Wordle

Only open this if you play Wordle

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For much of his life Fyodor Dostoevsky struggled with a gambling addiction. He played roulette obsessively, and would lose huge sums of money, and be driven into debt and self-loathing as a result.

I’m no Fyodor Dostoevsky, either in terms of writing or in the depravity of my addictions. Where Dostoevsky wrote Crime And Punishment, I wrote an advertorial for a dog seat belt. Where Dostoevsky played roulette, I play… Wordle.

This email is really only for you if you play Wordle as well. If you don’t, or have never even heard of Wordle, then you are a better or luckier man than I.

Wordle has been a daily addiction for me for the past three years or so, pretty much since I discovered it.

I tell myself Wordle is a tool I use to relax and reward myself for a job well done. But the the fact I play Wordle first thing in the morning, when I’m neither stressed nor when I’ve done any job, well or otherwise, exposes my reasoning as a lie.

The fact is, I like word games, puzzles, brain teasers, clues that tell me if I’m on the right path, the brief flash of insight when a solution comes together.

And then the added features of Wordle — the fact that it’s simple and limited in scope, that there’s just one puzzle a day, that it tells you how many days you’ve kept up a streak of guessing the day’s Wordle puzzle right…

Well, you play also. You can understand me.

Really, Wordle is harmless. It’s also useless, at least in any adult view of the world. But in the words of Claude Hopkins:

“The love of work can be cultivated, just like the love of play. The terms are interchangeable. What others call work I call play, and vice versa. We do best what we like best.”

These be profound words.

The same motivations and drives — love of word games, narrowing in on a solution, a flash of insight when it comes together, a streak you don’t want to break — can be put to some adult use.

It’s why I’ve been writing these daily emails even longer than I’ve been playing Wordle.

And unlike Wordle, these daily emails have been very valuable to me, personally, professionally, and metaphysiologically.

My point for you being, see what you already like to do, and see how you can take elements of that and make it a part of something that pays you.

Nobody was ever going to pay me to play Wordle professionally — THE WORLD IS UNFAIR — but writing daily, in a short format, keeping a streak up, getting some kind of feedback always, is the next best thing, and in some ways, even better.

All that’s to say, if like me you play Wordle, you might enjoy writing daily emails.

You might also enjoy my Daily Email Habit service, because I very consciously introduced elements of Wordle into it — the hints, the streak, the unique once-a-day puzzle.

You can see an example of a daily email puzzle at the page below, or you can sign up to start playing the game yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

How to de-cult your mom (or any other QAnonized family member)

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How careless and maybe even harmful was my email yesterday. I just didn’t realize what I was getting you into.

I’ll explain everything.

But first, let me tell you about a 72-year-old Florida woman I’ll call Susan.

Starting in 2019, Susan fell deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole that is QAnon.

Each day, she spent many hours binging on conspiracy videos and scrolling through that freedom-figthing app, Telegram.

Susan’s daughter, Karen, watched all this in horror.

Now, I’m personally not sure what the harm is in a retired, 72-year-old lady thinking that Hilary Clinton is harvesting adrenochrome from the living bodies of young children.

But Karen and Susan live together. And I guess it can get exhausting if all your mom ever wants to talk about is Satanic pedophiles.

So Karen tried everything to get her mom to snap out of her QAnon haze.

Karen tried listening patiently. She got angry. She threw facts and reason in her mom’s face.

Nothing worked.

But then Karen got lucky.

She found something that’s completely snapped her mom out of her QAanon habits…

… a safe, positive, apolitical alternative:

Wordle.

I talked about Wordle yesterday. It’s a little word game that’s been going viral over the past few months.

I even casually recommended you check it out.

I should have been more careful.

Because as the story of Susan above shows, Wordle and QAnon have lots in common. I’m not kidding.

Both QAnon and Wordle are fundamentally puzzles.

They feature clues, and with work, reveal more clues.

Both create an atmosphere of tension, of uncertainty, of consequence.

Both allow you to feel progress as you work to resolve that tension.

And finally, both offer a simple, clear solution… one that takes all the clues and snaps them together in a perfect fit.

The result at the end is an addicting emotional payoff. And the urgent desire to go for another spin.

Like Susan above:

​​”Now she spends as much as 2 to 3 hours per day,” her daughter Karen said, “playing bootleg Wordle on another site that lets you play as much as you like. I’m not even joking.”

So my point is, be careful when you play Wordle. If the New York Times ever decides to shut it down or put it behind a paywall, you might find yourself craving a fix and getting sucked into QAnon…

… or maybe even something worse.

Like getting obsessed with my Gospel of Insight Marketing book.

Because you can create the same feeling that Wordle and QAnon create with your own writing.

You can flood people with satisfaction… give them the feeling it all makes sense… and create a need for more of the same.

That’s what that my Insight book is about, or at least that’s the promise of it. And as usual, I’ll use the ideas I’m writing about to write the actual book itself.

That’s all in the future though. But if you’re into this puzzle stuff, then keep your antenna up. I’ll drop more clues in the coming days and weeks. Sign up here if you want to be in on the comms.

My guilty-pleasure morning ritual gets an ugly update

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I sat down a few moments ago for my guilty-pleasure morning ritual. The coffee was ready, I flipped open my laptop and—

“Oh what the hell is this,” I said out loud.

The game was still the same. But the background of the site had changed from dark gray to white.

I checked the URL. It was no longer some weird .co.uk domain. It was now nytimes.com.

Perhaps you’ve seen the same.

After all, millions of people around the world have all been playing this game each day, and millions more have been joining them week by week.

The game is a word-guessing game, called Wordle, created by a guy named Josh Wardle.

Wardle created Wordle some time ago as a game that just he and his girlfriend could play together. His friends and family got in on it too. Then Wardle released Wordle publicly on his website last October.

That first month, a total of 90 people played it.

Two months later, in December, the number of people playing Wordle each day had grown to 300,000.

By January, it was millions each day.

On February 1st, the New York Times bought Wordle from Wardle, for a “low 7 figures” sum. And today, here we are, with the stupid, white, failing NYT background.

Oh well. In the end, the corporations absorb everything. But let’s talk influence:

I can see many things that went into making Wordle a success. I want to point out just one. It might be relevant to you if you are interested in the creative or marketing side of reality.

Like, I said, Wordle is my guilty-pleasure morning ritual.

That’s because there’s only one Wordle puzzle each day.

Once you play — whether you win or lose — that’s it. You gotta wait until tomorrow, when the next one comes out.

This has a few key consequences:

One of course is scarcity. It makes each Wordle puzzle feel more valuable and interesting. It keeps you coming back day after day.

Two is that you can’t glut yourself.

With most games – and with things other than games too — I often keep playing to the point where I start to feel disgusted.

But there’s no risk of that with Wordle. It’s like a Spartan marriage. The two sides meet only rarely, and are full of desire for each other.

But maybe the most important thing is that each Wordle puzzle feels unique and real.

Wordle grew so quickly because players shared their results on Twitter. (Through a clever design, Wardle allowed people to share their results without giving away the puzzle.)

That worked because there is only one puzzle a day. Everybody in the world who played Wordle on a given day had that same puzzle.

In other words, it made sense to brag about your results, because other Wordle players actually shared your experience. It even created a sense of connection to other people playing Wordle.

But maybe you haven’t played Wordle yet, and you’re getting lost in what I’m talking about. Or maybe you’re wondering what this might mean for you, or how can you use this.

I’ll give you just one idea bouncing around in my head:

For a long time, I’ve been writing these daily emails, and then posting them to my website as an archive. This has helped me in the past because these blog archives were the main way people found me and my newsletter.

But that’s slowly changing. And so today I remembered an idea I had a while ago:

To scrap the archive, and simply post the latest daily email on my site. Each day, the email on the front page would be updated, and the previous email would disappear. Plus there would be a newsletter optin form for people who don’t want to miss out.

I’m not sure if this is smart. I’m not sure whether I will do it. But maybe.

Because Wardle’s Wordle success shows that in a world where everybody’s working hard to get you as addicted and engaged as possible… less can be more.

Anyways, if you have any advice for me on the technical side of how I could easily implement my latest-email-front-page idea on my WordPress site, please write in and let me know.

And if you haven’t played Wordle yet, you can find it on the white-background page at the link below. (I got today’s puzzle in two tries only — my best score yet.)

https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html