Warren Beatty

My trivial mistake and maybe a profound human insight

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I went for a walk this morning and I passed by a small public park. The gate was closed. On the gate, hand-written in white paint, was a quote in Spanish. It said something about a man sitting in the shade, and it was attributed to actor Warren Beatty.

I’m a big Warren Beatty fan, going back to the movie Shampoo. As soon as I saw this quote, I imagined this handsome, confident, and yet accommodating Hollywood star smiling at me as he said whatever the quote said.

But what did the quote say?

My Spanish is still not so good. I googled “warren beatty tree quote” on my phone, hoping to find the original. Amazingly, the quote popped right up:

“‘Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.’ With this quote, Buffett was speaking to long-term investing…”

That was the original quote all right. But Warren Buffett? Giving a metaphor for investing? I did a double take.

I checked what I had googled. Sure enough, I had searched for “warren buffett tree quote.”

I looked at the handwritten quote on the gate. It too was attributed to Warren Buffett.

And yet, in spite of processing “Warren Buffett” on some level, the conscious part of my brain had confidently seen actor Warren Beatty’s face and heard Warren Beatty’s voice — not Warren Buffett’s.

That might seem like a trivial mistake. But to me it’s not. Consider another anecdote:

A couple years ago, I was driving a car on a mountain road. Turn after turn, all I saw was forest around me.

It got a little monotonous but I kept my eyes on the road and kept focused — the way was windy and narrow.

And then, as I was staring ahead at the next turn, straight into some bushes, in a flash, the bushes metamorphosed and became a deer that was standing in the road.

Of course, I realize the bushes probably didn’t jump into the road and turn into a deer.

What I guess happened is that my brain kept predicting “bushes, trees, turn, trees, bushes, turn…”

But then that monotonous picture became unsustainable, and a more useful picture — there’s a deer in the road — popped into my consciousness.

I’d like to suggest to you this is what the human brain does all the time. It makes up guesses, predictions, images, stories, in line with what we expect and what we hope. But it does something else also.

The brain also gives us an incredibly powerful feeling of certainty that whatever we are seeing right now, right in front of our eyes, is real and right — even when it’s far from what the “reality” is. We just don’t usually see the counter-evidence as clearly as I did today or on that mountain road.

Anyways, these are things I like to think about.

I also like to think about how to play with that feeling of “certainty of rightness” that we all experience at the core of who we are.

And that’s connected in some subtle way to my Most Valuable Email.

Today is the last day I will be promoting that program for a while. That’s not any kind of real deadline, except for the benefits you could be getting if you went through this course today.

Maybe you’ve been interested in Most Valuable Email. Maybe you’ve been telling yourself you want to go through it and apply it. But maybe you’ve been postponing it because you think there’s time and I will keep reminding you day after day.

If so, then your brain might be fooling you with certainty that isn’t very useful.

In case you want to get a jump on your brain while the image of MVE is still in your consciousness, here’s where you can get the Most Voluble Email:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

The Warren Beatty strategy for seducing copywriting clients

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“Women are like a jar of olives. You can eat one, close it up. Or you can eat them all.”
— Warren Beatty

I recently read some statistics about the sex life of Warren Beatty.

The man lost his virginity at age 20.

And then, he became a Hollywood star.

Over the next 35 years, he supposedly slept with almost 13,000 women, according to the best estimates of his biographer, Peter Biskind.

That averages to a new woman every day.

Almost certainly not true. Even Beatty himself has denied the claim.

However, he has over the decades been associated with a lot of famous women, including Melanie Griffith, Darryl Hannah, Jane Fonda, Vivien Leigh, Madonna, Carly Simon, Goldie Hawn, Barbara Streisand…

Oh, and Joan Collins, who said Beatty was “so pretty but just TOO exhausting in the bedroom.”

Mind you, all those women knew about each other. In other words, Beatty’s playboy background didn’t hurt. It helped. ​​

Anyways, now that you have that in mind, I want to tell you something related that might help your copywriting career.

I am currently negotiating a project with a client that I’ve done some smaller work for.

If this comes through, it will be the biggest single project I have had to date.

But the interesting thing is how I got this client.

About a year ago, I wrote him a cold email to introduce myself.

“Sounds interesting,” he replied. “I will keep you in mind.”

And he did.

He first hired me for a single project around December, then again for something in April, then a few small things earlier this summer. And now, here we are.

And here’s the thing.

I’ve sent the same cold email to several other leads.

They haven’t hired me yet. But they have all gotten back to me very quickly, with an almost identical response.

“Sounds interesting. I will keep you in mind.”

So what was the cold email? Well, if you’d like to find that out, you can get it inside my shamelessly promiscuous A-List Zone. For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/alist-zone

The Bugsy Siegel “take my gun” way to build vision

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I started watching Bugsy last night.

It’s a Barry Levinson movie starring Warren Beatty as Ben Siegel (don’t call him “Bugsy” unless you want a sock in the jaw).

Bugsy (all right, he’s dead) is a big-time mobster from New York who comes to Hollywood to expand his business.

And so he goes to meet a local crime boss (right across the street) and gives him two options. “Option one,” says Bugsy, “is you come to work for me. We take 75%, you get 25%, which has got to be worth at least three times what your 100% is worth now.”

“And option two?” asks the local crime boss.

Here Bugsy pulls out his gun. The whole room stands up on alert (Bugsy is alone, the local crooks are a dozen). “No, no, don’t worry,” Bugsy says amiably. “Here, take it.” And he shoves his gun into the local crime boss’s hands and points it at himself.

The local crime boss looks confused for a second. Finally, he says, “What, I gotta kill you?”

Bugsy again smiles and nods his head.

The negotiation concludes, and the Hollywood crime boss is now part of the Bugsy Siegel organization.

I thought this scene was a great illustration of how to build vision (a cornerstone of the Jim Camp school of sales and negotiation). The vision in this case is not that the local crime boss would have to commit a murder. The vision instead is that Bugsy (and his associates) are fearless, crazy, and will stop at nothing to get what they want.

I’ve found that the most effective ways to build vision are often this simple and surprising.

It’s something to keep in mind if you’re negotiating or trying to sell. And as I’ve written before (“The sink-or-swim sales close”), this kind of “take my gun” approach can work in building vision in copy as well. If you want to read about that, here’s the link to that ancient post:

https://bejakovic.com/sink-swim-sales-letter-close/