday, I told you about Albert Lasker and Claude C. Hopkins.

Lasker, who ran the biggest and most powerful ad agency in the US, wanted Hopkins to come and work for him.

Problem was, Hopkins 1) didn’t want to be in advertising any more and 2) had made millions and didn’t need to work ever again.

Lasker asked Hopkins to meet for lunch at an upscale restaurant.

He played to Hopkins’s vanity, pulling out several pages of typewritten copy for a major new client, the best copy he had been able to get written by the best copywriters out there, which just wasn’t good enough to be submitted.

He made Hopkins an “easy yes” proposition — “just write three ads for us so we can submit it to this one client.”

Crucially — and this is really the picture-within-the-picture I want to give you — Lasker didn’t offer Hopkins any money to take the job.

After all, what’s money gonna do for Hopkins? He’s already got enough.

Instead, as the dessert arrived, Lasker told Hopkins to send his wife to the car dealer so she can pick out whatever car she likes, and Lasker would pay for it.

A bit of backstory:

1. Hopkins’s wife wanted an electric car (crazy thing is, those existed in 1907).

2. Hopkins, though a multimillionaire, was cheap and couldn’t part with the money to buy his wife the electric car. This was causing… tension at home.

You might think, what’s the difference between getting paid outright and getting paid via a free car for your wife?

In theory, no difference.

In practice, all the difference in the world.

And so it is with your prospects and customers too.

You might be promising them money.

That works some of the time. But what works all the time is to promise people what they really want. And that, like old Fred says up top, is a picture of the end result of what they are buying, playing a part in their life.

Of course, that takes some research on your part. Lasker had to do some scheming and digging to find out that Hopkins’s wife wanted an electric car and that Hopkins was too cheap to buy it for her, and that this was the most pressing problem in his life right now. But that’s what made Hopkins yield, “as all do, to Lasker’s persuasiveness.”

And that’s it. That’s all I got for you.

I have nothing to sell you today, at least nothing wonderfully expensive the way I would like.

But if you want more stories that can buy you a car, featuring Claude C. Hopkins and Albert Lasker, can find a couple in my original 10 Commandments book.

I’ve shipped off the new 10 Commandments book to several trusted readers and I am waiting, my cheeks red from holding my breath, for their feedback so I can integrate said feedback and hit publish on Amazon.

Meanwhile, if you still haven’t read the original 10 Commandments, you can find them all waiting for you here:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

A persuasion riddle featuring the greatest ad man of all time

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I got a riddle for you. A persuasion riddle. It goes like this:

In 1907, Albert Lasker, President at the Lord & Thomas ad agency, badly wanted to hire Claude C. Hopkins, widely believed to be the greatest ad man of that time, and really, of any time.

Problem:

Hopkins 1) didn’t want to work and 2) didn’t need the money.

The background was that, a short while earlier, Hopkins had been publicly disgraced and privately shook up.

He had become a part owner of a patent medicine company called Liquozone. He believed in the Liquozone product — he thought it had saved his daughter’s life. He advertised it very aggressively and effectively.

Hopkins took Liquozone from bankruptcy in 1902 to making a profit of $1.8 million the next year (about $60 million in today’s money).

Over the next five years, Hopkins, who owned a 25% stake in Liquozone, made millions of dollars personally, probably over $100 million in today’s money.

And then some muckracking journalist had the gall to go and write a series of muckracking articles (“The Great American Fraud”) about how patent medicines were all bunk and how Liquozone in particular was the “same old fake” and how, according to lab tests, it was probably more harmful than helpful.

In response to those articles, a bunch of states banned Liquozone, and the federal government set up the Food and Drug Administration, to regulate health products and the claims made about them.

Again, Hopkins, who genuinely believed in Liquozone, was privately hurt. And publicly, being involved with something that was now known as a fake and a scam, he decided to retire to a village on Lake Michigan, determined not to work in advertising no more.

And yet, as Hopkins later wrote, “As far as I know, no ordinary human being has ever resisted Albert Lasker. Nothing he desired has ever been forbidden him. So I yielded, as all do, to his persuasiveness.”

So here’s the riddle:

What did Albert Lasker say or do to convince Hopkins, who didn’t want to work and who didn’t need the money, to come out of his village hiding hole and get back into copywriting?

If you dig around on the internet, or if you get Perplexity to do it for you, you can probably find the answer.

But what’s the fun in that? And what’s the value?

The fact is, if you riddle this out for yourself, you might come up with good ideas of your own.

And when I share the actual answer in my email tomorrow, it’s sure to be much more memorable and useful to you.

By the way, the answer to this riddle applies way beyond convincing A-list copywriters to come work for you. It applies to just about any kind of new business partnership you might want to start.

But more about that tomorrow.

For today, I thought about what offer makes sense to promote, given the Hopkins and Lasker story above.

I realized that once again, it’s Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin, which I was promoting extensively last month.

I’m no longer giving away bonuses just for trying out Ronin for free for a week.

I am giving away bonuses if you decide to stick with Ronin past the free trial.

But honestly, the bonuses I’m offering, nice as they are, are but a drop in the total value of what you get if you are actually inside the Ronin community, and if you simply make a point to do something with the resources inside.

If you’d like to find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

My top 7 marketing books

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I heard once that reading lists make for great lead magnets.

Is that true? I don’t know.

But it got me to put together a recommended reading list of my own.

I started with a goal of 10 books — but though I’ve read many more than 10, I couldn’t honestly recommend 10. That’s a good thing for you — less reading to do.

So here are my top 7 marketing books, for you to enjoy, learn, and profit from:

1. The Robert Collier Letter Book, by Robert Collier

This book has it all — wagons of coal, silk stockings, genies in the lamp, free pens, rattlesnakes, dinosaurs. If you only ever read one book about direct marketing, this is my number-one recommendation.

2. Positioning, by Al Ries and Jack Trout

Tons of other good marketing advice beyond, “Get yourself into a niche of one.”

3. My Life In Advertising, by Claude C. Hopkins

All the wisdom in Hopkins’s vaunted Scientific Advertising, but presented with stories and detail that make it go down more easy.

4. The Adweek Copywriting Book, by Joe Sugarman

Very accessible, usable, and current, even if you never write a full-page magazine ad selling a calculator or UV-blocking sunglasses.

5. Influence, by Robert Cialdini

I wish I had written this book. What more can I say?

6. Start With No, by Jim Camp

You may have seen this negotiation book recommended before by online marketers. It happens a lot. What is it about Camp’s negotiation strategies that could be useful to sales and marketing online?

7. Made To Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath

I read this book only once but it’s stuck. That’s because the authors know what they’re talking about, and because they apply it to their own writing.

Like I said, I’ve heard that reading lists make for great lead magnets.

Do they also make for effective email copy? I don’t know.

But I’m willing to test it out.

If you haven’t already clicked away to Amazon to get one of the books above, maybe you will click below to the sales page for my Daily Email Habit service. It sometimes forces even me to write emails I would never write otherwise. Here’s the link if you’d like to find out more about it:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Only open this if you play Wordle

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For much of his life Fyodor Dostoevsky struggled with a gambling addiction. He played roulette obsessively, and would lose huge sums of money, and be driven into debt and self-loathing as a result.

I’m no Fyodor Dostoevsky, either in terms of writing or in the depravity of my addictions. Where Dostoevsky wrote Crime And Punishment, I wrote an advertorial for a dog seat belt. Where Dostoevsky played roulette, I play… Wordle.

This email is really only for you if you play Wordle as well. If you don’t, or have never even heard of Wordle, then you are a better or luckier man than I.

Wordle has been a daily addiction for me for the past three years or so, pretty much since I discovered it.

I tell myself Wordle is a tool I use to relax and reward myself for a job well done. But the the fact I play Wordle first thing in the morning, when I’m neither stressed nor when I’ve done any job, well or otherwise, exposes my reasoning as a lie.

The fact is, I like word games, puzzles, brain teasers, clues that tell me if I’m on the right path, the brief flash of insight when a solution comes together.

And then the added features of Wordle — the fact that it’s simple and limited in scope, that there’s just one puzzle a day, that it tells you how many days you’ve kept up a streak of guessing the day’s Wordle puzzle right…

Well, you play also. You can understand me.

Really, Wordle is harmless. It’s also useless, at least in any adult view of the world. But in the words of Claude Hopkins:

“The love of work can be cultivated, just like the love of play. The terms are interchangeable. What others call work I call play, and vice versa. We do best what we like best.”

These be profound words.

The same motivations and drives — love of word games, narrowing in on a solution, a flash of insight when it comes together, a streak you don’t want to break — can be put to some adult use.

It’s why I’ve been writing these daily emails even longer than I’ve been playing Wordle.

And unlike Wordle, these daily emails have been very valuable to me, personally, professionally, and metaphysiologically.

My point for you being, see what you already like to do, and see how you can take elements of that and make it a part of something that pays you.

Nobody was ever going to pay me to play Wordle professionally — THE WORLD IS UNFAIR — but writing daily, in a short format, keeping a streak up, getting some kind of feedback always, is the next best thing, and in some ways, even better.

All that’s to say, if like me you play Wordle, you might enjoy writing daily emails.

You might also enjoy my Daily Email Habit service, because I very consciously introduced elements of Wordle into it — the hints, the streak, the unique once-a-day puzzle.

You can see an example of a daily email puzzle at the page below, or you can sign up to start playing the game yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/deh