Elizabeth Gilbert Archives

This morning I was reading an article about Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote the massive bestseller Eat Pray Love, and the “dizzying numbers of women” who have followed in her wake to narrate their lives and loves online. This passage made me tingle:

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On social media, many of the most chaotic and emotionally lawless people you’ve ever known are posting on a regular basis about having at long last achieved inner peace. Many among us, after observing this cringe-inducing side effect of regular self-narration at mass scale, have given up altogether on sincere ideas of personal epiphany.

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I’m not on social media, but I am on email, a lot. And the passage above sounds exactly what I feel when I read the often-emailed phrase, “This changes everything.”

For fun or frustration, I just typed that phrase into my Gmail and came up with 52 exact matches in the subject line or preview text.

From coaches… crypto peddlers… course creators… Internet marketing gurus… two A-list copywriters… a B-list copywriter… and about a half-dozen investing mavens who act as the face of various Agora newsletters.

Whenever I hear somebody who has been in business for more than 2 weeks breathlessly announce that “This changes everything,” I conclude that this person or brand is either 1) chaotic or 2) the sales equivalent of “emotionally lawless” ie. unscrupulous.

And I lose a bit of respect for them, if I have any left. I also become a little more jaded towards the idea that anything being advertised at me can be worthwhile.

I’m telling you this as a kind of public service announcement, so you can beware of people using this phrase, or maybe, so I can warn you against using the same in your own marketing.

My second public service announcement is to remind you of my recently reopened Skool group, Daily Email House.

“This changes everything?” I hear you asking.

No.

But Daily Email House might change a few things in your life or head to help you, as the current mission for the group says, “use your email list to pay for a house.”

If you’d like to join me inside:

https://bejakovic.com/house

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

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

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

Weird, right?

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

And yet, what now?

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

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

What now?

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

I’ll tell ya.

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/deh