Matrix

Remember, all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more

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A few days ago, I got a question from a reader:

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Hi John,

What are the differences between “most valuable email” and simple money emails”? Thanks!

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Now get ready for the big bland takeaway from this email, which will probably be as familiar to you as the taxes you have to pay:

Facts and figures rarely persuade, and often they don’t even inform.

For example, I could have replied to my reader’s question above by telling him the facts and figures of my two courses — the prices, the main promises, the intended audiences.

But that stuff is literally in the half page of deck copy on the sales pages for the two courses. This reader knows about those sales pages and clearly doesn’t want to read them, or maybe has even read them, but the facts and figures failed to mean much.

So what to do? Because this is hardly one reader asking about my specific courses. This is how most of us act and think and feel most of the time about most things.

Certainly, if you have customers or prospects, this is how most of them are. They will not read the well-researched facts and figures you send their way, or maybe they will even read, but those facts and figures won’t mean much.

One powerful strategy when facts and figures fail is to stop being so damn linear, logical, and thorough, and to instead make your point in an associative, intuitive, non-linear way.

In other words, instead of facts and figures, give people a metaphor. Let me give you an example:

I recently rewatched the first Matrix movie. To my mind, that movie is the richest source of powerful metaphors that’s come out in pop culture over the past 30 years (and longer, probably going back to the original Star Wars movie). It’s well worth rewatching from time to time so you have it close at hand when writing your marketing material.

But back to my reader’s question and the difference between Simple Money Emails and Most Valuable Email.

My best answer is that Simple Money Emails is like the kung fu, the use of semiautomatic weapons, the piloting of the fighter helicopter that Neo and Trinity and Morpheus can own in an instant with the push of a button thanks to their loading program.

These are powerful and practical skills, which look incredibly cool to the uninitiated, but which ultimately anybody can do and profit from very quickly — in the Matrix, to fight and destroy; with Simple Money Emails, to write quick and easy messages that make money and keep readers reading.

On the other hand, Most Valuable Email is like the little bald-headed monk-child at the Oracle’s house in the Matrix, the one who tells Neo that there is no spoon.

Really, at the core of MVE is a similarly simple but profound idea.

It’s not an idea that is meant for everyone, but only for a small group of pre-selected people.

However, if you can accept this idea and make it your own, you can start to bend reality — including both your readers’ reality, and your own.

This makes it so you ultimately don’t need to rely on the email copywriting equivalents of kung fu or semiautomatic weapons or even fighter helicopters, because the ultimate results happen simply via “inner work” of a sort, by just absorbing and repeating the mantra that there is no spoon.

Now, if you are interested in either of these two courses, I bet you still have questions even after this metaphor. But I imagine you might have a better sense which of the two courses is really right for you.

If you’re looking for practical, result-oriented, quickly acquired skills, then it will be Simple Money Emails.

If you’re looking for mastery and a long-term practice that will take you to places you cannot imagine yet, then it will be Most Valuable Email.

You can get your remaining questions answered on the sales pages for the two courses. In the slightly pompous words of Morpheus:
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“I can only show you the door. You’re the one who has to walk through it.”

Plan Horse brings in a surprising number of sales and a satisfying Matrix analogy

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My email yesterday about “Plan Horse” brought in more sales of Most Valuable Email than any email since the official launch of this course closed, last September. I asked myself why.

Maybe it was just the weather — hurricane winds over the Mediterranean have been blasting Barcelona for the past 14 hours. They almost carried off the potted olive tree that lives on my balcony. Maybe they also forced in extra offshore sales.

But maybe it was something in the email itself. I have an idea what that could be, and I’ll be writing about that in the future.

In any case, some of those new buyers have already gone through MVE – it only takes an hour. One of them, copywriter Anthony La Tour, wrote in this morning to say:

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Whoa…

Just finished your MVE course. 

Meta-level stuff. 

I feel like I’ve just been unplugged from the Matrix.

I’m gonna go through it a few more times.

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I never thought of the Matrix analogy for Most Valuable Email. But I like it, and I’ll be using it going forward. It’s a rich mapping, and it therefore feels satisfying. That’s something to keep in mind if you yourself use analogies to make your point. Here’s what I mean:

Like Anthony says, MVE shows you the Matrix, the underlying reality — what’s going on beneath the surface in some of my most effective emails.

But it goes beyond that.

Because in the Matrix cineverse, once you’re unplugged, you can go back inside and upload new skills into your head — and that’s how applying the Most Valuable Email trick feels to me. Like at the start of the first Matrix movie, after Neo has just been unplugged, and is now beginning his training, Tank sits him down in the jack-in chair and says:

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We’re supposed to start with these operation programs first. That’s major boring shit. Let’s do something a little more fun. How about… combat training?

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Neo sits there in the chair while the upload runs. A moment later, his eyes open wide and he gasps. “I know kung fu,” he says.

Well, uploading skills via Most valuable Email is not as push-button as the process in the Matrix. MVE takes some personal effort. And it takes more than a second or two to write one of these Most Valuable Emails.

But over time, this process uploads new skills into your head — including skills which you might have felt you could never learn to do well. At least it’s been that way for me.

If you’re willing to keep pressing the “Upload New Skill” button, then MVE might be as valuable to you. To get started with it today:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Baby Internet turning into the Matrix

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Fair warning:

Today’s long post isn’t about persuasion or copywriting. It’s just a kooky and perhaps embarrassing prediction I want to make. Read on at your own risk.

In case you’re still here, I first want to point out a few facts.

Fact one is that some complex systems are made up of simple parts.

Bee hives. Ant colonies. Human brains.

Take a bunch of simple nodes. Bring millions or billions of them together. Allow them to communicate and react to each other.

What you can get is complex behaviors. They are unpredictable, adaptable, and often display something you can call intelligence.

Second thing I want to point out is that the Internet fits this mold.

Like the human brain, the internet is made out of billions of (relatively) simple parts.

All these laptops and servers… and cell phones and routers… and smart toasters and data centers… link together in uncountable ways. They constantly communicate among themselves. They stimulate different patterns of activity. They are always changing and yet they maintain an underlying structure.

In other words, the Internet has the features needed for complex, emergent behavior. It might even have features needed for intelligence. Not a human-like intelligence, but an intelligence nonetheless.

Fact three is that more and more people are claiming the corona situation is a large-scale conspiracy.

I don’t personally believe this. Partly because conspiracy theories are often a dumb answer to complex questions. Partly because I can’t imagine any country or Illuminati-like organization coming out ahead of the current mess.

But I do think the Internet as a whole will profit.

It will get more nodes added to it… more synapses and connections built inside it… more energy and money fed into it. As an organism, it will get more powerful.

Now here’s a fourth and final thing, which I’m not sure qualifies as fact:

The whole corona situation would not have been possible without the Internet as it is today. And by “corona situation,” I mean the pandemic plus the economic and political reaction.

30 or 40 years ago, people got one dose of news a day, and it tended to concern local things more than today. Plus, those news were somewhat filtered. News outlets still paid lip service to “decency” or “professionalism” or “public responsibility.”

Thanks to the Internet, all that’s gone. People get constant news updates, all day long. And the news has become more provocative, shocking, and global.

This meant an unprecedented level of public attention and concern about corona. Long before anybody had any direct experience with the actual virus.

Combine this with the fact that today, everybody’s got a global voice (again, thanks to the Internet). The upshot was a new level of pressure on politicians to do something. So they covered their rumps by making decisive yet short-sighted decisions. And here we are, working from home, communicating by Zoom, and shopping online.

Summing it all up:

The Internet has all the preconditions for a kind of real intelligence.

The Internet played an active part in the development of the corona situation.

The Internet stands to profit from the same.

So you can see why I said this post is kooky and potentially embarrassing.

I’m not 100% saying the Internet is an intelligent entity that consciously fanned the flames of corona for its own benefit…

But my prediction is that it’s gonna get there, some time soon.

I compare it to a newborn baby, crying because it’s hungry. It does this instinctively, but the response is nourishment and growth.

Soon enough though, the baby stops crying and learns how to speak. A few years later, it grows up and turns into the Matrix.

Are you still with me? I’m impressed by your perseverance.

If I didn’t manage to convince you with my sci-fi scenario above, well, then it’s my fault.

But if I did manage to (somewhat) convince you, then I want to point out a persuasion lesson after all. It’s Gene Schwartz’s idea of gradualization. In Gene’s words:

Every claim, every image, every proof in your ad has two separate sources of strength:

1. The content of that statement itself; and

2. The preparation you have mode for that statement — either by recognizing that preparation as already existing in your prospect’s mind, or by deliberately laying the groundwork for that statement in the preceding portion of the ad itself.

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