Werner Herzog

Should I offer to eat my shoe?

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Back in 1979, German film director Werner Herzog ate his shoe.

Herzog had once said that a fellow director, Errol Morris, would never finish his movie Gates of Heaven. Herzog was hoping to be proven wrong, so he added that if Morris did ever finish the movie, he, Herzog, would eat his shoe.

Morris eventually finished his movie.

So Herzog put on an event. The thing was filmed. A couple hundred people attended.

Herzog first boiled his leather shoe for five hours with garlic, herbs, and duck fat to make it somewhat edible. He then cut up the leather into tiny pieces. Over the course of about 45 minutes, Herzog chewed and swallowed much of the leather. The sole went uneaten.

I thought of this today because I was thinking of guarantees for an offer.

It is a well-known truth that a guarantee reassures undecided buyers and increases sales.

The standard is the money-back guarantee. You can get generous with it, and offer double-your-money-back. Or you can get creative. “I’ll eat my hat!”

But I don’t wear a hat. I don’t even own one. That’s why thought of Wener Herzog and his shoe.

I looked over to the shoe rack near my front door. There’s a pair of old white Converse All-Stars there. They’re made of canvas. I could boil them? Maybe season them? A bit vinegar? At least eat the laces?

But then I snapped out of my fantasy.

Guarantees are great. I encourage you to think about how to offer them for what you sell, and to get creative.

But I am not and will not be offering a guarantee for Daily Email Habit, the main offer I’ve been promoting over past few months.

It’s not simply that shoe canvas is tough, and my Converse have been through a lot, and that I don’t want to risk somebody actually requesting that I eat one of them.

My reason is simply that I actually want Daily Email Habit to be useful to the people who join.

The basic offer I’m making is to help you start and stick with the habit of sending daily emails.

What I offer is help getting you over initial hurdle of what to write about each day… guidance to making your daily emails more effective… and savings of time and brain power.

But you still have to put in the work.

I don’t want to encourage uncommitted or undedicated people to try out Daily Email Habit by promising to eat my shoe, or by offering any kind of guarantee.

As I wrote a few days ago, I’m even trying to turn people away if they don’t know what they’re getting into. Daily Email Habit only really makes sense for people who are committed and dedicated to write daily and profit from it.

If that’s you, Daily Email habit can be a great help. I have a growing wall of testimonials and case studies on the sales page from people who started their own daily email habit and who profited as a result.

If you’d like to read some of their stories, or start your own habit that can lead you to similar results, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

It takes two to tango with a bear

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After about 5 months of very slow reading, I recently managed to finish Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Honestly, I think this book will become a Bible of sorts for me.

It crystalizes so many vague ideas I’ve had and also gives me new and valuable perspectives.

Such as Kahneman’s concept of “the two selves.” Let me illustrate this with something else that’s meaningful to me, and that’s Werner Herzog’s movie Grizzly Man.

This is a documentary about a guy who traveled up to Alaska summer after summer.

He camped out in the wilderness, living in a tent, and recording hundreds of hours of video of himself, of the tall grasslands, of the beautiful rivers, and of the troupe of grizzly bears that hung out all around him.

The grizzlies and the video guy eventually developed a mutual respect for each other.

He got closer and closer to them, and more and more in touch with nature.

It was becoming quite transcendent. Until one lean summer night, when a hungry grizzly bear came into the guy’s tent and, during a horrific and terrifying few minutes, ripped him apart and ate him.

Shocking story.

And a good illustration of Kahneman’s two selves.

One self is the “experiencing self.”

It’s how we feel, moment by moment. The grizzly man’s experiencing self got many thousands of moments’ worth of peace, beauty, excitement, and self-discovery.

The other self is the remembering self.

​It’s how we evaluate or judge our experience in hindsight, or from a removed perspective.

​​The grizzly man’s remembering self, if it could put the pieces back together, would probably remember the one emotional high point of his Alaska summers — maybe the time he managed to get close to a mamma bear and her cubs — and the tragic end — the late-night bear mauling.

So why am I telling you this?

Well, I personally find I consult my remembering self too much, both when evaluating how I felt, and in making big decision about the future.

There’s no getting around the remembering self — it’s an essential part of all of us.

But it’s only one half of the tango.

The experiencing self should have something to say too.

And as I hope the grizzly man story above illustrates, the two selves can often come to very different conclusions.

Anyways, maybe this philosophical rambling will be useful to you in some way.

Now it’s back to the mundane world of direct response money-making. And if you have a business and you need some help with that, both your remembering and experiencing selves might appreciate the following experience:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorials/