I’m in Bologna this week, sitting around parks, drinking Aperols, eating mortadella sandwiches.
I know. I know. Bear with in my time of trouble.
In the mornings, before this intense laying about begins, I also do a bit of work, which includes opening my inbox and reading 2-3 of the dozens of emails that have piled up over night.
That’s how yesterday I came across an email by a guy named Henrik Karlsson, who wrote on Substack about “How not to forget what matters.”
I want to share Karlsson’s answer with you today, because it’s kind of what everything is about.
Says Karlsson, reading is not enough to make a change that you want to make in your life.
Neither is making a resolution to do so.
Instead, it takes habitual practice and revisiting and resetting to the direction you want to go in.
But how to do that rather than letting it slip away? That’s where Karlsson introduces an interesting practice that dates back a couple thousand years:
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During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, there spread a practice known as hypomnēmata, a type of notetaking system, used as a tool for meditation, in which the writer would store quotes from books they had read. Each day, often in the morning, the notetaker would open their notebook and look for a passage relevant to something they were struggling with, and then they would meditate on that—unpacking it, making the idea top of mind, ensuring it was alive in them.
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I never before heard about hypomnēmata, but I wrote it down in my own notetaking system, which I have been keeping for years now, with the exact same goal, of not forgetting what matters.
I’ve since built an entire journaling and notetaking system around it, so I don’t just pile up notes, but actually come back to them, and make some use of them instead of just meditating on them.
This system has served me very well over the years, and has saved me hundreds of hours of time I would have wasted otherwise… made me hundreds of thousands of dollars I wouldn’t have made otherwise… and has simply turned me into a healthier, wealthier, wiser Bejako than I might have been otherwise.
I eventually packed up everything I have learned about notetaking and journaling and getting value out of notes into a course I called Insight Exposed. It’s not a course I sell regularly, but earlier this year, Maliha Mannan of The Side Blogger promoted Insight Exposed to her list. In an email with the subject line, “If you buy only one course this year,” Maliha wrote:
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This is the course (called Insight Exposed) in which John literally lays out the secret behind his creative genius. It’s a course on how his writing brain works.
How does he collect ideas? Which ideas does he think are worth collecting? How does he retrieve those ideas when he is writing? How does he connect multiple, seemingly random, ideas to create something new every time he sits down to write an email? And how does he make them so damn persuasive that even complete strangers are moved to give him their attention… and money?
That’s what the course is about: the persuasive writing brain-map of one of the most persuasive writers I know.
A disclaimer is necessary here… See, it is a dense course… as expected of such a course. And I recommend that you take your time going through it. Take notes, and then go through it again (I myself have gone through it thrice in the last few weeks).
But it’s worth the time and effort because I don’t know of many people who are as effectively convincing with their words as John is, and seeing how his brain works will give you ways to be more effective in your own thinking, idea collecting, and writing.
To be clear… this is NOT a how-to-be-a-good-copywriter course.
This is literally a course on how John cultivates his own ideas and creativity.
And as a fellow writer and email marketer, I will tell you now, I have never gone through a course quite like this one and gotten so much out of it. That includes John’s other courses, and all of John’s courses are pretty effing fantastic already.
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Maliha recommends taking your time with Insight Exposed. I will make one further recommendation, or rather two.
This course won’t do you any good unless you actually put it into practice. Not only collecting notes, but also connecting them, revisiting them, and ideally, turning them into some kind of content of your own. Such as for example, writing your own daily emails.
Which brings me to my Hogwarts of Influence event. It ends tomorrow at 12 midnight PST. It brings together a bunch of my offers at 3 different tiers, designed to turn you into a persuasion wizard of greater and greater power.
At the Dumbledore tier, you can get your hands on Insight Exposed, in all its dense glory, which I don’t normally sell.
At the Dumbledore tier, you can also get two years of Daily Email Habit, which is my service to help you turn your notes and ideas and experiences into emails that make you money and save you time on sales calls and make you smarter and happier as a person.
There’s a lot inside Hogwarts of Influence. That’s my fault.
It’s also why this offer ends tomorrow.
If you want to take advantage of the most generous offer I will make this year, you will have to wade through all the many things I am bundling inside.
For the full info, before the clock runs out: