The Three Month Vacation Podcast: Recent Episodes
Sean D'Souza
Sean D'Souza made two vows when he started up Psychotactics back in 2002. The first was that he'd always get paid in advance and the second was that work wouldn't control his life. He decided to take three months off every year. But how do you take three months off, without affecting your business and profits? Do you buy into the myth of "outsourcing everything and working just a few hours a week?" Not really. Instead, you structure your business in a way that enables you to work hard and then take three months off every single year. And Sean walks his talk. Since 2004, he's taken three months off every year (except in 2005, when there was a medical emergency). This podcast isn't about the easy life. It's not some magic trick about working less. Instead with this podcast you learn how to really enjoy your work, enjoy your vacation time and yes, get paid in advance.
Some people are adamant that they will never use AI. However, that's a tiny, obscure minority. AI is here to stay and that means we've all dipped our toes in it. Well, I took a bath one day. I got AI to tidy up my article. What happened next? Let's find out.
Many of us burn out simply because we live in the past. How long the past? We could go all the way to our childhood, and it's there where we learn how to go for perfection. It's this level of perfection that continues to drive us crazy for the rest of our lives. Is there a way out? Yes, there is. It's called quantity. Instead of trying to go for quality, you get to that stage of quality by working on your quantity. Doesn't that seem strange? Check out this episode and decide for yourself.
We hear that somehow we have to get 1% better every day. However, how do you measure this improvement? Can it be measured at all? And what does it mean?
Once a course ends, it's often just the beginning of a journey. Think about it for a moment: you've finished an article writing course, and you've just managed to put all the pieces together. Now you need to keep going. That's the point when the teacher leaves the room, and so does the group that held everything together. We've tried, tried and tried again to make this follow up work but it's been less than successful. Then we hit upon three specific steps, and everything changed. Here are those steps.
We are constantly inundated with something new and improved. It seems almost impossible to keep up and we scramble for new tools. But what if we could pare back a lot and stay with a lot less? How can we achieve a much bigger "wow factor" with a lot less?
It's not important to win an argument in person. However, when writing a book or creating a presentation, you need to get a slightly new idea across. However, what if the client has a strong counter-opinion? In this episode we look at how to use misdirection to get across an idea that's new and make it feel like it was the client's idea all along.
Notice something strange when you tell a story. People are always waiting for you to finish because they want to know the point of the story. This subtle curiosity level gives us an advantage. It means that we can play director and change the path of the story. Every story seems to have a predefined pathway; yet what if we took one story and swung it in different ways? Wouldn't that be amazing? Let's find out how it's done.
One-on-one consulting seems logical, even superior to group consulting. It's why clients consistently prefer it. Which is why it seems almost reckless to move to group consulting. All the obvious fears bubble up madly. How can we tackle these fears and keep the client more than happy? Let's find out in this second episode.
No one needs to tell us that one-on-one consulting is extremely tiresome, even when it's rewarding. Each consulting session takes so much time: the preparation before, the downtime needed after, and the session itself. But will clients appreciate it—or even stay with you—if you suddenly change to group consulting? Let's find out how it's done, because yes, we've done it before, and so have many others.
Free or paid? That's the question that rattles around in our heads when we want to promote an information product. And if it's free, why free? What's the benefit for you? If it's paid, should you go high or low? Let's explore Part 1 and Part 2 of this seemingly eternal mystery.
It seems almost impossible to price a product—and even harder to decide when it comes to information products. How do you decide if you should give away the information free or charge for it? Let's explore the first two parts in Part 1 and Part 2.
When we think about the journey of a thousand miles, we often assume it means constant forward movement. We picture ourselves taking one step after another, continuing steadily until the journey is complete. But in reality, most journeys involve setbacks. At times, after making progress, it can feel as though we're actually moving backwards. Strange as it sounds, going backwards is a good thing. Let's find out why.
There's hardly anyone who says they have loads of time. We all want 36 hours per day and eight days a week, and yet most of the time the time we so desperately seek lies in plain sight. If you use your time well, you will find that you suddenly have lots of time to waste. Let's go on this weird journey to find time that already exists.
We believe coaching is often the best approach but it's not always the case. You might find an average coach and make little progress or you could have an exceptional coach and become incredibly skilled. For most of our learning, self-study is essential but it doesn't seem to work for many people. Why is this? Sometimes the most perplexing question has a surprisingly simple answer. Explore why self-study is so effective for some while others struggle to make much progress.
You are told that you have to be productive, but how productive is productive? We have been at work for close to 26 years, and we still have a full day of activity. Isn't that good enough reason to slow down or just do nothing at all for some of the days? Let's find out why productivity needs a break.
If you ask most people what is the core of learning, they will give you something banal like hard work or practise; however, they will also state that you need to get feedback. The problem is that feedback almost never has the necessary impact. The reason why it fails to help us move forward is because of the timing. What we need is not feedback but instant feedback. But why is instant feedback far superior than just feedback alone? Let's find out.
Most of us still accept the idea that you need 21 days to build a habit. Yet, most habits can fall apart even if you labour at them with dedication. That's because of why a habit fails. It fails because of a lack of a system. But what's in that system? It's the drive to remove inefficiencies. All habits fail if they're inefficient. Find out why you need a habit system, instead.
If habit change is really about personal effort, why do so many carefully built habits quietly fall over the cliff? The answer isn't motivation and it's certainly not willpower. Bah, grit! Habit change is based instead on your environment. It's almost always based on the company you keep. Let's find out why your environment is the most important habit changing strategy of all.
We are constantly typing, whether it's on our phone or at the computer. Sometimes, it's just a simple message; at other times, it is a bunch of emails. But the typing is relentless. No matter how quickly we type, we can speak a lot faster (sometimes between 80 to 100 words per minute). This is where Wispr Flow really helps. It works at the speed of thought, and better still, it formats everything correctly. This will make you more productive than ever and give you that free time that you're looking for. Listen to the podcast and shave off at least 30-50% of typing time right away. Here's the link for the free month: Try this. I've been using it for messages and for lots of other work. It's far, far superior than Siri and makes no mistakes. https://wisprflow.ai/r?SEAN1058
What if the secret to growing your business isn't changing your product, but changing the problem it solves? This article takes you on a surprising journey from airport walkways to creative entrepreneurs, revealing how a simple shift in perspective can unlock untapped markets and breathe new life into what you offer. With real-world success stories and a healthy dose of marketing wisdom, you'll discover why the path to innovation might be as easy as seeing your product—and your audience—in a whole new light.
We all seem to believe that there's nothing left to explain. There are millions of articles, books and stories out there. Yet, there's always a way to cut through the clutter. No matter how much information exists, some people are still able to communicate in a way that gets and keep your attention. Here's how you go about it.
Are you really in charge when it comes to changing your habits?.While self-help books promise transformation, true change often stems from a shift in environment. Explore how small differences can influence your daily routines. Let's jump on the environment bandwagon because it knows where you and I are headed.
You and I avoid grumpy people, if we can. However, when those grumps happen to be your prospects or clients, you better pay close attention. Why? Because they're they are key to finding out your uniqueness for your products and services. Uniqueness seems so hard to find, but grumpy people are everywhere. Here's how you harness the grumbles to your benefit.
We believe that we’re talented in some areas and not talented in others. However, a lot of this understanding of talent is an illusion. It’s based on what we have been told and also our current behaviour. How can we overcome these barriers and become better learners? Let’s find out.
One of the unseen enemies of learning is dropout. Clients get into a course very excited to learn. Then they go off a cliff. They don’t show up as often, if they show up at all. This dropout factor isn’t a new problem. It has existed for hundreds of years, but it’s only recently that we’ve understood how to get better results while spending less time. Let’s find out how to quell and even get rid of the dropout factor once and for all.
We think procrastination means laziness. But often it’s just the first step that feels impossible. How do you make your clients move ahead quickly and recommend you more often than ever before? Let’s find out how this principle works.
IF you ask someone why they can’t focus, they usually say they’re very distracted. But are we really distracted? Or is it congestion, instead? Let’s dig deeper into this slight nuance, because distraction may be a good thing after all.
When clients look at us, me in particular, they see an almost unblemished trail of success. But you can’t see the fear behind what we’ve been through. Yes, it’s fear. Let’s go into storyland and learn about the fear and possibly how to overcome it.
If you ask anybody, you will hear that things have gotten a lot worse. But is that the case? And do we have any control over what's happening around us? How do you stay calm even when things don't work for you? Let's find out in this episode
We sometimes believe we write for a client, or for a website. And that belief is true. Except, it’s not true for most of the time. There comes a time when we go on a trip, a discovery of ourselves. We write for a completely different reason. Let’s have a look, shall we?
Writing seems so laborious at times. We feel like giving up, but there’s a reason why we write. Actually, many reasons.
We all seem to know how every day matters. However, what causes people to plateau suddently and how does every day activity help in avoiding that messy situation? Dig deeper into the very average concept of every day learning and you’ll see it’s anything but mundane.
I’ve now been writing articles for 25 years. And in those 25 years I’ve learned some things that you may not always find on a writing site, or even in any writing article. LIsten to this episode and you’ll suddenly have a completely different view of how to go about writing your article.
We all want to be somehow perfect. It doesn’t matter that we know it’s not possible. In this podcast, we have four crazy arms of perfection brought to life by writer Keith Rhys. I wish I could have said it better, but Keith (alumni of the Article Writing Course) says it eloquently. You’ll relate to these arms of perfection, no matter who you are or what you do.
If you feel overwhelmed and seem to get nothing much done, you’re not alone. That’s because many of us go around in circles. We never attain take-off speed and are doomed to circle the airport endlessly. Or are we? In this podcast, we will examine why top speed is so crucial and how to get to the point where you can fly on autopilot.
Do you sometimes think you have “shiny object syndrome”? Do you seem to hop from one thing to another, only to feel disappointed? What if you couldn’t change your mind so often? That’s what the “five-year” lease is all about. You somehow have to make it work. Let’s find out how to use the “five-year” lease concept to your advantage.
This is back to back travel series. First it was Europe, now it's India. Enjoy the journey!
Imagine there are two computers. One computer is a standalone connected to nothing but the electrical supply. The second one is connected to a network of computers. Which of the two is likely to be more useful to you? A similar concept applies to learning. People with a greater database are almost always seen as “more talented”. A database is something we can control, and learning how to use it makes us more “talented”. Here’s where you start on the journey.
This podcast is called the Three-Month Vacation, and yet we almost never cover vacation stories. Well, that’s about to change. Here are some stories from India and also from Singapore and France. Allons-y!
How do you get clients? This is one question that repeats itself endlessly. You’d think the answer would be common knowledge by now, and it is. The answer lies in a concept called “groups”. We fail to understand the power of groups, and that’s where the struggle begins. How do you use the power of groups? Let’s find out.
“Hard work” has never been considered a problem. If anything, we’re all told to work hard. How do you know when you’ve crossed the line from hard work to overwork? Surprisingly, the answer doesn’t lie within ourselves. Here’s how to use your family as an early warning system.
It’s clearly impossible to avoid using a phone. Which is why software seems to come to the rescue. However, the way to avoid the phone (at least once a week) is simpler than you’d think. What’s more, the habit grows. You start avoiding the phone more than you’d expect. How is it all done? Let’s find out.
Podcasts, membership site, cartoons, photography, Whatsapp—the list goes on and on. And it’s puzzling to clients how I (Sean) manage so much. Well, there are bound to be some principles. Here are just four of them, and we cover two of them in this first episode.
It’s that time of the year when many of us travel. If it’s even a short trip, we get jetlagged for days. How do you beat it? Here’s a theory based on my “diaries”. Diaries? Yes, diaries. Let’s find out.
It's normal to want to wait for the perfect moment to start a project. However, that's usually a mistake. A tiny, random project can be started right away. And in a little while, a whole decade or two decades pass. Find out how tiny, random projects make a huge difference.
At times, you simply can’t think of an analogy, and you reach for something that’s been used many times before. However, there’s zero fun in using a tired analogy. How can you take this rather overused analogy and turn it into something with oomph? Let’s find out.
The Power of Analogies (Part 2): How to use everyday life to create stunning analogies Probably the biggest mistake that most of us make is that we try to find analogies. We sit down at a desk and wrack our brains trying to find an analogy that's just right. Instead, we end up with analogies that have been used repeatedly by other people. Or analogy doesn't seem fresh—and certainly not memorable. Yet, there are dozens if not hundreds of analogies waiting for us round the corner. And by that I mean literally round the corner. It's a secret waiting for us in plain sight. Let's find out how to go about creating those analogies by the dozen!
When we sit down to write an article, or design a presentation, we tend to slip in an analogy. However, most of the analogies that we seem to come up with a "boring and tired". The reason why we struggle so much is because we're going about it the wrong way. And allergies – in general – should be written backwards. How do you write an analogy going backwards? That's what we'll find out in this episode.
We start on a learning journey and then we quickly get lost. Why is this the case? We might have systems in place, reminders that keep going off, but we still don’t have a clear understanding of what will get us to a level of fluency. This level of fluency is called “base level of success”. Unless, you and I know the base level, we simply practice, and while we get better, we don’t get very good at a skill. Well, it’s about time.
When you go for a meal, you follow a sequence. When you are part of a wedding ceremony, there’s also a sequence. Sequences allow us to follow a thread, but it also gives the client a clear pathway. In this episode we look at the power of sequences, how to implement one and why you may want to change your sequence as technology moves forward. Let’s go!
The Internet has and will always be a great source of getting clients. However, if you notice, it’s also a very crowded space. There’s a place that’s a lot less busy. It’s called “the world offline”. Here’s why you need to do some exploration away from your computer.
We continue on our two part series of why adults struggle with learning. And this time around, we have an unusual enemy. The enemy is “vocabulary”. How can that be the case?
We all believe that languages should be learned early, and we’re not wrong. However, most adult learning is based on a school system that’s boring and plainly illogical. Why do adults struggle so much? The short answer is that they don’t learn like kids. The question is: what do kids do differently that makes learning so enduring? Let’s find out.
In most cases, you can increase your prices by as much as 15% by moving from left to right. But what if you wanted to increase your prices by, say, 20%, instead. Well, then you move from right to left. What does all of this right, left, right mean? Well, listen to the podcast and it will make sense in a few minutes.
Giving a presentation is often nerve wracking. You know you need to relax but you are driving yourself up the wall. The usual way to solve the problem seems to be that you need to practise more. You practise, practise, and practise, but the stress won’t go away. So what does reduce the pain? It’s simpler than you’d think.
When we get into a learning situation, we’re usually excited. Then, almost immediately we feel unsure. We stumble along, not keen to move ahead. What’s happening in our brain? I’ll tell you what: a pain map is being created. This pain map is because of a lack of good instructional design. How do we avoid creating this pain map for our kids and especially for our clients? Let’s find out
When we fall behind, the core instinct is to catch up. In most cases, that’s a strategy that stresses us out, and achieves very little. It feels like one foot inside and another outside. But is there a better method? Try the “next sunrise” method and see how well it works for you..
We are told time and time again that we need to practice. That we need to work hard. That’s usually a load of rubbish. Learning depends less on you as a learner and more on how the learning is designed. Here’s an understanding of how “prompts” in learning make the client eager to get to and finish an assignment, even if the learning journey is extremely long and complicated.
You've probably heard it before: I am bad at names. I don't remember names so well. But are you truly bad at names? Or is it something that we all say? In this podcast you can test yourself and figure out how impressive your memory really happens to be. Best of all, you will never say that you're bad at names – or even have a bad memory. Your perception of memory will change quite substantially. Let's go, shall we?
We all struggle with information. We’re almost always behind, always making notes, trying to catch up. Should we cut back on information completely? Is that the solution? Or is there a simpler, more elegant way to relax and take in endless amounts of information? Let’s find out
When you read a book about negotiation, it seems like you should be able to get exactly what you want. However, when you go out into the real world, your negotiating turns to custard. Others don't seem to agree with your terms, and you're left hanging. Often this problem arises because of a simple set of stages that we ignore. In this podcast, we look at those three stages and see how they boost our negotiating power, without us doing anything extraordinary.
When we create information, we tend to think of a single book, a single article—and may I say—a single podcast. That system works fine, but there's a method that is far superior. It's called a series. Here's why a series works so much better and how to go about creating a series of series.
We don't always realise it, but we go through precise psychological stages when we are becoming entrepreneurs. The biggest problem is that one stage is more deadly than all the other stages put together. It's the stage where we lose control because we are driven by outside forces. How do we know which stage we are in? And how do we prepare ourselves for the stage that is going to seriously rock the boat?
On any given day we will have some amount of chaos. And someday the chaos is just looking outside the door, but other days it forces its way through with an intensity that's hard to control. It seems like we are always juggling too many things, but there is a method where we can manage chaos in a less frustrating manner. Let's find out how we can look at chaos differently so that, in general, we have mostly wonderful days.
We often want to help others. It's a great trait to have in a world that is rather selfish. Yet, it can be a terrible idea when you're communicating with friends and clients.
People rarely want your help. What do they want instead?
Listen to the "hug, hear, and help" method to change the way you see the world and also the way the world sees you.
Next Up: The Not So Obvious Angles For Succeeding In Life
Sometimes we think that we're just wasting our time writing articles or recording a podcast. Or maybe even the advice we give seems to go nowhere. You'd be surprised to know that you're making an impact beyond your wildest imagination
Do you feel like you're in the world where everybody is just angry with each other? How do you cope with a situation where you don't agree with the other person? You may not agree with their politics, their way of life, and you may have no intention of going over to the other side. The answer to most "aggressive conversations" is simpler than you would expect. And it's also a lot more fun and you get to stay friends. Let's find out how.
While writing an article, report or book, you're more than likely to need a metaphor. In fact, you may need at least a dozen. The problem with metaphors is that they're usually very predictable. How do you take a "boring method" and make a metaphor quite exciting? Let's find out.
The quickest way to get out of a rut is to have a deadline.
The moment you don't have a deadline, you're in trouble. Soon, that blip becomes a blurb, which becomes a balabooza that you can't control.
How do you get out of a rut quickly—really quickly?
Let's find out in this episode.
Next Step: Listen to—How To Get Unstuck Bit By Bit (And Why Speeding It Up Doesn’t Usually Work)
We all want to praise others, but sometimes, it seems extremely difficult to do so.
This is why we often resort to something like "great job" or "that's cool. And Facebook has trained us to just "like" everything. This means that the person you're praising rarely feels the impact of that praise.
In this episode we'll look at how to go about praising someone, and especially how to give praise when you don't have much to say.
Next: Let's look at
How To Introduce Yourself At An Event (Without Describing Your Achievements)
Usually a "NO" feels like a door slammed in your face.
However, in many cases, a "NO" isn't a forever thing. If you look at "NO" differently, there's a good chance you'll get a bucketful of "YESES".
Here's my experience of going from "NO to YES".
Next Step: Listen to
Three Ways To Harness The Mastermind Mindset (And Use It Across Your Business)
You'd think that success parameters are everywhere—and they are.
Yet, some of them are so obvious that we completely miss them. In order to turn things around and get people to get your clients—and yourself—to understand success better, you have to know the difference between ego and mastery.
In this episode, that's what we explore and why it makes such a vast difference.
Next Step: Find out How Ego-Killers Can Drive Clients Away
Have you heard yourself saying: I'm not good with names!
Almost everyone you run into is likely to say something similar. Is it because we're bad with names and have terrible memories? Or is it a myth that we've been perpetuating? Let's find out in this slightly odd view of memory.
Next Step: Have a listen to
Why A “Lack Of Memory” Causes You To Be Less Talented In Life
The first line is what pulls us into an article. Yet we end up writing a really boring first line. What's worse is that you could use the power of story to create an intensely powerful first line in minutes.
Don't believe me? Well, do you have 10 minutes? Let's start.
Next Step: Don't miss the series on Writers's BlockWriter’s Block Series: Why Discussion and Feedback Are A Writer’s Secret Weapon (And How Professionals Use it to Their Advantage)
If we went back in time, we'd all feel a little less stressed out.
We weren't being pounded with endless information all the time. There weren't a million courses, workshops, training and videos, let alone an endless parade of books.
It seems like we'll never keep up. And no, we won't.
But there's a way around the problem and it's quite permanent. Let's fix it, shall we?
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Here is another podcast on Overwhelm
The Overwhelm Virus: How To Get It Out of Your Daily Routine
I was chatting with a client, and he told me how he needs to improve his drawing. "I always draw stick figures", he said to me, "and somehow, I need to improve these drawings."
This strategy struck me as odd because I didn't see a problem with his stick figures.
The stick figures looked as good as they would always be, with little room for improvement. "You don't have a problem with stick figures," I said. "You have a problem with memory!" My comment confused him because he was talking about drawing and learning to draw, but I was referring to "a lack of memory".
What is this "memory" bit all about?
Let's find out.
Once you finish listening, you may like this podcast too:
Rapid Talent (How To Get There and What Holds Us Back)
The biggest underlying success factor of a business is repeat clients.
Yet time and time again, we have to keep looking for new clients. This sorry situation is often because we are seduced by information, not results. We know results are important, but we still go in the "opposite" direction.
How do we solve this ongoing nightmare?
Let's find out.
Next Step: How To Gain Momentum In Business Using The Subsets Technique (And Gain New Clients Too!)
Do you remember the story of the Three Kings in the Bible? You might have heard that they didn't come empty-handed.
That's because they understood one of the core principles of living was "giving".
Not all the advice you get is obvious. Today, let's look at some not so obvious ones, shall we?
You can also listen to:
Why You Should Pay Attention To Giving (And Why Receiving Is Just As Important)
We're told we need to practice if we want to get better. However, most of the times when we're practicing, we're quite bored.
Instead, "play" is far superior in every way.
It's not boring and like that kid next door, we "dribble" all the time. Let's look sideways at dribbling, instead of just practice, practice, practice.
Next Step: Don't miss
How To Get Results Like A Pro (Without Endless Practice)
Last week we heard about willpower and how ineffective it can be when we most need it.
Today, we have guest—the first ever—Keira Menon. She not only gives you her version of willpower, but also tells you how she went about recording this podcast.
This a fun listen so don't miss it. We had so many people write and tell us how much they enjoyed the episode.
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OMG I did, and it made me smile so much. I know you have been involved in your niece's life for some time as Sean has mentioned her often in the past, to hear her sounding so grown up and mature!
My first thought was noooo....surely not! and it instantly reminded me just how long I had been following your work. She did a fabulous job. Congratulations, and was an episode I starred becaue the podcast tips as well as brain tips. And I have quoted the "edamame beans, naan bread, chai tea" evidence used by Sean Nicky T ___________________
We're told time and time again that what we need is better willpower? Yet, science and endless studies have shown willpower to be ineffective. If you're tired, for example, you'll do things that you don't normally tend to do. Your willpower is completely ineffective in many situations.
However, numbers help. How do they help and why are they so underrated?
Let's find out.
No one needs to tell you how stress can take its toll. Yet there seems no easy way to ramp down the stress factor. If anything, we seem to be more stressed than ever before. The news closes in on us on all sides and we seem trapped. However, there's a way that can ease that stress considerably. It could even be considered a form of meditation. It's called "writing down what delights you". Let's find out how easy it can be to be delighted and decrease our stress considerably.
One of the biggest problems when starting up a speech is that you have to find something that captures the attention of the audience. Instead, what we often get is a round of introductions, blah, blah etc. All of which causes the audience to get restless. How do you get the attention of the audience instantly? Better still, how do you do it with a story that has already gotten a great response? Let's find out.
When we want to increase our sales, we search for new methods. However, that search is often quite unnecessary. What's needed instead, is a tiny bit of common sense. With little or no effort you can change the way the client perceives you and your company. Re-oxygenation isn't that hard. Check out this episode!
After three months of staying put in New Zealand, we finally made a long trip. Long in terms of distance, as well as duration. For the past three years, most of our travel has been within New Zealand and a week in Fiji. However, the month-long vacation is what brings out all the stories. And here are some stories from Spain!
Often enough your client may need a transcript for a long video or workshop. Not everyone needs or wants a transcript, and it does cost a lot to produce transcripts for everything. In the past we've had AI driven transcripts, but they too have been untidy and it requires a lot of tidying up. However, Chat GPT is different. Learn how to use Chat GPT and YouTube to create a superb, accurate and very context-driven transcript for just about anything.
All of us cringe at the thought of getting feedback. Yet, we all need feedback to improve. There are formulas for feedback but they don't work as well as they should. However, this method of balance is tricky. We can't praise people all the time, and we can't say what we really think. Is there a way out? Yes there is, if you use this method of balance by Randall Stutman from Admired Leadership. His method works so well, you could give feedback all day and people will ask for more.
There are times when you need to introduce yourself, such as for a personal website, social media profile, or professional bio. That's where you and I often get stuck. We were told not to keep praising ourselves and yet without listing our achievements, how are we supposed to create an aura of expertise? The answer is simpler than you think. All you need to do is add a touch of surprise and your blurb becomes super cool. Find out how in this episode.
When we start writing, we know we're hopeless. However, in time, we all get to the stage where we're average. What does it take to become outstanding, and then an absolute maestro in writing? The answer doesn't lie in "practice, practice, practice". Instead, it's something as mundane as a combination of "structure" and "confidence". But even as you try to get better, your brain won't let you progress. Why does all of this happen and how you get out of this rut? Let's find out in this episode.
What if you ran into clients that have never heard of you? And what if they've never heard of your products or services? Would they still buy from you? It seems highly implausible, even impossible that you'd get a client interested. And yet, the reality can be remarkably different. A business philosophy can turn a client around and make them interested in you, after hearing just a single line. Let's find out how.
It's more than likely that you've tried to create uniqueness before. Yet, it seems a bit of a pain, because it sounds so trite. Well, how about we look at uniqueness from a "construction" point of view. Instead of just trying to dream up the uniqueness, how about we look at it with "guardrails" so that we hit the target every time. Let's give it a shot because one—or two of these methods—will certainly work for you.
When a client buys a product, what goes through their mind? Often you'll notice they have a similar product, so why do they buy again? There are four reasons why your client (and you and I) keep searching for products. And no matter how saturated the market seems, clients will keep searching. This is good news for you, because if you give them what they want, they'll keep coming back. It seems irrational, but it's perfectly rational. Let's find out why this behaviour exists.
AI has sent a chill down the spines of many of those who create content for a living. Won't so much content saturate the market? And why would a client choose your work when some other work can easily be put together by AI? The reason why you needn't worry, is because people have not changed much. They still make their decisions based on specific logic. Let's see how you, me—we all make decisions.
If you're a teacher, you might be surprised at times at why people seem to learn seem to learn so slowly. You may wonder if it's because of your method of teaching, or is it the material? The reasons why learning is so slow isn't always apparent, but it usually comes down to a factor of trust—and control. Find out how trust and control become crucial elements in learning as well as teaching.
We all know the little things that recharge our batteries. For most of us, a walk in a real forest would calm us down and give us that much needed energy. Yet, as we go about our every day lives, there seems to be no way to slow down. If anything, we're told to speed up. Here's a solid case for why that walk into that forest is so needed and how to recalibrate your energy once again.
If you haven't already heard the news on the street, you soon will. AI is going to take away all our jobs as writers. Anyone can create a course in minutes, write an article like a pro, or generate thousands of outstanding headlines. Is this just a rumour or is this our dystopian future? Here's a slightly sane answer from New Zealand.
Even if you have a workable metaphor, how do you use the metaphor in your article? The key is to go backwards and find the one word or one idea that you want to convey. Almost magically, the word seems to fit the metaphor. Not convinced? Listen to this podcast and find out how to go about this relatively-easy task.
You'd think you would need to have some scintillating stories to write a metaphor. Or worse still, you'd believe it's a skill that only some people have and can never be learned. Well, you know what they say, right? The proof of the pudding is in the eating. And the proof of writing metaphors isn't in some fancy story, but rather the mundane activities in our everyday life. Ready to go on a metaphor trip that's fun? Well, here we go.
The myth that is perpetuated is that you just need to sit at your computer and get endless number of clients. The reality is the face-to-face connection is far superior. This is why musicians, politicians et cetera hit the road. Face-to-face – even with the smallest audience is extremely powerful. Here’s how you go about it.
Why are some books, videos and audio so much "better" than others? Or rather, why do we consider so many to be dry and boring? The style of delivery matters, of course. A well spoken audio, a well crafted book is always going to stand out. Yet, all information can do with the cherry on top—namely, entertainment. We're going to explore why entertainment is so crucial and how much is too much.
Sometimes, all it takes is for us to sit in a car, and all hell breaks loose. These are a few stories of how things went a bit "off-the-road" during our travels.
At the start of the year, it's almost natural to want to wipe the slate clean and start doing something new. We create goals, we set deadlines and hope like crazy that things will work out well. The part we consistently forget is the "stop-doing" bit. The very same issues that have been a pain in the neck before, will continue to be a nightmare in the future. Why is this stop-doing list so very important?
No matter what industry you're in, there's already competition. This isn't just some random competition, but rather people who are better established than you. They've worked with your clients before, have a greater profile and probably a fancy portfolio. And then there's us—you and me with no way to get our foot in the door. But are things really that hopeless? Can we come from behind to take over the coveted job from our competitors? Here's how you go about understanding how to overcome your mental block and put a quick, workable strategy in place almost overnight.
Practice, practice, practice! Isn't that how you get better? Well, yes, but the problem with that mantra is that few of us have the time to get to schedule in as much practice. What if you stopped believing in endless "practice, practice, practice"? Suddenly you'd have to have answers to problems pretty rapidly. Instead of spending endless time in practice, you'd be able to get fluent not at just one, but two, possibly as many as a dozen skills. However, first you've got to figure out what professionals do and how they go about their lives. Let's find out, shall we?
We all seem to know that fluency takes time—lots and lots of it. It also takes a lot of effort and learning. We're told that to be fluent we have to put in thousands of hours of work. However, what if that premise were wrong? What if you could be fluent at something in a matter of weeks, or better still, in a matter of minutes? It sounds almost scammy doesn't it? And yet, fluency is closer than you'd think. Here's a look at fluency in a manner you've probably not encountered before.
In the first part of this podcast, we noticed that there's a logic to choosing what elements to fix on the sales page. We're looking at attraction, conversion and risk. And at the same time we're trying to slow down the client from skimming. This episode puts the brake on skimming by using graphics and captions Learn how to use them effectively.
When creating sales pages—or even when fixing them, you have a long list of elements to tackle. So many in fact, that you may just put off the fix for a few weeks, which ends up taking a few months. The reality is that you and I can't do it all at once. Why not take on a few elements, instead? If you were to fix things, where would you start? Here are two of the ones I'd get cracking on, right away. And there are two more showing up in the second part of this podcast.
We know how it feels to be in a state of flow. Our work seems so effortless. However, we almost seem to be rushing to meet a deadline, and work seems—well—just like work.
We've always thought getting things done on time is a good thing, and it is. But is it possible that getting things done on time is one of the biggest reasons why we always feel behind?
How do you get into a state of play if you're always stressed? Let's find out in this episode.
Next Step: Learn how to get to the finishing line of all your projects—The Dual Boomerang System Of Learning.
We all know storytelling is a crucial skill to have as a business owner and also for you as a person. When we tell stories at the dinner table, everyone seems to listen.
The same concept applies to marketing, but there's another bigger reason why you need to be able to tell stories.
In this podcast, you learn the core importance of storytelling.
Next Step: Ready to listen/ read the entire series on Story Telling? You can start with—Three Core Elements of Storytelling (And Why You Need To Write Stories Right Away)
No matter how good things are, there's a moment when things just don't go your way. That's when you've entered stall mode.
It doesn't matter how skilled or experienced you happen to be. It's still a place that you can't pull out from. Yet, we all do. And there's a way to speed things up.
Next Step: Listen or read about—The “Coats Of Paint” System To Break Out Of The Curse Of Perfection.
Isn’t it better to recycle instead of writing all the time?
A tiny bit of recycling may not be out of place, but there’s a good reason why we should keep writing new material all the time. Well, here are my reasons anyway.
Next Step—Listen or Read over 51 articles on:
How do you keep your readers locked into your article?
(Audio and text)
You know how you're told to set a goal and then benchmark your success based on that goal?
Well, that's what we set out to do with our membership site at 5000bc. However, we kept running into these headaches that seemed to derail us.
In time, however, we found that these constant diversions were to our benefit.
That if we just stopped fighting them so much and figured out a way out, we'd end up better than we expected. And we did.
Here's the story.
Next Step: Find out (Audio and text)
Why Clients Leave — And Why Lack Of Community Is One Of The Big Problems
What does it take to get a membership site to keep going? We go on a wild journey where the entire site was wiped out and how it bounced back again. And how nearly 20 years later it’s still going.
What does it take to get a membership site to keep going? We go on a wild journey where the entire site was wiped out and how it bounced back again. And how nearly 20 years later it’s still going.
Kids have a super power. When they're very young, they don't know Monday from Sunday. And it's this lack of knowledge that also gives them an upper hand when they're learning. Unlike adults who are clear about how the result needs to look like. just about anything will do with a child. How do we take that child-like attitude and use it to speed up adult learning?
Kids have a super power. When they're very young, they don't know Monday from Sunday. And it's this lack of knowledge that also gives them an upper hand when they're learning. Unlike adults who are clear about how the result needs to look like. just about anything will do with a child. How do we take that child-like attitude and use it to speed up adult learning?
You’ve heard the line many times before, haven’t you? And at times it seems like kids learn at a blinding pace. But why does this phenomenon occur? Is it because kids are smart or just that we are more accommodating as trainers?
One of the toughest tasks a business owner can have, is when it's time to write a sales page. You know that it's unlikely your product or service will sell unless you have that sales page. Yet, once you sit down to write something, it's almost impossible to write anything down. And when you do, the words are so um, boring, that you believe it's something to do with you. In reality it's because you haven't done a target profile interview. Why does that interview become crucial, even to seasoned copywriters? Let's find out....
Almost all of us have varying levels of stress. Yet some of us are always in a fog, always struggling. Is there a fix? And is it a non-overwhelming one?
When it comes to audience building, we tend to fall for the hype. It's all about "get a thousand clients" or "make thousands of dollars". If you've already been down that path you know that all of those methods fail spectacularly. You have to ask yourself: what works? Or rather, what are the principles that you need to be paying attention to, if you really want to get, grow and keep your audience? Let's find out with these cool concepts from photographer, David duChemin.
When we start on a course, we all expect we'll get to the end. Yet time after time, we seem to abandon the course quite early. Part of the reason may be that the content is boring, or too difficult, but often the bigger problem is our desire to implement. What if that method was one of the primary reasons why we don't seem to finish courses and books? What if there were a counterintuitive method to complete and implement your learning? There is, and it's simpler than you think.
If you're a big company like Amazon, YouTube and Apple, should you bother to send out e-mail newsletters? Can't you just spend loads of money on publicity and advertising? Why do these billion dollar companies still work with e-mail? The answer is remarkably simple. If you don't keep in touch, some one else takes your place. However, that's not the only reason why you should start and sustain an e-mail newsletter—even in a world where we get too much e-mail. Find out in this podcast just why you should and the stuff you should avoid as well.
How do most of our stories end? Usually it's a fairy tale ending. Or maybe it ends in chaos, sadness or even disaster. We believe that an ending is crucial for any story. And there is no doubt that endings are needed for stories, but they're almost always irrelevant when you're using a story for an article. The story is there to make a point, not end with "happily ever after". Learn why a fairy tale ending is something you want to avoid almost all the time.
It's not unusual to approach an edit with a machete. We see a mass of words and want to hack through it to make the story more interesting. The problem is, we don't know what to throw away and what to keep. That's why "relevance" is more important to a story than just adding or removing words and sentences. Let's use the power of "relevance" to make a quick, precise edit.
We often believe that stories have a sequence.
First, this happens, then that happens and then something else shows up. And while that belief is generally true, the heart of the story is the "stuck point".
You know it's powerful because the audience sits up upright. If you were to stop or even pause long enough, they'd be asking, "What happened next?"
Do you get the "What happened next" with your stories?
To get a consistent "what happened next" we need the power of the "stuck point". Let's find out more in this podcast.
Next Step: Read or listen to:
Three Unknown Secrets of Riveting Story Telling
When you hear someone tell you about their vacation, you try to be interested. All that exotic food, that astounding accommodation—it's all boring.
Yet there's a reason why it's boring.
We aren't really hearing stories, but instead, we're just getting a sequence of events. The magic to making it not boring is when you hear the sound of Thumpity-Thump-Thump-Thump-Thump. Yes, like falling downstairs. That's what storytelling is all about.
Next Step: Have a listen to—
The Storytelling Test: How To Quickly Test How Your Audience Will React To Your Story
When people ask what we do, we are often unsure what to reply.
Sometimes we may have a script that we've practiced over and over again. Yet we don't often have success with scripts, because somehow we haven't gotten the attention of the prospect.
How can we bypass the tedious answer and create a small 2-minute sales pitch that gets the prospect involved?
Learn how to use the twin powers of contradiction and demonstration to instantly get and keep attention.
Next Step: Once you finish listening to this podcast, listen to:
How To Turn An Average Elevator Pitch Into One That Gets Consistent Attention
Ever wonder what Writer's Block happens to be?
It's a form of choking under pressure. When we're called upon to speak, to write, or to do something under pressure, we almost always seem to struggle.
This choking happens even with professionals who normally breeze through their work. The big reason for this choking under pressure is partly because of the lack of the right preparation.
Instead of training under Lucy Moments, we train under Charlie Brown moments.
Let's find out how to avoid the choke and to avoid the sticky moments completely.
Next Step: Read or listen to—Writer’s Block Series: How A Lack of Energy, Not Time, Causes Writers to Stall and Crash
The hardest part of writing is usually the first few lines. However, the ending can also be quite a vexing problem.
Unless of course, you use a simple method called "sandwiching".
When you use a "sandwich", it closes the loop, leading to a very satisfying sort of finish.
How do you learn how to sandwich?
Well, listen to this story taken from The Moth Podcast and you'll see how it can be done.
Next Step:
How do you keep your reader locked into your article? Find out here.
Why do you have a bloated story?
It's often because there are way too many facts in the information you've put down on paper. Even if we know we have too many facts and figures, how do we separate the information so that we don't lose the power of the story?
Let's find out in this episode.
Once you finish listening to this episode head over to listen or read the series on—How To Keep Your Reader Locked Into Your Article.
When we sit down to write a sales page, we run into a problem almost instantly. We know that the client is usually looking to solve one problem, but which problem should we choose?
How do we know if the client is simply going to ignore the headline and not look at the rest of the sales page?
Should we stuff our headline with three separate problems or is that a really bad decision on our part?
The answer is that the headline and the first problem isn't as crucial as most copywriters would have you believe.
Follow these steps and you'll notice your sales page will come together in a less stressful, and more specific manner.
When we sit down to write an article or create an information product, we often have a sinking feeling.
We look around and find that it's "all been done before".
That we have nothing new to add to the conversation. Why should we keep going despite these odds? More importantly, why is our hesitation driving clients to the competition?
As I sat down to write a sales page for a course, I wasn't stuck.
However, my progress was so slow that it was driving me crazy. A sales page consists of well over a dozen elements.
However, to get started, it's important to get two core sections right.
- The first section to work on is: What you want to cover.
- The second section is: what are clients looking for?
And as always, you need to start with me, me, me. Hence I started with the first section and here's my story.
When we write an article, we tend to get one point across. Yet, what if we were to disagree with our "one point" and do a complete u-turn?
It doesn't seem logical to flip flop, does it?
And yet that's what the client needs to create a more complex, more interesting version of an article.
Let's find out why u-turns are crucial when writing articles.
Usually when we're stuck, we want to get out of the mess in a big hurry. As a result, we end up digging a bigger hole for ourselves.
How do you—that's you and I—systematically get unstuck?
There's no precise formula, but there are stages of getting unstuck.
And we have to do it slowly. Let's find out how.
This week there is a promotion for The Brain Audit version 3.2, but there’s a place where it all began. And you can compare the progress over time.
Here is the link:https://www.psychotactics.com/bonuses/brainaudit_old.pdf
Is giving better than receiving? Maybe not. If you've tried to give something to someone and they won't accept it, you know exactly how it feels. We're not talking about something creepy here. The stranger off the street is wary even if you're handing out $100 notes, as giving has to have some trust involved. Even so, receiving is highly underrated. Let’s find out why.
A random piece of advice isn't supposed to stay with you for years, and yet it does. In this episode we zig and zag into India (where I lived for a chunky part of my life) and then into New Zealand, where I had to start anew and with little or no help from anyone.
Let's say you're about to learn a new skill—and you don't.
You finish the course and you're still not quite anywhere as good as you hoped.
Is that your fault? Or the teacher's fault? Or is it 50:50?
Learn why so many of us struggle with skill acquisition and why mindset matters.
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P.S. How do you change your mindset? What can you learn from children?
Here are 21 articles on learning.
Why a simple fix can bring them back.
Most of us have products and services that solve many problems. The natural, and the seemingly logical way we go about talking about the product or service, is to make sure the client knows they're getting a great deal. However, this over-enthusiasm is precisely what causes clients to be confused, and leave.
Let's find out how to simply, and quickly get clients to keep reading your sales page.
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P.S. Interesting in learning more about —How To Write Your Sales Page (And The Biggest Mistakes)?
Write every day. Write every day. Write every day.
We seem to hear a lot of that advice when we start off in writing. Yet, are we likely to be misunderstanding what the real meaning of "write every day" means?
Most of us believe that we need to write at least an article a day, or at least some chunky bit of content. And yet that level of having to write on a daily basis is precisely what would cause us to fail. Yes, as you'd expect, there is a way out.
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P.S. Here are 27 Articles on —How To Keep Your Reader Locked Into Your Article
Why would clients be uncomfortable on Zoom?
They're your clients after all. Yet, time and time again we notice a reluctance on the part of the client.
—They turn off their video, and it's possible they don't have a photo either.
—They don't ask questions, despite you trying your best to get them to pitch in.
Zoom calls can often seem thankless, but there's a way to get clients extremely comfortable on Zoom.
Let's find out how.
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P.S. Here is a series on—Strategies On How To Start A Podcast.
Some days, you can't get yourself motivated. Yet on other days, you're working so hard that you're frying up much too quickly.
How do you keep a balance between getting yourself motivated and still not tipping over to the other side?
Some days seem to start not on Monday, but Wednesday.
You fully intended to get your planning going, but something got in the way and it looks like the week is slipping away from you.
What do you do to arrest this slide?
We bring Goldilocks to the rescue—that's what we do. Weird weeks show up all the time, but here's a system that gets you back on the rails.
P.S. Here are 21 Articles on Time Management
(You can read or listen to the articles)
Most people tend to tell you to be more productive.
Sales need to be doubled, you somehow aren't satisfied with the client numbers, and need a lot more. In short, it's this endless race towards a rather nutty goal.
Instead, how about a goal that allows you to waste more time? That throws you back to when you were 17 and not constantly trying to earn, learn or hustle your way through life. Productivity is important, but the goal isn't exactly what you're expecting.
Let's find more about the real goal of productivity.
It seems illogical to sell just 25 copies of a product when the product is just digital.
Isn't it just a PDF, audio or video? Shouldn't we sell as many as we can? On the face of it, this logic of selling less seems seriously flawed. But is it?
Find out what did we found when we started selling less instead of selling greater numbers?
Have you ever wondered why people keep buying recipe books?
Your grandma had a dozen books, so did your parents, and now, even if you're not such a good cook, you're likely to have a few around the house. There are tens of thousands of recipes in blogs and on YouTube.
Even so, there's when yet another recipe book comes out, and there's still a market for it. Why is this the case? The reason is more straightforward than you'd expect because this factor of recipe books doesn't just apply to food.
If you've tried to learn a language, you're likely to have gone to a live course, bought several apps and some home study versions of the language. When the next "wonder language program" comes out, you'll still want to try it out. And all of these purchases of books, courses and training don't just apply to beginners.
An experienced writer, for example, will evaluate and possibly buy a new writing course or go to a writing event. Why is this the case, and how do you use this information to make your sales page better?
P.S. Find the entire Three Month Vacation Podcast Guide here.
Most of us believe we have to start a business. Hence, we get all fancy with business cards and websites. We talk about how we solve problems. And then—then we hear nothing. Clients should be rushing to avail of our products and services, but it's nothing. Why? Because the risk is too high. You and I are unknowns, remember? But what if you created something low-risk. Something low risk for you and just as low-risk for the client? Something like a doorway. Let's find out how you can get your foot in the door, shall we?
Everybody starts off with a plan, but shortly after that plan turns to custard. We should be able to realign ourselves and restart, but restarting seems to be extremely difficult.
Which is the quickest way to get back on course?
That’s what we’ll find out in this episode.
When I was 13 years old, my parents got involved in a court battle. I was past 40 when the issue was finally resolved. We don't see ourselves wanting to engage in high conflict.
Yet, there seems to be no way to avoid the tectonic forces of our world. No matter where you look online or offline, someone is continuously bashing the other side.
And often, that chaos spills over into our world.
Like it did with my parents. They had no intention of being sieged for over 25 years, and yet that's what happened. Tensions escalate beyond a point, original facts disappear, and conflict becomes a reality. Yet, all conflict isn't destructive.
There's a difference between High Conflict and Healthy Conflict.The dangerous kind is when it's "us" vs "them", "good" vs "evil". That kind of conflict bestows arrogance and superiority. It layers on the rage, sometimes even dread. It's a state where almost everyone loses, unlike in Healthy Conflict, where disagreement doesn't soar and serves more as a way to understand each other and improve.
"High Conflict" is a book by Amanda Ripley, which kept me reading late at night. Typically, my eyes are on self-shut mode by 10 pm (since I wake up at 4 am), but this book was fascinating.
Plus, it tackles a topic that seems to swarm around us both on a personal and a societal level. Is there a way around High Conflict? That's what I set to find out.
The toughest part about creating bonuses is how time-consuming they can be, especially when you want to make them desirable.
Yet there is a method of creating extremely desirable bonuses without doing much at all. This is what this episode on “ creating bonuses out of thin air” is all about.
It may sound odd, but the bonus is often the tipping point for a client to buy your product or service.
And yet, by the time we are done with creating the product or service, we are too tired to work out what the bonus should be.
n this episode we look at two methods.
—One is a more traditional method called “bundling“, well the other is quite unexpected and requires very little work.
—A method called “Unbundling“.
Let’s find out how we can use both of these methods, or just one, to create bonuses that are extremely yummy.
We tend to think all is well with the world when no one complains.
Yet, most customers rarely complain. Instead, they just walk out of the door, without saying a word.
A silent customer is not necessarily an asset.
How can you get your customer to be a little more 'noisy'—and why you should start now.
What was the trigger for the Three-Month Vacation?Why do we have workshops at random locations?
This is it—the second part in the two-part series of "how all these traditions started".
- How did the gold star show up in Psychotactics courses?
- How did we start sending chocolate across the world?
Here is a two-part series on how all of these traditions started.
It's rare that we don't learn lessons from a child.
Even so, I think we don't always pay closer attention to what they're saying. My two nieces have taught me a lot.
Here are a few nuggets of simple, yet intense wisdom.
Are you pro or anti-vaccine? Are you pro this or anti-that?
We seem to be pushed into one camp or the other and we end up getting ourselves in a tight corner. Is there a way to be part of a conversation and still neatly sidestep the argument?
When starting up, it's almost impossible to get clients.
Yet, there's a method that's almost fail-proof and gets the client interested in you, right away. What's more, this method not only gets you one job, but has the potential to get you back repeatedly.
The big surprise is that it doesn't work just when dealing with new clients, but it works amazingly well with current clients too. Want to get going? Well, here's what the checklist is all about.
The biggest problem with perfection is we feel we have to keep to the job until it's done. As logical as the idea sounds, it's always—yes, always—counterproductive. Instead, there's a method that's far superior, and quicker. Which allows you to reach even higher levels of satisfaction than you'd expect. All of this "perfection" can be achieved by understanding the "coats of paint" system. Ready for a quicker, faster road to "perfection?"
Many books, yes whole books, are dedicated to the pursuit of happiness. And yet, all it takes is a simple mind shift. Happiness isn't something we need to find, as it's something we feel all the time. Which begs the question: Are unhappy people choosing to be sad? Find out how to tap into instant happiness.
In a perfect world, you would be asked a straightforward question, and you'd give the answer that was expected of you. And most of the time, interviews on podcasts, radio or TV can be just as you imagined, or even better. Yet, there are times when the questions are awkward, or worse, boring.
What do you do under these circumstances? And there's a third situation too: where you're terrified.
All of us, will, at some point need to be in some kind of interview. It might not happen today, but it will occur at some point. When it does, this advice is likely to come in handy.
We often see overwhelm as a nameless, faceless monster. It seems to charge into our lives like some Godzilla and never wants to leave.
However, the moment we categorise the concept of overwhelm into sections, we realise we don't have to be powerless. Here's a trip into the three faces of overwhelm and how to beat it—or at least keep it at bay.
Sometimes we need to make big changes to our behaviour. Sometimes, it's just a little tweak.
In today's episode we look at three very tiny tweaks that I learned while listening to other podcasts. And yes, you are likely to find good value in these tweaks too.
Do Clickbait Headlines Work? Can a normal headline be just as powerful? Clickbait headlines seem to be designed to get our curiosity. But what makes a clickbait headline so attractive in the first place? And how do we write “normal” headlines that are far superior in getting the attention of the client?
Let's find out in the podcast.
When is it beneficial to adopt a contrarian mindset? What does it mean to be a contrarian? What is the concept of contrarianism?
Do you know why Tesla is such a big car? Think about it for a second. Tesla Motors only make electric cars. The bigger the car, the heavier it's going to be and the greater the drain on the battery.
So why make a big car? Let's find out.
Which product should you pre-sell?Should it be the $20 product or the $2000 one?
Let's find out what's involved and how you can systematically manage your pre-sell. Stage 1: Which products are the most important? Which are not?
Stage 2: Have we created a “separate section” for each of the vital products/services?
Stage 3: How can we create urgency and scarcity?
What is a mastermind mindset? How does a mastermind group work for courses, workshop and membership sites? When we think of a mastermind mindset, we tend to isolate the ideas to a group of people. But what if you could use the very same concepts in online courses, workshops and even in membership sites?
Here are three steps to powerfully use mastermind concepts across the board in your business.
Learning is odd. It should be logical, even progressive. This is why we feel that we're bad at learning. But if we recognise what's really happening, we can move forward steadily.
In this series, we look at three sets of phenomena that I've personally encountered while learning.
You'd think you'd need to be someone great or at least do something wonderful to inspire others. Yet, you're a source of inspiration. How do you inspire? It's remarkably simple —and here's a short piece on how you need to go about it.
We often go looking for a magical solution to help us write. And yet the magic is often found in the ordinary. How can seemingly repetitive advice help you become a consistently good writer? Let’s find out
When someone asks you what you do, what do you say? People tend to give a top-level answer. They say, "I'm a lawyer, a real estate agent, a fitness trainer". And while that information is descriptive, it's also extremely vague. It doesn't necessarily get clients to want to work with you right away and often they're not curious enough to ask for more information. How do you avoid being vague? You do so with the power of subsets. Subsets allow you to be extremely precise and in turn make the client want to know more, thus increasing the chances of working with you. Best of all, creating a subset is easy. Time to figure out how to create a subset and use it to your advantage, eh?
Does generosity have its limits? Let's say you decide to give away a lot of information to clients. How do you get them to come back to buy the rest of your information? Won't it overlap? Won't they get mad and demand a refund? Not necessarily. It all depends on how you go about about the free vs fee strategy. At Psychotactics, we give away hundreds of articles and an equal number of podcasts. We give away whole courses, reports and other goodies. And yet there are no shortage of buyers. How do you manage fee vs free? Let's find out in this episode.
When we think of writing, we automatically assume it's the act of sitting down at the computer and creating a new article, report or book. What we seem to miss is that there are other factors that come well before the writing process that drain us more than the writing itself. What's even more important, is that you're able to easily avoid those other factors—those minefields. While writing may still be difficult, there's no reason to make it even harder than it is. Let's find out how to remove the unnecessary obstacles in our way.
It's one thing to create information and quite another to know whether you've ticked all the boxes. When creating information, the client doesn't just seek information. Instead, she looks for other elements as well. Elements such as examples, entertainment etc, all of which need to be part of the product itself. In this podcast, we go back to front. Let's say you've already finished creating your information product. Can you go back and make tweaks to make it more complete, even more interesting? Sure you can and let's find out how.
When we start to build a list, we think of followers or fans, but all of these potential clients are elsewhere on YouTube, or Instagram or Facebook. We can't wait for the fans to swell up in number. Instead, you need to move quickly. Even if you have just four-five fans, you need to get them over to YOUR list, your website. How can you go about that task effectively? And how do you then get them to the very next stage, which is to buy something? List building isn't complex, but without these fundamentals in place, it's can be a massively wasted exercise. Find out how to avoid the pitfalls that a lot of people drop into and never seem to recover.
It's a line we've all heard, but as it does in life, the very same line plays an extremely important role in list building. When we think of building lists, we hope that some course will give us a silver bullet. That some coach will tell you which buttons to press, and you'll magically have a list. Or worse, we believe people who tell us that we can build our lists pretty much like a Jack and the Beanstalk story. Unfortunately for us, all of these promises are castles in the sand. The reason why we fail time and time again to build lists, is because we believe the dream-merchants and fail to pay attention to how a list—any list is built.
Imagine you've missed the sunrise for the past 300 days. Would that mean you'd give up on sunrise forever?We know the answer to the question, don't we? Even if we snoozed right a few hundred sunrises, it's possible for us to wake up on the 301st day and bask in the glow of a morning sun. And yet when it comes to projects, we often treat a stalled project as a form of failure. Why do we follow this crazy method of giving up? And how to we restart a stalled project?
In this second part, we go deeper into how it's not just the writing alone, but how a fixed formula can derail us. We often believe that if we've written 800 words in the past, the next article needs to be just as long. Which slows down your writing and often throws you completely off track. Find out why staying flexible is good for you as well as the reader.
Why does writing seem like a chore? It's easy to believe that we need more practice. But practice alone doesn't bring an article to life. A dull article, even when filled with lots of words, is still very boring. The problem lies in the misunderstanding that we need to write like authors. Authors and writers may be similar but most often are not. Being an author is often a gruelling task, and as a writer of articles, it's best to avoid that path. Here's how you go about it.
Did you finish the last book you bought? How about that last course? And if you're like me, you probably have at least two dozen things that you've bought—and still not finished. Well, there's a reason why. Somehow, our note taking gets in the way. We never seem to reach the finish line and we have a ton of books and courses to complete. Yet, what if there were a way to solve this problem? It's a method I use, and it's based (strangely) on boomerang behaviour. Here's how it works.
When clients leave, we automatically assume they say they aren't using the service or membership site. They give reasons why they're leaving, and it sounds logical to our ears. However, there are situations where clients almost never leave. And as you'd expect, it has all to do with community. Which is also why you don't leave your family, your friends and your dance group. How can we understand this concept of community better? And how can we make clients not only stay but benefit from community. Let's find out.
The 1000 true fans concept seems to follow a simple multiplication rule. If you have a thousand fans and they buy $100 worth of product in a year, you earn $100,000. Which sounds perfectly fine when you're doing the multiplication, but falls apart in reality? Where are the flaws in the 1000 fans concept? And what if we went down from 1000 to just one? Just one? As in "zero to one"? Let's find out.
Almost all of us will be asked, “what do you do?” And despite having to answer this question frequently, we struggle to create a powerful sense of curiosity with our answer. In short, the elevator pitch seems to fall flat. What makes it flat and how can we easily fix the problem?
Motivation people around you seems like an unending task. Your staff, your team, your walking group, your kid all need motivation. And all of them are motivated by different things. Some by money, some by responsibility and others by praise. Is there one system that works for everyone on the planet? Yes it is, and it's called "being a fan". Learn how you can become a fan and how it changes the dynamics of a relationship forever.
Which do you think is superior? Group or one on one consulting? Most people aren't likely to pick group consulting. It seems like the benefits of one on one consulting far exceed that of a group. And despite our bias for one-on-one consulting, greater learning and implementation is done with groups. Plus as a trainer, you earn a lot more while spending fewer hours. If this all sounds magical, it is. But how do you position group consulting in a world that's tilted towards one on one? Let's find out
If you were to ask someone to pick a field where there's more vs less competition, they're likely to pick one with less. And that would be a mistake, possibly a fatal one. Competition isn't bad for you—it's good. If it makes no sense, here's a podcast that shows you exactly why competition helps you determine if you're going to make it or not. And how to go about using the power of competition to your advantage.
You think you know Renuka, but maybe there's a bit you don't know quite yet. She looks mischievous, but her real mission comes alive on April 1. Enjoy this slightly unusual episode of April Fool when Renuka's maniacal genius comes to life.
The problem with a service-based-business is that you can't always publish a fixed price. The pricing always seems to depend on what needs to be done for the client. This results in a lot of wasted time and effort. Often, both the client and the vendor (that's us) get so bogged down in the process of quotes that the job gets postponed or falls through. How do we avoid this back and forth? And is it really possible to make your service like a product? Let's find out in this episode.
I used to hate writing a newsletter. It would be the task I'd keep postponing until the very last minute. Of course, that would make my entire week miserable. Until, I found what could be called a "rough formula". And it's an easy formula too. Try it and you'll see that your newsletter isn't as tedious as it used to be. In fact it's fun—well, almost.
If you look around you, the obvious success benchmarks are usually money first, and then, at least a huge dollop of fame. But are our benchmarks of success skewed by Fortune Magazine or Inc or Fast Company? Are those blogs we read driving us down a path we didn't originally set for ourselves. We had to muddle around a fair bit because we too were confused. However, here are our benchmarks for success. Maybe it will get you to set your own, as well.
When we think of membership sites we tend to think just about "information" based sites. However, there are many ways of looking at membership sites. In this second episode we dig into the "limited membership site" (yes, one that lasts for a fixed time and then stops). And we also look at membership sites that are not membership sites at all. Yes, it's a weird trip. Come join us and see how your business model might find these types of sites quite suited to your way of life.
A membership site isn't just another site. Instead, it's almost like an inner circle where you draw your closest clients to you. Yet, which kind of membership site would suit you best? Should you hand hold your clients? Or should it be a membership site with content they can pick and choose—and with no input on your part? In this two part series, we look at the power of the hand held membership site and compare it with the content-only membership site. Which one is for us? Let's find out.
Clients may love our work. They may refer us on to others. And yet, when it comes to sales, we shrivel back almost in horror. We find sales techniques to be a bit over the top and often bordering on yucky. Is there a way to quickly get over this terrible feeling? How do we promote ourselves without feeling icky?
Do you find yourself loving your work, but knowing that you're getting a bit one-dimensional? You work, then work, then work some more. And when others around you protest that you're working, you say, "But I love my work" or "I'm not working that much". You find yourself justifying the importance of the work, both from a monetary point of view as well as something you want to do. And yet, you know that setting needs a slight recalibration. That there are these things called hobbies. Things that you do for no reason at all, but for the pure joy. Where there's no financial benefit at all, and yet it somehow seems magical. If you want to keep working endlessly, that's a call to make. But if you'd like to re-calibrate your life to include something more, here's how you go about it.
Which is the most frequently used method of evaluating someone you want to hire?Usually, the method used is quite bizarre. You tend to ask for references, probably some sort of resume and you're expected to make a decision based on those parameters. However, almost everyone will make sure they have a polished resume, which means you don't know if the person is really a good fit for the job. At Psychotactics, we've hired duds before. And in order to avoid the frustration of hiring and then having to let go of staff/outsourcers, we've devised a method that is surprisingly easy—and effective. And in this episode you'll find the three steps we take to get very precise hiring results. Listen away!
Imagine making one change in your pricing strategy. Then let's say you make two. But let's say we make three changes. With three tiny changes, we have not just made tiny little moves, but have created a whole pricing environment. Or a trophic cascade, where one thing leads to the other, and then the entire cascading effect changes the way you do business. Your revenue goes up, which buys you more time. Wouldn't you like to know how to create this cascade? That's what today's episode is all about and how to go about putting together the elements of the cascade.
Either your article is too long and bloated or it's much too skimpy. When faced with either of these situations we are at a loss as to what needs to be done. Well, worry no more because "examples" are waiting to rush to your rescue. Let's find out how to use examples to extend or reduce content in articles, books, presentations and just about any other media that goes out to clients.
When you run a business, there are three things that seems to come up. The first is "ungrateful subscribers", the second is definitely "pirates" and the third is the "competition. No matter how hard you try, these three pesky occurrences seem hard to avoid, but as you'd expect, there's a way out.
Clickbait headlines seem to be designed to get our curiosity. But what makes a clickbait headline so attractive in the first place? And how do we write "normal" headlines that are far superior in getting the attention of the client?
Often contrarian advice is precisely what the client needs. But how do you present the concepts to clients? Don't you need a lot of proof and research? Here's how you can get your client to not just listen, but also implement your contrarian advice.
It's one thing to say "be contrarian" but you can stick out too much. And anyway, we don't particularly care to disagree. Yet, being contrarian gives you a uniqueness factor that gets the attention of the client. What steps do we need to take to get to this attention? And how do we go about it systematically? Let's find out.
Do you know why the Tesla is such a big car? Think about it for a second. Tesla Motors only make electric cars. The bigger the car, the heavier it's going to be and the greater the drain on the battery. So why make a big car? Why not make it more compact like other electric cars? The answer lies in the battery. The entire base of the car is nothing but a battery. The bigger the battery, the greater the distance the car can go. The top of the line Tesla can go 400 miles (that's over 640 kilometres) on a single charge. How did Tesla come up with technology that far supersedes the range of a fuel-driven car? The answer lies in a concept of contrarianism. Being a contrarian means you're not like sheep, just following what has been done in the past. Being contrarian means you're creating an end point and working backwards, without even knowing how you're going to get to the "finish line". Find out how to use the power of being contrarian to your advantage.
When we think of making the transition to our own business, why do we freeze? It's simply because we're not sure where to start. A business has so many aspects to it. Yet, most business people never start up a business. Find out what you really should be doing.
When it comes to testimonials, we tend to end up with rambling, not so great testimonials? How do we get powerful experiences, instead of watered down testimonials? Here are three quick (and relatively easy) ways to go about the task of getting great testimonials.
The final rerun of six re-runs: Can you really double your sales of a product you've created a while ago? And why are satellite products so very useful to clients and profitable to your info-product business? In this episode we look at info-products as we'd look at a piece of software like Photoshop. Find out the magic that already exists within your info-product and why you don't have to keep crazily searching for newer clients all the time.
The fifth of six re-runs: Whenever you have a deadline, somehow you're able to stagger towards it and get the job done. But other tasks never seem to move forward. You fall behind on your reading, your fun projects, even that movie you'd promised yourself. In life we need to complete projects that are urgent, but also projects that are good for the soul. How do we get these projects going and how can we sustain them over the long term? Let's find out in this episode.
The fourth of six re-runs: It might not seem like tolerance is the root for success, but if you dig deeper, you'll find that small businesses struggle without these core concepts of tolerance. So how does tolerance play a part in something like a successful artwork, or music, or the next product or course you produce? Let's find out in this podcast.
The third of six re-runs: How do you know whether an idea is good or bad? Is there a system of validation for your info-products, courses and workshops, or do you just go with the wisdom of the crowds? And why do brilliant ideas like the Segway fail? This episode shows you exactly what causes one idea to fail and the other one to succeed. But what about self-doubt? Find out how to take on self-doubt as well as validate your ideas in this episode.
The second of six re-runs: One of the biggest hurdles in writing, has nothing to do with writing at all. It doesn't have anything to do with time, either. Instead, it's an understanding of energy. Without a clear view of how energy works, we're likely to start off strong and then find ourselves stranded. Is there a way around this energy hurdle? What causes an energy loss? Let's find out in this episode.
The first of six re-runs: Hype works exceedingly well, even when the client knows they're being duped a bit. But what if you can't stand hype? Does that mean you roll over and play dead? Here's how you can avoid hype completely, if you wish to do so. And if the hype is so great, that it can't be ignored, you can use the hype like mental judo to turn the tables and to achieve precise results for your clients.
When we think of mastermind-based concepts, we tend to isolate the ideas to a group of people. But what if you could use the very same concepts in courses, workshops and even in membership sites? Here are three steps to powerfully use mastermind concepts across the board.
It feels difficult to feel any gratitude when you're cooped up. Yet, these weeks in relative isolation have also brought unexpected joy. This is a small insight into how it has changed our personal live and even the structure of our online courses.
One of the most draining aspects of article writing is the research that we need to put into writing an article. No matter how hard we try, we end up spending hours, even days digging up for the right research. But what if there were a faster and better way to do research. What if that method was "accidental", yet super reliable? Let's find out how to go about it, shall we?
We've been told time and time again that our mindsets need to change in order to change our skillsets. But what if it's the other way around? Why are we still stuck despite making a change to our mindset? And are we fighting just a solitary mindset without realising there are multiple levels? Let's go past what's holding us back in this episode of mindset vs skillset.
When are you and I the most distracted? Often, it's right after you've finished one task and on your way to start another. You've planned your day well, but you lose your momentum and before you know it, you're in a big doom loop. How do you avoid this in between distraction so that you get tasks done and cross off all those boxes on the to-do list?
Imagine you are a prisoner of war. You're thrown into an isolation space, not just for a week, or month, but for an entire year. All the while you're being tortured and despair seems to be around you. Should you continue to stay optimistic? James Stockdale thought otherwise. The optimists don't do well at all. What does well, you may ask and how you keep going if you don't have optimism? Find out the paradox that made Stockdale survive and thrive.
Travel can be good, bad or even ugly. But in our travels through India in Feb 2020, we ran into a sense of warmth that needs to be shared. Get yourself a coffee or tea as you settle in for some really heartwarming stories.
We all get into argumentative situations. Yet, these situations almost always leave us worse off than before. How can we learn to negotiate instead of creating confrontation, and end up even better off than before? That's one of the three things I learned last year. To find out more, you know what you have to do. Listen to the podcast!
Many times when we are asked to show our work, we're quite reluctant. There's a reason for this reluctance. It's more than likely that the work is quite shoddy. And yet, what if we changed our perspective and had a goal to create a ton of "rubbish". If the concept sounds bizarre, it's not! In this short piece, you'll hear how top professionals encourage the steps to great work—by creating a fair bit of rubbish along the way.
Does a 100 year old book on advertising still apply today?
In part two we explore the second of Hopkins' principles: tell your full story.
If you ever tire of the slightly ridiculous drone of "hustle, hustle and hustle", you might want to step into the past over a cup of coffee and cake. And read the wisdom of yesteryear as the world hurries by.
Does a 100 year old book on advertising still apply today? In this two-part series we delve into concepts that are not just relevant, but crucial in marketing. Find out the principles that have lasted almost a whole century and how they can be useful to you, today. And tomorrow too. Probably the next decade or two as well.
Pre-sell is notoriously difficult for most entrepreneurs. It feels greasy and icky at times. And that lack of enthusiasm dooms the sale from the very start. But what if there were a way to sell without selling. Instead, all you'd need is a story. A simple story with tiny little details could easily achieve the goal of selling a product or service in advance. But how do you go about it? Let's find out.
Most of us are more than likely to get going by having a to-do list. Yet, we at Psychotactics do things a little differently. We start with the breaks, to begin with (and there's even a "Julia story" that explains why). Plus we also include a stop-doing list. To find out how and why this weird planning system may work for you, listen to this episode.
The first line of an article drives most of us insane. And as if that were not enough, we are called upon to write an interesting first line. How do you nail that first line every single time? Here are three—not four—just three methods that will excite and surprise you.
How do you find the most authentic food in a foreign city, minutes after you've landed? How do you find seats on a plane where people won't bump into you while you're sleeping? These and some other nifty tricks are what you're about to learn about in this episode.
Most of us have tried and are unable to keep up with the onslaught of information that comes our way. Add the deluge of distraction and it seems like a losing game. Or does it? You'll be amazed at how tiny tweaks can make a considerable difference to both learning and implementation.
Would you be able to write a newsletter on a weekly basis and keep it going for the next 20 years? How do you even get topics, let alone write consistently for all of this time? The answer lies in somewhat of a strategy, but mostly a structure. If you use a similar structure, you'll find that twenty years is just a starting point and that writing will be a joy, instead of a dread. Here's how we made it to the 20-year mark!
Would you choose between mastery or fluency? Many would opt for mastery, but it might just be the wrong choice to make. If, instead, you work with fluency, you can get incredibly talented while spending just five minutes a day. Is such a fabulous really possible? Let's find out.
How do you make your articles or sales letters more interesting? Analogies and stories always increase the drama and attention span. Yet, it's hard to find and craft interesting stories on a regular basis. Or is it? Find out how you can use three simple and effective ways to craft a ton of great stories and analogies.
Let's say you come up with what you believe is a great uniqueness for your product or service. How would you know if it's great or not? The answer is deceptively simple: every client needs to echo your uniqueness over and over again. But how are you supposed to hear that echo? Interestingly that echo is located in the testimonial. But not just anywhere in the testimonial, but in one really interesting area. Listen to find out and then do the same for your products and services as well.
Why do some books, courses or workshops end up becoming so addictive? Is it the teacher, the system, the information, or is it all of the above? In this podcast we look at why your business needs a bit of movement through three precise stages. Those stages are information, results and elegance. Elegance is hard to resist, but how do we get there and how long does it take? Is there any guaranteed way to get to elegance? Let's find out in this episode.
When we think of business, marketing tactics and strategy comes to mind, doesn't it? Philosophy does exist but it may be a bit on the back burner. Yet, for us at Psychotactics, philosophy looms large. Here are just a few nuggets that you can ponder over and see how they apply to you—and how you can use them in your life and business.
One of the most mind numbing tasks is to get a client to pay for the job you've completed. Clients tend to be slow with payments or just default. But is there a way to avoid such a mess? There's not just one, but three separate ways to go about it. Let's find out how you can get paid without all the bother—and well in advance, too.
We tend to believe that we're more overwhelmed than ever before. Yet look around you and you see people who are doing twice or thrice as much. It's hard to admit it, but often their work is of a higher standard too. How come they're not overwhelmed? Is it because they're more talented, or is there something that we're not quite seeing? Let's find out in this episode.
Remember when Google started? Or Amazon? At Psychotactics we started a few years after these giants. It’s perfectly normal to assume that we got in at exactly the right time. But you and I know there’s no right time, and that opportunities are always presenting themselves. Which is why when clients ask: What would you do if you were starting today—my answer is remarkably similar. Find out why the strategy of 2020 is not that different from 2000.
Most of us think we have to be incredibly special, or at least different to stand out in a crowded market. Yet, at least at the starting point, it’s the mundane that gets the attention. If anything, being unique or different seems to be backfire. How do you use the power of mundanity to break into a market and then how do you sustain that momentum?
If you and I look around, we see product or services just like ours everywhere. Instantly we get a feeling of having missed the bus. The market is clearly saturated and there’s little or no point in us having to create more content, or product or services. Or is it? One of the most surprising—even surreal—experiences is dropping into this seemingly saturated market, and finding out that it’s a big, fat myth. Why is it such a myth? Let’s find out.
If you’ve ever wondered if your headline is lacking some oomph, it might be because of an incredibly simple omission. It’s the lack of contrast. Contrast works in real life with colours, textures or flavours. Not surprisingly, it works with headlines too. Here are three common questions about headlines. And they have surprisingly interesting ideas.
The advice about "free vs fee" is clear. Free should be avoided at all costs because you will just be taken advantage of, while others get paid. Yet, this seemingly black and white advice has shades of grey as well. As a startup, payment isn't the only or even the best option. Find out how and when free can work to your advantage.
After the home page, the second most-visited page on many sites is the About Us page. Yet almost all the About Us pages you visit are drab, long winded or don't give much detail at all. If you already have an About Us page going, here are three quick fixes that will dramatically improve the visual and the text on your site.
If you've used some sort of learning techniques all your life, the core principles of learning should not mislead you. Even so, we get hoodwinked and it's important to look at why we struggle with learning. Here's what I've learned about learning so far.
Do you often get stuck when trying to come up with article topics? One of the reasons why we tend to struggle is because we get stuck at the "topic" level. However, when you write headlines, not only move along to the sub-topic level, but headlines give you more precise direction. To find out how to use headlines—even not so good headlines—listen to this podcast.
We tend to learn in sequence. Chapter one, two and three. But what if we broke the sequence? Would that enhance our learning? In this rather sequential piece, you learn how I tend to break quite a few rules to get the results I want, and you'll find it works very well for you too. Tah, dah, time to jump the queue and learn in a whole different way.
Almost all of us feel like impostors from time to time. And we even have an official sounding name for it. But the impostor syndrome is an unfair burden to carry. What if we're just beginners? And what do real impostors look like anyway?
You'd think you'd need to be someone great or at least do something wonderful. Yet, you're a source of inspiration. How do you inspire? It's remarkably simple —and here's a short piece on how you need to go about it.
You've heard that it takes about 21 days to create a habit. But what if that weren't true at all? Could it be possible to create a habit overnight? Or even in the next few minutes? Let's find out.
It might seem that it's always up to us to change our habits. And that idea might be quite incorrect. Instead, what if something around us changed and our habits changed with it? Instead of us taking the blame all the time, this series is about how to look at habits differently and achieve lasting goals.
Researching an article is so frustrating because it's time-consuming. But there are ways to beat the pressure—and the pain. Believe it or not, there are ways to be productive with zero last minute research. This episode shows you how to make advance research work for you, as well as in situations where you have no research at all. Sounds too good to be true? Well, listen to the episode.
(Rerun of episode #220 Coaching Series Part 1 of 3). The toughest part of coaching isn't necessarily coaching itself. Instead, it's the niche, isn't it? How do you go looking for the right niche? And how do you know when you've found one that's rewarding as well as profitable? We go back in time with the British Cycling Team and what turned them into champions, and how their coach played a role. We also look at how Pilates went from being everything to everyone to finding a solid niche. Listen and enjoy.
It seems natural to keep an eye, even get obsessive about your competitors. However, it's a poor strategy for many reasons. In this episode we make the case for why the competition doesn't really matter as much as you think. And why focusing on them could possibly cause clients to desert you, instead.
How many books do you read in a year? Most people boast about how they read hundreds of books a year. That's what I used to do as well. Until I found that I wasn't really absorbing any information. So is speed reading a bad idea? Well, not entirely, but you need to know when to use it and why. Find out how speed works for you and more importantly, when it fails.
We're all told we should start with the end in mind, but we still get lost along the way. Why do we go off track? Could there be some barriers that show up a lot before the end? Let's find out we can stop focusing so much on the end and work on those barriers that blocks our progress.
Do you pre-sell if your audience is away on vacation? Should you pre-sell if you're unsure of a full house? These and other questions are what's on this Part 2 of the pre-sell podcast.
Which product should you pre-sell? Should it be the $20 product or the $2000 one? And why do silos matter so much? In this episode we not only learn why the $20 product might matter more, but also how you can promote a product almost endlessly without ever promoting it all.
Most of us believe that to cope with information, we have to speed up. But we've all tried that, haven't we? And it doesn't seem to work at all.
This episode is about why we are so obsessed with trying to keep up. And how you can do quite the opposite and still be a lot smarter.
Click here to read this episode: Information Overload
Many coaches and trainers struggle to get precise results for their clients And it's not for want of trying, either. They work very hard, probably too hard, and yet the clients don't get the results they seek.
The question is: how we go from mediocrity to excellence?
Find out the guidelines to becoming a good coach.
Is there a fun way to get unstuck? From all the experiences we've had so far, getting stuck is a real pain. The more we try to get unstuck, the more we seem to dig a deeper hole. But what if there were a few fun ways to get unstuck? And what if they were quite different from what you've tried so far? Let's have a look.
Why are some sales pages so confusing? Is it because of the message or rather because there are way too many messages hitting you all at once? A sales page needs a powerful message to get the client not just interested, but to keep reading. And yet sales pages often miss that goal.
But there's a way to start the sales page from getting off to a false start. And it's called “isolating the problem”. But how do we go about this isolation process?
Let's find out. shall we?
Click here to read: Why The Top-Half Of The Sales Page Goes Wrong (And How To Fix It)
As writers, we count words when we are creating a book or writing an article. We look at completing a fixed number of words per day—800 words. And yet, that system can be counterproductive to finishing your article. Professional writers seem to follow another method, one that ignores the output and instead focuses on the article writing process. How do they do it? And what have we been doing incorrectly?
Let's find out how to fix this problem and finish our articles.
Click here to read: Why Writing 800 Words Every Day Could Be Hindering Your Article Writing Progress
Luck it seems, is fickle? Or is it? How come some people are lucky (or as the case may be, unlucky) all the while. There is indeed a system and it may be off a bit, like weather forecasting, but by and large it's quite predictable.
Let's dump the “hard, hard, hard work” mantra for a while and find out how to make luck stick.
Read online: Can We Really Systemise Luck?
If you reached the top of your game, would you credit it to hard work or luck? Most of us quite easily slide into crediting our success to hard work. But what if hard work isn't necessary? What if we've been slogging for no good reason at all?
Let's find out more in Episode 1 (yes there are two episodes) in this series on hard work vs luck.
Read online: Hard Work Vs Luck: Which One Is More Dependable?
Naming a book or info-product is often a royal pain in the neck. And that's because most of us tend to sit down at our desk hoping for inspiration to strike. The weird bit is that inspiration is often in some other place altogether. It's right in front of your nose, but often you may not see it.
Let's go on a treasure hunt and find out how to get an enticing book title in next to no time.
Read online:How To Create Intensely Catchy Book Names (Without Too Much Of A Struggle)
How to avoid embarrassing time overruns when making presentations? Timing your presentations are crucial yet all the practice in the world may not help if there's an external issue. An emcee may cause confusion, the sound system might cause delays. And all of these unexpected issues eat up into your time. But some presenters keep to their time, nonetheless?
What method can you use to avoid this issue of overruns? How do you design your presentation? Let's find out, shall we?
Read Online: How To Avoid Time Overruns When Making A Presentation
What is the biggest headache with transcription? Well, there are many, aren't there?
Errors bug me no end, and they seem to make a lot of them. There's also the cost, the turnaround time and other issues.
But what if there were a service that solved all of these problems?
Better still, what if there were a service that you could just dictate into, like normal speech and find that it put the right punctuation in place?
Here we go into the fantastic world of transcripts. You'll be amazed, because I sure was!
Click here to read the article: Coolest Transcription Service
You know how you're told to make lemonade when life hands you lemons?
Well, what do you do with overripe bananas? You make Filos!
This episode is about the times when we should have given up because the failure seemed so great. But they are also stories that show you what happens when you persist.
You'll enjoy these stories about 5000bc and Psychotactics. And it's all about failure, and how things turned out on the other side.
Read the transcript here: Failure Through Different Lenses.
Many, if not most of us, have already experienced what it seems like to be a fraud in our mind.
Still we can't seem to shake the impostor syndrome.
But what if we understood how the psychology works?
Find out the twin factors ramming into you and me, and how we can avoid feeling like we're not worthy.
Click here to read: How To Overcome The Impostor Syndrome
Most of us have probably said something to the effect of "If it weren't for the deadline, I'd get nothing done".
Yet, for many of us, a deadline is crushing, if not crippling. We scramble at the last minute and wish there were a better way to get things done on time.
We could fool ourselves by having an earlier deadline but that doesn't seem to work either.
But have you tried the "second-last-minute-deadline"?
And how do you use it to get things done not just well before time but also a lot better?
Read more here: How To De-Stress With The Second Last Minute Deadline
What makes some courses vastly better than others?
The answer lies not in the content, or the instruction, but rather in the set up.
But why is setup so crucial?
Setup becomes vital because it gets rid of clients that don't follow instructions and gives you the cream of the crop.
You get clients that follow through and therefore get better results. The more consistent the results, the less you have to market your course.
But the question is: how do you set up a course?Let's find out. The Magic Of Set Up: Why Some Courses Are Better Than Other
Fun seems obvious as a concept.
But "fun in learning" almost seems like a bit of a paradox.
What is "fun" and how can you find it, let alone use it when you're teaching a skill?
Let's take a bit of a deep dive into intimidation and find how fun can save the day—yes, yet again.
How To Accelerate Learning
Why do we get upset with ourselves when we forget information?
Surely we should be able to remember at least 30-40% of a book. But it seems to slide through our brain like semolina in a sieve. Yet, there is a way to remember things—and there's also a big reason to forget.
Find out why forgetting is just as important as retaining facts. Find out exactly how to go about it in this episode on memory.
How to Accelerate Client Learning
If you were asked: What is the uniqueness of this podcast, would you be able to answer the question?
The chances are that you might state one of the features, but not what makes it truly unique.
—What do you have to do to make the uniqueness come to life?
—And how do you get clients to pass on that uniqueness?
Find out in this case study on our own podcast.
How To Use Contrast To Create Your Uniqueness In Seconds
It's not unusual for clients to say they're perfectionists.
This means they take more time, spend more effort and they sound like the ideal client on your course. But as perfectionists know fully well, they're often jeopardising their own success, because all the extra work isn't dramatically improving their work.
—How, then should you make them pay attention to what's important?
—How can you help them gain the confidence and the skill?
If you want your clients to be really skilled, here are three concrete steps to get them away from circling and into results.
How to Stop "Perfectionist” Clients From Sabotaging Their Own Success
Most courses have huge dropout rates.
And yet, that's not the case for some teachers and trainers.
What makes some courses so dramatically different? The slightly surprising answer is that the course material itself can doom the course.
If that makes no sense, follow along, because there's a method to this madness.
Find out how to create a scenario where clients never want to leave.
Let's say you come up with what you believe is a great uniqueness for your product or service.
How would you know if it's great or not?
The answer is deceptively simple: every client needs to echo your uniqueness over and over again. But how are you supposed to hear that echo? Interestingly that echo is located in the testimonial. But not just anywhere in the testimonial, but in one really interesting area.
Listen to find out and then do the same for your products and services as well.
How to Validate Your Uniqueness
Big companies talk a lot about leadership. However you and I may not have that big charisma factor. What do we have to do to get things done when working with freelancers? What if we need to work with several team members? In this episode, we look at how the primary task is to get the right people in, rather than playing leader. And how that frees up a lot of your time and moves your company forward with a momentum that is quite unexpected.
Why Staying Small Is Smart
Think Big. Really?
Studies show us that scaling up is often disastrous for most companies. But what's the alternative? That's what we look at in this book review—well, chapter review—of Company of One by Paul Jarvis.
Instead of driving ourselves crazy, we bring in sanity and upper boundaries to our business, while living a very good life. How do we do that? Let's find out.
Why Staying Small Is Probably A Smarter Move
People are often amazed at how quickly we fill our workshops and courses.
It's almost like we have a separate channel to our clients.
Well, as it appears, we do. And it's not quite a Facebook group. It's even cooler. Here's how we filled a big chunk of the Munich workshop.
How WhatsApp Helped Fill The Munich Workshop
Hype works exceedingly well, even when the client knows they're being duped a bit.
But what if you can't stand hype?
Does that mean you roll over and play dead? Here's how you can avoid hype completely, if you wish to do so.
And if the hype is so great, that it can't be ignored, you can use the hype like mental judo to turn the tables and to achieve precise results for your clients.
How to Avoid Hype and Still Get Clients
In business the advice we get is to hang in, no matter what happens.
Yet, to me that sounds like the wrong advice.
You definitely need to hang in a bit when things get slightly tougher than you expected.
But there's a time for quitting as well. How do you know if you should quit or soldier on?
When Quitting Is the Smarter Option
We may often hear ourselves saying, we have a long to-do list.
Or things that we still haven't completed.
Or worse, we may talk about how we have no time.
Often, it's just a matter of issues that can get resolved with a touch of philosophy.
There's work to be done as well, but the philosophy needs to come first.
In this second part of the series, let's find out how philosophy can come to our rescue and serve our business—even save us time!
The Philosophy of Psychotactics
When we think of business, marketing tactics and strategy comes to mind, doesn't it?
Philosophy does exist but it may be a bit on the back burner. Yet, for us at Psychotactics, philosophy looms large.
Here are just a few nuggets that you can ponder over and see how they apply to you—and how you can use them in your life and business.
The Psychotactics Marketing Philosophy
So much effort goes into the launch of a product, but what happens next? How do you handle the calm after the launch? How do you keep selling products on an ongoing basis? These are the questions we tackle in this episode as we get rid of the "post-launch" blues.
Click here to read the full transcript.
When we price a product or service we often use the ending 7 or 9. As in $27 or $29. Is there any basis for using such an ending? Yes, there is, but does it help to sell more products or services? This is the journey we go on, as we explore the crazy world of pricing. How to set prices shouldn't be voodoo and yet it is.
Let's go on this trip by first removing the silly myths.
Click here to read the full transcript.
How many books do you read in a year? Most people boast about how they read hundreds of books a year. That's what I used to do as well. Until I found that I wasn't really absorbing any information.
So is speed reading a bad idea? Well, not entirely, but you need to know when to use it and why.
Find out how speed works for you and more importantly, when it fails.
Click here to read the full transcript.
Most of us have grand plans to succeed. Yet, almost the moment we start there are a million distractions in our way. Chaos lurches around in our doorway and there seems to be no way out.
At Psychotactics, we had managed to get around most of the chaos but then I was in charge of mentoring my niece. As she moved from Year 6 to Year 7, it seemed like we were hit by an okinami of chaos.
What did we do to find our way out? How did we manage to avoid the madness that we had no control over? Find out in this episode of The Three Month Vacation.
Click here to read the full transcript.
How do you maintain a high productivity level when switching tasks? How do you get the brain and body to handle the transition? And how do you manage the transitions with a minimum amount of fuss?
Click here to read the full transcript.
When you create or find your uniqueness, do you need to test it?
Incredible as it seems there's little point in doing any testing at all.
In this episode you'll find out why testing is practically impossible and how instead of wasting time on research, you should follow three steps to make sure your uniqueness occupies a permanent part of your client's brain.
Click here to read: Three Steps To Getting Your Uniqueness Recognised
Objections aren't something we necessary think about when writing articles. We're so focused on the main content that we might see no need to contradict ourselves. Yet, it's this very contradiction that makes the article more robust and removes those chunky holes. Let's find out why objections are crucial in our articles.
Click here to read the article online:
One of biggest problems with any sort of prospecting is the dead silence right after clients love what you've said or done. You'd think they'd call immediately, but there's not a peep out of them. Is there some flaw in the system? And how can you overcome this obvious glitch?
Click here to read online: Coaching Series 3/3: Why Clients Nod But Don't Call
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How do you Find Prospects? Red Bull has the highest market share of any energy drink in the world, with 6.302 billion cans sold in a year. However, it almost never got started.
Before the launch, part owner, Dietrich Mateschitz hired a market research firm to test Red Bull's acceptance. The result was a complete let down “People didn't believe the taste, the logo, the brand name. “I'd never before experienced such a disaster.” But Mateschitz believed the product would do well if he placed it in the right market.
Which is precisely what he did His insight was to target not just students, but trendy students in universities. Instead of selling the brand to them, he'd pay them to throw a party and supplied them with free cases of Red Bull. What Mateschitz was doing, was two masterful acts all at once. He was seeking out the kind of clients he'd want, and instantly demonstrating the application.
For someone starting out in coaching it might seem like an uphill task to get clients No one knows you, no one knows your brand, and no one even cares. Sounds pretty much like Red Bull doesn't it? But just like Red Bull, you've got to know how to work your way around such a dismal scenario. The first stage would be for you to decide on a specific audience. Before you get close focus on a single person, namely a profile, it's important first to find an audience.
Take Mike Jara's audience for instance Mike deals with the issue of stress management. And that's a pretty broad audience. On any given day, you're likely to run into people who are wound up. Even so, it's not quite the audience you (or Mike) is looking for. Instead, Mike has chosen to talks to teachers.
They have a pretty stressful day, not just in the classroom, but with the prep work and the assignments after the last kid has gone home. The stress gets in the way of sleep, causing the teachers to be even more sleep deprivation. When they get back to work, after a restless sleep, they're edgier than ever before.
However, without the audience in mind, the message goes quickly off track When Mike started the exercise of getting a message across, his line went like this: Start your mornings with abundant energy. Ditch the coffee and grab yourself a hot cup of habits. Not only was the line a bit confusing, but it instantly brought up objections.
Most people drink coffee, because they like the taste, but also because it's a break, and often a social gathering of sorts. They don't see coffee as the enemy.
If Mike were to look for prospects with a line like that, he'd be likely to get little or no response, which would be a shame, because there's nothing wrong with Mike's offering. When looking for prospects, it's not enough to have a great product or service.
Instead, you have to get started with the target audience, then move to the target profile, and that's when you avoid the noise factor and get a clearer signal.
When I started out as a coach/consultant I thought I had a great line I'd say something like this: “Reactivating dormant business clients”. I was so chuffed with my line that I got a designer to design my stationery, which included a thousand business cards.
Months later, I found barely little or no interest in what I had to offer. However, I also got lucky because I was introduced to a networking group. This group met on every Friday, which meant I could test out which lines worked best. Even so, I got nowhere in a hurry.
What changed everything for me was a live situation As part of the group exercise, I had to visit every member of the group individually. They, in turn, had to explain their product or service to me. I'd listen patiently, while some people took as much as 10-12 minutes to explain their marketing message.
I'd then reassemble the concept in my brain, and put it forward to the member. “You explain it better than me,” they'd say in astonishment. Even so, I was not convinced.
I was the guy who “reactivated dormant business clients.” Plus I had all these sunk costs in the stationery. I wasn't about to go all nuclear on the existing message. It took over a dozen people to point out what I did before I was cured of my stubbornness.
Eventually, I started talking to people about how hard it was to get the attention of a client in a few seconds, and almost immediately those very people would stop what they were doing.
They'd look up and pay attention to what I was saying because I'd hit a chord with them. I'd narrowed down my audience, and had managed to craft a message that appealed directly to that very audience.
Prospecting may seem like a frustratingly tricky task You're not sure where to get your clients and they, in turn, can't find you. However, the core of prospecting is to figure out where the gold lies in the first place. Your gold is to “find the audience, any audience”.
When I started as a coach, I worked with a small business owner group, but I could have easily worked with dentists. Mike Jara is targeting teachers, but dentists are fair game too.
It doesn't matter who you start with, because most problems are relatively generic. However, once we get past the first stage, it's the second hurdle that's harder. You somehow need to speak to your audience and find out the most significant barriers they face.
As you dig, you'll find something that they're very keen on solving and they'll even tell give you the exact terminology for their problem, and how to articulate the solution. A target profile interview helps tremendously in this regard (and if you're in 5000bc, here's a link).
Once you have clarity with your message, it's time to go back to your original audience and see how the message works. Yup, it's time to test. Will they react? Will they get in touch? There are three steps to ensure the prospect takes the next step. Let's see what those three steps happen to be.
Why prospects react positively, but don't get in touch You've been there before, haven't you? A client has been excited about your proposition, but then you hear nothing from them.
Why do prospects go dead on you? Let's look at three big reasons: They’re hearing the idea for the first time
You don’t have a clear next step
They’re not sure how to apply your idea to their world
One of the biggest problems is definitely “hearing the idea for the first time”. There's a reason why people that follow up do better than others. Even when we're keen to buy into a product or service, unless there's a screaming level of urgency, we move very slowly.
We fully intend to solve the problem, but we tend to have other fires to put out. Having an idea in place is wonderful, but how are you going to follow up? When I worked as a cartoonist, I'd send a monthly calendar as a follow-up.
Notice the term “monthly calendar”? Most people get a calendar once a year, but I wanted my clients to remember me month after month. With Psychotactics, we send out newsletters; we do podcasts, etc. And granted it's not about coaching and more about products and courses, but let's not sidestep the issue of follow up.
Even if you're offering the most powerful product or service, clients take their time to respond. Without the follow-up, your message is like a ship in the night. If clients have listened closely to your message, it means they're interested, and you've got to take the next step and get their details so that you can follow up. However, do these potential clients have the next step?
Having a next step is crucial If a potential client is in your space, what can she do next? There's no prescribed answer for every situation. Sometimes the client can get in touch with you, go to your website, or join some newsletter. The better option, wherever available, is for you to get their information and get in touch with them, instead.
If that potential client is stressed, not getting enough sleep, etc. she may be motivated to get to you, but other priorities might be greater. Hence it's usually better to get them to give their card, or their details, with one tiny additional step.
I used to make the clients write “YES” at the back of the card so that they had a clear memory of opting in. It was less for the opt-in process and more so because they remember their decision to move ahead.
Online, it's a good idea to get them to take some action It's one thing to just have a report, white paper etc. but it's easier to get distracted online. You might want them to get to a specific page in the report or a particular set of pages.
Yes, the report starts at Page 1 and moves ahead, but there's no rule that doesn't allow you to nudge the prospect to Page 7, where you have something powerful in place. You've gone through the trouble of finding the prospect, have even gotten the prospect's attention, but something that creates action on their part is a powerful tool.
If you're an art coach, helping them draw something quickly might help If you're into assisting clients to get work, a quick template might be the answer. If you're into meditation, an active meditation technique that's different is likely to get their attention. Many of us believe that prospects will make their decision and take the next step. It isn't as true as you'd expect.
Most of us need that additional nudge. We don't need to be inundated with “this is your last chance, goodbye” newsletters or follow-ups, but a cute little bump in the right direction does wonders.
However, this only applies if your client can see the application of your service. We looked at follow up, next step, and it's time to see how the application matters.
Let's say you position yourself as a coach in InDesign. Is that likely to get the client to call you? In many cases, you're not going to get the call, because clients aren't necessarily familiar with the term InDesign. They don't necessarily know it's a layout program. And if they do, they don't know what they're supposed to do with it. Which is where applications come into play.
Let's say you show a prospect how she can create a gorgeous e-book in InDesign; now they have one type of application. Another set of prospects might open their eyes wide when they see the ability to create stationery and brochures. It's still InDesign, but there are many applications, aren't there?
When we started out with The Brain Audit, it seemed like clients would figure out how to apply the book to their own businesses. However, in time we learned they weren't always sure. Which is one of the reasons why I wrote the book, “The Brain Audit Applications”.
It showed how to apply the concept of The Brain Audit to marketing messages, to strap lines, websites, etc. In short, if I were a trainer for The Brain Audit (there's no coaching system, but let's say I was a coach), I would need to at least give prospects a glimpse into the possibilities.
Don't confuse this advice with a one-stop shop A one-stop shop is where you try and push everything under the nose of the client all at once. That kind of business is quite counterproductive for a small business, as it positions you as an extreme generalist and not a specialist at all.
However, if you were to draw the client into your business with a single concept. e.g. Mike Jara's line is: Morning has just started and do you already feel left behind?
That's a feeling, an emotion, a real day to day problem that draws in the client. Jara might have a slightly bigger program or coaching system, and he needs to reveal it much later. When the clients are sure of what he's offering, he can then put forward the applications. It might seem that sleep has just one application—to get a restful sleep—but you'd be surprised.
People, and in this case, teachers may not be sleeping because of a change in a relationship, death in the family, money issues and a whole raft of issues. These issues can be directly addressed or gently brought up as tiny examples, which in turn gets and keeps the attention of the client.
Which in turn brings us right back to Red Bull Red Bull isn't a coaching service, of that we're all quite sure. Even so, the principles of getting a client are relatively similar. They found their audience by hiring the popular kids to throw a party. The problem they solved was one of being cool.
Red Bull was and still is considered to be a cool drink by many in that audience. Nobody believed in Red Bull at the start, and it took Dietrich Mateschitz three years to get things going.
Even so, as a company they've followed up consistently using sporting and cultural events, creating spaces and parties to make sure they're in the public eye at a relatively low cost.
As coaches we need to put similar principles in place to get prospects, so let's go through a quick summary: Work on getting to your target audience—yes, offline and online
Meet with clients and run your message past them
Watch for something in the message that gets their attention
Go back to your audience and state your line and message
If they are interested, do they follow up? If not, it’s because you’ve got to follow up, give them a clear next step and show them various applications.
Yes, these are a lot of steps, indeed And it's one of the reasons why many coaches don't do so well. The fundamental steps are remarkably similar whether you have a product, training or a service like coaching.
Just having a website or just one speaking engagement isn't going to do the trick. You've got to be diligent with the steps, and even a great coaching system takes time to get off the ground.
Get started with your plan and execution right away.
Next Step: Coaching Series : 1/3 – How to Start Up with a Great Niche
We all struggle to find niches when trying to get into the coaching game. But is it really that hard? Or have we been looking in the wrong places? This episode shows you how you can find dozens of niches, all of which have great power and are profitable now and for years to come.
Click here to read online: Coaching Series 2/3: How Niches Can Easily Be Found in Recurring Client Problems
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In 2010, Gillette blades dominated the market at 70 per cent. Six years later, they were down to 54%
How can Gillette get back into the game? Phil Masiello is one of the reasons why Gillette is losing market share. Masiello founded 800razors.com and sales at his company were up to about $2 million annually before he sold it. However, Masiello is only one among many competitors.
Harry's, Dollar Shave and other smaller razor and blade companies are all responsible for the drop in Gillette's market share. It's Phil Masiello, himself who has the best advice for Gillette.
“Gillette makes a great shave,” Masiello said. “Nobody has ever complained about the great shave of Gillette and Schick. People only complained about the price. You take the price difference out, all of a sudden they are back in the game.”
Notice what Masiello is pointing to? It's the “recurring problem”. If you've ever bought Gillette's blades, the only thought that crosses your mind with every purchase is: how can five pieces of plastic and some metal cost $40 per pack? In New Zealand, each blade is priced at the whopping price of $8. 15 zillion shaves later; you think of the same problem over and over again when buying new blades.
The recurring problem exists in every industry, without exception Take for instance the role of a media planner in an advertising agency. What is her recurring problem? It's ROI or a return on investment. A media planner's job is to decide where to spend the client's money. Will it be on social media? On TV adverts? Or some place else?
What she decides then trickles down to the copywriters and designers and everyone else in the agency. The teams will need to either need to make more TV commercials or instead, radio spots, depending on where the ROI is best. And the biggest problem with media planning isn't the spending of the budget, but the perception of the clients and the agency.
If you were asked: On a scale of 1/10 how high would you rate newspapers with regards to ROI? What about TV? Or radio? Or would social media be a better choice? Perception isn't reality, and when a firm did painstaking research, they found something mind-boggling. See the figures below.
What's the recurring problem? Yup, it's perception. And this kind of recurring problem shows up consistently when you're coaching clients. Usually, the same problems turn up again and again. Take, for instance, the Article Writing Course. All of our coaching is done online via a forum and through assignments. It's not what you'd call a traditional system of phone calls, Skype calls or in person. Even so, it's not the medium of coaching that is valid for this discussion.
What's important is in identifying the recurring problem. And the recurring problem is that our clients, at least, are keen on getting new clients, and they realise that articles are one of the better ways to create authority and hence, get clients. But they struggle with speed. Writing an article takes so long that they get exhausted.
And you know what happens when you get so tired, right? Your output isn't that great. The coaching system we have in place is therefore built around speed. By the end of the coaching program, the goal is to write magazine-quality articles in 90 minutes.
If you're training a netball team the recurring problem might be different Nerves and pressure situations on the court is almost endemic among young players. As Leanne Hughes, once a netball player herself, says: “Playing in the circle is tough. You don’t want to miss that goal and lose the game by one point. How do you calm the nerves when you need to deliver that shot?
The recurring problem is getting the shot even under extreme pressure. This precise idea is what enables a buyer to lock into whatever it is you're selling as a coach. And in turn, it prevents you from saying something silly like: “Oh, I'm a netball coach” when asked what you do for a living.
One more example and then it's time to move on through the series. Joseph Ch'ng runs training in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) Clients learn to be NLP coaches just like him. But what's the recurring problem that shows up? Joseph has found that coaches aren't always in the right frame of mind to coach others. To get into that state of mind—a meta state—as he calls it, is essential. And that's a recurring problem that he sees with many coaches.
As Joseph says: Meta State is a peak performance state. A state of being in-tuned, open, connected. Clients respond well to coaches who are in this state and as a coach you get far more impressive results. You need to learn how to move into, and stay in that meta state when working with clients, no matter how your day has been before that moment.”
See those problems cropping up time and time again? Gillette has its price issues; a media planner tends to battle with the perception of clients. On the Article Writing Course, we have to deal with speed, while Leanne works on nerves. And finally, Joseph's client's recurring problem is the “burdens of the day” and “how to switch into meta state right away”.
Find your client's recurring problem today. Ask them. They'll tell you. Just like I would tell you why I don't like paying $8 for a single Gillette blade.
However, now that we have the recurring problem concept in play, how do we go about the important task of finding prospective clients?
Next Step: Coaching Series 1/3: How to Start Up with a Great Niche
The toughest part of coaching isn't necessarily coaching itself. Instead, it's the niche, isn't it? How do you go looking for the right niche? And how do you know when you've found one that's rewarding as well as profitable? We go back in time with the British Cycling Team and what turned them into champions, and how their coach played a role. We also look at how Pilates went from being everything to everyone to finding a solid niche. Listen and enjoy.
Click here to read online: Coaching Series 1/3: How To Start Up With A Great Niche
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Hand washing is not exactly the activity you'd indulge in if you wanted to win the gold medal at the Olympics. Yet, that's exactly what the British Cycling Team did at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. They hired a surgeon to teach the athletes to properly wash their hands, in order to avoid illnesses during competition.
The team staff were utterly fastidious about food preparation. They even brought their own mattresses and pillows, so that the athletes could sleep in a familiar posture every night.
What does all of this have to do with coaching? It might seem totally weird, even slightly crazy, but these were just some of the methods Sir Dave Brailsford, head of British Cycling used to turn his scrappy little bunch into world champions.
British Cycling went from a terrible 76 year record of just one gold medal, to 7 out of 10 gold at the Beijing Olympics and then 7 out of 10 at yet again at the London Olympics. They've even won three out of the last Tour de France competitions, with only Italy interrupting their successful run.
Surely Britain didn't sprout champions overnight Something else was in play, and that something else is simply the teacher, or a coach. And there's a remarkable difference between being just someone who coaches others, and one that coaches to get precise results. The coach who works with a specific goal in mind takes great performers and transforms makes them unbeatable.
If you look at almost any great artist, performer, athlete or professional, it's easy to seduce yourself into believing in inborn talent. In almost every instance, you will find it's the coach and their methods that take the client from a seemingly ordinary level to something quite stupendous.
Without a coach, a person has to go through the gruelling method of having to figure out all the mistakes and fix it themselves. When you look at the 10,000 hour principle, what you're seeing is someone who doesn't have an outstanding coach. A coach can not only reduce the learning curve, but can make learning fun and addictive.
In this series, we'll take apart not just what makes for good coaching, but the elements of coaching. Let's get started.
How do you define your Niche as a Coach? Around the time of the California Gold Rush, one man, Samuel Brannan was known as the richest man in California.
Contrary to what we might believe, Brannan didn't quite make his money panning for gold. He'd decided early on that he'd never make much money in the gold mines. Instead, he was reputed to have gone down the streets of San Francisco, shouting, “Gold, there's gold down the American river”. So where did Brannan's riches arise?
His fortune arose from a strategic move. He owned the only store between San Francisco and the gold fields. He stocked his store with the picks, shovels and pans he could find paying barely 20 cents for each pan and selling it for $15 each.
In scarcely nine weeks, he had made over $36,000 (in today's terms that would be 1,080,077.47). In short, Brannan put himself in a position where it was hard, even impossible for him to fail with his insight.
When starting up as a coach, it's not easy to have such clear insight. In many cases, you're in transition yourself. You're often trying to find your own feet, your own space and voice. You do know one thing, though. You know that you can't be like everyone else rushing off with their pans and shovels.
You instinctively know you've almost got to swing the other way and find a niche. But how do you go about creating a niche?
Let's start with luck, shall we? When I first got to Auckland in 2000, I got thrust into coaching by accident—twice. I wasn't into coaching at all, but instead was drawing cartoons on Photoshop. A client who'd come over watched in awe as I got rid of all the icons on the screen. No tool bar, no colour picker, not even a menu bar.
“Where is everything”? He asked, amazed partially at the speed of my method, but more because I seemed to be working almost magically. I explained I was using shortcuts and he was so impressed that he offered me $1000 to train his daughter.
And I had my first accidental coaching session “How to use Photoshop faster than graphic designers”—that was my temporary slogan. In a week, his daughter went from never using Photoshop to teaching graphic designers how to use shortcuts as well.
With my new found slogan, I managed to pick one more client—yes, another graphic designer. As a result, I was able to do my cartoons in my Superman time and had this little Clark Kent coaching operation on the side.
But why was this type of coaching earning me a fair bit of money in a brand new country? I didn't have any testimonials, no referrals, not even a business card and most definitely no website. What I did have was a subset, or what you'd call a niche. Which coincidentally takes us to the second coaching scenario.
Around 2001, I had decided I didn't want to draw cartoons for a living anymore and started up a marketing company, instead. At first, I tried to solve every possible marketing problem and got nowhere in a hurry. Then, one day, by sheer fluke I decided to create a presentation on just seven elements.
This presentation was called The Brain Audit, and once I was done with the presentation, I was pushed into creating a book, which then sold online and guess what buyers wanted next.
They wanted me to coach them on The Brain Audit I wish I knew what I was doing back then, but the reality is I didn't know much at all. I was desperately reading books, buying courses and finding myself spending anywhere between $1500 to $8000 for seminars and workshops. However, at the very same time, clients were happy to pay me as much as $150 an hour to help them through The Brain Audit.
If you put the Photoshop and The Brain Audit story together, you should easily see what's happening It's the power of the subset that matters most to clients. Clients don't want to learn how to cook Indian food. They want to learn a subset, like “vegetarian food for special occasions”. They don't want to learn InDesign, but instead “how to create an ebook in under an hour”.
In almost every subset, we also find there are both—a specific problem and a corresponding solution. But the moment you get out of the subset, there's a complete lack of clarity.
Let's go back to Photoshop, shall we? What problem does it solve? How about marketing? What problem does it solve? And Indian food? See what I mean? The problem with saying “I'm a life coach” or “I'm an NLP coach” or “I'm a boxing coach” is totally pointless.
People can't make head or tail of what you're trying to say. But the moment you pick a subset, you almost automatically get a problem and solution.
And maybe that's where you ought to start What problems do clients have in Photoshop? Or with guitar playing, watercolours, marketing or NLP? How can you reverse engineer that problem so that you can end up with a solution?
Then, it won't matter if you have a fancy card, website or referrals, what you do have is a solution to their problem. And that's how you get started with a niche.
You start with the problem It's not going to make you a nine-week millionaire like Samuel Brannan, but it will get you off the ground and started into the world of coaching.
How do you know you've found the right niche? If you were asked to go to the supermarket and buy a packet of potato chips, would you make the right choice?
There are only two answers here, aren't there? You could pick the right one, or be wildly off the mark. After all, the supermarket loads at least two dozen different brands and then there are the variations. Low fat, full fat, crinkled, plain salted, vinegar, paprika, whisky—who knows what else! The chances of getting it wrong far, far exceed the probability of getting it right.
And how do we know if we've got it wrong or right? It depends who you're buying the chips for, doesn't it? If Renuka sends me into the market to get chips, I know I can only get the brand called Proper Crisps, and it won't matter if I get the paprika or the salted versions—because they're both the right choices.
When choosing a niche, it might seem like you're stuck in a “nightmare supermarket aisle” Wouldn't it be better, if there were a way to make a correct choice from the very start? Let's find out whether such a task is possible, or if we just have to bludgeon our way through choices.
The reality is that the answer lies somewhere in between No matter what niche you pick, you can almost be certain you're off the mark. The good news is that you're partially, not completely off the mark. Which means that a piano coach, life coach, breathing coach—any kind of coach is more or less going to be in the right box.
They'll still be in the broad spectrum of piano, life coaching and breathing, just like the chips are still in the broad range of chips. What makes a niche right isn't the broad spectrum that you choose, but instead, the narrow niche you choose to occupy.
You might know the story of the coach, Joseph Pilates Pilates wasn't an exercise coach in his early years. Born in Germany in 1883, he'd already dabbled in gymnastics and bodybuilding in his younger years. In 1912 when he moved to England, he moved to professional boxing, was a circus performer and a self-defence trainer.
Notice how versatile Pilates seems to be? Well, that's the problem with a lot of businesses. They have the capacity or at least believe they can be a one-size-fits-all-type-of-coach. And it's not like Pilates was destitute. Despite this smorgasbord of doing a bit this and a bit of that, he got by.
However, it's only in 1925, that he finds a niche Over the years, and through World War I, he developed an integrated, comprehensive system of physical exercise, which he called “Contrology”. Instead of trying to appeal to everyone who wanted to improve their well being, Pilates set up shop under a dance studio. The dancers needed to be fit at all times, plus have flexibility, strength and stamina. His focus was on reducing injuries, and to the outside world, it looks like he just got lucky to find this profitable niche.
Luck has its role to play, but when we examine the unlucky coaching businesses, there's a clear pattern The businesses that struggle are those that stay incredibly generic. You ask the coach what she does, and she says, “I'm a writing coach”. As you can tell, her statement tells you nothing. But if we were to choppitty-chop our way a bit, she might say, “I'm a writing coach that specialises in removing writer's block.”
Notice how that specialisation gets your attention? She's possibly good at teaching writers how to create structure, drama, flow, style and a whole bunch of other stuff related to writing. But the moment she goes wide, she loses the power of the niche.
We wonder if we've found the right niche, but any niche is the right niche. Pilates could have made a great life for himself as a boxing coach, a self-defence coach, a circus coach. But he instead he chose to focus not just on an audience of dancers, but then to “reduce injuries”.
All niches are already niches There's no such thing as the right niche. The moment you get yourself into a category of being a writing coach, you've already cancelled out all the other things you can do. But your audience still won't care, because a client doesn't buy into a coach.
Instead, the client buys into a specific problem that needs solving. We waste endless days, weeks and months—even years trying to find the “right niche” when in reality we're already in the right niche, but haven't defined the problem we're solving.
But how do you know if the problem is the right problem? There's no such thing as the right problem. But there is such a thing as a recurring problem. Do dancers get injuries? Yes, they do. Did they get injuries during the time of Pilates dance studio?
Yes, they did, and they still do today. If you are a fitness coach, all you need to do is specialise in how you can make the dancers get fewer injuries. You don't even have to reinvent the problem. It was done for you back in 1925 by Pilates.
You think Writer's Block is a recent problem? Or was snoring invented yesterday? Not one of these things are new, and all you need to do is look for the recurring problem. People have had these problems for centuries and will continue to have the same problems over and over again.
Where do you go from here? Your first step is to find yourself a category. e.g. Writing.
The second step is to find yourself an audience. e.g. Small business owners who want to write blogs.
The third and final step is to find the recurring problem: Writer's block.
And there you have it—your niche—the right niche—is yours for the asking.
Next Step: How To Make The Mental Leap From a Job into Entrepreneurship
One of the biggest hurdles in writing, has nothing to do with writing at all. It doesn't have anything to do with time, either. Instead, it's an understanding of energy. Without a clear view of how energy works, we're likely to start off strong and then find ourselves stranded.
Is there a way around this energy hurdle? What causes an energy loss? Let's find out in this episode.
Click here to read online: Writer's Block: How a Lack of Energy, Not Time, Causes Writers to Stall and Crash
How do you speed up your writing process and what causes it to slow down to a crawl? Surprisingly, discussion and feedback play an incredibly powerful role in unblocking Writer's Block. The more you're stuck, the greater the reason to invite discussion and feedback. The moment you do, it causes you to explain the concepts in a way that catches you totally by surprise!
Click here to read online: Writer's Block 3/4: Why Discussion and Feedback Are A Writer's Secret Weapon (And How Professionals Use it to Their Advantage)
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C) Discussion and Feedback If you drop me in Kyoto or Paris, I'll walk happily for hours. However, the moment I have to exercise, I detest the very concept of walking. And yet, day after day, year after year, we go for a walk. It's healthy of course, and I actually learn stuff or listen to music, but the most crucial part of the walk is the part right up to the traffic lights.
It's about a ten-minute walk from our house to the lights, and that's when I talk to Renuka about what I've been reading or watching. And there are days when Renuka is “sleep walking”, so I'll get nods, but some days she's wide awake, and we have a discussion. If I'm lucky, she'll disagree with almost everything I'm saying.
Discussion is a great way to get prepared to write an article I remember the author, Malcolm Gladwell drumming home this very point. He tends to find a friend either in person or over the phone, and they discuss the topic. If the friend doesn't respond well, Gladwell knows the idea either needs tuning or needs to be dropped entirely.
If the person gets interested or goes off on their version of the story, Gladwell knows the premise is interesting. It struck me that this method is what most writers tend to do instinctively, yet the ones that struggle don't do it at all, and it puts them at a significant disadvantage.
If you keep your article under wraps, it's your own secret This secretive nature of ours tends to boil down to one aspect—and it's called insecurity. Sounds harsh, I know, but it's just because we're insecure about our topic, or that we'll be called out in some way.
Feedback rocks our boat so much that we feel happier to simply get on with the job of writing, and avoid this discussion bit completely. It's sobering to note that discussion and exposing your ideas to the world is how great science is done.
Scientists don't tend to work in a bubble They postulate an idea, or do some research and publish a paper. That paper is examined by others in their field, and they come up with holes in the research or idea. The holes might be so large that the scientist has to go back to almost the starting point if they want to ratify their idea. Is this method frustrating? Is it a big blow to the ego?
Of course. It is Renuka is not the only source of feedback and discussion. I'll get on WhatsApp and chatter away with a private group. I'll have discussions via e-mail or Messenger. And often, I'll post a rough idea on the forum in 5000bc. If you're wondering why there are so few holes in a lot of the articles or books from Psychotactics, then wonder no more.
Those holes existed. If you look at the courses, e.g. the Sales Page course, it's in Version 3.0. That tells you that the course material of 1.0 and 2.0 had holes. The same applies to the Article Writing Course, or any course, any article—just about everything we do.
This article too will have holes in it, and we know this to be true, because the moment I post it, someone will ask further questions or have clarifications needed. Or, as the case may be, they may disagree with some point or the other.
But feedback is about holes and the discussion is often just for the sake of clarity When you have an idea or a topic you want to cover, it's a bit premature in your head. When you put it down on paper, on chat, or in a verbal discussion, you have to be more precise in your argument. It forces you to think of analogies. You might say: “You know this topic we're discussing is exactly like the Barbie case study. Remember how…”
And that discussion will spur case studies and examples, but it does a lot more. When explaining something to someone else, you also tend to bring up analogies. You say, “It's a lot like a roundabout, instead of a traffic light.
Both systems regulate the traffic, but one works without any punishment or and yet is far superior in traffic control.” When you explain yourself, you can't help but try and pull up a series of analogies. The discussion becomes the groundwork for all the analogies, stories, case studies and examples you could insert into your still to be written article.
Whether you choose a forum, chat, the phone or a walk in Kyoto the result is similar You're going for a little stroll with your ideas. And along the way, you meet other ideas or even run into that snarly feedback guy from next door. You haven't started to write yet, but you're beginning to percolate, which is far more important.
It might be a good idea at this point to reach into your pocket and scribble the ideas down. I tend to dictate them into my phone into Evernote so I can access the ideas on any computer or device, later. You may think you'll remember it all. I promise you it's not a good idea.
For one, even if you have a great memory, you have to use energy to remember those points. In doing so, your discussion won't move as quickly as it possibly should. I tend to quickly save whatever I can remember and then continue the discussion even as I'm marching up or down the hill.
If you can, it's a good idea to have many articles going at once When I first started writing, I was so pathetic that I could only focus on a single article. I'd spend days over that article, and that was my sole obsession. In time I realised it was better to have many articles all at different levels of progress.
You see what's happening, right? It feels chaotic to have many articles all on the go at once, but in fact, they're all percolating over the duration of a week or so. The one that started last Monday might be completed by the following week, or earlier. Or later.
But the discussion and the feedback move it backwards and forward. When starting out, it might take all your energy just to focus on a single article, but in time you'll find having many articles inching ahead to be a great way to get discussions going on many fronts.
Keeping secrets is mostly a terrible plan in almost all areas of life We get bad advice from well-wishers, parents and guardians. We're told as we're growing up that certain things need to be private. In reality, it's hogwash. In many cases, secrets only seek to make us more insecure. And this kind of “let's keep it private, let's keep it a secret” usually makes work worse, not better.
Scientists prove this point, coders prove this point, and great creativity underlines this idea over and over again. If you really want to get your article moving faster, and want it to be more robust, you have to overwrite the nonsensical programming you had in your formative years. Discussion and feedback help you formulate, tear down and rebuild ideas at high speed.
It's input Input shows up when you read about your industry's subject matter. It creates a sweet, creamy layer of creativity when you cross-pollinate with different case studies, industries and even different media. And finally, input pushes your ideas to the wall.
Your job is to make your work clearer, more robust. The more you accept feedback and discussion as part of your routine, the more volatile the process will seem at first. In time, however, you'll seek out discussion and feedback at every turn, and overwrite the “keep secret” programming that slows you down and keeps you isolated in your own dark, insecure corner.
So far We've tackled two main topics of—Why Lack of Pre-Work Almost Guarantees Writer's Block 1) The Lack of Pre-Work
2)The Scarcity of Input
It's time to go to the third one: Understanding Energy Management When Writing
Next Step: Writer’s Block Series 4/4: How a Lack of Energy, Not Time, Causes Writers to Stall and Crash
Most of us are content to learn a great deal about what's happening in our industry, but is that causing a blockage when it comes to writing? When we go into the depths of writer's block, we find that you need cross pollination not only across industry, but across styles as well as media such as video, audio and text. Find out how a lack of cross pollination could be causing your writing to freeze up.
If you're already good at writing, do you need an outline? It might seem one more barrier and yet it's the first element that creates this so called Writer's Block. Find out why outlines are a map that quickly get you to your destination.
Click here to read online: Writer's Block Series 1/4: Why the Lack of Outlines Even Stops Professional Writers In Their Tracks
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If you give employees a bonus, will they work harder? This is the seemingly obvious question that Michael Sturman had to contend with. Sturman, a professor at Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, decided to find just how much pay and performance mattered.
And as you'd expect, he found the obvious. People who are paid above the market rate, do a much better job. As you'd imagine, he found that even a 1% raise, can tend to boost employee performance to about 2%.
However, when the same 1% bonus was linked to a specific task, the job performance spiked as high as 19%. Turn that statistic around, and we can speculate that the employee had been working at 19% lower than their potential.
When writing articles, it's easy to work way below your potential as well And most writers feel their potential is reached when they do fancy research or when they sit down for hours to write. However, a lot of potential is wasted long before you sit down to write a single word. A lot of the potential lies in the stages of preparation.
Let's look at three critical elements that cause a fair bit of chaos: 1. The Lack of Pre-Work 2. The Scarcity of Input 3. Understanding Energy Management When Writing
1) The Lack of Pre-Work The moment I sat down to write this article, I was a little lost. I'll tell you why. I hadn't done much pre-work.
I fully intended to outline it, work out the story that was needed, and add a lot of notes. However, when it came to writing the article, I did what most writers do.
I sat down at the computer and hoped I'd get lucky. And luck can be pretty fickle under the best of conditions, but it seems to take special pleasure in taunting the article writer.
The problem with article writing is that we don't see it as several tasks Writing an article is more like an expedition than a casual walk in the park. To get a well-written article out, you need the story, or possibly more than one story (just like the pay-performance story above).
Then you've got to have at least one point in that story that's exceedingly curious. The opening paragraph can cause enough grief for a writer, but it doesn't stop there.
You need to know the points you're going to cover, have case studies and examples, need to understand at least one or two of the main objections, the headline, and yes, the list goes on and on.
I've written about 50 articles a year for about 18 years That is roughly 900 articles, and this doesn't take into account course material, books and over 100,000 posts in forums. In short, it's a heck of a lot of writing.
You'd think you'd get really good at writing with all of this experience, right? And you do. But we're not talking about writing at all. We're talking about preparation.
Without the ingredients, an expert chef can make a dish relatively quickly, but there's a lot of fumbling and bumbling before that meal is ready. However, with the smallest amount of preparation, that dish, even in the hands of a newbie, can be so much better, so much tastier.
Easily the most critical pre-work lies in three main areas The first is the outline. I didn't have any outlines to write in school, so I can't share the hatred of outlines. However, on the article writing course, most clients start off with resenting the very thought of outlining.
They come around when they realise that the outlines they did at school were terrible and that outlines for article writing are more like a laundry list of what needs to go where. But even among the converted, the additional step of outlining seems like another 10-15 minutes of work that can be avoided.
And it can't I did that this morning when I sat down at my computer. And like that expert chef, I can manage to write when I'm half asleep, but I still waste enough time that I could have simply spent with a quick outline on a Post-It.
I did outline the points, of course, but failed to make any notes and had to work out what I was saying as I went through the article. And that's just one element we're talking about. The outline, the story, the objections, the headline—they're all work in progress.
Yes, even the headline Though it's a spindly one or two lines, having a raggedy working headline in place keeps the article on track. In this very article, I went up to check the headline thrice, to make sure I wasn't wavering.
And all of this back and forth is wasted time and wasted energy. If you're good at a task, you can wing your way through it, even on really rough days, but if you're prepared, it's a whole different ball game, isn't it?
However, the preparation stage isn't confined to the outline alone. The second point we need to cover is the input. If there's one thing that will derail you every single time, it's the lack of input.
When you have input, you have a regular source of information. It's a feed you can't ever do without. If you don't keep that input flow going, your article suffers. And this is long before you even get started.
Next Up: The Scarcity of Input
Next Step: Writer’s Block 2/4: Why Cross Pollination of Ideas, Media and Styles Are Crucial (And Avoid Shutdowns When Writing)
One of the most mind numbing tasks is to get a client to pay for the job you've completed Clients tend to be slow with payments or just default. But is there a way to avoid such a mess? There's not just one, but three separate ways to go about it. Let's find out how you can get paid without all the bother—and well in advance, too.
Click here to read online: Want to get paid a lot in advance? 3 Methods to get paid earlier than ever before
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What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare. No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
Wouldn't it be a bit of shame that we have no time to look at sheep and cows because we're trying to get paid on time? There's no foolproof system to get paid every time, but if you pay attention to how other industries work, you might never have to chase payments again.
There are three core methods to use: – The Construction Company Method
– The 100% Payment in Advance Method
– A Downpayment in Advance Method
Let's look at all three to see which one works for you.
1) The Construction Company Method When we were building our office—which is next door to our house—the builders followed a slab system of payment.
Every stage of the construction had a pre-payment attached, and it looked a bit like this: Foundation: Pre-payment 1
Rough framing: Pre-payment 2.
Rough plumbing and electrical: Payment 3
On and on it went through the insulation, exterior, interior, carpeting and exterior driveways. If we wanted the next stage to proceed, we needed to make the payment to keep our builders “motivated”. This slab system of payment is one of the finest both for the client and the person doing the job. It makes sure that both parties are incredibly motivated to go ahead with the process.
As a service provider, this is often an excellent system to follow because it ensures both parties move ahead systematically However, there's also a bit of a downside if one of the parties decides to walk away. Let's say you start working on a client's website and the payments are going well when the client suddenly runs into some sort of difficulty. Maybe she's had a personal problem and can't pay the rest of the sum, or perhaps she's just really slow with sending her text and images across.
No matter what the problem, you're stuck because you can't proceed with the job. The happy news is that if you've worked out your payment structure well, you'll won't run into a loss because you've covered what you've done.
By no means is this a foolproof system because your project might need to do a lot of core work at the start, and then not a lot in the middle and at the end. It means you'll have put in a lot of effort and not been paid for it.
But wait, no one said the slabs had to be equal, right? If the first slab requires about 45% of the work, then that's the first payment the client needs to make before you get started. If the second slab is just 10% of the work, then you get the client to pay accordingly.
However you decide to break up the slabs, it's important you get paid for the proportion of work you're putting in, which means you've got to do some groundwork and estimation in advance. However, that's just the first method of getting paid. The second seems harder because it's 100% in advance. But is it really harder?
2) The 100% Payment in Advance Method My father ran a secretarial college for over 25 years and it wasn't an easy life. He'd leave for work before 7 am, to make sure he opened all the doors and windows, turned on all the lights, and had his first cup of masala tea long before the first student showed up an hour later. All day he'd be at work, returning home about 8:30 at night. It was a time-consuming job, but the one thing he didn't spend much time on was collecting money.
He'd always get the student's money in advance If you wanted to be on a course, or learn a skill such as typing, you had to pay before you got started. This simple act of payment in advance is incredibly common for schools, colleges and not surprisingly with a lot of the things we buy like electronics and petrol.
But will it work for you as a business? It depends on two factors. Your confidence and the demand for your product or service. We may assume, for instance, that a restaurant will charge you once you show up and finish your meal. That's not the case with David Patterson, at San Francisco's restaurant which goes by the name of Coi.
If you cancel 48 hours in advance, you won't be charged However, should you tip over into the last 48 hours, your credit card is charged the late cancellation fee of $275 per guest, and that's just for the tasting menu and doesn't include wine. There's also a 20% service charge.
Will you be charged the service charge if you don't show up? It's not clear, but what's more than clear is that they treat all sales as final, just like a sporting event or concert.
If you think they're alone, they're not! Lazy Bear, another San Francisco restaurant sells each month’s tickets all at once, usually on a Wednesday in the middle of the previous month. They announce ticket sales via Twitter and send an email to their mailing list.
Tickets are not refundable and can’t be switched to a different date or time, but they are transferable to other people. The list of restaurants that have this policy in place is growing. In short, it's payment in advance in an industry that has traditionally brought the bill to the table after you've downed your last espresso and Porto.
With Psychotactics we take almost all payments in advance If you buy almost any book, any course or workshop, you have to pay in advance. Even if it's consulting, you pay in advance. In several cases, this payment is made by the client several months in advance. The Article Writing Course, for instance, started in August, but clients paid about five months in advance.
The Sales Page workshop which is in late October was also sold out four-five months in advance. And you may wonder if this is linked with the demand for Psychotactics workshop and courses and yes, to some extent it's true because the courses, workshops and even self-study products are all sold out quickly. There's a demand factor in place, but there's also the second point, which is confidence.
At Psychotactics we always confidently charged in advance Even going back to the earliest days of consulting, we charged in advance. We might not have been 100% confident that the client would be so very co-operative with a 100% payment, but we'd ask anyway. Sometimes we'd have to do a little back and forth discussion, but once we removed the risk, they'd pay.
When we sold our products online, we had no choice but to charge in advance, and with every sale that confidence grew stronger. It takes a bit of bravado when you're offline and standing in front of a client. That client might be hiring you as a speaker, buying a product from you or hiring you for your services.
You have to bite your lower lip, whistle a happy tune and ask for the amount upfront. You may hear the sound of butterflies whooshing in your tummy, but you need to ask anyway. You'll be surprised how many clients will give in if you just ask.
Asking put you in a great position as well Even if you don't get paid 100% in advance, it sets you up nicely for at least 50%. And that's the next possible option to get paid in advance.
3) A Downpayment in Advance Method Is there a big advantage of getting only 50% in advance? It may sound like a negative, seeing how you could have easily been paid in one go. However, there's a definite psychological advantage not to have all the money in your pocket right away. The 50% that's not been paid is a definite form of motivation.
You want to make sure the job is done because the remaining 50% is still pending. It's often hard to be motivated when you're paid everything in one lump sum.
The 50% motivates you, but it also motivates the client Now they're not just shooting the breeze but have a stake in the process. They know that they've put their money down and they have to do their part as well. You're still going to run into clients that won't give you the information you need, or create needless delays in the project, but this confusion can be reduced if you have clear instructions and deadlines for the client.
Either way, you've got three core ways to get paid in advance and what you finally do, depends on your level of confidence and the demand for your product or service. Either way, the worst possible method is to get paid after everything is done.
When I moved to New Zealand, I stepped away from that system However, when I lived in India, I didn't set up the right expectations with clients, and I'd spend close to 30% of my time merely chasing payments. At one point I was so upset with the backlog of payments that I had to see a doctor because I had high blood pressure from all the worry.
I did have great clients too, who paid on time, but also terrible clients who wouldn't pay and even decided to pay me just half the sum I was owed. All of the payment in advance systems arose from years of frustration, so much so that I vowed that one of the things I'd do when I got to New Zealand was get paid in advance.
Summary: How you get payments is up to you.
You might have a client who pays promptly on time. In which case this entire article is just advice for something in the future. However, if you've been struggling with payments or expect some struggle, use one of the three ways outlined above.
You might still have a life full of care.
And may still have not much time to stand and stare.
But at least it won't be because you're chasing up payments.
Next Step: How To Get Better, Higher-Paying Clients With Testimonials
Most of us are quite obsessed with stashing away case studies, examples and stories. However, it's not enough to simply put it away. You have to be reasonably familiar with the story. And how you get to be familiar? You focus on one point in the story. Why does that one point matter? Let's find out.
This is not a regular podcast episode but a quick announcement about Fritoon... Your chance to receive a funny cartoon direct to your inbox every Friday. Visit psychotactics.com/fritoon , to sign up! Enjoy
Researching an article is so frustrating because it's time-consuming But there are ways to beat the pressure—and the pain. Believe it or not, there are ways to be productive with zero last minute research.
This episode shows you how to make advance research work for you, as well as in situations where you have no research at all. Sounds too good to be true? Well, listen to the episode.
Click here to read online: How to research an article (without killing your productivity)
Readers often get lost in an article and hence abandon it. However, there are pretty simple, yet powerful methods to let the reader know exactly where they are in the article at all times. Plus when you use these techniques, you push the reader forward as well. Here's how you go about using these "Transition Techniques".
Read on the website:Transition Techniques
Websites are daunting projects but even the casual listener is astounded to learn that a website took three years to complete. Of course there's a story, so here we go with the tale.
Read on the website: New Psychotactics Website Story
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Back when I was in university, my friend, Shelly Brown sent me a recording of a rap band called Run DMC I listened to the music patiently, then decided rap had no future. As you can see, I'm a lot worse than most people at predicting the future. Even back in 2008, I had friends in the industry, who were talking about mobile as being the next big thing.
But there we were in the middle of 2015 with no intention of creating a mobile-friendly site. I figured mobile had no future, so why bother with a new website when the existing website was doing just fine?
However, what prompted me into action was a little chat with a client This client was into some sort of search engine optimisation, and he suggested it would be a good idea to create a new site as well. While we'd designed all the earlier sites, I was clearly out of depth when it came to mobile, which is why I left the entire task of design to the client.
The design he produced was so horrific, so hard to describe, that there was no choice but to abandon the project. But now we'd been bitten by the redesign bug. And so, on July 27, 2015, the first website sketch was done. It would be another three years and ten days before the website went live.
Planning is priceless but plans are useless I don't think we'd ever decided a fixed date for the release of the website, but shortly after a burst of initial designs, we ran into a whole bunch of barriers. The first was the Headlines Course, that started up in August.
In 2015, I decided to add headline trainers to the course as well, which complicated my life a bit. When the course was done, we got an unexpected invitation to go to Nashville.
There was no point in making such a long trip just to attend a seminar Which is why we decided to have a workshop of our own on the topic of storytelling. This meant notes needed to be written, slides had to be created, zillions of cartoons needed to be drawn for those slides.
And yes, the website went into the first session of deep freeze as we conducted our workshops in Nashville and then Amsterdam. Which brought us right into 2016 and the promise of a renewed resolution to get the website going.
However, remember how I wasn't clued into mobile? It had been over six months, but I was still working out how mobile designs worked differently from earlier websites. Which meant that the very pretty looking Photoshop designs looked gorgeous in the program, yet terrible on the site itself.
Plus we were so much in love with our sidebars that we wanted them on the new website as well until we saw how messy it all looked on mobile. While I was spending inordinate amounts of time on websites like Squarespace, March came along, which brought about the biggest challenge of 2016.
As you're probably aware, we tend to treat our courses like software Every now and then we'll do a major update even if a course is selling extremely well. I'd grown tired of the Article Writing Course and Version 1.0 had to somehow move to Version 2. In theory, this rewrite shouldn't have been a problem.
I'm pretty adept at writing, as well as at creating course material. But there's also a factor of laziness. If I can procrastinate, I will, and the only way to get going is to announce that we're rolling out Version 2.0.
The challenge was to write the course material while the course was in progress We tend to send course material at least a month in advance, and clients got Version 1 of the audio and notes. While they were working their way through the new course, I moved everything around. And by everything, I really mean everything. Assignments that were in Week 8, were moved to Week 3.
Whole sections of the course were chipped away, while others were completely discarded. It may not sound like a lot, but every assignment takes over 3 hours to write because it includes complete step by step instructions as well as detailed examples.
Then to add to that workload was the notes and the re-recording of the audio series. All of this was happening while the course was in progress.
To say I was fried after all of this activity was putting it mildly I remember a whole week of headaches. My sleep wasn't so good either, and my head felt like Neil Armstrong could take a walk on it. By the time we headed to India in July, on vacation, my blood pressure was up, and so was my cholesterol.
To talk about or think about the website was not much of an option, yet that's exactly what we did when we got back from our break.
And the website might have still been ready to go by end 2016, but we had two painful technical problems One of those was our broadband connection. The broadband connection and other issues. If you drive around parts of Auckland, you're likely to see signs that say, “fibre connection coming in 2019”.
And back in 2016, if there was one thing I wanted more than anything else, it was that fibre connection. All around us, everyone seemed to have broadband. Plus our home, it seemed, was the furthest away from the Phone junction. This meant that like a water pipe, everyone got their water, and we got just a tiny trickle.
It was so bad that it would take 4 to 5 minutes to upload 5 MB of data. And just as a matter of comparison, in order to upload the podcast I had to go to the café down the road and stand there for 10 to 12 minutes. If I was brave enough to upload a file from the office, it would take anywhere between 12 to 16 hours.
It wasn't until 8th August 2017 that we got a fibre connection Suddenly we were 500% faster and we could actually get around to the website. That didn't mean that our work process improved dramatically. Because of some technical difficulties we had hosted the sandbox website on another server.
That server was extremely slow and it took ages to get any of the pages updated. When it's a single problem that you're dealing with, it doesn't seem much more than a bother, but these problems were cumulative. The software, the Internet connection, the server — they all piled upon each other to create a perfect headache.
Still, when you're faced with barriers there is no way but to go forward. Anyway, by August 2017 we had our modem, did a little modern dance and got on with the job of completing the website.
It was late in the year, and we were a bit exhausted The membership site at 5000 BC had been upgraded and there were the usual pieces of the puzzle that didn't fit in. When all of that had subsided, it was time to head to Australia.
I had a speaking engagement in October, but we decided to take a couple of weeks off in Bryon Bay. That was October, and before we knew it December had rolled along and it was time for another New Year's resolution.
But it's really 2017 where things got going However, we had this start, stop, start, stop for so long that any progress was frustrating. At times I just wanted to give up, but there was no way of going back. We had to go forward. Here's a note from as late as August 2017.
Part of the problem was my own doing I didn't want the website to be a rehash of the earlier one. If we were going to create a new website, we needed a new look, and this included dozens of cartoons. But luck does play a role from time to time. Without putting much thought into it, I bought an iPad Pro.
I'd owned iPads before and they were mostly glorified book readers, but this one was different. The software, Procreate, combined with the Apple Pencil, allowed me to do a lot more sketching. Before the iPad Pro, I was chained to my computer and Photoshop.
But once I got the iPad Pro, I could go anywhere and draw. In fact, I would lie on the sofa and generate quite a few cartoons. It got to the point where I was creating about a dozen cartoons a week. This was a critical component of the new website and the new look.
To have all those fresh cartoons with a style that represented where we were in 2017 was pretty important. In the iPad, Pro played that role in getting me to draw at a furious pace.
It's August 2018 as I write this note If you were to ask me what was the most challenging part of the website, I could cite the broadband, the server, the software—lots of little things. What took me by surprise, however, was the testimonials. Of all the elements on the website, the testimonials took the most time to put together.
A single testimonial would involve four different sections to be updated. Then there was the size of the photographs. The photos on the previous site were tiny, some weighing in as small as 8 KB. That would not do for the new site, but we had hundreds of testimonials and many of them need photos.
That's when my great Facebook and LinkedIn scavenger hunt began. I'd look for the clients first on Facebook, then if I couldn't find them, I'd go to LinkedIn. Some of the testimonials go back in time, so clients had updated their photos.
I couldn't tell if they were the same people, so I had to read through the bios just to make sure I wasn't putting the wrong photo alongside the name.
The only reason why the website got completed in 2018, was because there was no choice We work for about 12 weeks and then we take a break. This means that any sort of project which is ongoing, like the website, gets put on hold. But not only does it get put on hold, but everything else takes priority. We have to queue the newsletters for when we are gone, and also the podcasts.
And then we have to queue a whole bunch of newsletters and podcasts for when we get back. However, looking at my calendar I knew that if we postponed it past August, it would never get done in 2018. This is because the article writing course was due to start in August, and that is extremely demanding.
After the course, I knew I had a speaking engagement in Australia, and then a vacation coming up. That would mean we would be tossed straight into 2019. It had to be launched before August rolled out.
However, all of this frenetic activity had taken its toll I was pretty exhausted and so was Renuka. We decided to take a week off in Fiji even though the website was ready to go. The web developers, Audrey and Mangesh, from Stresslessweb.com were keen to get going in late July, but Renuka was adamant that the break came first.
That meant another ten days or so of waiting. But it was a good move. In Fiji, we did almost nothing. No swimming, or snorkelling—zero activity. It wasn't so much a vacation as a change of scene. We'd have breakfast and Renuka would head back to the room, check e-mail and fall asleep.
We'd have lunch and we would nap for another few hours. This was pretty much the routine for a week before getting back and setting the launch date for the 6th of August.
Even at that point, there were a few hiccoughs I can't remember what we were waiting for, but the cartoon I drew seemed to reflect my mood. And then on the 7th of August 2018, at 10 am, New Zealand time, we were not quite live. There was a “site soon to be back again” sign on the website and we were told to do a sanity check.
But sanity was the last thing on our mind. Renuka wasn't in the mood to go through hundreds of pages, or even the most important pages. If things didn't work, we'd fix it later. An hour later, at 11:17 am, the site was live.
Three Years and about a month—that's what it took And this is just Version 1. I'm still working on the pages I really want to do. But first, I need another vacation. Those changes will need to wait until next year.
Footnote: Now that the website is live, I have to thank the dozens of volunteers from 5000bc.com who have combed through several pages and Renuka's inbox is flooded with suggestions. Some of these suggestions are simple typos, but others reflect the sophisticated nature of our clientele.
It's going to take several months of work to get through all the suggestions, but that's what needs to be done. we are extremely grateful to all of those who volunteered in 5000bc.com, and especially grateful to Audrey and Mangesh, who put up with a lot of stop and start activity over the years.
Their business, StresslessWeb.com is really what kept our stress at bay. Without their technical expertise and without 5000bc, this task would have been infinitely harder and we'd still be working on the website in 2020.
Next Step: The Psychotactics Story: The Craziness of The Very First US Workshop
It sounds bizarre to make your own products, courses and services redundant, but it's a very sound strategy that's been used by companies such as General Motors, Apple—and oh, we've done it for almost as long as Psychotactics has existed. What's it about? Let's find out in this episode.
Read on the website: The Cannibalisation Strategy
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In 1923, Alfred P. Sloan took over a company that was far behind its closest competitor The company in the first place was the Ford Motor Company with a monstrous 60% of the market. General Motors, in comparison, was lagging far in the distance at just 20%. Part of the reason was Ford's Model T, which was far more affordable than what GM was offering.
Sloan decided General Motors could never win a price war and so he rolled out a completely different strategy GM rolled out not one, but five different brands. Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac—these were all from the same company but had their own identity and were pitched at different economic brackets of US clients. When we look at what he did, we see a cannibalisation strategy
Let's see: how would we describe a cannibalisation strategy? The concept seems more straightforward to understand when we think of software or a specific software like Photoshop. For the past 25 years or more, Photoshop has been through thousands of changes and had about 27 versions. Each version cannibalises the earlier version.
Today the program works through a subscription model and upgrades without fanfare, but until quite recently, a new version of Photoshop would effectively be the death knell for an earlier version. It meant that Version 8, would cannibalise Version 7, which in turn cannibalised Version 6, and so on.
What Sara is referring to is a concept called cannibalising your product When we brought out The Brain Audit, it wasn't designed to be a version—as in Version 1.0. We were so new to the business that we were happy just to have a book that clients were buying. Nonetheless, the earliest version of the book needed an update, but we called it an upgrade (just like they do with Photoshop).
The Brain Audit went from Version 1 to Version 2. And then to Version 3 and finally sits at Version 3.2. With every iteration or upgrade, existing as well as new clients bought into the product. The Brain Audit was cannibalising the previous versions, and all the time, we were getting newer clients and earning revenue.
Which is General Motors did very effectively The strategy to overcome Ford was built around how the client would operate. At least in the case of their cars, they'd come back to buy a higher priced brand as soon as they could afford it. What we'd call the upgrade is essentially a concept of cannibalisation.
When Sloan took over as president of GM in 1923, Ford was the dominant player in the U.S. auto market Ford's Model T cost just $260 ($3,700 in today's dollars), and Ford held 60% of the U.S. car market. General Motors had 20%. Sloan realised that GM couldn't compete on price, so GM created multiple brands of cars, each with its own identity targeted at a specific economic bracket of American customers.
The company set the prices for each of these brands from lowest to highest (Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac). Within each brand, there were several models at different price points.
By 1931, a mere eight years after Sloan took over; he combined some excellent financial management and cannibalisation strategy to turn the tables on, Ford. GM had a 43% stake vs Ford's 20%.
What do we learn from this seemingly simple concept? When most of us create a program—whether it is a service, a product or course, we're super happy for a while. Then we tend to get bored and want to create something entirely new. And I do this as well. I'll create an Article Writing Course, and then I'll be itching to create a storytelling course, with the fancy name of “Traffic light storytelling”.
No one is suggesting you stick to one product endlessly. However, when you go back and cannibalise your product, you create two markets—new buyers and existing clients.
The Article Writing Course is no longer on Version 1.0 And clients have not only bought the new version home study, but they may also come back to do the new course online, as alumni. Take the copywriting course as well. That's going through a metamorphosis as we speak and later this year, Version 2.0 will be available. The storytelling course we talked about earlier?
That's been done live in Nashville and Amsterdam, but guess who's keen when I announce a newer version? It doesn't mean we don't create new products, courses or products. But it does mean that the existing products and courses are given a significant upgrade.
When you get down to writing your course or even offering a service look at it as Version 1.0 And when Version 2.0 is on its way, offer it to clients. And you'll experience what Apple does with its phones every year, or what Photoshop did for years, and certainly what catapulted GM over Ford.
Cannibalisation may sound weird to you. Well, then just call it an upgrade.
Next Step: Here are a few marketing strategies that work extremely well for small business.
It seems natural to keep an eye, even get obsessive about your competitors. However, it's a poor strategy for many reasons. In this episode we make the case for why the competition doesn't really matter as much as you think. And why focusing on them could possibly cause clients to desert you, instead.
Here is the website link: Ignore Competition
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There is a story about an author who wrote a book The book was incredibly cheap, and as a result, he was able to sell several thousands of them. The competition looked at the increasing volume of sales and decided they could do the same.
However, to their frustration they found themselves losing money. The reason why they had such significant losses, was because the book production cost more than the price that it was being sold for.
And in this little tale is the story of competition.
Most of us are reasonably obsessed with our competition We don't start out that way. When we start out, we are in awe of the people who have already made it. We don't consider them to be “competition” at all. They seem so far ahead of us that they are more like people we admire. We don't feel we need to compete against them.
However, in time we make more significant progress, and we see that we are on par with them in several respects. That's when we decide that they are officially competition. It also makes perfect sense to watch what the competition is doing, so that we are not left behind.
Which is precisely the point where things can start to go wrong Let's say you're a competitor of Psychotactics. And you notice that we are selling home study versions of the Article Writing Course, the Sales page course etc.
And you decide, “Well, I have the same courses, and let me create some home study sales for myself as well”. All good so far, and let's assume you sell a few home study versions, but your sales are crappy.
You're possibly selling 2-3 copies a month, and that's it. You are convinced something is wrong with your system and you keep trying to copy what we're doing.
You spend hours trying to tweak your website, trying to track down where we're posting and copying what we're doing. You probably did your due diligence in every area, except one.
You possibly forgot to ask: What is our goal? Simply trying to monitor the competition is fine for inspiration, but if you don't know why the competition is doing what they're doing, you are simply creating a nasty scenario for yourself.
Remember the author who wrote the book? What was his goal? His competitors assumed it was the profit margin from the book. In reality, the author was also losing money, but his goal was not to earn from the sales but to build a client list. That client list then bought other products and services from the author, which is how he made his real fortune.
When it came to the home study versions, we too had a strategy Back in 2016, I decided to write a brand new version of the Article Writing Course. That was Version 2.0, and it was built from the ground up. I didn't refer to the earlier notes or audio.
I took what I knew (based on the knowledge we'd gained in the last ten years) and put it in the course. By the time I'd completed creating the new version, I was exhausted.
So tired, in fact, that I didn't want to do any courses until 2017 Courses form at least a fourth of our income, and not doing the live courses online meant that we'd have to forego that income. It's at this point, that my wife, Renuka, came up with a strategy to sell home study courses instead.
Remember, we were already selling home study courses, but they weren't doing so well. The primary reason for the not-so-great sales was that we were promoting the live courses and had no bandwidth on the newsletter to also promote the home study versions. However, once I got super-tired in 2016, there was little choice.
It's at this point, that we also made a radical choice We decided to sell only 35 copies of the course even though it was digital. It may not make sense to restrict a sale of a digital product, but we wanted to create urgency and scarcity (something you should do too). In essence, I got taken off the live course schedule for a whole year, and that was our first move.
The second move was to create the waiting lists with the urgency and scarcity Two quick moves that from an outsider point of view are almost impossible to decipher. How are you supposed to know that all these micro decisions were taken along the way? How would you know if we got results or not unless I were to reveal the results to you?
But if you're a competitor, how can you know all of this detail?
It's impossible to know, and so you copy, but it's a blind copy. You're spending so much time and energy trying to work out what we're doing when in reality you should be working on your own product or services.
If you really want to monitor the competition, you have a full-time job Sure you can find gaps in their products and services. And yes, you can find out where they're advertising and who are writing about their offerings. You can also track which podcasts or sites they appear on, thus saving time with your own research.
You can also maybe, possibly, work out the threats that are headed your way. However, by and large, all these activities suck up a humungous amount of time.
In reality, the best form of defence is attack—or co-operation. When you think about it, every restaurant is almost automatically a competitor for another restaurant, even if it doesn't serve the same food. However, at least at the top level, restaurants will vie for awards, rather than go around poking into the kitchens of other restaurants.
To get that Michelin star, they have to up their own game. There's often not much time, let alone any point in trying to worry about other restaurants when you have your hands already full.
Which is why your efforts are much better used trying to create your own uniqueness, than worrying about what others are doing in your own space.
And if you can't beat them, you join them Almost all of our business over the years hasn't been as a result of an attack, but instead from cooperation. All the websites that we've guest-blogged on, all the podcasts we've appeared on, and every event that we've spoken at—they're all that you'd traditionally called “competition”. We don't see them as competition and instead we've worked with them very successfully.
Even two of the biggest rivals—Windows and Apple worked together In 1997, Bill Gates invested $150 million in Apple, for shares of Apple non-voting preferred stock. Microsoft was going to support Microsoft Office for the Mac for five years while Apple agreed to make Internet Explorer the default web browser on the Mac.
Apple was desperate for cash that the time and Microsoft was able to shoo away the concern that it was getting to be too much of a monopoly. They just shook hands and worked side by side with each other.
Does this mean you never have to look at the competition? In reality, you never do. You just have to focus on your clients, instead. Clients have a problem they want you to solve. If you can solve that problem extremely well, there's more than a chance that clients will choose you.
All the information you have about the competition isn't going to change the fact that clients will make their own decision based on the information in front of them. Plus the client sees the world differently than we do as business owners.
For example, if you were to run a restaurant, you'd likely see other restaurants as competition.
Clients don't see the world the same way as we do. They see the marketplace as a choice. A place where they can pick and choose what they like. In terms of the restaurant analogy, they will eat Japanese food today, Indian food tomorrow and gorge on fish and chips on Friday.
And it's the same sort of decision making they do when dealing with us at Psychotactics. They will buy a marketing product from us and buy it from some other marketing company next month. Even if you and I have worked at becoming a unique product or service, in the client's eyes, you're mostly just a commodity.
If they don't buy it from you, they just go elsewhere. They may find the competition to be inferior and hence come back, which is what most of our clients do. And that's one of the reasons why we encourage them to go to the competition, instead.
And yes, I get it. It does take a lot of guts to send your clients to competition but think about it for a second.
Aren't they doing it anyway? For instance, Renuka and I drink coffee at five different cafes. Is it because the coffee isn't good at Cafe No.1 or Cafe No.2? Clients are going to buy from the competition anyway, with or without our help.
The more time you spend trying to figure out what the competition is doing, the more likely you are to stay a commodity.
In my opinion, trying to pay close attention to the competition is a waste of time Too much changes too quickly and by the time you figure out what the competition is doing, they're well down the track. By the time those wannabe authors figured out the profit-making backend strategy, they'd already lost too much time and money.
ˇˇNo one is saying you should stick your head into the ground and not pay attention to what's going on around you. However, other than the cursory knowledge of what's happening in the market, it's really a complete waste of energy and time to bother with the competition.
Or as the popular comic, Mad Magazine used to write in their slogan: No.1 in a field of one.
That's something worth aspiring for.
Next Step: Why selling your secrets to competition is a sound business strategy
When it comes to testimonials for our product or service, we assume clients have to get to the end. Or do they? The reality is that it's a mistake to wait until the end because anyway clients aren't giving you a review of the entire product or service, but only a small section.
But what structure and system do you follow to get a testimonial—or even to get the client to respond to your request? Let's find out in this episode on pit stop testimonials.
Read on the website here: Pit Stop Testimonials
How do you know if the fruit is ready to be picked? According to monk and philosopher, Matthieu Ricard, here's how you do it. “You reach up to the fruit and touch it. You don’t have to pull and break the branch to get the fruit. You just touch it, and it falls in your hands.” Which is fine when you're dealing with fruit, but what do you do when your course, product, workshop or consulting is still unfinished?
One of the most frequent questions I get is one about testimonials
And clients ask: How do I get testimonials if my product is new? Or they may make a comment which goes like this: The course I created is so new that no one has completed it yet, so it will be a while before I can get these testimonials done. I have one student who is in part 3 (of 3), so hopefully, she will be ready soon.
It's easy to see how you can wait forever to get a testimonial—or do you?
Let's take both the situations and deal with them separately.
Situation 1: You have a brand new product, course or service
Situation 2: The product, service or course is not brand new, but no-one has finished it yet.
Situation 1: A brand new product or service When I was young, I'd occasionally get to see a movie before everyone else. Movies were only ever screened in the cinema, and to get to see a movie, days, often a few weeks in advance was a rare treat. However, my father seemed to know people who did these early screenings which got us into the movie theatre in advance.
However, there were other people in the same cinema hall. Who were these people, I wondered. My father told me they were movie reviewers. They'd get to see the movie in advance; then they'd critique the movie in their newspaper or magazine columns.
Not a lot has changed in terms of advance reviews
Movies still run private screenings so that they get reviews as do books, software and pretty much most products you can think of. In most cases, if you have something physical or even digital, someone can go through it and give you a review.
You may or may not have a list of clients or subscribers. If you do, you can ask them to review your material. If you don't have the list, you may well be able to ask on social media, in forums, or in your networking group.
Some of this review process can start earlier than you'd expect
Most of us tend to finish our books, tie up the courses, go through from start to end in a training program. And you don't necessarily have to go to the end. You can get someone—even a friend—to help you while you're still putting that course or book together. They can not only be a source of feedback and information, but they can then give you that testimonial.
To give you an example, let's say I was putting a course together on cooking Indian food
At this point, if you go to the Psychotactics website, you'll see a recipes page with yummy food photos and recipes, but there's no mention of any recipe book or course.
Let's say I wanted to create a course or book. I could invite a friend, or people from my networking group, members from 5000bc, or anyone who was interested.
Take my friend, Els Jacobs, for instance. We communicate almost daily through Facebook messenger. And I send her some recipes, and she tries them out and gives me her feedback.
Now let's say I wanted to get that book or course going, I could get Els and others like her to be on a sort of beta program where they tested the product and gave their feedback.
And here's a question for you: Do you think they'd be likely to provide a testimonial sooner than later, even though the product isn't ready?
It's easy to believe that a product needs to be complete before you get your testimonial
However, let's assume that your product is ready for the market. In such a case, you have to get some early reviews, so that you can put the product on your site or in your marketing material.
In such a situation, you have to reach out to someone you know—or some group that you belong to. However, this is precisely the point where things tend to go wrong.
You try to get people to review your product, but no one is interested. Several requests later, you've received no response at all. Why should this be the case?
Part of the reason is you're asking for too much
When you ask people to review your book, your course, your entire long and winded consulting program, you're asking me to put my life on hold, to meet your deadline.
Most people simply ignore such requests, because they're already busy. Even the most helpful people shy away from such a complex task. Which is why you make it easier by breaking it up into pieces.
In early August, we launched a new version of the Psychotactics site
A week before the launch we asked our members at 5000bc if they'd be keen on reviewing the site. What was the response? It was terrific, but why was this the case? The reason for their enthusiasm was two-fold.
We promised we'd get them to review just ONE page. And we had clear guidelines as to what feedback we wanted in return. When you look at most people asking for a review, they do just the opposite.
They ask their friends or clients to “review the site”, or “review my book” or “give your critique of my course”. Are you surprised there's little or no response?
If you really want to get a response, you have to have both elements in place. You have to give the reviewer a tiny piece to review, and you have to give them guidelines—clear guidelines.
And that's when you get reviews in advance. Not surprisingly, if you follow this practice of asking for specific feedback on specific sections, you also solve the second problem.
This takes us to the part where we look at: The product, service or course is not brand new, but no-one has finished it yet.
Situation 2: The product, service or course is not brand new, but no-one has finished it yet. Early in 2016, we launched a three-day Sales Page course workshop in beautiful Queenstown, New Zealand. And six clients made their way from the US, UK and Australia to be on that course.
How can you get a client to give you a testimonial for the course on the first or second day? You almost know the answer, don't you? It's not unlike the website review situation.
Instead of the client talking about the entire course, they can talk about a section, instead. Maybe they were surprised to find out that the sales page needs to be written from the bottom up and not top down.
Perhaps they learned how to create a uniqueness from the features and benefits. Or let's say they understood how they could create bonuses from the bullets. All these three aha moments come through on the first day of the course.
Does the client have to wait until day three to give a testimonial? In our case, the clients had flown in all the way to New Zealand and weren't exactly leaving in a hurry, but it's still exhausting to collect testimonials on the last day when your brain is like a fried potato.
If anything, we tend to get clients to give testimonials right through the course itself. Some give their testimonials early on the next morning, some in the lunch break and at other times of the day.
You see what's happening?
The product, course or service is brand new. No one has finished it yet, but why do they have to get to the end? No single testimonial can cover every single aspect of the course anyway.
A client is always going to give you just one or two points that were of value to them. Why not ask which part was of value to them? When you do, people will be happy to volunteer. Or you could change the question.
You could say, what did you find in Section A that was useful to you? Or what did you find in Section B? Or Section C. This line of questioning causes the client to review what was important and, if requested, they would be more than happy to give a testimonial.
Your product or service may be unfinished
Or it might be that clients haven't quite reached the end of your book or course. It doesn't matter, because you can still get testimonials if you structure things well. However, there still might be a problem getting a testimonial, if you don't set things up.
Let's say you're quite desperate for a few testimonials
You don't have people in a room like in a live workshop, so you are dependent on them getting back. Nonetheless, you can improve the odds right from the start.
When a client buys your product or service, you can let them know you're keen for feedback and testimonials. Would it be possible to get their feedback early—long before they finish the product? Would they give their feedback on the first chapter itself?
It might seem premature—almost like a fruit that's not ripe—but you'll be surprised at how many people say yes, but provided you don't use the word “testimonial”. Unless they know you well, they're likely to want to give a testimonial only after they get to the very end.
But feedback? They can give feedback from the very start. While in this feedback mode, they'll also want to balance things a bit. They may tell you what you can improve (which is great for you) but also what impressed or changed things for them.
And that's your moment—ask them whether they can elaborate on that point. They are likely to do so, which in turn gives you your testimonial.
And there you have it.
You usually have two situations where you struggle to get a testimonial.
Situation 1: You have a brand new product, course or service
Situation 2: The product, service or course is not brand new, but no-one has finished it yet.
In both situations, it's relatively possible to get a testimonial well in advance. And strangely, Matthieu Ricard is right. You reach up to the fruit and touch it. You don’t have to pull and break the branch to get the fruit. It’s just “touch it, and it falls in your hands.”
You just have to set up the situation so that the client is ready well in advance. And that's how you get your testimonial.
Next Step: Find out—The Six Questions To Get Outstanding Testimonials
We're all told we should start with the end in mind, but we still get lost along the way. Why do we go off track? Could there be some barriers that show up a lot before the end? Let's find out how we can stop focusing so much on the end and work on the barriers that block our progress.
Click here to read this article on the website.
There's something incredibly fascinating about the way chefs work. A chef doesn't tend to cook for one person.
In a single night, that chef might need to go whip up anywhere between 50-200 meals. And we're not even necessarily talking about chefs you see in fancy kitchens.
You can walk into any food court or even roadside food stall, and it's the same story. There's flavour, taste and texture, despite both the volume and variety of the food.
It got me thinking: What makes the chef so very proficient at what she or he does? The answer, strange as it seems, is they don't tend to worry about how the dish will turn out. Instead, they seem to obsess about the preparation—the prep work—instead.
Let's say you have to make an Indian dal (dal are split pulses or legumes) You're going to need onions, tomatoes, some chillies, ginger and garlic paste and about five-six spices. It's at this stage that the professional and the wannabe seem to have plans that are diametrically different.
Let's take the act of chopping onions How do you chop an onion efficiently? Here's what you do:
• You cut the onion from head to toe, not through the belly.
• If you follow the first instruction, the peel comes off way faster than if you went through the belly.
• You then hold the half of the onion, chopping methodically and evenly (but only three-fourths of the way)
• Finally, you cross cut the onion, and you get chopped onion that's precise and cooks evenly.
A similar amount of preparation is involved in the skill of article writing, as well A wannabe writer will look far into the future, towards how the article is written. That writer might even spend hours wondering how to start the article. But that's not what professionals tend to do. Professionals head right into the zone of prep work.
They know it's the preparation—the onions, the tomatoes and the spices of the writing—that's what matters. They work on getting topics together. They then realise that topics are too broad, so they move to the sub-topic and even to the sub-sub-topic stage.
When that phase is complete, they get into the act of outlining. Some scribble outlines in a matter of minutes, some colour their outlines with explicit detail.
What is the wannabe writer doing at this stage? The wannabe is doing triple somersaults about what's down the road. They're eager to get past all of this nonsensical planning, outlining, topics and other blah, blah.
All of this prep work is somewhat of an obstacle, and the sooner they get over it all, the more likely they are to get to the finished work. But any professional will tell you that the endpoint tends to be the most straightforward bit. All of the energy goes into the prep work.
And this brings us to a critical point The prep work can be truly exhausting. Writing an outline can take anywhere between 30-60 minutes. That's on top of the time taken for the topic or sub-topic. And that's not counting the story you're going to need for the First Fifty Words.
All of this prep work is truly frustrating at the best of times. Which is why the pros always focus on reducing the energy needed for the prep work. They know that if they can shave off the time taken to write a decent outline, they'll go from 60 minutes to 30, from 30 to 20, from 20 to ten—and even possibly just a few minutes.
If they work on getting stunningly fast at their preparation stages, the end product takes care of itself If you want to find someone who struggles with their writing, drawing, cooking—or any skill—look at their preparatory stages. They're slow. They're inefficient.
They may still turn out a great product, but it's mind-numbingly energy-dependent. By the time they're done with their project, they have to rest, take long breaks. They dread starting up another project of a similar nature.
I was that person If you look at my drawing today, you'll think I was always this good at cartooning. And the thing with cartoons is that it leaves a trail. Even if you don't consider yourself much of a critic, you'll see giant strides all of a sudden.
At one point, back in 2000, I was already a good cartoonist, but if you look at the work today, it seems remarkably superior. It's easy to put all of this down to practice because most of us don't see the prep work. But today, I put in more prep work than ever.
I'm continually adding reference material to my iPad. There are over 800 images that are like ingredients for when I finally start to draw. I'll have several cartoons in stages of progress, all waiting to see the light of day. I'll toss out ideas to my wife on our walk and see how she reacts, or I'll send it to friends via messenger and wait for their response.
And I do the same with my cooking. I cook a new dish for every meal. Unlike in the past, our fridge never seems to have leftovers, because we cook and we eat.
The process of prep work has become so energy efficient than having stale, and reheated food makes no sense at all. It's taken years to understand what makes some people so incredibly productive. If we're paying attention, we'll all eventually come to an unmistakable conclusion.
Prep work needs to be ruthlessly efficient Take, for instance, the Article Writing Course. In the Article Writing Course, the client has to learn about topics, sub-topics, about outlines and the first fifty words. And yes, as a teacher I'm looking at the assignment every single day.
But I also want the daily log of the participants. I want to see how long they took to do the assignment. I want to look at how much time they spent on learning. I am more than slightly keen to read about their state of mind.
Are they dreading something? Are they overthinking ahead? Are they getting confused by second-guessing? All of this information in the daily log is more important than the assignment itself. It paints the detail of the prep work and how they're going about it.
This isn't to suggest that the end isn't important Having a goal, even a hazy idea where you're headed is definitely the way to go. However, it's easy to place all your attention on the endpoint and forget that it's the tiny components that it's the prep work that makes the journey more fun, instead of more dread and drudgery.
To finish, let me tell you a story about John Wooden You may have never heard of John Wooden. He was a coach. An excellent basketball coach. In the space of 12 seasons, he won 10 championships with U.C.L.A, putting him in orbit all of his own.
John Wooden holds the fantastic record for national championships in men’s basketball at ten. The next closest “competitors” are a couple of coaches who only managed a “paltry” four championships each.
But John Wooden had a strange starting point to his coaching system At the start of every season, he taught every basketball player on his team to tie their shoelaces.
Shoelaces? Surely there were better things to learn than tying shoelaces. But Wooden did it every year. And he had a reason why he went through this seemingly mindless routine. “Badly tied laces lead to blisters”, he would say. “And well-tied laces mean you don't easily get sprained ankles”.
Notice something? Wooden wasn't focused on the final score. Instead, the prep work mattered. Take care of the prep work and becomes incredibly stunning at it, and the end—mostly the end will take care of itself.
Next Up: For too long we've treated teaching and learning as an activity that needs endless slides, pages and work. But what if clients get better results having fun?
Find out—How To Speed Up Client Learning With The Incredible Power of Infotainment.
It's one thing to get attention, but how do you use it on sales pages? And what about articles? Can we use it there as well? In this second part we see how the power of objections work for sales pages, when creating information products and also with articles. It's real, it's practical and it works. Here we go!
Most of us avoid controversy because it brings up too much pushback. But what if you were able to get your very controversial topic across and delight your clients? Let's find out how to ramp up that curiosity and controversy-level without alienating your clients.
Click here to read online: Ramp up curiosity.
Do you know the exact date the Earth was created? If you lived in the 18th century, you learned that the world was created on Saturday, the 22nd of October, 4004 BC. And not just any moment on 22nd October, but “on the beginning of the night”. This idea of the Earth being just 6000 years old is preposterous to us living in an age of science, but back in those times, the only geology textbook was the word of an Irish bishop and theologian called James Ussher.
It was in this world that James Hutton came up with his theory of the Earth James Hutton is called the founding father of geology. In 1747, Hutton had just graduated from medical university. He was a bright young man, but his sexual exploits and drunkenness got him in trouble. He got his lover, Miss Eddington pregnant.
This scandal caused her to be rushed away to London to give birth, and Hutton went into self-exile from Edinburgh to a small family farm in Slighhouses, Scotland.
It was at this remote, damp, seemingly boring place where he came up with the theory of how the Earth was formed. While observing the side of a hill, he noticed bands in the cliff face. Over time, he realised there were possibly hundreds of bands of sediment laid one on top of the other, compacting itself into rock. Hutton's great insight was that the creation and destruction of land wasn't one day in October, 4000 BC, but instead a remarkably slow build up over time.
Today, in the world of science we have a term for this slow build up of land. It's called “sedimentary rock”. He mulled over these ideas for over 15 years, trying to drum up enough courage to put them forward.
Then in 1785, he presented his radical idea to the Royal Society of Edinburgh The Society rejected his theory almost immediately. And as if that were not enough, the members of the society branded him an atheist. Hutton was God-fearing, and he must have felt the sheer weight of how his ideas were being rejected out of hand.
History is full of instances where ideas were too controversial to be accepted. Ignaz Semmelweis concept that washing hands saves lives was considered to be bizarre, Alfred Wegener came up with the concept of continental drift and was thoroughly rejected. Nicholas Copernicus was sidelined because he stated that the Earth was not the centre of the Universe.
And we too are faced with scepticism when we present an idea. While our ideas might not be as earth-shattering as these great scientists, they're still very important to us. The only problem we have is that our concepts are controversial. They're ideas that are very hard for clients to digest, and therefore we tend to stay on the safer, more boring side of life.
But what if there were a way to present your controversial idea? And what if you could do it in various media. Would it be possible to create an info-product that went against the grain? What about a webinar or seminar that was a bit different from what clients expect?
In this series, we'll look at books, articles, and even sales pages and see how you can take on the biggest and most controversial point and give it the spotlight. And we'll do it by using the power of objections. Let's find out how objections work and how and when to use them to maximum effect.
Let's do this in three parts. Part 1: Why you should not discard a controversial idea
Part 2: How examples, case studies and practical demonstration reduces pushback
Part 3: Three real life applications: article, sales page and info-product.
1: Why you should not discard a controversial idea What caused the slow decline of newspapers?
If you were to ask this question to most people today, the answer would likely be quite prompt. Most people are likely to say: It's the Internet. The news online is free and can be accessed at will.
It can be tweaked to your taste, has video and other interactive content—plus, it's searchable. It's not hard to see that the Internet was the most dominant factor in the decline of the newspaper industry.
Except there's a neat little graph that tells a different story If you started the graph back in 1945, you'd notice how the trend heads south. 1955 has fewer readers per household but is better than 1965, which in turn is better than 1975. As you hurtle through the years, the readership drops precipitously as we get to 1995—and the Internet as we know it today didn't even exist back then.
In his book called “The Content Trap”, professor Bharat Anand, brings up a concept that we'd consider to be quite odd, if not outright controversial.
However, the very nature of the controversy is what jolts your audience to life If you were to read an article on “how to increase prices”, you'd be likely to be interested, but something that talks about “how to decrease your prices” might seem controversial and ignite a much higher level of curiosity.
But is this controversy really necessary? Can't we get our ideas across without having to raise hackles all the time?
It really depends on the situation Take for instance the formula that most marketers tended to follow. Marketing strategies comprised of finding an audience, a target audience. Once you knew who you were targeting, you needed to state the features and benefits of that product or service.
This sequence of events would get you your desired result, or so it seemed. Which is why we ran into instant pushback the moment we started speaking at small events in Auckland and parts of New Zealand.
The earliest version of The Brain Audit did have the concept of Target Audience and Benefit, but it suggested that the most important element was the Problem. Not only was the Problem the most important, but it needed to show up before the Solution or any kind of benefit.
Controversial ideas don't always land on fertile ground With The Brain Audit, we did get people saying that they loved the idea of the Problem. However, by and large, people felt the entire concept was negative. Why bother leading with the problem? they asked, especially when the solution has worked so well for so long?
What if clients respond badly to the problem? They liked the other parts of The Brain Audit, but the concept of the problem needed to go, or so it seemed.
The reality is that controversial concepts need to stay When your audience is saying, “this won't work”, they're simply objecting. They're saying, “we can't see how this will work for me, and could you possibly be so kind as to give us some proof?” Which is exactly what Bharat Anand does in his book—and he does so at many levels.
First, he pulls out a graph of newspaper circulation per household over the past 70 years. Then, to bolster his point, he talks about a Norwegian media group called Schibsted. Schibsted published newspapers too, and their costs had spiralled upwards while the returns were horrific.
They had a loss of over 200 million kroner. By 2011, Schibsted had turned the ship around. Its operating profits were up to about $220 million—nearly 60% of the entire group.
Bharat Anand realised that controversy can be a friend When you introduce a controversial idea, there's instant pushback, but also instant attention. The pushback is merely the objection that needs to be tackled. Once he was able to furnish the proof, that attention level morphs into intense curiosity.
The reader, or the audience, want to know more because their worldview has not only been changed, but there's proof to back up the sudden change. When presenting The Brain Audit to a sceptical audience, I had the same aha moment I could start off by being like everyone else or could choose to advance the idea of the Problem being the most critical element of all.
Which is why I'd go through a demonstration of picking up a piece of paper and crumpling it into a ball. That would get the audience's attention, but then I'd suddenly throw the ball towards the audience. Instantly people would duck or swing their heads away from the oncoming missile.
Without too much fuss, I was able to demonstrate that a ball of paper might get their attention, but when thrown at them, that very paper got far more people to react.
It's more than likely that you do things that aren't run of the mill They may well be controversial, and it's easy to believe that it's safer to stick to the well-trodden path. However, all that's missing is the understanding of the objection. When James Hutton came up with his theory of sedimentation, sure he was ridiculed, but part of the problem was merely that he couldn't explain several facets of his theory.
Granite was considered to be the Lord's foundation stone—the first part of the Earth to be created. Hutton, on the other hand, claimed that granite was an example of a recent development. And, he suggested, that rock had not so long ago, been almost liquid.
See the controversy at hand? Sure you do, but you also are hooked into the excitement that would follow if there were proof. And that's why the controversy concept is so very powerful. You push it towards your audience, and they, in turn, push back. They come up with every reason why your idea is nonsense.
As you get more objections, you are quickly able to figure out which one of those objections recur with the most frequency.
That's gold for you Now you've got controversy, but you also know what's getting the most attention. And then, you also have proof. However, it's not always easy to overcome the sceptic with one level of proof. How much proof do you need and how do you present it?
Part 2: How examples, case studies and practical demonstration reduces pushback What material makes up Saturn's rings?
Saturn's rings hadn't been a mystery for quite a while. Galileo discovered Saturn's rings in 1610, and by the mid 19th century, astronomers knew that there were two large concentric circles. However, no one seemed to know what the rings were comprised of.
And more importantly, why did they not somehow disappear or float away? Over 200 years had passed since Galileo, and the rings were mostly a mystery until the Cambridge college announced a competition to solve the mystery of the rings. However, they also wanted mathematical proof.
It's into this space, that James Clerk Maxwell entered Just 25 years old, this physicist decided to take on the challenge, and he did so by the process of elimination. Saturn's rings could either be solid rock or ice. The second hunch was that they were liquid-based. The final possibility was that there were millions of tiny particles.
What Maxwell did was working it out by pure mathematics Through maths, he showed that a solid ring would be bunched on one side of the planet. The liquid explanation didn't work either because they would be quickly broken up by physical forces acting upon them.
Which led to the final possibility: that the rings comprised of a large number of independent particles. What Maxwell did was to write an equation to tell you how many—yes, how many—particles would be needed to have the system stable.
In short, James Clerk Maxwell used the power of demonstration to get his point across. The fact that he used complex maths to do it is fantastic, but it also underlines that we can overcome objections through three separate methods. The beauty of overcoming objections is that you can do it either using just one, or even all three of the methods.
Let's look at the methods, first • Examples
• Case studies
• Practical demonstration.
Let's start with examples and go right back to the presentation of The Brain Audit Faced with an onslaught of objections, it was essential to come up with the “roll the paper into a ball and throw it at the audience” trick. However, that was just the starting point. I'd then come up with an example to get across the point that the brain focuses on a problem, first.
I'd talk about how you might go out to dinner and let's say you were wearing a white shirt or white blouse. At dinner, there's a bit of an accident, and the pasta on the plate seems to fly towards you. Fortunately, the disaster is averted, and you get a tiny bit of orangy-red tomato stain on that white shirt.
The stain is almost pathetically tiny and will easily disappear when you have that shirt or blouse cleaned. However, the stain represents a problem. Then, you get to the state of obsession to somehow clean or at least minimise the redness on the apparel.
However, for some, practical examples are not enough However, you could use a second, if you could, right? Which is precisely what I did as well. Because the most significant objection was that the problem represents a “negative view” of the world, I'd ask if anyone thought that weather forecasts were evil.
Let's say the weather forecaster was to tell you that a thunderstorm or hurricane was headed your way. Would that be a bad thing to do? Or let's say you went to a warrant of fitness for your car and you were told you'd need to change the rear tyre or you'd have a nasty accident.
Would those instances be negative or positive? In every situation, you realise that the audience shifts from the objection zone to moving across to your side of the fence. And all of this is done by simply taking on practical examples that you encounter in everyday life.
However, for some, practical examples are not enough Proof—they want proof—and let's make it something that someone has written a paper on. Luckily there is proof pretty much everywhere, if you go looking for it (I hear there are people who you can pay to research for you as well).
To get back to the point, I'd found this interesting experiment by Dr John Cacciopo. The late Cacciopo was a neuroscientist ran a test. He showed his subjects three different sets of pictures.
The first was a picture of something positive—like a red Ferrari or a delicious pizza. The second picture would be a picture of something mundane, like a light bulb or a plate. The third would be a picture of a dead cat.
I'd tell the story of how Cacciopo would record the electrical activity of each participant's cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex, in turn, reflects the magnitude of the information processing taking place. And then I'd tell the audience what Cacciopo found. The brain reacts more strongly to stimuli it deems problematic.
Or to put it another way, when faced with a problem vs solution, the problem gets our attention. This cat vs plate vs Ferrari was a case study that quelled the objection but did so from another angle.
Which leaves us with the third method—practical demonstration The crumpled paper was one way to demonstrate the power of the problem, but I'd put chairs between a participant and me. I'd then ask the participant to walk towards me. In every instance, they'd swerve past the chair.
Why the swerve? I'd ask the audience. The answer was pretty obvious, wasn't it? If you slam into the chair, you could hurt yourself. “The brain sees the chair as a barrier; a problem”, I'd explain.
Slowly, but surely the audience would have enough of examples to hold on to, thus getting to understand that as controversial as the “problem” may be, it's the way we do things in real life. It's the way we make purchasing decisions or just about any decision.
However, you have to pick your media In an article, you might use an example and a case study. In a presentation, you might be able to have all three: the case study, the example and the demonstration. And when you read the same concept in a book, you could put in all three elements and have even more than one of each.
In The Brain Audit book, there's an example of dog poo and Lisa's laptop before it moves to the Cacciopo case study. On the very next page, we swing back to the flashy car vs your 1980s gas-guzzling sedan.
And then for good measure, there's a sort of demonstration where you're comparing between economy and business class. Or business class and first class.
It doesn't end there There are examples of a slow computer, the weather report, the timing belt or cam belt in your car, and a coffee break. Yes, indeed, so many instances and that's only half the chapter. If you think it must be tedious to read so many examples slamming in one after another, you'll find to your surprise that it makes for easy reading.
If you were to pick up your copy of The Brain Audit today, you're bound to be amazed at how the controversy has been stamped out in a simple, elegant manner, by using a lot of examples, demonstration and one solitary case study.
Pushback isn't always permanent In most cases, you have to look at the objections as your guiding light. They're telling you exactly why people get edgy when you bring up your ideas. Instead of trying to evade the objections, hug them tightly.
Then take those very objections and find the examples, case studies and demonstrations to drive home your point.
In doing so, you've done something quite familiar. You've rolled out the stages of The Brain Audit. The controversy is the problem—and we now know that the problem does get the attention of the audience.
And the objection quelling exercise is indeed the solution. This happy moment takes us right into the third part: how to use it for a sales page, an information product or an article.
Next Step: Have you read the The Brain Audit?Here is an except: Find out why clients buy and why they don't
Why do some books, courses or workshops end up becoming so addictive? Is it the teacher, the system, the information, or is it all of the above? In this podcast we look at why your business needs a bit of movement through three precise stages. Those stages are information, results and elegance. Elegance is hard to resist, but how do we get there and how long does it take? Is there any guaranteed way to get to elegance? Let's find out in this episode.
We tend to believe that we're more overwhelmed than ever before. Yet look around you and you see people who are doing twice or thrice as much. It's hard to admit it, but often their work is of a higher standard too. How come they're not overwhelmed? Is it because they're more talented, or is there something that we're not quite seeing? Let's find out in this episode.
Is it hard to get a client? Sure it is, but how many of us “lose” the client within minutes or days? We may not realise it, but without a very clear on-boarding system, clients simply get confused and leave. Or they feel unsafe and don't consume your product or service.
The question is: how do you get an on-boarding system in place and what does it entail? Let's take a sneak peek into what's possible.
Click here to read online: Onboarding is Crucial
There are three distinct stages before we order a meal in a restaurant. The first stage is when you're standing outside the restaurant, deciding whether to go in. The second stage is when you get welcomed into the new space. Finally, it's when you first get acknowledged after sitting down; you get a glass of water, and a menu. All of this happens so quickly that we don't realise that every stage is essential. More so, the very same steps have to play out when you're getting a client into a new space, like a membership site, course, or even an offline store.
The first stage is before they enter your site or course. The second is how you greet them and the third and equally crucial stage is how you make them feel within “minutes” of entering that new space. These three sequential steps are what you'd call “on-boarding”.
Every stage of on-boarding is vital because if we were to go back to the restaurant, would you be happy if no one received you once you entered? And having been assigned a table, how long would you wait before stalking off when you got no service?
All of these ideas and this very sequence seems particularly vivid when we think of restaurants, yet we fail to roll out these systems when clients sign up.
The importance of onboarding can be boiled down to a single term: safe zone Standing outside the membership site, course or workshop, you are trying to gauge if you're making the right decision. Once you do get in the door, it's equally important to feel as if you're in a safe space. You need someone real to step up to you and take care of you.
Instead, what you get is an automatic e-mail that confirms you're in the membership site and then it's just a bunch of weekly e-mails that don't have the slightest personal touch in place.
Now wait a sec, no one is saying you shouldn't use automation What's about to follow is how automation doesn't become a crutch but is a handy companion that allows a small business to keep in touch with clients and prompt them to consume what they've purchased. However, depending on automation alone is a mistake.
At some point very early after the client has shown up to your “restaurant”, a real person (that's you) has to make yourself available. If you're surprised at where this article is going, it's only because of how a large part of the internet works. They take a hands-off method and wonder why there's constant churn.
Which is why they then have to do constant advertising (which in itself takes time), joint ventures etc. to make sure their membership site doesn't look barren. At 5000bc, we like to see ourselves as a restaurant. And here are some of the things that we do within less than a month of a client joining the site.
• Tiny increment autoresponders
• Cave Guides
• Taking Action
• Contact individually
• Chocolate
• Buddy
• Country welcome
• Video conference
• Tags
In this episode, we will look at three things. 1. Tiny increment autoresponders
2. Cave Guides
3. Taking Action
1: Tiny increment autoresponders Have you noticed how there's a lag when you're talking to customer support on chat? Let's say you get to a site. On the right-hand side, you see a little button that signals you can talk to someone. You click on the chat button and almost immediately you get a response. It may say something like, “Hi, I'm Maria”, how can I help? You automatically assume Maria is around and start to type your question.
It then seems to stall you for a while, asking for your name and possibly a phone number, just in case you're disconnected. Then, there's a lag after you type in your details. So what just happened? I'll tell you what. You were talking to a machine. All that “Maria bit” of chatter was an automatic back and forth and once you got past a certain point, it handed you over to a real person.
And for the most part, no one is wiser, or unhappy, but it allows the transaction to go ahead pretty flawlessly.
This is what automation can do well, if used intelligently. Which is why we use autoresponders. It makes sure a client gets into 5000bc and then continues to gain from it. Some clients jump right in, introduce themselves and are off the mark right away. Others may not enter right away, and things go on the back burner.
It's easy to buy something these days, fully expecting to use it, but then other distractions take over. Hence the autoresponders.
There are seven that show up in the client's inbox, over a period.
- The welcome
- Meet others
- Next step
- Cave Guide
- Handy tools
- Two questions
- What you expected
Every one of these autoresponders is meant to do something similar to what you'd experience in a chat.
They're designed to engage with the client. It means that in the early stages, you're giving a sense of what's where (it's mostly information). But as you go down the line, you're called to participate and given many options to do so. At every single stage, Renuka or I respond back to the client.
If you've ever gotten an e-mail from us, and replied, we write again and keep conducting a conversation, asking questions, etc. It's not just a “here you go, it's automation, and you're in a funnel”. Instead, the emails are designed to help us help the clients to consume what they've bought; to get use of the resources; to find others just like them.
Without the automation, it would be too much for a small business (or any size of business to handle). It's a nightmare keeping track of who's been contacted, what they've been told, etc. The automation allows us to give the pertinent information to the client and then to work with them on an ongoing basis.
That's the starting point, and there are a lot more elements in place. The second primary factor is the Cave Guides. Why are Cave Guides essential? Let's find out.
2: Cave Guides When I first visited Paris, I got lost for several hours. I thought I knew my way around, so one morning before Renuka was up, I stepped out for a walk.
I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, because I couldn't find my way back. What made it worse was I knew Renuka would be up and getting ready to go out for some croissant and coffee, but she wouldn't know where I was, or how to reach me because we never have any data on our phones. Worse still, though I can read French reasonably well, I can't speak much, if at all.
It was nearing 9 am, when I had an idea. I walked into an Internet cafe, and typed in the destination. It worked out where I was, and where I needed to go. With a printed map I was able to make my way back in half an hour or less. Google Maps had calmed me down and helped me get back when lost in a new city.
Cave Guides perform a similar function in 5000bc When you get to 5000bc, it's a whole new city, possibly a whole new world. At this point, there are hundreds of articles, vanishing reports, and over 322,000 posts of extremely valuable discussions. When a client signs up to 5000bc, they have a heightened sense of anticipation. However, it's very possible, despite their excitement, that they find themselves on an unexpected road, and get lost.
Which is where the Cave Guides come in. The Cave Guides are 5000bc members who volunteer to help those who are new in the membership site. A guide doesn't necessarily give any business advice, but instead merely gives you the chance to familiarise yourself with the city.
However, it's the feeling of safety that's more important than just familiarisation When you and I get to a new place, we are apt to be uncertain and tend to make mistakes. Some clients will push through, but others may feel silly when they make a mistake. Others still, may not even attempt to make a move as they think they are guaranteed to make an error and be publicly called out.
And this fear could be justified as there have been numerous instances where people are made to feel small and insignificant, in the full glare of a large group. Having to deal with one person, and a person that's specially dedicated to being a guide, brings a tremendous amount of safety to the entire exercise. Even seemingly “trivial” questions are asked—and they seem “trivial” to the person asking the questions, but in fact they're huge barriers to getting comfortable in that new space.
It's an integral part of the onboarding process Just like in a restaurant where someone is usually around to receive you, you need to have some guide to help you along. If you walk into an Apple Store, for instance, you'll see this level of guidance occurring as well. When I walked into the Apple store for the first time in 2008, I had been a Windows user for years.
Everything about the Mac was weird and unknown, if enticing in some way. However, because I could make a quick appointment with someone at the Genius Bar within the store, enabled me to get my questions out quickly and safely.
In a course, we have onboarding of a different kind With the cartooning course, there's a fair bit of posting cartoons and linking to be done, which is why the entire first week is about slowing down the progress. The clients get assignments that enable them to get familiar with the forum and how to get their cartoons to display.
With headline course, or any other online course, clients are given extremely tiny instructions so they can get through the first week familiarising themselves with their environment and with each other. At a live, onsite workshop in a city, we have a meet and greet the evening before.
The clients are often told what to expect the next day, and wherever possible we take them to the room itself so they're comfortable and can show up having gone through a rehearsal of sorts.
Being a guide or having a guide is essential for a company When you're selling a product or service, it might seem like a big bother to take so much trouble to get a guide system in place. It might seem that a guide might be betters suited for a workshop or course instead. However, every entry point is fraught with the chance that the client may get lost, sometimes for a short while, but often for hours, just like I did in Paris.
That one mistaken turn might put them off getting back and they've lost the chance to be part of your wonderful enterprise and you've lost a potentially fantastic client.
Which is why you need guides or at least a guided system that everyone follows. But that guide is still just one step. What's needed is a sense of comfort. How do you achieve this sense of happiness? We find someone who's familiar. Let's find out how it all works and why it's so imperative.
- Taking Action Way back in 2009, Mackay Rippey (a founding member of 5000bc) made a suggestion.
“How about a Taking Action forum?” he asked. That was the start of a journey that's had a ton of ups and downs, but today is the core of creating a quicker onboarding. Why? Because getting into a new community is always scary. There are far more people than you want to deal with.
The Taking Action section forms a tiny little capsule where you (and just one other member) can create a bond and move ahead in tiny steps.
You'd think a taking action post would be easy for clients, right? It's not. As Nobel Laureate, Richard Thaler says: It's not that people are dumb. It's that life is hard. And taking action is one of the hardest things that a person can do, but also one of the most critical steps for onboarding. Let's take the example of 5000bc first and experience the journey of a client, before heading out to see how it may work in other cases both online and offline.
In 5000bc, a client signs up to become a member They do so for reasons of their own, but primarily are interested in relevant information, access to me, priority for courses—but also to be part of a community. The moment they join, they wander in, may add their details and photograph, look around and leave. Will they come back? Sure they will, but to get value out of their membership, they have to come back more often.
They have to not only absorb the information but implement it. This is precisely the point where things start to go off course. The client is often too unsure to ask for advice, and they lurk.
The key is to get them out of lurk mode, which is where the Taking Action forum comes in At first, the Taking Action forum was just a place where you went and posted your goals. In time, the instructions got refined because it was easy enough to get started, but then lose track because of a lack of planning. When we look at the Taking Action Forum today, it has seven steps.
They read like this:
Here are the easy steps to play. Step 1: Name your goal.
Step 2: List what you'll do. Keep it restricted to 2-3 things.
Step 3: List how you intend to do it.
Step 4: List how much time you'll spend on it daily x 21 days (this is very important)
Step 5: What resources you have/ What help or information you need.
Step 6: Start date/finish date. Let's keep it for 21 days.
Step 7: Don't miss this step: Get a buddy: It is always good to have someone nudging you along in case you start slacking off. Sean me an email me, and I will assign you a buddy: renuka@psychotactics.com
All of the steps are important, but there's one that surpasses them all Naming the goal, the list, all of that organisation—that's all crucial to the success of the plan, but the most critical element of all is Step 7: getting a buddy. It's obvious when you think of it, right? What does a buddy do for you? You're in an unknown forum, a new membership site and are bound to get lost.
You can't depend on the power of the group, but another person—your buddy—is easy to lean on and learn from. Plus, it's easy enough to lose steam when you're trying to motivate yourself. When you have a buddy to keep you going, the very act of knowing someone is waiting nudges you on.
The Taking Action Forum works incredibly well in many cases And the reason why it works so well is because it gives the newcomer a tiny space and a friend. That's usually all we need when we enter a website—or at least a membership site. However, the dynamics may change depending on the business itself. In the courses, like the Article Writing Course or cartooning course, the group size is larger at about 5-7 people.
The same applies to the group size in live, on-site workshops. And there's a reason why this is the case. When working on an individual goal, the input, often just the nudge from another person is enough. When it comes to learning a skill like writing or drawing, the higher the contribution, the better.
Also when the client is part of a group, they're able to see what the others are doing, and most importantly the mistakes they're making. This in turn, reduces their error rate, and it keeps the group going. However, the moment you start to go beyond 7 people in a group, you're asking for trouble.
About 7 is just right to create activity and keep the momentum going. Beyond 7 you merely have anonymity and it's not hard for clients to slip away.
No matter whether you have a membership site or something offline, you want to get them involved with a human We get so gung-ho about technology that we forget that we're humans first. And that humans seek humans. But once they're done finding the other person, they also want to contribute. And this contribution needs to be towards their cause (their action plan) but also help the other person. The combination of settling in and getting moving is probably the more natural way for a new client to get going, without being too much in the spotlight.
The final question is: does it work? For the most part, it does, but it doesn't work automatically. In our case at 5000bc, we make sure that we pair up clients. In the workshops and courses, it's the same. All of this requires a bit of groundwork on your part. When one of the pairs goes missing—and it happens—there needs to be a mechanism in place so that the client can get in touch with you and you can assign another partner.
It's easy enough to dismiss this activity as too much work, but it gets clients in and keeps them coming back. Which in turn means you don't have to spend all that time and money—and energy, I might add—trying to get new clients all the time.
Onboarding is crucial, and a big part of this onboarding is getting people to know each other and start working on a project. When we started out the forum back in 2009, based on Mackay's request, we had no idea how useful it would be. However, it's been one of the main areas for us and I suspect it will be for you as well.
Start up a Taking Action Post to take action on your membership site.
Oh and before I go If you haven't yet subscribed: Here are the links to get all the Psychotactics articles, goodies and podcasts automatically.
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Testimonials are extremely powerful in solving problems that range from getting the clients you want, to finding your uniqueness. How do you use testimonials to increase conversion or just change behaviour? Let's find out in this episode and get these mysteries out of the way.
We might be generous, but are we rushing the act of giving?
Often we give people what we want, instead of what they would like to receive. Can giving be less rushed? How can we improve our generosity? In this episode, we find out how we did things wrong, and how we've tweaked the way we give.
Chaos comes visiting every day. Are we prepared to receive it? The reason for stress is a lack of planning on how to deal with chaos. Let's find out how it's done.
What happens when your book finally goes out into the world? Gladwell has been attacked time and time again for his chapter on the 10,000 hour rule. But was the attack justified? Or was it all wrong? How do you defend yourself against something you're innocent of, in the first place? Plus, a bonus on how much time it takes for a book to get traction—and more—in this episode.
Choosing the title of a book seems to be an almost impossible task. Is there a method or science behind a title that works vs. a title that's just "meh?" And interestingly, when does a "meh" title work just fine. We go deep, but not too deep into how to create evocative titles. If you've ever struggled with a title, here's a system that will work almost every single time.
Most of us aren't really sure how to know if our articles are really good, or even if an idea is good. It gets more complicated when we have a story that we love. Does everyone love it too? Malcolm Gladwell shows us how to get precise feedback and do it in a casual manner.
Right click here and ‘save as' to download this episode to your computer.
Or read it online: Lessons from Malcolm Gladwell
What I learned from Malcolm Gladwell- Part 1 When I was in university, all I wanted to be was like Christopher D'Rozario.
Chris was the creative director of an advertising agency called Trikaya Grey. However, I soon wandered away from that dream and then wanted to be like Bill Watterson, the creator of the comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes. But even that dream went into deep freeze as I transitioned to wanting to be a writer and ran into a book by Malcolm Gladwell called “The Tipping Point”.
It was my tipping point in a way I loved the way Gladwell wrote, and for the longest time I yearned to know how he came up with so many cool stories. His research seemed exhaustive and to be like Gladwell was one of my big priorities. Then, like everything in life, you move on, and life pulls you in its own current.
Even so, recently I watched a series made by Masterclass.com about Gladwell on Writing. I went in expecting to learn interesting stuff. I wasn't disappointed. And here in this series, I would like to share with you, six things that jumped off the screen—so much that I made a note of them, even drew some cartoons for a quick reference later on.
What are those six points? 1. Candy vs the main meal 2. How to gauge reader interest with conversation 3. The power of juxtaposed titles 4. Why you need to walk away from drafts 5. What to do when your story enters the world 6. And finally, how to read
1) Candy vs the main meal In 2008, I switched to the Mac after almost 15 years of being on a PC.
When people asked me why I'd tell them the story of my presentation I'd been doing a series of presentations for the clients of a radio station.
Now, I'm like a helicopter mom when it comes to my presentations, but on this occasion, they wanted the slides in advance. To make sure nothing went wrong, I arrived a whole hour before the event and tested the slides.
To my horror, everything looked different. “Who's tweaked my slides?” I asked the technician in charge. “We didn't change anything,” said the guy in charge. “All we did was load your presentation through the Mac software called Keynote. When I looked closer, I realised I was looking in admiration at the slides, rather than frustration. If all they did was run a Powerpoint through Keynote and it improved so much, it sure was my signal to fall head over heels with the Mac.
This is akin to what Malcolm Gladwell calls “candy” “There's a difference between the meal and the treat,” he says. “It corresponds to the way people talk about things and think about things”.
When people talk about things, they tend to strip it down to something smaller, something enjoyable, even tweetable.
The reason, Gladwell continues, “Is because the way you think about something is complex, may have several parts, may or may not be contradictory. Or parts of it may even be remarkably difficult to explain. The things you talk about are those you can talk about. The things that are easy to remember or get across. And usually, they're short—tweetable.”
Which is similar to the story of the migration to the Mac I didn't want to move to the Mac. I had a whole suite of programs on the PC, including costly Adobe software and painting software like Painter, which were all purchased for the PC. Moving to the Mac would mean I'd have to ditch all of that software or buy new versions all over again.
Plus, there were programs like Corel Draw that at the time (if I remember well) worked solely on the PC. To have to make all of these changes were frustrating. When I explain my story about the Mac, there's a lot more that I'm not even expressing in this piece. Instead, I strip it down to the smallest, most interesting story. The story of how my presentation became went from Cinderella to Princess in glass slippers. In effect, I'm giving you the candy version.
The candy version is a snippet, but no ordinary snippet. It's a way for the writer to give you something to talk about as well as something to think about. The information—whoa, that's clearly the cerebral, thinking stuff. The candy, in a story, article, webinar—the candy is the fun stuff. Which is why if you look at The Brain Audit, you'll see loads of candy. Let's say you want to talk to a colleague about The Brain Audit.
To get the colleague to read the back page of the book, or even the introduction would be too much. But if you have candy, it allows you to talk about the “seven red bags” story. You're not dragging out all the words from the 180 pages of the book. Instead, all you're telling is a short 3-4 minute story. Instantly, you have the floor and the attention, but you've also neatly communicated something.
A book must have the main meal, without losing out on the candy The candy is a tool for engagement and helps people sell the idea to their friends or talk about what they've consumed. It could be an analogy in the book, like what you experience in The Brain Audit with the seven red bags, but it could also be part of a chapter when you're explaining about “dog poo” and how it's relevant to how the brain processes “problems”.
If you see the Yes-Yes pricing video which shows you how to raise your prices by 15%, there's an explanation—and a reasonably long one too—about pricing. But there in the middle of it all is a coffee and a muffin. When you're talking to a friend and trying to convince her to raise her prices, there's no way on Earth you're going to explain the entire Yes-Yes pricing. Instead, you're more than likely to reach for the muffin and coffee story.
And this got me thinking because I like structure. Does every chapter need candy? Gladwell doesn't go into the details, but he gave me candy, didn't he? I had to switch into “ponder-mode” to work out how every chapter could have its candy. Logically, almost every good analogy is candy. Which means you and I have at least a few places where we can insert the candy. Analogies, case studies, examples, even footnotes.
To get this act right, we can't just think of books as Gladwell does. What about podcasts? Or webinars (not the yucky sales pitches, but instructional webinars). Or we could even create our own candy version. For instance, at the Landing Page workshop, it seemed like a good idea to create some postcards that would encapsulate the entire workshop into a single postcard.
Cartoons would make the postcard really cute, but the postcard also quickly allows a client to show a friend exactly what they learned, even as the elevator hits the “ding” on the eighth floor.
Since around November 2017, I've almost stopped eating sugar, but I'll chew anyway into this candy concept as we head to the next idea: How to test your idea quickly and efficiently.
2) How to test your story idea quickly and efficiently. About two years ago, my friend Luca and I were up late at night drinking a bit of Lagavulin.
As the whisky drained itself out of the glass, the topic veered to “talent”. Since at least 2008, I've been threatening to write a book, even three books on talent. But on this particular night, I was, for no particular reason, trying to boil down the concept of talent to an equation.
From that moment on I have this equation chat with people I meet, discuss it on the forum at 5000bc, and finally, in Singapore, I presented to the audience. It wasn't a workshop about talent. Instead, it was a sales page workshop, but I found it pertinent to start day three with the “talent equation”.
And when the day was done, my wife, Renuka came up to me and said: “That's it. I've heard you talk about talent many, many times before, but for the first time I've heard you explain the concept in a way that's easy to understand and implement.”
Finally, it seemed I'd gotten to the core of the story. Gladwell talks about how he tests his stories as well
Often at the outset of developing a story, he'll tell it over and over again to different people. You know what he's looking for, right? He's gauging interest. Apparently the story is interesting to Gladwell, but do the others find it interesting as well? Which parts interested his listener?
When did they tune out? More importantly, when did they change the subject? It what point do they jump in with questions or objections? And also, what do they say next, once you've finished with your story or concept?
The reason why all of these questions are so very important is due to the fact that Gladwell is testing the waters. He sees the person in front of him as a stand-in for his eventual audience. However, at all times, you want honesty with the listener's feedback.
Laziness rarely helps in such matters. So what's lazy? Laziness in such a situation is texting someone an idea or sending an e-mail. Yes, there are situations where you're in Auckland, and the other
person is in Leiden or Singapore. But even so, a face to face conversation matters. Gladwell prefers the direct, in your face feedback, because it brings out the directness. There's a raw honesty when you're right next to the person, rather than separated by technology.
Even reading a draft of a chapter or book doesn't elicit the same level of honesty. And once again, we've done this draft reading before, haven't we? We're usually concerned about someone's feelings; we barely have time, we don't necessarily feel we're the right person to ask—and so on. But when someone's right in front of you, you can only tend to take so much.
They ask your opinion, and you give your response. It's not necessarily a brutal response, but even if you say nothing, they can gauge how excited you are.
Comedians know this factor of instant response to be true Take for instance some clips from The Daily Show with host Trevor Noah. When the show goes for an ad break, Noah chats with his audience. Noah improvises on the spot with a private audience. If the joke gets a lot of laughs, it could then be taken to a much bigger stage.
This randomness in telling a story is what gets you great feedback It feels like a conversation, not an audit. And when you're just riffing in the wind, there's a lot less at stake. In effect, Gladwell is saying, “lower the bar, make it easy for them” Just for good measure, Gladwell will pick friends that he bores to death.
He chooses people who he knows aren't awed by his status as a best-selling author. They will cut down his story if needed. Which is why he goes back repeatedly with a different angle to the same story.
My battle with the “talent equation” story was similar Since 2008, I've been trying to get this idea across that inborn talent—if it exists—is inconsequential. That if you wanted to learn to draw outstandingly well, cook, dance—you could do so in an incredibly short span of time. So well in fact, that people would think you've been practising it for years or are “born with it”
Anyway, it wasn't hard to find people who would say things like “you're so talented, I could never be like that”.
They look at my cartoons, and at least 50% of the people say just that. Which was like a red rag in my face, because then I'd get into this two-hour discussion with them. At the end of the two hours, they'd either stick to their point or agree with my point of view.
But how do I get this idea across in a shorter amount of time? How do I make it more elegant? The only way to get the story to that point of elegance was to keep pushing it back in different forms, over and over again. When I say forms, what I mean is I try and get the same idea across in different ways, using various examples, and different approaches to see which one is more palatable to the audience.
Be aware that you're not watering down your concept, or changing it. You're just approaching the idea from a different perspective. And then it's time to test it out with an audience like Gladwell does.
Let's take an example For years, I was trying to prove that talent isn't necessarily inborn.
This concept would and continues to meet with massive resistance. Over the years, I changed the approach. I started to talk about how “almost children in all countries” draw when they are three years old. And almost all children in all countries are hopeless at maths and writing when they're three, but then something odd happens when they're ten.
Suddenly all the kids who were pretty good at drawing, now become hopeless at drawing. And all who are hopeless at maths and writing are now reasonably proficient at it.
That's a different approach, and it's something that all of us tend to agree with. However, there's still doubt because we feel that someone else is better at cooking, drawing, dancing etc. So I had to go back and formulate a system where there was no doubt at all. And that system would mean that I could prove, without question, that everyone in the audience could draw well, or multiply at super speed, or be able to speak in the future tense of a foreign language. And all of this had to be done in the space of 10-20 minutes.
The concept is the same: talent is not inborn. The approach is different. When you suddenly see a room of 5000 people drawing, speaking and multiplying (and there's no exception), now the concept is on fire.
But let's deviate for a second because most of us don't have easy access to feedback from others Gladwell works in New York; he's a staff writer at The New Yorker. Already, being in a big city is an advantage. But to then have access to other writers in a world-class magazine, that's extremely rare.
Sure, there are interesting people everywhere no matter if you're in Cape Town, Liverpool or Dunedin, but it's not easy to find such people, let alone get their attention. Which is often where a forum helps tremendously. When I get an idea I want to test; I might put it on Facebook. But Facebook and even Facebook groups tend not to go in depth. The format is clunky because it's more suited to information that's on the move, rather than an archivable discussion. And in 5000bc, the forum is where I put forward my ideas.
This article, for instance, is first being written in 5000bc, in the forum. At which point, the feedback comes in pretty rapidly. People like it, or have objections or have read something and drive you to another reference. Yes, the in-person chat is the best of all, no doubt about it, but barring that option, a well-curated forum is hugely beneficial to test your ideas.
Even the validity of your headline can be gauged by how many people click on the link to read your discussion. When you do put it out in the world as an article, podcast or chapter of a book, do you know whether the title was exciting or not? Was it just interesting to you or others as well? This kind of information is part of a forum structure, and it's tiny little giveaways like this that give you a scale of how impressive your article or story happens to be.
Gladwell urges you and me to pay attention to a specific phrase as well The moment you write or say something that's even mildly interesting to the other person, they want to jump in. They want to be part of the ongoing conversation, and they will utter something like: “Oh, that reminds me of…” and they will go off on a tangent. Listen, listen, listen.
Don't pull back to your own megaphone because that person is giving you a lead into another world that you're not aware of.
A world that possibly leads to a dead end, but there's often a chance that it will significantly enhance the depth and clarity of your story.
Conversation is a bunch of building blocks that we have with each other. For instance, you may say to your partner: I didn't sleep well last night, and they say something about their sleep. And then you go down what possibly disrupted your sleep. Given some amount of chatter,that conversation may get to a point where you realise that all you need to do is to get that White Noise app out and you'll sleep a lot better.
When you have a story, you have to do a lot more listening It's a conversation, yes, but it's a specific type of discussion. It's one where you're testing, but also getting their version of what they hear, what they know, the resources and connections they have, etc. Asking someone: “What does this story remind you of?” is a great way to get a conversation going.
Testing a story isn't difficult, but it might involve a bit of Lagavulin and a conversation Or it might be just a walk that you take with friends or a visit to a cafe. But even if you can't go out, find yourself a forum where your ideas could be challenged consistently; where you can get objections and resources. And as far as possible do it casually, because there's a higher chance of the other person responding quickly and without too much fear of offence.
And that's the second thing I learned. Let's go to the third: juxtaposed titles and why they matter when you're trying to get attention.
Next Up: How To Choose Evocative Titles for your Book (Lessons from Malcolm Gladwell – Part 2)
It's very hard for most of us to slow down, but what happens when we slow down to a complete standstill? This little snippet is our story of how we got back and were stuck for two whole weeks. Here's the first little snippet.
What happens at 4 am? That's a question I often get at Psychotactics, because I've been up for well over 25 years at 4 am. Well, that's how the question started, but you also get a bit of a peek into how the day unfolds. This isn't a business podcast. Instead, it's a view into the world of the 4 am crazy person (that's me). Hope you enjoy the journey.
When a client buys your product or service, they obviously like it at some level, right? So why is it so very hard to get feedback? The answer may not lie in the act of feedback itself, but instead in trust factors, formats and follow up .Find out how the simple act of feedback is quite a bit more complex than it seems. And how to make it easier to get the response you need to grow your business.
Finding or creating a uniqueness is hard enough all by itself. But how can your small business create a stunning uniqueness as well as defend it mightily from your competition? Tah, dah, you bring on the power of difficulty, both for you and for them. What's the power of difficulty? Find out in this episode that will immediately give you the chance to get ahead of your competition, especially in a noisy marketplace.
Why would clients trust you when you're new and you goof up? This is an incredibly insightful question as clients can be skeptical. Yet, it's incredible how much enthusiasm and results can play a part. Find out how to get a bad start and still get great results.
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Thanks for this series. I have a question about the initial story. Why do you think those 10 people bought despite your “not perfect” performance? And why did they show up in the first place?
Because repeat customers are great, but you have to sell something for the first time to be able to do a second sale, a third sale, and so on.
The 10 people bought because they knew me. That's the short answer.
However, that's an incomplete answer, because it's easy to say: Well, no one knows me. However, bear in mind that I was a new immigrant into New Zealand, so I didn't know anyone. When I joined the networking group, I got to know them all, one by one. And of the twenty people that showed up, ten signed up. They were the ones that knew me best and felt I could help them move forward.
In every situation, you're going to get a few people The networking group I was part of, had 35 people. Out of those 35, we got 20 to attend. Out of those 20, about 3-4 might have been friends of friends. Those people didn't sign up for anything. The ones that did sign up were those that knew me. And I went with the first ten. I'm sure if I had another event, I could have gotten another set of people to first attend the session, then to sign up to the recurring class.
As I mentioned in another post, this method can be used even with a bunch of strangers For instance, the cafe I go to had “barista classes”. You'd go to one class, they'd then sign you up for several follow up classes. I went to a restaurant in the city and they served pasta, but they also have pasta making classes. And both starter and advanced. In short, the answer is to get the trust, give skill or information, or even get them to eat something, and you're more likely to get clients to come back. But you have to have the system in place, first.
When you say “they need enthusiasm and a result”, do you mean a result you obtained or a result you promise?
They are very different when you are starting. The former is much harder, because since you are starting, you hadn't had clients yet.
To sell something—anything—you first need “enthusiasm”. Why? Because sales is a transfer of enthusiasm from one person to another. Without enthusiasm, you struggle to sell. Which is why if you tend to tell people how difficult things are, they never buy from you. In fact, they avoid you. But if you're really enthusiastic about a product/service, people buy on enthusiasm alone. Most clients can never know what they're buying.
I'm not saying “they don't know”. I'm saying “they can never know”. Even when the product is clearly spelt out. Let's say you're buying a phone. Or a car. Or a house. Your brain can only process a few details and a lot of detail is based purely on the enthusiasm of the purchase/ person selling the product. For instance, if you get to the sales page workshop that we're having. You may read the sales page.
But what are we really doing? How will it be done? How much do I stick to the syllabus? Who will you be sitting next to? What kind of seating formation will we have? There are more questions than answers and they don't even relate to the workshop contents itself. So you can never know.
Clients will buy based on their need of course, but they could easily buy some similar course online at a tinier price. The reason why they make the journey is because of enthusiasm (the enthusiasm that has been transferred to them from me). But there's also the second aspect: results.
You can always guarantee results. Even at the most basic level you can guarantee results. For instance, you asked why people came to the follow up events my first presentation of The Brain Audit was not very good. The reason was because they got a result.
Before that evening, they didn't realise that there were seven items to tick off the list (the seven red bags of The Brain Audit). They also didn't realise that the problem was more important than the solution. Those changes got them to sit back and pay closer attention. And those are results.
When you look at the Headline Report on our site, that also delivers results. In 10 minutes you are able to write 3 types of headlines. It's not a headline course.
It's not exactly headline university, but there are results. Starting out is not a barrier to getting results. You have to break down your big topic (e.g. everything I know about headlines) into something small that anyone can get, and deliver results.
Smaller lists work amazingly well, but there's a big task at hand You not only have to keep clients coming back, but prevent them from leaving as well. How do you do that? At Psychotactics we have many methods and it should give you some ideas as to where you can begin. If you have some ideas, do send them in.
We'll focus on just three things that we can do with our tiny list 1- The first purchase: why you don't need thousands, or even hundreds of clients on your list.
2- How to willingly get clients to buy a second, third, fourth, even ten times in quick succession.
3- Monitoring the connectedness of your community.
What makes a society feasible? No doubt, a lot of elements go into the making of a society, but two of the key components are:
Are the rest a lot like me?
Are they completely different from me?
Our lists are small in comparison to most others in our field Our list now hovers around 25,000 people, and probably 5000 people open their e-mail. The membership site at 5000bc has just 600 members. Our workshops allow for just 35 people at a maximum, but often we'll have boutique workshops like the Landing page workshop, and admit only 15 participants.
When you consider the size of other lists, and especially those who've been around as long as we have, you'll see there's a marked difference. But how come we're able to do this whole three-month vacation bit, take weekends off, etc.
It's because of our belief in the small list, but there's a greater driving force We have community in the sense that's easier to manage when you're smaller. It wouldn't be over the top to state that we've personally met close to one fourth of our members in person.
We've interacted with clients via e-mail several times, and on 5000bc, possibly hundreds of times. Even so, the community aspect only tends to work, if the client is willing to pitch in. And they only tend to pitch in, if their two questions are answered reasonably well.
Are the rest a lot like me?
Are they completely different from me?
If the client feels socially overwhelmed, they will not participate in the community. Social overwhelm doesn't come from abnormally large groups. Instead, as one client told me: “I feel about 15 people is all I can manage”.
Which is why you need to keep your clients to smaller groups, and for our workshops and training, we might take 35 people on the course, but split them into groups of 5-7 people.
That avoids the social overwhelm. Then, we give them structure to introduce themselves to each other and to get to know each other. They get to know the likes, the dislikes—and this reduces isolation. The reason why a society exists is because the group members don't feel extremely different from each other. This fosters a sense of identity with your tribe. And in doing so, it also answers the question: Are the rest a lot like me?
When a group is small, and get to know each other, they tend to stay longer The more the connectedness, the more they're likely to pitch in and help one another. Whether you're in business online, or have an offline service—say a clothing firm, or a bakery—there's always a chance to get your audience together.
Lulu Melon, the fitness clothing store, for instance, has yoga classes every weekend. Others like the lawyers I worked with, would have seminars and then cheese, and really good wine. And if you're sitting in a land of 64 million sheep, far away from the rest of the world, you can connect with your audience, as we have over the years.
To make this work in small groups, we use a ton of methods. Methods we've used so far:
A) Offline meet-ups
B) Online meet-ups
C) Courses online and workshops (but restricted to groups of 7 people)
D) Taking Action forum and Cave Guides
E) Chocolate from New Zealand
A) Offline meet-ups The toughest bit about workshops is all the preparation involved. It's exhilarating for me, as an extrovert, to conduct a workshop, but it's also a fair bit of work because we promise skill, not just a seminar filled with information.
Then, to make it harder for myself (and apologies for the “me, me, me”) is I promise to give the notes a whole month in advance of the event itself.
This sudden decision was only half the trouble. A workshop needs a proper venue, it needs catering, and because we're pedantic. We fly in at least three-four days in advance to make sure everything's just right.
And yet, workshops are astounding at creating communities. Clients who come to workshops get a greater ability and tend to participate more in the membership site at 5000bc. And yet, as you can tell, workshops are well, a lot of work.
Which is why we decided to have offline meet ups.
B) Online meet-ups A meetup doesn't need a venue. Any cafe will do, though we go to extra lengths to get a nice venue, where possible. It requires no notes, little or no planning and I can sleep well the night before. Believe it or not, a meet up achieves a similar result as a three or five-day workshop when it comes to community building. The meet-ups are usually about three hours long where everyone (and we restrict the numbers to about 15 people) talks to the others, but then I get asked dozens of questions (and I answer them all).
That session moves to a restaurant, where people spend two or three hours more, talking and enjoying the company of other entrepreneurs just like them. And in some cases, some have stuck around until dinner, and as you can see, it's a pretty long day for an introvert, but a glorious day for someone like me. Nonetheless, even if you were just to have a meet-up, as Dorothy does, that alone is worth the trouble.
Dorothy who? Dorothy Goudie, who founded Dorothy’s Fashions in 1982, decided not to renew the lease on her Neville Street women's boutique and retired at the age of 78. Even so, when the store was going, Dorothy would have her meet ups. It wasn't anything fancy. She'd personally invite her clients to an afternoon of tea and snacks. And in that tiny little act, she managed to get her clients together and form a community.
One of the best ways to get clients together is to have an offline meet-up, yet your clients may not be local. In which case, an online meet up is what's needed for sure.
Online meet-ups We live in New Zealand, and yet we travel the world, so it's relatively possible to have meet-ups from time to time. However, the offline meet-ups were so well received that it made perfect sense to take the concept online. That way we could have clients from different countries and varying time zones getting to know each other. Think of a meet up much like a webinar, especially since you're going to be using webinar software anyway. Getting clients together to just talk to each other and interact with you, is slightly different from meeting over beer and coffee, but there's no reason why it can't be fun.
Some clients will not turn on their video, some will not show up on audio either, but my guess is that almost everyone will say hello, at least on chat. To straddle east and west, we've had two separate time zones. This takes us to the third method of getting clients together—courses online. Most clients are delighted to meet in small groups. The bigger the group, the more they lurk. It's well worth having several sessions, rather than one big nameless, faceless group.
C) Courses online and workshops Courses are a great way to get clients to interact. As explained earlier, we start off with a group of anywhere between 25-35 people, but they're in groups of no larger than 7. Why 7? Because if a couple of people go missing for a few days, you still have a discussion going between 5 people.
If you have a smaller group, say of 5 people, and two go missing, it's just down to three. That's a bit too close for comfort, and hence 7 is a good number for a group. However, we've found that this number can then be pared down to as small as two per group. If you have a final couple of weeks, you can pair people off, and they work very well.
A similar concept can be used for on-site workshops creating bonding between the group as well as between two specific individuals. Is it possible for someone to request a move to another group? Of course, it is, and it doesn't happen often, but it's easy enough to make a move, if needed. Which takes us to the Taking Action group in 5000bc.
D) Taking Action forum and Cave Guides The big reason for joining a membership site like 5000bc is to get a consistent level of progress. Or in many cases, just to be heard and have someone to hear you out. That's what 5000bc's Taking Action forum is all about. Once again, it can become quite isolated, except for the fact that we pair up clients. Just having another person listening to what you've achieved helps you come back and get progress.
And yet again, it's a bond that forms between clients. There are also the Cave Guides and the Elves. The Cave Guides are there for those who've just joined and need a helping hand around 5000bc. The elves, on the other hand, come out and volunteer when we go on vacation thrice a year. They keep watch over the place and pitch in if help is needed.
E) Chocolate from New Zealand One of the most intimidating aspects of the Internet is the inability to connect with the owner of the site. It almost seems like you're interrupting them at some level when you write in. The chocolate bar sent with a hand written card, all the way from New Zealand makes a huge difference and a connection. Some people suggest we get a service to do this task. And perhaps print a card and send it off.
Yes, all that advice is very efficient, but let's focus on why we're doing all of this in the first instance. It's about connection. The moment the client gets a chocolate bar, they usually write in. Clients send photos of their family and of course the chocolate bar (but often just the wrapper).
You may sit around and drool at the thought of big groups In reality it's just that the grass looks greener on the other side. You can run a perfectly profitable and sustainable business. You get to stay close to your family, to travel when you need to, have lots of downtime and to run a business like that's not chasing its tail. Best of all you don't need a big group at all. You grow your audience organically and systematically. But most of all, fish at your feet first. Keep the clients you have and they'll help you grow as they grow too.
That's pretty much it.
Part 3: Why Smaller Lists Work Just As Well As Big Ones
Does a big list guarantee success? You know the answer to that one, already, don't you? Your small business isn't going to grow exponentially because you suddenly have a big list. Yet, in many ways, a smaller list has the potential to do better than a big list. Find out how to start ignoring the sound of “big lists” and work with a tiny list, instead.
Does a big list guarantee success? You know the answer to that one, already, don't you? Your small business isn't going to grow exponentially because you suddenly have a big list. Yet, in many ways a smaller list has the potential to do better than a big list. Find out how to start ignoring the sound of “big lists” and work with a tiny list, instead.
Is there really a cure for perfectionism? How can you make your work far superior in a shorter amount of time, often moving ahead of your peers? The answer lies in nature. In this episode we look at two different kind of plants: the monkey puzzle tree and the campion flower. The monkey puzzle tree stands for perfection, but the campion flower is able to make 120 dramatic changes while the monkey puzzle struggles with perfection. Interesting? Find out more in this episode and get rid of your perfection sooner than you think.
Read the article online: https://www.psychotactics.com/use-procrastination/overcome-perfection
You've probably heard of the Monkey Puzzle tree. The Monkey Puzzle tree is a conifer that grows to 40 metres (130 feet) and may live for hundreds of years. Yet, there's a bit of a problem because the tree doesn't reach sexual maturity until it's 40 years old. Compare the Monkey Puzzle tree with a Campion flower and the flower looks puny at just a foot or two. But here's where it all gets very interesting.
The Campion flower reproduces within just four months. This means that while the Monkey Puzzle tree goes through a single generation, the Campion flower goes through 120 generations. And with every generation, there's a possibility of a genetic mutation. That mutation that may give it some slight super power to help it survive and thrive. The speed of the lifecycle means one very crucial thing: The species can adapt to rapid changes in the environment. There's a far greater chance of them getting better, hardier, different and possibly superior.
Perfection, on the other hand, doesn't allow for speedy turnarounds Many of us like the idea of perfection, toiling away at our work, in order to reach a seemingly impossible goal. And like the Monkey Puzzle tree, we put ourselves at a disadvantage that's may seem hard to measure. But in reality, it's relatively easier to measure, and that's exactly what we've done on our courses like the Article Writing Course; or when training our niece, Marsha.
We've seen speed work better when learning to cook or learning to draw cartoons. And yet this isn't a clarion call for shoddiness.
In this series we'll explore the importance of speed vs. perfection, while also giving a nod towards really outstanding work. But is it all about speed? Doesn't a lack of speed play its role? All of this information is about to follow, so stay tuned, little Campion flower.
How speedy progress reduces drain on energy Marsha, my niece, was struggling in maths in Year 4 and seemed to be almost at the bottom of the class. Four years later, she won a distinction in maths for being among the top performers in the class.
This year (five years later), teachers routinely call on her to evaluate and help with corrections of tests, plus she often gets called to the board to demonstrate how she solves a problem.
And you might have an inkling how Marsha was able to make this dramatic turnaround Yes, there's hard work, and there's good mentoring. In fact, on IXL alone (which is an app for maths learning), Marsha has solved over 18,000 problems. Staggering as that figure might seem, there are two ways to get anything done. The first way is to be slow and methodical. The second way is to beat the clock.
In a Psychotactics course, clients are trained to beat the clock When you're conducting a live course at a venue, it's easy to monitor what clients are doing. However, the moment you conduct a course online, it's impossible to tell how much time and effort is being put into a project. You don't get to see the drafts, the cancellations and the huge volume of edits.
All you ever see is the finished work. However, on Psychotactics courses, we have a simple bunch of questions that need to be answered every single day.
One of the questions are: how much time did you take to finish this project? In order to answer the question, it's important for the client to monitor the time. Which is why it concerned me deeply when one of the clients wrote her answer, after doing her article writing assignment.
“Three hours”.
Three hours? Three hours for an article? I'd imagined my instructions were clear enough. That you needed to get the job done as quickly as possible, but I wasn't counting on the perfection monster. It's not hard to imagine the state of that client.—let's call her Candidate No.1. Perhaps she started the assignment at 9 pm, after an incredibly hard day.
At midnight, the article is still not perfect, but she's too tired to argue with her drooping eyelids. She hits “publish” and the article is done. On the other hand, we have Candidate No. 2 who rigidly follows instructions and stops typing the moment the clock strikes the 90 minute mark.
Whose article will be superior? The article of Candidate No. 1 or No.2? The answer is that they're both not very good. When you're just starting to learn to draw, write, dance or draw cartoons, you know approximately where your ultimate goal lies. As broadcaster, Ira Glass says: You have style. You know what the finished product looks like but there's this gap between what you would like to see, and what you can produce right now.
Hence, both the articles are usually very early versions of a good article and nowhere close to amazing. Yet one person has taken three hours while the other has stopped diligently at 90 minutes.
Who's going to be more tired? Who's going to make more mistakes as the fatigue sets in? Who's going to be struggling both at work and to complete the assignment the next day? And what about the day after next and the day that follows it?
The Campion flower comes to mind, doesn't it? It's all very fine to aspire to be a Monkey Puzzle tree and soar at 100 feet or more. However, the Campion flower concept is what we all need to get there.
Which is exactly what Renuka did with Marsha's maths tuition. Instead of considering her situation, which was pretty dire four-five years ago, she simply gave her an assignment and used a timer.
Invariably the mistakes would soar at the start, but all the mistakes were made in a precise amount of time, giving Marsha, a chance to recover. The brain learns a lot while doing the task, but the downtime is just as, if not more vital, in the learning and implementation process.
Whether it's cooking a meal or completing a project, you should be a Campion flower This goal is important, because it allows you to make a huge number of mistakes. Skill, or talent, is really a reduction of errors, so you need to make the errors and then reduce or eliminate them completely. If you take your time over a project, you can only make a fixed no. of errors.
Which is why, on a course, on in a workshop, I encourage clients to do their assignments quickly, rather than perfectly. Which means that if a client were to do their assignment early in the morning, they could get a correction, possibly many corrections within an hour or so.
By their break time they could fix their minor errors while having a cup of coffee. Then at noon, another correction later, they could fine tune their errors (after I corrected their third or fourth tweak of the assignment).
By tea time they could have gone through four or five drafts, and with every submission, they'd have fewer errors to fix. However, only the first submission would be lengthy. The submissions through the day would be shorter, and we'd be tweaking nuances which don't take too much energy or focus.
Now compare this with ol' Monkey Puzzle client The client who waits all day, mulling and toiling over his work. When he finally submits it, late at night, he misses out on all those nuances, but more importantly from an evolutionary point of view, he's barely budged at all. Ironically it's the speed that has created more errors, more genetic modifications to the skill.
If you're trying to be perfect, your Monkey Puzzle submission is the worst possible way to go about it.
Energy is crucial when working on any project Creating versions, or tiny bits, to a fixed deadline and moving on to the next version might seem like a pretty idiotic method to go about your work.
However, the main point of this article is that your work will not improve dramatically if you put 200% more time, or 300% more time. If, on the other hand, you create more versions of the same job, you will almost always see a fairly dramatic improvement.
Even when we are struggling to learn or implement something, we are almost always able to come back and do the same thing better, the second time around. Let's say you're recording a YouTube video or a screencast. Not one of us is surprised to find the third or fourth version to be superior.
If you're asked to take four different pictures of an object, you'll find yourself composing the picture a tiny bit better in the second, third, or fourth round.
Even in the movies, they do many takes, not because they have money and time to blow, but because the versions improve with every take. Instead of trying to labour onwards with your first version, it's almost better to move on to the second and third and fourth—and to a deadline.
The problem is we often look at projects as a whole For instance, you see yourself as writing ONE article, doing ONE podcast, writing ONE book. However, the bigger picture is far more important. What if you had to write an article a day? Or a book a month? What would you do differently? The changes you'd make would all be energy-dependent.
You'd work in short, intense bursts, improving as you went along. And you'd proceed to create a greater volume of work, and far, far superior work than your peers.
Doesn't painstaking work count? Yes it does. You want to do outstanding work and take loads of time over it. However, just working as a perfectionist, means you're going to just manage a single version of your work.
If two people: Person A and Person B were to start the same assignment on the same day, the person that lavished more attention to their work would have a much better result.
However, that advantage would not stay in place for long. Within a few weeks, Person B would be far ahead of Person A. And just remember one thing. What you consider to be imperfect is often just your own perception.
If the client or the person receiving your work is happy with it, there's really not a reason in the world to be a perfectionist. If you truly want to do outstanding work, you have to be Person B most of the time, occasionally slipping back to your Person A perfection level.
The greater the output, the better your work is going to be, especially if you take feedback as you move along. Marsha moved at a high speed, but the program always gave her feedback.
The students on a course move quickly and they get feedback just as rapidly, thus allowing them to make big changes. The painstaking work is great when you have the luxury of time. Ironically, that time never seems to be on the horizon, so we have to improve even as we battle deadlines.
One more point and we're done I really struggled to write this article. I wrote one version, then cancelled it. Then another version, and that too was deleted. In fact, I ditched well over 1000-1500 words including some really nice stories because I realised they didn't fit.
However, I had a deadline for this article. And right now, I'm seven minutes over the deadline. Which is why I must stop. In short, you make your revisions, learn from the feedback, but then there's a deadline that you can only overshoot by a tiny margin.
After which you have to hit “publish”. And that's exactly what I'm going to do in about three seconds.
Three, two, one…
Epilogue Let's face it. If you consider yourself to be a perfectionist, well, you'd have spent almost all your life being told, or telling yourself that you're a perfectionist. You're probably trying to shake that habit, but it's easy to see why it's easier to stay in your comfort zone.
Well, here's what psychologists suggest If you want to break out of your comfort zone, you stretch yourself ever so slightly. If you're labouring over a single article for several hours, how about spending half the time getting to the same goal?
Your work may not be as perfect as you hoped, but it gives you a chance to get feedback and to improve your next article. If you're struggling to do one cartoon (correctly, of course), how about drawing just two, getting feedback and drawing even more in the given time?
It's easy for an article like this to suggest that you need to take a big leap That massive jump may not be possible. Instead, take a smaller one—just a slight stretch goal. Set yourself the time in which you'll complete the job, stop, and get feedback. Then, tomorrow, do the same.
If you follow this simple formula you'll find yourself less exhausted and with more energy. However, the biggest benefit of all is you'll become far better and far quicker at what you're doing.
And that's what you wanted anyway, didn't you? You wanted perfection! So there you go!
P.S. Oh, and print a picture of the monkey puzzle tree! Stick it on a prominent place where you can see it, just in case you forget. And don't look for the perfect picture. Any picture will do.
Next Up: How to use procrastination to your advantage
Are habits a matter of routine? You'd think so, wouldn't you? Yet, there's a bigger factor in play that goes beyond a cue and routine. It's called the Reward. There's just one problem: how do you put a reward? And how do you know it's the right reward? What should you do if you want to motivate a client, instead? All these answers wait for you in this episode, plus a hidden factor that goes beyond cue, routine and reward. Check it out.
How do you make your articles or sales letters more interesting? Analogies and stories always increase the drama and attention span. Yet, it's hard to find and craft interesting stories on a regular basis. Or is it? Find out how you can use three simple and effective ways to craft a ton of great stories and analogies.
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Writing Salesletters or Articles? How to Ditch The “Tired” Analogy I remember how I always groaned when my father started to tell his story of “how he drew a kingfisher”, when he was just a boy in school.
I loved the story, but I'd heard it so many times, that the thought of escape always crossed my mind when he'd start up that story. The reader experiences a similar “groan moment” the minute you start up on an analogy that they've heard before.
Analogies like how you learn to ride a bicycle, drive a car—these are tired analogies These analogies are boring for the reader, no matter if you use it in a sales letter or in your article. So how you decide when to ditch the analogy? Or better still, how do you improve it so it's not so “tired” after all?
Let's take an example In the book, The Brain Audit, there's an analogy of standing near the airport carousel waiting for your bags to be unloaded from the flight. So what's interesting about that situation? Well, for one it's not something that you hear about a lot. It doesn't have that ring of “when you learned to ride a bicycle”. And so, by merely changing the example, your analogy becomes slightly more interesting.
But what if we wanted to make it even more interesting? This is where the power of the personal story comes in. Imagine yourself waiting for the bag. What happens? What happens next? What ups and downs do you go through just waiting for those silly ol' bags? In The Brain Audit, the bags aren't just bags—they're “red” bags.
And there aren't just “red” bags, but there are “seven red bags”. And the story rolls out where one of the bags goes missing. As you can tell, this isn't just some tired analogy, but something that's slightly riveting. You want to know what happens next. You want to know how all of this then reconnects to the story.
So the key to writing better analogies is to write a personal story first Put yourself at the airport. What did you do? What happened next? And next? And yes, I know I said this already in the last paragraph, but can we have some ups and downs as well as you're relating the analogy? In fact, the moment you dip into a personal story, even a tired story of riding a bicycle comes to life.
About the best way to sidestep a boring analogy is to use a personal story. In fact, let's take an example of a personal story.
Only an idiot would learn to cycle like me. Most people find the safest, flattest area to learn how to cycle. Not me. I decided to learn on slopes filled with red mud. Every time I fell—and I fell a lot—the mud would graze me badly. And of course, learning on a slope means you're tempting gravity all the time.
Yet, long after the wounds have healed, the learning of how to ride the bike has stayed with me.
But what if you don't want to tell personal stories? Well, turn the personal story into a “YOU” analogy instead. Tell the personal story but without using “I”. So the story would work like this:
Why would anyone be insane enough to find the most difficult cycling course?
Most people find the safest, flattest area to learn how to cycle. But imagine you decided to learn on slopes filled with red mud. Every time you fell—and you do fall a lot—the mud would graze you badly. And of course, learning on a slope means you're tempting gravity all the time.
Yet, long after the wounds have healed, the learning of how to ride the bike has stayed with you.
Notice how the analogy isn't tired, isn't personal and still seems like an amazing analogy? If you're ever reaching for a tired analogy, the first recourse would be to simply find something that's unusual—like the “seven red bags” story. However, an even better strategy is to write a personal story because personal stories have this inbuilt oomph factor. Should you feel shy about revealing the personal story to your audience, all you have to do is simply tweak it a bit. Put in the “you” into the story and you have a great analogy.
Analogies can be used not just in articles, but also in books, presentations and sales letters Some of the best writers and marketers know the power of the story and analogy. And they use it very effectively to drive home several points throughout their marketing or editorial material. And they mix it up a lot with analogies and stories, while the amateurs simply write yucky, boring stuff.
Tired analogies are for lazy writers.
Be not sloppy. Be not boring.
Put in the power of story in your analogy and let the “groan” go away, today!
Next Up: The Power of Story Telling
Do you know how to put that Zing-Kapow in your articles (with story telling)?
Find out right here in this three-part series on Storytelling!
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Why do clients leave? It seems odd, doesn't it? When you ask a client why they join, they seem to suggest it is all about information and content, but then they inexplicably leave. They seem to suggest they need either better content, or they need time to implement the content. But that's rarely the case, as we've found out.
The need is far greater and we've all experienced it. Clients leave for a very obvious reason that you're never going to find in analytics software or surveys. Listen to find out more.
Read the podcast online: Why Clients Leave.
Ok, so it has always bothered me why clients leave. And when that thought crossed my mind, I was sitting in the cafe—the very cafe I'd been avoiding for well over a year or more. So now I had two thoughts: why do clients leave? And why did I return to the cafe? In case you're wondering, the answer is not “coffee”. And if wasn't the coffee, then it had to be something else, right?
But let's leave the cafe for a second and go online—say to a membership site, instead Let's say you belong to a membership site and the membership fee comes up for renewal. Why do you stay? Or why do you leave? The obvious answer is: it's the product or the service, right? And yet when we look at membership sites all over the place, there's really no shortage of content.
No matter how grotty the site, there's usually way more content than you can browse, let alone consume. Videos, audio, articles, reports—they all swarm around you with increasing intensity. If the content were really the problem, you have no problem, do you?
So let's take another angle There's too much content, and you really can't absorb it all. You've had your fill, and you now need to buckle down and focus on your business. Even if you have received advice and answers to your questions; even if your business has indeed gone ahead, you still need some breathing space to implement all of that information.
We say it, but we don't mean it, do we? None of us has time. We didn't have time yesterday, or last week, last year, or even in the last decade. Time marches on to the sound of a jiggling rumba beat, and there's no way we can stop that time parade. So it can't be the focus or the time off, because the moment we've left the site, that information will cease to exist, but some other stuff will replace it.
And that's when I finished the foam of the coffee, and I got my “bfoto” Yup, that's short for “blinding flash of the obvious”. People, clients—they don't leave because they need time to focus; or because they're not getting enough content. Most of the time they don't even leave because they need the money. Unless the relationship with the site or the coach is just crappy, it makes more sense to get good advice and pay the fee. If it's not the money, or the content, or the time, what is it?
It is the “people”. To get back to the cafe story above, we were regulars at the cafe about two years ago. However, back then, we knew a lot of the people at the cafe and by people I mean the staff. Then the manager, Justine, left and took some of the staff with her. Suddenly the place wasn't so appealing, even though nothing much had changed.
Two years slipped by, and we avoided the place. One day early this year, the current manager invited us in. She assured us we'd get great service and the coffee we were used to. And suddenly we're home again. We got to know the current staff, they know us, and it's like nothing's changed.
The bfoto—or blinding flash of the obvious is just “people” When asked why we buy products or services, we often give a logical reason. We reel out the features or the benefits, but in reality, it's the people. It's the reason you and I have a preference for a particular petrol station, when all petrol stations have the same product, at approximately the same price.
It's the reason why we don't care for rotating hairdressers or barbers, choosing as far as possible to go to the same one every single time. I know it's evident that people matter, but how does this play out when you consider the field of marketing? And what are you supposed to do if clients are starting to leave even when you're doing your best?
The plot thickens. Stay tuned. We noticed something very odd in the courses we conduct online
The online courses, like the Article Writing Course, is remarkably difficult, and rightly so. You're trying to compress a skill that usually takes years, into just 12 weeks. This intensity means you're going to have several sleepless nights, have to do assignments, interact with the group.
Wait, interact with the group? Isn't learning about the teacher and the student? What's this group nonsense about? And if you look at the data, the data speaketh plainly. It says: those that interact with the group do two things consistently. The first being they finish the course and show a far higher skill level than those who don't interact with their group.
The second point is that clients, having done one course, then show up for a second course; then a third; buy many products and services; come to offline events, and so on. The ones that don't interact with the group, and merely do their assignments don't exactly fall off the face of the Earth, but they're—and I hesitate to say this—less skilled and more likely to leave, or find it harder to go on (for some reason or the other).
Africans knew this a long time ago In Africa there's a saying: If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go with a group. However, when you look at the saying, or the course, or the cafe, what you see repeatedly is the interaction with people. We are really like a herd of elephants that want to travel together, as far as possible and not some lonely leopard sitting by itself on a tree in the middle of the Himalayan foothills.
We want to be together, or at least to know each other. The blinding flash merely is that if you don't get people to become part of the group, they will get less of a benefit, pick up fewer skills and finally find they need to leave.
We've found this phenomenon to play out repeatedly in our business If clients come to a workshop, they meet. And at Psychotactics we don't have this thousand person, 150 session seminar. We have boutique workshops, which means you don't take notes; but instead, you work on your project and the projects of the group (yes, here comes the group again).
And in doing so, we find that clients come back repeatedly not just for the workshops, but also for other products and services. They've connected with Renuka and me, that's for sure, but they've also connected with each other.
Which is why we started having paid meet ups You noticed the term “paid”, right? We tried having free meet ups, and they just fizzled and died because it's easy to look out the window, see the rain and climb back into paid. A paid meet up leads to commitment, and you get a 90-100% turnout. Anyway, the meet ups had the same effect. The more people met, the more they knew each other and the more they then interacted in 5000bc. The interesting bit is that they didn't just interact with others they'd met, but with the rest of the members in 5000bc.
And as you'd expect, a phenomenally large number of those we've met in person are still members of 5000bc. Some have been members for ten years, some have been around for 15, while others are newer. It isn't to suggest that longtime members are people we've met with or interacted with on a live course. If you're looking for a magic trick, it's right in front of your eyes: it's the people.
What should we do at Psychotactics to increase this interaction? What are we currently doing? Quite a few things. The first is the chocolate bar, the second are the e-mails, the third is the Taking Action forum, the fourth is the welcomes when you join—but instead of a list, let's find out how it all works. And yes, let's find out what else we can do because there's a real downside when a client leaves or doesn't participate.
If you look way back to the tribe, you'll notice that every person in the tribe could bring knowledge to the fireplace. When that elder didn't participate, the group was poorer. Or if a participating elder died, that group's learning and interaction were greatly impoverished. Going alone sounds pretty cool, but it's terrible for the group, and it's crappy for the individual.
We're not done yet. I'll be back to explain how we use and how we can use the people interaction for mutual benefit. Oh, and you know how it's frustrating when you don't have examples, lots and lots of examples, well, “don't you worry”, there will be examples galore. Let's move to the next part, shall we? But before we do, let's take a little detour into what makes people happy.
Robert Waldinger is the director of a project that should have been abandoned a few decades ago. He's the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which is possibly the longest study of adult life that's ever been done. Over the past 75 years, the study tracked the life of over 724 men, year after year, deeply digging into their homes, their lives, their health and one more thing. They were also asked how their life stories would turn out.
A study like this is extremely rare, because funding tends to dry up, the researchers get bored or the people involved in the study die. Yet this study is still going and still has about 10% of the original participants still alive and well into their 90s.
And what did they learn? The real happiness came from something extremely boring: good relationships. Yup, that was it. 80% of today's millennials, when surveyed, want to be rich and at least 50% want to be famous. Yet, the thing that people figure out over time, is seemingly mundane. It's that we crave relationships most of all. People who are socially connected to each other are physically healthier and live longer and happier lives. Secondly, the quality of those relationships matter. Toxic relationships don't count for much.
And the third big lesson that they learned about relationships is that good relationships don't just protect our bodies, they protect our brains. It turns out that being in a securely attached relationship to another person in your is protective, that the people who are in relationships where they really feel they can count on the other person in times of need, those people's memories stay sharper longer.
But what has all of this got to do with your business? It's the “bfoto”: the blinding flash of the obvious. We all want stuff, don't we? We want to be rich and famous, but most of all, we want to feel wanted. All those phrases of “no one is an island” or “love me or hate me, but don't ignore me” comes into play. And this feeling of being wanted goes right to the very root of our happiness.
UC Berkeley psychologist and author Dacher Keltner. When Pixar was doing research for the movie, Inside Out, they needed guidance from an expert on emotions and they turned to Dacher Keltner.
Anyway, here's what Keltner said in an interview with Shane Parrish from Farnam Street.com. “The connection, you know, happiness, our sense that life is going pretty well, is strongly driven by three things in the vast scientific literature now. One is the positive emotions we’ve been talking about, like mirth and laughter and love and sympathy. Another is how you handle stress and negative emotion. The third is social connection“.
We are so focused on adding content, playing with technology and dancing with keywords that we forget to work on the most basic (and most wanted) human emotions of connectedness. Advertising and great salesletters are important to get the client to become part of your clientele or community, but it's what you do next that makes all the difference.
Keeping clients is—at least to my mind—the most important part of a function of how you go about connecting them, getting them to talk to each other and help each other. And voilà we are still going to have some people that leave, but by and large, people want to stay.
This concept applies to every job most of us have ever held Most of us get into a job for economic or prestigious reasons. Even so, even when the money or prestige is great, we feel like chumps and long to find another job if the company isn't great. We long for the people and the connections and to be treated with dignity and respect. This “bfoto” is something almost all of us have experienced if we've been in a job somewhere. And it applies just as profoundly in your business.
But how do we go about creating this community and connectedness? Let's find out what we are doing at Psychotactics and maybe you can add to the list as well. it would be great if you added what you're doing, to the list as well. And why you're doing it. But first, let's check out what we've done so far and how it has helped.
Next Step: Have you seen your customer back out of a deal at the very last minute?The Brain Audit is a complete system that enables you to understand what's going on inside the brain of your customer. It's a system that is based on a deep understanding of how our mind works.
The very moment you announce a waiting list, it seems like a nerve-wracking decision. Is it going to drive clients away?
Or will it work?
The odds are it will fail if you don't consider “segregation” and “creating attraction”. This episode shows you exactly what those two terms mean when it comes to waiting lists. Let's roll on to the episode, shall we?
Click here to read online: Why Waiting Lists Fail
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Commitment Would you wait 14 years to join a Disney Club?
Apparently so, because Club 33, in Disneyland has a 14-year waiting list. Originally intended as a place for Walt Disney to entertain investors, the club now has a nose-bleed $25,000 joining fee plus a recurring $10,000 a year membership fee. Oh, and you still have to pay your tab for the food and drink.
But surely all this waiting is excessively nutty behaviour, isn't it? We wouldn't ever get obsessive about a waiting list, would we? And yet we do get on a waiting list all the time, though on a modest scale. You may not think of going to your hairdresser as being on a waiting list, but if you've made an appointment, that's just what it is.
The reservation you made at the restaurant next week, that's also a waiting list. That flight in October, the hotel bookings—they're all waiting lists. Waiting lists are everywhere, but we don't quite seem to notice because they're part of our everyday lives.
And when you book or put down your name, the commitment increases Or does it? If we look at the hotel you booked, there's a reason for that specific choice. The flight, the tennis match, the restaurant booking—they're all a form of commitment. Some of them you might need to pay for, in advance.
Some of them, you pay for later, but the reason for being on that list is because you and I seek a level of satisfaction. However, we are more likely to show up, pay for, or join something if we're already on a list than if we're not on that list.
Nonetheless, a waiting list by itself doesn't work. If all you do is slap on a form on your website, it's unlikely to get any attention. However, if you create the demand for it, the corresponding commitment goes up as well, because potential clients have both something to gain and to lose.
If they get into Club 33, for instance, they have additional status, plus other goodies such as immediate fast passes, upgrades on Disney cruises and behind-the-scenes tours of Disneyland attractions. If your eyes glazed over the attraction—and the loss factor, in the case of Club 33—then clearly you're not going to get on that list even if you owned half of L.A.
At this point we are probably clear, a factor of attraction is what we're going to need to get a commitment of any kind In the case of a famed club, restaurant or event, the attraction can be a foregone conclusion. In the case of your course, workshop or book launch, you need to spell out the detail of why the client should even bother getting on that list. However, you don't have to list everything that the client is likely to get.
Clients are pretty smart and know a good deal when they see one, but can quickly get overwhelmed with dozens of reasons. Instead, picking one reason why someone should get on the list is extremely important. For instance, even with the home study versions, we expressly communicate that there are only 25 copies. When a to-be buyer realises the scarcity factor, they understand they can't get the product any other way and hence sign up.
But what if you're a complete newbie? If you are, pay close attention to the previous paragraph. Even a completely unknown business can focus on one big idea that will convince a client to commit. Let's say you've just decided to sell a physical product like a water bottle. There's nothing fancy about water bottles, but let's say your bottle is designed to enable the person know for sure, how much water they've consumed in a day. That's a single point.
It solves a problem, and the potential client is likely to be more eager to want to know when the product is out so they can buy it. Or let's say you have a camera—a video camera—that is likely to help you edit video as if you were operating a two or three camera set up. That one point is likely to get most people who shoot video to pay very close attention to your list. As you'd expect, it works just as well for a training session or a digital product.
You'll need to pick ONE point from your product that's super-compelling. Let's say, for instance, I'm laughing a book on “talent” for example, or a book on how to “make nutritious Indian food, 10 minutes after you get home”, I'd be harping on a single point. And that point alone without a ton of details about the book is likely to be enough to get you on a list.
Once you're on a list, it doesn't mean you'll go through with the commitment Many reservations get cancelled and changed along the way. However, the greater the loss factor, the more likely the client will go through the entire process. Therefore, even if you're only able to create attraction at this point, you'd want to think about the downside as well.
A person headed to a hard-to-reserve restaurant is more likely to clear all obstructions so that they can make it for dinner. A person that is keen to do a course will wake up at midnight just to make sure they sign up.
It might sound a bit like science fiction to you right now, but remember that all businesses that have that kind of demand today, were once struggling just like everyone else. They systematically put the attraction/loss factor, increased the scarcity and then commitment followed soon after.
In case you missed it: Listen to Part 1: 3 Elements That Create Waiting Lists that Work
A waiting list seems to be both a barrier and an enticement The problem with waiting lists is that they fail, and fail miserably if you don't get the elements right. So what are the elements that contribute to a really smart waiting list? Let's find out in this episode, shall we?
Click to read online: 3 Elements That Create Waiting Lists that Work: Episode 183
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Why do most of us prefer Friday to Sunday? It's odd when you think about it, right? Friday is a working day (in most countries), and Sunday is a day of rest. Yet we wait with baited anticipation for Fridays. The reason is probably apparent to you by now. Friday clearly and consistently holds the promise of the weekend that is to follow. We all know what follows Sunday, don't we?
Anticipation—that's one of the big reasons that you need to have a waiting list Anticipation creates an enormous amount of drama in our minds. If you have to wait for something, there's a pretty good chance you're going to value the product or service a lot more than if you hit some magic button and got an instant delivery.
We create waiting lists for three core reasons: The first reason is the anticipation
The second is to create a barrier
And finally to get a commitment.
Let's take a deeper dive, shall we?
1: Anticipation In 2010, some British ministers came up with an incredibly interesting, if slightly preposterous idea.
If you were going to apply for British citizenship, you had to learn to queue. Phil Woolas, the immigration minister at the time was dead serious when he suggested that to-be citizens would need to learn to queue. He said: “The simple act of taking one's turn is one of the things that holds our country together. It is very important that newcomers take their place in queues whether it is for a bus or a cup of tea. It is central to the British sense of fair play, and it is also better for everyone. Huge resentment is caused when people push in.”
There you go—anticipation in a nutshell And you know something, the British are spot on when it comes to creating anticipation. We like stuff better when we have to wait. Tali Sharot, associate professor of cognitive neuroscience in the Department of Experimental Psychology at University College London gives a simple example of how anticipation works.
Regardless of the outcome, the pure act of anticipation makes us happy The behavioural economist George Lowenstein asked students in his university to imagine getting a passionate kiss from a celebrity, any celebrity. Then he said, “How much are you willing to pay to get a kiss from a superstar if the kiss was delivered immediately, in three hours, in 24 hours, in three days, in one year, in 10 years?
He found that the students were willing to pay the most not to get a kiss immediately, but to get a kiss in three days. They were willing to pay extra to wait. Now they weren't willing to wait a year or 10 years; no one wants an ageing celebrity. But three days seemed to be the optimum amount.
So why is that? Well if you get the kiss now, it's over and done with. But if you get the kiss in three days, well that's three days of jittery anticipation, the thrill of the wait. The students wanted that time to imagine where is it going to happen, how is it going to happen. Anticipation made them happy.
A waiting list is all about anticipation, isn't it? No matter whether you're about to sell a product, service or training, it would do us all a bit of good to create a waiting list. And waiting lists work for a simple reason: it creates a feeling of scarcity—even if you're not exactly well known in your field. Take the example of Joseph Pilates, for example. When Pilates started out his studio, he wasn't just an unknown; he was also an immigrant to the US with a German accent.
That didn't exactly stop Pilates from creating a waiting list. He started his exercise regimen near a niche audience—dancers. Despite being brand new in the business, Pilates never agreed to see a client right away. The client was always put on a waiting list, a few days or a week or two after the initial contact. Waiting in that “queue” as it were, created anticipation for the client. When the day rolled along, they were eager to get started.
In the case of a kiss, that anticipation needed to be relatively quick However, that's not always the case. A few years ago, I bought a cigar-shaped Nakaya pen from Japan. If you're into fountain pens, you can bow now, because the Nakaya is easily one of the most revered pens. Solar orange in colour, the nib is fashioned to your writing style, and yes, the nib is made from 22 karat gold. It comes with its own fancy box and a whole lot of razzmatazz justifying its price.
And as you'd expect, you can't just walk in and buy a Nakaya. That would ruin everything, wouldn't it? The joy of owning a Nakaya is in telling this story. The story of how I was told I'd have to wait for at least nine months. Nine months turned to a year, and if I'm not mistaken, it took yet another six months to get the pen. By the time it showed up, I had almost given up on ever owning it.
Which brings us to an important point of anticipation Some anticipation can be relatively quick; some months long. The main factor is to keep the flame alive while the client is waiting. Waiting for the Nakaya was partly interesting, partly a pain. I didn't get any updates on what was happening, and as a client, I had to follow up. That's not good practice, especially since the delivery was an unspecified date. Even if the delivery time is well into the future, it's a good idea to keep the client in at least a mild state of anticipation, or the whole experience can quickly turn to irritation.
Pilates' system wasn't complex He created a list. Anyone of us can do that. Whether you use a notebook, appointment software or some form online, the first task is to create a list. That list alone creates the first level of anticipation. And believe me, it makes a big difference to how clients perceive your offering.
Take for example the home study courses we have at Psychotactics One of the downsides of creating content is that there's this eagerness, almost a lust for creating new products. It's so much fun to create yet another course, yet another product, yet another service. And it's inevitable that as you produce new products, the older products—powerful as they are— seem to become very Cinderella-like. They don't get much attention because all you're doing is promoting the new and fancy program or workshop or app.
Well, in 2016 I overdid things a bit. I rewrote the entire Article Writing Course so that it was now in Version 2.0. However, I like to do things “live”, which meant that I rewrote all the notes, re-recorded all the audio, and moved around whole sections of the course. Stuff that was in week 8 moved to week 2 and let's just say it was like trying to refuel a plane while flying it.
Anyway, that fried me a bit and I couldn't do any more courses that year Which is when Renuka and I sat down and decided to bring out the stuff that we'd already done. The uniqueness course, the copywriting course, and yes, since I wasn't going to conduct the Article Writing Course in 2017, that too went on the list of courses to be sold. We then created waiting lists.
And just because we're weird, we kept the list down to a fixed number. Which meant we'd sell only 25 copies. As you can tell, the scarcity works quite well, and the sales of the product replaced me. Instead of me doing a course, just the combination of the waiting list, the anticipation and the scarcity created enough revenue so I could do something else instead of conducting a course.
If you're just starting out, Pilates is an excellent beacon in the dark Yes, go and do some Pilates at a class, but also pay attention to how he created anticipation by making people queue in an imaginary line. And that's the first point to consider when designing a waiting list; the first element to put in place. Create the anticipation.
However, a waiting list is an instant barrier. Is that a problem? Or a blessing? And can it blow up in our faces? Let's find out.
2: Barrier If you host a valuable seminar and charge a lot, will more people show up? Or is it better to have one free of cost?
Back in March 2007, we had the chance to test the free option. We'd decided we wanted to give back to New Zealand because we got so much from this strange and lovely country. We decided we'd have free marketing events under the brand name “The Learning Rock”. You could come to the event; there would be no up-sell; no charge and not even the Psychotactics logo anywhere in sight. In effect, we decided to spend over $1000 a year (and these were the costs of hiring the venue), without expecting anything in return.
We had a room capacity of 40 people. Would enough participants turn up or would the room be half empty? The answer lay in the barrier that needed to be put in place. For one, the event was at 7:32 am. Not 7:33, not 7:34. The doors were fastened as though with superglue once we got to the start time. The attendees were put on a list, and if they showed up, they'd get a chance to be on the priority list. If on the other hand, they didn't show up they'd be taken off the priority list. All of these barriers should have put people from making the long drive into the city. Instead, the room was packed to the brim, every single time.
Barriers play a significant role in creating a filtered waiting list It's not like there aren't waiting lists online, but having a barrier of sorts makes a big difference to the quality of the clients. It's easy to believe that a barrier isn't much use if you're selling something like products or digital products, but it matters. In our case, we don't sell products, but we do sell information products. When there's a barrier in place (and we insist on clients reading The Brain Audit), they tend to buy a home study product and finish it. This behaviour carries on to online courses like the Article Writing Course. The course is incredibly tough and should have a high dropout rate. Instead, the opposite scenario unfolds. Over 90% of the clients get right to the finish line and get the skill of writing.
Having a barrier in place is one of the first things to consider when starting up a waiting list The size of the barrier doesn't matter. What matters is that there's some sort of barrier in place. You could get the client to read a few pages of a report. Or you could get them to fill in a detailed form. Or there could be a small fee—say $10—that creates a barrier. The waiting list itself is a barrier, but to make it, even more, wanted, add one more level, and you get a far better quality of clientele.
However, easily the coolest reason to have a waiting list is, so you don't have to bug clients who are not interested in your product or service. Having a waiting list creates a nice opt-in and commitment factor.
Next-Up: Listen to—Why Waiting Lists Fail.
How do you instantly grow your small business? How do you become “rich” overnight? These are the frustrations we have to deal with, almost every single day as we wade through the temptations of the internet.
It almost seems like a lottery, doesn't it? But people win the lottery, don't they? And so we fancy our odds too. Yet, there's a hare vs tortoise race in play here and usually, it's the hare that seems to burn out.
How can you enjoy the race and have a good life and yes, become an “overnight success?”. Find out in this episode.
Click here to read online here: How to Become An Overnight Success: Episode 182
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Winning the lottery is like flushing money down the toilet, right? Richard Lustig doesn't agree. Despite odds of 175 million to one, Lustig has won the lottery seven times, and claims he's won over a million dollars so far. When you hear the repeated success of Lustig, it's easy to miss the sub-text in his wins. The first point of the sub-text is that he's been playing the lottery since 1992—that's well over 25 years. Plus he has a strategy. He goes after the smaller prizes, like the $100,000 lotteries, completely avoiding the $40 million jackpots.
Are you going after the $40 million jackpots in your business? You know what I mean, right? Let's say you've managed to make the break from a job to your own business. That move, wonderful as it is, hasn't brought a lot of relief because you still have to commute to and from meetings with clients. And now you're keen on hitting the jackpot. Well, what's the jackpot? You want to reduce or eliminate that commute completely, don't you? And while it would be ideal, that's not what a “gambling man” would do.
A “gambling man” would reduce their odds of losing. Instead of five days of commuting, maybe you can whittle it down to four. Four may not sound like much until you get into the percentages—yup a 20% increase in home-time, isn't it? In the months to follow, reduce that by yet another day, and you have a 40% improvement over the start of the year.
A similar sort of phenomenon plays out when it comes to earning revenue online Let's say you're earning twenty three dollars online. What next? Oh, that's easy. Most people would like to go from twenty three to two hundred thousand and twenty three. It sounds bizarre right now, as you're reading it. No one in their right mind is likely to achieve so much of a monetary gain, so quickly. Even so, it's a lot like playing the lottery, isn't it? You see others playing, they seem to be winning; surely you have the same odds too.
Our world, your world is inundated with success stories Everyone is making more money than you, everyone is spending more time on vacation (yes, I'm guilty) and everyone seems to be winning the lottery, except for you. It's not like there's any shortage of avenues, either.
Some make their fortune via podcasting; others on YouTube; the third through some SAAS (software as a solution) offering. We all have this multi-pronged attack of the different types of media that will make us our fame and fortune, and the fact that everyone else seems to be doing just fine.
But a gambling man like Lustig may tell you a different story He's spent the past 25 years hacking away at the lottery. He's picked the smaller wins, because the odds are so much better. It's all about structural change, making sure that he gets ahead bit by bit. And to be fair, his gains are pretty average by a wage standard.
By his own admission, he's won a little over a million dollars over twenty five years. That's a pretty modest $40,000 per year. You can easily beat those odds in your own business, but your goal must always be structural.
I guess it's time for an example, right? When we bought our first house in New Zealand, it was priced at $230,000. I'd read a book about how to whittle down that mortgage in a few years (In New Zealand it pays to wipe out the mortgage quickly). Our expenses, barring educational courses, was about $3000 per month (and that included the mortgage). We set about aiming to turn that mortgage into a big fat zero. In the first five years, we bought three houses in Auckland, totalling well over a million dollars.
In ten years, we paid off every last cent on those loans. Would anyone in their right sense try and pay those loans in three months? How about six months? Ten years seems pretty quick by any standards, but we learned what we had to do, and we went about it systematically.
We applied the same rigour to our business In the year 2000, the business was just a website with a dozen articles. No one bought anything, hardly anyone read much of anything. We simply buckled down, went for dozens of meetings with clients. And out of those dozens, sometimes hundreds, we got ourselves our first client; a sofa store.
The second client was a law firm. The third was a division of Quickbooks. We paid the mortgage, we budgeted our expenses and the only big blow out was education. I bought a ton of stuff online and we both read through them. We listened endlessly to workshops and marketing material (even the stuff which was tedious).
It took a while for things to happen. The first international workshop was in 2004, but that was after we'd done a tonne of speaking sessions in little places all around New Zealand. By 2006, we had our first really big ticket item, the Protégé sessions where clients paid us a substantial sum. That's when we knew we were finally getting somewhere.
Jim Collins is the author of “Good To Great”, a book that has sold over 2 million copies In the book, Collins talks about the “Egg and Chicken”. He says: If you look at an egg before it hatches, it looks like nothing’s happened. Then the chicken jumps out—now we’re the chickens—the chicken jumps out, and Fortune magazine comes running in or Fast Company comes running in and says, “Revolution at Egg! Transformation to chicken! Interview with CEO of Egg!”
But if you ask what it looks like from the chicken’s point of view—from the chicken’s point of view there was a lot going on inside the egg before this one step happened that you never know about that led up to that process.
We know what leads up to that chicken moment It's structural change, bit by bit. Whether you're aiming to win the lottery, or start up a business, your job is to go about the steps systematically.
— Will you get twenty e-mails telling you that you could become a millionaire overnight? Sure you will.
—Will there be a pull to do this, that and the other all at once? Sure there will.
But eventually, it's the gentle progress that counts. Progress like commuting just four days, instead of five; getting one strategic alliance per month; taking on one medium, e.g. podcasting, and working it day after day for the next few months, weeks, and yes, years.
All those stories about how you can double and treble your income, they're probably true. And they probably aren't at odds of 175 million to one. However, the structural way is better. With tiny changes, you can move ahead. You can slowly but surely get your commute down to zero; your bank balance to a healthy state and pay off the mortgages in style.
If you want to become an overnight success, you'll need to slow down a bit and work the structure.
The odds are a lot better, I can assure you.
Special Bonus: The Brain Alchemy Masterclass give you the structure that you need to build your business upon. It gives you the tactics and strategy that will form the very core of your business, no matter whether you're just starting up, or have been in business ‘forever.' We've always recommended that clients start off with this workshop because it whizzes your strategy around.
Here is the link to get this $2500, product free: The Brain Alchemy MasterClass—How To Structure Your Business.
Is negotiation a skill? How do you win when your back is against the wall? When negotiating will aggression help or should you use something else, like questions? Questions play a role, but nothing does the job quite like calibrated questions. In this second part of negotiation strategy we find out exactly the questions you need to ask to get the information you need to get your negotiation to work out stunningly well.
You can read the article online here: https://www.psychotactics.com/negotiation-battle/
The three negotiation concepts we'll cover are 1) Going too fast—and why you need to slow down and listen.
2) The power of labelling—and why it validates emotions.
3) Calibrated questions—a way to completely remove the attack mode and get the opposition to give you vital information.
If you're a cartoonist and want a job as a copywriter, how do you get that job? This was my dilemma around the age of 20. I'd finished university, and my dream was to become the top copywriter in the city I lived in—which was Mumbai, at the time. There was this peculiar problem, of course: I didn't know much about copywriting.
To smoothen my entry into the world of advertising, I did a class, which loosely promised a job in an ad agency, but it was just a hot-air promise. No one got a job, or not at least one with the big agencies. And I was impatient.
I can't remember the details, but there I was sitting in front of the creative director who was leafing through my cartoons. She looked up and said: “You know there's a difference between cartoons and copywriting, right? I agreed, but it wasn't a time to be coy.
As most negotiators will tell you, there's a way out of any negotiation, if you know what to ask. When FBI and other international negotiators get on a scene, the situation is already way out of control. Their job is to somehow, get a nutter to give up hostages; and to surrender. In short, their job is simply to win in a situation where winning seems implausible or even impossible.
Which is why Chris Voss talks about calibrated questions Calibrated questions are easy to dismiss as everyday open-ended questions, but they're pretty precise in how they get the discussion moving forward. They're designed first to acknowledge the other side (that's always super-important).
Once that acknowledgement is achieved, calibrated questions get you to introduce ideas and requests that would generally seem pushy. It edges you forward. Instead of getting all riled up, a question that's calibrated swings the problem across to the other person.
In the book, “Never Split the Difference”, the author gives a range of questions you can choose from However, most of the questions he recommends you work with, are simply “HOW” and “WHAT” questions. Quite by chance, this is approximately what I did back at that early meeting with the creative director. I asked her:
What can I do to be a part of this agency? How about I work for free for a month and then you can decide if you want to pay me, or I can decide if this agency is a good fit?
The questions seem pretty mundane, and even silly when you think about them, but they get outstanding results.
Voss insists that calibrated questions have the power to educate your counterpart. It brings the problem to the fore and completely defused the conflict. Calibrated questions aren't random at all. Once you have a conversation going, or if you've decided how that conversation should move, you design what and how questions that make the other person think it's their idea.
Of course, when I was sitting in front of my potential boss, I had no idea I was asking intelligent, let alone calibrated questions, but they were “how” and “what” questions and I was hired. Without pay for a month, as you'd expect, but I had a job in Leo Burnett, one of the largest agencies in the world.
The same kind of questions apply to most negotiations because they get the other side to explain their situation You start with “what” and “how” and completely avoid the “why”. Why is very confrontational so barring rare situations (which Voss describes in the book) you stick closely to “what” and “how” questions. Which is what I did when we were negotiating the fence issue earlier this week.
• What about this is important to you?
• How can I help to make this better for you?
• How would you like me to proceed?
• How can we solve this problem?
• What are we trying to achieve here?
• How can we look at this in a completely different light? What if we could put in a hedge instead of a fence?
Notice the tenor of those questions? They're all about the other person and their agenda. And you almost appear subservient. You're not even asking “what can “WE” do to make this better. You're asking what can “I” do? And only once you've moved along do we get to “we” solving the problem. Or “we” trying to achieve a goal.
The scene outside my dining area was complicated. The builder didn't want to leave out the space that was owed to his client. The client didn't want the area to become a problem when she developed and sold the property. In short, there wasn't even one person to deal with, but a range of people, some of whom weren't even on the scene until they bought the property somewhere down the line.
Even so, being calm and working through the problem got the builder to progress from, “We are sorry, but there's no way out,” to pitching in with a whole bunch of very workable solutions.
The trees at the far end weren't going to be touched. The apple and the pear espaliers (which grow on the fence) will be removed in the dormant winter season in June. Even the big tree that's in the way will have a skirting around so that it doesn't have to be cut down.
In short, the builder got precisely what he wanted, including every inch that was on his client's property, and we got our trees, our fence and yes, there will be some minor inconvenience, but what a good solution, wouldn't you say?
The calibrated questions led the way at all times As we went through the questions, he showed me his plans, explained his situation, worked with me. And though we went for the win, and not the win-win, both of us ended up getting whatever we wanted and without any fuss or aggression. The key to your success is to make sure you stay calm at all times and ask the questions. However, one question did make me a bit queasy. That question was “how am I supposed to do that?
“How am I supposed to do that?” seems anything but an open-ended question. It seems like someone who has the upper hand would simply snap back and say: I don't know. You figure it out. However, that's not what happens. Once I went through the above questions, I blurted out the last question too. And I was amazed at the response. Instead of telling me to go take a hike, the entire set up of questions before this one caused the builder to be even more helpful than before.
In the end, we shook hands on a decision that we both loved and went our merry ways! The next time you're in a negotiation, use just three of them and see them work like magic, though I'd add the fourth one about creativity too. It helps the other side come up with a slightly different point of view, especially if you give an example. However, here are the three questions and the fourth that I added to the mix.
• What about this is important to you?
• How can I help to make this better for you?
• How would you like me to proceed?
• How can we look at this in a completely different light? What if we could put in an “x” instead of “y”?
What?
How?
And no WHY.
And on that happy note, let's go to the summary. But here's something even more interesting. “Never Split the Difference” is almost like a layer over The Brain Audit. It handles the conversion issue in almost an identical way. Let's find out how these two books almost match each other, shall we?
Negotiation Summary 1) Going too fast—and why you need to slow down and listen.
2) The power of labelling—and why it validates emotions.
3) Calibrated questions—a way to completely remove the attack mode and get the opposition to give you vital information.
With The Brain Audit, you're likely to be using it more in written material, whereas negotiations tend to swing to words and situations. I think that's the core difference between these books (from a bird's eye view). However, the book had more than I could chew off, at least after going through it twice.
So I worked out three core aspects: 1) Labelling. I moved very quickly to labelling the situation.
2) Calibrated questions: I used only three and a half: important, better, proceed (and the half was: how am I supposed to do that?).
3) Information gathering with two parties: I listened and made mental notes (and Renuka came along). The listening with two parties (and Renuka didn't say a word) meant she picked up stuff that I didn't hear at all. And she also was able to see things from her perspective, because I was too focused on working with the other person.
The match with The Brain Audit. Often, when you read or listen to a book, the information either seems old or new.
Old, as in, “I already know this stuff, so it's slightly boring, or at least not very groundbreaking”. Or “new” in the sense that you're learning nuances, and you have to pay close attention to what's being said.
For instance, there's a tiny nuance in the calibrated questions: e.g. How can “I” make this better for you? which moves to “how can “we” solve the problem? The nuance is so tiny it's easy to miss unless you pay close attention, or someone points it out.
Either way, whether you consider the information to be old or new, you're always working out how to implement the information in your own life, your own chat with a client, or when you have to negotiate something like a lease or rent. Which is why, when I listened to this book for the first time, I missed a lot of the information.
Then, the whole fence-dispute started up and I was instantly focused on trying to speed up the learning and implementation. I downloaded the Kindle version of the book and marked it up (I have special software for the iPad, which I'll cover in a future series). Even though the negotiations are mostly over, I'm listening to it once more. Even so, I didn't realise how much this book fit with The Brain Audit, until I was being interviewed for a podcast.
During the podcast, me being me, I stopped talking about The Brain Audit and went on to talk about “Never Split the Difference”, instead. And I realised something pretty cool. The books are almost identical from a bird's point of view. Let's see what Chris Voss' book really says:
• Listen to the person
• Ask them calibrated questions
• Mirror what they are saying
• Slow down and listen
• Label their emotions
What do you find in The Brain Audit? • Listen to the client (and fix an interview)
• Ask them calibrated questions (the questions in the target profile interview)
• Mirror what they’re saying by writing down their exact words on your sales page
• Slow down and listen (don’t talk, just ask questions in the interview)
• Label their emotions. How does it make them feel? Do they feel like hostages, in a way? Why?
The Brain Audit, has an almost identical layer as FBI procedure, it seems You have the target profile; you ask them their problems, you listen carefully to their version of the solution. You write it down on your sales page. Mirroring, slowing down, listening all the time. You have now finished the first section of the book, which gets the attention of the client. Then you move to the second part of The Brain Audit, where you're reducing risk.
In “Never Split the Difference”, Voss talks about “the objections” and how you need to destroy those objections, thus building trust. Objections equal risk and removing them becomes a crucial part of dealing with people who are not seeing things your way.
You may not see the similarity between a kidnapper and a client, but they're both in objection-land and their objections need to be reduced or completely defused if you are to reach a solution. I haven't figured out how testimonials or case studies figure when dealing with terrorists or bank robbers, but they do reduce risk for a client. As I listen to the book for the second time, I'll keep my ears peeled.
Finally, you have risk-reversal, which everyone wants. How are you reducing the client's risk? What guarantee will the hostage takers have when they walk out that door? Will the building project go through on time, or will there be a stall because of the fence? The risk-reversal needs to be in place for progress to do its thing. And finally, uniqueness: why you? Why not the other negotiator? Why should the client buy from you, and not from your competition?
The similarities hit me like a thunderclap I simply hadn't seen the two overlap in so many ways. I was excited to be on the call, and even more excited to get off the call and listen to the audio as I went for my walk every morning. And that's just what I'm going to do today and tomorrow and for the week to come. And it's what I'd suggest you do too. Listen and read both books. They're really cool, but more than anything they're result-oriented. They get you and your client to a common goal.
Negotiation is about information. So is writing sales pages. How cool is that?
Special Bonus: The Brain Audit: Why Clients Buy And Why They Don’t Click here to get an excerpt of The Brain Audit.
Imagine you're dealing with a terrorist or hijacker who has captives and threatens to blow up everything if you don't agree with his demands. How would that knowledge help when negotiating with a boss, a client or perhaps your own kids?
And how are you supposed to remember the negotiation steps? That's exactly what we'll cover in this episode—you'll get to hear how we applied the negotiation skills we learned (and got to a perfectly great settlement). Listen away!
Read the episode online:
https://www.psychotactics.com/negotiate-win/
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“The auction's on,” said the auctioneer, “would you give $520,000”? “I've got $520, now $525. The bid is at $530 would you give $550?”
The year was 2005. We had decided to buy a three-bedroom house in Auckland to separate our work from our home. It seemed like a good idea to have a separate residence and a dedicated workplace. We thought it might even be a good idea to hire staff. And that's how we were in the middle of this auction.
Except for one tiny fact The auctioneer wasn't having a good time. It seemed like just one person was bidding. For about 5-7 minutes, there was a spurt of bidding—many voices—and then suddenly, the only voice you could hear repeatedly was my own. The situation might have seemed bizarre to anyone who was standing around because I was bidding against myself.
“$565”, said the auctioneer. I nodded and added “$567”. Then before he could recover, I shouted out, “$567,500. No sooner had those words come out of my mouth than I was off, but this time not in multiples of thousands, but in $500. Potential buyers must have been in a tizzy. Only a fool would keep increasing his own price; they must have thought to themselves. But there I was, moving steadily ahead, bidding $500 at a time.
At one point, the auctioneer realised that the price was moving up in smaller multiples than he expected, but there was simply no opposition. As far as the assembled crowd was concerned, they were dealing with an escapee from the mental asylum. Pretty soon, the negotiation was over, and the house was ours (at a price very marginally over our initial budget).
The auctioneer had been out-negotiated. Instead of the auction being a battle between two or more parties, it fizzled off at a much lower price than he might have normally received. But why did that occur? In every negotiation, both parties have information. The core of what makes one party gain the upper hand isn't logic. Instead, it's emotion.
Emotion and information Two weeks ago, I started listening to a book that I'd bought way back in late November. We went on our vacation to Sri Lanka shortly after and I had a bit of catching up to do. However, I heard an interview with the author, Chris Voss, and I was taken with the concepts he brought up on the call. I was so excited that I started listening to the book shortly after.
And that's what this series is all about. It's a look into “Never split the difference: Negotiating as if your life depended on it”, by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz. It's important to mention both Voss and Raz because they're both outstanding. Voss has a wealth of experience, and this is real-life experience with murderers, bank robbers and terrorists. They're the kind of people who demand a ransom and casually murder people. Voss walks us right through this minefield of ego and terror.
However, Raz, Tahl Raz is the writer, and as a result, the book is spectacular. I rarely marvel at a book's structure, because by and large books tend to be more about information, which can get tedious. However, this book is masterful in the way it has been constructed. It brings up a concept, explains the concept, tells a story, gives examples and then goes on to succinctly summarise the contents of the chapter.
I love this book for two reasons It's elegant in its construction and detail. But more importantly, negotiation is part of our lives. If you want to get a better price from clients, a higher salary, or even want your kid to go to bed, you've got to negotiate. But negotiating is one thing: winning is another.
In this book, you're going to find out how to win without the other person feeling bad. No, it's not win-win in any way. You go in wanting a specific solution to the problem, and you win. And the other party doesn't feel like it has lost. How's that possible? I know, you're itching to know what makes this book so cool. In fact, you're probably trying to ditch reading this and go and read the book yourself.
Well, hang in there What you don't know yet, is that I've read this book once, listened to it twice and listened to a couple of interviews as well with Voss. This piece will distil the core stuff that makes the difference. Instead of leafing through the entire book, you'll get a few core concepts that you can use right away. And then you can go and read the book and the concepts will be more enduring. Sound good? Well, keep reading.
The three concepts we'll cover are: 1) Going too fast—and why you need to slow down and listen.
2) The power of labelling—and why it validates emotions.
3) Calibrated questions—a way to completely remove the attack mode and get the opposition to give you vital information.
1) Going too fast—and why you need to slow down and listen. About a year ago, our hedge was the bone of contention with the neighbours.
Sure, we'd got the house for a very decent price at the auction, and with it came a hedge that four of five metres high. Every now and then, we'd get the hedge guys to trim the hedge, but it was always a respectable height. That gave us our privacy, but more importantly, we could look into a sea of green, instead of another house, with a grungy shed on the other side of the fence. And about a year ago, on two separate occasions, something happened that would permanently change our view.
At first, the neighbour cut down the trees near the far side of the fence To come back and watch the trees hacked was an incredibly rough moment, but it chopped down while we were away on vacation and there was little benefit in getting into a war over trees that were gone forever. However, the next time we were away, the entire hedge was reduced to the legal height of just two metres, and that's the way it seems likely to stay.
What's interesting about this whole hedge and tree episode is that the neighbour wasn't aggressive, to begin with. If anything, she was overly helpful, calling us to let us know when our TV antenna had gotten ripped off in a storm. How did someone who was on our side, literally move to the other side of the fence and declare a “hedge-war” of sorts?
Author, Chris Voss would say: It's a listening problem. Back in 1979, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Harvard Negotiation Project was formed. The goal was to improve negotiation results so that people could be in a better position to take on stuff like peace treaties, business mergers and I suppose, the occasional hedge. As a result of the discussions at Harvard, the co-founders of the project came out with a book—and idea—called “Getting to Yes”. They mostly seemed to discard the unreliable, primal animal instinct and espoused a more rational, “let's be friends and fix this together” type of approach.
And yet the FBI, who Chris Voss was a part of, wasn't getting consistent results in their negotiations. Even if deals seemingly worked out in the boardroom, the idea of a rational approach was ending up in a bloody mess when it came to terrorists and hostage situations. Which is when two of the most decorated FBI negotiators, Fred Lanceley and Gary Noesner, started asking a simple question.
Their question was directed to 35 of the most experienced law enforcement officers, and the question went like this: How many had dealt with a classic bargaining situation where problem-solving (or logic) was the best technique?
Not a single hand went up. Then came the follow up question…
How many had negotiated an incident in a dynamic, tense, uncertain environment where the hostage taker was in emotional crisis and had no apparent demands?
Every hand went up. What this informed the FBI negotiators was pretty clear. Emotions are the key drivers of our behaviour, not logic. It's the frustration of some factor that caused the trees and the hedge to be hacked in the way it was. Instead of silly logic and defining our position, we have to step over and listen.
Listening, says Voss, is the cheapest, most effective concession we can make to get the other person on our side. When people feel listened to, they listen to themselves more carefully. Notice that line again? They listen to “themselves” more carefully. They almost do a double take evaluating the strangeness of their demands. The jagged defensiveness goes down, and they're keen to help, instead of simply barging in with their demands.
The goal of negotiation is to stop acting like a goat Instead, always move towards the other side. What does the other side need? What are their monetary, emotional or other needs? Who do they need to report to? What constraints are they working with? Being angry and emotional will merely get them to mirror your behaviour, and you get to a situation of mistrust, which often leads to a standoff.
The way to get control is to give the client the illusion of control. It isn't to suggest you're conning them in any way. However, when the chips are not in your favour, you want to even the odds and get the client to start thinking of you. And the only way to get that going is to start listening.
When both parties want to row the boat in opposite directions, it looks like there's absolutely no solution However, experienced negotiators (like my 8-year old niece, Keira, for instance), knows that's not true. Her mother will be all upset, refuse to give her what she wants and threaten to ground her for a week. Keira switches from “whiny mode” to “listening”.
She says: If I do this, that and the other, can I get it? And almost instantly you are taken back to negotiations you've had with your nieces, nephews or children. They know their position is pretty hopeless, and they turn from tiny little devils to skilled negotiation experts. They listen and turn things around in their favour.
And that's what we need to do as well if we want to get anywhere, let alone get the negotiation in our favour. We need to listen. Slow down and listen. However, that's just one piece of the negotiation puzzle. Listening alone will pay huge dividends, but we need to get the person to realise that we understand.
So we do the most obvious thing of all: we use labelling.
What is labelling and how can we quickly use it in our negotiations?
2) The power of labelling—and why it validates emotions. Ever seen how some presenters start their speech when they get on stage.
They might say: “Good morning, everyone. It's good to be here. It's a wonderful morning, isn't it?” And while all of this sounds like adorable banter, it's missed out on a significant opportunity to get right into the audience's emotional state. Audience members aren't sitting around to discuss the weather. And neither is the person across the table from you. While you don't have to be all business-like, it's best to get the person across the table to know that you're on their side.
Most people always talk about themselves And here's where you can run a little test. Tomorrow morning tell your partner how you didn't sleep too well. Almost immediately, he or she is likely to ask you a question or two, but the conversation will swing rapidly to their sleep patterns.
People are so obsessed with their issues that they fail to realise how quickly they take over the discussion. Now imagine you talk about their sleep patterns instead. See what I mean? Immediately two people are talking about precisely the same thing. Suddenly you're the best “conversationalist” ever.
Negotiation pushes that point a little further with “labelling.” Labelling is a bit like putting a Post-It on a person's forehead. For instance, in early January we got a nasty surprise. There was some development work going on in the plot next door. Three houses were being built, and yes, there was the usual earth-shaking noise.
However, nothing prepared us for what came next. The surveyor's plan indicated that our fence—and the eleven trees on our property, was really within their boundary. As you'd expect, they wanted every inch of their land, and it really did come down to inches. In reality, it was about 12-13 inches at one end and a lot less at the other. Even so, because of the location of the trees, it was about to cause enormous disruption to the landscaping.
How do you get out of a mess like that? For starters, you listen and keep your cool. Once you've moved into your meditative zone, you label the situation. It was clear from the very start that the builders were not happy with this sudden surprise. On the very day they discovered the boundary problem, they were all raising their hands as if to say, “don't hate us for this problem”. Which is exactly the label I gave the builders when I spoke to them. I called it “messy”. I said: This is a terribly messy situation for you, isn't it?
Think about that label for a minute Normally we'd be likely to say something like: This is a big issue for us. The trees are getting cut down; the fence is going to be destroyed. We'd go on and on about our own problems, which have absolutely nothing to do with them. No, no, no, no, no—that kind of nonsense won't get you very far. Instead, use the label. What is the situation? Is it messy? Is it noise you're negotiating (and it's noisy?) Does it seem like it's overpriced? (and hence they are already edgy about the price?) Whatever the situation, you can use labels to identify how the other side is feeling.
And this is what author, Chris Voss, suggests Spot the emotion. Then label it aloud by using either of the following terms:
• It seems like…
• It sounds like…
• It looks like…
The exact terms are important You can't go around saying “I'm hearing that…”. The moment you put the “I” back in the discussion, you're talking about yourself. It also makes you take personal responsibility for the discussion that follows. And things may go horribly wrong.
However, “it seems like…” is a very neutral statement that feels almost like you're trying to get to grips on the situation. It also gives the other side a chance to speak. When I said, “It seems like a very messy situation that you want to avoid”, the builder immediately responded to my point explaining what was going on. He told me about their plans, where they were stuck, and what had been discussed with the architects. The information wasn't particularly important to this situation, but in many cases, the smallest bit of information is of extreme value.
But what if the other person disagrees? What if you said:”It seems like you're uncomfortable with this high pricing”, and they disagree. You can always step back and say, “I didn't say it was that way. I just said it seems like that”. However, in many cases, if not most, the other person will not go on the attack. Instead, they will explain themselves in a fair amount of detail.
There's just one big caveat Once you've put forward the label, be quiet.
Deathly quiet.
One second.
Two seconds.
Three seconds.
Four, tick, tick, tick.
Wait for them to speak, because you won't have to wait long Once you add the label, you'll get the reaction you need. It's almost one of “thank goodness, you know how I'm feeling right now”. Now both parties are seemingly rowing in the same direction. You haven't lost any control. No one is going to eat you for lunch. However, a standoff has not only been averted, but you've got the other side to see you as a partner.
Which takes us to the third part—calibrated questions. In the first part, we slowed down and listened. We moved from that stage to getting onto the other side's platform. However, there's a third part that gets most of the information you need. And that's really what negotiation is about. It's about information harvesting. The more you know, the more you can move in the direction you need. And what better way to get information than asking questions. Except there are some landmines in the question section. Ask the wrong question, and we're back to square one, or worse.
Let's sidestep that landmine and find out what questions to ask, instead.
Continue listening here: Why Calibrated Questions Enable You to Win Your Negotiation Battle
Is it really possible to get a surge in sales with products? And are product sales similar or different from services? In this episode, we go exclusively into the sale of products. But more importantly, you get to see where you need to dig to create the power of your headline and how the consequences that follow make a massive difference. Listen and read this episode. You'll enjoy it.
To read online: How To Increase Sales Using The Brain Audit: Episode 179
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You've probably never heard of Ben Curtis Ben's a client and a self-described fan. In an e-mail addressed to both Renuka and me, here's what he wrote: “I am a massive fan! I listen to all your podcasts and reread sections and chapters of the Brain Audit over and over.
I am constantly applying your tools in every way possible. I am using your advice and information in exactly the way you hoped people would from your book. I also purchased the “Applications for the Brain Audit” too. I am constantly using those tools for headlines, marketing material, and websites.”
But it's not all hunky-dory, rah-rah Ben also has a bit of a bone to pick with me, in particular.
And here's how he puts it:
“I'd like to make a suggestion, recommendation, or at least make you aware of something when you're writing content.”
“It's not that anything is wrong (I love it), I just wish there was more relatable or direct content for people who have products. That's what I do, and many other people have products too. I have products to sell either online or in retail stores, or both.
In the Brain Audit, there were two examples– Website Strategy Workshop and Allergy Clinic. Both are service-based businesses. It was difficult for me to try and write with a product in mind when there were only two examples, and both were services.
I'm was very happy to stumble upon the Applications to the Brain Audit because I was dying for more examples. I just started it, and already love it. However, I noticed the same thing here. The 15 case studies in Chapter 2 are all still service businesses and not directly relatable or useful for myself. It's difficult to model after the examples when none of them are products. I know that what you write can apply to many industries, but I am talking specifically about examples for products.
There are 15 examples, and there wasn't a product based business.”
Ben's got a point, don't you think? Well then, it's time to correct this grievous mistake, because it gives us a chance to dive deeper into The Brain Audit. Well, here we go. Let's look around the room for some products and play a game of “I spy”. What do I spy? It starts with the letter M. It's a product, and it's a microphone. Except that I already have six microphones, so why bother with another one? Let's find out, shall we?
In this series, we'll go through the stages of how to get—and keep the attention of the client. Stage 1: We'll list all the benefits—and narrow down on our problem.
Stage 2: This stage calls for us to drive home not just the problem, but also the consequences of ignoring that problem.
Stage 3: We'll do an instant check after we've gone through the first two stages.
We didn't start off needing or even wanting the products because the products have been randomly chosen. Has that desired level gone up just a little bit? Let's find out.
Let's start off with three different products. And as you'd expect, I spy something with my eye, and we know, it starts with the letter m. M as in “microphone”.
Stage 1: We'll list all the benefits—and narrow down on our problem. Microphone?
Let's look at the microphone that I recently bought. What problem could it possibly solve? Why buy yet another microphone when there are plenty lying around? As you're probably aware, every product solves many problems, and since we're on that trend of reasoning, every product must have many features and benefits.
Let's list the benefits and features of this microphone, shall we? • Let's start with the weight: It's just 10 g. That's just 0.35 ounces. That's light, don't you agree?
• The usage time on a single charge is 6 hours. That solves a problem too, of having to change batteries all the time.
• The operating temperature is from -10°C to 50°C. Which means it would work well in a desert, which is freezing by night and boiling by day.
• And finally, it has an operating distance of 65 feet or 20 metres. That's a fair distance away.
But what problem does it solve? Let's say you're keen to shoot videos of yourself as a speaker. There are two reasons why you'd need to capture the event. The first reason would be to capture the information for a showreel for your clients. The second reason would be to see and hear yourself so you can improve your technique.
However, you've always needed a slightly sophisticated set up with a cordless mic. But imagine a microphone so small that it's just a clip-on. And once you have it on, you can be a whopping 65 feet away and record perfect video—but more importantly, the audio. It's a Bluetooth mic that frees you from cords and cables.
That's it! No cords, no cables, but what about the other points? What about the weight, the extended battery time, the ability to work under crazy weather conditions? They're all important, but you have to pick one problem if you want to get the attention of your client. It's not like we're chucking away the rest of the points.
We just can't have it all up in lights together. Only one problem needs to be chosen. Think of it as a movie. There's the hero, and there is the supporting cast. The rest of the points; those benefits and features are the supporting cast. The only thing that matters is the “no cords and no cables”. And if you're a speaker, you know exactly what that means.
To be able to simply walk across the room, over even across the bridge to the other side and be recorded perfectly, that seems like a dream come true. It's a big problem and this microphone; this Bluetooth microphone solves the problem perfectly.
That's example No.1 down. Let's take another example: Daniel Smith watercolours. Now this example is interesting because I've never used these watercolours. Back in 2010, I went for a watercolour class, and my teacher, Ted, told me to do one small watercolour every day. Being a model student, painting every day is approximately what I've done. In the past eight years, I've probably painted about 2500 images—yet not one of them was with Daniel Smith.
My goal today was to find out why I should bother with Daniel Smith watercolours when I already have several tubes with a rival company called Winsor and Newton. So many tubes of paint, in fact, that though I paint every day, I'd still be using those tubes for at least two-three years.
And yet, here we are, looking for a problem to solve with a whole new brand of paints This diversion brings up an essential fact of customer behaviour. In a majority of situations, clients or prospects may not have a problem. I am reasonably happy with my paints, but that doesn't mean I'm not on the lookout for something different. When we, as sellers of a product fail to get the point across clearly and succinctly, the customer is left in a bit of a limbo. Which is what Daniel Smith colours tends to do when you do your research.
But here's a start from a post online: I love Daniel Smith. What I like about the paint is the pigment load, ease of re-wetting in my palette; ease of handling on the paper. Every tube I have bought is fresh, soft and well mixed with the binder, no separation into binder and pigment. And I love their range of colours. No other paint maker offers such a huge number of colours. It seems Daniel Smith is always looking for new colours to add.
In that short client description we have the bits and pieces needed for a problem, don't we? Let's look at the features and benefits mentioned in that post.
• Ease of pigment load: That's a bit technical, but what I can figure out, is that the paint sits nicely on the brush.
• Ease of re-wetting: This is a nuisance with watercolours. They tend to dry up into a hard rock-like mass. Re-wetting is a definite benefit.
• Ease of handling on paper: It's a vague description, but we'll take all the description we can handle.
• Well mixed with the binder—no separation of binder and pigment: That's yet another winner.
• And the final one: Astounding range of colours—especially for those always on the lookout for yet another shade.
Once again, we have to pick, and most of the time, the pick will be based on the target profile It seems that artists are always on the lookout for new shades, new textures and so the range of colours is a big solution. And the opposite of the benefit is—tah, dah—the problem. Daniel Smith has a massive 252 colours, including the Primateks as well as 48 luminescent, pearlescent and interference colours.
The problem is evident isn't it? With the paints I've been using, I've more or less restricted myself to a range of shades. Daniel and Smith seemed to have gotten me out of my stupor and caused me to investigate a whole range of colours that I may never have considered before. In effect, it's created a problem where none existed.
This takes us to a third product, like the t-shirt I'm wearing. I'm a big fan of graphic design, and there's probably no greater joy than to walk into a t-shirt store when on vacation. Portugal, for instance, has an astounding design sense, which frankly surprised me. Whether we were in Vancouver, Tokyo or Sardinia, I'd be on the lookout for new, well-designed t-shirts. Yet, for the past three years or so, I've more or less given up buying t-shirts while away from home.
It's a strange phenomenon, don't you think? The plot, as it were, thickens, because the t-shirt brand I now wear doesn't quite suit my design appetite. Even so, I've made the change to the Icebreaker brand. And the reason why I've made this leap is that it solves a precise problem: it doesn't stink.
It's summer here in New Zealand, in January And summers here are hot, really hot, and with heat comes sweat and body odour. Which means you have to get yourself some sort of deodorant or wipe rubbing alcohol, vinegar or hydrogen peroxide onto your underarms. If you want to save yourself of the trouble of any of those weird and wonderful methods, all you do is wear an Icebreaker.
That's it. No odour. Wear the t-shirt for a day, no odour. Ten days, still no odour. Forty days? You're getting the point, aren't you? As you can quickly see, Icebreaker solves a problem you didn't know you had in the first place. I wouldn't go so far as to say all my t-shirts are Icebreaker, but let's just say they've taken the whole fun part out of my vacations.
I haven't bought a new t-shirt on vacation in over three years. I ask people to send me vouchers for Icebreaker for my birthday, or if they want to give me a gift. I use Icebreaker in my presentation on Dartboard Pricing at events. I can't even begin to tell you what killjoys this company has been for me, consistently solving my problem.
And there you have it, random picks right in the room with me. A set of paints from Daniel Smith watercolours (I had to look up the name again). A t-shirt range called Icebreaker that wasn't on my radar but now accounts for 100% of all t-shirt purchases. And a microphone—the sixth or seventh microphone that I own, just because it solves the problem of no cords, no mess. Of course, we could go on and on.
There's a type of cream in the room, shoes, a language course, computers—three of them, a standing desk that I never use any more, drives, etc. All of these solve a problem, but where do we go digging to find the problem?
In the benefits, that's where We may not be clear which problem is the one we need to pick, but we sure know the benefits. You can pick up any object in your room, or head downtown to any store and randomly pick up a product. There on the side of the packaging are all the features and benefits—what we like to call the “solution”.
The opposite of the solution is the problem. As you'd expect, an Icebreaker t-shirt will happily tout all its benefits, but it's best to stick to one as the lead actor, letting the other problems take a secondary role of supporting cast.
And once we have our problem, you know what The Brain Audit recommends next, don't you? Yes, it's time for the consequences. A problem is a problem, but it's not quite as big a problem unless there are consequences. What are consequences and how do we use them with the marketing of our product? Let's find out.
Stage 2: The consequences of the problem Imagine you're driving down the road, and in the corner of your eye, you see flashing red and blue lights. What do you do? You slow down, don't you? You're aware that somewhere in the vicinity there are cops and there's no point in flooring the accelerator.
That's how the brain works. It senses a problem and immediately most other thoughts are subdued. The focus is almost exclusively on that problem. However, to stay in that state for too long would be counterproductive, so once the cops are out of sight, you and I tend to go back to our normal behaviour.
When clients are buying products or services, the problem gets their attention, but it's not enough Once the problem isn't front and centre, there's the risk of the client going their own way. It's akin to spotting a cop car on the highway and then encountering a sign that says: No cop car for the next 300 miles, guaranteed.
Without the consequences, the attention wavers quite a bit. Which is why when you introduce the problem, you need to pick the problem that is top of mind for your target profile (read about target profile in The Brain Audit). If you don't have a target profile, then you're going to have to make a choice, but it's more precise if you use the target profile. Anyway, let's not go off track, because we still have to focus on the consequences.
So what are the consequences of not having an easy-to-use Bluetooth microphone? If you've ever fiddled with a wired microphone, you'd know what a pain mics can be. The cords and cables run all over the place, someone trips over the cords and cables, or at the very least they need to be taped down. That's great if you're in the sound business because as disaster hits, you have Option B in place.
However, as a small business owner, you're hoping for one take. You want to get your video on YouTube, or you want to record that seminar you're giving. That's one take, in most cases, and there's no going back. With a Bluetooth mic, a simple phone can record the video from anywhere in the room, while capturing very high-quality audio.
Without audio, even the sharpest video is unwatchable. And that's why a Bluetooth mic is so very crucial. One that you can quickly fasten to your clothing and in seconds the wired microphone is history.
That's an example of consequences Just because you've brought up a problem in your headline or speech, doesn't mean that clients get the point to the fullest extent. There's no doubt they're paying attention, but unless the consequences are driven deeper, there's a good chance of bypassing, or at least not valuing the product to the fullest extent.
The consequences are akin to underlining what's being said, and yet staying on point. We're not trying to cover all the problems the product solves. If anything, you have to be careful to stay on target. When I was writing about the microphone above, I was tempted to talk about the lightness factor and how it lasted for six hours. It took all of my focus to stay on topic of “no cords or cables”.
We can bring up the issue of how it lasts for six hours later in the message. On a sales page, there's a lot of space to bring up features and benefits much later. At first, however, we have to nail down the problem and the consequences to the exclusion of everything else. And the consequences matter.
Take for example another product like “Dartboard Pricing”, a product about pricing on the Psychotactics site When you look at the sales page, it's clear that the problem—the biggest problem—is about “losing clients if you choose to raise prices”. That message is clear, but just letting the headline do all the work is a mistake. The consequences have to come in quickly. And here's what the page reads like:
How do you systematically raise prices without losing customers?
Is it possible to raise prices and still keep customers? And how do you keep those costs going up, up and away—and still keep customers coming back?We all undercharge!
No matter what our business, we've all undercharged for our products and services. And yet, at this very moment, there are others in our field that charge a lot more—for what seems to be a similar offering to ours.
We know we should increase prices, but we can't bring ourselves to take that leap because we're deathly afraid our customers will leave in droves. And so we charge a lot less for our products, workshops, services and courses.
As if that first section were not enough, there's a story that comes into play that explains the consequence of not being able to increase prices.
I remember the first time we sold a copywriting course in 2006 I was reasonably happy with the price until I read the feedback from one of the participants. “You're charging too little,” she said.”I just did another course on a similar topic, and they're charging twice as much.” I took the feedback but felt the terror of having to increase, let alone double my prices.
This is the dilemma we all face. We don't know how to increase our prices, even by a tiny bit.
So how do we strike a balance between running a profitable business without losing clients and sales? How do stop trusting our mostly inaccurate “gut instinct” and work with a precise system instead? How do we raise prices solely based on client demand? And most importantly, how can we do this price increase step by step, instead of randomly increasing prices?
The consequences put a spotlight on the problem, but because it creates agitation, it also sets up the client for the solution that must follow. As you read in The Brain Audit, the problem shows up, and then we go to the solution. But sitting smack in the middle is that big consequence that needs its share of the spotlight.
Execute the consequences correctly, and it's clear why Daniel Smith range of colours solves a pressing problem of not quite having the shade you need in your paint palette. Or why choosing Icebreaker as a garment makes for the most pleasant t-shirt wearing experience, because who wants to stink?
The consequence of being inadvertently socially unacceptable or even having to put chemicals (or for that matter vinegar) on your body is a bit of a pain. And it's only when those consequences are driven deep that we're ready for the solution. In fact, we're not just ready; we're hankering for the solution at this stage.
Stage 3: An instant check Which brings us to the third part of this series: An instant check after we've gone through the first two stages. We didn't start off needing or even wanting.
Did you need a microphone?
If you're recording an event, do you feel like you need one now? And do you need that specific brand so that you don't run into cords and cables? What about the paints? Maybe you're not a painter—yet—but should you wander into watercolours as I did back in 2010, you'd want the best possible colours, right?
And personally, I'm feeling a bit like a dunderhead because I haven't heard about this brand though I've been painting for eight years straight.
What about the t-shirt? Icebreaker has no stink, even if you wear it for a month. Not that you want to wear it for a month, but notice how the problem and the consequence have gotten your attention and kept that attention.
The proof of the pudding is almost always in the eating If you feel you need the products mentioned above, then The Brain Audit has started to weave its magic. We're not done yet, of course. There are the other “bags” of The Brain Audit that need to be tended to, as well. We still need to go to the target profile, the solution, the objections, testimonials, risk reversal and uniqueness.
All those “seven red bags” need to be taken off the conveyor belt (and you'll know what I mean by conveyor belt when you read The Brain Audit). However, what we've done here is gotten off to a great start.
And more importantly, we've found out that products, physical products or digital, don't differ that much from services. In fact, we just have to look at one thing to figure out the problem and the corresponding consequence. What's that one thing? Let's find out in the summary, shall we?
Summary The three things we covered in this series were:
Stage 1: The list of benefits that to narrow down the problem
Stage 2: The consequences of ignoring the problem
Stage 3: An instant test of desire
This is your ONE thing to do today. Create a list of benefits. Look around your room and pick on that lampshade you bought. What are the benefits of that particular shade? The bookshelf that's in the corner does it have features and benefits? What about that bottle of wine that's on your desk? Wait, you have a bottle of wine at work? Anyway, all the stuff around you is probably there for a reason.
You could make your work a little easier by heading over to Amazon.com because you won't need to hunt down features and benefits because all packaging has a list of bullets. However, this exercise is a solid one whether you're hunting down stuff in your office, on Amazon or just about anywhere. This exercise shows you that there's no real difference between a product or service or training.
They all have their features and benefits, and one of those points is going to need a flip. You'll take one of those benefits and turn them into a problem.
Which takes us to the second point: consequences. If you don't stick with the consequences, it's unlikely that the client will continue to pay attention. In many cases, the client may already fee the consequences, e.g. the roof tiles are missing, and a torrent of water is pouring in, but in a lot of situations, you have to drive home the consequences.
For instance, I can tell you that The Brain Audit helps you in removing that last minute hesitation that you feel from clients. However, it's only when I recount the story of the seven red bags that the message really stays with the client. That's the point when they buy The Brain Audit, use it and write those wonderful testimonials.
The entire sequence: from The Brain Audit to 5000bc, to other courses like the Article Writing Course is mostly dependent on taking the time to elaborate the problem with a paragraph or two of detail.
And finally, we get to test the power of the problem I didn't start out wanting Daniel Smith paints. In fact, at one point, I even forgot the name and called them Daniel and Smith. But by the time I realised the problem they were solving, I was keen to buy some and test them out.
The same concept applies to the microphone (yes, there's a link below). I didn't realise how intrusive wires and cables had become until the microphone company brought it to my notice. Did they do a good job of consequences? Maybe not. Most of us are too busy trying to get our message to every possible audience and to line up the features and benefits.
We think the more we load onto our website or marketing material, the better. But in reality, it's the core stuff: the problem, the consequences—that is what really matters. And we can test it because clients don't just say, “wow that's interesting”, but instead ask, “where can I see it or where can I buy it?” That's your test. That shows you that your message is working.
And that's pretty much it. You can use The Brain Audit on products, services or training with equal effect. Try it out today and you'll see how effectively it works.
Special Bonus: The Brain Audit Excerpt Find out—'Why Clients Buy And Why They Don’t'
So much effort goes into the launch of a product, but what happens next? How do you handle the calm after the launch? How do you keep selling products on an ongoing basis? These are the questions we tackle in this episode as we get rid of the "post-launch" blues.
Read the article online: How To Sell A Product When There’s No Scarcity Factor
Do you like cold pizza? Apparently, some people do. They eat pizza, leftover pizza, the next day and they thoroughly enjoy it over breakfast. Some people eat it as a snack, while others may eat it for lunch or dinner. What's the point of this pizza discussion, you may ask? The pizza analogy is to demonstrate that barring some exceptions; pizza is almost always treated as some kind of food.
A similar sort of concept applies to selling a product. Often, people believe that selling a product is entirely different from a service. Or that selling training, a workshop or course, for example, must somehow be different from selling info-products online. The reality is sales is sales—pretty much like pizza.
There are various situations in play, but by and large, whether you're selling a dump truck, a $20,000 course or a pizza, the principles are remarkably similar. You launch a product or service when it's ready. You get a few, possibly a fair number of sales. And then what?
This article is about the “then what” that occurs right after you've done your launch And the reason for all that “pizza preamble” is because the example you're about to read about involves a digital information product, namely, The Brain Audit. When we launched
The Brain Audit back in 2002, we had no clue what we were doing. To put things in perspective, Google was just four years old, YouTube didn't exist, and hardly anyone bought anything online, let alone an e-book that was twice the cost of a hardback that you could get in a bookstore.
We launched The Brain Audit, then we waited. And nothing much happened. A similar concept might apply to whatever you're selling, whether it's a product or service. You'll launch the product and wait, but find that nothing seems to happen. How are you supposed to keep selling the product/service for years on end? Do you create scarcity all the time, or will it get old and tired? Will clients get fed up with your tactics?
This series outlines the things we've done with The Brain Audit, just because it's our most enduring product However, just to give you a framework so that we're all on the same page, we've sold services too. We've sold consulting, both one on one, as well as group consulting. We've sold seminars and workshops, courses like the info-product course or the Article Writing Course.
And as you'd expect, e-books, videos and audio—both digital and physical, as well as to sell a membership site like 5000bc. In short, while this story is mainly about The Brain Audit, it's really a “pizza story”. You can quickly and efficiently apply these steps. And they are steps. They take time, often months and years.
But that's the reason you're reading this article, aren't you? You've created a product or service, and you don't want it to languish on the bottom shelf, do you? You want it to sell on an ongoing basis.
Let's find out how we rolled out The Brain Audit. Let's go all the way back to 2002, shall we?
Stage 1: You've launched the product; now what? The moment after the launch can often be a thud.
Nothing happens, simply because nothing is supposed to happen. All the clients who intended to buy your product at launch stage bought your product or service. Those who hesitated, stay in the wings and what you're faced with, is an unreasonable amount of nothingness.
This is true for any product, like software, a new kind of shampoo, or for that matter a workshop announcement. There's a bit of a spike at the launch, and then there's nothing.
We were faced with this nothingness factor when we first sold The Brain Audit Except our launch was a bit different. We simply put up a sales page, and one person came along and bought the e-book. It took us totally by surprise. And so we'd sell a book here and a book there, often selling twenty or thirty books speaking at local events in Auckland.
Nonetheless, the slow pace of sales can't be sustained forever. There are two primary reasons why an increase in activity is essential. The first and I think the most important is that a client that doesn't read your information will often go elsewhere.
To me, getting that client to understand that information was far more important than just seeing yet another sale. Nonetheless, the sales matter too. Which is why both of these factors are vital. Your product partially brings a client into your “fold”, your way of thinking but it also helps create revenue. Even so, there's a lot of “nothing” that happens once you've launched your product.
Which is why you need to prepare for both the drip and the next launch The drip is your newsletter or any method you keep in touch with your clients. At first, we'd send out one newsletter a month with an article. Then we changed it to twice a month and finally a weekly.
We then moved it to twice a week, once on Tuesday and the other on Saturday (no, there's no logic for the days chosen). But to go back to the very start, all we'd do is send out the newsletter and then add a little blurb—an interesting blurb—at the end of the article. It would say something like: “Aren't clients odd?
They nod at all the right times, agree with what you're selling, and then suddenly don't buy. Or worse, buy from someone else. What causes such behaviour? Find out what's going on in the brain of the client with The Brain Audit (and there'd be a link). That little blurb would cause the drip purchase. A few people would buy the product with every e-mail. As we increased the frequency of the e-mails, the sales of the product went up as well.
Then we'd announce a bonus sale several times a year. We'd package The Brain Audit along with a few other goodies or bonuses and offer it to our list. The bonuses always did the trick. We'd get a tidy spurt in sales with every launch. Right from the very start, we tried to put ourselves in our client's shoes. We didn't want to be in their face all the time with all of these launches, which is why we'd send out an offer twice or thrice a year.
If we went really nuts, it would be four times a year. And just for good measure, we'd pick days that were supposedly bad days. For instance, one of our e-mails would go out on Christmas Day. No one is supposed to be checking e-mail on that day, but our sales would be extremely high. A few launches like this for The Brain Audit and we were well on our way to creating the leverage we were looking to achieve.
The key is not to get too predictable If you know there's going to be a sale or some goodies, would you buy something earlier and forfeit the goodies? Which is why we kept the announcements of such sales, unpredictable. It ensured that clients bought through the year in small batches and then we'd see a spurt in sales. However, there's a bit of a downside to this strategy as well.
If you don't put in the dates in your calendar, you'll see the months fly by without the bonus sale happening. We'd often “wake up” to find half the year gone and we'd forgotten to announce a bonus sale. We now have the entire year planned to make sure this kind of periodic amnesia doesn't recur.
There's a little note about the bonuses too When we began, we only knew what we saw around us. And everyone would pile up a ton of bonuses. Monkey see, and monkeys do, so we did the same. In time, we realised that a single bonus is enough. However, there's a significant point to consider, which is to have a must-have bonus. Every product or service has must-have items, yet they're often included as part of the package.
Unbundling the item from the product or service and offering it as a bonus, is an excellent first move. However, you then have to take the time and effort to describe the bonus in detail, almost as if the bonus were the main item; almost like the primary item doesn't exist.
We weren't always brave enough to keep one bonus over the years. For instance, the Article Writing Course has many bonuses, just as a matter of legacy. We put it there, and now we haven't removed it, but by and large, when announcing the bonus sale, a superior move would be to choose or create one bonus and then push that bonus to the hilt, so that the client must have the bonus, no matter what. And all, or most of this selling is done through your own channel, most often your e-mail newsletter.
Your newsletter is easily the most powerful way to drip sell and to sell a bonus version of your product or service. However, it's not the only way. The other way is to get onto someone else's platform. Let's explore how to sell via someone else's list, without making a big hullabaloo about it.
2: If you have a podcast or videos or anything, keep repeating the name of ONE product over and over again. Many years ago when I first started in advertising, I read a book by David Ogilvy. Ogilvy was a master at promotion, but he came about it the hard way. He had to sell products door to door and work out what caused customers to buy.
One of the things that he seemed to underline to aspiring copywriters was an idea of consistency. And my memory is a bit hazy because I read those books back in 1990, but it went something like this: You'll need to follow up about nine times. And it's not because the client is not paying attention. It's just that she or he is lost in their own problems.
Which is why repetition is a must in your newsletter, but it's easy to go off track in other media When you're sending out a newsletter, and if you do it on a frequent basis, you're going to think about including your product. You could either add the links to the product as part of the editorial, below the editorial (right at the end) or do a sales pitch several times a year.
However, when it comes to other media, that factor of repetition might not be as consistent. Take the podcast for example. When we started the Three-Month Vacation podcast, I'd mention products, courses and workshops right at the end of every podcast in the section called, “What's happening in Psychotactics land?” However, the choice of product or service being offered would not always be consistent.
Then at one point we decided to create a format of sorts Every podcast would talk about 5000bc, no matter what else was trying to hog the spotlight. Let's take the Houston workshop we're conducting in the last week of October. That would need to get into the podcast, but even so, 5000bc would be mentioned, even once the Houston workshop promotion ceases. In short, you want to get the same message over and over and over—and over again.
But do you say the same thing? Essentially, yes. I always say “5000bc is filled with introverts and that I'm the extrovert”. However, the tone or the message may change from time to time. At times, there may be an example from 5000bc or a story that's related to 5000bc, but the core message of “introverts” and “5000bc” stays doggedly on target. You too need to change the angle but keep the story consistent.
Let's take an example of The Brain Audit If you were to drive home one message from The Brain Audit, it would be about “hesitation”. It's about why the client gets hesitant. Why at the last minute she goes from being not sure and not buying your product or service. That concept of hesitation has to be drummed in, over and over again.
However, let's take a chapter from The Brain Audit. Let's talk about the concept of “uniqueness”. How does the concept of “uniqueness” and “hesitation” relate? Or what if you picked a chapter like “objections”. How do “hesitation” and “objections” relate to each other? Did you buy a 99c app online? Did you spend 3 hours and possibly six days wondering if you should buy that app or not? What caused you to hesitate?
With 5000bc, the message of introverts represents “a safe place”. All the messaging about 5000bc has to be about it being safe. And what does “being in a safe zone” mean to most people? It means it's different from other places online where there's hacking and hustling, pimping and pumping.
It's the polar opposite of people trying to climb over one another to get noticed. It's a place where you can be heard and treated with respect. Both 5000bc and The Brain Audit have a consistent message as do most of the products and services on Psychotactics.
All of the consistency comes from “one wordWhen you examine your product or service, it will almost always seem to represent more than one word. Take The Brain Audit for example. It could be about hesitation, but it could also be about “speedier conversion”.
If you have a service like a yoga class, you might achieve mindfulness, flexibility, injury-free. You could end up with three, four, even a dozen ways to explain your business. The big mistake most people make is they use two or three, and in the process, they don't get a single message across.
A single message sent out repeatedly is what sticks in the brain of the client. And that's what you need to put in your podcast or video.
I say video, or podcast, but the application doesn't matter You might be using webinars, speaking to live audiences, or getting your message through social media. The consistency is what is going to bring you repeated sales. The consistency of the “one word/one idea” is the ONLY thing that's going to cut through the clutter. When the client runs into flexibility issues, they're not thinking of mindfulness.
Drum home that one message and you'll get the point across. Then take the same message into videos, podcasts, speaking, webinars or any medium that you're going to employ in the future.
However, it's not enough to do a sales pitch. In almost every situation, you also need to embed the product or service within your content. Let's find out how.
3: Embedding the information within the editorial Russian dolls.
You've seen those Matryoshka Russian dolls, haven't you? Also known as nesting dolls, it's a set of wooden dolls inside each other. You open one doll to find another smaller doll within, the smaller doll reveals yet another smaller doll, and so on. It's like one doll embedded into the other.
When it comes to selling your product or service, it's a lot like embedding the information within the editorial content, with one prominent difference. The embedded information doesn't necessarily get smaller. If you do it right, you can take all the time and space you need to get your point across.
Let's get right to the example, shall we? If you've been following this series, you'll notice that there was an entire discussion about 5000bc, our membership site. You got told how 5000bc was for introverts and got other bits of information about 5000bc.
Then, there was a follow up of The Brain Audit, which is also a product being sold on the Psychotactics site. In effect, you were introduced to two products, and if you paid close attention, the sales page/landing page workshop was brought up as well. Yet, you may have also noticed something else.
You didn't resent the information at all. If you're already a member of 5000bc, you are happy that your decision to be a member has been reinforced. If you've already read The Brain Audit (thrice as suggested), then you don't resent the information. And the workshop: that too would have caught your interest if you wanted to attend a Psychotactics workshop in October.
In short, the entire piece in part 2 was embedded as a form of a sales pitch, as well as the information you just read in the past paragraph. What makes it so non-confrontational is that it's giving you information that is useful to you. If you imagine a photographer conducting a workshop, you'll know exactly what I mean.
Let's say that photographer is a stockist for some lenses. And during the workshop, she can either talk about the lenses and give you the prices, or she can do something quite sublime. She can introduce you to the lenses, let you see them, play with them, even use them on your camera. Not everyone will be captivated, of course, but some will. And in embedding that information, she's got prospects who move over to clients.
Think of that yoga class we mentioned earlier What could you do in the yoga class? Maybe you're having a weekend session. You could say it during the class itself. It's possible you are selling some new yoga books that you've sourced.
Often enough you don't even have to mention the books. You could simply display them on a stand, and you'd get clients wanting to buy the product. However, not everyone notices or gets why one book is better, or why they should join one membership site over the other. And it's why editorial is so very crucial.
When you explain concepts using the editorial format, the client gives you lots of time to drive home your information. Try doing a sales pitch as long, and many, if not most of the clients will tune out immediately.
However, there's one more point to pay attention to when bringing up your product or service You can't merely keep the spotlight on yourself. Notice that Psychotactics doesn't have yoga classes. It doesn't sell photography lenses, either. Even so, you ran into those examples and for two good reasons. The first big reason is that more examples let the client get a better picture.
If you're embedding examples of info-products and courses, for instance, a lot of clients may not make the leap. But as you add more examples, like yoga and photography, you're creating depth in your presentation. You're giving them examples of both products and services, and you're doing something even more critical.
You're moving the spotlight away from you for a little bit. Once you've embedded your information, it's time to move on and give other examples, just to level the playing field a bit. Clients don't feel like they're stuck in an unending sales/editorial sequence.
Embedding sales information in your product isn't hard to do Once again, you can use it not only in your articles but also in your video, podcasts, webinars and every other media. Even a casual social media post can show a bunch of camera lenses or photo equipment. Or it can mention a workshop that you're thinking of having in New Zealand.
Whatever the eventual goal, you don't have to get stuck with just trying to sell. You can also use plain ol' editorial to keep selling products through the year. You may not sell in huge volumes when mentioning the product or services through the year.
Your sales won't see any great spike. However, that doesn't mean your clients aren't paying attention. These embedded pieces of information are getting through, and when you finally do your sales pitch or your sales email, all of this hard work will pay off.
There's really no downside to embedding like a Matryoshka doll. You've created great content, have sound examples and have moved strategically towards greater sales of your products and services.
Next Up: Find out the magic that already exists within your existing info-product and why you don't have to keep crazily searching for newer clients all the time. Find out how you can really double your sales of a product you've created a while ago?
How do you sleep in an exceedingly noisy environment? How do you beat jet lag? These are some of the questions we've had for years. This episode shows you how we've stumbled on a few nifty tricks to make travel so much better.
Read online: https://www.psychotactics.com/travel-tips/
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My friend loves egg curry And though I've learned over the years to make complex Indian dishes like biryani, peeling a humble hard-boiled egg seemed to be beyond my control. So here's what I did. I tapped the egg dozens of times so that it looked pretty much like a parched field.
Six eggs probably had six hundred fragments with that insane tapping of mine, and it took me about half an hour to peel six eggs. Then I went on YouTube and found that all you had to do was tap the egg once on the kitchen bench and roll it forward and the entire peel would unfold in a matter of seconds.
That's tip. A nifty tip. And since we travel so much every year, we've picked up some of these goodies along the way. Let's take on four of them. Some of them we've been using for years, and some we picked up just on this vacation to Sri Lanka and India. Here are the four, all in a row.
1: How to entirely sidestep jet lag
2: How to sleep soundly in extremely noisy environments (without earplugs)
3: A travel app that sorts out your entire sequence (especially if you have a complex set of journeys)
4: Why travel agents are invaluable (even though you can book everything on the Internet).
1: How to completely sidestep jet lag In 2010, we conducted a series of workshops based on The Brain Audit. It seemed simple enough. The first three- day workshop was in California, the second just outside Washington D.C and the third in Vancouver. There was just one problem. All three workshops were in a span of approximately two weeks.
This meant that we had to fly economy (we fly exclusively business now, but back then we flew economy) from Auckland to California. That's a distance 10,492 km and 12 hours. We conducted our first three day workshop in Campbell, California and then flew to Washington D.C.
You see the problem unfolding, right? The time difference between Auckland and California can be between 3-5 hours. You land in a different time zone, have little or no time to get used to the difference and you're off to Washington D.C, which is three hours ahead. And Vancouver? Yes, Vancouver is three hours behind.
All of this meant that we were zipping back and forth between time zones, and bear in mind we had 3 workshops to conduct and no time to get used to jet lag.
Except there's where our first nifty trick comes into play It's called No-Jet-Lag. They're tiny little pills you take every two hours on the flight. So if our flight was 12 hours long, we had to take 6 of those pills for the journey. There's just one problem: homeopathy isn't supposed to work. The dosage is so tiny in any homeopathic prescription that most doctors will tell you that it's a sham.
Do we care? Of course not, because for years we've been having these pills on flights, stepping out on the other side and getting right into the time zone.
To give you an extreme example, we were speaking at an event in Sweden in 2017 Sweden is the “polar opposite” of time zones for us, because there's about a 12 hour difference. We flew from New Zealand to Copenhagen, Copenhagen to Stockholm and the entire trip, if I recall, was 39 hours door to door.
The day after we landed, I was to give an hour-long presentation at around 3 pm. If you do your calculations correctly, that's 3 am New Zealand time (plus you do have to wake up, shower and go through some practice runs).
We don't have the time or the energy to argue with whether homeopathy works or not All we know is that we travel a lot every year, crisscrossing the globe for work, but mostly on vacation. International travel is tiring and No Jet Lag won't help you with the tiredness. It's like being in a car. If you travel 12 hours, it feels like 12 hours.
However, you don't feel like you've changed so many time zones. For me, especially, this is important, because more often than not, a Psychotactics workshop will be three days long. It's one thing to get on stage and give an hour long speech, but quite another to be on your feet (and awake) for three whole days.
There are no doubt, many methods to beat jet lag One ex-air hostess said she doesn't eat or drink anything on the flight. Sorry miss, but we love our champagne and the food helps us pass the time on these very long trips out of New Zealand.
We've used No Jet Lag since 2004, and it's worked just fine for us, so we'll stick to our weird little formula.
There's one downside, however No, it's not to do with the ingredients. Instead it's more to do with keeping to a plan. Before I leave, I set alarms on my phone to go off every two hours until we reach our destination. That way I can be sure we don't miss the two-hour cycle.
Apparently, you can take it every four hours if you're asleep, but not many of us sleep for hours on a flight, hence the alarms keep us on track. The instances where these tablets haven't worked is when we've been sloppy and popped them whenever we feel like it.
Like this trip, returning back from India. We didn't keep to an alarm plan and we were waking up at 3 am for about a week. Do your due diligence and you're likely to still be exhausted, but at least nicely ensconced in the new time zone.
No Jet Lag is made in New Zealand, so pretty much every medical store and travel store has it on display. If you go to their website at http://www.nojetlag.com/where-to-buy-No-Jet-Lag.html, you can find out where it's available. Try it.
And that's it. Our first nifty travel tip. The second one is pretty cool, though because noise is just part of travel. How do you sleep soundly in extremely noisy environments (without earplugs)? Get ready for a story that you're just not expecting.
2: How to sleep soundly in extremely noisy environments (without earplugs) Let's assemble some speakers, shall we?
Let's take a speaker, the size of your desk. Then let's add another speaker on top. Then just for good measure, let's add two more huge speakers on the other side and turn them on at full blast. Do you think you'd be able to sleep through the night?
When we travelled through Sri Lanka, we ran into some exquisite hotels and villas However, nothing was quite as nice as Apa Villa. A huge mansion-like villa, it seemed to be surrounded by forest. Almost without fail, as you were seated for breakfast, you'd have wildlife of all sorts not more than 50 metres away.
Monkeys, peacocks, monitor lizards and the occasional mongoose, they all were part of this jungle scenario. And in the middle of it was Apa Villa, in all its luxury—but mostly, quiet. Quiet that we luxuriated in.
Then on the last day something happened that would shatter that quiet The place had been rented out for a big, noisy party that would start at 9 pm and go on until 7:30 am. And those speakers, that wall of speakers, was aimed right towards our room.
And where there's a party, there are people drinking, talking and getting louder every minute. Except for the fact that we mostly slept through most of the noise.
The secret is white noise The moment this concept is brought up, most people nod and smile. They know what white noise is all about. It's a sound created by say, the hum of an air conditioner. Or the sound of the sea. However, most people don't think of battling noise with more noise.
Instead, what they tend to do is try and reach for earplugs. Which, if you're someone like me, is a pointless exercise. Not only am I a light sleeper, but I damaged my right ear, using cotton buds when I was younger. I can't sleep with anything in my ear as it just hurts.
Enter the white noise app We turned it on loud, to the sound of rain. At first, it might seem too loud for your ears, but your brain soon adjusts to it. And in doing so it tunes out the rest of the noise almost completely.
Think of it as being at a party. Someone across the room mentions your name and your attention is instantly focused on that person, instead of paying attention to the discussion right in front of you. White noise—and yes, there's an app for it—does exactly that function.
It helps your brain focus on the rain—or whatever sound you prefer, and tunes out the rest.
We slept through the party in Sri Lanka We slept through the noisy clatter of feet in Leiden, in the Netherlands.
We even slept with a jackhammer going outside our hotel window in Goa, India.
Few hotels in the world have true soundproofing And the more you travel, the more you realise how much you crave silence on your vacation. Well, there you have it. Battle noise with white noise and you'll have a restful sleep.
In fact, don't just use it on vacation. You can even use it at home when your neighbour has decided to create his own wall of speakers to party through the night.
3: A travel app that sorts out your entire sequence (especially if you have a complex set of journeys) Many people go on vacation from Point A to Point B.
If that's the case, you don't need much help, do you? However, if your travel plans are a bit like ours, you're going to need a bit of help. And incredibly, that help is free in an app called TripIt.
The app works like a really efficient secretary. As you book hotels, cars, and other elements on your vacation, you tend to get an e-mail with the confirmation.
All you have to do is forward that e-mail to TripIt The moment you forward it, it will collate all the information from that e-mail and order it sequentially in the app. This means if you're headed to Auckland on Thursday, via Air New Zealand, then staying at an Airbnb, and picking up a car at 2 pm, the app will slot all of these activities in chronological sequence.
All the details, booking numbers, directions—anything contained in the e-mail will all be put in neat little sections so that you can dig deeper into your reservations as well.
If you've forgotten to book a room, TripIt pays attention As soon as you open the app, it nudges you with a paid link. You are likely to ignore the paid link, but it's enough of a red flag to get you book your accommodation for the night.
If you choose to opt for their paid service (which isn't much at $45 or so, per year) you'll get a lot more features that all help the frequent traveller. If you're not a frequent traveller and just a complicated traveller like me, then the free version works just as well.
But what about your privacy? Obviously all of this information is sitting somewhere in a server. Someone could get all of this information and use it for nefarious purposes. They know where you're going, what you're doing, etc. Isn't that dangerous?
Yes, it's dangerous, but if someone really wants to track where you're going; if they're really motivated, there are many ways to get that information. The moment you start booking things online; or rather the moment you went online fifteen or twenty years ago, your privacy was private no more.
There's always the option of keeping all the information in a printed format with your passport, but if you're into digital apps, this is the way to go.
That's nifty trip no.3. Shall we go onto 4?
4: Why travel agents are invaluable (even though you can book everything on the Internet). Travel agent?
Isn't that a profession from the last century?
That's what I thought until I ran into a travel agent at a party. We got talking and later when I got in touch with him, I realised that the Internet wasn't the friend I thought it was, after all.
For years, Renuka and I have been booking our air tickets and hotels online. Imagine my surprise when I realised I'd been paying a lot more by going online. Granted, our trips can be extremely complex, but even so, I was shocked at how useful the travel agent happened to be.
Not only was he able to save us money, but help us avoid a lot of needless arguments A single vacation can involve several hotels, connections etc. And if you're zigzagging, it's not easy to find connecting flights or even airlines that you prefer. These days, all I do is e-mail the travel agent, and a few hours later, with no work whatsoever, on my part, he shows up with all the flights I need.
Just to make things easier, he knows we hate to catch early morning flights because it means you've got to wake up even earlier. Many of our flights take off around 11 am or noon, or even later, depending on where we're headed. In short, the travel agent's screen is entirely different from the one you have at home.
Instead of burning through an entire evening trying to get the flights and hotels you want, an agent takes over all the hard work for you and gives you a quote.
Agents know you have Google They know they can't randomly throw in high quotes. At first, we got some incredibly unintelligent agents, but in time we did run into one who understood our needs and was able to make the bookings quickly, effectively and at the prices that worked well for us.
This agent also looks at my schedule and will make suggestions. For instance, he told us to avoid spending more than a couple of days in a city in Europe because the city was boring (it was). It's the little bits and pieces, the little suggestions that make a good travel agent worthwhile.
Plus if you get stuck, things change, while the other passengers are lining up, a travel agent can quickly make changes for you.
Walk into a travel agency today if you're planning a trip. You might be amazed at how much time and energy you save in the future. And at no extra cost either.
And there we have it, our four nifty tips. 1: How to completely sidestep jet lag. You do it with No Jet Lag. Remember to set your alarms before you leave.
2: How to sleep soundly in extremely noisy environments (without ear plugs). Get a white noise app. Most of us would sleep soundly to the sound of falling rain.
3: TripIt is a travel app that sorts out your entire sequence (especially if you have a complex set of journeys). Every single part of your journey is mapped out in handy screen. No need to dig through a dozen e-mails. And you can often use the information on TripIt when checking in at airports.
4: Travel agents are invaluable (even though you can book everything on the Internet). You may never have considered a travel agent recently, but I am totally hooked. Our travel agent has saved us hours of needless searches, gotten us out of boring places, made bookings in places where everything is seemingly full and done it all without any extra charge. I don't know about you, but that's magical.
That's pretty much it. Bon Voyage!
Next Up: No one thinks running a small business is easy But even so, there are forces that pull you in all directions. These forces almost seem to tear at us as we go through our daily work. Find out the answer here: How do you cope with the forces of small business?
What is the hallmark of great content? When you start writing articles, you get advice from all sides. But there's advice you don't want to hear. It's advice that goes against the grain. And yet, it's this advice that forms the hallmark of great writing. So how do you get from average to great? You take the road less-taken. It's harder and yet far more satisfying. Here's advice you probably don't want to hear.
The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere This is an elaboration/review of the book by Pico Iyer. How do you slow down? What do you mean by going nowhere? And how can we slow down with our busy business and family life?
Which is the most frustrating part of an article? Yes, it's the First Fifty Words. We get so stuck at the starting point that it's almost impossible to go ahead. But what if there were not just one, but three ways to get your article going? That would be cool, wouldn't it? Well, here you go. Not one, but three ways to start your article instantly.
Why do some landing pages work while others fail? The core of a landing page lies in picking a target profile. Yet, it's incredibly easy to mix up a target profile with a target audience. And worse still, the concept of persona comes into play. How do we find our way out of this mess? Presenting the target profile mistakes we make and how to get around them quickly and efficiently. And create a landing page that attracts the clients we want.
In this episode we look at the relationship between energy management and time management. In the modern age we are expected to be on the go continuously; working while on holiday, being ever available for phone calls and e-mails etc. By the time we get to the end of the working day we often find we have no energy. Is there a way to not only have energy for work but also remain energized during our time outside of work?
Which is the most frustrating part of an article? Yes, it's the First Fifty Words. We get so stuck at the starting point that it's almost impossible to go ahead. But what if there were not just one, but three ways to get your article going? That would be cool, wouldn't it? Well, here you go. Not one, but three ways to start your article instantly.
Many of us believe that smartness comes from learning the skills in our own field. And yet, that's only partially true. We can never be as smart as we want to be, if we only have tunnel vision. So how do we move beyond? And how do we find the time to do all of this learning? Amazingly it all comes from limits. Find out more in this episode.
Even if you have the best idea in the world, analysis-paralysis can stop you in your tracks. You feel frozen, not sure what to do. So you research. Then you do some more research and educate yourself even more. But that doesn't get you very far, does it? Even famous people like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo would get stuck in this mode, just like you. But they still went on to create great art. So how do you create great "art" as well? Find out and beat the analysis-paralysis once and for all.
When writing headlines, you often get stuck. Can grammar come to the rescue when under pressure? Find out how grammar class helps you write outstanding headlines in a jiffy.
In 1970, two psychologists did a very interesting experiment called the “The Good Samaritan experiment”. It was meant to determine whether we're kind other some conditions and oblivious at other times.
What makes us kinder, more generous? Is there something that's been under our nose all along that we've been missing? Let's find out.
You can read the transcript here: #167:The Incredible Power of Kindness (And Why It Has Nothing To Do With Business)
A few months ago, my brother in law's house was burgled. What do you say to someone when their house has been burgled? What do you say when you run into a friend, and you find she's lost her father? We live in a world that's filled with kindness, or else we wouldn't function on a day to day basis.
However, as one writer wrote: We're only one generation away from anarchy. We're all born selfish. Kids hang on to their toys and bawl at the need to control the entire ice-cream stand.
We have to be taught to be kind.
And kindness comes in different forms It's not just about charity or letting the other driver cut into your lane on the motorway. In today's episode, we go all philosophical, simply because of a book I'd been reading (which I didn't complete, of course). It's a book by Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook.
Sandberg and her husband, David were on vacation to Mexico. David was on the treadmill exercising when he collapsed and died alone. In her book, Option B, she recounts the horror that inhabited her brain at the time of the accident, and for months later.
This episode isn't about business. It's about kindness and its many forms.
Let's find out how we can be adults in a world of “kiddy tantrums”. And how we can be kind as children, in a world of jaded adulthood.
Here are three things we'll cover. I promise it will change the way you look at kindness from now on. 1) Not asking what we should do, but doing something instead
2) Telling someone how they changed your life and being very specific
3) Slowing down, because kindness can be heavily dependent on how much you slow down.
1: Not asking what we should do, but doing something instead. In 2010, my father in law; Renuka's father, passed away.
I don't remember much about the day. What I do remember was the act of our friend, Cher Reynolds. Somewhere after the funeral, Cher showed up to the house with muffins. “I baked these muffins”, she said. Cher then stayed a while and left. So why did the incident of the muffins stay in my head?
I only realised it when I read Sheryl Sandberg's story. The difference between Cher and so many people is that Cher left out a question that so many people tend to ask in times of crisis. When there's a disaster, death or sudden misfortune, we feel helpless. And our helplessness shows because we all make a similar sort of statement.
We say: If there's anything we can do to help, please let us know. On the face of it, such a statement is exceptionally kind. In effect, we're writing a sort of blank cheque. We're saying we'd go completely out of our way to help, no matter what the request.
And yet in its kindness, the statement becomes a bit unkind. It's asking the person who's under enormous stress, to let you know what they need.
The stress is so high that the person is often cut off from reality and can barely function. It's at this point that we misguidedly ask them to “think up a list of what they need”. Author Bruce Feiler writes, “that the offer while well-meaning, shifts the obligation to the aggrieved”.
Cher didn't ask if she could bring muffins Instead, she took a decision, made the muffins, drove halfway across town and gave the muffins. In the book Option B, Sandberg talks about her colleague Dan Levy. Levy's son was sick and in hospital. That's when a friend texted Levy with a message that went like this: What do you NOT want on a burger?
Levy could see how the friend has not dumped the obligation. “Instead of asking if I wanted food, he made the choice for me but gave me the dignity of feeling in control”. Another friend texted Levy saying she was available for a hug if he needed one. She added that she would be in the hospital lobby for a whole hour, whether he came downstairs or not.
Kindness comes from specific acts, writes Sandberg “Some things in life can't be fixed. They can only be carried.” My brother-in-law and sister-in-law weren't the same people I'd met just a few days before the incident. They were shocked beyond belief that someone had violated their space.
It's at times like these that we sip from our cup of helplessness and ask that question, “how can we help?” It's at this time that we have to step up and act.
That's just the first act of kindness, however. There's more. Like letting someone know how they changed your life. And be specific about it.
2: Tell someone how they changed your life and be specific At the end of every Psychotactics course, we do something quite unconventional.
We ask for feedback. What's so unconventional about that, you may ask? This act is unusual, because clients are expected to give about 1000 words of what went wrong, and suggestions on how to fix the course.
Which means that if there are 35 clients on the course, we get a mind-boggling 30,000-35,000 words of feedback. And it was on one of these courses that I got feedback from a client named Gordon.
Here's what Gordon wrote to me, separately in an e-mail. “Whenever I do an assignment incorrectly, you take a lot of effort to tell me what's wrong. You help me get back on track when I'm struggling. And I really appreciate that a lot. However, when I do an assignment, or part of an assignment well, you simply say, “That was good”.
You get what Gordon is saying, right? He wants specifics both when he's going off the road, but also praise when he's done something correctly. And then for good measure, he wanted to know exactly which part he got right and why I thought it was so very good. In hindsight this request seems so very obvious, doesn't it? Look how quickly we snarl when the coffee's cold, but never stop to tell the barista when the coffee is perfect, and why we think it's so well done.
Every day we get countless opportunities to get mad—and probably just as many where we can be exceptionally kind Being specific is the key because just a pat on the back, while helpful, is nowhere as good as telling the person why they earned it. Baristas, waitresses, the chef that you never see at the restaurant, they all count.
Even the guy who is trying to get you to buy something at the doorstep counts. And within our own families, our kids, our friends, they all do little things for us, and we often forget to be specific. We forget to tell them how they changed our day, often our lives.
I've learned a lot from my nieces, Marsha and Keira, for instance. Keira runs in like a typhoon every Friday, turning off all the switches where devices are not charging. I have to remember to tell her how she's changed my laziness with keeping switches on.
Marsha has told me how she often doesn't force her opinion in a discussion, even when she knows she's right. And I've learned to be less pompous as a result. I think we can all be slightly more kind to the people we run into every day.
No one is saying you need to be a saint, of course. We all need our moments of anger and frustration, but when we turn on our faucet of kindness, let's make sure we turn it all the way up and tell people how they make a difference to our lives.
Which takes us to the final aspect of kindness Strangely, this has nothing to do with how we choose to act. Instead, it examines what causes us to stop and be kind. It's the odd phenomenon that's now known as the “Princeton Seminary Experiment”. But what was this experiment about? And how does it determine our ability to be kinder people?
3: Slow down, because kindness is mostly dependent on an unusual factor If a traveller is assaulted on the road, who stops to help?
If you've ever read or heard the story of the Good Samaritan, you'll be familiar with how a traveller is assaulted by thieves and left to die. A priest and a Levite pass the injured traveller but don't stop. The Samaritan stops to help the traveller, bandage his wounds and takes him to an inn, where he proceeds to pay for the care of the traveller.
In the 1970s, Princeton social psychologists John Darley and Dan Batson decided to run a modern-day Samaritan test The students of the Princeton Theological Seminary were asked to deliver a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan. Once they had reached a reasonable level of preparedness, they were expected to deliver a sermon on that very parable. However, in order to give that sermon, they need to get to a studio, in a building across the campus, where they were told they'd be evaluated by their supervisors.
Bear in mind that all of the students were studying to be ordained priests. And every one of them had already been buried in their preparation of the story of the Good Samaritan. Both these scenarios would suggest that if they ran into a scene where someone needed help, this group of all people, would be more inclined to help than any other group.
However there was a little monkey wrench thrown into the mix As the student prepared to go across to give his sermon, he was given one of three sets of instructions:
“You’re late. They were expecting you a few minutes ago. You’d better hurry. It shouldn’t take but just a minute.” This was the high-hurry condition.
“The (studio) assistant is ready for you, so please go right over.” This was the intermediate-hurry condition.
“It’ll be a few minutes before they’re ready for you, but you might as well head on over. If you have to wait over there, it shouldn’t be long.” This was the low-hurry condition.
The students—all the students—were then expected to walk by themselves to the studio In every case, the student would encounter a “victim” in a desert alley, just like the injured traveller in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The victim was a plant, but the seminarians didn't know that. All they could see was a slouched, destitute-looking person who desperately needed assistance. In such a scenario, and bearing in mind how they were influenced by the parable, how many seminarians would stop to help the “victim?”
The research findings were startling Only 10% of the students in the high-hurry situation stopped to help the victim. 45% of the students in the intermediate-hurry and a whopping 63% of the students in the low-hurry situations stopped to help the victim. The researchers concluded, “A person not in a hurry may stop and offer help to a person in distress. A person in a hurry is likely to keep going.
Ironically, he is likely to keep going even if he is hurrying to speak on the parable of the Good Samaritan, thus inadvertently confirming the point of the parable. Thinking about the Good Samaritan did not increase helping behaviour, but being in a hurry decreased it.”
Time, or the lack of time, that was an overwhelmingly important factor when it came to being kind To be kind, we all need time and energy. This isn't to suggest that someone with more time will be a kinder person, but when we're in a hurry, we are definitely more aggressive. Tunnel vision comes into play, and we fail to see how we can help others who are in need of our kindness.
It's scary to realise that our lack of time could make us inadvertently selfish And the anguish that comes from the lack of time isn't new either. Way back in 1911, poet, Henry Davies wrote about how we lead a life of care, and we have no time to stand and stare. Over a century ago, time or the lack of it was still the problem. There's no easy way to solve this problem, of course. We have to hurry up, but there are moments when we can decelerate, so that we have time to be kind.
Kindness isn't something we're necessarily born with. We learn kindness along the way. To get more kindness in our lives, we need to look at three core aspects.
1) Stop asking what we should do, but doing something instead.
2) Tell someone how they changed our lives, and be specific about how they did it.
3) Slow down, because kindness is mostly dependent when we're not in a hurry.
Epilogue The motto of 5000bc is “Be kind, be helpful or begone”. Kindness is a lot of work and I'm very grateful for everyone that pitches in. All of those who ask questions are being kind because you're helping others who are reluctant. Those who help out in the critique section or in the Taking Action forum, or in the Technology forum—you're all taking the time to be kind.
The way you welcome a new member, that's an extreme act of kindness, because nothing is better than feeling safe in a new environment. And there are the Cave Guides who voluntarily step in to help new members navigate their way, plus the Cave Elves that step in to make sure all is well while we're away on vacation.
Every one of you makes a big difference.
Thank you for your kindness.
Thanks very much.
Next up: Why Happiness Eludes Us: 3 Obstacles That We Need To Overcome
What causes clients to keep coming back? Is it information?
Or could it be entertainment?
For too long we've treated teaching and learning as an activity that needs endless slides, pages and work. But what if clients get better results having fun? And what if you had a ton of fun as well?
Let's find out how to speed up client learning with some pretty minor tweaks in your e-books, courses, presentations and webinars.
Click here to read the transcript on the website:
#166: How To Speed Up Client-Learning With The Incredible Power of Infotainment
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When my mother-in-law, Preta, was in her twenties, she was teaching at Sunday school. Like most Sunday schools, the kids were there to learn about the Bible. However, my mother-in-law decided to teach the girls how to sew tiny dresses for their dolls.
Within weeks of her starting up, all the girls wanted to be part of her class. Ironically, this made the other Sunday school teachers jealous. They complained to the “higher authorities”, and Preta was called in to explain herself.
“We've heard you're not teaching them about the Bible, and instead only involving them in play”, said the person in charge. “You can come in and test the knowledge of the kids,” retorted my mother-in-law, “and you'll find they know they're well-versed in their Bible studies”.
You can clearly see the wisdom of play in this story, can't you? You can also see how people in charge resist it a lot, even though it's apparent that we all have a maddening streak of playfulness we can't seem to shake. That when learning something, we want the trainer to bring a sense of joy into our learning. Instead, most education is soulless, incredibly dull and it's not surprising that clients drop out. The problem is that we're pretty sure we're guilty of this callous training and teaching as well.
But what if we were to make fun the core of our system? What if we postponed designing the information-based section and thought about the fun elements, instead? What if fun wasn't an afterthought but part of the entire structure of learning? How would we do things differently, if this were the case?
In this series, let's look at:
In this series, let's look at: 1) How to create Infotainment
2) Why we need to understand the goal
3) How to place the fun elements in your training
1) How to create Infotainment If you were in charge of getting a kid to write, would you start with “slimy, oozy eyeballs?”
Here is a story of Jen Jackson from Seattle. She'd started a small English tutoring business aimed at kids that were being homeschooled. One of her students was Michael, Michael clearly despised writing, despite being able to read well. His mother tried “everything”, but her methods weren't working, so she called Jen to help Michael write.
Except for the fact, that Jen didn't make Michael write at all. The two of them read joke books, challenged each other to tongue twisters and did everything but write. The second meeting involved fun drawing games and drawing a monster. Still, no writing was included. It was only the third session where a Monster Cafe was created, apparently to accommodate Michael's monster.
That's when Michael wrote out a short menu that included slimy, oozy eyeballs. In the sessions to follow, Michael went on to create many menus for different monsters. Today, Michael is not exactly prolific, but he willingly writes short paragraphs and is eager to keep improving.
When we read this story, we can see how entertainment has led to information success, can't we? Yet, as an educator it somehow feels scary. Even if you embrace the power of entertainment as the doorway to learning, how are you supposed to implement it? If you did what Jen did, wouldn't Michael's parent look at you funnily, wondering if you were just wasting their time and money? What are you supposed to do when you're not dealing with kids, but adults instead—and in serious fields like marketing or finance?
The core of entertainment is to take the pressure off, completely Let's say you wanted to learn Photoshop. If you've never looked at Photoshop before, that sounds a bit intimidating, doesn't it? So how do you make it fun? You look at the what causes people to freeze. Incredibly, it's the computer and Photoshop itself.
When I'm showing clients how to use Photoshop for the first time, I usually take them to a cafe—without the computer. We sit down and work our way through some core shortcuts. If the client wants to learn to draw, what alternatives would they need? Wait, you're reading this, so you can easily play along.
Let's say you want to get the brush tool. Which letter on your keyboard would you press? Yes, you're right, it's the letter B.
What if you wanted to change the opacity of the brush to 30%? What number would you press? Some clients say 30, but of course, the answer is 3. What about 50%. Yes, it's 5. And 70%?
I'm teasing. Of course, you know the answer. Let's move on to the brush size. If you wanted to increase the brush size and you had to choose between the left and right square bracket, which one would you choose? Most of us correctly select the right square bracket, which means that the left one will reduce the brush size.
Imagine you're sipping a cup of coffee, there's no computer in sight, and you're told to create a theoretical drawing in Photoshop. You have to get to the brush, get the opacity to 90% and then reduce the brush size?
Notice how much fun that whole exercise turned out? The first way of taking the pressure off a person or a group is merely to get them as far as you can from the activity. When you put yourself (and the student or client) in a different setting, the pressure is instantly off and a sense of play sets in.
However, not everyone can waltz their way into a cafe or garden Some teaching needs to be done at the venue itself. What do you do, then? One of the best and most effective ways to get the pressure off is to get the clients to do something wrong. Let's take an example. Of the many workshops we've had over the years, one of the more intimidating ones is the uniqueness workshop.
The fact that we were going to take three days to get to uniqueness didn't help. How do you take the pressure off? You get the uniqueness wrong, that's what you do. Within minutes of starting the workshop, I gave each client an advertisement for a local business.
They all had the same ad, and they had to figure out the uniqueness of the company in under 10 minutes. However, before they started, I informed them, that all of them, no matter how hard they tried, would get the assignment wrong.
Imagine you're in the room right at this very moment You can hear the hush, can't you? You have an assignment, but you're going to get it wrong. But that quiet lasts only for a few seconds. Everyone has a big smile on their face as they take on the assignment that they just can't get right. The pressure to get it all correct is gone, and they can have a jolly good time.
They start the assignment, complete their version of it, and then they're all chattering away and having a great time. After which everyone is called upon to give their answers, and a logical explanation follows. They've been entertained as well as informed! Tah, dah, infotainment!
Good teachers know the value of play.
Good workshop trainers will take the pressure off as quickly as they can. Excellent writers and speakers will use the power of stories to get their audience smiling, long before the main guts of the information comes along. The more pressure you put on a student, client or audience, the more the brain goes into shut down mode. Which is why we have to release the tension.
But more importantly, it's because you need to understand the real goal. But what's the purpose? Ah, that's easy. You want the client to want to go forward of their own accord. You want them to beg you to continue. They must enjoy themselves so much that what you're teaching them must feel like a bowl of warm, chocolate muffins. Understanding the goal is what makes the client—or student come back repeatedly.
Let's find out how we can get this goal going, shall we?
2) Why we need to understand the goal “‘Better, faster, cheaper.’
That was NASA's mantra around the year 1999. And it was in this very year that the Mars Climate Orbiter was destroyed. On Nov 10, 1999, the Mars Climate Orbiter, a $125 million satellite was supposed to become the the first weather observer orbiting over another world. For the orbiter to do its job, it needed to get into a stable orbit around the red planet.
But something had gone wrong. The software was required to control the Orbiter's thrusters, and it did so, using the system of measurement of “pounds”. However, a separate software was processing data in the metric unit—”newtons”. The two systems of measurement threw the entire mission entirely out of whack, and atmospheric friction likely tore the fragile satellite apart.
From the outside, it might look like a doofus-plan: that sophisticated scientists didn't notice that the software was calculating in two completely different units.
And just like that, the mission—the $125 million mission—was no more.
When training clients, the burnout rate is consistently like the Mars Orbiter That's because we're using completely different systems of measurement in our teaching methods. The goal isn't necessarily to get the ideas or learning across. Yes, that's the final goal, but not the primary goal. The primary goal of any training system is to get the client back.
Remember the story about Jen Jackson and how she tackled Michael's writing problem? Remember how my mother-in-law got her students to get all excited about Sunday school?
When you think about education in an objective sense, you may feel that it's your job to get the information across. But knowledge is tiring. It's frustrating. It's the wrong system of measurement. And it's most often what causes the client to burn up before the mission so much as gets underway. Instead, think of how you can get the client back using fun and a factor of entertainment.
Entertainment doesn't just mean you're rolling out tacos and a Mariachi band But then again, who says learning has to be all work, work and more work?
In the headlines course, for example, we start off with an assignment that goes like this: Day 1: Introduce yourself
Day 2: Watch three videos—and these videos are from the movie, Karate Kid
Day 3: List five topics and many sub-topics
And what does their list look like?
Ice Cream
• Cup
• Cone
• Scoops
• Buckets
• Sprinkles
• Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup
• Brown Cow
• Whipped cream
By Day 5, clients are clearly having fun Mermaids, dinosaurs, deep sea aliens (yes, deep sea aliens exist, you know)—they all make a list. And everyone is having a blast. They're getting to know the members of their tiny group; they're coming up with all of these crazy topics and sub-topics. And it's a lot like what happens at our place every Friday.
On Fridays, for the past four years, we've taken our niece Marsha to the food market The assignments could involve walking to the veggie section, weighing an object and writing down the weight. Or we might have to skip—no walking, just skipping—to the dairy section to find out how pricing works, and how Swedish rounding of prices works. In short, Marsha (and I) have been running, jumping and skipping through our learning exercise.
She's learned about frozen, dried and fresh foods. She's learn about weights and measures, about addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Then when we get home, we do spellings in the garden or walking around the car (yes, I get sneaky steps on my Fitbit when I do that activity).
However, let's make this really boring. Let's hunch over a desk or dining table and you get the idea why most kids detest having to study. There's zero entertainment and a lot of screaming and do this, do that, involved, instead.
So what would Marsha want to do the following week? And the week after? Doesn't take much imagination, does it? If our goal is to educate, to train, to impart knowledge, you and I are sure going about it the wrong way. A workshop doesn't need your audience to reverentially worship you as you show them slide after slide. At Psychotactics workshops, clients go for walks and do their assignments.
They sit by the pool. We have games, we have soft toys like Jordan the otter, and of course, Elmo comes along wherever we go. At one workshop, two our clients, Jessica and Alia, who happened to be belly dancers, taught one part of the group to dance, and the other to clap along and create the mood.
Would you want to go to another dull, reverential note-taking-workshop or come to a Psychotactics workshop, instead?
If it sounds like too much fun, and no work, that's not the case at all Every course online, every workshop, every book you write needs to be result-oriented. If the client buys your product or service to get a result, a result needs to be the finale. But why does it have to be boring? The only reasons why any learning is boring is because the trainer doesn't realise that fun is possible, or they take the easy route and do what they've already done a million times before.
To create a fun-based situation takes a lot of work on your part. It's not as if to suggest that a serious training session isn't a lot of work. It's just that you need to do so much more planning when fun is involved. Entertainment is great for the learner or the audience, but it's a hard grind for you to put into place.
However, the results of information + entertainment are incredibly predictable Clients come back repeatedly. If you were to attend a Psychotactics workshop, you'd find close to 50% of the audience are back for a second, third, fourth helping. Clients travel long distances just to be at the workshop. And they sign up even before we have time to put up a sales page. For instance, if you take the Singapore Landing Page workshop, ¼ of the seats are already gone.
With the Brussels workshop, ¾ of the seats were taken before we completed the sales page. A similar trend plays out when we're conducting courses online.
There's the Article Writing Course—yes, the live course online—in July 2018 The seats would go on sale by early March. And before you know it, and often within 24 hours, that course is filled to the brim. If you look at a presentation, there are compelling videos, loads of cartoons, a touch of animation—all designed to give the audience respite, even though the presentation may be under 40 minutes long.
And if you've read a book from Psychotactics, you know that once again there are cartoons, a recipe in the middle of the book and an epilogue at the end of the book telling you the process of how the book was made.
What's the goal of education? To come back, that's what the goal should be, shouldn't it? Imagine you as a kid wanting to race to school every day, because, hey, school was so much fun. Imagine desperately wanting to continue a video series on a topic like Photoshop, because the presenter is so amusing. Now make no mistake. It's not about pure entertainment.
You're there for the information as well, but why on Earth does the process of imparting information have to be so boring?
“Better, faster, cheaper” That was the mantra, the chant that caused the Mars Polar Lander to fry just 23 days after the Mars Climate Orbiter. According to an article in Wired Magazine, vibrations in that craft’s legs may have convinced the craft’s on-board computer it had already landed when it was still 100 feet in the air.“The specific reasons [for that failure] were different, but the underlying parts, this overly ambitious appetite, were the same.”
“NASA made some “big-time” changes after that,” said NASA engineer Richard Cook, who was project manager for Mars exploration projects.
They got rid of several other missions, including one that involved bringing rocks back to Earth. NASA, it seems, reevaluated what they were doing, based on strategies and concepts that had stood the test of time.
When teaching, what stands the test of time better than entertainment? Would you rather go back to a place that is boring, or one that is a fun-learning experience?
Which one are you most eager to go back to, time and time again?
Well, since we're on the same page, let's go to the third part. Now that we're pretty sure that fun is part of learning, let's move to the third part and find out just where we can put fun parts in the learning.
3) How to place fun elements in your training Rob Walling has an unusual video in the middle of his presentation that takes the audience by surprise.
In May 2017, I spoke at the Double Your Freelancing conference in Sweden. Rob was one of the speakers, and his topic was about the topic of “how to launch a startup.” Rob's a pretty easy-going speaker, with well-thought-out slides and a gentle progression. Until midway, when the entire presentation seems to stop for an intermission of sorts.
Walling decides to show the audience a video of how his son solves a problem progressively. It's a home video, nothing flashy, yet the audience laughs as they watch the story unfold.
How did the video show up in Rob's presentation? It's the same question that could be asked when you attend a Psychotactics and go off scampering for a scavenger hunt. Right in the middle of the workshop, there's a peculiar assignment. The pre-assigned groups are given 30 minutes to go out and find a whole bunch of items, return and then upload the pictures to the blog.
The next day each group makes a presentation; the best entry is chosen by popular vote, and there's a tiny little prize ceremony.
You noticed the fun element in both the examples, didn't you? The question is: how did they get there? And the answer becomes pretty apparent even as the question is being asked. Someone has to put it there, because yes, it may show up quite by chance. However, in most cases, the creator of the product or service has to be proactive enough to put in the fun elements.
Your product or service needs this break as well Why should it be? When I went to school, we had a short break of 15 minutes, then a lunch break of an hour. We'd race out of the class at break time, so we could get onto the playground. Was the play connected in any way to our biology or physics class?
Of course not, but the fact that someone decided to have the short and long break enabled us to study and play on every given day.
Your product or service needs this break as well The way to go about creating the entertainment factor is to sit down with the book you're about to write. If you could make it fun, more interesting, what would you do? If you're about to conduct a course online, what do the assignments look like? Is there any space for play?
What about your workshops or seminars? Are the participants like prisoners listening to you drone on forever? Or is there some factor of entertainment and play?
If you remember picking up a copy of the Reader's Digest, you have this example with “The Lighter Side of” and “Laughter the Best Medicine” in the middle of some pretty serious articles. Someone sat down and said: “Ooh, all of this stuff is intense. We need to lighten up”.
Not everyone appreciates the entertainment, of course A scavenger hunt may not go down well with 100% of the participants. Cartoons in a marketing book sound a bit crazy, doesn't it? A door that creaks open on a website (it's going to be on our new website) may seem outlandish. And there are always going to be naysayers.
However, by and large, those are the people who wanted to stay in and do their homework while we ran out during school breaks. If they're unhappy with the entertainment factor, don't go around chaining the rest of your group to ol' grumps. Instead, design the event, the book, the product or service with a bunch of fun elements.
Look through other books or situations to find inspiration Esquire Magazine may have a joke section—just one joke told by a supermodel. Could you be that supermodel in your book? If you've got a video course, why do you have to be Ms.Serious or Mr.Let's-Get-To-The-End? Have a couple of videos that tell a joke, or show something funny around your neighbourhood.
Maybe take a leaf from Rob Walling's book and put in a video about your kid's crazy jokes. The fun part doesn't always have to be disconnected. It can connect quite easily as well.
In The Brain Audit, there are sections where there's a whole page of cartoons, and they connect quite precisely. There's also a total disconnect with a butter chicken recipe.
Do what you please: connect or disconnect at will. • Crossword puzzles
• Recipes
• Funny home videos
• Cartoons
• Stories
• Case studies
These are just some ways to entertain your audience while educating them As this article demonstrates, entertainment isn't just a nice-to-have. Instead, it's a necessity. Sometimes it is the reason why people show up. Sometimes it's the reason why they stay and continue.
And sometimes the entertainment may be right at the end, like when David Attenborough and his crew put in the “how we made this documentary” as an epilogue of their film.
When you see an idea you like, make sure you borrow it and use it well. We've used ideas from video and used it our books. We've been to a Sting concert and used some of the concepts in our podcasts. You can get ideas from everywhere if you look out for them—and more importantly—implement them.
My mother-in-law's Sunday school story didn't end well. She managed to get the kids interested, but jealousy worked against her. She was told to stop the fun bits and focus only on the serious religious teaching, instead. You, on the other hand, aren't going to be pulled up if you add entertainment to your work.
However, you have to plan in advance. The entertainment isn't likely to just work its way into your syllabus. Sit down, create the entertainment. Start small and build from there.
Work is fun. But play is just as educational, if not more so.
Next Up: The Secret of How To Get Clients To Keep Coming Back Repeatedly
Procrastination is bad, right? Well, not quite. If you break up a project, you're likely to find most projects have five distinct sections. To get to the end of the project, you're going to need a form of managed procrastination. But how do you go about this form of procrastination? And why is it seemingly better to keep you focused? Let's find out in this episode, shall we?
Read the transcript online: #165: How to use procrastination to your advantage
Imagine you're sitting down late at night to get ready for your presentation the next day. And you find your slide deck is empty. That's precisely what happened to me when I was conducting a workshop in California many years ago.
Usually, I'm very thorough, making sure everything is in order at least four-five days before we board the flight. This time, however, I'd somehow put off what I needed to do, confident I'd have enough time when I got to the U.S.
When preparing for workshops, I go through my slides anywhere between 10-15 times, and complete full run-throughs at least thrice, on the day before. So how come the slide deck was empty? Our workshops usually span three days or more, and the slides for Day One were just as they needed to be. But who looks for Day Two slides on Day One? Not me, at least.
Which brings us right to the evening of the first day, when I sat down to prepare myself for Day Two. That's when I realised many of the slides had incomplete information.
Procrastination doesn't have a good rap.
And rightly so. Just because we've pushed something out into the future, doesn't mean it's gone away. In fact, there's a good chance that unfinished task is a mega-energy drainer.
If I have to go for a medical checkup, and I can see that white slip in front of me, it bugs me. If you need to finish writing that chapter in your book, you spend enormous amounts of energy just pushing that task out on a future to-do list. However, there are times when procrastination can be good for you.
In this series, we'll cover three points: 1) How Deadline-Based-Procrastination Helps Formulate Better Thoughts
2) How Procrastination Can Help Manage the Email Deluge
3) Why Procrastination Can Be Good For Energy Levels (And When It’s Bad)
1) How Deadline-Based-Procrastination Helps Formulate Better Thoughts In 1966, there was a study on the Ju/’hoansi bushmen that wander around the borderlands between Namibia and Botswana.
It found that the bushmen only worked seventeen hours a week, on average, to find their food. An additional nineteen hours were spent on domestic chores and activities. In all, their 36-hour week might seem pretty excessive when you consider that most working people aim for a 40 hour week.
However, our week is a lot longer Even back in 1966, a comparable week in the United States was roughly double. 40 hours were spent at work, and about thirty-six, on average, on domestic labour. Today, adults employed full time in the U.S. report working an average of between 47-50 hours per week. That's more than a whole working day as compared with 1966.
All of this extra work only means one thing The working brain of the Ju/’hoansi and the busy business owner in Beijing, is similar. But the demands on energy, distractions and travel have made procrastination an imposing part of our lives. Even if you were to go back just to my father's time. He ran a business, a secretarial college and while he put in a long workday from 8 am to 8 pm, he didn't have Facebook or a mobile phone.
Once he got on his train at night, he'd be eating roasted peanuts and nodding off as he made his way back home. In comparison, we have to battle all sorts of crazy stuff, just to get through the day. It's inevitable that as our energy depletes, our procrastination levels skyrocket.
Even so, procrastination can be a great ally when it comes to formulating thoughts Take this article for instance. I write most of my articles within 5000bc, right in the forum, on forum software. Which means every member of 5000bc can see the progress of the article. This article, for example, started on 19th September. It was just an announcement of the article.
By the 20th, I'd only managed the three topics I was going to cover. As the 21st makes its way to another sunset, four paragraphs are in place. And then there's a “to be continued” added to the unfinished piece. If you look at this form of article writing, you can either consider it to be procrastination or progress.
I think it's procrastination and it's good when you're trying to maximise your creativity Creative work, according to Hungarian psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, there are five steps to getting to a sort of finish point. They are:
Preparation
Incubation
Insight
Evaluation
Elaboration
When you and I look at that list, there are five whole levels of procrastination Tiny tasks would blur those five elements together in a matter of seconds. However, the moment you have to write an article, compose some music, or even put that plant you bought last week, it all requires five chunky steps. Trying to rush a project of some complexity through those stages, is likely to be counterproductive.
Even so, every stage of the procrastination process needs to be long enough, but not so long that you completely forget about it. The bigger the project, the more likely you're to push it to the back burner and then it just lies in a corner, unfinished.
Properly managed procrastination seems paradoxical Procrastination by its very nature is putting off something for the future because you don't want to deal with it right now. Managed procrastination, however, is where you do a tiny bit, then put off the rest for just a little while. In some cases, you may start on the task in the morning, and continue your task a lot later in the day.
For other tasks, it might be a lot better to hit the pause button until the next day. While you're seemingly stuck on the pause button, your brain will come up with different angles to solve the problem. If you're writing an article, you'll have different examples, possibly even a different way of expressing yourself.
The more significant the task, the more the complexity Writing an article might be no big deal for one person, but for you, it might mean a lot of sweat, tears and a bit of beer too. Even so, professionals tend to have some system that will take them through preparation, incubation, and insight. The job gets done as a first draft, then you come back to evaluation and for some elaboration.
The more we find ourselves working through these steps, the greater the procrastination. However, it's a managed form instead of simply putting things off, like we usually do.
Distraction has a bad name and rightly so We're off on a tangent when we should be working on our project. Unlike the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen, we have too much to cope with all at once. When you accept distraction as part of your day to day life, procrastination becomes even more vital. You realise that once you're done with a pre-designated chunk of work, you're going to reward yourself with some distraction, so your brain doesn't slip into a downward spiral.
Hours later, or even a few days later, you're fresh, filled with a range of ideas and examples (that you no doubt jotted down) and the very same project has a raw new energy. The distraction, unfortunate as it may seem, is not quite so ugly if you plan for it in advance.
In previous versions of the Article Writing Course, I'd get clients to write an article every day Then around 2016, someone mentioned that she was taking 3-4 hours to finish the article every night. I was appalled at the idea, because in my mind, clients should be taking between 60-90 minutes at best, to write an article.
If you spend 3-4 hours, you merely get exhausted, and the material isn't 300%, and often a lot worse than if you're not so exhausted. Hence I went about re-engineering the Article Writing Course. On Monday, the clients only write topics. On Tuesday they outline the topics.
As the week winds its way to Wednesday, they chip away at the article using the system of procrastination. Instead of writing five articles a week, they may end up with just two. However, those articles are of a higher quality, and the student isn't dreading the following week as much. Make no mistake; learning a new skill or working on a project with twists and turns, is never going to be easy.
However, slaving your way through it is a silly strategy. Going through several stages makes more much more productive, more valuable content and finished projects.
And if procrastination worked for projects alone, it would be wonderful. However, there's another excellent application for managed procrastination. I use it for my e-mail. How? Let's find out.
2) How to use procrastination to deal with the deluge of e-mail. On Sunday nights, I sit down to go through my e-mail.
That way when I wake up on Monday, I expect my inbox to be empty or at least sparse.
Hah, I should be so lucky.
No matter how much you and I deal with e-mail, there's always more coming through. And easily the biggest problem with e-mail is that it drains you. If you're doubtful about this, start up a new e-mail account and look at the vast blankness of that account. Not a single e-mail sits in your inbox in that new account. And if you sneak back later, maybe 20 minutes later, there's still nothing to be seen.
Now if only you could make your current inbox so neat and tidy, eh? Well, you can. And it's all a matter of managed procrastination. Email software has gotten very smart over the years and some of it is free, while some of it requires a subscription of some sort. What most modern e-mail software allows you to do is to push e-mail away until it's needed. Maybe someone is requesting an article that I won't tackle until next week.
Normally I'd just let it sit in my inbox, because it needs to be done. Or I may put it in a folder that I won't ever see again. But at this point, and because of e-mail software, I can push it away. In other words, procrastination comes to the rescue.
On any given day, I'll deal with the urgent e-mails right away. Everything else gets pushed for later. Either later today, which is about 3 hours after reading it, or for the evening, weekend, next week, next month, or at a specific date and time. Like Friday, 29 Sep at 3:13 pm, for example. No matter how important you are as a person, most of your e-mail can be allocated to another time zone, when you're more likely to be able to tackle what needs to be done.
For instance, some emails that require more effort, I'll either deal with right now, or push until later. It's hard to say which ones you should keep and which ones you should push away. How you defer your e-mails depends on your work load and your mood.
But one thing is clear If you've ever had an inbox with zero e-mails or just a couple of e-mails, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You feel like a burden has been lifted off your shoulders. You feel free. You feel excited—ok, ok, I'll stop. And yet, all this procrastination, managed as it is, may seem like you're just fooling yourself. We all put reminders and alarms and when we're supposed to do the task, we swipe away that reminder.
Won't the e-mail that comes back be just an excuse to swipe it away for somewhere in the future?
I once had a few e-mails that kept coming back At first I'd send them off for a week, as they were not urgent. But I soon found myself pushing them away for a month. They showed up in the inbox in January, February, then again in March. April, May—which is when I decided I was never going to act on them and simply archived them to pull up, should I ever need them again. If you're never going to read that e-mail now or later, you may as well get rid of it or archive it (because you never know).
E-mail is a fact of life We don't expect to get less. We're always going to get more. And it sucks our energy to keep scanning e-mails in our box, often opening some we've already read. Much better to clear up that box so that the e-mails appear later, or as when needed in the future. To get this job done, I used Boomerang for Gmail (which is a paid service and costs about $5 a month).
On the Mac, you also have Spark, which does an excellent job and strangely is free. I know nothing about the PC because I walked away from PCs back in 2008, though Boomerang works with Outlook and should be PC-friendly.
All e-mail isn't the same Some need to be dealt with right away. Some can do with managed procrastination. Use the procrastination and you'll be more relaxed and you'll have that new e-mail account feeling yet again.
Which takes us to the third part—and probably the biggest reason why procrastination helps.
3) Why Procrastination Can Be Good For Energy Levels If you head to Uluru, also known as Ayer's Rock, your first experience as you leave the airport, is an invasion of bush flies. Within seconds they're swarming all over your face and in some misguided effort, you try to get rid of them. Do what you will, but they keep coming and you have the sense of losing the battle.
Work can seem a bit like bush flies, at times You try swatting it away, but it comes back with gusto. And as you take on the day, your energy keeps edging downward. That's how our brains function; first at reasonably high efficiency, and then we seem to get slower, even making more mistakes. Procrastination, managed procrastination makes for a great energy reboot.
Which is why I'll work for a couple of hours in the morning, then go for a walk. Then I'll work for another couple of hours and then go cook lunch. All of these breaks may well seem like “wasted time” but it's “time well wasted”.
But even within that “work time”, I'll mix up activities For instance, I may start writing an article, but then move to answering e-mail, and then to writing detailed answers to questions asked by 5000bc members. Every activity is different and disconnected. The article writing might create the highest demand on my brain, which is when I have to procrastinate after a while. Trying to take on the article on the very same day might be totally counter-productive, so I'll go build the website or go to 5000bc, instead. The activities will vary between high energy and low, all day long.
However, in between there's a clear sense of adding chunks of procrastination.
Going from one end to the other is seen as focus Most of us revere the concept of focus, but focus doesn't mean that you have to start and finish everything at one go. A lot of activities both work-related and non-work related could all do with the break up of the activity. For instance, when I'm talking a complex dish, I'll make sure I do it in phases. That phase by phase method is really nothing but a form of managed procrastination, and a good use of high energy vs. low energy tasks.
Procrastination is often seen as a form of laziness And for some of us, that's just what it can turn out to be. We are either so drained by the activity that lies in front of us that we choose to avoid it, causing a further drain on energy. We know it's still on our to-do list and that drives us crazy, even though it's hard to admit it to ourselves.
However, managed procrastination is a whole different kettle of fish. When used well, it can keep your energy high so that at 5 pm every evening you're still raring to go, instead of feeling washed out and unable to do much.
Use procrastination to your advantage.
Use it to formulate better thoughts and better examples.
Use it in your e-mail to keep that inbox clean as a whistle.
And finally keep your energy high right through the day by mixing high and low energy tasks, thus using a slightly sophisticated version of procrastination.
Next Up: Can Resistance be Beaten? We want to achieve a lot, but as soon as we get started, resistance kicks in. But did you know there are ways around resistance? Resistance loves to play the game of winner. We need to put resistance in second place. Here's how to go about the task of winning the resistance game.
Some days you just feel fed up of your work. You know you shouldn't. You love what you do, but you can't shake the feeling. You almost have to drag yourself to work and you don't know how to turn the day around.
That day can quickly turn into a second day. Before you know it, the week is a puddle of frustration. But there's a way out of this mess and it's incredibly simple. You can turn your day around in 30 minutes. Let's find out how.
You can read the transcript on the website: #164: How To Transform A Miserable Day Into A Happy One, In Under 30 Minutes
How to turn a miserable day around in 30 minutes: Episode 166
Some days you just feel fed up of your work You know you shouldn't.
You love what you do, but you can't shake the feeling. You almost have to drag yourself to work and you don't know how to turn the day around. That day can quickly turn into a second day.
Before you know it, the week is a puddle of frustration. But there's a way out of this mess and it's incredibly simple.
You can turn your day around in 30 minutes. Let's find out how.
Right click here and ‘save as' to download this episode to your computer.
Sean D'Souza:Three Month Vacation How to turn a miserable day around in 30 minutes How to turn a miserable day around in 30 minutes
Fed up. Fed up. Fed up. I said it thrice on my walk this morning. And then Renuka pointed out that I was saying it yet again, as I reached the cafe. If you know me well, you probably know I'm always darting around at a squillion miles an hour. As a friend, Kimberley Carroll once said to me: “Sean you're a mad person. You're always busy doing things”.
Even so, at some point all of us hit a wall It's not the kind of wall you're thinking of. This isn't a spiral into sadness, frustration and depression. It's just a feeling I tend to get into, when I sense I need a break. And instead of paying attention to what my brain and body is telling me, I dig my heels in and go to work.
I turn on my phone and listen to another podcast or audio book. I turn that moment into a learning episode.
Except today, my phone decided to have a mind of its own. I turned on the phone on my walk back, expecting to continue listening to an audio book. Instead, the phone started playing my favourite music. Admittedly my music tastes are pretty eclectic. They go from quawwali, to African drums, some Turkish music.
Buried in the middle of it all is tango, Taylor Swift and Zhu. However, today my phone decided to play Randy Travis.
Yup, country music. That's the twangy stuff that comes out of Nashville, Tennessee. The stuff that most people like to turn their noses up at. But for me, country music isn't weird at all. I pretty much grew up with a generous dose of country music.
Think about that; a kid growing up in Mumbai, India, listening to country music. But I didn't just listen to the Randy Travises, George Straits and Ricky Skaggs. I record whole country radio shows and listen to it repeatedly on the sound system
As you can tell, the music floods my brain with subtle waves of joy and growing up. Anyway, my earphones were plugged in, and there I was on my “horse”, listening to country music on my way back home.
But something had changed. I was no longer disgusted. I had a big smile on my face, and Renuka was struggling to keep up with my pace and stride. By the time I was back home, a mere half an hour later, I was a changed person.
The body and brain has a wall We all run into that wall from time to time. Instead of paying attention to that obstruction, we try to bludgeon our way through it. What the brain is telling us, is that it seeks a bit of distraction; a good dose of downtime.
For most of us, music is an instant mood lifter. Yes, it's an obvious choice to turn our mood around, but strangely we seem to ignore it when we're in a foul mood. But why stop at music? What else makes you happy? I know a visit to the library makes me happy. So does a visit to the cafe, but not with any books or learning to do. Just to sit there and watch the world go by—that's a big fun-trip.
Most days my to-do list is fine, even important, but on some days I need to block my ears. Instead of listening to my to-do list, I need to pay attention to your brain and body. Bowing to the demands of a to-do list is bound to make me even more miserable. Instead today, instead of wallowing in frustration, I decided to have some fun on a Thursday. I blasted the music, cooked some food, went for a haircut and wandered through the public library. I even thought of driving down to the ferry and jumping on it and going around to the city, for no particular reason.
A miserable day is a miserable day only because we choose to make it miserable It's not something that can be solved with a tub of ice-cream or half a dozen cookies. Work is a lot of fun for a lot of us, but we often fail to realise that work is a series of projects. Take for instance, the work I've been doing this week. I had to write an entire sales page, draw cartoons, put in videos and organise the layout for a sales page.
We're having a sales page/landing page workshop in Singapore and Brussels next April and clients have been asking for details so they can sign up. Having finished that sales page, I had another chunky assignment. I needed to finish my presentation for a speech I'm giving in Australia in early November. These are big, mind-taxing projects.
What would you do right after you finished this volume of work? I'll tell you what I did. I ploughed right into another project, because just like you I have another twenty thousand things to complete.
Yet that was completely the wrong thing to do and it's no wonder that I was feeling rotten And that's when my phone decided to take over my life. It played music, instead of yet another audiobook. It's something that we all need to understand if we're to make our work more fun and with greater meaning.
What's really cool is that it doesn't take a lot of effort.
Blast the music.
Do something you really like doing. In half an hour you'll feel so good, you'll almost feel like going to work. I feel so energised that I came to work, but only to write this article. I'm off to library-land and to drink a coffee with no other agenda in mind for today.
I'll be back tomorrow, re-energised It's been four days.
Am I still fed up? Or energised?
P.S. It's Monday morning and I forgot that I was irritated four days ago.
The weekend helped as well. I watched a TV series for five, maybe six hours straight on Netflix. I slept at 1 am, woke up at 7. I did a lot of drawings, played with my nieces on the weekend. I suppose that storm has passed for more than one reason.
But the primary reason is that I was jumping from one project to the other.
I wasn't rewarding myself mentally, by taking the time off. And that's when it all feels like too much work. That mental refreshment is underrated these days. We're all supposed to be on the go, go, go, all the time. Instead, just filling in my mind with fun activities and a great deal of no activity, I woke up to a bright Monday with no recollection of Thursday.
I'm still singing country songs.
I must be happy.
If you're keen on turning your day around, this is definitely the way to go
Stop doing work, because work will always be around. Even if you're employed and can't just take the day off, like I could, you can still take a short break, turn on the music and go for a walk. If you're like me, and have your own business, take the rest of the day off.
In all the years I've been in business, I've never ever seen the to-do list go down. No matter how much you do, there's always a lot to be done. Take the day off, refresh your brain, sleep—sleep a lot, because that's what your brain is craving.
And that creates a turnaround. Suddenly work is fun again.
Next up: How To Stop Your Left Brain From Thinking
How do you get clients to return? One of the most underrated tactics is often right under your nose. Yet most people having events don't realise the mistake they're making and have to work a lot harder to get clients to come back.
In this episode we look at what every business should do: not just get a client but get the client to come back repeatedly.
Read online: How to Get Clients To Return To An Offline Event
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If you head down to the South Island of New Zealand, you'll run into a little French town called Akaroa. The story goes all the way back to 1838 when the commander of the French whaling ship Cachalot what can only be called a slightly questionable purchase of the land around the area. Then, the French colonists left France to sail to New Zealand to establish a French colony.
The French did get to Akaroa but found a treaty had been signed between the Māori and the British. The whole of New Zealand was officially a British colony. As the story goes, the French were just a wee bit late.
The French seemingly missed out on yet another colony, and we can feel the impact of being late when it comes to testimonial-gathering as well.
But why testimonials? Because testimonials are the lifeblood of any organisation, product or service.
The more testimonials you have in place, the more the prospective client can experience your product or service, long before they pay for it. Which is why books have testimonials on their dust jackets, and websites have testimonials on every single product or service.
But back to the concept of lateness If you wait long enough, the client is unlikely to give you a testimonial, simply because they've gotten too busy. It's also harder for the client to gush as much once they've moved on.
2) How and when to get testimonials Getting a testimonial for an event is almost as important as the event itself. For one, when a client gives a testimonial, they're ratifying they made the right decision to attend the event. However, it gives you, the person holding the event, a chance to make sure you never have to struggle to fill in seats in future.
Which is why you should get testimonials during the breaks If you don't have breaks in your event, there's no way to stop the juggernaut from rolling on. At Psychotactics we have workshops, and for information-based events, it's critical to have many breaks or clients simply get more tired.
If you're having an event like a cooking class or a watercolour class, something that's not usually break-oriented, it's easy to forget that every event could do with a break of some sort. People need to get to the toilet; they need just to step outside or reduce the intensity of what's happening.
Most trainers or people hosting events fail to pay attention to the concept of breaks, merely because they think it will stop the flow of the event. What you'll quickly realise is that people regroup speedily and focus better after a short break. It gives you some downtime as the organiser, and it leaves some room should something go wrong during the event.
If you simply go from one end to the other, you're not really planning for any chaos, and as we know, that's a hazardous strategy. Chaos can erupt from nowhere, and it's best to prepare for it in advance, by having at least one, if not several breaks.
It's in this break that you're going to be able to get your testimonial Usually a client will be having a great time and will come and tell you so. It will quickly be evident as to who's having the most fun, and you can usually go up to them and ask if you can shoot a quick video.
Be prepared to know in advance where you can shoot the video, ideally some places that are slightly quieter and away from the scene of action. I tend to use another room or another area close enough, but far away from the group.
Ideally get 2-3 people to give testimonials, and in about 10 minutes, you can get about three quick testimonials that can be used in a video, audio, or when transcribed, in text format.
Be sure to use the six-questions found in The Brain Audit The Brain Audit gives you typical questions to ask a client, and when you use the format of the six-questions, you get a client experience instead of yet another sugar-coated testimonial. It also gives you a clear pathway to follow when asking the testimonial. You rarely have time as you have to get back to the event itself.
Even so, you may well run out of time, and it's good to schedule testimonials for the breaks, but also for a short time after the event. Despite all your best intentions, sometimes it's not possible to get the testimonials, or all the testimonials during the event.
Even if that's the case, ask people if you can call them on Skype video and get a testimonial. Most people will agree, and that serves as a form of an appointment, and you've more or less got your testimonial in the bag.
Waiting for a testimonial after the event can often be too late Once people leave, or if they don't make a commitment to speak later, the task of getting a testimonial gets increasingly harder as the days go by. You're eager to recover after your event, and they're keen to go back to their lives.
This means you've lost the one thing that's incredibly important to business: third party proof. Getting a testimonial needs to be almost as important as conducting the event itself.
At Psychotactics we've goofed not once or twice, but often It's quite tiring getting an event off the ground. You're never quite sure whether clients are quite ready for the testimonial. And notice that break?
That break should give you a breather as well, but you're often using it to get testimonials. However, we've had to learn to structure our testimonial system in a way that we get a bit of a break and get our testimonials too.
There are times when it's all too much to do on the day itself. For instance, we hosted some really popular meetups that were three hours long but went on for six and seven hours.
It was difficult to break away from the fun and chatter to record a testimonial. It does feel a lot like work, and it takes an iron resolve to keep working when everyone is having a great time.
If it's really so hard to break away, simply ask the group to write each of their names on a piece of paper and give it to you. Later, you know who's keen to provide you with the testimonial, and you can call in or video chat and get your testimonial.
Testimonials are how clients decide, so getting them early is critical to your business. But there's one more thing to cover, isn't there? It's about getting the clients back. How do you do that?
Let's find out.
3) How to get clients to come back. If you were to get a dolphin to do a trick in the pool, would the size of the reward matter? In the wonderful book, “Don't Shoot the Dog”, author, Karen Pryor talks about how a dolphin would learn and execute a trick. However, the trainer decided to give the dolphin a smaller fish as a reward.
You'd think the dolphin wouldn't bother too much, considering a fish is a fish, is a fish. However, dolphins do care about the specifics too, just like humans. Which is why if you get a client to come to your event once, you're going to have to figure out how to get them to keep coming back.
You've probably heard that getting a new client is the most expensive part of a business, right? Even if you don't spend any money on advertising or publicity, getting a client to trust you and attend your first event is a huge task. And your mission should be to get the client to come back repeatedly, if possible.
When a client trusts you, they're likely to sign up at higher prices, and without needing you to create a long sales page and endless promotional messages. Which brings us back to the fish, doesn't it? Why do clients tend to come to one event and never return?
There are many reasons why clients may not return, but one of the most significant responsibility lies with you One of the biggest reasons why clients come to information based events is, ironically, not to get information. We may believe they come to get more knowledge, but YouTube is full of information.
So is Google, Bing and their inbox. The reason they're coming to you is to get less confusion and more skill. Strangely, the information you're imparting can only be less confusing if you just what's required.
When we started out with Psychotactics, we had no idea how to get the client back to an event We got lucky because we sat down and did some planning in advance. At the very first event, where I presented early concepts found in The Brain Audit, I had an ending section where I talked about follow up sessions.
For $75 a month, clients could be part of a group that learned different concepts just like The Brain Audit. We'd didn't have the money to book a venue, so we asked for help, and people offered their offices since no one was around after 6 pm anyway. But why did clients sign up for the follow-up sessions?
It's because they got their reward, their right-sized fish, the first time they showed up. That presentation, as amateur as it may have been, got them to a result and they were keen to come back.
If you're hosting an event, clients are eager to get a similar sort of reward } If you're teaching them how to do a pose in yoga, please don't spend the evening showing them ten thousand poses. Show them one or two and get them to a result.
If you have a cooking class, don't run around like a headless chicken trying to get five-six dishes going. A single dish, maybe two will do the job. Clients are increasingly going nuts with the level of information that's streaming through their doors.
What they're looking for isn't a bucketload of fish. They just want one—provided it's the right size.
When we did our first event, we didn't expect anyone to sign up for future events All the same, we put our strategy together and were pleasantly surprised when about ten people signed up and consistently showed up over the year to follow. Some of those clients then attended higher priced workshops and even ended up consulting with us.
All of this information is very important for those of us who've grown up believing that everything can be done online. The internet is a great tool to market our business, but just starting up a blog and hoping people will visit is a strategy that may get you quickly disappointed.
The core of today's world is a factor of overwhelm, but also a sense of loneliness. Which is why an offline workshop or event should deliver not just a factor of skill, but also the chance to meet others on a similar journey.
So what do you do from this point on? The first thing you need to do is to work out how you can get the client the reward he/she is seeking. If they come to an event that promises they'll learn to make mozzarella, then all of them should be walking out with that mozzarella-making skill.
Once you have them at the event, and possibly get a few testimonials, you need to do them the courtesy of asking them to come back repeatedly. Even if you're hosting an event in a different country, there's a high likelihood that clients will come back to future events.
Over 50% of the attendees at any event, have met with us before or been through our courses or events. We invite them back to another event, and they come along happily because they enjoy the experience.
If you're going to do an event, plan for six, or ten This is true especially if your audience is local. The key is to prepare, go into the event, give the participants a skill and call them back. That's the way to go about making sure your events are full in future.
Three things to consider:
1) Where you'll get your clients
2) How and when to get testimonials
3) How to get them to come back.
Now go out there and host your event and give your computer a break .
Next Up: Imagine being a hostage at your own workshop! Imagine not having access to your own venue; having to take permission from someone else just to conduct your event. This is the crazy story of the very first Psychotactics U.S. Workshop. And while it's an entertaining story all by itself, there's a lot to learn as well for any small business owner.
Click here to read more: The Psychotactics Story_The Craziness of The Very First US Workshop
Most of us dream of having an online business We are led to believe it's fine to just start up a blog and the audience will show up. Reality is a lot different. It takes time for an audience to appear. And when they do appear, it takes time to trust you.
So how do you speed up that process of client acquisition and trust? Welcome to the land of offline events. In this episode we'll see why you should have the event and how to get your clients.
Read the transcript online: Why You Need An Offline Event to Boost Your Chances of Success
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I don't like Microsoft Excel. However, my wife, Renuka does. She can spend hours, even days tinkering with that “weird” program and come up with some statistics that are plainly astounding. One day as we sat down to lunch, as we do every afternoon, she announced the results of her morning escapade with Excel.
“Guess what percentage of our income is derived from workshops and offline events?” Before I could answer, she revealed her statistics. The income we earned from offline events was barely 2% of our income. This tiny percentage wasn't terribly surprising to both of us, because we knew that conducting international events was an expensive exercise. Even so, I was a bit ambivalent at the thought of putting in so much work and getting a return of just 2%.
That's when Renuka revealed her ace, “Guess how much of our income comes as a direct result of those events?” she continued. And mercifully I didn't need Excel to answer that question, because I've done the hand-raising ceremony at our live events. What's the hand-raising ceremony, you ask?
At workshops, I will ask how many clients have done one online course with us, and at least 50% of the hands go up. Then I ask them to keep their hands raised if they've done two courses and few hands, if any, go down.
Three courses? The hands still stay up. The courses at Psychotactics are not necessarily cheap. While some start at around $900, the hands-on courses can cost as much as $3300.
If at this point you think that it's the online courses that lead clients to come to the in-person workshop, then it's the other way round. Clients that meet us in person, tend to sign up for the online courses, and then just for good measure come back and attend an in-person event as well. It makes perfect sense to you, when you think of it in terms of dating, doesn't it? A relationship can be formed online, but to make sure you're not picking the wrong person, you and I, we both have to do the offline thing: we have to meet.
The exciting bit about the meeting is that it doesn't always have to be a big event At Psychotactics, we've had three-day, four-day, even seven-day in-person workshops. At other times, we've had a presentation for between 20-45 minutes. But there have also been situations where we've just spent a few hours in a meetup, given answers to client's questions and then gone for an extended lunch or dinner.
In every case, the results are similar. Clients that get to know us don't bother to go to the sales page with a fine tooth comb. When we offer a product, workshop or course, they sign up instantly. They have met us offline, they get to know us well, and they trust us. When you see and meet someone one the flesh, you can often make a pretty accurate assessment of whether to go ahead or not.
Which is why despite the meagre 2% income from workshops and events, we continue to run offline events.
But what if you're just starting out? You may not have any books or products to sell the clients who attend your event. You aren't likely to have an online course or training system.
Is it still worth it? Without a doubt, it's one of the best ways to get started, no matter what you're planning to do for a living. In most cases, a workshop will get you to interact with clients, you'll find out what interests them, and you'll get instant feedback. Plus, if you do your budgeting well, you're likely to make more than just 2%.
When we did our very first workshop back in the early days of Psychotactics, we were rewarded for our audacity. I was part of a networking group, and I cajoled several of the members to show up and bring their friends along. The fee was $75 for the evening. The cafe owner offered to rent us the place for no cost and even provided the coffees free of charge. That event netted us $1500 because 20 people showed up.
But it didn't stop at that point. It's a well-known fact that the hardest sell is the first one, so I'd prepared myself to sell recurring events just like this one. How did we go about this task? And how do you do something similar?
This series will cover three core factors. 1) Why consider planning an event—offline
2) Where to get clients
3) How to get people to sign up and the next step.
1) Where to get your clients When I was just about eight or nine years old, I had a job on Sundays.
Not every Sunday, of course, but around the months of late May and most of June was when my father needed my brother and me to pitch in, in the family business. Since my father ran a secretarial college, admissions would start in July, which meant that we had to stand outside churches and hand out a leaflet. After reading those flyers, many young women would then sign up for the year-long batch that started in July.
But why churches? As it turned out, most secretaries at the time were almost exclusively Catholic. In Mumbai, India, masses are held on Sundays, on the hour from 6 am, and then all the way until 10 am. Which meant that we'd often be giving out hundreds of leaflets to everyone coming out of the church.
Some of whom would either become secretaries or would pass on the leaflet to a friend or relative. In effect, to start up any business, you need to show up and make yourself known in places where your future clients congregate.
If you've been brought up on the goodness of the internet, you might think the best idea in the world is to sit behind a computer, write a blog and the clients will come rushing in. In several cases that method of creating content is valid, but it could take a lot of time, money and energy to get that kind of business model off the ground. Which is why you may as well take a deep breath and go offline. Scary as it may seem, it's time to do an in-person event instead.
Which raises a very pertinent question: Where do you get clients? The answer is not apparent and for good reason Let's say you wanted to start a cooking class. Let's say you're no champ at making Michelin starred meals, but you're no slouch at cooking either.
Where would you go? Do you randomly post leaflets into your neighbourhood boxes? That's one option, but there would be a lot of waste as it's unlikely that everyone in your neighbourhood is suddenly going to be interested in investing a frying pan and heading to your class.
Instead, go looking for a problem that needs solving. When you look at the leaflets being distributed outside the church, it seems like a scattergun approach, doesn't it? However, as we already noted, there was a method to the madness. The girls were out of school or college and back in the early seventies, those were among the only jobs available to them.
It enabled them to get more independent and earn a reasonable income. When looking for your audience, you too need to look at the problem you're solving and not focus on just the solution. The problem you're likely to address is: unsure of how to make meals that kids love? The answer is “how to make meals that kids will eat in minutes”.
And where would you find kids? Right, you figured it out, didn't you? At the playground, in schools—even in doctor's waiting rooms fighting those millions of germs they seem to attract.
But what if you're selling a product instead, like a microphone? Again, we don't necessarily start out with an audience, but tackle the problem, instead. What problem does the microphone solve? The Rode Podcaster, for instance, combines broadcast quality audio with the simplicity of USB connectivity, allowing recording direct to a computer without the need for an additional digital interface.
Suddenly finding kids and their parents for a cooking class seems a lot simpler, doesn't it? However, you're more likely to find a group of podcasters that meet locally. If you look up a site like MeetUp.com, you're more than likely to find all sorts of different groups.
But what if you looked long and hard and not a single podcast group shows up? Well, let's go past the technology problem and see what problem a microphone can solve. It helps a business owner record podcasts, or just have better-sounding screen recordings or screen videos for their business. The business owner can simply plug in the microphone, and they're well on their way to recording without needing to get muddled up with digital interfaces.
Every product or service is going to solve a problem Sometimes you can find clients in an obvious place.
For example, we were able to find clients at our networking group. However, we also went on to meet with a group of coaches who held their weekly meetings not far from where we lived. We found dentists who needed marketing advice. I know this sounds bizarre, but we also wrote and got paid for articles in an alpaca magazine. We didn't get to do a workshop or in-person event with the alpaca folks, but the example is designed to show you how to look beyond the obvious.
In some cases, your audience is likely to be pretty narrow Kelly Q lives in Australia, and her audience is a relatively tiny niche of “supply teachers”. Know what happens when your kid's teacher can't make it for the day? They get a temporary teacher, don't they? They're called “supply teachers” or “teachers for the day”.
Kelly writes a book that helps them work out the issues that plague supply teachers, and her business has started to take off. Where did she find her audience? Not offline, but online in teaching groups and Facebook groups. In her case, the Internet has come to the rescue and enabled her to sell her book. Yes, it's not an offline audience, to begin with, but over time every audience whether you find them online or offline can be engaged within a real setting, in a real place, and drinking real coffee.
2) What's the first step to finding an offline audience? Sit down with a couple of friends or someone who knows your business well and write a list of the problems your company solves. Once you have the problem, or problems worked out, you can find out the audience that needs your solution. If you're still struggling a bit, try going to a site like MeetUp.com.
For Psychotactics, I had no luck with volleyball teams, or with potters, but that got me to think of volleyball coaches who might need marketing advice or pottery companies. With a little bit of brainstorming, you should be able to find several groups or at least ideas for where to get started.
But what's next? How do you go about getting people to sign up for your event?
3) How to get people to sign up to your event You know the phrase that says, “Think Big”? Well, the way to get people to sign up, is to get rid of the idea of thinking big. And I stumbled upon this “think small” idea quite by mistake. When we started out, I'd always compare myself with more prominent marketers, and somehow extrapolate their numbers to my own. If they had 5000 people at their event, I automatically assumed that 150 people at my to-be-event were entirely feasible. Then I ran into a friend of mine, Kushla Martin, excitedly told me about an event she was attending and that she'd paid $75 for the event.
Two things struck me at once The first thing I realised was that it wasn't some elaborate event that I was always dreaming about. It was a simple speech that would take an hour, possibly a couple of hours. Kushla was more than happy to go out, get inspired and pay $75 for the advice.
The $75 was the second point that stuck in my head. When you have to make a decision that involves hundreds or thousands of dollars, there's a lot of decision-making, fund-checking to be done. With an $75 event price, it was relatively easy to decide to go. Even though my business was relatively new, I too had been to at least two or three events that ranged in the $50 to $75 range.
But how do you get people to sign up for your event? You merely announce the event, the venue and put a price on it. Remember that clients aren't coming to your event just to support you, though a few friends might just do that. They're there to learn something so that they can use it in their own lives and business. So ask yourself: what will the clients get as a result of attending your event?
Sachie's Kitchen in Auckland, New Zealand started with a simple goal in mind. Run by Sachie Nomura who's Japanese and her husband, Nick (who is Kiwi-Chinese) their goal was to take the most helpless cook and turn him or her into what they call a “black belt of Japanese cooking” in a single 2 ½ hour session.
A cookbook store called CookTheBooks, also in Auckland, turned their backyard shed into a kitchen of sorts teaching (and serving) Sri Lankan, Moroccan, North African, Spanish and other cuisines. The clients that come to their events know exactly what result they'll get. In Sachie's kitchen it's a masterclass on Japanese cooking.
In CooktheBooks, it's a bit of knowledge of the cuisine, but it's a great fun evening out and hence it attracts office groups and friends along.
Should you consider having free events? You could, but it's hard to get people to show up to free events. Remember those series of sessions we did back when we first started? Those were paid sessions, and you could safely say that between 80-90% showed up month after month. Several years later, we decided to give back to the community and host free monthly sessions of one hour each.
For over a year, participants turned up, and the room was always packed with 40 people, but it was never the same people. When an event is free, it's easier to stay at home if it's a windy, rainy day. We found the same with our meetups worldwide. When we'd announce a free meet up in a city, people would turn up, but not in force.
The moment we started charging a modest fee of $30 or so, everyone turned up. Free events are harder to market and even harder to sell. It's better to restrict your free goodies to something online or also something you can give away at the event itself. By and large, you'd do well to avoid free events.
What do you do next? Depending on how you publicise your event, you can put details on sites like Eventbrite or EventFinda. Those are event sites in this part of the Pacific. You'll have some event sites on your side of the world.
f you're meeting with a group of people, for example, a group of volleyball coaches, you can get them to sign up and often pay through a mobile device. Finally, don't forget to print a few leaflets that talk about the results you're going to get the clients. If you just want them to meet and have a great time, make that the focus of your leaflet and marketing. If you want it to be deadly serious, that's fine too. I've been to watercolour classes, photography sessions, dancing lessons and even bought a couple of houses as a result of offline events.
However, once you've got the event going, it's time to think of the next step You'd think the contents of the event are pretty important, right? And they are, but that's what you have to put together. No one can tell you what agenda you need.
You can pretty much work it out yourself, and even if you're feeling reasonably nervous, no one is going to notice. The first 5-10 minutes of any event are reasonably nerve wracking but once you settle in, the crowd relaxes, and everyone has a decent time. However, while settling in, you may easily forget a crucial next step.
Next Up: How do we get clients to come back? How do you get clients to return? One of the most underrated tactics is often right under your nose. Let's look at what every business should do—not just get a client but get the client to come back repeatedly.
How do you redefine the term “passion”? A definition shouldn't be a barrier to your progress, should it? Yet, the moment you hear people talking about passion, you're stuck. And that's because their definition is all wrong. How do you redefine the term “passion”? And what does one-buttock have to do with passion? Let's find out.
You can read this episode online: One Buttock Passion
In a TED Talk that's been watched over 9 million times, the conductor of the Boston Philamornic, talks about a seven year-old child. And this is what conductor, Benjamin Zander, says in his speech.
He talks about a seven-year old child and what he sounds like when he's pounding on the piano. Clearly, the sounds that emanate from the piano border on pain. Even so, if that seven-year old practices for a year and yes, takes lessons, he's now eight. And the piano isn't screaming out in terror any more.
Benjamin Zander goes on to talk about how the child sounds when he's nine, then when he's ten. At which, point, Zander suggests that most kids give up. However, if he'd waited for one more year, he would have sounded pretty wonderful.
Zander takes pain to suggest that it's not that the kid became suddenly passionate, engaged or hit puberty. He explains that when the child was younger, he was playing with an impulse on every note. Then as he got better, he was playing with an impulse on every other note. At 10, it was every eight notes. And the 11-year-old had one impulse on the entire phrase.
Zander calls this the “one buttock” moment When instead of hogging the piano stool with both buttocks, the music takes over and you're taken over by the music itself, so that you're playing on a single buttock. People who try to find their passion are two-buttock players. At the start of their journey they're struggling to hit the right impulses and this is because of the information they get about passion.
-Stop looking for your passion.
-Knowing something well and solving someone's problem is more commonplace than you believe.
-Why the terminology is all wrong—and hence drives us crazy.
-What if you know too much or too little?
Think about passion for a second and what does it sound like to you? It sounds remarkably like love at first sight, doesn't it? You don't equate passion with spending five years chasing after a girl or a guy to get their attention. Instead, it's quick, it's instant. You have a new type of drink, possibly a wonderful Pisco sour, and you fall head over heels with it.
Now you want to talk about it to everyone. You want Pisco sour for breakfast, lunch and dinner, if possible. It's all about instant, now, magical moments. And that's what passion sounds like to everyone, whenever it's brought up in a conversation.
But passion for your work is almost never like that It's almost always a kind of slight attraction, a lot of frustration, some joy, some more frustration, some more joy. And then bingo, you look backwards and it's no longer two-buttocks on the seat.
Take me for example. Most people consider me to be a really proficient writer. Without fail and for 40 weeks a year, I diligently turn out at least 5000 words a week. That's the bare minimum, by the way. However, I had no passion for 500 word-articles, let alone 5000. In time, I could turn out 500 word articles while conducting two courses, it was that easy. And may I add, fun too. I was one-buttocking my way to writing.
In 2014, I started writing longer pieces that progressively moved into the 5000 word zone. As we were having coffee this morning, Renuka reminded me how I was getting upset with her all the time. Well, really I was getting upset with myself. I couldn't come up with topics. Writing 5000 word articles would drain me completely. I'd reach out to her to get ideas, and of course it wasn't something that she was interested in, so it wasn't possible to suggest something as quickly as I needed it.
This would cause me to complain, and quite bitterly at times, that she wasn't helping me at all. In reality, I was a one-buttock 500-word writer, but a two-buttock 5000-word writer. Then, later, much later in 2017, something happened. Yes, you know what happened. I was writing and able to look at the back as well and notice that one buttock was off the chair.
Now I have the opposite problem I have so many 5000 word articles, that I barely have time to write them. I have about 5 or 6 of them outlined and ready to go, and by the time I write them, it will be a week or two from today. By which time, another 5 or 6 will be in the queue, if not more. The passion I'm feeling for writing, just wasn't there when I started Psychotactics, then it came along. Then it wasn't there at the 5000 article mark, and now it's suddenly all fun and games again.
Even so, there's nothing instant about passion. The idea of passion is all wrong. This one-buttock stuff just takes time. This is not a Pisco sour where you swig it down and you hit an instant high. This is slow, often boring, consistently frustrating progress. One more example and I'm out of here.
I recently bought an app because I love cooking. The name of this app is Paprika (yes, like the spice). And I was instantly in love with it. I could use it on day one and I continued to sing its praises. I even did a double spread cartoon about the app in my Moleskine diary. This experience with the Paprika app is diametrically different to the the experience with Evernote. I didn't like Evernote. I found it hard to work with. I made excuses, I deleted it from my computer, from my iPhone and then installed it again.
Then over time, as I learned how amazingly eccentric it was, I started to love it. And today I'm passionate about Evernote. How do I know that to be true? Because if you gave me the option of deleting one app and keeping the other, the Paprika's head would be on a plate in a second. I would never, ever, ever, ever, give up Evernote, if I could help it.
So all this talk about follow your passion is going to take you nowhere because the starting point is more frustration than one-buttock playing. Which leaves us with a nagging question.
Where do you go from here? The key is to start learning something you think would work for you. Maybe learn how to do some pottery; or make face cream; or how to build running shoes. Perhaps you're already skilled at something and need to get the message out and need to learn about how to give a better presentation or write better. Wherever you are now, it's where all entrepreneurs are at any point in their lives.
They are almost always in transition. There's almost always that point where you get a bit fidgety and want to do something else, or at least the same thing differently. Whatever it is you have an inkling for, the only way to get the passion to keep going until you look back and see your one buttock.
It's an inexact science, but it boils down to a few simple steps You start, not necessarily knowing where you're going You run into a lot of frustration until things start to ease up a bit. You aren't doing very well, but you still love what you do, and you persist. Eventually, the tide turns in your favour. You get terrific. And clients think you're close to perfect. It's an inexact science that requires a good deal of focus and persistence.
That's when your passion will find you. And that's all I can really say. The journey is long, but it sure is interesting. You may as well start today.
A few questions on passion: 1) I do have a question: How do you find that intersection passion or even exploring a passion and solving someone's problem? Especially when you have too many interests and passions & can solve several problems just like you can. Or you just pick one and stick with it until you find a reason to change the course.
- How about people who draw a complete blank on their hobbies, interests or often times they are things like playing tennis but at 50, bodies don't cooperate very well, or a mum who wants to learn calligraphy but fears what's the point of that and where will that lead her, or someone who simply draws a blank? I have met several people like this and it fascinates me that I have a complete different problem to what they are struggling with.
Everyone has either a problem where they feel they know nothing. Or they know too much. The point is the people who feel they know nothing, haven't really thought things through. I know a woman who for years was just a stay-at-home mother. Technically, that doesn't get you very far if you're looking for a job or want to start a business. She had no intention of starting a business, so she got a job. And how do you get a job if you don't have the skill? That's an easy answer, isn't it?
You look at what you want to learn, and you learn it. Then you apply for the job, and if you meet the requisite needs of the employer, voilà, you have the job. We all know how this system works, don't we? Most of us have had to do some kind of job at some point, whether at home or at work, and we get the skills and off we go.
If you know nothing or believe you know nothing, you have to learn something This very same person never cooked much. For her a sandwich is as interesting as a fancy meal. Even so, she got herself some cookbooks and took to baking. She now bakes all the time and turns out some great pies, muffins and all sorts of goodies that you and I are not supposed to eat. Once again, no experience, no knowledge magically turns to a high level of skill.
Almost everyone can create something, if they're not physically or mentally handicapped. It sounds trite when someone says the word “simple”, but it's really that simple. To get a skill, you have to learn a skill. To get better at the skill, you have to practice the skill. To get good at muffin-making, you have to burn some muffins before you get your Michelin stars. The same analogy applies to business.
You can sit around thinking that you know nothing, can do nothing and end up doing nothing The result of all this inactivity isn't nothing. It's a few levels below nothing. Feelings of uselessness wash over you with increasing rapidity. Others see you as directionless and lazy, or just confused. Yet, think of yourself as being 15 years old again and wanted to move into a career. You wouldn't be aimless. You'd pick a college. You'd pick a university. You'd do a professional course. You'd learn, and acquire the skill knowing fully well that it was just a matter of time before you had enough ability to do the task.
There is the flip side to ability, of course. When I was 25, I felt like I was a bit cursed. I adored Photoshop. I wanted to spend all day with it. But I also drew cartoons. Hey, I could use Photoshop to draw cartoons. No clash of interests, there, are there? But what if you can write, draw, dance, cook, and find there are subsets of everything. Because cooking can involve Italian cooking, but also French. It can involve Sri Lankan cooking, Thai, Malaysian, or Indian.
Suddenly the options are too many. And the excuses increase with every subsequent option. Well, you have to “kill some of your babies”. If you're so very talented, so very skilled, you have to sit down and get yourself a nice big red pencil. Then you make a list of what you can do, by crossing out everything that isn't important right this minute.
You pick one and you stay the course, just like you'd do with a marriage. If things go sour, and you've given it your all, it's time for a change.
The problem with passion is that it changes all the time When I was growing up, I was a shy kid. All those cartoons you see; all that skill you think is inborn isn't a result of some magical gene in my family. If you go back many generations, you'll find zero cartoonists in our family. All of that drawing came from a lot of encouragement and being much too shy to talk to too many people.
I went through a lot of years, all the way into the first couple of years of university, being relatively shy. If there was one thing I was passionate about, it was drawing. It got better over the years, people complimented me about my talent all the time, and more importantly, it was a perfect “chick magnet”.
While other guys were busy trying to get the attention of the girls in university, I'd sit quietly in the corner of the canteen. I'd drink my chai, open my book and start drawing. Before long, a few girls would be oohing and aahing over the drawings. I didn't have to go and find the girls; the cartoons drew them to me. That's how I got over my shyness, and that's how my passion for drawing cartoons burned even brighter.
But by the time I was in university I wanted to be a copywriter By the time I'd spent a year and a half in copywriting, I wanted to script 30-second commercials. Then, on a whim, I decided to go back to cartoons. The journey to New Zealand back in the year 2000, caused me to want to get into marketing. Could I end up becoming a chef in the next few years, or find myself obsessed with origami?
It's hard to tell, but look at the story of most entrepreneurs or freelancers, and a common thread starts to reveal itself. Passions change over time, and the starting point of passion is almost always marked by lots of enthusiasm—and a lot of frustration.
It's hard to imagine it now, but back in the years 2000 and 2001 it was really a slog trying to get clients I was passionate about jumping into marketing, but no one else was willing to pay me for it—not for a while at least. And sure we had our website up and running. Sure, we wrote articles. You have to do that for yourself, if not for anyone else.
But the slog continued for quite a while. That frustration is the starting point, and it seems to swirl about like a fog for the longest time. Which is when most people give up and try to find something else.
Something easier, or shinier. And this is where I think the concept of the 10,000 hours really shines.
I don't believe you need to do 10,000 hours to gain a talent You can get good enough to be hired in a fraction of that time. Even so, the 10,000 hoursmeans you're deep into what you think is important to you. It shows persistence, and if you're spending that much time learning, you will also figure out ways to make things work for you. When I started cartooning, I had no clue how to earn an income. I persisted and found areas where I could make my mark and get paid for it.
The same applies to any skill. At first, if you're floundering, you'll be in that position for a while. If you study your profession well; if you keep improving your skills and more importantly, get away from that computer and into the real world, you'll find that your passion will eventually find its way to you.
In the end it's not about whether you have a passion or not. No one starts off wanting to be an engineer at a waste-recycling plant. No kid runs into the room saying, “when I grow up, I want to sell USB cables to the world”. It's something that you find along the way. That passion comes when you play enough on two buttocks and find you're having fun.
And you know it's one buttock time. For now. Tomorrow, or next year, who knows?
Next up: We are told to start up a business doing what we're passionate about. How do we know what we are passionate about in the first place?
Let's explore the concept of passion and why you should let your passion find you instead.
Most of us are told to start up a business doing what we're passionate about. There's just one problem. We don't know what we are passionate about in the first place. How are we supposed to find something we know nothing about? Let's explore the concept of passion and how to stop looking for it, and get it to find you, instead.
Read the podcast on the website: Passion:Let it find you
Imagine a person who can sniff a perfume and instantly identify the brand That person is my wife, Renuka. She can quickly work her way through as many as 150 fine fragrances. Fine fragrances are perfumes made in the classical style, by companies such as Chanel, Givenchy, Estee Lauder, Calvin Klein, etc. If you asked her if she's passionate about perfumes, her answer is clearly, yes. She worked in the perfumery industry for well over ten years, spending as much as half an hour to an hour each day, just tuning her nose to the subtleties of every perfume.
Would that count as passion? It should, shouldn't it? All your life, you're told to follow your passion. To dig deep and find that one thing that makes you ecstatic. Somehow, you're supposed to know almost at the point of leaving school, what you're going to be good at, and to go after that passion. And Renuka didn't fit that bill at all. The only reason she took on the job at the fragrance company was because she was sick and tired of travelling and wanted a marketing job that involved little or no travel.
So how much of a newbie was she at the job? In Mumbai, India, wearing flowers in your hair is a common trait among women. Whole market spaces are designed just to sell flowers. And two of the most popular flowers worn in women's hair are “mogra” and “jasmine”. When put to the test, Renuka couldn't identify their fragrance. It came as a complete surprise to her when she discovered that soap contained perfume. In short, this was a really miserable start to any kind of passion-hunt.
Success feeds passion, more than passion feeds success Those are the words of Scott Adams, author and creator of the highly successful cartoon strip, “Dilbert”. And he's right, you know. Passion is a slightly ridiculous word because very few of us know what we're going to be passionate about, and especially so early in life.
If you speak to my nieces, who are 8 and 13, they seem to have a range of things they love. One loves dancing and music to the point where she'll stop chattering and start singing along to the music. Another loves animals and is really fond of the idea of the romantic version of being a vet until she has to do all the un-romantic bits as well.
And that's because success feeds passion I remember going to Fotosoft, a computer training school to learn Photoshop. Photoshop itself was barely five or six years old having first been released in February 1990. However, I was keen to learn Photoshop. I went to the class, learned what I could and then promptly forgot most of it. To say I was passionate about it, was an incredibly silly statement to make.
Not many years later I needed Photoshop almost all the time. Instead of using the archaic system of creating a sketch, taking photocopies by the dozen and colouring each photocopy, I was able to do a single illustration, scan it in, and colour madly on the screen itself. Then along came the Wacom tablet, and I bought the ArtZ II. I was soon head over heels with Photoshop—a passion that has remained strong for almost 21 years.
Most people don't get hit by a passion bolt of lightning Instead they fumble, stumble and grumble their way into a whole new world. Along the way, they suddenly run into a whole new world, and they start an exploration process. They look to solve either a problem that has loomed large in their own life or they set out to help someone else. Or like Renuka, they get a highly unusual assignment and then go through the process of falling in love with the skill.
Take someone like Michael Phelps, for instance. Surely he was born to be a swimming champion, right? Nonsense. Phelps hated water as a kid. But he had a problem at school. He had trouble concentrating and was constantly fidgety. When his paediatrician diagnosed him with ADHD, he was expected to take the drug, Ritalin.
When Michael Phelps was in the sixth grade, he was fidgety and had trouble paying attention in the classroom. His paediatrician diagnosed him with ADHD and prescribed Ritalin. To burn off all of that excess energy that Phelps seemed to have, he was told to “swim it off.”
Except for the fact that he hated water “It's wild to kind of think about how far we've come,” he said in an interview with ESPN. “From my mom putting me in the water safety — I hated the water. I didn't want anything to do with it. I learned on my back.” Now with 23 Olympic medals to his name, we'd all be forgiven for believing that he was born with a passion for water.
Even once he more than made his mark in swimming, his so-called passion flickered wildly. In the run-up to the 2012 Olympics, he routinely skipped practice for days on end. He got into intense arguments with his coach, Bob Bowman. Bowman told Dateline that he wished Phelps would have quit right at that point: “I didn't want him to go through this and I thought it was going to end badly,”.
If you pick successful people at random, you're sure to hit those who knew they were going to make it big Some people, it seems, were either groomed, or got really good at a skill, and they went on to huge success over time. That's more the exception than the rule. Akio Morita, the founder of Sony first started out making rice cookers that were flops.
The inventor of the pacemaker, Wilson Greatbatch, had no interest in getting the heart to function well. Instead, he spent his days as a young man, absorbed in radio technology. Thomas Knoll, one of the Knoll brothers that invented Photoshop, was a doctoral candidate in computer vision, with no desire to create one of the world's most loved photo retouching tool.
So where do you go to find your passion? When you hear how Renuka got into the perfumery business, it might seem like a lucky break. The reality is that she sold discount debit cards, to begin with, then timeshares with a company called Dalmia Resorts. Her lucky break was like any other lucky breaks. It wasn't lucky at all.
It was just a matter of getting involved with a project for long enough and finding you're hopeless at it at first, but are willing to stick it out for the duration. Most people start out in one field, get into another, and another and the passion grows, and even wanes over time. One thing is clear: you're not going to find your passion anytime soon.
You'll just have to do what almost everyone before you has done You'll have to start solving a problem for yourself or someone else. Just writing on a blog or creating a website might be baby steps, but it's probably not going to solve the primary goal of business. A business tends to figure out what a client needs and then create the solution for that problem. To address the problems of the clients, you'll often to get moving past the computer screen.
To get a business going, start those cooking classes, make those guitar videos, teach someone how to do the stuff you know. For starters, all you're doing is going down the road to find success. And success is simply being able to do something decently well. So well, that you're almost starting to enjoy it.
I had no idea I'd like marketing I was positive I hated writing. I didn't speak very well, cook or dance very well. I started out with a passion for drawing, and that I still do to this day, but not as a profession. Instead my passion hovers around marketing, writing, and yes, I love to dance, cook and I'm a really good speaker.
Forget looking your passion Learn something well. Solve a problem. Your passion will find you, instead.
But don't you need to know something well before you solve someone else's problem?
Does your neighbour know how to mow a lawn better than you? I'd say if you walk across, you will find the answer. Whether they do a better job or not, it barely matters.
At some point, that neighbour is likely to pay you for the job if you offer to mow their lawn. Most businesses don't start solving some amazing problem. Most businesses are remarkably mundane in their approach. You need to get a package across, let's invent a business like FedEx. You want to learn how to get rid of the cracks on your feet, let's make a crate called Heel Balm. You want to go to Mars? Well, that's an amazing problem, but most of the time, you're not trying to rewrite history.
Take for instance the book “5-Minute iPhone Magic” That's a book, and yes we sell it on our website. How many pages do you think that book contains? It promises a 5-minute makeover, so it can't have many pages, can it? But wait, surely I must be a great photographer to write a book on photography, right? Even as you hear those words, you know it ‘s not true.
I'm an excellent cartoonist. My writing skills are way above average, and photography is something I do on the side. Unlike any of the books you see on Amazon, this book isn't promising you'll learn about any technical stuff. In fact, what makes it so very palatable is that it takes the 50 odd features that exist in the software and gets rid of 47. When you have only three things to learn, you are on your way to taking some wonderful, if not excellent pictures with your iPhone.
The most mundane job will get you started as an entrepreneur Which is why so many successful people talk about those mundane jobs. They delivered papers, they worked as waiters, they brushed down a dozen horses—jobs like that. And while they were lucky enough to get their mundane job earlier in life, every job, every business has an overwhelming amount of mundane moments.
The reason why most of us don't start is because we think have to be outstanding, or at least superior in some way. No one is saying you have to be mediocre, but when you start out, by golly, you're going to be average at best. And there's this funny story to tell at this point because it involves photography. A few months ago, my cousin came over to visit from Dubai. For some reason, the discussion about my sister's wedding came up. And since I've been such a keen photographer/videographer, I'd taken pictures and video of their wedding.
It wasn't easy to find the DVD of the recording, but I was persistent. It only took 30 seconds of video for me to realise I was terrible back then. My video flipped aimlessly from side to side. The photos were devoid of composition, story and didn't resemble anything close to what I can achieve now. Would someone hire me back then as well? The answer is yes. Even when I was turning out what I now consider terrible cartoons, abominable logos and probably ugh articles, someone was willing to pay for it, because it solved their problem.
The reality is you'll never know something well enough for yourself Or to put it another way, what you think is horrifying, is pretty good for someone else. The reason why successful people get that way is because they are either ignorant how bad they were (I was that way for sure) or they expect to get better as time marches on. If you wait to get better, the wait extends interminably. You'll never really get off the ground. And that passion, your passion, will go find someone else more deserving.
Harsh words? Sure, but that's how passion comes into being Instead passion starts at the bottom of the heap being really crappy. Renuka didn't know about perfumes. Even you probably know that soaps have perfume. Even I, who have zero interest in fragrances, could identify a “mogra” and “jasmine” flower fragrance. Renuka's start wasn't at the intersection of knowing something well and solving someone's problem. There was nothing. Then there was a little bit. Then there was more. Then she was offered a job as a perfumer.
You don't get asked to be a perfumer unless you have knowledge of chemicals She knew nothing about it. She didn't take the job because life veered off in another direction. But one thing we know for sure. She'd start at crappy, no-knowledge and work her way up. It took her six months to get to a point where she was ready to rock and roll from not knowing anything to being pretty confident. It might take you three months, or nine.
However, if you wait for that intersection; that intersection of knowing something well and solving someone's problem. Well, that's a long wait. A wait that will last forever.
So, stop looking for your passion. Knowing something well and solving someone's problem is more commonplace than you believe.
Next up: Whenever you have a deadline, somehow you're able to stagger towards it and get the job done. But other tasks never seem to move forward. In life we need to complete projects that are urgent, but also projects that are good for the soul. Find out how do we get these projects going and how can we sustain them over the long term? How To Avoid Overwhelm (And Systematically Complete Projects)
How many books do you read in a year? Most people boast about how they read hundreds of books a year. That's what I used to do as well. Until I found that I wasn't really absorbing any information. So is speed reading a bad idea? Well, not entirely, but you need to know when to use it and why. Find out how speed works for you and more importantly, when it fails.
Read it online: Mental Barriers Myths
Mental Myth: You need to speed up your learning (and there are systems to go faster) If you looked at the About Us page on the Psychotactics site, it used to say that I read 100 books a year.
Well, that was true when I started out in business. I didn't have many clients, hence loads of time. It was also the very early days of the Internet. There were still millions of pages online, but blogs barely existed. Youtube was non-existent. Facebook was years away. If you wanted to get those 100 books, you had to physically make your way to the book store or the library. Nothing online was particularly instant or as distracting as it is today.
Even so, I bought a book on speed reading. In fact, it was an entire course. The course was instantly impressive. It showed me how my brain could recall just about anything it viewed even for a brief second.
It got me to open a random page of the dictionary, then flick through the page and later recall a fair bit of what was on the page. It was a long time ago, and I forget the details of the exercise, but I was hooked into believing I could store endless amounts of information in my head. As I found out, it wasn't impossible to store information, but it was quite like a photocopy machine.
Think of a photocopy machine for a few seconds What is the primary function? It takes photocopies of information. You can run tens of thousands of pages through a photocopy machine, and it just takes images. Your brain, from what I understand, can do something similar. However, it does not mean that your brain can make sense of the information.
It's just information, loads of information piling up on top of more information. The speed reading course was instantly enjoyable and useless to me, even back in those early days. I abandoned it despite paying a small fortune for it and went back to reading two books a week at top speed.
For someone like me, who was just learning marketing and business reading a lot was a great idea It was a bit like getting to know the streets in a city. It gave me the confidence and feel for the city. And I didn't have a fear of getting lost. And this constant, pounding flow of information is great as long as you don't have to do too much with the information. You watch the news; you read magazines, you listen to podcast interviews. They constitute a mountain range of information, but not information you necessarily need to use, now or in the future.
I found that I was losing out on depth In my need to keep up with 100 books a year, or even 25 books a year, I was playing a game of chicken. I was headed right towards my goal, refusing to swerve, and in doing so, missing out on the nuances. To bounce back to the analogy of the city streets, I was getting a lot of information, but not enough depth. I didn't need to speed up my learning. I could take things at a reasonable pace and even slow down.
When I slowed down, I noticed something quite interesting I missed out at least 30-50% of the nuances in the first reading or listening. I remember listening to how trees absorb nutrition, for example, and I loved that podcast episode, so I heard it again. And again. And yet again.
The fourth time around I was still picking up nuances I'd missed on the earlier drive-throughs. It wasn't enough to read and listen at normal speed but to go back and read again, listen again. Which is why the book, The Brain Audit has a note right in the introduction to go back and read the book thrice. And most clients come back to say that they were surprised at how much they learned on the second and third pass.
This isn't to say that speed itself is a problem Right now I'm learning some nuances of InDesign and ePub. And much of it is “old knowledge”. I've been over the material and could do some other activity while “listening to the video”, let alone looking at it. In cases where I am very familiar with the material, I will wind up the video to at least 1.25x or even 1.5x.
Even in these conditions, it's important not to get cocky. The material may be the same, or remarkably similar, but often the presenter talks about a new way to implement the information. And if I'm just speeding things up, I will almost certainly miss it. And the idea is to make the learning stick.
But doesn't your brain adapt to faster speeds? I believe it does. If you listen to everything at twice the speed, over time that double speed is more than likely to become the new standard for you. This isn't to say you're going to know twice as much, only that you can absorb twice the amount at once. There's also a definite downside when you enter the real world, and people don't speak at 2x. If you listen to everything at high speed, normal speech will cause you to get distracted because everyone seemingly speaks so slowly. The main point, however, is that speeding up your reading or listening doesn't necessarily make you smarter.
Eventually, what's the point of all the information you've just read? When you go online, you'll often run into a site like ours. And some person just like me will tell you that they read 100 books a year. That information may have been correct when they had less work. Or when they were needier for that information. It could be true in an age when everyone wasn't being blasted with ten million pieces of information every single minute of the day. We believe in speed. And for the most part, speed kills. Speed doesn't make things better or more profound.
As singer/songwriter, John Mayer writes in one of his songs:
Twice as much ain't twice as good
And can't sustain, as one-half could. It's wanting more, that's gonna send me to my knees.
It's a myth that you need to go faster You can slow down, make notes, make mind maps. Even doodle. You can go over a book once, twice and thrice if you choose to do so. Savour what you're learning and learn it in a deeper, more profound way. It sure beats rushing through life at 2x.
Next up: How do you dramatically increase your rate of learning? And why do we get stuck when we're trying to learn a new skill? Strangely the concept of boxes comes into play.
Find out more: Accelerated Learning: How To Incredibly Speed Up Your Skill Acquisition
Do you have a bad memory? Well, so does the memory champion of the US Memory Championships. How's that possible you may ask? But that's exactly the point.
We have misconceptions about learning and memory that need to be wiped out and replaced with accurate representations of how our brain works.
In this first episode we look at two of the mental blocks that cause us to stutter, if not fail. And we transform them from failure to success.
Let's find out how.
Read online: Business Mental Myths
As late as the 1970s, women's brains were considered to be inferior to that of men, and especially so in the game of chess. Chess is a game that demands a high level of spatial awareness, among other skills, and it was erroneously believed that women could never equal men at the grandmaster level. In fact, not one woman had made it to grandmaster level until Susan Polgár came along.
Susan's father, László Polgár, didn't believe in inborn talent. He wrote a book about genius, and in it emphasised the fact that “Geniuses are made, not born”. To prove the point, he and his wife Klara educated their three daughters at home, and while geography and history lessons were important, chess was considered to be the most valuable of all.
At 4, Susan Polgár won her first chess tournament in the Budapest Girls' Under-11 Championship, with a 10–0 score. In 1982, at the age of 12, she won the World Under 16 (Girls) Championship.
In a series shot by National Geographic, called “My Brilliant Brain”, Susan Polgár talks about her first visit to the premier chess club in Budapest. She was still just a little girl. “The room was filled with smoke and there were elderly men who thought my father was there for a game and brought his daughter along.
But the reality is that my father wanted to see how I would against the members of the club”. The club members thought László Polgár was mad. But they went along with the crazy plan and soon found the “pretty little girl” was beating them hands down.
Susan Polgár continued her meteoric rise She was the first woman in history to break the gender barrier by qualifying for the 1986 “Men's” World Championship. In January 1991, Polgar became the first woman to earn the Grandmaster title in the conventional way of achieving three GM norms and a rating over 2500.
No longer could men claim that a woman couldn't attain the role of a grandmaster in chess. In time, Susan's sister, Judit also became a grandmaster. The third sister, Sofia earned a norm in a grandmaster-level tournament in 1989 when she was only 14.
The mental myth was shattered once and for all.
In business too, the we have to deal with mental myths that hold us back. As we weave our way through videos online or articles that rarely have any solid research, these myths take a hold of us and create a factor of intimidation. It feels sometimes, like everyone else is moving ahead while we lag behind. In business, as in life, it's not enough to just get and keep the business going. We have to make sure we don't get bogged down in myths have have no basis in reality.
Three persistent mental myths that prevail are: Mental Myth 1: Copying is not a good idea. We need to be original.
Mental Myth 2: You Need To Remember What You Learn
Mental Myth 3: You need to speed up your learning (and there are systems to go faster)
Let's find out why these myths need to be banished, once and for all. We will look at the first two myths in this episode.
Mental Myth 1: Copying is not a good idea. We need to be original. When you look at the Taj Mahal, you don't think of Humayun, do you?
Humayun, who? For over 200 years, the Mughals ruled over parts of what is modern day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. In what is surely one of the greatest empires the world has ever known, they were rulers of between 110-150 million people—a fourth of the world's population at that time. The family tree of the Mughal emperors started with Babur, went down to Humayun, Akbar the Great, Jahangir, but it's Shah Jahan who gets most of the spotlight.
And let's geek out a bit on history a bit here because we're talking about the Taj Mahal, built by Shah Jahan. Emperor Shah Jahan was utterly besotted with his wife, Mumtaz Begum. In an age where marriages were simply ties between one ruling family and the next, Shah Jahan and Mumtaz fell in love with each other.
However, Shah Jahan was so in love with Mumtaz that he showed little interest in exercising his polygamous rights with his two other wives, other than having a child with each. Mumtaz, on the other hand, bore him thirteen children, which, if you're rolling your eyes, was a family size quite common back in those times. Anyway, on 17 June 1631, at the age of 38, Mumtaz Begum died while giving birth to what would have been the fourteenth child.
The Taj Mahal is a memorial to the intense grief that followed It took 21 years, from 1632-1653 to build the Taj Mahal. And today, if you're around Delhi, you're likely to make a trip to Agra to look at this remarkable monument. The Taj Mahal had more than its share of inspiration from another structure built almost a hundred years earlier—Humayun's tomb. If you look at Humayun's tomb and then look at the Taj Mahal, there's more than a striking resemblance. It almost looks like a copy.
Copying is given a bad name because it's often mashed with plagiarism Before the advent of computers, the best way for an artist to learn to draw was to copy. If you head to Amsterdam and look at Van Gogh's start, you'll notice he copies a lot. In a museum dedicated to Van Gogh, the curators have taken great pains to show how Van Gogh's early work was an almost identical copy of the Japanese art of the time. As it says on the museum's website: Japanese printmaking was one of Vincent's primary sources of inspiration, and he became an enthusiastic collector.
The prints acted as a catalyst: they taught him a new way of looking at the world But did his own work change as a result? There was tremendous admiration for all things Japanese in the second half of the nineteenth century. Vincent did not pay much attention to this Japonisme at first. Very few artists in the Netherlands studied Japanese art. In Paris, by contrast, it was all the rage. So it was there that Vincent discovered the impact Oriental art was having in the West when he decided to modernise his own art.”
In a letter to his brother Theo, Vincent Van Gogh says the following: My studio's quite tolerable, mainly because I've pinned a set of Japanese prints on the walls that I find very diverting.
You know, those little female figures in gardens or on the shore, horsemen, flowers, gnarled thorn branches.” He and his brother then proceeded to buy stacks of Japanese woodcuts because they recognised the Japanese art as highly as any Western masterpiece. Van Gogh then went about copying the structure and composition of Japanese art in great detail. In a letter to his brother, he wrote: “All my work is based to some extent on Japanese art.”
Whether you're a writer, singer, golfer or musician—you have to copy In the Da Vinci cartooning course, we have whole weeks where the participants have to trace—yes, with regular butter paper or tracing paper—just like you did when you were a child. To be able to copy allows you to see what the other person has done. And how you, in turn, can do the same. As a cartoonist, I had whole books of work.
I started out copying Superman, Batman and other superheroes, moving on to comic strips like Hagar the Horrible, and for a good while, even Dennis the Menace. Years later I was copying Mort Drucker and Jack Davis from Mad Magazine. And Ajit Ninan who was a caricaturist for India Today, one of India's largest magazines at the time.
The copying didn't stop there When I started out in advertising as a cub copywriter, I knew almost nothing about copywriting. I'd leaf through books; advertising books called the “One Show” that were so thick they could be used as doorstops. I learned a ton of how ads were made from those books alone.
When I moved to marketing, I bought endless material from marketer Jay Abraham, learning how he promoted his courses, workshops and home study versions. I'd get his 15-20 page sales letters in the mail, and I'd go through them with a yellow marker, trying to figure out why I was so excited to buy his material.
When you copy, you learn When you copy from many sources, you start to merge one style into another until you soon have a style of your own. If you keep copying, your fixed style changes. When I look at some of the cartoons I did between 2000-2010, I cringe a lot. I don't like the colours, I don't like the line work, and I want to change it all. Not entirely erase the work, I'm not that daft, but
I've been copying all my life. Which, as we know, is different from plagiarism. Plagiarism is a rip-off. A photocopy of someone else's work is plagiarism. Work that's not yours and is signed by you, that's plagiarism.
Without copying, you quickly plateau Copying is what pushes you outside your comfort zone a lot. When Van Gogh started to copy Japanese artists, he had to relearn a whole different way of painting and composition. As it says yet again on the Van Gogh website: “Japanese artists often left the middle ground of their compositions empty, while objects in the foreground were sometimes enlarged. They regularly excluded the horizon too, or abruptly cropped the elements of the picture at the edge.”
However, not all copying should be done blindly It's one thing to copy a style, but quite another thing to blindly copy what others are doing. For instance, when we did our early workshops in Auckland and Los Angeles, catering was included in the cost of the workshop. All the workshops we'd been to, before hosting our own, had always served food. However, we found that just copying someone's else's actions doesn't necessarily work well.
When we'd ask about feedback for the workshop, people would complain about the food. Someone always wanted proteins; some one else wants carbs. And these were in the days before the wave of crazy diets came along. I got good advice from speaker/author, Brian Tracy. “You're not in catering, Sean”, he said to me. And so we gave up serving food at workshops.
In the same manner, it's probably a good idea to find out the strategy behind why people do certain things. It's better to know the story behind the plan, before making some horrible mistake and finding out later.
Despite the downsides, copying is what makes the world go round. The Taj Mahal, Van Gogh's works of art, even Disneyland got a large dose of inspiration from the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. When you're next thinking of creating your website, painting, writing or doing just about any activity, first consider copying. Consider tracing.
Originality is slightly overrated P.S. Even while this article series was being completed, I found a clear case of plagiarism. The author had taken the six questions from The Brain Audit and palmed it off as his own. What made it weird was the fact that it was on the Intuit site, the company that sells Quickbooks. Through Facebook, they got in touch with me, because someone tagged Intuit. The article was taken down shortly after.
Mental Myth 2: You Need To Remember What You Learn In 2006, a journalist called Joshua Foer won the U.S.A Memory Championship. He also set a new US record in the speed cards event by memorising a deck of 52 cards in barely 1 minute and 40 seconds.
However, Joshua Foer doesn't consider himself to have a very good memory at all. He forgot where he put his car keys, often where he'd parked his car in the first place. He'd routinely leave food in the oven, forget his girlfriend's birthday, their anniversary. Despite the onslaught of advertising he'd miss Valentine's Day, and not remember most of the things that you and I seem to routinely forget. In 2005, he was a journalist who wanted to figure out what made memory champions so successful. In 2006, he was the U.S. Memory Champion.
If there's one statement almost all of us have heard before it's this: I have a really bad memory. At first it's some relative; maybe a grandparent or someone much older that seems to complain about memory, but increasingly, even in your teens and twenties, you'll find yourself—and others making statements such as: I can't seem to remember names at all. I have a really bad memory.
Which seems to make sense, because we find there are those who seemingly have memories like elephants and our memories seem to be like a sieve. Trying to remember what we've learned seems hard, and often impossible. Learning seems to go one way where we build up skills and knowledge.
Forgetting seems to land all that hard earned information into the gutter. Forgetting seems to be the arch enemy of learning. Forgetting seems to be about failure, and it drives us crazy. And yet, forgetting is exactly the opposite.
“The brain is nature's most sophisticated spam filter” says Benedict Carey in his book, “How We Learn” To be able to remember one thing, we often have to forget the other. In his book, he talks about how we're all amazingly impressed at the sight of a spelling bee, a competition where young kids seem to be able to spell incredulously complex words. As all contests go, there's a winner and there are losers.
Yet how do we make every one of those seemingly smart kids lose? Instead of getting them to spell words, let's say we drag them back on stage and run a different type of memory test.
The questions would go like this:
•Name the last book you read
•What did you have for lunch two days ago?
•Which was the last movie you saw?
•What's your sister's middle name?
•What's the capital of Ouagadougou? (It's Burkina Faso)
“In a hypothetical content, each of those highly concentrated minds would be drawing a lot of blanks”, says Carey. But why is this the case? And how does this related to what you're learning? Most of us automatically assume that we should remember what we learn.
In many cases, we assume that we've understood what we've just read, seen or heard. In almost every instance, it might take three or four tries for a person to get all the facts right, even if they go back over the information.
Take for instance, this article itself. You probably remember that there was a memory championship. But was it a world championship or based in a specific country? Who won it? Do you remember the year? You possibly remember that the winner was male and that he was a journalist, but there are constant gaps in your memory.
Which is why people tend to write notes However, while notes might be a better-than-nothing option, they're still extremely poor at pulling up details. All information is dependent on your initial knowledge of the subject matter in the first place. Take for instance, the book called “Dartboard Pricing”. The book goes into a lot of detail about why one product or service can be priced higher than a similar product in an identical market. As you're reading through the book, or listening to the audio, there's a feeling that you're getting the idea.
However, the moment clients put up a pricing grid, they get elements of the grid wrong. Logically this shouldn't be the case at all. You have the book in front of you. The information isn't flipping past you at high speed. Even so, clients will get the pricing grid wrong. To really get the information, you have to go back several times and no amount of arrows and boxes, or explanation will help. The brain is designed to pick up some information and drop all the rest.
The best way to retain information is to follow the way the brain works best And that's to get to the first powerful idea and then turn off the audio. Close the book. Stop watching the video. If you have to, rewind, or go back. But going forward does little good. Your brain isn't necessarily picking up the details as you progress. Even when reading an article, I will get to a point where I run into something profound, different or difficult.
At which point I stop any sort of progress. If it's on my phone, I freeze the idea by taking a screenshot. If it's on audio, I stop listening to the podcast and yes, you need to do the same, if you really want to remember what you've just read. The breakdown allows your brain to stop at that point. When you go back and review the point, it makes even more sense. Then, if you're ready to go ahead, please do.
Does this method mean you'll progress an inch at a time? No it doesn't mean that at all. It depends on the information you're learning. I'll listen to some podcasts and it's pure storytelling or information that keeps my brain cells entertained. They may apply to my business or not, but at least at the time, I don't find I need to imprint it in my memory. However, if there's something that's important, I will make sure I stop and come back later.
It's a way of highlighting that information and forcing your brain to remember. I do this at workshops and seminars as well. I will continue to sit and participate in a seminar, but I wait for the first big point to hit me. When that's done, I'm “technically” ready to go home. I notice others are scribbling tons of notes, but I know I will remember nothing when I get back. So I keep the idea down to one. If I'm feeling really generous, I may add a second or third, but that's easily the upper limit.
You don't need to remember everything you learn It's a myth that your memory, or even the memory of the memory champions are any good. The brain is one of the nature's most powerful spam filters. It remembers what's important. And hence it's your job to help your brain. When you find something that's important, dig in your heels. Stop. Then go back and review it later.
That's how you'll improve your memory and your knowledge over time.
Next up: Is speed reading a bad idea? Well, not entirely, but you need to know when to use it and why. Find out how speed works for you and more importantly, when it fails—Mental Myth: You need to speed up your learning (and there are systems to go faster)
Whenever you have a deadline, somehow you're able to stagger towards it and get the job done. But other tasks never seem to move forward. You fall behind on your reading, your fun projects, even that movie you'd promised yourself. In life we need to complete projects that are urgent, but also projects that are good for the soul.
How do we get these projects going and how can we sustain them over the long term? Let's find out in this episode.
Click here to read it on the website: How To Avoid Overwhelm (And Systematically Complete Projects)
I remember lying in bed on a Sunday morning and realising I was a hypocrite. My niece Marsha says she loves reading, which is why we bought her the entire Harry Potter, the Percy Jackson and the Kane Chronicles. She stuttered through the Harry Potter series but made her way to the last book. And as of this moment, she's been stalled on the first book in the Percy Jackson series.
When I ask her if she's been reading, she always nods happily, but she's barely progressed further than 10-15 pages in the last month or two. It bugs me, because I know that reading isn't just about reading. It's about spelling, structure, storytelling and imagination. As you'd expect, I'd nudge Marsha at every chance I got, encouraging her to read, but she still gives me a happy smile and makes little or no progress.
Until that Sunday morning, I didn't think the lesson of the nudge applied to me I'm one of those crazy people. I go for a walk, and sometimes I'll listen to music, or Renuka and I will talk all the way. Even so, I'll get at least between an hour to two hours of audio every week.
I'll read before I go to bed, and sometimes on weekends. I'll even spend Friday morning planning and then get an hour's worth of reading. I'll even watch a TED Talk on while making breakfast every day. Marsha's situation doesn't apply to me, so why did I feel like a hypocrite?
It just so happened that I was browsing through my Kindle collection that Sunday morning As I scrolled through the books, I realised I hadn't read at least 30% of what I'd bought. That among those I'd read, there were several that were half-abandoned.
A good chunk was complete, but how's that different from Marsha?
How's that different from all of us? We start out with good intentions. We buy stuff; we save stuff onto our computers or devices for future reading and then suddenly it seems to be too overwhelming. We're reading through one book when you get a recommendation to read five others. You're leafing through one article, and a stack of one thousand seem to be trying to be trying to get through the front door.
I don't like the feeling of being a hypocrite, so I devised a system. And since I like naming systems, I called it “TBM”: the bare minimum. It even sounded nice when written on a piece of paper. Or better still on a car plate. In my crazy mind, I read it as “T BM”. As in the “the bum”. The kind of guy who is lazy and won't do much more than needed to get by. This mindset of doing the bare minimum was my own invention, it seems. And yet it's not. Many years ago I'd read about the financial advisor, Dave Ramsey who talked about his own bare minimum method when paying back loans.
When you have several loans to pay back what advice do financial planners give you? They tell you to pay the biggest loan first. Which means if you have loans of $500, $2000, $200,000, it makes a lot of sense to whittle down the biggest loan, as it also has the largest portion of interest. Ramsey works on a seemingly counter-intuitive method. He gets you to pay the smallest loan first.
Here ‘s How the Debt Snowball Method Works As he explains on his website, it's a bit like a snowball, a debt snowball. The debt snowball method is a debt reduction strategy where you pay off debts in order of smallest to largest, gaining momentum as each balance is paid off. If the task is too big, it's easy to give up. After all, a $100 payment is barely going to tickle a $200,000 loan. But put that $100 towards the $500 loan and you've wiped away a chunky 20%.
TBM—The bare minimum. The idea gelled in my brain on a Sunday morning. And this series is a bit counterintuitive as well. It's not about achieving any big goals. Instead, it's about chipping away small wins. It's important because we all seem to fall by the wayside when it comes to long term goals. The more personal the goal, the more likely it is to fall into the cracks. Reading a book that you dearly want to read, goes into the must-do-in-future list. And the future comes and goes, and the book is unread.
So what are we and Marsha to do? The world isn't getting less complicated.
How do we roll this bare minimum plan out and keep at it? Let's find out.
The three things we'll cover are:
– What is the bare minimum, and why it's not a mind trick to do even more.
– How to use triggers to get the bare minimum going
– Why you need to use it exclusively for long-term projects
1) What is the bare minimum? And why it's not a mind trick to do even more Almost every one of us has seen a progress bar on our computer, haven't we?
It's that little bar that goes from left to right, telling us that a program is opening, or a file is being saved. What many of us might not know, is that the progress bar doesn't quite give us the real situation because let's face it, we're impatient. To counter this impatience, then-student, Brad A. Myers decided that progress bars made computer users less anxious, more efficient and could possibly help them relax at work.
He then got his fellow students, 48 of them, to take a test with and without the progress bars. 86% said they liked the bars. They loved knowing that progress was being made. They were told that the progress bar wasn't an accurate representation of what was happening within the computer, but they didn't care. They still preferred the progress bar, to not having anything at all.
Let's rewind that last line, shall we? Still preferred the progress bar, to not having anything at all. That's what it says, doesn't it? And when we look at the tasks we have before us, we see nothing at all. We haven't started on the job, because we know there's a lot involved. Just the thought of the steps needing to get to the end point seems to overwhelm us immediately.
And we're not talking about learning a complicated program or writing a book. We're referring to something as simple as reading a book. We look at the book, knowing full well we'd like to read it, but absolutely nothing happens. And one book piles up on another, until we have books and e-books that we'd like to read, but can't get started. Or if we get started, a distraction comes along, and we chase down that butterfly-like-distraction right away.
When I first started out in marketing, I didn't have many butterflies to chase Back in the year 2000, almost all marketing was done offline. You'd get a big package in the mail. Pages, lots of pages, talking about some program that would help you become more successful. But that's all the post box held—one big set of pages.
There was nothing else to see. Unlike today, where you can easily find two dozen courses and programs in your inbox, there was just this one package. You paid a small fortune for the program as they all seemed to start at around $1500 or so, and some were $5000 and even higher. Then you got these three ring binders, your cassette tapes, later CDs and that was that. You didn't see any butterflies and didn't have to invest in any Butterly net.
Today, you and I have a sea of stuff that we can download in minutes, and buy in seconds And that's only part of the problem. Learning, yes, that's really important, but then so are the other things in your life. They're all piling up, and you can't seem to figure out how to beat that overwhelm. So why not borrow a concept from the credit card companies?
Let's say you have to pay $5000 on your credit card. Logically speaking, you should be getting Mastercard or Visa to deduct the amount directly from your account. But the credit card companies seem like Santa Claus, don't they? They say: Don't worry, just pay $125 on your credit card, and we're good. You and I know there's not a lot of good in paying off the minimum amount, but hey, sometimes we do. And then the insidious debt creeps up.
It may be insidious for paying off credit card bills, but it's perfect for getting things done Going back to that book that you haven't read, you don't have to do anything but the bare minimum. Let's say the bare minimum is one paragraph. C'mon, you say. One paragraph is a cop out. You're not going to get very far with one paragraph, are you?
Well, there's this story about John Grisham, the famous author. “If I had 30 minutes to an hour, I would sneak up to the old law library, hide behind the law books and write A Time to Kill”, he said in a USA Today interview with Dennis Moore. It took him three whole years of 30-minute segments, but a thousand days later he was done. If Grisham weren't famous and hadn't sold 250 million books, this story might have never been told, but now we know that his entire career was built on 30-minute increments.
And yet, for many of us, 30 minutes seems like a lot My friend, Campbell Such and I had a mini-tussle over meditation. I happily boast that you need at least 30 minutes of meditation to get any momentum. For the first 20 minutes or so, it seems like you're swatting flies in the vast Australian outback. But as you get to the 30-minute mark, things start to happen. Campbell disagrees. He spends 5-10 minutes every morning, meditating. “That's all I can manage,” he says. And he's right. I disagreed with him at the point we had the discussion. I thought that 10 minutes was barely a warm up and that if a person couldn't do at least 30 minutes, it's better to avoid it altogether.
Which is the flaw with a lot of productivity plans, when you think about it They seem to suggest you fool your brain. That if you want to go for a walk, you should put on your shoes and then you'll end up going for a 30-minute walk. And the concept of the bare minimum is entirely the opposite. It's pure sloth behaviour. It's not asking you to fool your brain at all. It's saying: do the bare minimum, just like those credit card companies ask of you. Do nothing but the bare minimum. No mind tricks, no additional time, no extra effort. Just the smallest possible thing you can take on, and that's all you should do.
I tried this method for my website In July 2015, I started on the revamp of our website. I'm super fussy, but I did outsource the website. I got quotes, I got designs, and they were so terrible, I was tearing my hair out in frustration. Anyway, in 2015, I did the website designs in Photoshop and Stresslesweb (they're our coders) put together the site so I could get on with my fussy ways. Two years ticked by. Every chance I got, I thought about the website, but nothing happened.
Then in August 2017, I decided to do the bare minimum. Some days, I'd merely list what I had to do on the website. The next day, I'd do a headline and the first paragraph. Another day, I'd add a cartoon or two. To my surprise, I started getting that silly momentum. I'd want to do more, but most days I resisted like crazy.
It's because I have a lot of other long-term projects as well I paint every day in my Moleskine diary. But that too was falling apart because I felt the burden of painting. So instead of doing another painting, I'd just do the bare minimum. It could involve simply doing a sketch. Maybe later in the day or next day, just doing a wash. It seems almost tedious because you're literally watching paint dry, but I've begun to turn out some amazing art work. I'm painting better than ever before.
And guess what? The web pages are getting done, and I'm going through the book list as well. I read just one or two paragraphs, and then my progress bar is complete.
The bare minimum may not seem like much, but we all need to push psychological boulders When faced with the task of taking a walk for 30 minutes, writing a book, or doing any long term project, it seems like we're never getting anything done. But think of your progress like the progress bar. You might get just 2% of the task done, and the progress bar in your brain feels like it's 100%.
You follow up the next day, and whammo—another 100% is done. It may make no logical sense, but this isn't about addition or logic. It's about the satisfaction not just of getting something done, but 100% of that something. It's tiny, that something, but you don't care. The goal isn't to take the second step. It's to take the step you need and stop right there. No fancy motivation or momentum—just one step.
My niece Marsha doesn't need to go through the Percy Jackson series She needs to go through a paragraph or two. That's it. Campbell Such doesn't need 30 minutes of meditation. If 5 minutes is all he has, that's all that he needs to do. The bare minimum, that's all we need, and it's amazing how much slow progress we make.
However, there's still a problem with planning to get all these activities, right? Which is where triggers come into play. Instead of fancy alarms that you merely ignore, how about aligning your bare minimum to a trigger that shows up every day? Let's find out how.
2) How to use triggers to get the bare minimum going In many Western countries, Christmas brings carols, chaos, and carrots.
Carrots for Dasher, Dancer, Prancer and Vixen, Comet, Cupid and Donner and Blitzen. And Rudolph, of course. They also leave a plate of milk and cookies for Santa. That tradition seemed to have originated in the 1930s when the US was deep in the Great Depression. Parents tried to teach their kids that was important to give to others. And also to show gratitude for the gifts they'd received. But what sets off the milk, cookies and carrots? Why, Christmas Eve, of course. It's the trigger that requires no alarm or reminder.
And that's because alarms and reminders don't work very well anyway You know how it works, right? You put a reminder on your phone, but as the reminder pops up, you swipe it away. If it's e-mail, you're likely to jump right into reading it, possibly even answering it, but any reminder to do a task gets a look of disdain. The way around this system is to have no alarm at all. Instead, you do something when something else happens.
So for instance, I paint right after breakfast No matter what time I have breakfast, I will sit down for about 5-10 minutes and sketch or paint. Renuka on the other hand sketches every time she drops her mother off for Tai qi. When we go for a walk, we talk until we hit the first traffic lights. Then, it's time to put on the headphones and listen to audio books or podcasts. The same applies on the walk back from the cafe. We walk to a certain point, hit the dentist's clinic, and it's back to headphone time again.
This system of triggers is important because we rarely keep to a fixed plan No one ever has breakfast at the very same minute, and hence if your breakfast is early or late, it's easy for you to ignore the alarm. When an activity like breakfast is itself the trigger, then you know what comes shortly after. We do take our vacations.
Every 12 weeks we're off for a month, and that means the triggers go out of whack. But since I'm not working on vacation, nothing else matters. I can ignore the painting after breakfast, choosing to do it at noon helped by a bottle of Cabernet, instead. Or not do it at all. However, once I get back, and the triggers go off, it's back to normal.
It's important to point out that you should not start with many items on your to-do list Right now I have about 4-5 long term projects going. I know the website won't last forever. And in a month or two, I should be able to get the hang of how to use ePub. My painting, however, has been on since 2010 and that will go on for a long, long time. Some long terms projects come and go while others need to be done every day.
To make things a habit, you need to choose just two or three things to do in a day Five minutes each and you've only spent fifteen minutes of activity. And even the busiest person has fifteen spare minutes in a day. Over time, some things become so much part of your second nature that you don't even think of them as part of your to-do list.
Take brushing your teeth, for example. When was the last time you needed an alarm or trigger for that activity? I now wake up to the sound of the meditation chant. It's part of what happens every day, and so that's not even part of the list anymore.
However, when you're starting out, just set up one trigger and the bare minimum time you can spend on that task. And get going. But there's one last caveat. All of these bare minimums are not for urgent or important tasks. They all need to be used only for long-term projects. Let's find out why that's the case.
3) Why Use The Bare Minimum Only For Long Term Projects We all know the story of the tortoise and the hare, don't we?
They both set off on race, and the tortoise is slow, taking step by step. As the story goes, the hare falls asleep, and the tortoise wins the race. The story may sound remarkably like a bare minimum tale, and in a way it is. But it's important to note there's a big point of difference as well. A race is not a long term project. It's reasonably finite, in the sense that there's an end point and in many cases, a deadline.
We tend to drop things that have no deadline There's really no point in learning Spanish, or painting or doing many of the things that you and I do. We do it for our own happiness. You may, therefore, join a dance class or a cartooning course and then find you've given up somewhere along the way. The photographs you planned to put in that photo book—that didn't get done either. We smartly prioritise what's important to us. Things that are revenue-driven, client-driven or have fixed deadlines can't wait, and so they get done. Things that are often essential to the soul, that gets tossed into the corner.
It's sad, isn't it? We feel that sadness. We feel the pain of taking a course that feeds our soul and then finding we've either abandoned the course or having finished it, don't get the joy of continuation. It's the same with books we haven't read or documentaries we would love to watch.
However, sometimes even the work-related projects, like my beleaguered website, end up in that same to-do pile. Doing just the bare minimum keeps the project going. At all times, however, the bare minimum should be reserved for the long-term project. No one needs to tell you how wrong things can get if you do the bare minimum on something that's governed by a deadline.
But if the project isn't something that has a line in the sand and probably goes on forever, it's best to simply plod along step by step. It's the journey of a thousand miles.
But it's not about taking steps. The bare minimum is about taking just one step. And then you're done for the day. When you have to take just one step, there's no overwhelm. Yes, the list of things that you need to do can and will pile up. But you're just taking one step. The rest of the world can drive themselves crazy. Like Marsha, you read two paragraphs at a time. Like me, you finally get down to building your website.
You achieve a lot with a single step per day. TBM—The bare minimum. Now do it.
P.S. Ready to start working on your bare minimum taking action plan?
Join a whole lot of introverts in 5000bc and take one step at a time to achieving your goals.
Writing a report for your website can be quite a nightmare How are you supposed to put 20-30 pages together? And what system should you follow to get great results? That answer is remarkably simple, and plainly effective. And instead of just one way, why don't we look at three ways you can put together a great report! Let's go into report-land, shall we?
Read this episode on the website: Three Ways To Write A Stunning Report Overnight
Rice.
Curry.
Meat,
Fish.
Papad.
Pickle.
Vegetables.
Many, if not most of the meals we'd have when I was growing up, consisted of a what you'd easily call a well-rounded meal. But as a teenager, I couldn't wait for dinner. I was ravenous by the time I got back from school at 4 pm. I'd head to the pantry, and pick out my favourite noodles: Maggi Masala.
Boil the water, toss in the noodles and the tastemaker and “two minutes” later, I'd be well on my ate to satisfaction-land.
When creating information, it's easy to get lost in a “rice, curry, pickle, papad land”. However, complexity is the last thing you need, because it slows you down. What you need is something that's quick, yet effective. Something you can put together for your website, or as goodies to attract clients.
In this series, we're going to look at three ways to create a report, seemingly overnight—if you have a small or even disconnected content. And we'll also look at what to do when you don't have any content at all. It might not take “two minutes” but you can put together a report that will create a solid impact.
Let's take a look at the three types of reports you could put together. Type 1: Report that goes from C to A
Type 2: Diverse, Disconnected Topic Report
Type 3:One Topic, Many Angles Report
Type 1: Report that goes from C to A How do you make a delicious rice dish in under five minutes?
Step 1: Take a cup of cooked rice.
Step 2: In a frying pan, pop a teaspoon of mustard seeds and some dry red chillies in oil.
Step 3: Pour the oil, mustard seeds and red chillies over the rice and add 1 ½ cup of natural yoghurt.
Notice where we started? We didn't start with the cooked rice. Our goal was to make a delicious rice dish in under five minutes. And then we worked our way backwards, didn't we? We didn't go from A to B to C. Instead we started with the goal in mind, then rewound the steps and it wasn't very difficult to get a very tasty result.
When writing a report, it's easy to feel like you have to cover a lot of information When I started writing marketing articles back in the year 2000, I had no idea what to write about. I'd read a book about positioning, and then borrow some of the ideas and write my own version of positioning. I'd talk to someone about how they needed to brand their product or service and then rush home to work my way through an article.
These were early days. I was struggling just to get 500 words on a page. I wasn't exactly worried about which articles got more attention than others. Even so, it was hard to ignore how some articles got far greater views than others.
One such article was about how to write headlines in three steps. Another winner seemed to be how to tell if your business card was too busy. Again, three steps.
At which point we had this bizarre idea to turn one of the articles into a report. We did nothing more than put the very same information into a PDF.
We added some graphics, made the report look all pretty and then put it on the website as an incentive to sign up to the newsletters. If you've ever subscribed to the Psychotactics newsletter, you're likely to have seen and read this report. The reason why it works is because it's short, but more importantly it starts with Point C.
It shows you how to build a headline in a few minutes, that's what it does. With the goal firmly in mind, it walks you through Step A, Step B and then in a matter of 8-10 pages you're at Step C. It's not unlike the method used to make the yoghurt rice, is it? You're not creating a complex document. All you're really doing is getting a client to get to a specific point, no matter how small the point.
We might believe a report needs to be more detailed, certainly more complex to be taken seriously Instead what you'll quickly realise is that clients want the quick wins. And if the quick win is small, so much the better. If I were to give you a recipe of a biryani (another rice dish), with 30 ingredients, you're not likely to make that dish, are you?
Yet, a 5-minute shot at yoghurt rice couldn't go so terribly wrong, could it? In the worst possible scenario you'd waste five minutes, wouldn't you? Having a simple report that starts at C and works its way backwards in about three steps is what makes it easy to create a ton of reports—if you want to do so—that is.
But why create a ton of reports? Let's say your site covers different topics, or has different products or services. Let's say you get to the Psychotactics site and land on a page about resistance. Would you be more likely to sign up for a report on resistance or on a topic like consumption? And if you were to land on a page about consumption, would you want more information on consumption or suddenly be fascinated with the topic of resistance?
Having multiple pages with reports embedded in them helps a client land on a page, read an article, and then find a report that's closely matching up with the article itself. Best of all, that report doesn't promise a tonne of information, but instead has three tiny steps to get the client to a result.
If you're wondering if you have to create a report for every page, no you don't. We have topics such as websites, article writing, consumption, uniqueness, etc. And if you have five-seven broad topics, you can create five-seven quick reports on each individual topic.
But back to the headline report That report itself has been responsible for getting tens of thousands of clients over the years. When I put up a figure, I say it's been downloaded over 55,000 times, but that's being overly conservative. That headline report has been downloaded at least over 100,000 times and possibly a lot more. What's important is that the report didn't take time to put together. And when you look back, it didn't even have much of a strategy.
If you're teaching Photoshop, show your clients how to get from A-C in three steps. If you're selling blue-tac, show your clients how to use it in three-steps.
Almost any product or service can be quickly reduced to a specific subset, and then you can show the client how to get to that result quickly and consistently.
Try the yoghurt rice.
It takes five minutes.
It takes three steps.
It would make a good report, that's for sure. A one page report, but the moment you tried it, you'd be hooked. You'd want more, wouldn't you? And that's the magic of a C-A report. It's quick to put together and the client loves it.
But that's only one way to create a report.
What if you wanted some variety, instead?
Let's look at the second option where you have a report with content that's diverse and seemingly completely disconnected.
Type 2: Diverse, Disconnected Topic Report “Bring a plate”.
Sometimes, when you go to a party in New Zealand, you're told “bring a plate”.
For anyone born in Kiwi land, such an expression isn't very odd. But you have no idea how many immigrants think it's a crockery problem. They somehow think the host must have just a few plates, and bringing a plate along will help ease the dinnerware issue.
“Bring a plate” just means bring some food along, because we're having a potluck party And if there's anything I detest when it comes to food, it's a potluck party. Barbecue chicken mingles with wontons, and chickpeas with some tomato-ketchup concoction. For me, it's a culinary nightmare. The textures, colours, and especially the tastes are a complete mishmash.
But really, no one cares about me They're having too much fun with their chickpeas and tomato-concoction. And sometimes being a little stuck up at a party, is similar to being stuck up when creating a report. It's easy to believe that a report has to go from C to A, or has to work with a single topic. In reality, reports just do fine, potluck style.
We tried this in the membership site at 5000bc One of the perks of 5000bc is something called the Vanishing Reports. At first, I was an absolute stickler about the reports. They all had to have a sequence. They all had to somehow take you from one point to another. Then, I realised that's hardly the way I read anything.
At this very moment, I'm reading about the “butterfly effect”, “the moons of Jupiter,” “creativity” and “confidence”. That sounds very mishy-mashy, doesn't it? Which is why we trialled reports that had a combination of “pricing, conversion, starting up, and a whole bunch of topics that seemingly didn't sit side by side with each other.
And it worked! Sometimes the report will have super-duper-ultra focus. Like Report No. 59: The Magical Time-Saving Powers of Evernote. Or Report No.6: Three Core Steps To A Viral Campaign. But Report No.60: How To Keep Learning and Growing for Success, or Report No.45: Good Business Habits ,can have a bit of bacon baguettes jostling with the wontons.
This revelation shouldn't have surprised me because that's how I read, and how a lot of people tend to read. A newspaper, for instance, is a bit of a mishmash, isn't it? A magazine, that's definitely all over the place. Blogs, podcasts, videos: they all seem to follow a slightly random pattern without us so much blinking an eye.
What does this mean for you, however? It means that you may not have ten articles on a single topic. You may run a yoga site, and some articles might be about stretching, some may be about shavasana, some may be about what the client needs to do on a full moon night. They're seemingly disconnected, but it still makes for a splendid report, doesn't it? And better still, you don't even need ten articles.
Just three-four, okay five articles. That's just fine because every article will probably span 2-3 pages and if you slip in the introduction and a bit of an epilogue, you're looking at a decent fifteen to seventeen pages of content.
And despite the mishmash, you can create a strong feeling of cohesion within the report There are two elements that create a connection. The first point of focus is the title. If you're going to put together a bunch of unconnected pieces of content, the title must somehow tie the content neatly together. Interestingly, you can veer down the non-specific route when creating a title.
E.g. How to create “hidden magic” in your business. Or “Good Business Habits”. As I veer my chair to my left to look at the titles of some books, I see a title like “The Non-designers Design Book” by Robin Williams. Or “Design it Yourself” by Chuck Green. Or “Scientific Advertising” by Claude Hopkins.
All of these books may, on the face of it, look incredibly focused, but one look within the pages and they're a disparate bunch of articles that have a workable title and one other element that is probably more important. In most of the books—and this applies to reports as well—there's a bridge between the chapters.
This second element isn't utterly crucial, but it's nice to have Notice how this piece of content connected from the first type of report to the second? A bit earlier in this piece, you read about the report that goes from C to A. And then as we got to the end, we could just stop dead, or create a bit of a bridge. The last few lines spoke about how the C to A report is potent, but what if you wanted more variety? And then it suggested that there was a second kind of report—the report that had diverse, disconnected topics.
It's the kind of thing you should be doing: creating a bridge As you come to the end of your piece in the report, build up the anticipation for the second piece. As the second piece winds to a close, it's time to shine the spotlight on the third, and so on. A simple set of lines at the end of the content create enough of glue to bind seemingly random topics together. We're not talking about mixing auto-repair and gardening in a report on business, but you get the point, don't you?
That isn't to say I like potluck parties. I guess I never will. Yet, as we've seen, it works just fine with reports.
Are we done, yet? Not quite. There's still one more kind of report. Which as you might have guessed is the most obvious one of all. It's the report that consists of a single topic. It seems pretty self-explanatory, doesn't it? Still, let's take a look at why that kind of report is much-loved and how to go about creating it in a way that is pretty magical.
Type 3: One Topic, Many Angles Report On 29th March 1974, farmers in the Xi'an district of China stumbled on a treasure that was to rival the Great Wall of China.
The farmers real goal was to find water for their crops, when they stumbled on a beautifully sculpted head. The more they began to dig, the more they found hundreds, and then thousands of soldiers—terracotta soldiers. This was the army of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of unified China.
Over 8000 terracotta warriors, cavalry, charioteers, foot soldiers and archers, were built to accompany the emperor into the afterlife. These terracotta soldiers were created using moulds and seem to have an early assembly-line construction.
And this is where the story gets really interesting Most of the hands of the Terracotta Army appear identical. Yet, when you look closer ever single soldier seems to have completely unique facial features. Every one it seems came from similar moulds, but somehow got tweaked just a little bit to create a high level of uniqueness.
When creating reports, a single mould; a single topic can be tweaked in dozens, possibly thousands of ways as well Which is why a report on a single topic can be so very powerful. The information that seems to emanate from one source suddenly creates a wealth of sub-topics that become very attractive to the reader. What is being suggested here, is that you can you have a single topic and have dozens of sub-topics. Each sub-topic represents an article and several such articles become a fascinating report. To get the one-topic report going, all you have to do is first start with the topic and add a few sub-topics.
Let's take a topic like headlines, for starters. What kind of sub-topics could we generate?
Testimonial Headlines: How To Get Your Clients To Write Your Headlines
Bottom-Up Headlines: How To Use Headlines As Email Signatures
Keywords And headlines
How To Avoid Potluck Headlines
Why Unclear Topics Lead to Unfocused Headlines
How To Use The Attraction Factor of Knew and New (When Writing Headlines)
How to Write Intensely Powerful Headlines Without Using Keywords
What you're experiencing is the creating of a Terracotta Army The topic, in this case, headlines, is pretty mundane. Even so, if you leave your computer, and your Internet connection behind and head to the cafe, you're likely to be able to come up with several sub-topics for any given topic. You may not end up writing great headlines right at the start, but you'll have a bunch of topics nonetheless. Let's take an example from Photoshop, for instance. Let's not get lost in the Photoshop universe, however.
If you've done just a bit of homework, you'll quickly figure out that you can just pick one sub-topic in Photoshop. Let's say for instance, that sub-topic is “Selections and Layer Masks in Photoshop”. Ready, let's run through the sub-sub-topics, shall we?
Okay, Selections and Layer Masks, here we come! Using the Marquee and Lasso tools
Combining selections
Converting a selection into a layer mask
Using the Quick Selection tool
Selecting soft-edged objects using Refine Edge
Touching up a layer mask with the Brush tool
Granted that all of the above topics may seem alien to you at this point, but just talking about Photoshop does bring up an interesting story.
When I first got to New Zealand I had a job as a web designer Within six months, I was made redundant and needed to get some work as a cartoonist. This took me to several ad agencies, and in these ad agencies you tend to deal with art directors. As they were leafing through my portfolio, I would tell them how I used photoshop to do my illustrations. And how I would use Photoshop without the toolbar and double my speed and productivity.
This little nugget would get them instantly interested and at least a few of them asked whether I could teach them how to speed up their own use of photoshop. It led to jobs where I would charge $60 an hour training them individually.
However, it's not like I was outstanding at Photoshop. For instance, all of the points that we have just covered with layer masks would have been beyond my reach. Even so, I would be able to watch the videos several times, get fluent at the skill, and then in turn be able to teach it.
Any topic quickly cascades into sub-topics And sub-topics in turn become a bit of an avalanche as you dig just below the surface. What's extremely exciting when you sit down to write a report, is that you don't need the Terracotta Army of Qin Shi Huang. A report can be extremely powerful with just three-four articles.
However, it's still an excellent idea to go into caffeine-land and brainstorm the topics and sub-topics needed. You may use the bare minimum needed for a report, but you can use the others to create more single focus reports in the future.
All of this brainstorming has a wonderful series of side effects When you sit down to brainstorm the topics and sub-topics, you realise that you know quite a lot and can write about several topics for your report in detail. However, this very same brainstorming session may be a cause for intimidation. When I was called upon to teach those art directors, I knew a bit of Photoshop, but by no means was I well versed in every facet of the program.
For instance, “Selection Layers and Masks” were definitely something that I hadn't learned about. This exposed my weakness and there are two ways to handle any weakness. You can pretend that you were not born with innate Photoshop skills, or you can simply pick up a book or video and learn the skills. I have no inborn skills, as far as I know, so I just learned and taught and learned an taught.
To this day, a decent chunk of what I do is something that I've learned along the way. If I find any gaps, well that's what learning is all about isn't it? I learn and then I teach and that is the lesson you can use for your report as well.
This learn and teach method is slower, no doubt However, we are all beginners at some point in time and having information to share is not going to be at our fingertips. In such a scenario, it's a better idea to simply use the “learn and teach” method. It's more tedious, but I can assure you that almost everyone has to go through an almost identical method when they run into new material.
Not knowing enough about a topic is pretty normal, but what's also normal is that a lot of people intimidate themselves and give up. If you're made of sterner stuff, you'll quickly realise that you can put together a report just by learning about the topic, trying it out yourself and then tying it all together in a nice little PDF, or even a video or audio report.
Having a single topic is a great way to focus, if you're creating new material If you've already created content in the past, it's easier to find as well. For instance, if I needed to write about topics like pricing, planning, productivity, etc, it would be quite an easy task to go digging through the archives and finding three-four articles on just one topic.
And there you have it You might have to slog a bit if you aren't familiar with the topic or sub-topics, but it's not an earth-shattering task. For instance, I still don't know a lot about layer masks, and that list I got from the Lynda.com site.
If I wanted to move deeper into the world of layer masks, I'd have to have access to the site (which I do) and about 43 minutes of learning. Even if I were to go over the videos thrice over, that would still require fewer than two hours of work. But that scenario only arises if you're a complete newbie.
If you've been creating content for a while, it's really a matter of collation, some tea or coffee-drinking and you've got yourself a report that's pretty single-minded. It's no army but you don't need an army do you? You don't even need a corps or division, no brigade, regiment, battalion or company. Not even a platoon, squad. Just a section—just 3 or 4 little foot soldiers will do the job just fine, don't you agree?
And that brings us to the end of “how to create a report”. Let's review what we've just learned.
Summary There are three ways to cook up a quick report.
1) Report that goes from C-A
2) Diverse, Disconnected Topic Report
3) One Topic, Many Angles Report
The report that goes from C-A starts at the very end—and yes, three steps are usually enough of a journey for the client. Start with C and work your way back to A because it ensure a result. Anything that you can achieve in three quick steps is a good enough target. Ideally it needs to pertain to something you're selling.
For example, if you're in the business of gardening then your report would consist of three steps to get something done quickly and effectively in the garden. You don't want to name the report: “3 steps to a better blah-blah-blah”. It's better to give it a curious title, instead. E.g. The title of the headline report on the Psychotactics site is “Why Headlines Fail” and then it goes on to give three steps within the report, anyway. The C-A report is powerful because it has an end point.
However, the diverse, disconnected report seeks no such end-point clarity If anything, it's a bit of a potluck party. You put in various pieces of content that seemingly don't have any sequence or relation to each other, but come under the broad umbrella of a topic. For instance, the podcast series at Psychotactics is called the “Three Month Vacation”. One episode of the podcast can be about pricing, the second about productivity and the third about software. Even though they're quite diverse topics, they're still bound under the topic of “marketing and business”. The concept of potluck that you hear on the podcast can just as easily be a sure-fire method of creating reports.
Finally we looked at one topic and many angles Or let's call it topics and sub-topics. Or even sub-sub-topics. A bit of a brainstorm session, and time away from the office can do wonders. Even if you're no pro at the topics or sub-topics, you can quickly spot where you're weak. You can then learn and master the topics, and pass on the knowledge in your own style, tone and language to someone else. In case you're wondering, this isn't plagiarism.
Plagiarism is when you simply “photocopy” someone's work and pass it off as your own. This method of learning and teaching is what everyone needs to follow, and it's simply a form of “tracing” or “copying” and then using your own method to get it to your eventual client. It's why yoga teaching aspirants go to yoga training centres, or why we attend workshops and seminars. We learn, so we can teach.
Which brings us right back to the yoghurt rice. Remember the recipe? Step 1: Take a cup of cooked rice.
Step 2: In a frying pan, pop a teaspoon of mustard seeds and some dry red chillies in oil.
Step 3: Pour the oil, mustard seeds and red chillies over the rice and add 1 ½ cup of natural yoghurt.
Go try it. You'll love it. Oh, and if you like, keep it in the fridge for an hour or so. It's delicious when it's cold.
Bon appétit!
Next Step: With tens of thousands of similar products or services in the market, it seems impossible to make your product stand out.But is there a way to make your product/service irresistible—and without looking cheesy? Find out how here: The Two Psychological Techniques To Creating An Irresistible Product/Service (And Increased Sales)
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Competition? That's the enemy isn't it? Why would you sell or worse, give the competition your ideas? It doesn't seem to make sense at all and yet it's a very solid business strategy—and especially for small business.
In this episode, you'll find three solid reasons why competition can change your life for the better. Right click here and ‘save as' to listen to this episode.
You are read the transcript on the website too:#155: Why Selling Strategies to Competition Is a Smart Idea
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Approximately every month we take our nieces, Marsha and Keira for dinner, but Keira always does something very curious. Since the girls were little, my wife Renuka and I have taken them to dinner
After dinner we head to the mall, where they buy themselves an ice-cream. The first thing Keira does when she gets her ice-cream is offer me the first bite. “Not too big a bite”, she'll always say. But yes, I do get the first bite, before she continues to devour the rest of the ice-cream. In doing so, Keira is sharing what's rightfully hers to keep. She doesn't need to have a chunk of her ice-cream bitten off, no matter how small.
Like Keira, our business is our ice-cream We don't need to share our secrets with someone else, do we? Yet, the smaller your company, the bigger the upside in sharing the secrets and knowledge you've gained over the years. Big companies can thrive on muscle power alone and sell solely to their customers. A smaller business, on the other hand, needs to learn to share; to teach the competition what they already know.
I know, I know, this strategy sounds really odd. However, there are very solid reasons why you should wade right into the unlikely world of “teaching your competitors”.
Let's find out why and cover three main points. 1: Clients Come And Go, Competition Remains Longer
2: You're always ahead of the competition (even when you tell them what you know)
3: Why selling your information to competition makes the market more viable
Part 1: Clients Come And Go, Competition Remains Longer Imagine you dominated 90% of your market. Would you be happy?
About 20 years ago, I heard of a lumber company that was hugely successful. So successful, in fact, that the competition was reduced to just 10% of the share of market, while this lumber-company gobbled up the rest. Ideally they should have rested on their laurels.
A 90% stake signifies a healthy bottom line and lots of champagne, but they were restless. Their restlessness arose from their unusual plight. Being a lumber-based company, they could only operate profitably in a certain geographical area. If they tried to sell outside that area, they would run into increased transportation costs and other additional taxes, which made it unprofitable to go outside their boundaries. In short, they were “trapped” and could never expand or grow their business.
What would you do in such a situation? Marketer, Jay Abraham, came up with a solution. He suggested the lumber company sell their secrets. As you can imagine, such a suggestion meets with instant pushback. The lumber company was the market leader because they had a system to treat the trees.
I don't remember the story very well, but it went a bit like this: If they overdid the treatment, the lumber would be “overcooked”. If they were too cautious, the wood would be “raw” and unfit for any use. Every year, companies lost hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of precious lumber, because they hadn't perfected this system of treating the lumber just right.
And now the company was being asked to sell its secrets You'd recoil if you were asked to do the same, wouldn't you? Like some crazy grandmother defending her precious recipes, you'd refuse to give away your secrets. What if the competition learned all of the methods and put you out of business? Why should you sell something that has taken you so much pain to acquire? Giving away, or selling your secrets to the competition seems like the most dimwitted thing to do.
Selling to competition may seem foolish, but competition is an exceedingly powerful source of revenue and longevity. My friend Julia used to own several bed stores. Over the years she learned how to run the stores very effectively. So effective was she that she'd make 200-300% higher profits over other stores. What's interesting about a bed store is that the goods aren't terribly unique. If you look at a brand like Sealy or Sleepyhead, you're likely to find the same beds in practically every bed store.
Yes, her profits were higher than other stores, but there's a limit to how much stock can be held in a store Unless Julia were to lease a new space, get the franchise rights, hire new staff etc., there seemed to be no way to increase her profits with clients. However, there was a spectacular, if slightly hidden opportunity to sell the secrets to the competition.
Clients come and go. You buy a bed, and you're not exactly rushing out to buy another one tomorrow, are you? So clients buy the product and leave, but what does competition do? They stick around. If Julia were to sell her secrets to the competition, they'd stick around for as long as they were getting results. The “result” might mean greater profits, more time off, less staff turnover, or less chaotic management systems.
Which is what the lumber company did as well They realised their geographical boundary was going to inhibit their growth, so they started having seminars. At first, the seminars were modestly priced at $5000 per head. Then in barely a year or so, the very same seminars shot up to $25,000 per person. Would you find the price of the seminar prohibitive? Lumber companies lost hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.
Badly treated wood was taken as the “cost of doing business”. Once this lumber company showed them their methods, the other lumber companies were in a position to make a small fortune by not consigning the wood to waste. And it wasn't just the lumber companies in that district, or city, or even country. Lumber companies around the world wanted to pay for that information so that they could reduce waste to the bare minimum. The competition would stick around as long as it was finding the information profitable.
Every bookstore on the planet is an example of this concept of selling to the competition When confronted with the fact that you may need to sell your secrets, the idea may seem unpalatable, but look at the bookstore in your city. Those videos, the books, the magazines—they're all filled with secrets that are being given away.
Grandma kept her secrets and she's highly revered in her own family, but Grandma's only clients are her immediate family. The clients of the books, videos and magazines are the entire world. And you know as well as I do how the systems start chugging along once you buy a book.
You rarely buy one book and never buy another one again When a business owner gives you their “secrets” and you get value from the information, you want to go back for more. However, as we've experienced in the past, we rarely restrict ourselves to just books. We buy into a lot more.
The lumber company continued to make steady profits from their sale of lumber to their customers, but it's the competition that needed more information on a regular basis. They were not only able to give information in the form of treating lumber, but on many other topics that the competition needed to succeed as well.
However, the most important bit of all is the longevity of the competition Customers tend to come and go. Whether you're selling a bed, lumber or consulting, a customer will show up, take what they need and leave. And truly speaking, so will a competitor. However, in many cases the competition will come back to get even more information.
They'll consult with you, buy your courses, attend your workshops, and want to get as much as possible from you. If you're already ahead of the competition, they will keep coming back. No matter whether you have a brick and mortar business or something online, the principle remains exactly the same.
Customers come and go.
Competition stays around a lot longer.
The lumber company was seemingly trapped Yet, it's that very trap that transformed their business. Instead of dealing solely with clients, they moved to competition and operated in a completely different universe. However, a red flag does pop up, doesn't it?
What if the competition takes your stuff and makes it their own? Is it possible to muscle in, on your market? What if you don't recover from your weapons being used against you? Let's find out in this second section on why you're always ahead of your competition, even when you're teaching them everything you know.
2: You're always ahead of the competition (even when you tell them what you know) Let's say you started walking down the road, six months ago
Somewhere along the way you learned a lot about the road, the pit stops, the method of walking, rehydration methods, etc. Now you're teaching your competition who's coming down that same road. If both of you were to keep walking, you'd still be many “months” ahead of the competition. Even though they've bought all the videos, read all your books and followed your plan in extreme detail, they're still going to be many months behind, even with you giving away all the tips that will help them move faster ahead.
However, if you're still feeling a bit paranoid about the competition, there are two factors that will keep you ahead.
The first factor is that time marches on. Let's say you've figured out how to make social media ads get a great return on investment. By the time you teach your competition everything you know, time is ticking away. Things change all the time. What worked for Facebook yesterday, may be different today.
The same would apply for any business. Every so-called “success case study” is only a record of the past, and whatever you teach is likely to have changed anywhere from a tiny fraction to quite a lot. Even if you're teaching in an area that's not changing everyday—let's say watercolours, for instance—there's still some change in tools or equipment.
Something in your technique, material or sequence will change all the time, often without your knowledge. And the competition can't keep up.
The second point is one of mistakes We all have been lost at some point or the other—even with a GPS. Why is this so? A map is a map is a map, right? We're not supposed to get lost when we're given precise instructions. However, human error, and often, human creativity comes into play. Even when it seems you're following the map with a great deal of precision, there's always some possibility that it will be interpreted in an incorrect manner. Your competition is going to have to work out those mistakes and fix them.
It's easy to believe that selling information to competition is risky What if the competition takes your ideas and uses it as their own? The reality is different. No matter how generous and detailed you are with your ideas and systems, you will always be ahead of the competition. When we did the Protégé sessions back in 2006-2008, most of the “customers” were really our competition.
For most of our courses we get clients to fill in a form before, or right after they join. In this questionnaire, many of them revealed the primary reason why they wanted to be part of the course. As you've already guessed, they didn't want to reinvent the wheel. They wanted to use the system that we already had in place.
If you stay stagnant, the competition will catch up They'll show up, they may overtake you and you're likely to be left in their dust. Yet we know that few of us intend to remain stagnant. As we learn and implement, invent and re-invent, we move ahead always maintaining enough of a lead. Plus, a lot of what we do depends on our strategy.
Staying ahead is a weird concept, because we're not running parallel races with our competition. In reality we're chapping and changing our strategies all the time and any comparison with the competition is odd, at best.
You can't really compare one restaurant with another. You can't throw one author in the same bull ring as another. Comparison itself is a super-weird activity to contemplate. Anyway, if the competition really wanted to copy your work, there are ways and means of doing so.
Instead, selling your work to competition is a much saner idea It earns you revenue, builds up your authority and no matter how much you give away or sell, there's still an astounding amount of information that remains to be explained. If anything, selling the system is a far superior way to grow a business, as it draws in both customers and competition on a much bigger scale.
But here's one of the biggest reasons why you need to sell to your competition: it is called “expanding the market“. Most of us think of competition as a bad thing, but it's quite the opposite. It makes the market more viable. Let's find out how.
3: Why selling your information makes the market more viable In 2014, Tesla Motors did something very revolutionary. They gave away the patents to their electric car.
What are we to make of news like that? Is Tesla just being generous?
Or does it have an ulterior motive? We know electric cars are a tiny fragment of the market. Despite being superior in almost every way to the petrol-driven car, they're still to make big inroads. But as an article on Forbes Magazine pointed out, Tesla's real competition is not another company.
Instead it's the archaic petrol engines that are being manufactured in the millions around the globe, every single day. By giving away the patents, the competition doesn't have to figure things out. More importantly, they don't have to get into yet another patent lawsuit that would slow them down. Even when the other car manufacturers start to work on Tesla's patents, Tesla should be well down the road.
James Part is the co-founder and CEO of Fitbit, a wireless fitness tracker. When Fitbit entered the market, they had bigger, gruntier competitors like Nike and Jawbone with the potential to crush an upstart like Fitbit. But here's what Park says. “You need some critical mass to legitimize what you're doing.” And Ben Yoskowitz, an angel investor told Inc. Magazine: “If nobody is competing in your space, there's a very good chance the market you're going into is too small.
Any reasonably good idea has 10,000 people working on it right now. You may not even know they exist because they're as small as you.”
But what's all of this got to do with you? After all Fitbit didn't give away or sell its information, did it? We grow up in an us vs. them environment. Which means that many, if not most of us, believe that competition isn't a good thing. We also believe that too much competition causes a saturation in the marketplace.
Both these beliefs have some truth in them, but it really depends on your point of view. When you teach competition to do something that you already know, you're not only earning an income, but you're doing your own bit to broaden the market.
My friend, and super-graphic designer, John McWade was literally the first one on the planet to use desktop publishing software McWade ran into some of the earliest Mac computers back in the 80's. He had a job as an art director of a magazine called Reno when he was given a little piece of software by Jeremy Jake. Jake was the chief engineer of a tiny Seattle startup called All This and was writing a software called PageMaker. Today we use the fancy InDesign software for desktop publishing but the heart of Adobe desktop publishing goes all the way back to PageMaker.
But who was using PageMaker? Literally no one on the planet, except the engineers and John. Which is when John started up Before and After Magazine. And he showed people how to use PageMaker, and to create amazing graphic design. You could safely say that John McWade single handedly expanded the market and created competition.
Today there are tens of thousands of books, videos and courses on InDesign. Selling the secret of how to create great graphic design has given McWade a good life and a huge fan following. In turn, the expansion of the market has been good for almost everyone. However, this advice of expanding the market doesn't just apply when you're starting up. It also applies when you're entering a reasonably mature marketplace.
Which is why no matter where you look, whether it's books, cosmetics, shoes, consulting or training, there's new stuff appearing on the horizon almost endlessly. Which brings us to a very crucial point.
Your competition is going to sell to your competition If you decide to keep your secrets all to yourself, that's your prerogative. However, your competition isn't exactly going to keep mum. If you have some great knowledge in selling real estate, and you decide not to tell or sell, another real estate agent will write a book, do seminars and give their version, anyway.
If you're outstanding at creating apps, so are a thousand others who will happily put their information out for sale. The market will exist with or without you, so you might as well get your skin in the game because there really is hardly any downside and a ton of benefit, instead.
Selling to your competition may at first seem like a bad idea, but it rarely is. No one is saying you need to ignore your customers. Your customers are extremely important, but so is the competition. Go out and find the competition. They're good for business.
Next Step: Read or listen to: The Unlikely Bestseller (And Why It Sold 2 Million Copies)
Take time off? Doesn't everyone want that? So how are you supposed to achieve that force of business?
How do you get to downtime? And what about the passion projects you've been putting off for so long?
In this episode we wrestle with the remaining two forces of business and start on a journey that's been put aside for much too long.
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Read the article online: Passion Projects: How They Can Completely Change Your Business
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In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Fourth Force of Business—Passion Projects
Part 2: Fifth Force of Business—The Power of Down Time
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The fourth force: Passion Projects In 2010, I got this dazzling idea to do a series of stock cartoons.
As you probably know, I'm a professional cartoonist, and my fascination for Photoshop has lasted for well over 20 years. It seemed like a very good idea to create a unique set of cartoons that clients could use for their blogs, e-books, webinars or presentations. Then, seven years sneaked up, and now it's 2017. The cartoons aren't done.
Passion projects are what feed your soul A passion project is something that you really want to complete, not necessarily because of revenue or fame. It's just something that you have to do because no one else will do it. The longer you put it off, the more you feel something chipping away at your soul.
I've wanted to write a book on talent; I've wanted to write about real education online with “Teacher vs. Preacher”, there's a website that I started out in 2015, and it's been on ice ever since. So much of what's important to me, to you just seems to circle the airport and never really lands.
However, at least at first, passion projects don't necessarily feed your tummy If you were to decide to spend time embarking on a photography project on the side, or writing the novel you've always planned to write, there's almost no guarantee that any of it will bring in revenue or clients. It's possible that you may hit paydirt or hit a wall—at least when it comes to any sort of riches or fame. Even so, now and then it's important to feed your soul.
Take for instance, Marcus Stout from Golden Moon Tea Back in 2011, Stout decided to trash 4 out of 5 of his best-selling teas. As if that were not enough, his company had to re-create 75 of his tea blends? What was the reason for all of this upheaval? It was a passion project that Stout wanted had wanted to put into place for a long time.
Around 2011, he changed the way he was personally eating and found he wasn't keen on drinking a lot of his own tea. “Most people don't realise it,” he says, “but a lot of tea has chemicals, even if they say it's natural.” Since he was keen on getting rid of all chemicals and every last toxin, he decided to scrap his best-selling tea.
It wasn't easy to take on a passion project of this nature Stout did his homework. He didn't merely jump into changing the teas without seeing if a market existed. Even so, it was an incredibly difficult decision to make as some of the teas had been superstars all the way back from 1995. Some of his clients ask for those teas even today, and he won't stock them or sell them because they don't meet his standards.
A passion project can be a small undertaking or a complete change in the way you conduct your business No matter how we look at it, it's a plane that's been circling the airport, and you need to get that plane to land. At Psychotactics, this meant walking away from doing courses in the second half of 2017 and early 2018.
The Article Writing Course and other live courses (that means courses that are conducted by me online) won't show up until mid-2018. In doing so, we walk away from well over $100k-$150k of profit. Will the passion projects replace that income? It's impossible to tell. When we walked away from the Protégé Program back in 2009, we also walked away from $150k a year, with no idea how to replace that income.
Whether you're dealing with smaller revenues or substantial revenues, the fear and the excitement are remarkably similar However, a passion project needs to be done. It can't be postponed forever. All those dreams of what you and I will do when we retire, can't wait for retirement. They might be pushed onto the back burner for a while, but at some point, we all have to do what is important to us, even if we aren't sure it will have a payback.
Getting to New Zealand was a bit of a passion project for us When we left India, we didn't know what to expect in New Zealand. We'd never been to Auckland and knew next to no one. We were also leaving a very settled and decently luxurious life back in Mumbai. The people we'd met along the way told us that it rains a lot in Auckland and it's really quiet. That to us was our beacon of light. We love the rain and the quiet, and it became our not-so-little passion project.
Making space for “landing those planes” is necessary. It may not happen right away, but it needs to happen because it's good for the soul. What we've found as well, is that in the long run it's been reasonably profitable. Every time we've walked away from one thing to put our energy into another, we've found it's helped not just our mind, but our business as well.
A business needs so many things and has so many forces pulling at you in all directions Learning by doing
Learning by learning
Revenue generation/client retention
Passion projects
There's still one thing that we all desperately need, and it's called downtime. It's such a simple concept that it almost requires no explanation, but let's give it a shot, shall we? Let's examine the fifth force of business and why it's incredibly crucial to your business and sanity.
The fifth force: Downtime In the early days of the watercolour course, I gave everyone a break for a month.
When they came back, almost every participant was painting a lot better than the month before. Did they practice during the break? Did they access other material? Some did, but it didn't explain how almost everyone was better—even the ones who hadn't picked up a brush at all. The only common element between every one of the participants was a factor of downtime.
Business requires downtime Without downtime there's a lot of do, do, do and not enough time for the brain to process what's happening. Time away from work is almost as crucial as work time itself. Which is why we plan the year differently from most people I know.
Instead of listing out all the things we need to do and projects we need to complete, we first put in the blocks of downtime. Then we put in the work in between that downtime. It enables us to recharge in a way that's not possible when at work.
Yet most of us don't have the luxury of downtime When we started mentoring my niece, Marsha, for instance, it was a bit like starting up a new business. There was no time to waste. To get her up to speed, I'd tutor her on the way from the classroom to the car. Then in the car, we'd talk a bit and do spellings and practice multiplication tables.
We worked through the week, and for a couple of hours on the weekend. The school holidays were intensive for her, but also for us, and we often put in 6-8 hour days for five-six weeks on end. When you're right at the starting point, everything is an uphill journey. However, over time, Marsha has zoomed to the top tier of the class. Now she still works as hard as she possibly can, but she also has big chunky breaks during the day, week and in the year.
In business, it's not unusual to have no downtime The mortgage and bills are starting to grow in untidy piles on your desk, and those payments need to be made. But in time, almost all of us have the ability to take time off. It almost seems like a silly thing to do, to take time off when the business has just started to pick up. And yet, it's what we all need to do. Downtime calms you down, relaxes you, and it helps you come back refreshed.
It's a force of business like the other forces If anything, like the students on the watercolour course, it helps you come back stronger than ever before. Plan your downtime. Start small. Take a few days off, before embarking on longer breaks. But ignore the breaks at your peril. A tired brain is not quite as good as a rested one. And certainly not as creative.
Which brings us to the end of this journey where we explored five forces that pull us in different directions. It's a tug of war. Get used to it. With a little work and strategy, you'll be on the winning side.
Next Step: Have a look at—Why Anti-Fragility Breeds Success (And How Nature Focuses On It)
No one thinks running a small business is easy But even so, there are forces that pull you in all directions.
These five forces almost seem to tear at us as we go through our daily work. It's not just a question of coping with the forces. We have to somehow make them part of our lives. Let's find out how.
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Read Online: How To Cope With The Five Forces of Business: Part 1
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In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: What are the five forces of business?
Part 2: Why it is a question of management?
Part 3: What sucks up the most time in business?
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In December 2015, I attended a workshop in Nashville, Tennessee. The workshop itself was very tedious. There were endless slides, countless examples of TV commercials and no breaks. However, there were these long lunch breaks that spanned almost an hour and a half. With little else to do after lunch, I’d wander around the lobby looking at the signs posted on the walls. The signs were quotes from prominent American politicians.
One of them was attributed to US President, John F. Kennedy.
It simply said:“If not us, who. If not now, when?”
No one seems to know if John F. Kennedy said it or not. And yet, for me at that moment, the quote was relevant. I’d wanted to get certain things done. I’d wanted to write some specific books on talent; books on teaching etc. And this sign seemed to slap me in the face. If it wasn’t for me, who would do it? If not now, when would it get done?
And yet here we are all these months later, and the battle rages on Many other projects got done, but some remain almost permanently on the to-do list. How could I, I wondered, make things happen? It was time to take stock. I soon realised that business—at least my business—had five permanently competing forces. To achieve what I wanted, I couldn’t only focus on one and leave the others sulking in the corner.
This wasn’t a question of focus, it was a question of management For me to feel a profound sense of achievement with every passing year, I knew I had to deal not with just one or two, but with all five forces of business. So what are these five forces of business? The first two involve learning.
The third includes revenue and client retention. The fourth was critical, but often neglected “passion projects” and finally there was downtime. All five of these forces jostled for space, and every one of them was incredibly important.
Let’s take a look at all five of them by listing them out, to begin with. 1) Learning by doing
2) Learning by learning
3) Revenue generation/client retention
4) Passion projects
5) Downtime
The first force of business: Learning by doing Stop for a moment and think of something that kills 842,000 people a year.
That’s a whopping 2,300 people per day. You didn’t think of water, did you?
Water isn’t supposed to kill. It’s meant to give life. And yet it runs around day after day, year after year like a mutant Jack the Ripper. No one, it seems, is interested enough to stop this killer. No one, except Dean Kamen.
“We could empty half of all the beds in all the hospitals in the world by just giving people clean water”, says Kamen. And Kamen is the one person who’s uniquely placed to take up this challenge. In Manchester, New Hampshire, where he lives and works, he’s known for the invention of the Segway, Ibot Transporter – a six-wheeled robotic “mobility system” that can climb stairs, traverse sandy and rocky terrain, and raise its user to eye-level with a standing person. Kamen has over 440 patents to his name, but it’s clean water that got his attention.
Which is why he set about creating the “Stirling engine”. The “Stirling Engine” is so amazing, it can generate clean, drinkable water even from water contaminated with mud, even bacteria-filled human faeces. For most people, creating products of such grand simplicity would be an insurmountable barrier, but Kamen’s team at his firm, DEKA, soon came up with a working machine. A machine that only needed the power of a hair dryer. And if necessary, it could even work on fuel sources such as cow dung.
The product was ready; the challenge was met. It was then that Kamen ran into his first major hurdle For fifteen years Kamen struggled to get his “Stirling Machines” mass-produced and distributed around the world. And yet all he met with was polite smiles and closed doors. The World Bank, the UN, the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and many other governmental agencies, and NGO’s—they all realised the problem but couldn’t help.
Too many of these organisations were not set up to help mass manufacture or distribute Kamen’s machine to the poorest parts of the world, where they are most needed.
This is our first challenge in business: We need to learn by doing At Psychotactics I’ve conducted the Article Writing Course since 2006. It’s called the toughest writing course in the world, and for a good reason. For three months clients have to slog to get to the finish line and be able to write an article in between 60-90 minutes. For me, the workload is magnified several times over.
Every day, I have to look at 25 assignments and lots of questions relating to the assignment. The course itself generates no fewer than 600 articles, all of which have to be read and evaluated. It’s not just the toughest course for the clients; it’s also a mind-bending course for me as the trainer.
So why do it? The course isn’t cheap at $3000 or more, but it’s not the revenue that’s the biggest driver. It’s easy enough to create one, even two products that would generate a far greater profit, without all the associated hard work. The answer is in the “doing”.
By teaching that course time after time, for the past ten years, you learn things that you couldn’t know or experience by just writing a home study course. Every course brings up brand new challenges all of which have to be tackled.
It’s the problems that create enormous spikes in learning. The secrets of teaching and learning are revealed frustratingly slowly, as I push myself yet into another iteration of the course. Without doing, I’d have no learning, no way to overcome the barriers.
Kamen’s 15-year learning journey to deliver clean water ended in an interesting place too While the UN or NGOs don’t head out into the tiny villages, there’s one organisation that has found penetration in the smallest pockets. No matter where you go on the planet, you can get yourself a bottle of Coca-Cola. In exchange for a redesign of their age-old dispensing machines, Kamen teamed up with Coke to take the Stirling machines to the far edges of the planet. That’s not as if to say there weren’t more challenges in getting the device to work. Nonetheless, all of these issues can only be overcome by doing.
It’s the reason why you need to blog.
It’s the reason why some of us create podcasts.
It’s the reason why we keep doing stuff even when at times it’s plainly disheartening to go on.
It’s in the doing that we learn the lessons The reason why so many people fail is because you have to persist for a while before the oceans part and you can walk through to the other side. It’s not like Dean Kamen isn’t well-connected. He’s directly in touch with prominent organisations, US presidents and well-known figures. Even so, it’s taken him a solid 15 years to find any traction. Many of us, swayed by the “double your results tomorrow” bandwagon feel like we’re losers when things don’t happen overnight.
At Psychotactics we’ve had to learn by doing We’ve held workshops in New Zealand, in the US, in Amsterdam, in the UK. Every workshop is a super-challenge. Why not sit back and just conduct an online course instead? Why not just do the simplest thing possible?
The answer is in doing. You learn most when you push your boundaries. All of this earth-shaking work takes energy and time. A single workshop takes a month of preparation, a month of travel and a month of re-entry time. It's all learning by doing. You can’t make big leaps in your work, and you can’t stand out in the way you’d want to, by taking tiny steps all the time.
It’s these big steps that also cause the greatest chaos If you were on the Article Writing Course in 2016, it would have been just a course. But if you were part of the alumni doing the course, you might have been slightly horrified. The entire course had changed. Assignments that were usually in Week 11 showed up in Week 4. Whole systems that were used in earlier courses were just dropped and replaced by quite another system. Was the new system tested? Of course not.
It's what learning by doing is often about. When you make significant changes, there’s no way to know how something will work right away. You’re supposed to improvise, and it pushes you to the limit.
Learning by doing easily sucks up the most time in a business Dean Kamen is a multimillionaire. He flies to work by helicopter every day and has earned enough fame and money never to have to work again. He took on the challenge of proving that clean water could indeed reach the poorest. The only way he could achieve all of this activity was by putting himself on the sword and keeping at it. It’s the core of what drives the business: doing stuff even when the odds are against you.
It’s where you learn the most.
But that’s only one form of learning. There’s also the relatively less strenuous form of learning that can suck up a lot of time. And that’s learning by learning.
Why is Australia hot?
Why is Antarctica cold?
The greatest change in my life in the past 3 ½ years has been my niece, Marsha’s, questions. Renuka and I mentor her, but once she’s done with Renuka’s part of the syllabus, I take over. We sit on the floor near the sofa, chomping cheese, carrots and almonds. And Marsha has questions, lots of questions. In the process, I’ve learned a lot about clouds, countries and their capitals, geology, biology and history.
I learned the Antarctica and Australia were once connected
That they had the same endless forests of Glossopteris. And that with the drifting of continents, Australia moved north. This created space for the Southern Ocean. As Australia floated away, the ocean currents had no landmass barriers. They started spinning around the continent of Australia at an increasingly rapid speed. So quickly did it spin, that the mild climate of Antarctica started to freeze over around 17 million years ago.
Second Force: This is learning by learning and is the second force of business It’s the one thing that we don’t always have time for. It’s easier to keep doing what we’re doing instead of learning a new skill. Having to dig into the freezing over of Antarctica or how some software program works, can suck up a lot of time. Then there are all those books that we buy that need to be read; all those podcasts that have to be heard; all those courses that have to be looked into.
This year, in particular, I dropped the ball on reading I benchmark my learning based on where I am with my New Yorker magazine and National Geographic reading. Usually, a New Yorker won’t last more than a few days, and the same goes for National Geographic.
It means I am reading at optimum pace and learning not only through magazines but also have time to read books—a lot of books. Instead, this year, I’ve been behind on New Yorker almost all year. I’ve still got to go through at least four months worth of National Geographic. Somehow it seems, I’ve not allocated enough time for this activity as I did in previous years. I got so tied up with the doing, with the courses, etc. that the learning dropped precipitously.
One of the core forces of business involves learning by learning To be exceedingly smart at what you do, the learning needs to consist of reading, audio (even if you’re not a big fan), video and learning programs. All of this learning is mind boggling and can be exhausting at times. It's one of the most vital forces of business.
It’s what keeps you on top of things in a way that Facebook or listening to yet another debate about the political madness can never do for you. There is, of course, the downside for this type of learning. I see people who read book after book but never do anything. They always hope to do something, plan to do it, even, but never do. They spend a lot of time in learning from books, audio and video but never doing.
To progress, you need both forms of learning to move together in progression No matter what the barriers, you need to keep doing. Failure will come, and failure will go, and you’ll learn from it and move ahead. It’s also important to keep your focus on the learning through books, audio and video. I know I slipped in the books department. I am aware that audio has never been a problem, but audio books are not the same as reading a book.
The forces of business pull in all directions. While we’re learning by doing and by learning, we still have to earn a living and keep clients coming back.
Third Force: Revenue generation/client retention When I just started out Psychotactics, I first heard the definition of the word, “client”.
According to Webster’s Dictionary, the definition of client was: one who comes under your care, protection and guidance. For a lot of people this definition rings true. They want their customers to be like their child. They want to care, protect and guide. And yet, you can do too much.
Back in 2006, I started a year long training called the Protégé Course It covered a lot of disciplines from copywriting, PR, information products etc. And that class alone was generating about $150,000 a year. But by 2008, I’d stopped that course. There were two reasons. The first reason was I felt I was covering too much material in a single year.
Going through the Protégé course was like having to learn five languages a year. But the secondary reason for stopping the course was simply that I wasn’t able to pay as much attention to the rest of the clients.
You’ve seen this in a classroom A teacher has her favourite students and they get most of the attention and the others are left behind a bit. In a business, focusing a lot on some clients and not on the others is a bad idea. You have to work on the care, protect and guide as many clients as possible. And do it to the best of your ability. It’s only when we worked this out that we realised we could do just fine with a fewer number of clients.
Psychotactics gets about 90% of its revenue from about 500 clients But it’s always a big balancing act. You have to have time to help clients through their issues, but no matter what you do, there’s always the brutal fact that some of them will leave. When I started 5000bc, I thought that clients would stay forever.
And many stayed for as long as 10 years, which is longer than forever on the Internet. But eventually clients will leave. You’re then faced with a nice big black hole if you haven’t been working on getting new clients.
And this bugged me a lot Most people are happier getting new clients and then leaving them to their own devices. I’m happier not having to worry about new clients and would be exhilarated if everyone stuck around forever. However, that’s not how things work. Which is why your third big force in your business is dual-fold. It’s to keep clients and to get new clients at the same time.
We’ve tried a lot of stuff along the way We gave YouTube a shot, started podcasts, then stopped it. And restarted again. We’ve never done much, if any, SEO. No advertising or publicity. But what’s worked for us has been a steady stream of clients from search engines, from a bit of guest blogging and finally, just creating products that no one else wants to create.
In the end, a few activities have made the biggest difference. I know the 80/20 group of people may pop up here, but it’s not been 80/20 at all. It’s just been that we’ve been more comfortable in some areas e.g. podcasting or e-mail, and persisted. Over the years, that persistence and subtle changes in strategy have worked for us.
But this third force of business takes a lot of time To care, protect and guide your clients takes up a ton of time. And then, in your “free time” you’ve got to go out and get new clients. We’ve been in the business of marketing since 2000. I thought it would get easier over time. It doesn’t. You have to allocate a good amount of time to just keep client and get clients as well. Your strategy is going to depend on what you do.
I do have one quick tip about this point of getting new clients, though Once you find what you do, do a lot of it. If you decide to write books on Amazon, write lots of books. If you decide to do guitar videos, do a ton of them. And this is because once clients find you and like you, they binge on your work. If they don’t find a lot of your work, they go elsewhere. Which is why you have to decide what you want to do and go for it. There’s no right or wrong strategy.
When we started our podcasts (or rather restarted it) back in 2014, we had no idea if it would work But we got going all the same. For a good two years, the download figures stayed more or less the same. We got almost no e-mail from clients. Our reviews on iTunes barely made it past 100 reviews. Still, the sales of products kept going up steadily, month after month. And then for some unknown reason the downloads increased by 20%, then up to 25%. Having all these podcasts; all this information; it’s helped us do both things simultaneously. Get and keep the clients.
This getting and keeping—it’s a force of business. You have to allocate time for it as well. And it can distract you and me away from something we actually love. That something is our “passion projects”.
Let’s find out why in Part 2: Why The Five Forces of Business Can be Tamed
Articles can be mundane or enthralling. But what makes an article stand out? The short answer is enthusiasm. Yet, it's not easy to know how to create enthusiasm in an article, is it? In this podcast, we learn how to step through the three phases that makes your article pack a rollicking amount of enthusiasm.
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Read the article online:
#152: How To Write Enthusiastically and Avoid The Dull Article
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In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why you need to outline and how to keep it fresh
Part 2: Why you need to feel very strongly about the issue RIGHT NOW.
Part 3: Why you need to be able to deviate from your script a bit and make it messy.
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What is the definition of sales? There's are probably a lot of definitions, but back in the year 2003 or so, Canadian-born American motivational public speaker and author, Brian Tracy came to New Zealand. I loved Brian's work and got to know him personally. One of the things I really liked was his definition of sales. “Sales is a transfer of enthusiasm from one person to another”.
A transfer of enthusiasm.
Wow! I always thought of sales as something grimy Something you were forced to do to get your product or service in front of a client. With this definition, Brian changed the way I looked at sales. What he couldn't have known is that he didn't just change my perception of sales, but of communication itself. If selling could be enhanced through enthusiasm, then so could writing. Instead of just putting words on paper, an article could come alive with enthusiasm.
There's just one problem, isn't there? How do you write enthusiastically? Are there stages or steps to follow? Not surprisingly, the stages aren't something you're unfamiliar with. The steps to enthusiastic writing are seemingly so obvious that it's easy to miss them.
Writing can get really grimy without the power of enthusiasm. It's time to find out what makes your words sing, isn't it? Let's take a look at the three steps you're going to need to put that zing in your words.
1: You need an outline. And the outline needs to be fresh.
2: You need to feel very strongly about the issue RIGHT NOW.
3: You need to be able to deviate from your script a bit and make it messy.
1: How to write enthusiastically: The “fresh” outline The week my mother in law came to stay with us, I had to throw out all my spices.
Most people think that cooking is the act of getting ingredients together in a pot or vessel. But we also know that ingredients matter. The fresher the ingredients, the tastier the food. What we seem to forget are the spices. Like many others, I bought bottles of spices and they sat in the pantry for weeks, even months on end. My mother in law was appalled at the lack of freshness. She got me to bin the entire lot and start with a fresh lot.
An outline is a lot like stale spices Whether you're outlining a big project, like a book, or a relatively smaller project, like an article, you're still dealing with the factor of freshness. If the outline is a week old, it's already getting relatively stale. If it's older, you're likely to be struggling to find out what you outlined in the first instance.
The reason I outline is because it saves me time I'm not exactly the kind of person that loves to outline. The reason why I do so is because I know it gives me structure and it saves me an enormous amount of time. Even so, there's the curse called “excessive outlining”.
In my desire to create a truckload of content, I'll head to the cafe and outline five or ten articles. If I get down to writing those articles within a week or two, maybe even three, I'd be fine. But as you can tell, it's practically impossible to write so many articles in such a short time span.
Which means that the outline starts to get stale I get newer ideas along the way, and add to the mountain of outlines and the longer I wait, the more the earlier outlines seem to fade into oblivion. I will look at the outlines; I know they're important, but they're not fresh anymore.
Like those spices in my kitchen cabinet, I can throw them in the dish, but they won't enhance the dish at all. Which is why you need to get an idea, outline it, and then get started with your writing.
If you need to re-outline the material along the way, that's perfectly fine, but the outline must be relatively fresh at all times. The longer you wait, the more you have to battle with what you were really thinking about. And battle takes up a lot of energy, which means that you're less likely to write with any sort of enthusiasm.
Consider that outlines don't vary too much An outline for an article will tend to have a pretty straightforward construction.
First Fifty Words (Opening of article)
What?
Why?
How?
Other questions
Objections
Examples
End of article
So if you had an article on “How to buy earphones” First Fifty Words
What to look for?
Why is it important?
How to avoid the noise in earphone marketing
What else to consider when buying earphones
Objections
Examples
End of article
That article outline isn't going to change a lot six months or even six years from now, is it? You can still write a great article or create a chapter in a book about it. It makes no sense to say that six years from now you will shy away from writing the article. But this is where the weirdness kicks in.
Intellectually you know you can write the article, but when it comes down to writing it, the fact that you wrote the outline a while ago will prevent you from getting too far ahead. You'll somehow want to write another article—any article—and avoid the one that's stale.
When you're going through so much avoidance it's hard to be enthusiastic Fresh outlines are like fresh spices.
You shouldn't wait too long.
You need to outline and write as quickly as possible.
I will outline on one day and by the next day or two, I'm writing But why not write on the day itself? You could, of course, but more often than not it's better to keep a bit of space between the outline and the material you're about to write.
Why? Because the outline allows your brain to let the thoughts percolate. A day later your article is likely to be far superior because you've been thinking about the contents as the hours tick by. An outline, a fresh outline, is crucial to get that enthusiasm in your writing, but it's not enough.
The second most important factor is feeling strongly about the issue right now.
2: Feeling Strongly About The Issue Right Now My friend Cher taught me an important lesson on the day of my father in law's funeral.
When someone close to you dies, most people are uncomfortable around you. They know you're grieving and they feel your pain. It's at this point that almost everyone makes the same statement.
They say something like: “If you need anything, please let me know”. Cher did something entirely different. She baked a whole bunch of muffins, brought them over, stayed for a short while and then left.
I feel strongly about that issue right now I feel that so many people tend to use words, not actions. That if we were all like Cher, we wouldn't be asking “what can we do?” Instead, we'd be doing something for our friends, our relatives or even that stranger that we may never meet again.
When you feel strongly about an issue, you need to write about it as quickly as you can. Right at the top of my agenda is to write an article about how we need to: 1) Not ask what we should do, but do something instead.
2) Not wait to tell someone how they changed our lives, but be specific about how they did it.
3) Avoid grumbles and demonstrate persistence, instead
We feel strongly about issues all the time We may have just run into a problem and the issue is top of mind. Or we may have been the recipient of a great wave of generosity. But you don't always need to be prodded by happy and sad moments.
You could have just heard a podcast and that could have ignited a fire within you. Or in the case of this article, a client may ask you a question that you feel needs to be answered in detail.
There are lots of things that rev up the engines of your brain and the more strongly you feel about these issues right now, the more likely you are to write with a greater amount of enthusiasm.
Yet, doesn't this “feeling” lead directly to the outlining process? Yes it does. The feeling comes right before the outline. Once you feel the surge, you then get down to outline. However, in many cases, a surge may break the rule of outlining.
Take for instance, when you see something on Facebook or in a forum. There's a discussion going and you need to get an important point across. In such a scenario, outlining may slow down the process and the moment of passion passes.
Instead you need to capture the enthusiasm while it's still fresh. What you tend to write in that moment may be remarkably more lucid than anything that's outlined and planned.
Writing while the “iron is hot” is not an excuse to avoid the outlining process Outlining is smart because it saves time. Writing an answer quickly is just a way of getting your thoughts out quickly and keeping that fire alive. It's a shoddy excuse if you just want to avoid outlining.
Yet it does feed the flames of your outline. I tend to write quickly, if needed, but then I will create an outline and fit the information into that outline. Later, probably the day after, I will write the article or the chapter in the book.
Enthusiasm doesn't come easily Yet it does strike from time to time and if you don't go through the process of writing down your thoughts and fashioning them, your writing won't necessarily be dull.
A lot of writing is done by sitting down and just working your way through a project. Yet, that sparkle that comes from frustration, desperation or inspiration comes and goes in quick bursts. Learning to capture those shiny bits in your article is what a great writer does.
All of this outlining and striking when the iron is hot is about structure. It's about discipline. Yet, enthusiasm often shows up when you least expect it. It's at this point that we need to learn to trust the diversion. Let's find out how deviating from the script is a good idea to create a high level of enthusiasm.
3: You need to be able to deviate from your script a bit and make it messy. When does a concept become a coconut?
When you run into your computer's auto-correct, that's when. Like the other day when I was writing an answer in the forum in 5000bc. I fully intended to use the word “concept”, but as you do, my fingers went on their own journey. And as I typed something that was clearly garbled, the auto-correct suggested “coconut” as a replacement. This is the messiness, the unexpected factor that leads to enthusiasm.
It's not unlike the “I have a dream” speech by Martin Luther King Jr. In the book, “Messy”, author, Tim Harford talks about how Martin Luther King Jr valued preparation. By the age of five he was learning Bible passages by heart. By fourteen his dedication to detailed research, outlining and re-outlining was paying off as he won a prize in a public speaking contest.
This attention to sticking to a script paid off time and time again when he started preaching, then later as he snapped up an oratory prize in college, and finally helped him get his job as a minister.
Every sermon started out on yellow lined paper as an idea on Tuesday, would be researched and re-drafted many times during the week, before he delivered it on Sunday. He lavished well over 15 hours a week learning every sermon by heart, just so that he never had to refer to his notes.
Yet the one speech that was the most memorable of all wasn't rehearsed It was an improvisation. Even though he went through his prepared text for most of the speech, as he came to the end, he started to improvise.
At that moment, Mahalia Jackson shouted: “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” And then he was off, giving one of the most memorable speeches, that seemed to take a life of its own.
In the world of scriptwriting it's known that scripts take a life of their own Often writers are astounded to find that the character in the script dictating the series of events. Just like “autocorrect” on your computer, the character decides what to do next.
This concept of the character taking over sounds really odd, until you speak to writers who express how the words on the page seem to come alive in a way that is hard to imagine.
To create enthusiasm in your writing, you need to follow trust the diversion The outline is crucial, there's not a shred of doubt about that fact. The outline lets you stay within the parameters, but an outline can also be the launching pad for enthusiasm of a monumental scale. Suddenly the words are flowing out of you in a way you can't imagine.
The result is something you're not anticipating, and yet it's extremely pleasing when you get to the finish point. Make no mistake: the results are random when you're first starting out. Martin Luther King Jr. was no average speaker.
Writers, singers, jazz players, sports people—they're not rank amateurs. They've got a bit of practice under their belt and it's only at that point that the improvisation kicks in.
Which isn't to say you should wait until you're a great writer, just to improvise No one is a great writer. Everyone is still learning their craft and the best way to get started down this path of improvisation is to simply go down the road when you hear “improv” calling you. The enthusiasm you feel for the subject matter will present itself in a way that you don't or can't expect.
Even in the very early stages, you should break free and let the text take over. Unburdened by typos and grammatical errors. Unfettered by whether what you're writing makes sense or not. Writing in a way that a cartoonist doodles, without a care in the world.
I had to learn these lessons of breaking free as well Take for instance the script of the podcast. When I first started doing the podcast back in late 2014, I'd have a very rough outline, but no script. I'd stick to the points but all of the thoughts had to be improvised as I went along.
By mid-2015, I not only outlined the podcast in great detail, but started reading it off the computer screen and then off a teleprompter on my iPhone called Promptsmart. I thought I was doing a great job until someone suggested I could do better. That comment via e-mail got me thinking about what I'd learned about the diversion; about how letting go was a smart strategy.
And so that's what I did. I still have the outline. I still script and follow the script, but from time to time in the podcast, I'll let the diversion take over. This diversion perks me up when I'm bumping down the side road, but also gives a ton of energy when I get back on track with the script.
It's odd, this advice—even contrary. And yet we know it to be true. To get enthusiasm you have to doodle, do some fair work, then go back to doodling again. It's what makes for great work, and brings immense power to your words.
Next Step: Find out—Why You Need to Have “Tension and Release” To Create Drama in Article Writing.
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How do you find a good coach? We've all done courses that have been a waste of time, money and energy. Yet, finding a great coach isn't easy, is it? There doesn't seem to be any way to know in advance how good (or bad) a coach will be.
Or is there? There are a few benchmarks that make the difference between average and special coaches. And strangely, your first point of due diligence is located right on the sales page in the testimonial section.
In this episode Sean talks about Factor 1: Look for the “End Point” in the testimonials
Factor 2: Why you need to focus on the next play
Factor 3: The Rollercoaster Design Training System
Read it online: Unusual Methods to Find Outstanding Coaches
I wanted 200 gm of coffee. The Russian behind the counter was only willing to sell me 50 gm. My idea of a great coffee, was instant coffee, Nescafé to be precise. At which point I was introduced to New Zealand's amazing coffee culture. To improve my coffee taste buds, I first moved to a slightly fancier brand; a Dutch barista-style coffee called Moccona.
It consisted of coffee granules in a reasonably sized jar. However, that wasn't enough. My journey to becoming a coffee-snob involved buying a pack of pre-roasted coffee called Gravity. Shortly after, I ran into the Russian.
The Russian ran a boutique roasting company not far from my house When I needed coffee, I'd go over and order about 200 gm (about 7 ounces). Until the day he decided not to sell me that quantity. He was only willing to sell me 50 grams (about 2 ounces). “You live close by,” he said. “What's the point of buying coffee and letting it oxidise for the whole week? When you're out of coffee, you come back and take the next 50 gm.”
A good coach is like my Russian coffee “dealer”. Good coaches know that you can't consume massive amounts at one go, and so they slow you down so that you get a far deeper, richer experience. Over the years, I've had the luxury of having good coaches. Coaches that take speed up your progress. And there are also the bad coaches, who in their own way, teach you what good coaching is all about.
In this series, we'll take a look at how you pick a good coach that moves you forward on the journey from a “Nescafé” to a delicious “brew of excellent coffee”.
In this series, we'll cover three factors that will help you spot good coaches. Factor 1: Look for the “End Point” in the testimonials
Factor 2: Focus on the next play
Factor 3: Rollercoaster design
Factor 1: Look for the “End Point” in the testimonials If the sky is filled with cirrus clouds, what will the next 24 hours bring?
Cirrus clouds are those feather-like clouds you see high up in the sky.
In fact they're so high up at 20,000 feet that they're composed exclusively of ice-crystals. But here's an interesting fact: if you see a sky filled with cirrus clouds, you'll get rain and cooler, if not cold weather within the following 24 hours.
What's fascinating about this fact is that almost all of us have seen those fairy-like cirrus clouds, because they can cover up to 30% of the Earth's atmosphere at a time. Even so, we've missed the obvious—that rain and cold soon follows.
Missing the obvious is something we tend to do a lot when trying to find the right coach—or even the right course to attend—online or offline. And that obvious fact is in the most obvious place of all, in the testimonials. Almost every coach or coaching system will have testimonials, and it's through scanning the testimonials that you're likely to find a lot of incredibly valuable information.
But what does a mere testimonial reveal? Here are just some of the things you should look out for in the testimonials. Let's say you joined a class to learn to make sushi. When you finish the class, what would you expect to be able to do? Silly question, isn't it? Almost all of us would “want to make sushi”.
That's why we joined the class, and that would be the end point, wouldn't it? Which means that as you scanned through the testimonials, you should see row upon row of words talking about how the attendees were able to make flawless sushi. In fact, we'd be a little concerned if we didn't see testimonials with a clear end result.
Yet when we sign up for courses, we don't bother to check the fine print of the testimonials Let's say the course makes some bombastic claim like how you can treble your client list in 60 days. Now we know what to look for in the testimonials, don't we? The testimonials should talk about how everyone (yes, everyone) saw a 300% jump in client growth.
Instead, you rarely see any talk about 300% growth. Most of the testimonials seem to talk about the amazing quality of the videos, about the stunning modules in the course or how the person conducting the course is a great teacher. Almost none of the clients talk about the fact that their list numbers have gone up 300% or more. And if such a testimonial does sneak in, it's probably just one of the many testimonials that seem to say little or nothing.
The reality is that every client should reach a clear “End Point” If you're about to sign up with a coach, your goal is not vague, is it? Which is why if you run into a coaching program, whether it be offline or online, ask to see the testimonials or reviews. Peer carefully through them and you'll find the first clue to locating a coach that's focused on results instead of just another barrage of information and blah-blah.
But that's just one of the points to look for, in a good coach. The second is “the focus on the next play”. What's the next play all about?
Factor 2: Focusing on the “next play” Think of a GPS for a moment and you'll get an idea of how a coach tends to work.
A GPS knows your starting point, and knows where you need to go. Yet, at all times, the GPS is tracking where you are. It's focused on your current situation and the the traffic that's building up or easing around you.
Good coaches are like walking-talking GPSs themselves They are focused on the next turn, not something that is going to come down the road. They have that end point in mind, but right now the only thing that matters is the next left or right turn; the next play.
One of my earliest coaches in New Zealand was Doug Hitchcock Doug was a coach who focused on the next play. He got me to do my goal setting and I wrote down half a million goals. Doug was the one who pulled me back and got me to get the tiny bit done, then the next and the next. “Keep to just three goals”, he'd say and then he'd get me to work on the first one.
This concept of focusing on the next play is what I use today almost 17 years later. When I write an article, it's not about the article, it's about the stages of the article. First the idea, then the outline, bit by bit, play by play. When I look at projects that I haven't finished, it's because I didn't pay attention to Doug—and every brilliant coach's simple advice—focus on the next play.
When looking for a coach look for someone who has a GPS-like functionality And to be like a GPS, that coach can't have too many clients. If you're considering a course where you can't see the number of likely participants, you're probably signing up for just another dose of information. A good coach is likely to have a fixed number of clients, not an endless number.
You can't watch the next play of a client if you have 500, 200 or even 50 clients. That's just too much activity for a coach to handle and it's almost certain that many clients will simply slip through the net and not do as well as they hoped to do so.
There's a difference between a rally and true coaching You wouldn't send your kid to a class with 200 other students—let alone 50 students. So why sign up for a coaching program like that yourself? If your goal is to hide among the other students, then it's a good strategy. However, if you want to dramatically move forward, find yourself a coach who can help you focus on your very next move.
In my early twenties, a good friend of mine taught me to do the dance called the “jive” I wanted desperately to go out and dance well. My parents are great dancers, but that wasn't helping me at all on the dance floor.
So great was my desperation that I joined a dance class, but I was just one of many at the class. Many sessions and months later I was no better than before. I have come to realise that the same story plays itself out for the all the classes where I failed. Whether it’s photography classes, the Spanish class, watercolours—pretty much every class where I hadn't learned skills was simply because I didn’t do my due diligence.
In every situation, I was crammed in with others and the only goal of the coach was to get to the “End Point”. In every situation, the end point wasn't a clearly defined scenario, but merely a point where the class term ended.
It's not like no attention was given to us at all, but it's impossible for a trainer to do what Doug Hitchcock did. Or to get the same level of support that Phelps got from Bob Bowman.
Like a GPS, every turn is just as important as the final destination. And good coaches, pay close attention to these points. Even so, a great coach has one more trick up his or her sleeve. It's the system of “rollercoaster design”.
Factor 3: Rollercoaster Design of Training My first tour of New York was done at a screaming pace.
I was with my friend, Mark Levy, Author of “Accidental Genius”. Mark is a great guy, but he also wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything in New York. We set out early that morning from New Jersey and went through New York at breakneck speed.
I guess I remember the day so very clearly even though it was back in 2004 because it was all go-go-go. A frenzied tour through a city, with no stops, is sometimes the way to go when you want to see all the sights and have little time. However, when you're looking for a coach, one of the main factors to watch for is what can be called the “roller coaster” learning design.
So what is the roller coaster design? Even if you've never been on a roller coaster, you know somewhat how it operates. It sets off gingerly, then takes you up slowly and then throws you into a few screaming loops. What's important in roller coaster design is that there's a time to scream and a time to get your breath back. A coach should have “rollercoaster” modules in place when designing a training regime as well.
Almost any skill acquisition will have really tough sections Which is why a coach must draw out the sequence of the course in advance. The coach or trainer must intersperse tough tasks throughout the training, but always go back to the easy wins. That way the person being coached doesn't feel like they're on the scream machine all the time.
Too much screaming is terrible for learning, but then so is too easy learning. If there isn't a scream session, the roller coaster is not much of a roller coaster. And while not one of us wants to battle it out through a course, there are going to be tougher sections in any sort of training. Sections the coach needs to figure out well in advance.
But it's not enough to have the roller coaster alone The training system needs to have some sort of breathing space as well. Let's say you're learning to write articles. The course may start out nice and easy but then run into some difficult concept. Concepts that may need more time, understanding and practice.
Is there any leeway in the system or does the coach just barrel through? Is there room for an additional amount of practice? Can the coach take the participants on a detour for a while before getting back to the syllabus again?
Most training rarely has any breathing space. Instead, it's just like the NY tour. The coach takes the clients at breakneck speed across from one point to another.
And this need for getting mindlessly to the other point has real ramifications You find that people drop out at a high rate simply because they can't cope with the intensity. However, the impact has far greater implications than just dropping out of a course or training. If you drop out of enough Spanish classes, for example, you tend to get the erroneous idea that you were never meant to learn Spanish.
Which is when the “give up” sign flashes madly in your rearview mirror. Granted, just putting in the roller coaster design isn't going to solve every problem. Clients can still go off track for many reasons, but having breathing space in terms of “easy assignments” as well as just “breathing space” to catch up, is critical.
Which brings us to a crucial juncture about how to do our investigations about coaches It's easy enough to look at the testimonials for any coach. Almost every website will tend to have a string of testimonials that allow you to do your own due diligence. A quick look through the testimonials will clearly tell you whether there's an end point in place.
But how do you find out about whether the coach has a next play or some sort of roller coaster design in place? Unfortunately, there's only one way to tell, and that way is to call or email some of the people who you see in the list of testimonials.
The best way would be to e-mail them first, then get on the call and ask questions about how the course is conducted. Remember that what works for them won't necessarily work for you. If they became rich, famous or acquired skill, it doesn't mean you'll be bestowed with the same shower of goodness.
Which is why you should stick to the questions that involve the structure of the training. The structure is what shows you whether this is just a random run of endless information from start to finish, or instead, a well-thought out, well-executed course.
Finding a coach isn't easy. Finding a great coach is a lot harder. However, in a rush to grow our business or improve our skill, it's easy to avoid doing the appropriate amount of due diligence. Or we may simply not know what to look for in a good coach. Many elements mark a good coach, but the easiest way of all is to get to the website and look for the testimonials. Then once you're there, read between the lines and the story of the coach will reveal itself to you.
One more thing: don't be afraid to bail out I once went for a community college photography class. No, I didn't do any due diligence. I figured it was just $200 or so for the tuition and I failed to do my homework. In the first session itself, the trainer went off on a tangent. He talked endlessly about his family, and we learned almost nothing about photography. I didn't go back again. My brother in law also signed up for the course with me.
There wasn't any way to get a refund, so he continued to go for the rest of the sessions As it turned out, they were all a waste of time. Trainers tend to show their colours very early. Sloppy coaches are sloppy right from the very start.
It's a good idea to bail out very quickly and to spend the time doing something else. Even with all the due diligence, you can make an error of judgment. However, once you've figured out your mistake, get out there quickly and use the time to learn something more constructive instead.
Next Step: Have a look at—Good to Great: How To Take Your Small Business To Greatness
The biggest problem with article writing is the exhaustion factor. It's write, delete, write, delete and the endless cycle goes on. So how do you go about article writing? Can you really write articles and not get exhausted? In this series you get to see how I went from getting really frustrated, to writing 800 word articles and then 4000 word articles. What's the secret to such an enormous output? And how do you do it without getting exhausted? Let's find out how spacing the writing and the timer play an incredibly important role in writing.
Why do others seem more talented than we are? Is talent innate? Is it just practice? Or is there something else. Incredibly the key to talent is in the way you define talent. Change the definition and you see it in a whole new light. In Part 1 of this episode on talent, you'll see how mere definitions change the way you see the world of talent (and how it can get you talented faster than before).
Envy isn't something we talk about, or even to admit to openly. And yet it's the one thing that all of us feel. We feel that others are going places and doing more than us. We even feel we need their spot and somehow that spot belongs to us. So how do we overcome this intense envy before it kills us? Find out how even the superstars of the world have to deal with envy. Yes, even people who seemingly have unimaginable wealth and success.
The leap may seem physical, but it's mostly mental. In your head you don't know if it's the right time to jump into being an entrepreneur. What about the mortgage, the family and the bills? And how do you deal with the fear? How do you stay steadfast to your vision? And what about focus? These are the questions that spin in your head over and over again. This episode isn't an answer to your question. No one can answer the questions, but you. However, it helps you understand how to keep true to your vision, how to keep your focus in a distracted world. And then, how to take that leap.
Trying to come up with a suitable name for your book or info-product seems like a nightmare. What if you're wrong? What if the name isn't well received? However, there's a way to make your book really stand out. And guess what? It's not the title that matters. It's the sub-title. Find out why we've been tackling things the wrong way and how to get a superb name for your book or information product/course before the day is done.
Most of us know of the concept of the "guardian angel". They come into our lives and they take care of us. The "kicking angel" is quite different. The angel shows up just to push us over the edge and then he/she disappears from our lives. How do we know when we're being kicked? And what "kicks" do we pay attention to and what do we ignore?
Can you really double your sales of a product you've created a while ago? And why are satellite products so very useful to clients and profitable to your info-product business? In this episode we look at info-products as we'd look at a piece of software like Photoshop.
Find out the magic that already exists within your info-product and why you don't have to keep crazily searching for newer clients all the time.
Read it online: Double Your Sales With Versions and Satellite Products
Most people have never heard of the Knoll brothers, but they've certainly heard of the program the brothers invented. That program was Photoshop
Developed initially in 1987 by Thomas and John Knoll, it wasn't the sophisticated program like the modern version. Back then it wasn't called Photoshop, but was named “Image-Pro”. It was only when the Knoll brothers decided to sell the program in 1988 that they changed the name to Photoshop.
As the story goes, no one was really interested in the program, except for Adobe. Adobe saw the potential and purchased all the wholesale rights, and by 1990 the first version of Photoshop was released. Today, Photoshop has gone through thousands of changes and 27 versions.
Every time a version appeared on the market, two sets of customers bought the product: new clients and existing ones. And in that version history is a lesson for almost all of our information products.
Photoshop is no doubt, built by its programmers, but who comes up with endless suggestions for the improvement of the program? A large portion comes from the users themselves. And who buys the newer version of Photoshop? Once again, it's the existing users of the program. Today, Adobe has a subscription model in place, where all upgrades are automatic, but for at least 20+ years, the newer versions of the product were purchased by existing users.
A similar concept can be used to sell your own info-products It's not common in the information products world to think of books, videos or courses as they do in the software world. Most information product creators write a book or create a course and it stays in its original format. Yet your target profile is always looking for an improvement.
At Psychotactics, we create newer versions of info-products as often as we possibly can. As you're probably aware, the Article Writing Course is now in Version 2.0. So is the First Fifty Words course and The Brain Audit has seen many versions since we first released it in back in 2002.
Bear in mind that not all courses or info-products need constant revision, but instead of simply dashing madly into yet another information product, you might want to take a look at how versions will help sell info-products to an existing, as well as new audience.
Listening to the target profile can also help you create more in-depth versions of your products Take the Article Writing Course for instance. It's an extremely comprehensive course and clients love it—they really do. At first the course existed as a standalone, but the target profile—or clients, in this case—kept asking for in-depth sub-courses.
For instance, writing headlines is already covered in the Article Writing Course, but now we also have a separate eight-week headline course. The opening of the article, or the First Fifty Words as we call it, is also part of the Article Writing Course, but it's also a separate 8-week intensive course. What you're learning from the above example is that even when you have like what seems to be a complete info-product, clients are more than happy to buy in-depth versions of the components of the products.
To make this clearer, let's break up the Article Writing Course into components – Headlines
– First Fifty Words
– Connectors
– Subheads
– Sandwiching
– Objections
– And so on.
When you look at the list above, every component could possibly become a separate and more detailed information product or course. Some might be shorter, or take up fewer pages in a book, but they all have the propensity to break off from the mother ship called the “Article Writing Course” and become satellites of their own.
And clients tend to want more of the same good stuff you're putting out. If you go deeper into the satellite info-products, clients are more than happy to buy into your offering. We know this to be true because of what we see at Psychotactics. A client will do the headlines course and then do the Article Writing Course and possibly the First Fifty Words course.
Or they may start with the Article Writing Course and then move to the headlines course. The satellite courses don't cannibalise the main course. And this concept applies to any sort of info-products whether audio, video or text.
And you know this to be true because of the music industry At some point, we've all bought music in some shape or form. Some of us may have had the pleasure of buying cassette tapes, CDs, DVDs and then signed up to Spotify, Pandora or Apple Music. The fact that we already have access to all the music we need doesn't stop us from listening to it on the radio or YouTube, for that matter.
If the musician rolls into town, we're reasonably likely to pony up anywhere between $100-$500 for concert tickets. In short, all versions and satellite versions work and the client—your target profile—wants you to create updated or at least deeper content on the very same topic.
The target profile is a great boon for a business If you have a target audience, you can't really do much. If you have some persona stuff, again you're just stabbing at some made up stuff. However, the moment you have a real client in front of you, you are able to learn so much more, because a real client speaks, complains, gives feedback and yes, buys your info-products. Even so, a target profile can be a distraction as we've learned on this target profile trip.
So let's summarise what we've learned so far: What have we learned so far?
The Knoll brothers: John and Thomas Knoll. We learned they invented Photoshop. But besides that very important point, we also learned:
1) How to create an information product and why you need to leave the target profile out of it There are times when you might want to include the target profile, but that product might end up like a lot of me-too products on the shelf. To go rogue, you might need to sit down all by yourself and create an information product that is based on how you see the client getting from A to B.
To put this fact into perspective, think about Photoshop itself. No target profile created that program. Instead the Knoll Brothers worked out what was needed to get clients from A-B and off they went into generating that awesome piece of software.
The Photoshop me-too products were largely constrained by the boundaries of Photoshop itself. In short, the me-too were more a sort of target profile driven info-product, while Photoshop itself was a creator's dream.
The target profile is not completely excluded from the creation-process, though. Once you've gone through the early stages and have your content past the early drafts, the target profile becomes extremely useful. I tend to send the draft to the target profile to get their feedback. There's almost something that I have left out, things I've not explained, examples that need more detail, etc. And the target profile will give me that very pertinent (and often, persistent) feedback.
However, the target profile does play a role in pre-selling the info-product.
2) The target profile and the pre-sell While you shouldn't really get the target profile involved in the early stages of creating the info-product, you should get that client in very early in the landing page/pre-sell process. The reason why the target profile is invaluable in the pre-sell stage, is because you get to know what motivates the client and the main problem they're facing.
Once you have the biggest problem clear, you can create your sales page to tackle that issue. The target profile interview becomes utterly invaluable when you're in the sales/pre-sell phase. To understand more about how the target profile plays a role, pick up your copy of The Brain Audit and read the chapter on target profile yet again.
3) Finally, the target profile plays a significant role in in a version or satellite product creation Users usually want a sort of upgrade. They'll ask you to fix this and that in your info-product. Most info-product creators nod glibly and do nothing. They simply don't bother to create a newer version of the info-product.
Admittedly not all products need an upgrade, and any sort of update can be as much, if not more work than the existing product. Even so, you're able to sell an upgraded product to existing as well as newer clients.
The other aspect is the creation of satellite info-products
Just because you have a complete and detailed info-product, doesn't mean your target profile won't hanker after even greater detail. This is when you create a satellite info-product. The Article Writing Course has satellite courses, and even The Brain Audit has satellite products.
In short, the user is asking you to create info-products that help them understand your information differently or in an intermediate format. Paying attention to the target profile makes for loyal clients and substantial profits from an existing clientele. Instead of scrambling all over the place to get new clients all the time, you can use this concept of satellites products and versions to run an extremely profitable business.
The target profile is crucial. Or not.
It depends on the activity and the stages of your info-products.
What’s the one thing you can do today? There’s no one thing. This is all about stages. 1. Write the product you want to write to help the customer get from point A to point B.
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Once finished, have a target profile review it for feedback. Make changes.
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Interview target profile to help create a sales page:
– Find out the problems they're having and use those problems in the sales page.
– Find out their solution, objections, testimonials, risk reversal and uniqueness. Use on the sales page.
Next Step: If you missed the first part of this series, here is the link: Info-product Creation Part 1: When to Leave The Clients Out (And When to Include Them In)
When creating an information product is the client important? It might seem that a client is extremely important when creating an information product. After all, you're getting them to tell you exactly what she needs. However, more often than not, this method is a recipe for disaster. Even so, the client is extremely useful in another phase.
So when do you include the client? And when do you leave her out? Let's find out in this two part series on info-product creation.
Read online: Info-product Creation Part 1: When to Leave The Clients Out
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: How to create an information product and when you need the target profile
Part 2: How to go about pre-selling your book
Part 3: How to use the target profile to create info product versions
Did you ever wonder why evergreen trees don't shed their leaves even in freezing winter? The moment autumn rolls along, most trees in temperate and boreal zones shed their leaves. Every tree has chemical light receptors—phytochrome and cryptochrome. These light receptors can sense a loss of light. Which is precisely when deciduous and broadleaf trees shed their leaves. However, the evergreen trees hang on to their leaves even in the dead of winter, because their foliage is coated with a wax. This wax helps fob off the cold. Plus their cells bear an anti-freeze sort of chemical that enable it to avoid it having to drop its leaves.
When creating an information product, we have to mimic trees Sometimes it's best to drop the client out of the creation of the product, because they're likely to get in the way. At other times we have to make sure we hold onto them like the evergreen tree does with all its leaves. But when do you get the client involved? And when do you drop them?
In this series we'll look at the client—who we call the target profile. We'll have a closer look at three core elements:
– When to leave the client out
– When to bring the client in—and specially when pre-selling the info-product
– Why the target profile plays an important role in creating versions or additional satellite products.
Let's start with the first one.
1) How to create an information product and why you need to leave the target profile out of it What's the worst way to cook a great dinner?
Let's assume you ask the guests to drum up a list of their favourite meals. Were you to go down this path of asking guests for their recommendations, you'd quickly get swamped with a mishmash of dishes.
Dal makhani, fried chicken, broccoli, couscous—just about any dish would show up on the request list. And that's no way to cook a dinner, Instead a better way is to have an overall view of what the clients need—and then completely avoid asking them for any advice while you're prepping dinner.
A similar process plays itself out when you're creating an info-product Many years ago when I sat down to write an info-product on membership sites. My idea was simple: I pre-sold the book on membership sites. I then asked clients to give me the topics they wanted me to cover.
As you'd expect, I got a list of questions that seemed to go on forever. While at first it seems like topics given by clients are a goldmine, the requests turned out to be incredibly debilitating. As you'd expect, I was unsure where to start or how to go ahead.
When creating information products, leave your client out of the planning stage completely. The goal of the information product—a great information product—is to get a client from Point A to Point B and to enjoy the ride in the process. Think of yourself as a GPS. The GPS has access to a tonne of information, but do you see that information on screen?
Instead, what the GPS does is show you only what's valid for your journey. And should there be delays along a route, that very same GPS may take you down a longer route, but eventually get you to the destination as quickly as possible.
Take for instance the series called ‘Black Belt Presentations' The goal of the book series isn't just to create presentations. Instead it helps you create presentations that the entire audience can recall, and repeat, long after you've finished speaking.
When creating this series, I had to think of the three elements that would help get the client to achieve this level of simplicity and elegance. Yet, if I were to ask clients what they wanted to see in a series on presentations, I'd have got a massive list. So I did what you should now do. You should play GPS. What three steps can the client take to get to the desired end point?
Three steps? What if you have seventeen? Well, cut it down to three. With the ‘Black Belt Presentations' series, the focus was on slide design, structure of the presentation itself and finally crowd control. With just three big steps, you should be able to take the client from one point to another. And just for good measure, let's take another example.
Let's say you're writing about how to take good photographs. Surely there are a dozen things you can cover, but you focus on just three. Maybe it's not even three broad topics, but subtopics instead. So instead of exposure, ISO and aperture, maybe you could focus on just three aspects of aperture, instead.
At this point in your product creation, you should have little or no input from your client All the outlines, the drafts and more drafts should be done all by your lonesome self. It's only when you get to the next stage and write down all of the information in a book that the client should take a look.
It's akin to cooking a dish and then giving someone to taste it. If you're creating a video or audio, however, this method of recording might be a waste of time and energy, which is why the movies use storyboards. At the storyboard stage, clients can see how it's all playing out because it's a more polished, finished version of your idea.
I tend to have written material ready first, long before I create any audio or video With written material, it's easier to move things around a bit, should you need to do so. At this stage, I'll tend to get a lot of suggestions and feedback by clients. Even so, it's important to restrict the feedback to just 2-3 clients. If you notice, I didn't say “editors”, and said “clients” instead.
The reason why you should choose “clients” is because they've paid or are likely to pay for the product. They are invested in what your final output will look like and they'll be quick to tell you what's confusing. At this stage, if they make suggestions or additions, it's not terribly hard to implement their recommendations as well.
Finally, I'd go to the editor The editor brings the ultimate level of finesse to an info-product. That editor is likely to look through the grammar, remove inconsistencies and get your product up to a very high standard.
So if we were to go back to the analogy of the dinner, you're the chef, the clients are the tasters (and recommenders) and the editor is person who makes sure the plating is just right. When you have all of these three elements in place, what you truly have is a great dinner—or in your case, a great information product.
Bon Appétit!
Let's move to the next element.
2) The role the target profile interview plays in regards to pre-selling the book—and how to go about it My mother hates eggplant.
I didn't know that. I thought she loved it, considering the number of times we were forced to eat it when we were kids. And then, when I was all grown up, I finally took a great liking to it, only to find that my mother always hated it. To me that was one of the biggest surprises of my life.
It's the kind of surprise you're likely to get if you don't do a target profileinterview. When selling a book, a course, a workshop—or any kind of info-product, it's easy to believe that our perception was right all along. We resolutely sit down and battle our way through the headline and the body copy on our landing page.
We think we know the problem well, have the right solution and we're all ready to sell to the client. Except it's a bit like selling a yummy eggplant dish to my mother. It would have saved all of us a lot of grief if we did some research, wouldn't it?
As soon as you hear the term “research” it's easy to think of Google Adwords and Facebook However, in most cases such drama is totally unnecessary. When creating an information product, we've done almost zero research. We simply create the product that we want to create and then link it to an existing problem. For instance, if you look at the Article Writing Course, it's about writing, but the problem is about “getting clients to call you”. Now that's the bit of research you should be doing.
And this research involves talking to a single client, who we fondly call the “target profile”. The target profile will tell you exactly what's wrong with your offering, almost every single time. Which means you can tweak, but mostly have to rewrite the entire page, look at all the objections, redo the uniqueness. The target profile interview is likely to turn your world upside down, and it's all for a good cause.
When you pre-sell the course, you'll realise that the target profile interview is critical You don't necessarily need the target profile when you're creating the contents of the book (except when you've already written it), but you will need the target profile at the very start of the sales, pre-sell process. Without the target profile, you're just guessing that they love “eggplant” when in fact their favourite dish is quite something else. Doing the interview with the target profile becomes super paramount. There's just one tiny problem: how do you do the interview?
The interview is designed to primarily sniff out the problem of the client Let's say your product—your information product—is about “how to grow 1000 tomatoes in a 3 x 3 foot area”. It might seem like the problem is obvious, right? The problem is either that your crop of tomatoes has been too tiny in the past, or that you don't have enough space to grow tomatoes. Yet, that's not necessarily the way the client sees things. Maybe their problem is completely different.
Maybe their problem is that their tomato crops have been constantly attacked by white flies. Which is why the main problem is going to need tweaking. If you don't solve the “white flies problem”, you may not be able to sell your product.
Waitasecond, doesn't this change the entire information product? Let's say your information product was about how to plant, grow and harvest tomatoes, wouldn't the “white flies” be a diversion? Didn't we just agree that then client should not be involved in the creation of the info-product?
We did indeed, but it's more than likely that the “white flies” issue is just a side show that can be easily tackled in the info-product. Yet, because the client sees it as the biggest issue, it's hard for that client to focus on anything else. And it's the target profile interview that reveals the fact that the client sees the main problem differently from you.
In almost every situation your perception of the problem will be different from the client Which is why you need to make sure you choose the client with a relative degree of care. Over the years we've found the best target profile to be someone who's got two qualities:
Quality 1: They're eager to buy—because they have a genuine problem.
Quality 2: They're able to pay.
Let's take an example of a real example to show you how these two elements work together I don't know if you're aware, but I've had the most terrible internet connection for the longest time. So bad, in fact, that it was impossible to make a Skype call as my voice would get garbled after 5 minutes.
So bad that a 100 mb file would take over 25 hours, if it got to the server in the first place. About three days ago, we got our turn to get high speed fibre. And how do they sell the fibre to me? They talk about Netflix and downloading stuff. But even in my darkest hours of throttled bandwidth, we were able to watch Netflix without too much drama.
What really scared me was how slowly my backups were moving up to the cloud I'd have at least five backups off-line, but having one super-fast backup online was imperative. When offered 100 Mbps, 200 Mbps or 1 Gig, which one do you think I've chosen? However, because the smart copywriter selling the offer didn't bother to check, he will never know why most clients are choosing the lower speeds.
The company would continue to sell fibre connections, but be not hitting the right hot buttons, even when they have the above two conditions of a) the client need the problem solved and b)having the ability to pay.
The target profile interview itself follows a route of discovery You follow the path of The Brain Audit. The Brain Audit has seven elements and since you already have the target profile, you have six of the elements to go through. You start with the problem, then move to the solution, and work your way through objections, testimonials, risk reversal and uniqueness.
At all times, the clients are filling in the gaps for you. You're simply interviewing them and finding out what's on their mind. In short, they're telling you what you'd need to do to get them to buy the product. The ISP can do the same with me. What's even better is that the client will tell you all of their issues, and even if you don't put it in the headline of your sales page, you can still cover the issues in the features and benefits and then further down in the bullet points.
Easily the most important reason for the target profile interview is the emotion in the language. When you sit down at your computer and write, you often write words that are dry and devoid of emotion. When a client describes the problem, there's a completely different set of emotions that are hard, if not impossible to replicate. Which is why the target profile interview becomes crucial for pre-sell and for any ongoing sales.
But why not involve the target profile from the beginning of the content creation? You could do the interview first and use that interview as a roadmap for the contents of the product (as well as the sales page copy)?
This answer is ridiculously difficult to answer. Here's why. Let's say you have a target profile. And let's say they have a bunch of issues. Now if your goal is to simply answer those questions and thus create a book, video or audio, you're on the right path. Many books are written around a brief that involves you simply answering the client's questions. This isn't to say that the info-product needs to be boring.
Take for example an info-product I'm creating on the topic of “how to create an e-book using InDesign” Around 2013, I had already created a version of this info-product and it sold remarkably well. Since then InDesign has gotten a bit better and while the principles remain the same, I thought of upgrading the product. Which is why I started working with a client on this very topic. In effect he was asking questions and I was building the product around his problems and needs.
However, merely answering a question isn't always the way to go Take for instance the Website Masterclass we did way back in 2006. The live workshop and the course itself was about websites, but the angle we took was hinged around “religion”. It was about how “religions” are built and this includes religions such as Harley Davidson, or sports such as cricket or football.
The metaphor of religion was superimposed on how to build a website. And it was an extremely powerful metaphor for most, if not all the attendees. They understood the concept and the underlying principles and that the website was just a medium to express themselves.
Involving a client in the process can be both useful as well as tiresome Instead of creating something using your own parameters and creativity, there's a great likelihood of getting stuck to a fixed format dictated by the needs of the client. Often enough, customers are only helpful if the info-product is something they're thinking about and need. However, if the info-product isn't something they're thinking about, it's impossible to get the client to participate.
Take the issue of an info-product like the First Fifty Words, for example When you start writing an article, you need to get off to a brilliant start. However, that's the point where a lot of writers get horribly stuck. Let's say you ask a client to participate in creating a product. What are they likely to say?
They're likely to give you the problem—which in their case is that they struggle to write the First Fifty Words. The problem is not something they can decipher, and so any input from the client is only possible once you put the information together and get them to review the course.
In my experience, both the types of info-products can exist side by side However, to create really info-product that's a lot different from what everyone else is creating, you'd have to think of your own method of solving a problem. I tend to avoid any target profile input at the start.
I can't say I'm completely deaf to a target profile's comments, but by and large I go off to create what I think is important to get to the end point. A road map with the target profile might seem to be good, but it might lead you down the path that everyone else is taking. If you want to get a little off tangent (in a good way), my advice is to avoid the target profile until much later in the process.
Knowing the client and the language of the client is critical.
It's what helps us to talk to, and sell to clients in their own words. And they're happy when you take the trouble to find out what's important to them.
Next Step: Element 3: Info-product Creation Part 2: Double Your Sales With Versions and Satellite Products
When you create your business, product or service uniqueness, do you need to test it? Incredible as it seems there's little point in doing any testing at all.
In this episode you'll find out why testing is practically impossible and how instead of wasting time on research, you should follow three steps to make sure your uniqueness occupies a permanent part of your client's brain.
In this episode Sean talks about Step 1: You have to consistently get the word out.
Step 2: You have to state the position of the competition.
Step 3: You have to state your own position.
Read it online: How to Effectively Test Your Uniqueness
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When you have settled on your uniqueness, how can you test it? What is likely to happen to a woman's bikini, when she's surfing?
“If you're a woman, surfing with a bikini was slightly out of the question.You'd be out in the waves, walk out of the water and literally you've lost your bottoms,” said the business owner, Anna Jerstrom. So Jerstrom decided to create sexy, bright bikinis. And the uniqueness? Bikinis that stay on, no matter how rough the surf. And with this single-minded pursuit, investment banker, Anna Jerstrom started a business called Calavera.
Wouldn't she need to test the uniqueness before she began? In almost every case, testing a uniqueness is completely unnecessary. One of the biggest reasons why you shouldn't be bothered with testing a uniqueness is because you're unlikely to have any competition.
Let's take the uniqueness of Calavera, for example. Why did Jerstrom start the company? Surely she should have been able to find some bikinis that didn't slide off in the surf. Even with the power of the Internet at her disposal, she was still running into dead ends. It means that there will be hundreds, if not thousands of customers who are also finding it hard to get a decent product.
That line of thought may not sound reasonable to you, but let's look at the alternative, shall we? Let's say you decide to sell a product. Maybe it's an information product that's based on presentations. When you look on Amazon.com, you're likely to find at least 5,000 books on presentations. Do you really want to go through every sales page trying to find out what's unique about the presentation product?
Clients don't care about doing such extensive research either. They just want to show up to your business whether online or offline, and they want you to explicitly tell them why you are different from the rest of the competition. Whether you have a product, training or a service, your uniqueness doesn't need testing, simply because it's impossible to do a test.
But there's another good reason why you shouldn't bother to test The biggest reason why you should just go ahead and run your uniqueness is because the competition is lazy or confused, or both. Most companies are clearly at sea when asked what makes them unique. If you have a uniqueness factor in place, that puts you way ahead of your competitors. However, there's also another reason why you can go ahead quite happily.
Even if your competition has a uniqueness, it's not much use unless they use it on a frequent basis A uniqueness itself is not enough for clients to remember what is being said. Volvo is known for their safe cars because they ran endless ads about safety. Dominos made a billion dollars selling pizza because of their “30 minutes or it's free” slogan. Think for a second about your competitors right now. Can you quickly bring up their uniqueness?
It's not enough to have a uniqueness, you have to do so much more In fact you have to take three steps to make sure the uniqueness does its job properly.
Step 1: You have to consistently get the word out.
Step 2: You have to state the position of the competition.
Step 3: You have to state your own position.
Let's go through the steps—To Getting Your Uniqueness Recognised Step 1: Get the word out This means a uniqueness can't just sit around. It has to be repeated in some form or the other, over and over again. If you've listened to the “Three Month Vacation” podcast, for example, when I talk about 5000bc, I will repeat the same thing almost ad nauseam. I will say, “5000bc is a place where introverts meet because they feel safe”.
The same message will be sent out in articles, in books—in just about every medium possible. And the message never changes much, if at all. Keeping that message consistent is what is critical. If you keep changing the message simply because you're bored of it, you've lost more than half the uniqueness battle. You want to make sure you get the uniqueness as simple as possible and then continue to mention it everywhere.
When you consider that you may have more than one product or service, you have to pick your battles For instance, the uniqueness of Psychotactics is “tiny increments”. But often the overall company uniqueness is of little value to the client, because they are more focused on the product or service, instead. However, at Psychotactics, we have many products, so I pick the uniqueness depending on the medium.
On the podcast, I will consistently end with the uniqueness of 5000bc However, while I'm explaining something in the podcast or in an article, I will make sure to talk about the uniqueness of Psychotactics courses and how they're not just information, but about skill (see, I did it again). You don't want to bring up the uniqueness of every single product or service. You want to make sure you have a few entry points.
For us at Psychotactics, those entry points that need to be stressed are The Brain Audit, 5000bc and the courses. It's not like the rest of the products and services don't matter. They do, but the uniqueness of those products and services are on the sales page or sales pitch itself.
It's important to have your doorways Just rattling off a dozen uniquenesses for a dozen products doesn't get any message across to clients. Pick two or three of your services or products—or if you like, the uniqueness of your company. And then keep hammering them home in pre-selected areas of your marketing.
But that's only the first part of making sure your uniqueness is heard. To make sure you get the point across, you have to state the position of the competition.
Step 2: Stating the position of the competition Ever noticed how shiny Harley Davidson bikes tend to be? The reason for their shiny nature is probably the diligence of the bike owner, but equally, it's how the bike has been positioned in the Harley owner's mind. Harley owners have been known to truck their bikes across and then ride them locally.
After all, the bikes have to be in pristine condition at all times. The BMW bike owners, on the other hand, seem to favour the dust and dirt, pushing their bikes across all sorts of punishing conditions.
Even if the above description of BMW vs. Harley is not 100% accurate, it demonstrates the difference And uniqueness is a point of difference. To make sure you get the point of difference across, you need to have the competition clearly in your sights. If you have a million-dollar promotion budget, you can continue to mention your slogan, but if you're a small business, you tend to get very few chances. Which is why it's important to bring the competition when you're describing your own point of uniqueness.
So first, you have to pick your “enemy.” The enemy may not be a company. It could be a way of doing things. So when I say, “other courses give you a money back guarantee, but no guarantee of skill”, I'm not taking on anyone in particular. I'm simply taking on an aspect of online courses. If you were to say, “other yoga classes have a lot of yoga routines, but don't necessarily pay attention to what can injure you long after you've left the yoga class.” Or to take a third example involving microphones: Other microphones pick up unwanted noise and reflections, in a bad-sounding, untreated room.”
Once you've defined the enemy's characteristics you know what you're battling against
No doubt the enemy will have many flaws, but your job is to pick one. Uniqueness is about “one thing”, and the moment you pick the opponent's flaw, you can easily position yourself against them. Which takes us to the third step, doesn't it?
Step 3: You have to state your own position Your position is the exact opposite of the flaw you've picked.
If they work too slowly, you work quickly.
If they give you 200 pages of information, you give only the ten pages needed.
If they sell ripe bananas, you sell them green, so they don't ripen too quickly.
With the Calavera bikinis, Anna Jerstrom's enemy was “the terribly fitting bikinis”, and her position was “bikinis that stay on, no matter how rough the surf.” You can pick up anything off your desk and ask yourself why you use that particular product. And the same goes for any service as well. Or company for that matter.
When I give a presentation, for example, I want to stand out from the rest of the presenters, so I talk about how businesses make a gazillion dollars, but we make more than enough, and we take three months off every year, not working, but completely on vacation. When you state the competitor's position and contrast it with yours, you can see the lights going off in the prospect's brain.
Which brings us to that testing bit again: how do you know if your uniqueness is truly unique? It's the nodding of the head. When you state your uniqueness, the clients tend to see the difference between your competitor and you. And you get this smile, this slight nod of the head. You know you've struck a chord with the client. Oh, and there's the echo.
When you ask the client what you do, they should be able to echo your words perfectly Listen for the echo. Are they missing out important bits? If they are, your uniqueness may not be as simple as you think and you'll need to edit it a bit. If they're totally off tangent, then you haven't made your point as precise as it could be. If you run into your client a month or six months from now and they can echo your uniqueness perfectly, then you've got a uniqueness that has resonated with them, and it's truly a point of difference.
Finally, a lot of uniqueness comes about when you're not expecting it That line about how our courses are different from every other online course wasn't something I figured out while sitting down and going through this exercise. I probably said it in response to a question on an interview or when trying to explain what makes our courses different. Over times, I made sure to bring it up often so that it got a bit of an edge.
A lot of your uniqueness is going to pop up when you least expect it, so make sure you write it down when you hear yourself saying something interesting about your product or service. Nonetheless, as a starting point, defining the enemy is a very crucial exercise. It's only when you define the enemy that you can clarify your own position in a memorable manner.
To get your uniqueness really charging down the road you need to consider all three points: Step 1: You have to consistently get the word out.
Step 2: You have to state the position of the competition.
Step 3: You have to state your own position.
And that's how the uniqueness fits—just like a Calavera bikini. Oh, one more thing: Calavera closed down its business in 2017. They decided they wanted to do something different and after a good five years of running the business, they decided to shut shop.
P.S. What would it be like to stand out from the competition in a way that customers choose you over everyone else? And what if you were to raise your prices, and they still kept coming? Have you ever wondered what it might feel like to not be me-too?
Here are six goodies on uniqueness
Free Goodie No. 1: Uniqueness: Why We Get It Wrong
Free Goodie No .2: Getting to Uniqueness Part One and Two
Free Goodie No. 3: Uniqueness: The Importance of the Mundane and the Seemingly Uninteresting.
Free Goodie No. 4: Uniqueness mistakes and how to avoid them-video
Free Goodie No. 5: Uniqueness: The Difference (and Resemblance) Between Uniqueness and the Other Red Bags
Free Goodie No. 6: Uniqueness: Do You Need To Carve Out a Uniqueness For ‘Every’ Product or Service?
Get the goodies here: How to get to your uniqueness
How do you position your products and services? Finding your uniqueness is incredibly difficult, yet some companies do it consistently well. How do you learn from their ability to position their products and services?
Also, do you really need a uniqueness for every business product and service? The answer is “yes” and this episode will reveal why that's the case.
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In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: How do you go about finding uniqueness for your business/product/service?
Part 2: Do different products/services need their own uniquenesses?
Part 3: When you have settled on your uniqueness, how can you test it?
Read in online: How To Quickly Create Your Uniqueness
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A patch of grass, is a patch of grass, is a patch of grass, right? Take for instance the patch of grass near the volcano, Ol Doinyo Lengai in Tanzania
Every year around February, the wildebeest calves are born, all at the same time. If you look at where the calves seem to graze, it's on one patch of grass—while completely ignoring the rest of the think.
This particular grass, which stretches for miles, has nine times the phosphorus and five times the calcium as the next patch. The enriched grass nourishes the young calves and gets them healthy for the great migration that is to follow. In other words, you could easily call this grass unique, right?
In business we rarely have this luxury of inbuilt uniqueness Instead we have to go out and find our uniqueness, or create one. And this is where we seem to run into a lot of trouble. When we look at our products or services, they seem remarkably similar to what the competition is offering.
We too could do with a bit of phosphorus and calcium in our offerings, we believe. Contrary to what we think, we all have an incredibly powerful ability to distinguish ourselves from any competitors.
Yet, the moment we decide to work on our uniqueness, we paint ourselves into a corner We don't know if we're supposed to find a uniqueness or create one. The pressure builds until we convince ourselves that the exercise of uniqueness is much too tedious, and it's better to use our energy in other areas of marketing and sales. Even as we're veering away from uniqueness, we realise that we pick products and services precisely for their uniqueness. Running away from the issue isn't going to help us move ahead. We have to turn and face it head on.
And here's how you do it. Let's cover three elements: How do you go about finding uniqueness for your business/product/service?
Do different products/services need their own uniquenesses?
When you have settled on your uniqueness, how can you test it?
Element 1: How do you go about finding uniqueness for your business/product/service? Back in 2003, we started a little membership site called 5000bc.
It wasn't meant to be a membership site, but so many clients wanted to discuss business issues that it made sense to have a site. At first, it had almost no content, and I spent a good few weeks putting in a dozen articles or so. It was the early 2000's, remember? I was able to get in touch with almost anyone on e-mail and get their permission to use their content. So I contacted billionaire, Mark Cuban, best-selling author and speaker, Wayne Dyer and other such personalities. And so, 5000bc began on its journey.
But 5000bc had no clearly-defined uniqueness When you're starting out a business, it's hard just to figure out what you're doing. You're trying so hard to find yourself that finding the uniqueness for a product or service seems implausible, if not impossible. Nonetheless, over the years, as 5000bc grew, we went through the process of interior design. We'd add something here, something there and soon it became quite distinct in itself. Even so, we couldn't figure out what was unique.
This is the part where you turn to the outside world We sent out a bunch of e-mails to clients and time, and time again they'd come up with the same response. They'd say something like this—and this is an actual quote: My favourite part about 5000bc is the character of the community. From knowing that you will personally answer my questions to knowing I can post my own answers without getting ridiculed is really nice.
I'm just getting started, but once my business is rolling, I will certainly pay it back to the community. I've never seen anyone put anyone else down in the Cave.
But then they might add something like this I also like the depth of content. Before I came to 5000bc, I was very confused about the direction I want to go in for starting my business. Ever since joining 5000bc, and reading the content I've been getting a lot of clarity and confidence. I'm no longer running in circles, but moving towards my goals. I really appreciated the members sharing tips and comments on my post about “getting rid of negative thoughts”.
I also like that people hold you accountable to what you have entered in Taking Action Forum. See the problem yet?
In that answer, there are several points, and seemingly none of them co-relate with each other. Let's go over them in bullet form:
– The character of the community (you can ask questions without getting ridiculed.
– The depth of the content that gives me confidence and clarity.
– Being held accountable.
But if a single e-mail gets three points, we already have three tangents, don't we? If we were to poll everyone the list would be pretty exhaustive. We'd get a list that's akin to this:
– Kind, helpful community
– Restricted membership
– The philosophy ensures helpfulness
– Vanishing reports on various topics that may not be found elsewhere.
– The critique lounge
– The common language of The Brain Audit.
– The that me, Sean, is always around sometimes 15-20 times a day.
– That a question asked by clients may end up with a series of articles written especially for that client.
The list goes on and on and the longer the list, the bigger the uniqueness headache Which is when you randomly pick one element from the list. In the case of 5000bc, enough clients mentioned that they sign up for a membership site and the owners of the site are never around. They just dump information but aren't around to clarify any queries and any such clarification has to be done at an additional price. We took that information—the fact that I'm around and answer the questions—as the uniqueness.
If that seemed like a logical uniqueness, it's not The Vanishing Reports, for one, are extremely well-regarded. Clients consistently like the Vanishing Reports because they consider them to be yummy bites of knowledge, focused on a single topic. As a result, they don't overwhelm you, and as a member, you get it free of cost, until they disappear. Or you could take the fact that the philosophy of the community ensures that there's no trolling, no pitching of their own business, and introverts—especially introverts—feel very safe when asking questions.
Any of the elements in the list above could easily become the unique factor of 5000bc. And yet, the way to go about choosing a uniqueness is to only pick one—any one. And once you've picked you to need to elaborate why that uniqueness is so vital. It's the elaboration that makes it unique, not necessarily the element itself. Without the elaboration, nothing is unique, or rather everything is unique.
I call this concept the “Attenborough Effect.”
The “Attenborough Effect.” A forest contains thousands of species of plants, animals and insects. To try and cover them all is plainly a waste of time. Which is why naturalist and TV presenter, David Attenborough, does something dramatic. In one particular video, he falls to the floor and focuses on a single plant: the Venus Fly Trap. The act of dropping to the forest floor is a moment of pure drama, but that's not what you should be getting your attention. Instead, notice that he's ignored all the rest of the plants, animals and insects.
All of them, but the Venus Fly Trap.
This is what I call the Attenborough Effect and it's also the lesson as to how you need to choose your own uniqueness Your current business may do many things well, but trying to cover your own “forest floor” is a waste of time. Clients can't pay attention to many points at the same time. Even two points are far too many as you noticed when we used the 5000bc example. You couldn't have “helpful community” and “Vanishing Reports” at the same time.
A choice has to be made and while it may appear to you like the choice was very precise, it only seems that way because of the way in which it is presented. Walking around in the forest, the Venus Fly Trap may never get your attention, but by focusing the camera on one—to the exclusion of everything else—is how uniqueness is created.
However, all of this assumes that you already have a business, a product or service And that's a dangerous assumption to make for a specific reason. All of us, without exception, will have new products or services in future. And as we'll learn in the second section of this piece, every one of the products or services will need their own uniqueness. So how are we to create a uniqueness when we don't have the luxury of hindsight? The way forward is to create your uniqueness. The question that arises is “how do you do that?” How do you pick your uniqueness?
The answer lies in a concept we've covered many times before called a “superpower” Let's say you're conducting a workshop to learn how to acquire “X-Ray vision”. When the clients walk into the room, what are they expecting to learn? And when they leave? The obvious answer is “X-Ray vision”, isn't it? Let's assume 5000bc didn't have Vanishing Reports. Wait, we're not assuming, are we, because 5000bc didn't have Vanishing Reports.
When we started out, we looked at other websites and there was no concept like Vanishing Reports. So we just invented it. However, let's say everyone suddenly decides to create Vanishing Reports. What are you going to do in such a situation?
You add a little bit of extra description to your offering. Maybe your vanishing reports are “just 10 pages long.”
Maybe they're 50 pages, in-depth reports.
Maybe they're full of cartoons which are fun to read.
Maybe the report is not just a report but a stage by stage how-to document.
You see what's happening here? You're deciding in advance what superpower you want to bestow upon your client. You are deciding you want to give them X-Ray vision, or vanishing reports, or specially organised groups. You can simply decide what you want to focus on and then go right ahead and invent your uniqueness. Every feature you see in a new phone model, new software, new product or service is merely an invention.
When sitting down to create your product or service, you will need to do some brainstorming What features and benefits will it have? And the moment you make the list, you have a choice. Simply pick something that's interesting and elaborate upon it. If you've noticed, that's the second time, or possibly the third that the term “elaborate” has been brought up. We'll cover more about “elaboration” and what to elaborate as we work our way through this piece.
For now, either pick something like David Attenborough, or invent something you'd like to see in your product or service. And that will get the ball rolling. That is your first step on the road to creating uniqueness for your products and services.
Element 2: Does Every Product or Service Need Its Own Uniqueness? When you look at any family on the planet, what you're actually seeing is an example of products and services
Let's take the eldest child. And let's suggest his uniqueness is that he's calm. Let's paint the second child as having a wild nature. The third may well have an inquisitive nature. If the family were to extend almost endlessly, every child in that family would have a different character, attribute or what we'd call uniqueness.
Therefore something similar applies to your family of products and services too. Yes, your company may have a unique character, but it's equally important for every product or service to have a uniqueness as well.
Let’s take an example. Let’s examine The Brain Audit, for instance.
Did The Brain Audit always have a uniqueness? No, it didn’t. When we started, we had no uniqueness at all. Luckily we got over 800 testimonials, and that became the uniqueness. Now admittedly, once you have 800 testimonials, your product should stand out quite a bit, shouldn't it? And yes, the product will stand out, provided the format doesn't change in any way.
But The Brain Audit went from Version 1.0 to 2.0—and then to Version 3.2 And this is where the problem lies. If a customer has bought Version 1.0, why bother buying Version 2.0? Or for that matter Version 3.2.? And what if we were to bring out Version 4.0?
It's where uniqueness comes waltzing right through the door. Many, if not most of our clients have bought several versions of The Brain Audit. And the reason is simple: They can see why version differs from the next. And this difference is simply a factor of uniqueness.
When you define the uniqueness, you automatically get clients interested. And not just existing customers, but new ones as well.
It’s more than likely that the new clients haven't run into The Brain Audit So for them the uniqueness is pitched against other books of a similar nature. Why should they spend their hard-earned money on this product vs. some other marketing-based product?
And that’s not all… Let’s say we did put out a version of The Brain Audit on Amazon.com. And that price is just $9.99. And the product on the Psychotactics website is $119. What causes the client to buy the $119 version? Once again we have the uniqueness come into play. If a client gets a lot more on our website vs. what’s available on Amazon. Then there’s a point of difference.
When a thick, luscious layer of uniqueness is applied, price and reluctance retreat quickly But you can’t just depend on the client to figure all of this out. So you have to clearly define the uniqueness. You have to be able to tell the difference between an iPhone 4 and an iPhone 4s. The Brain Audit Version 2.0 and The Brain Audit Version 3.2. The Amazon offering and the website offering. Because in reality, every product or every offering needs to really stand out from the “hoi-polloi” even if the “hoi-polloi” is just a different version of your very own product or service.
In short, every product and service needs a uniqueness Just like a family member, every product or service is different. And even if you have the very same product, but in different formats or versions, you're still going to have to differentiate it so that clients know why they should buy one product over the other.
And this takes us to the third point- When you have settled on your uniqueness, how can you test it? Element 3: When you have settled on your uniqueness, how can you test it?
Information product sales don't always increase with promotions alone Often they increase by giving away content that you could easily sell.
But shouldn't you stick to giving away tiny reports? What if you were told to give away a big product instead? Would that reap any rewards?
Find out in this episode on giving as a strategy.
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Small value giveawayPart 2: Big value giveaway
Part 3: How to structure the giveaway and how often
Click to read online: https://www.psychotactics.com/giveaways-increase-sales/
n South Africa, there's a flower that only one insect can access. Orphium flowers don't contain nectar. Instead, they provide bees with pollen. Yet, not every insect can access the pollen. If you look closely at an orphium flower, you'll find the stamens are twisted and this, in turn, prevents the pollen from being stolen by visiting insects. Only one insect has access to the pollen in the Orphium flower. That insect is the female carpenter bee.
When she approaches the Orphium flower, her flapping wings make a particular buzzing sound. Yet that sound won't make a difference to the flower. The stamens remain locked. At which point the bee changes the beat of her wings creating what we'd call the C note. That simple act gets the flower to seemingly unlock and shower the bee with pollen.
In our business, we often seem to be like the other insects. We don't appear to be able to hit that C note and unlock greater products sales. Yet just like the wing beat of the carpenter bee, you can achieve a consistent level of success. So what's that note that you have to hit? And how often?
Let's find out: 1) Small value giveaway
2) Big value giveaway
3) How to structure the giveaway and how often
1) Why Small Value Giveaways or Products Work If you were a rooster, would you be able to crow at any time?
You'd think so, wouldn't you? After all, it seems like roosters cock-a-doodle-doo at any given time. In the journal, Scientific Reports, a study showed that roosters crow in order of seniority. First, the top ranking rooster initiates the crowing, followed by subordinates, all in descending order of social rank.
In fact, when the top ranking rooster is removed from the group, the second-ranking rooster initiates the crowing. At all times the social rank has to be adhered to maintain the hierarchy.
Fortunately, such a hierarchy doesn't have to maintained when trying to increase product sales. You can start off with a small value giveaway.
So what's a small or low-value giveaway? When you get to the website at Psychotactics.com, you're likely to have run into a giveaway called the “Headline Report”. It's why headlines fail, and how to avoid that failure. To date, over 55,000 copies of that report have been downloaded.
That report isn't a top-ranking, highly complex document. Back in the early 2000s, when we first launched a pre-Psychotactics site, I wrote an article about headlines, which turned out to be very popular.
And by this point you're probably thinking, “Ah, it's a report, there's nothing new about a report.” You'd be right if you thought that way because the report itself doesn't do much. However, if you take a report that gets a client from Point A to Point B as quickly as possible, then that report becomes pretty magical.
Which is what the Headline Report does. In under 10 minutes and in about as many pages, it takes you from not being very confident with headlines to getting a pretty good understanding of the working and the implementation of the headline.
All over the Psychotactics website there are tiny reports of this nature They're all small value giveaways, but they do one thing and do it well. They get you from A to B in a big hurry. The hurry part is important because people are swamped with information. If you're able to create change quickly, they're more likely to decide to take the next step and implement what you've shown them.
Once they implement, they're hooked. I remember a client who came to our workshop, spent $3000 for himself and his wife, purely based on the strength of the report.
But it's not just reports that matter; videos or audio can do the same task Last week I listened to a podcast about a book by Tim Harford. To date, I've read one book and am in the process of going through the other. The podcast isn't high value, is it? It's free, but the same concept of the podcast can be used on your site. The short video, the short audio, the tiny report, even a string of slides that explain a concept. Your starting point should usually be an appetiser, not a full meal.
At Psychotactics we have appetisers all around the place It might be an excerpt of a book or some reports that are extremely useful. They all serve to get clients to show up, then sign up on a consistent basis. In fact, our goal—and pay close attention—is to have a report that's suited to every type of article. It's a pretty extensive exercise but think about it.
If you're reading an article on resistance, what would you prefer a report on? Resistance, or overcoming resistance, right? The same concept would apply to any page of your website. Which means that if you bundle up even a few of your best Point A to Point B articles, you should be able to have a few reports ready in a few weeks, at best a few months.
The low-value giveaways don't need to be restricted to just the giveaway on your front page They can be all sorts of little audios, videos, or any information that is of value to the client. And they cut through the hierarchy. We all believe that clients need to read our book or attend a workshop. No, they don't. They just need a tiny bit of stuff that they can consume.
So why is this consumption bit so very important? When a client can finish and implement something, they usually come back for more. Which is why it then pays to have not just free, but also low-value products. When you look at Psychotactics, you'll notice that we sell The Brain Audit for $9.99.
There are also other products that have a lower value and are priced at $29 or $39. They're not exactly cheap, but when compared with some of the $3000 products they do come across as lower value. In fact, if you look closer, we even have a button that says, “products under $50”. Clients want to test the waters without too much of a risk. When they find value—and by value I mean they can implement everything smoothly and elegantly—they come back for more.
Nonetheless, free or lower value products are not the only way to go. Which is why you need to have something of high value to give away. Give away? Yes, give away. Let's look at how the high-value products work as well.
2) Let's look at how the high-value products work as well. Big Value Giveaway Did you know that the modern seat belt was invented by an aviation engineer who worked on ejector seats?
In 1959, it's not like cars didn't have seat belts—they did. But the seat belts were two-point waist restraints, which in car crashes, harmed rather than helped the driver and passengers. Which is when Volvo engineer, Nils Bohlin stepped up to the plate and invented the three-point seat belt—the kind we use today. It was such a remarkable safety feature that Volvo would have made a big pile of money on patents alone.
Instead, Volvo gave it away.
We often believe that we should sell high-value products However, you may find, as we did, that giving away high-value products can be an incredibly powerful way to build trust and get repeat clients.
On the Psychotactics website is a product called The Brain Alchemy Masterclass which is priced around $2300. The product shows you the core of how to start and build your business, and it's easy enough to get to the sales page and buy the product. Yet, from time to time we give away the product to the entire list.
Another product is the Website Masterclass This product digs deep into not just websites, but the psychology of what creates “religions” to work. In doing so, it takes you on the magic carpet through the major world religions, Harley Davidson, Football and other such “religions”.
You realise why some marketers never have to put crazy countdown clocks or dump pop-ups on their website. That without any fuss or hoopla you can create a business where clients buy because their trust in you is infinite. Would you hold onto such a product? And yet, a few years ago, we gave it away to those who were members of 5000bc—and no, there was no catch involved.
Giving away a big product seems to be a foolhardy exercise Why give something away when you can sell it? We've found that giving away a chunk of what we have has been beneficial for our business. At Psychotactics, we have over 20 products, and when we give away big chunks, we've found it builds an enormous amount of goodwill, which, believe it or not, turns to greater sales.
Bear in mind that while this article is clearly suggesting that you should use this giveaway as a strategy, our goal was not originally to garner a greater profit. Our goal was to give back since we'd already received so much. And this goal was stated way back in 2004, when the company was just over a year old. Even so, you'd be happy to know that giving away stuff you can sell, does lead to a substantial growth in profits.
In The Brain Alchemy Masterclass, we cover the early version of The Brain Audit Yet, the moment clients go through the course, they end up buying the new version of The Brain Audit. And they also buy The Brain Audit workshop. They then join 5000bc, our membership site and end up on online courses.
Consider that a Psychotactics course is quite expensive compared with most marketing courses out there. And if you're doing an online, live, guided course, you are promised skill, but no money back guarantee. So what causes clients to sign up in a tearing hurry? Why do the courses fill up in less than an hour? One of the big reasons is the big giveaway.
But what if you don't have any big products? No one starts off their business with big products, and yet in time you'll be likely to do a series of videos, or possibly a workshop that you record. Maybe you'll do a bunch of seminars on a particular topic. It's likely you don't have that product in place right now, and even when you get to it, you might not be that keen to give it away.
We had waited at least six years before we gave away our product and another three before we gave away the next. You have to be comfortable with giving away a big chunk of product. Nonetheless, bear in mind that the marketplace gets noisier and crazier by the minute and your best bet is to get clients to trust your work earlier than later. The sooner you can give away a big product, the better. It might even be a good idea to create a big product just to give it away.
If you giveaway big products, will clients ever want to pay? I have an e-mail software that I use to keep my inbox down to zero. It's called Spark (and it's for the Mac). I've used a lot of software to maintain my inbox because unlike most people; I don't outsource e-mails. And right now Spark does an excellent job. There's just one problem. All the e-mail software I've had before has not been free.
It hasn't been expensive, but they've charged me between $20-$40 overall. This one is a pure giveaway. That makes me really nervous because you can't run a business without charging for it. I'm hoping they can take some money off me as soon as possible.
It may sound bizarre to you, but not all clients are not over eager to get free stuff all the time There are those who will take endlessly, but there are enough clients who want to pay. If you create good info-products, you will always have clients who'll pay good money to get whatever you put out. Take the case of all the free information you see around you on a daily basis. You'll see entire videos on YouTube, or run into books that are priced at a tiny fee, or even free. A book, by the way, is a big info-product. The book or video then directs you to higher priced info-products or consulting.
Which brings up the next question: Should you structure the giveaway? If so, how? And how often should you give something away? Let's find out in the next section.
3) How to structure the giveaway Have you walked into a store where some of the goods are locked up and not accessible to customers?
Many years ago, we used to do workshops in Campbell, California—primarily it's because that's where Renuka's sister used to live. And while we were in the U.S. it was always a good idea to do some shopping.
On one of the shopping trips, I wanted to buy a rainproof jacket. Not just any old jacket, but something that would keep me super dry on days when it was super-wet. The logical choice for this outdoor gear was REI, the outdoor gear store. And guess where my prized rain jacket was to be found?
Yes, you probably guessed correctly
It was in a glass case, which happened to be locked. The brand I was looking for, Arcteryx, had a high price tag and there it was, sitting where it could be seen, but not touched. And that's approximately how you need to treat your own big value giveaways. It needs to have a barrier between you and the client, wherever possible and there's a good reason why.
The reason? It's easier to sell something expensive than to give it away free of charge
Think about it for a second. Let's say someone drove up to your house, knocked on your door and gave you the keys to a brand new car. What's your reaction? You should be jumping for joy, but this person who just gave you the car is a stranger.
There's absolutely no reason to trust his generosity. Instead of dancing around the room, you're trying to shut the door in his face, aren't you? Without setting up the barrier and anticipation, even a big give-away will fall flat on its face.
At Psychotactics we go through a routine as though we're selling a high-value product
Yes, the product is still free, but that doesn't mean you don't put up the barriers. When we give away a high-value product, we make the client go through a series of actions. This might involve going on a waiting list, then spreading out the sequence of e-mails so that the product is delivered in stages.
And for some giveaways, we've even got members to pitch in and help out with the work. In short, you shouldn't just dole out your high-value product and should take all the care and effort to treat it like a high-end product. It means a lot of work on your part. Lists to set up, e-mails to write—yup, no one said this would be easy. But when you go through the trouble of running a campaign for a “free” product, the client is in a better position to perceive the value.
What you also need to know is that low-value products can have the same intensity of drama
Just because it's not a high-end info-product, doesn't mean you can't roll it out to the sound of drums and bugles. Let's say I were writing a small report on “how to write perfect headlines every time”, there are two options.
You could get the report right away, without any fuss, or you could sign up in anticipation for the information when it is finally released. Which isn't to say that all small value giveaways need to have pomp. Some of them can just be given away, just as you'd do with a YouTube video or an article.
Even so, most of the items on our site have barriers
To get to a specific type of audio or video or report, you have to sign up. This, in turn, enables us to send more goodies to the client or to inform them about related products or services. If you can't get in touch with a client or can't remind them to buy something, there's a likelihood your info-products will sell, but having those contact details and the permission enables you to keep in touch on a fairly constant basis.
Finally, it's the strength of your info-product that really matters
Many clients will use different e-mail addresses and may not see the follow-up e-mails you send. Which is why your info-product itself, whether big or small, has to deliver the goods. It's not always sales, sales and more sales that matter. In many, if not most cases, generosity matters to an even greater extent. Be generous, and kind, and you'll find that clients are very responsive as well.
Oh and be selective in your giving
We give away products from time to time, not all the time. Once or twice a year, or even longer is a good strategy for a large product. For smaller products, it's going to depend on the type of info-product. I'll give away a report at the end of a podcast or maybe something embedded in the middle of an article or right at the end of the article. In short, even when we're giving away something, we're making sure clients invest in reading, watching or listening before finding the treasure.
Giving is a good feeling.
Do it with passion, but also with structure and you'll get rewards.
Best of all, it will lower risk and increase info-product sales. It's a really warm and fuzzy way to run a business, isn't it?
Next Up: Why Free Products Need To Be Better Than Paid Products or Services Giving away outstanding content is the magic behind what attracts—and keeps clients?When you're giving away bonuses, it's easy to believe you don't need to give away your best product or service. This podcast episode takes an opposite stance. You need to put your best stuff out in front—free. Yes, give away the goodies, no matter whether you're in information products or content marketing; services or running a workshop.
How do you maintain a high productivity level when switching tasks? How do you get the brain and body to handle the transition?
And how do you manage the transitions with a minimum amount of fuss?
Read online: https://www.psychotactics.com/high-productivity/
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I was asked in e-mail: I am curious to know, since you do so many tasks in a day, how do you deal with context switching? I can do a task for 60 minutes, but doing something different immediately, requires some time for the brain and the body to handle the transition. How do you manage these transitions?
The approximate formula is: High Intensity > BREAK > Low Intensity
Notice how it goes? High, BREAK, Low.
Then BREAK > High > BREAK > Low.
When you first see the switching formula, it seems like it's just a transition from high to low. But as you can tell from the emphasis above, the break is pretty critical. If you just go from high to low or even low to high, the brain doesn't get time to recover. And recovery is what's important when you want to keep your attention and focus.
Without recovery you get a factor of tiredness, that may also spiral downwards to exhaustion But with recovery, your brain and body get a chance to relax and come back to take on the next battle. It's at this point that the high to low bit also matters. Taking on high-intensity tasks one after the other just wears you out and having the high to low allows your brain to make a decent transition—and relax even more after you've had the break.
But how long are the breaks? The breaks depend on the time of day. During the day, while at work the breaks are short. However, at around lunch time, it might be about 30 minutes or more. At tea time I will take another 30 minutes. It seems like a lot of down-time, but that's the reason why you can achieve more.
A simple alarm or timer that does a countdown enables you to take that break. But there are days when I'll ignore that timer (as we all do) and that's the day when I get more tired. Instead, at the point of the timer going off, I can give my brain and body a break. I lie on the floor (yes, on the floor) and have two books to rest my head in a semi-supine position. Look it up.
It sounds totally bizarre that taking time off gets you to achieve more, but that's precisely the crux of higher productivity The more you work, the longer stretches you work for, the less productive you're likely to be. And of course, the more tired you'll get. If you're younger, you may brush this off, because you seem to have boundless energy, but in tests, young tennis players were matched against each other, and the top players were always the ones who recovered better. The recovery period forms the core—if that were not obvious by now already.
And it helps in switching tasks as well. My day starts with high intensity. I will either be writing a book, or be answering questions on a course, or in 5000bc. A lot of these activities involve not just reading, but analysis and giving precise direction. It's mentally draining and after 90 minutes or so (with rest periods in between), I'll go for a walk. That's a longer break. When I get back, I will make breakfast and watch some comedy on YouTube (while cooking up some yummy dosas).
Then it's time to paint for a while. That's all high to break, and now it's time to get back to low intensity, which would involve something like e-mail or something that doesn't require a tonne of resources. The day moves on from there to writing scripts for the podcast and answering 5000bc posts, before it's time for lunch and another break. The day is filled with breaks, high and low-intensity tasks, which enable me to write, draw, and do many other tasks like recording podcasts or doing interviews, etc.
To be productive pay attention to the formula and do the semi-supine. If you don't have a great floor, get a yoga mat and relax on the ground. The more you fight your brain and body the harder it is to switch. It also doesn't allow you to reach your highest productivity level.
And that, in a nutshell, is how to go about your day.
Next Step: Read—How High and Low Tasks Apply To Projects (How To Be Productive And Not Burn Out)
Even if you have the best business idea in the world, analysis-paralysis can stop you in your tracks You feel frozen, not sure what to do. So you research. Then you do some more research and educate yourself even more. But that doesn't get you very far, does it? Even famous people like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo would get stuck in this mode, just like you. But they still went on to create great art.
So how do you create great “art” as well? Find out and beat the analysis-paralysis once and for all.
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Two ways to validate your business idea
Part 2: What makes a viable product? And how do you validate it?
Part 3: How to deal with analysis paralysis?
Click here to read online: https://www.psychotactics.com/validating-business-idea/
How do you go about validating your business idea to give yourself the best chance of success? Can you think of a TV series that's generated over US$ 3.1 billion so far?
If you answered, Seinfeld, you're perfectly right. Except for one little fact. Seinfeld almost didn't get off the ground. As author Adam Grant mentions in his book, “Originals”, two entertainers got together to create a 90-minute special. Despite their abilities, they couldn't find enough material to fill the 90-minute special, and so they decided to create a half-hour weekly TV show. And that's precisely where all the trouble began.
The TV Network folks looked at the script and thought it was terrible Undeterred, they went on to create the pilot for the series. A hundred viewers dissected the strengths and weaknesses of the show. The majority of the test audience decided they wouldn't watch such a show. But a test audience in one city may hate the show and others may love it, which is why the pilot got screened at four diverse cities. Six hundred people in all saw the show, and the results were dismal.
They all thought it wasn't something they'd ever watch again. And at that point, Seinfeld should have simply died. And it might have if it wasn't for one network executive who doggedly campaigned for them to make and air four more episodes. The drama didn't stop there, and Seinfeld lurched back and forth, always threatening to tip itself into oblivion.
Johannes Sebastian Bach is considered to be one of classical's virtuosos He wrote over a thousand pieces of music in his lifetime. Not far behind was Beethoven and Bach who composed 650 and 600 pieces respectively. And yet, despite their voluminous body of work, they were as unsure as you and me about what would work and what wouldn't. Beethoven, for instance, trashed the final movement of his most celebrated work in the Fifth Symphony. Only later did he decide to put it back. Could he not tell right from the start that it was an amazing part of the musical piece?
Throughout history, experts have failed to spot the superstars. J.K. Rowling, the Beatles, Elvis Presley. History has hundreds of examples of bad calls, and it's not as though the crowd does better. Despite what you hear about the wisdom of crowds, the crowds are pretty hopeless at it as well. Which is why Seinfeld's early episodes got panned so badly.
1) If everyone is guessing, how would you ever be able to validate an idea? There are two ways to validate an idea, and they're both reasonably bizarre.
—The first way is not to do any testing with audiences at all. Instead, there's another group that can help you with greater accuracy.
—The second way is to create whatever you jolly well please, but then link it to an existing problem.
Let's start with the first point and figure out which group tends to be more accurate than others When we sit down to create a product or service, we instantly realise that we're not alone. If you're in marketing, there are thousands, if not tens of thousands of books on marketing. If you're in health, fitness, nutrition, programming, illustrations—it doesn't matter what you pick—it's all been covered. It's at this point we feel the need to stand out and fit it as well.
There's a reason why we need to fit in If we go too far away from what everyone else is doing, it might just not be viable. Novelty is hard to cope with because we don't know what to make of it. If you ask an expert, they don't see the world the way you do. Back in the early 2000s as we started an earlier version of Psychotactics, there were already solidly entrenched marketers such as Jay Abraham, Dan Kennedy and Brian Tracy.
They were well-established in the field of seminars, delivered their content through massive bookbinders and cassette tapes. If all of these methods of delivery sound archaic to you, it's only because you're looking back in time. Almost no marketer wanted to explore the Internet. It's the very entrenchment that causes you to see something new as a novelty. It's a blind spot. If you were to ask the experts or the audience, you still wouldn't get the validation you seek.
But there's another group that seems to understand the novelty factor a lot better They're called “fellow creators”. Fellow creators in the very same field have a sense of what's going to work, long before the audience or the experts do. When peers evaluate each other, they are twice as accurate as anyone else. When Justin Berg, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior, studied circus acts he found the ones who best predicted whether a video would be liked, shared or funded were when peers evaluated each other.
As a cartoonist, I know this to be true When one cartoonist sees another great cartoon, the instant reaction is: “I wish I'd thought of that joke”. The same concept applies across industries. Comedians look to their fellow comedians for approval. One of the greatest tribute you can get isn't from an audience or experts, but from a group—yes a group—of fellow cartoonists.
Cartoonists who have the same calibre or even higher. Peer judgments—when evaluated in groups—are more reliable because they see the very same idea through different eyes. So the first thing you've got to do is seek out peers; people who are in the same field and approximately with a similar mindset.
Yet, that's just one way to handle validation The other way is not to validate at all but to create what you pretty well please but then match it up to the existing problem. Let's take a company like Tesla. What product are they making? If you think of the cars they're producing, you'll be likely to say: They are building electric cars. Electric cars aren't a new thing. They existed long before the gasoline car and still failed repeatedly.
But apparently CEO, Elon Musk doesn't care about the failure because he's not building “electric” cars. If you pay close attention to Musk, you'll notice he harps a lot about the speed. It accelerates from 0-60 in 3.2 seconds. You see the problem, don't you?
He's not drumming the “save the planet” message, is he? Instead, he's building the car of his dreams, and tackling the problem of speed. And if you happen to sit in a Tesla, notice what the owner tends to drool about—yes, speed. Which tells you that if you build a product, they will not come. But if you link the product to an existing problem, you can instantly attract attention.
If we were to go back to the much-used case study of Domino's Pizza, you'd notice the same thread of creating what the owner wants. They just wanted to create a pizza, using their own method. Is that a feasible or viable way of succeeding?
Of course not. But marry it to a problem and see what happens. The problem was: the client was hungry and hence the pizza needed to get to the customer's place as soon as possible.
You're likely to have read this or heard it before at Psychotactics, but the product on “The Secret life of Testimonials” isn't exactly what you're thinking about, are you? It's got over a hundred pages, but it's a product I wanted to write about. And so I did. But where's the problem?
We found, quite by chance, that better testimonials get us better clients. Clients that respect our work pay in advance, etc. And so the problem is “crappy clients”.
You see what's happening when you launch a product? You're trying to make the product or service fantastic, and so it should be. The Tesla, Dominos Pizza or the Secret Life of Testimonials has to be a solid product. But that's not enough. What if it doesn't sell? It won't sell if you simply talk about the obvious. In every instance, whether it be the first car, the first plane, the first trip into space—they're all beyond the imagination of the audience. However, the moment you link it to an existing problem, you immediately get their attention.
2) What makes a viable product? And how do you validate it? If you're into testing, find a group of your peers. Your peers are big fans of the profession. A group of chefs, evaluating your work individually, are more likely to know more accurately which dish will be a hit than just a group of diners frequenting the restaurant.
However, if you care two hoots about testing, go right ahead and create your product or service and then link it to an existing problem. When clients get excited about the problem, you know you have a winner.
One last word about how this validation bit works For years I've wanted to write a book about “how to teach more effectively”, and it's called “Teacher vs. Preacher”. But who's interested in such a book? I've done an informal evaluation with others who teach online. Those who do courses, workshops, webinars, etc.
This group are likely to be clients, but they're primarily a group of teachers that really care about their students. They don't just want to sell a course or home study version of their product. They want their clients to be able to get the skill.
They love to sell out their courses, but their bigger focus is to be able to transfer the skill to their students.
And when I bring up “Teacher vs. Preacher”, they love the idea. So on one front, that's validation. But what if I wanted to write the book anyway? In such a scenario, I'll write but then connect it to the problem that we at Psychotactics solve so well.
Though our courses are higher priced than most on the Internet, we can sell them out faster than practically anyone else I know. A $3000 course sells out in less than 30 minutes, and with a single e-mail, while other marketers take weeks of endless e-mails, affiliates and joint ventures just to get any traction. That's the problem the book solves, doesn't it?
Validation can come from two fronts: peers or problem.
Try both if you need to be doubly sure.
But we're still stuck with the concept of analysis-paralysis. How do we get over that major hurdle?
3) How to deal with analysis paralysis? What trigger played a significant role in human evolution?
If we go back three million years ago to our early ancestors, Australopithecus, we find them to be more like a chimpanzee. Its brain volume is a bare 400cc. If we were to fast forward to 1.8 million years ago, suddenly there's an abundance of hominine species, including Homo erectus. And the brain size is double of Australopithecus.
If we move further to 800,000 years ago, we get Home heidelbergensis and another remarkable growth in brain size from 800cc to 1200cc. And finally, 200,000 years ago, we find a skull called Omo 2, and it has a brain size of approximately 1500cc, which is remarkably close to the brain size we have today.
But what caused those changes in brain sizes? Each one of those brain sizes occurred when the Earth was at its most elliptical and the climate was horribly harsh and changing. Rivers dried up; food was scarce, temperatures rose and fell in rapid succession. Human evolution is considered to have a direct line to volatile do-or-die situations.
Good times, on the other hand, don't seem to lend themselves to rapid change Think about your situation on a daily basis. As long as you have enough food in the pantry, it seems perfectly reasonable to lounge on the sofa. The moment you're out of food, there's no analysis-paralysis. In fact, even dwindling supplies causes you to act with increasing focus and rapidity. While there are many reasons why we get into a rut of analysis-paralysis, the biggest reason for the rut is the glut or excess.
So what does this excess look like in real life? Let's say you walked into an ice-cream parlour and you have to choose between two flavours: mango and strawberry. How long did you take to make that decision?
If we wanted to add confusion, we simply have to add excess. Let's add 18 flavours to that list. Now you have twenty flavours to choose from, and you go, at least partially, into analysis-paralysis. You want the coffee flavour and the mango at the same time. You can't decide whether they are suitable, and so back and forth you go.
In reality, you're going through a series of rejections To get to your unique flavour, you have to, theoretically, reject 19 flavours to pick one. A similar set of phenomena plays itself out when you're trying to achieve a goal.
You've been told it's important to learn about Facebook advertising, that e-mail is important, storytelling is critical and so on. It's normal to jump from one thing to the other like flavours of ice-cream.
What you really need is a lack of choice People who get things done are not hampered because they create situations where they can't do everything. They are forced to do just a few things, with usually one thing as the big focus. And if you want to get out of paralysis-analysis, here are three elements you need to consider. They are:
a) Drafts
b) Information
c) Deadline
a) Let's start with drafts Michael Lewis is a relatively unknown name as authors go, but his projects are well known because they're quickly transformed into Hollywood blockbusters. “Moneyball”, “The Big Short” and the “Blind Side” are reasonably well known. When interviewed about the struggle involved in writing,
Michael gets slightly philosophical. “The writing isn't a problem,” he says. “Instead, it's the drafts that require work”. Lewis talks about the multiple numbers of drafts he has to make to get a project going. And in layman's terms, that's simply an outline.
Yes, the very same outline most people hated to do when in school, and still avoid doing whether it involves writing an article, creating a product or giving a presentation. It's one of the biggest hurdles that get in our way time and time again.
An outline has stages of clarification. When we first begin the draft, we are grasping at straws. With every following outline, the brain has a chance to get a greater level of clarity. Three, four, six, eight—it doesn't matter how many drafts you create, as long as you create drafts.
Drafts seem like such an odd idea when you're dealing with analysis-paralysis When we think of it as a grocery list, it's easier to understand the concept. Show up at the supermarket randomly, and you either end up buying stuff you don't need or end up totally confused about what you have to buy. But a little prep work goes a long way. When you consider a grocery list, it's a reasonably uncomplex set of items. An article, a project, a book—they're so much more complicated and we merrily walk into these projects without going through a bunch of drafts.
J.K. Rowling had zillions of drafts for Harry Potter. Michael Lewis pretty much works his way forward through drafts.
Pixar, Disney—every animation company will create storyboard after storyboard. The reason why professionals work their way through drafts is for one simple reason. When you start a project, your brain has random sets of ideas. Without the drafts, it's easy to get stuck, and no one; not you or me likes being in that situation. So we move along to something else easier to cope with. And the failure looms large, resulting in almost certain analysis-paralysis.
But drafts are only one of the elements we have to deal with when working on a project. The second super-duper favourite has got to be the lack of information.
Let's look at information, shall we?
b) How information plays a role in analysis-paralysis Back in 2009, I re-wrote Version 3 of the book, The Brain Audit.
It should have been an easy task, shouldn't it? After all, I'd been through hundreds of examples of clients using The Brain Audit. I'd also spent years refining the concepts over and over again as I implemented them in my own business.
But even as I'm describing the trouble of writing Version 3, you get a feeling of déjà vu, don't you? And it's because most of us have experienced this struggle of having to explain the same thing in a different way. We know too much. We have the curse of knowledge, and it's slowing us down considerably.
Knowing too much means you feel the need to stuff everything into your information Let's take The Brain Audit itself as an example. The book is pretty comprehensive all by itself. However, if you look at the chapters (and there are about seven main chapters), every one of those chapters can be a book all by itself.
How do we know this to be true? Let's take the chapter on uniqueness. We've conducted a three-day workshop on uniqueness alone with separate audio and notes. If we were to choose the topic of testimonials, we have 100+ pages on testimonials in a product called “The Secret Life of Testimonials”. Any of those chapters in The Brain Audit could be expanded into 100-150 pages each. In reality, The Brain Audit could easily be a 1000 page book.
As a writer there's too much information floating in your head If you were to take any topic, be it photography or karate or any topic you're familiar with, you'd find a consistent problem to nail down what you're going to cover. I remember taking on an esoteric topic like feedback, and that generated well over ten chapters.
The more info-product you have in your head, the more you're going to get derailed. Which is why it's a good practice to write down all your ideas, and then just choose three of them. Which three? It doesn't matter. Any three will do. Any three will connect. All of the three are valuable to clients, but more importantly for you, as the creator.
Most software is bloated; most books are loaded with information we can't use. If we just had three topics to focus on, we could get going as creators, and the client would be happy.
A vague topic like feedback can be a monster in itself. But really, can we pick any three? Try it yourself, and you'll see you can match any three together. And just in case you think I wrote this up right now, I didn't. I made this mind map back in early 2016, and because I didn't pick three, I've still not started. The irony is not lost on me.
However, what if you're just starting out? Back around 2008, a client of mine wrote his first book. In it, he put everything he knew, which wasn't a lot. He was exhausted by the time he finished the book, but he was also scared. He felt he'd given his all and there was nothing left in him.
When I wrote The Brain Audit back in 2002, I felt the same way. I couldn't manage more than 16-20 pages (and that included fillers and cartoons). Today, you can see I have the problem in reverse. If I were to write The Brain Audit like it should be written, I'd struggle to keep it to fewer than 1000 pages.
All of us believe that we either have too much in our heads or too little But there's also a third factor that comes into play. Take, for instance, the series on pricing called “Dartboard Pricing”. It shows you why people pick your product over others, how to construct the pricing model and get 15% more, as well as the sequential pricing structure. In short, it's a very solid (and entertaining) series that pretty much guarantees you'll get higher prices than whatever you're charging today.
When I sat down to write the book, I wasn't sure it needed to be written. If you head to a search engine and type in the terms “Psychotactics” and “pricing”, you'll get enough content to fill up at least a day of reading and listening.
What else could I write, I wondered Information stops us in our tracks on multiple fronts. We know too much, seemingly know too little, or we've given away so much that we feel another book or course won't make a difference. Incredibly it does make a massive difference. I could sell the Dartboard Pricing series as it is, and do a webinar series and clients would sign up. If I did a workshop in your city, you're likely to attend.
How do we know this to be true? Because when I was presenting The Brain Audit workshop in Washington DC for the first time, many years ago, I was going through the same fear-ridden routine.
Most of the attendees in the room had not only read The Brain Audit, but many of them had read Version 1, Version 2 and Version 3. What else could I bring to the table? There's always a new angle, new examples, new insight that you as a creator don't even realise you're putting forth. Even if you've published a lot of the information before, the audience receives it from quite another angle.
To get going, you must start with drafts Write down all the ideas in draft after draft. Even so, that draft must have a deadline by which you start writing. When you write, put everything down into three categories.
What can you fit in those three categories? You'll see how we've done this on the Dartboard Pricing page and also the ‘Black Belt Presentations' page.
Those topics, like any topic, are vast and the only way I know of getting them down to size is to pick three topics and write about them. If I need to write more, I can just write three more later. Or you can expand the topics all by themselves as we have done with The Brain Audit, where topics like uniqueness or testimonial now have their own books or courses.
Easily the biggest thing that stops us in our tracks is that the information already exists. Either we have put the information out there, or someone else has, and no one really needs our product or service. As alluring as this fact may appear to us, it's patently false. There are many ways to present the very same product or service and clients want to find out all the possible ways.
But even if we were to conquer our fear of drafts and information, we still have one great hurdle to conquer. A barrier called “deadlines”.
c) Why External Deadlines Reduce Paralysis-Analysis Imagine gong to the supermarket with a list.
Yet it's not a typical list. That list has about 150-200 items which you'll need to purchase. Notice the fact that you're not doing anything overly dramatic. All you're doing is picking the item from the shelf and putting it in your shopping cart. Even so, as you get deeper into the list, there's this overpowering urge to quit the task and do something else.
A decent sized project usually has about 150-200 embedded tasksWe start off most projects with a fair bit of gusto, pretty much like picking items off the shelf. Then for no particular reason, we seem to lose momentum, and we get distracted. The more distraction we run into, the more we seek to do some more research. We somehow feel if we do our homework, things will get better. And they rarely do.
The only consistent way to get things done is to adopt the mindset of a programmer Any programmer on a project knows there's a date to ship the software. Will the software have bugs? Almost certainly it will have a fair number of bugs. A programmer has little choice. They've promised the software will be ready on a particular date and so it launches more or less on time.
But this deadline isn't restricted to programmers alone You get to your destination, because planes, trains and buses are mostly based on a non-negotiable deadline. The Olympics don't start one week later than planned. And even those 200 things you had to get off the shelves needed to be put there by someone who was following an external plan.
If you make internal plans, paralysis analysis is the default setting When I first started out writing articles for Psychotactics, I hated writing with a passion. It would take me two days and would involve an enormous time and energy. However, I'd promised that I'd deliver the article on a twice-monthly basis and so I had to finish the job. I'd battle through the process, hating every fifth word with a passion, but the job would get done.
Almost all of us start off a project with a lot of excitement and then struggle to get to the finish line When we have nothing to lose, we fill our days with something else. The only way anything can done is to have this external deadline in place. Most of the time it involves a cash transaction. When you sell a course, you have to show up and conduct the course.
When you promise to deliver software you'd better be shipping on the day itself or clients will be on your tail. Is all of this a source of constant pressure? Sure it is, but then great work is usually not done with a lot of leisure in hand.
The advice being given to you isn't particularly new. You already know that a project is going to have 200 sub-tasks. You have to work out the tasks and go at them with gusto. You also know that if you keep the project to yourself, nothing is going to happen.
Very few people have the ability to finish anything if there isn't a fixed deadline, often with a penalty if the job doesn't get done. And whatever you're shipping is going to have bugs. You can fix those bugs later.
There's just one tiny note We often underestimate the time we need. We take on too much and we struggle. Over the years, I've had to learn that making space is an important part of getting things done. If you're constantly battling all sorts of deadlines, you're running out of energy on a monumental scale. Without space, you have no recovery period. So I create space and set an external headline. And things get done.
Too simple? Well just as a parting thought, Michelangelo didn't want to paint the Sistine Chapel. Neither did Leonardo da Vinci wanted to paint the Last Supper. They were made to do it. That's why we have these works of art. Now get your work of art finished.
Epilogue: The Segway Syndrome
One of the most spectacular failures of modern times has been the Segway. In a world that longs for non-polluting transportation systems, the Segway seemed like the perfect answer to our travel woes. It moved swiftly, quietly and after a bit of practice, was easy to handle.
Even so, Segway sales barely got off the ground and have stayed relatively stagnant If it's evident that the Segway solves a problem, why should it have failed? Sometimes the problem lies not in the product or service itself, but in the distribution or infrastructure, instead. Take for instance the electric car. In 2017, a Tesla now has the ability to go 335 miles on a single charge (compare that with a gas-burning-fuel car that can only do 300).
That, to many people is the infrastructure part that needs to be taken care of. Superchargers have to be built so that they quickly replace gas stations and these super-chargers need to sit near cafes or stores, or in a parking lot. Without all of these elements in place, the car itself becomes redundant.
The Segway struggled for many reasons, including its high price However, even if you did own a Segway, you couldn't use it on the road or on the pavement. Without setting all the infrastructure and paperwork in place, it was doomed to failure. And this brings us to an important point: creating a factor of destruction.
When we try to validate an idea, we head in one direction We list all the reasons why the idea, product or service can and should succeed. But we rarely, if ever, create conditions for failure. If you're about to do a copywriting course, what can you do to cause the course to fail?
What infrastructure would you need to remove so that the course crashes and burns? If you're starting up a website business, what would you need to have in place so that clients show interest but don't do any work with you? These are the elements we have to consider before we put our product or services into the marketplace.
Ideas are super fragile The creator of the product or service may waffle between fear and reason when in fact everyone who launches a product is fearful. Everyone, without exception, feels the same uncertainty. Then we have the issue of validating the product or service, which for the most part is impossible.
However, your peers review can help and it's a powerful form of feedback. Later, when the product launches, clients will tell you what you need to fix. Instead of pretending like the problems don't exist, we need to roll up our sleeves and fix the problems.
Finally there's the issue of analysis, and yes, paralysis. Those that do endless research and wait for the right moment, almost always fail. Instead you need to set a deadline, get your product or service into the market and fix the glitches later. Preselling the product or service ensures that you keep to a deadline and don't wait forever.
The great works of genius in science, maths, language, arts of business weren't fully formed. They were mostly half-baked and got better as they went along. You may decide to start later, when things are perfect.
It's a decision that almost never has a good ending! Summary: Imagine if you invented a set of tyres and they were ridiculed. They called them pudding tyres”. Would you go ahead? Now you can because of the information we've covered so far. So what did we cover?
-How to distinguish between your own voice of fear, and voice of reason
-How to go about validating your idea to give yourself the best chance of success
-Tips for getting over analysis paralysis
Next Up: How to Make the Mental Leap From a Job into Entrepreneurship You don't know if it's the right time to jump into being an entrepreneur. What about the mortgage, the family and the bills? And how do you deal with the fear? How do you stay steadfast to your vision? And what about focus? These questions spin in your head over and over again.
Click here to: Understand how to keep true to your vision, stay focus in a distracted world and when to take the leap.
How do you know whether your business idea is good or bad? Is there a system of validation for your info-products, courses and workshops, or do you just go with the wisdom of the crowds? This episode shows you exactly what causes one business idea to fail and the other one to succeed.
This series is about the validation of your business ideas. We will explore what is important when you’re about to embark on a new business idea.
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: How to distinguish between your own voice of fear, and voice of reason
Part 2: Good ideas can't be left on the bench; they need to be consumed right away
Part 3: The big picture is usually the biggest problem
Click here to read online: https://www.psychotactics.com/validate-idea/
Imagine if you invented a set of tyres and they were ridiculed. That is precisely what happened to a vet from Belfast, Ireland. This vet, named John Boyd Dunlop, watched with a bit of angst as his son, Johnnie, as he bounced madly while riding on a bike on a cobblestone street. The solid rubber tyres were clearly not suitable and he set about inventing the first commercially viable pneumatic tyres.
But then they made fun of him. They called the pneumatics, “pudding tyres”.
What would you do if you were in Dunlop’s place? We know that Dunlop didn’t give up. He didn’t give into the ridicule, but partnered instead with Irish industrialist W. H. Du Cros to create the Dunlop tyre factory both in Ireland and across the world. But what if Dunlop backed away? What if he wasn’t so sure if his invention would be a success?
This series is about the validation of ideas. And in three parts we explore three chunky bits that are important when you’re about to embark on a “pudding sort of idea”. And here’s what we’ll cover:
-How to distinguish between your own voice of fear, and voice of reason
-How to go about validating your idea to give yourself the best chance of success
-Tips for getting over analysis paralysis
Part 1: How do you distinguish between your own voice of fear, and voice of reason? If you buy really well-made bread, it goes through a cycle.
At first, it's delicious. It's likely to be crusty on the outside, soft on the inside. But keep it on your kitchen bench for a few days, and it starts to get hard. In a week, it's likely to get rock-hard and possibly get mouldy. The question to ask yourself at this point is: Did you buy bad bread?
And the answer is self-evident The bread wasn't bad, was it? But if you take the best loaf of bread, made by the most dedicated baker, and you keep it outside for days, you're going to get an almost identical result. This is true for good ideas as well. No matter how great your idea happens to be at the start, the hardness will set in and so will the fungi.
Good ideas can't be left on the bench; they need to be consumed right away However, this is where things start to go horribly wrong; only we feel like it's going just right. The way things unfold is through testing, research and working out if the market needs our product. Once we've gone around the research block many times, we then wonder if we have anything new to bring to the table. And as we're doing all of this evaluation, the market marches on. The more we research, the more we get stuck in your own trap to the point where the only thing we can do, is to scout for yet another idea. Fear takes over, and we don't know what to do next.
But why are we fearful in the first place? We're fearful because we can't see the big picture. When you look at most business owners, they don't look confused and composed. They seem to have all these projects going; they appear to be attending events, speaking, turning out courses and books. In short, they seem to have everything well under control. You, on the other hand, aren't able to see so far into the distance, let alone figure out a way to get there. And this lack of the ability to see way into that future, plus the ongoing intimidation from seemingly successful people, puts you in a position of great angst.
The big picture is usually the biggest problem Entrepreneurs who succeed rarely see the big picture. They're not entirely clueless, either. They know where they want to go, but it's still, at best, a hazy view of the future. What they tend to look at closely is what's in front of them. To understand the analogy, think of yourself in a car. Let's say you have to drive from Auckland to Wellington, a route of almost 8 hours of hard driving. Do you know what Wellington looks like at this moment? It would hardly hassle you because you're focused on the road right in front of you. Your only piece of research is a sort of GPS system that will more or less ensure you don't get lost along the way.
But wait, you already have your GPS system You did the research; you read the books, you know how to move forward, so why are you still stuck? If we were to go back to the road analogy, you wouldn't be stuck. And that's because you're not figuring out whether you'll have a puncture 24 km from now. You're not worried that there's other competition; other cars on the road. What you're entirely focused on is the road right in front of you. If you get tired or confused, you stop for a break. If you get hungry, a meal does the trick. All along the way, you're just looking at what's in front of you.
Which is completely the opposite of what you expect when you're getting started with a project A project somehow needs to have all your ducks lined up in a row, or you simply drive around in circles. But what if there were a way to break up a project into smaller bits? When we think of a business or project let's drop the big, seven-silly-figure plan, shall we? Let's just focus on two core elements. The first point is where we're going to get our clients. The second is where we're going to get them to spend their time.
So where do we get our clients? If you just build a website, no one will come. Despite being online and having a rock-solid reputation, almost no one comes to our website out of the blue. Instead, they come from somewhere else. When we first started our business, that somewhere else was a portal called “Marketingprofs.com”. We'd publish an article at the portal and clients would head to our website after reading the article. When we'd go to a local, tiny event, and speak for about 30 minutes, prospects would turn into clients and buy an e-book, and then a small percentage would sign up for consulting.
In every instance, what you're doing isn't this big, long range planning. All you're doing is this tiny task.
Successful entrepreneurs are like successful comedians You only get to see the final one or two-hour show, but you never get to see all the small parts along the way. Comedians painstakingly put forward their jokes, only to see many fall flat. Some make the cut, and they go into the final show. Entrepreneurs do something similar. They make a move here, a move there and they keep going forward. By the time you see that fancy course appearing on Facebook or on their websites, they've made dozens, possibly hundreds of little moves to get to that point. And then, if they're good, as in really good, they keep working on their plans and refining it to the sharpest possible degree.
The road right in front of you isn't that scary When you consider the entire journey, the possibility of a breakdown, deteriorating weather, and crazy drivers, suddenly it seems like a pretty good idea to put some tea on the boil and stay home. But with every experience you have of staying home, you create a whole new layer of fear. After a while, it seems totally impossible to go ahead with any plan and research and further learning seems to be the only consolation prize.
Let me tell you a personal story I've told many times before I know how to create an ePub file. How do I know this? Because I've been through many hours of practice. When ePub first came out many years ago, I was keen to learn it, and so I followed the tutorial and made an ePub file. But it was a dummy file because I didn't want it to be anything a client would hold. When InDesign started to dig deeper into ePub, I went through tutorial after tutorial, in version after version of ePub and InDesign. To this day, I haven't created a single Psychotactics document in ePub.
You can see the problem, can't you? I'm trying to create this perfect book, this perfect product. Instead of simply planning out a simple ePub, I'm looking at the big picture, and it's stifling me. All the information and all the research isn't helping at all. The ePub project is many years old, and it's like a loaf of bread that's been sitting there the whole time. You can barely believe your eyes when you read this information, can you? You'd think, what's the problem with a measly epub file? Why can't you just give it a shot? Who cares if it turns out right or wrong?
Same question is headed your way Who cares if the idea is right or wrong?
How about taking on this tiny project and conquering the fear?
And if it fails, you'll figure out a way to fix it. But if you don't start, you know that idea will get harder by the minute.
Next Up: How do you go about validating your idea to give yourself the best chance of success?
How does tolerance play a role in small business? It might not seem like tolerance is the root for success, but if you dig deeper, you'll find that small businesses struggle without the core concepts of tolerance.
So how does tolerance play a part in something like a successful artwork, or music, or the next product or course you produce? Let's find out in this podcast.
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The Tolerance for Success and Failure
Part 2: The Tolerance to Learn
Part 3: The Tolerance for the Long Haul
Read it online: https://www.psychotactics.com/lack-tolerance-effect/
In September 2013, Renuka and I were headed to Cape Town, South Africa. Whenever we leave, we always ask our nieces, Marsha and Keira what they'd like as gifts. Keira was pretty clear about her gift. “Bring me an elephant”, she said emphatically. Now Keira was just four at the time, and an elephant seemed like a pretty plausible gift.
She wasn't taking no for an answer, even when we told her that the elephant might not fit in her house. But then I brought up a point that stopped her cold in her tracks. After she had heard what I had to say, she wasn't keen on the elephant anymore.
So what did I tell her? I said, the elephant is a big animal and all animals poo. The larger the animal, the greater the volume of poo.
Keira didn't need much convincing She wanted nothing to do with the elephant or the poo for that matter. And this is the battle we have to deal with every single day. We all want our businesses to grow bigger than ever before. What we don't always think of, is poo.
The bigger the business, the bigger the poo And in business terms, you could call the poo, tolerance. You need an enormous amount of tolerance to keep the business going. Which is why people struggle so much when they get into a business. They don't see the factor of tolerance needed to keep the business going.
Let's look at the factor of tolerance in three shades, shall we? —The Tolerance for Success and Failure
—The Tolerance to Learn
—The Tolerance for the Long Haul
Part 1: The Tolerance for Success and Failure In August 2015, a musical made its debut on Broadway
It wasn't just any old musical. A few months earlier in February of that year, the off-Broadway engagement was totally sold out. And in 2016 itself, it received 16 Tony nominations and won 11.
That musical goes by the name of Hamilton; a hip-hop musical is about the life of American founding father Alexander Hamilton and the American Revolution. And the musical's producer, Jeffrey Seller is passionate about the need for tolerance.
“People don't have the tolerance”, says Seller who's seen more than his share of failures. “The tolerance for anxiety, fear, bewilderment and pain.
In the book “Originals” by Adam Grant, there's a list of high profile failure You're likely to have heard about William Shakespeare's work in plays such as Macbeth, King Lear and Othello. But it's normal when you fail to recognise names of plays such as Timon of Athens or All's Well That Ends Well. Those two in particular rank among the worst of his plays and have been considered to be completely underbaked. But that's not unusual, is it? A writer does bad work and then produces better work as time goes on.
What's interesting about these plays is that he produced them in the same five-year window as some of his best plays. Shakespeare is known for his amazing plays, but most people fail to realise that he turned out a grinding 37 plays and 154 sonnets. His tolerance for getting into the heart of failure and getting out of it, was, as it turns out, consistent with any other successful person.
Hamilton basks in incredible success today, but its producer Jeffrey Seller clearly defines success through the eyes of failure.
Success feels good. Success is in its own way easy. It’s easy on my stomach and in my heart. It is also true that failure; the feelings that failure evokes are so much worse than the positive feelings that success evokes. I’ve heard of tennis players who say, “I never feel as good winning as badly I feel when I’m losing.”
“You can't cherry pick” We must not cherry-pick because it will never get it right. If I lose money in one show and then say, “Oh, I better not do it in the next,” I’m going to be in big trouble if the next one’s the hit. I’ll give you an example. I did an Opera on Broadway in 2002.
We did La Bohème on Broadway in Italian. It was a beautiful production conceived and directed by the filmmaker Baz Luhrmann. I had persuaded this group of Korean investors who I’ve done some other business with, to invest a whopping million dollars. They lose 900 of the million. I asked them to invest in this little show with puppets called Avenue Q. They passed.
Avenue Q goes on to make over $30 million of profit for all of its investors. They cherry-picked. They used the fear that losing money in La bohème generated to guide their next decision.
Picasso didn't cherry pick We look at Picasso's greatest paintings but what we don't see is the sheer volume that's almost too well hidden. By the time he died in 1973, Pablo Picasso has done over 1800 paintings, 1200 sculptures, 2800 ceramics and a staggering 12,000 drawings. Only fifteen or sixteen of Leonardo da Vinci's paintings are said to exist, yet in his surviving notebooks alone, we have a staggering 7000 detailed drawings.
It's called elephant poo. If you want to get the elephant you get the poo as well. And success, the success so many of us crave, is just a tonne of fighting through a mountain range of poo. In reality, success is far less frequent that failure. “The tolerance for anxiety, fear, bewilderment and pain.
But what's really happening when we get into this failure zone? What's happening is we're rooting out the mistakes. Talent, or success, is just a reduction of errors. Mozart is known for a few great works, but he barrelled through 600 of them before his death. Beethoven was no slouch either, producing over 650 in his lifetime. Mahatma Gandhi tried an endless number of ways to get the British out of India when he finally hit upon the “Salt March” in 1930 that would set the momentum for Indian Independence.
The tolerance for fear is the greatest one them all. But it doesn't stop there. We need the tolerance to learn and learn progressively.
Part 2: The Tolerance to Learn I know, you're probably laughing at me because this system sounds so ridiculous
And it may or may not be ridiculous. It's hard to measure what you can remember, but after years of trying to speed things up, I realised one important fact. I need to slow down. I need to have a higher tolerance for learning.
So what is a higher tolerance for learning? In my opinion, it's a method of slowing down, rather than speeding up. When I get a book to read, I rarely ever read the book. I'll read a bit, and then dig in my Moleskine bag for my pen and Moleskine diary (yes, I am a Moleskine nut). And then I'll make notes or mind maps.
Not every book makes the cut, but when I get a good book, like “Originals” by Adam Grant, I'll read the book, listen to the audio version, make notes and then write articles and possibly do a podcast too. So why go through all of this trouble? It's the opposite of the TV dinner.
It's like a chef that lavishes time and effort to get a meal ready for dinner. It allows me to get to the very core of what's being stated in the book. Or at least that's what I think.
My memory is like a sieve, sometimes I remember going back to listen to an audio book after many years. I knew I'd listened to it because it was on my Audible app. I did remember some of the material, but even so, it was like a brand new book. I understood the book at such a great depth, and it astounded me that I hadn't figured out what the author was saying in my earlier reading.
This level of tolerance for reading is not common because it seems so very trendy to say you read many books. To this day if you go to the About Us page on the Psychotactics website, you'll see how I proudly mention that I read 100 books a year. Well, that's hardly possible now, at this slow pace, is it?
Don't get me wrong; I crave books Just like someone longing for a great meal, I look at all the books I've missed, and there's a definite sense of regret. Even so, it's important to have a tolerance for slow learning. And with slow learning, it's also important to cross-pollinate your learning (which in turn makes it seem even slower). This cross-pollination means you're reading a series of books that often have little resemblance to each other.
At this moment, I'm reading “The Man Who Knew Infinity” a book about Srinivas Ramanujan (we'll get to know him better in the next section). There's a book by Adam Grant about “Originals”. And a book specifically about the David statue sculpted by Michelangelo. While poring through these books at a snail's pace, I'll watch videos about thermohaline currents and ponder over the information I get about high and low entropy in the universe.
All of this learning takes a mind-boggling amount of time It's easy to feel you always need to be in a hurry. You still could be voracious in your learning. I listen to podcasts and audio almost all the time, while on the move. I'll read when I can, but reading requires you to be focused on what you're doing. And then there's the writing, endless amounts of writing about what I'm learning.
This is what I'd say is the tolerance for learning To slow down, not speed up. However it's not necessarily about doing less, but instead, abut going deeper into the information and cross pollinating it in a way that makes you far more creative; far more open to seeing things in a way that others simply can't see.
But why go so far? So many people take the easiest way possible. They say they have no time to read. If you ask them to listen to audio, they say they can't remember anything. And that's not the point of learning. Education comes in layers. I can't remember a lot of what I learn in audio, but if I don't listen to audio, I will miss out on about 300-450 hours of education in a single year (that's because I go for a walk every day and listen to audio).
The tolerance for learning has to be high. Speed is not the answer.
Speed reading is more like a TV dinner—a quick, yet deeply unsatisfying experience. Slow down and absorb the information and that's what leads you to a greater level of understanding and success.
Tolerance to failure is critical.
Tolerance to learning is also extremely vital.
But we still have one factor of tolerance that's needed: the tolerance for the long haul.
Part 3: The tolerance for the long haul If you could buy Google for US$1.6 million, would you buy it?
Google in April 2017, was worth $560 billion. But back in 1997, Google was still a dream in CEO, Larry Page's brain. While at Stanford University, he created a search engine called BackRub. He tried to sell that search engine to another search engine company called Excite. But Excite's primary investor made a counter offer of $750,000. And Larry Page thought BackRub was worth a lot more. The short story is that today, 20 years later, Google is the most valuable company in the world.
A story that contrasts completely with what you're likely to run into on the Internet.
About a month ago, an ad on Facebook caught my interest. This person was promising you could get hundreds of clients signing up to an e-mail list, per day. And usually that kind of bombastic language just bores me to pieces, but on this morning, I was playing around with my watercolours, and it seemed like a fun idea to sit through this webinar.
The pitch was predictable The story was about how he struggled to make any income at all. And the rags to riches story went nothing to several hundred million dollars. And before we know it, this person is hobnobbing with big shots including Sir Richard Branson. So why am I giving you the run down of this webinar? I'll tell you why. It's because the webinar talks about hard work as the enemy. How we all work hard and how it never changes our life. And how this person's seemingly magic system will change everything. What he continues to suggest is that you can get the elephant—without the poo.
And that's the reality we know is untrue But we're often so sick and tired of being tethered to a job, or even feeling like we should be doing so much better in business, that we take the bait. We reject the tolerance for the long haul. We hope somehow there is a magic pill that will solve our troubles. Larry Page almost took that pill back in 1997. He had his reasons, of course, but it's the long haul that has gotten Google to where it is today.
So why is the tolerance for the long haul so critical for success? The answer is encapsulated in a single word: drudgery. Let's say you are nuts about coffee. You know the beans, you're over obsessed over the roasting process, and you dream of opening a cafe for coffee-snobs. For the first fifty or hundred days, you're probably running on the aroma of the coffee alone, but then one day you feel like sleeping in. Now imagine your client showing up to the cafe only to find closed doors.
Every business has days of drudgery You may adore your work, and should, but there are days when you simply don't feel like going to work. And ideally someone should and will step in to help, but the core of the issue is that no matter whether you're Google or that guy selling pipe dream webinars, it's all hard work and there are days of pure drudgery.
Days that you'll get over if you take a break. But if you don't have tolerance for the long run, you'll give up. You'll give up that podcast series you started; you'll give up on the blog posts, you'll give up when hardly anyone turns up to your workshop because you think you've failed.
Our membership site at 5000bc started in 2003 I've personally written 49,945 posts so far. Divide that by the number of years we've been running the site, and that's around 3,500 posts per year. It includes answers to clients, articles in response to questions, etc. With the courses, I've also finished over 50,000 posts. Add the podcasts, the books, all the workshops, etc. and you have a long list of stuff that needs to be done, and which I'm happy doing.
But if you think the work stops, it doesn't William Shakespeare, Pablo Picasso, Hamilton's producer, Jeffrey Seller, Mahatma Gandhi, Leonardo da Vinci—they all realised that they're in the long game. That if you think you're just going to get into a business and the business will run itself, well, that's like buying into a webinar and paying a small fortune to get a magic pill. A magic pill that for the most part, is unlikely to work because it too will involve work.
Which is why you need to get involved in something you love I love what I do. I love writing; I love making podcasts. I adore answering thousands of posts in the courses and in 5000bc. I didn't get into this business to simply walk away. I will take my weekends off, and I will take three months off every year. That's my way to get rid of the drudgery factor and come back fresh and rested. But I know that I—and you—we both need a tolerance factor for the long haul.
As Keira learned at the tender age of four, you can have your elephant, but it comes with poo. The bigger the elephant the greater the poo. If you want to build a business get the poo tray out because you're going to need the tolerance for failure, learning and most importantly the long haul.
How do you Get Smart (And Stay Smart)? Many of us believe that smartness comes from learning the skills in our own field. And yet, that's only partially true. We can never be as smart as we want to be, if we only have tunnel vision. So how do we move beyond? Click here to find out: How to find the time to do all of this learning?
"I wasted too much time getting angry". So said world-famous tennis champion, John McEnroe. McEnroe and arch-rival, Jimmy Connors had similar temperaments on the court. Both were easily provoked. Yet both of them managed to get to the No.1 ranking in the world for many years consecutively.
Yet McEnroe was gone from the tennis scene by the age of 34. Connors, on the other hand, was still around at the highest level, even at the age of 40.
So what happened?
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In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Work-Rest Ratios
Part 2: What Depletes EnergyPart 3: The Power of a Backup Battery
Read online: https://www.psychotactics.com/increase-energy/
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Performance psychologist Jim Loehr was on a particularly difficult mission. He wanted to understand what kept the world's top competitors head and shoulders above their competition. He watched hundreds of hours watching live games and followed up by poring through taped matches. Despite the rigour he put into this research, he ran right into a brick wall.
He noticed that during points, high calibre players appeared to be remarkably similar to each other. There seemed to be little or no difference in the way they went about their game.
Then Loehr looked closer and began to look at what players did in between points. That's when he had his Eureka moment. The best players, it seems, had consciously or subconsciously built up a routine.
As they headed back, they had a type of walk; they held their heads and shoulders in a certain way. And most importantly, their breathing seemed to slow down. These players were playing their shot and then, amazingly, going through a recovery method while getting ready for the next shot.
To dig deeper, Loehr hooked up the top players to EKG telemetry and was able to monitor their heart rates. To his astonishment, he found their heart rates dropping by as much as twenty beats per minute, in between points. Lesser ranked players seemed to have no recovery routine at all.
As Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz write in their book: The Power of Full Engagement, the key to being super-productive is to have enormous amounts of energy.
To drive home this point, they give the example of two players of relatively equal talent and fitness. The players have given it their all as the match has progressed, but as the game reaches the third hour, who's going to be less fatigued? Who's going to get more angry and frustrated? Who's going to push his heart rate even higher resulting in muscular tension and drop in concentration? The one who has been recovering in between points is clearly far ahead because he's got far more energy.
When you think of energy, nothing quite fits the analogy like an electric car. A petrol-driven car is a car with no fear. You can put $5 worth of fuel in it, and sure enough, you will find a petrol station along the way when you need one. At least at this point in time, in most countries, you can't do expect the same level of topping up for an electric car.
To get to your destination, and back, an electric car requires the driver to move forward without sudden acceleration. Brakes are applied only in an absolute emergency and most slowing down involves a generous amount of anticipation. In short, the electric car has a fixed battery and few, if any, charges along the way. If you manage your drive well, the car even recharges even while moving ahead.
An electric car and Loehr's research align almost perfectly. Energy needs to be used to propel us forward, but we have to make sure we not only recharge, but also avoid energy depletion. Which is why it's a good idea to look at three core elements of energy so that we too can ditch time management and work on energy management, instead.
Here's what we'll cover:
1- Work-Rest Ratios
2- What Depletes Energy
3- A Backup Battery
1) Work-Rest Ratios 1972 was a scary year for Southwest Airlines.
They had been battling it out on the ground for years, just to get the right to fly. But right alongside their legal battles, there loomed a threat that was promising to put them out of business. They were haemorrhaging on cash and in order to pay the bills, they had to sell one of their four planes.
However, Bill Franklin, former Vice President of Ground Operations and others in Southwest made a bold calculation They came to the conclusion that three planes could to the work of four. There was just one tiny problem to overcome. The planes had to be in and out of the gates in 10 minutes. Getting a plane cleaned, restocked and refuelled is a precision-driven task that often requires a solid hour.
Southwest had little or no option. They were either going to keep the planes in the air, or they'd go out of business. Years later, author, Kevin Frieberg, author of the book, “Nuts!”, was quoted as saying, “Aeroplanes only make money in the air”.
This kind of go, go, go machine-driven attitude is what we seem to apply to humans as well. Many of us see ourselves as the product of hard work; of having little or no turnaround time; of always being in the air. Internet marketers boast how they're spending time working at the beach, usually in their underwear. And all of this talk about being able to be always connected, always at work, always putting down rest as if it were a disease—this is what causes us to feel constantly tired. What we need are work-rest ratios.
This factor of work-rest ratios isn't news to you, is it? It shouldn't be, and yet we ignore it as though we have fuel-driven engines. We fail to see every day has to have a prescribed amount of work, then real rest. Every week has five days of work, and then two days off. Every quarter needs a break; every year needs many breaks. And though not all of us can, at this point, do a three-month long vacation, almost all of us can work with just the day.
It's so blindingly obvious that even reading this information seems bizarre Yet, look around you, and you find that almost no one but the kids are bouncing around like crazy. Well, those kids aren't watching TV until late at night, are they? They aren't scrolling through their devices endlessly either.
They're doing what performance coaches advise their clients. A good night's sleep—yes, the most obvious thing of all—is what we seem to ignore on a consistent basis just because we don't wind down before bed time. Is it any wonder that we seem to be tired all the time?
So what's the quickest thing you can do, and do today? Be like a kid. Figure out a bedtime for yourself, then wind down. That alone, this obvious task, is what causes you to have a lot more energy the next day. If for instance, we sleep just half an hour later every night, we've deprived ourselves of a good 3 ½ hours every week, and this accumulates over time.
Weekends or even half the weekend is what we should mark out to rest and recover, but we're always busy doing stuff. If you speak to someone they say that “the stuff needs to be done”.
But there's a downside to being constantly like a plane in the air You're compromising your performance. As you clock in more hours, you take more time to do the very same task, and there's a greater chance of errors. What's weird about sleep is that the more rested you are, the better you sleep. Think about the times when you're agitated, and it's clear that the sleep was just as disturbed. So without going round and round, we need to understand a simple philosophy.
Get the work-rest ratio consistent, most of the time In the book, The Power of Full Engagement, the authors talk about how there are times when you have to break away from the work-rest ratios. Sometimes we have to build capacity, and we have to increase our stress level. But even when you increase that stress, it needs to be followed by adequate recovery. You need to do both: push beyond limits sometimes and then to have enough recovery.
But work-rest ratios are not enough. There's something more, something even deeper. And that is to explore what depletes energy in the first place. Let's take a hard look at energy depletion.
2) The Energy Depletion View It's Wednesday morning here in New Zealand as I write this piece. But this Wednesday isn't like last Wednesday, or the Wednesday before last.
That's because on all those previous Wednesdays
I didn't have the pressure of having to write the script, and then record the podcast. However, this week I've fallen behind and the pressure is building up. The more I delay, the more my mind is focused on the task of writing and then recording the podcast.
Energy depletion isn't something that's immediately apparent It's all around us. Let's say you have to cook a dish. What does the professional chef do? She makes sure there's a sequence in place. No professional chef does what we often tend to do.
In one morning, we are likely to get the recipe, buy the ingredients, chop and prepare the ingredients and then begin to cook the meal. What we've done is gone through Stage 1, Stage 2, Stage 3, and so on. By the time we're ready to cook, we're already tired. That's not how a professional chef works. Every stage is separate so that the chef is at their highest possible energy for each stage.
Here's how I used to write an article back in the year 2001 or so I'd start with the idea, do little or no outlining. Then I'd write, but what I was doing was editing. I'd go a line forward and two lines back.
Eventually, after a brutal two days or so, I'd be done with the article. However, even after all that struggle, I didn't know if I had a good article or not. What's more important is that I'd be exhausted and dread having to write another article in the following week.
When I look at the way I'd create sales pages, write articles, cook, paint—all my activities were amazingly well-designed to create energy-depletion. Today, my methods are radically different. Take for instance the dish I prepared this morning. I soaked it last night, chopped the ingredients early this morning and about 10:45 am, I darted back home and cooked the dish.
Writing an article—this article for instance—involves a similar method of using stages. I've got a bunch of Post-It stickers on the wall that all have topics that I want to write about. When I'm ready to take on the topic, I go to the cafe or park bench and outline the article.
I'll then split the article into three parts and write the article over three days, taking a day to cover each section. If the task isn't broken up, the energy required to go from one end to the other is often too great. You can expend the energy, but then it takes enormous time to recover.
Completing tasks is only one form of energy depletion People and situations also play an incredibly important role in depleting energy. Take for instance a workshop we had in California back in 2006. One of the clients was terribly demanding, and we were still new in the business. We bent over backwards to make this customer happy, and I guess she was, but we were so drained at the end of the day. It's a good thing they have giant Margaritas in California because I needed more than one to feel like a human again.
The same applies to situations We go for a walk and sometimes a car will pull out of the driveway, leaving just a little gap behind for us to traverse back onto the footpath. I'll go behind the car, and then glare back at the driver. See what's happening? It's all a depletion of energy. That small incident can rattle me for the next 10-20 minutes. Put in a few of these seemingly small events in a day, and it's not hard to see why we can be super-drained by the end of the day.
Being constantly distracted is also an energy depletion factor No one is allowed to be bored any more. If you're bored for about 3 seconds, you reach for your phone to surf the Internet or look at what's on Facebook. Yet this behaviour is remarkably different from the way my parents (and possibly your parents) use the Internet.
My father goes online to look for something, to check the weather, but it's always a specific task. His phone isn't a distraction device. Instead it's a tool, like a hammer. You reach for it when you need it. Always going online and endlessly searching for something to allieviate our boredom is another factor of constant energy depletion.
The key to understanding energy is to see what depletes our energy It's easy to see where these negative energy fields exist in our daily lives. A job we hate; a person that drives us crazy; a course that's going nowhere; a friend or relative that puts us down; a lousy call to the bank, endless surfing—it's all draining. And there are some energy fields that are hard to avoid.
So how do you cope when you know you're bound to run into energy-depletion zones every single day? What you need is a reserve battery pack and here's how you get one.
3) The Backup Battery Imagine writing a complete article and finding it's vanished into thin air.
Granted it takes me just about 45-60 minutes to write an article, but this one was longer. It would take me at least an hour and half, maybe two to get the job done. The first instinct is not to re-create, but to go on a hunt. And that's exactly what I did. I searched high and low using all the tools at my disposal, but 25 minutes later I had nothing.
Right before that moment of seeming despair I loaded my backup battery For 30 minutes every morning I meditate, simply because of the returns I get from meditation. At first, meditation was just something to try out. However, when you go through a day from 4 am and you're still energised at 9 pm, eyebrows need to be raised. Meditation is my backup battery. I don't know how it works, all I know is it just does. If you could stop your day for 30 minutes and get several hours of renewed energy later in the day, would you do it?
Think about time management vs. energy management for a few seconds We are all focused on time, but at 5 pm you're pooped. You have time, but you have no energy. Now imagine having energy as you go through the day, then through the evening, and even late at night. It sounds so bizarre that I didn't believe it. I once heard the comedian, Jerry Seinfeld saying approximately the same in an interview, but I thought it was not possible. Maybe he doesn't spend long hours like me, I thought. Well, I was wrong, not once but twice over.
The second and possibly better reason for meditation is the capacity to deal with energy-draining situations. Feel like screaming at the traffic? Angry at some new law the council has passed? Clients driving you crazy? Suddenly you're able to see all these people, events and situations as a bystander. It almost feels like it's not something that affects you, but is happening to someone else, instead. Instead of grumbling, getting mad and clearly draining your energy, you have a feeling of going with the flow.
Remember that article I lost? I did my best to search for it, but instead of getting upset, I went about it in a calm and composed manner. Even though my problem wasn't solved, I simply went about some other activity. Then, today, while searching for something else, I found my article (about the same time as I was about to re-write it from the ground up). If all of this sounds like gobbledegook, then believe me, I thought it was too.
However, I believe in results too And if the supposed-gobbledegook is going to help recharge my batteries and more importantly, keep me from draining them, then that's exactly what I need. Hence the meditation every day for 30 minutes. And if you're wondering where you're going to get 30 minutes from, remember the concept of the electric car (because it's remarkably similar to your phone). When you charge a device for 30 minutes, it lasts longer, but even a short 10-15 minute charge is still a charge.
But charge it for zero minutes and you get zero.
The backup battery should be some sort of cola It really should be some sort of tequila shot or mixed in a cup of coffee. And yet it's just boring ol' meditation. The kind of stuff they've done for thousands of years. So, are you going to charge your battery with a longer, or even shorter charge?
This takes us to the summary where we'll look at the three aspects of energy.
Summary
“I wasted too much time getting angry”. So said world-famous tennis champion, John McEnroe. McEnroe and arch-rival, Jimmy Connors had similar temperaments on the court. Both were easily provoked. Yet both of them managed to get to the No.1 ranking in the world for many years consecutively. Both of them also won Grand Slams.
What's interesting about this story is that Connors was considered to be the lesser player. It was more than apparent that McEnroe had a flair that helped him win even when he was fuming and screaming.
Yet McEnroe was gone from the tennis scene by the age of 34. Connors, on the other hand, was still around at the highest level, even at the age of 40. It's not hard to see what's happening, is it? Energy starts to escape at the very moment you rant and rave. It might seem like you're disrupting your opponent, but by McEnroe's admission, he did better when his temper was in control.
From an energy perspective, we need to look at three core elements. 1) Work-Rest Ratios
Without the rest, we simply drain our batteries until our system can't handle it any more The more we work, the more we have to rest. When you rest, you come back fresher and more eager to do far better work. At Psychotactics, we take breaks whenever we possibly can. Through the day, on weekends, and then after 12 weeks of work, a month off. You may not be able to take a chunky three months off at this stage but rest and work beckon you. If you want to do better work, you have to have more rest. It's that simple.
2) The second—and more important point—is monitoring what depletes our energy
Losing our cool takes up a huge tonne of energy right through the day. Things invariably go wrong; chaos is almost hovering around us all the time. In the face of constant and overbearing trouble, how do we avoid depletion of energy? There's also a depletion that comes from the lack of stages. Without stages, we take on too much, and we're invariably tired as we move through the sequence. A little spacing out of stages, whether you're writing a book, an article or just cooking dinner, is what's needed to keep your energy at high levels.
3) Finally, we need a backup battery, and that battery is meditation
If you have 12 minutes, that's 12 minutes of backup in place. If you have 30 minutes, so much the better. But maybe 12 minutes will counter 12 minutes of chaos—and the net effect is that you're not losing energy. You're stable, calm and happy. Life takes you on a diversion, and instead of getting mad and upset, you go along like a child, glad to be part of the adventure.
We live in a world hostile to rest. We trust coffee more than meditation as a pick me up. We lose energy all the time and aren't sure how to get it back.
Well, now you know.
NEXT STEP: How To Get Smart (And Stay Smart)Many of us believe that smartness comes from learning the skills in our own field. And yet, that's only partially true. We can never be as smart as we want to be, if we only have tunnel vision. So how do we move beyond? And how do we find the time to do all of this learning?Amazingly it all comes from limits.Find out more here—How to learn.
In a small business, strategy and tactics often go wrong. Yet all you hear about is success, success and how someone made it big.
This episode is about some bad judgment calls and also about plain pomposity.
It's taught us to be better marketers and better people.
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In this episode Sean talks about Story No.1—The Internet Marketing Conference Fiasco of 2003
Story No.2—A Mess In Wellington: Why Extreme Personalisation is Not A Good Idea
Summary: How our minus two learning has helped us
To read this podcast online:
https://www.psychotactics.com/psychotactics-mistakes/
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I remember one of the early events in my speaking career Renuka was sitting in the audience. When I finished my speech, I came back to my seat and asked her how she found the speech. I gave you a minus two, she said.
Speaking hasn't been easy for me, and I struggled a lot not knowing what to say when in front of an audience Luckily, almost at the start of my career, I ran into Eugene Moreau and his 13-Box Speaking system. The 13-Box system was so honed, it was like having a Samurai sword at your disposal. Except, it's not much use having a Samurai sword and not going through “sword practice”.
To get my practice in speaking to a high degree of professionalism, I'd speak everywhere I could. And when I mean, speak everywhere, these weren't at fancy events. I'd speak at the Rotary club, some places where people would meet to network and even at association meetings. In my mind, it was pretty clear that if I didn't get the practice, I wouldn't become a confident speaker.
And I knew I'd reached a good level when I was paid to speak at an event It wasn't much. I think it was about $300 or $400, but hey, this was a paid gig. The only problem was that my so-called ability had gone to my head. In the first few years, I'd rehearse fifteen, sixteen times before getting in front of an audience.
This event, however, was different. The audience happened to be farmers—not professionals. They still had to sell their products, so they still needed a message like the one that's contained in The Brain Audit. But because they were farmers, I got a little pompous.
I practiced a couple of times, then my wife Renuka and I drove to the event The signs were not good. Both Renuka and I had spent a restless night, and we had a long drive ahead of us. She kept asking me if I'd done my usual practice runs. I nodded, but I knew I'd taken some shortcuts. And on that day, when I went on stage, I was sleep-deprived and already a bit tired from the drive. Plus, as you can tell, I hadn't done my usual 15-16 practice runs.
Yes, I got a minus two.
This series is a little detour into the world of Psychotactics—and. About times when we got below par results Some of the results were our fault, and some of them were just experiences we had along the way. In every instance, we learned a lesson, and it helped us move ahead in our business. Let's take a trip down memory lane, shall we? Let's look at some minus two experiences. Like the time back in 2004, I think, where I was a speaker at an Internet conference, and everyone was selling their products, but me.
Why did things go so wrong?
Story No:1—The Internet Marketing Conference Fiasco of 2003 I should have known better than heading to a particular Internet Marketing Conference in Australia.
It was what you'd call a pitch-fest.
Pitch-fests are given that name because the speaker tends to speak for a fixed amount of time, but then reserves at least a third of the given time to pitch their products or services. Think of speaker after speaker getting up on stage and selling like those folks you see on infomercials, and you get the idea.
I was not even part of the original speaker set up, but I was keen to be part of an international speaker group Even though it was barely 2003, the speakers at the event had substantial lists, exceeding 50,000 subscribers. We, on the other hand, might have had fewer than 1500 people on our list. I watched as speaker after speaker got on stage and made a presentation. Then they'd make an offer, and there would often be a scramble to the rear of the room, where they were selling their products.
It was pretty early in my career, but I was pretty confident of my speaking skill by then I'd done a bit of selling from the podium as well, and I thought I'd be going home with several thousands of dollars in sales. This dream of mine seemed more feasible when I compared myself to the person who did his presentation just before mine.
His presentation was more about how to run some software, than a real transfer of knowledge. And yet when he made his pitch, there was an almighty scramble to the end of the room. I was sure I could top that act, because my presentation was clearly better than his, and plus in my mind, I was a far superior speaker.
But even before I could get on stage, things went wrong I was allocated just 45 minutes, and that included my presentation and my pitch. I figured the person introducing me would be done in about 3-4 minutes, but like an Emcee that won't shut up, he went on for a whole ten minutes, maybe longer.
Sure, he was saying good things about me, but I was losing a tonne of time in what I considered to be a pointless introduction. Anyway, I got on stage, did my presentation confidently and made my offer. It was the moment I'd been waiting for. I had dreams of the audience stomping over each other to get to the back of the room to buy my products.
You have a good idea of what happened next, right? And you're right. Nothing much happened at all. About 15 people gingerly got up from their seats, and casually sauntered to the back of the room. Would they buy the product, I wondered? In my head, I was still doing the calculations.
Since we were selling the product for $100, I'd still make $1500 at the very least. However, maybe 9 of them decided to go ahead with their purchase. And you might think that's still a pretty good deal for a 30-minute presentation, right?
And yes it was a good deal, but not when you consider the expenses To be part of this event, I had to fund my own travel costs. There was the flight to Australia which exceeded $500, the hotel room which also exceeded $500 for the duration of the event. And then there was food, transport to and from the airport and other incidental costs. Plus, the organisers wanted 50% of all sales to be passed on to them as a commission.
This was a -2 experience I was out in the cold, and not feeling very good about myself. Any pity I have for myself is quickly tempered by the fact that there's a learning experience in every failure. I resolutely sat at the back of the room and watched what caused clients to scramble like crazy.
That event wasn't my first lesson in scarcity, but it certainly was the first one that was doused with so much defeat. It's the defeat that made me pay close attention to every single presenter. I stopped paying attention to the content of the presentation and instead paid attention to what they did instead. And I learned some very valuable lessons on that day.
But one mystery remained.
Remember the speaker who went before me? He wasn't terribly good; his content was mostly technical. He made a pitch that involved scarcity just like everyone else. So why did he succeed when I did so miserably by comparison? I knew him well, so I went up and asked him what he thought was the big reason because I frankly couldn't see what caused the audience to rush to the back of the room.
And that's when I learned about the concept of the bonus. Now you're well aware of bonuses when you buy a product or service online, right? But I had bonuses too with my pitch. Why didn't the bonus work as well?
The key was the nature of the bonus He was offering some software that would enhance their positions on Google rankings (yes, these were the good old days where a lot of crazy stuff worked). But that wasn't what people were so excited about. He had promised that the first 50 people would not only get the software, but he would install it on their servers, so they had to do nothing but run it.
Aha! It wasn't the bonus. It was so much bigger and better than a mere bonus. And that's when I learned that you need to make the bonus more important than the product or the service itself. Why? Because when people decide to buy something, they've already made up their mind.
If you've decided to buy a fancy new computer, you already are in the frame of mind to buy it. But what if someone offered you a bonus? Like a nice box of chocolates if you bought the computer from them? The box of chocolates costs just $15; the computer $3000. What are you focused on? What if I told you that you could get the computer without the chocolate box? That's the power of the bonus. That's the lesson I learned from this -2 experience.
I lost on the monetary front.
But when I got back to Auckland, I had a plan in place. We re-looked at The Brain Audit page and made sure we had an irresistible bonus in place.
And the power of the bonus worked! As a result of the “failure” in Australia, we sold more product than ever before. That embarrassment led to a profound learning experience, and to this day when creating a product or service, I think about the bonus long before I write the sales page for the product.
The bonus—that's what matters more than anything else. And it doesn't even have to be many bonuses. Just one compelling bonus is what makes the client decide they want your product or service right away.
But hey, this isn't about the good, success stuff. These are stories about where we messed up.
Time for Story No.2, don't you think?
Story No.2—A Mess In Wellington: Why Extreme Personalisation is Not A Good Idea Only thrice have I gone blank on stage. Once was back in school when I was about 12 years old. The next time was the first time I made The Brain Audit presentation, but the third time was really odd. It was at a time when I was confident with my speaking and was being paid to speak as part of a series.
When I first started out in marketing, I read and heard stories of personalisation One of these stories came from a veteran marketer, Dan Kennedy, who once spoke about how he showed up for a Mary Kay event. Mary Kay Inc. is a cosmetics giant and is famous for its bias to the colour, pink. Superstars—the salespeople who earn 0ver $18,000 in a four month period and build a team—are rewarded with a pink Cadillac.
Dan Kennedy, ever the showman, turned up for the Mary Kay event in pink Pink suit, pink tie, pink patent leather shoes. Kennedy said he wore pink in order to sell more effectively at Mary Kay events and it clearly worked for him as he'd sell 40% more when dressed in pink. Unlike at the Internet conference, I was not selling anything at this event, but I saw no harm in trying to personalise my presentation.
Since I was working with brokers at an insurance company, I spent hours talking to my liaison at the head office. I then sought out and found examples of insurance-based problems and solutions. All of this research was my aim towards personalisation, and I didn't realise I was making a big mistake.
The first mistake was that it ramped up my nervousness a lot… When you're making a presentation you're already on someone else's turf. I'd just made it a lot harder by over-tweaking my speech to include many insurance-based case-studies. Trying to force fit their case-studies in my presentation wasn't a mistake, but I didn't have any background of the case-studies. No sooner did I bring up the case-studies than I had people in the room say, “that didn't work” or raise objections to the case-study.
This threw me off guard Instead of doing The Brain Audit presentation, which was all my own, my entire talk was intertwined with their case-studies. I was not prepared for any pushback from the audience, and yet the cat calls came at intervals.
However, once you're nervous, things start to spiral. I was plainly confused and slightly terrified on that stage. Finally, I just gave up and wrapped up as quickly as I could. What should have been an hour-long presentation was curtailed to a mere 30-minutes. Suddenly the emcee had a nasty problem of filling in half an hour of dead air, as there was no presenter in sight.
This was definitely a -2 moment Renuka wasn't around to give me those low scores, and I had to self-evaluate my own performance. Why did things go so wrong? Was it Dan Kennedy's bad advice? Or was I at fault? What I failed to notice, and learned a lot later, was that presenters do tailor their presentations.
Kennedy would have worn that crazy, even slightly-ridiculous outfit, but his speech would have barely wavered at all. He might have had a few words here and there that talked about Mary Kay or the kind of business, but he would have scripted his script and nailed it down. The Mary Kay women knew their business; Dan didn't.
In my case, the insurance agents knew their business, and I clearly didn't. To give the audience examples that they could pull apart was a silly move. They knew I was an outsider and my attempt to endear myself to them was easily the worst move I could make.
So what's the learning we got from this experience? Let's say we're selling a product like the info-products course. That course is designed to show you not just how to create an information product, but to create one that's so useful that clients come back to buy many info-products from you in the future.
Now let's say your current sales page is pretty generic. But then you're going to be introduced to 10,000 coaches. And now you don't want the page to be generic. You want it to speak to the coaches, don't you?
Think of the Dan Kennedy factor: He only wore pink, he didn't colour his text in pink. If we were selling to an audience that was precisely coaching related, we could change the first paragraph to talk about coaching and the biggest problem facing a coach today. And how the information products would be likely to help that coach. But that's where it would stop. Once we went past the problem, the solution would be as it is on the Psychotactics page right now.
Which brings up an ethical problem doesn't it? If the product is not specifically created for coaches, would it be right to give the idea that the product was designed for coaches? And that's not what the main problem on the sales page is doing. The solution is to get the info-products course because it helps you create info-products—plain and simple. But we relate better to signage or information that seems to call us, rather than the general public.
The product or course would still have to deliver the goods. It would still need to help coaches (or anyone else) create outstanding info-products. However, there would be a greater attraction factor if the audience felt it was aimed at them.
At Psychotactics, we don't ever appeal to a specific audience e.g. coaches. Instead, we use the concept of target profile, so the question of using this method would not arise on our sales pages. However, there may be several situations where you have to appeal to a specific audience. In such a scenario, make tiny changes at the top, and don't go changing everything else.
My stop at Wellington was pretty scary I've mentioned in an article and podcast before how I was so petrified of the place that I was not keen to go back to that venue. But several years later it's exactly where I had to speak once again, and once again. And it was a paid speaking engagement, so I couldn't back out of it.
This time, however, I stuck to my original speech, got a rousing applause and didn't have to flee the auditorium in a hurry. I was able to turn my -2 experience into a plus 6 or 7, at the very least.
The third -2 experience was the mistake of tweaking the rules we have at Psychotactics We have rules because we've run into a problem before and we're not keen to rep area the mistake. Even so, it seems ridiculous to hold on to rules forever. Sometimes we break our own rules.
Retribution follows shortly. This is the story of a workshop where we broke our rules, and things went south very quickly. In fact, there aren't one, but two stories that follow.
The Importance of Keeping to Your Rules “I don't like the smell of the carpet”. That's the ultimatum we got from a client's wife.
You'd have quickly figured out we're not dealing with a customer, but his wife instead. But what does the wife have to do with the event? And what was the “carpet story” all about?
Rules are meant to be broken, but sometimes we bend over backwards too much, and we pay the price. We've had many such instances where we've sought to bend the rules; trouble has hit us thick and fast. Here are just two instances, where we allowed family members.
Back in the early days, we had a system called the Protégé system From that Protégé group, we created an Inner Circle which consisted of just a few clients. So few of us, that I thought to myself no harm could come by including their wives or partners.(Just as a matter of clarification: Back then all the clients in our Inner Circle were male, which is why I mentioned wives or partners). Anyway, on with the story.
And that's when our trouble began We'd booked an intimate boardroom, seeing we were so few. But as the wife of this participant walked in, she stormed right out. “I don't like the smell of new carpet”, she said. I'm not sure what the problem was, or if she was allergic to the smell of new carpet, but we were to start our session, and we were in a fix. She demanded another room, and there was none to be had at the hotel. So she took her grievance to the reception and started berating the staff.
If there's one thing I've learned in life, it's this: When you want to get on a flight, you don't scream at ground staff. And this was no exception. She was yelling at the people who were most likely to help her and help us.
As her screaming got louder, we were forced to step in and take over. As we found out later she'd inadvertently been screaming at the General Manager of the hotel as well. The GM was quite unassuming. You'd never expect that she was the GM because she was low-key and looked more like an employee. And this screaming was aimed at her as well until we decided to take matters into our hands.
With a lot of pleading and apologising, we managed to get another room The room was super-large, more like a disused meeting room. We were so few of us in the room, and it made the entire proceedings so very un-cozy. However, our little nemesis didn't stop there. When I'd bring up a point in the presentation, she'd object.
She hadn't read The Brain Audit; she hadn't gone through the notes. We thought it was a good idea to have the partners and wives come along, but it was evident she had no context, so she interrupted and argued her way through the day.
At most events and workshops, most clients hang around the meeting room Unlike other events where people leave shortly after, you'll find that we stick around, and so do most of the clients. We may be around for a good hour or more after we're done, but in this case, we were out of the room like a bolt of lightning. We made our way to our room just to recover our energy and then an hour later to the bar where we inhaled some gigantic margaritas.
But did we learn our lesson? Apparently not. The lesson was not to allow anyone who wasn't part of the group. Anyone who hadn't read the notes in advance (and we send notes a month in advance) or hasn't read The Brain Audit is not welcome at our events. But there was a pleading tone in the e-mail we got just the day before the event.
Apparently, our client was visiting California with his daughter, a teenager. He asked if we could accommodate her at the back of the room. She'd be very quiet, he said. She would just sit there and not participate, he said.
I don't know why I didn't see the signs Think of yourself as a teenager. Would you sit through a workshop on Website Strategy for three whole days for no reason? It became evident that there was an ulterior motive, but we only realised it later when going through previous correspondence with this client.
He'd earlier asked us if he could book two seats at the event but finally booked just one. WE didn't think about it at the time. Clients ask all sorts of questions, and we answer, and no one really dwells on such issues. But as the workshop unfolded, so did the chaos.
She didn't participate in the workshop discussions, but in a Psychotactics workshop we have group activities That's when she'd tow along with her father, which seemed fine at first. Soon enough other clients started complaining. She was butting in, in the discussions, the clients told us. She'd start going off on a tangent, and then her father would defend her, causing a very unprofessional situation in the discussion.
I had to tell the client that his daughter couldn't be in the room or attend any of the sessions This made him mad. He couldn't see why she wasn't able to attend. It didn't seem to occur to him that she wasn't part of the group, or hadn't even paid for the seat. It was a messy moment and one that we could have avoided. It created a whole bunch of frustration that none of us needed. And while it wasn't exactly a minus two moment, it sure created a bleak, nasty situation.
So what's the learning? The main learning is never to allow anyone who doesn't have the credentials. In the case of all workshops and courses, those credentials are the purchase of The Brain Audit. If the client hasn't read or listened to The Brain Audit, they're not welcome.
However, at a different level, we needed to stop being overly kind and letting in anyone—wives, husbands, kids or anyone who wasn't required to be at the event. No matter how much pleading is done, this rule is now unshakeable.
And that's how our minus two learning has helped us In every instance, we've learned more from the bad times than the good. That speaking engagement at the farmer's conference taught me not to wing it and be prepared, even over-prepared. The event in Australia seemed to be a fiasco, but it was a valuable training ground for me, once I started paying attention to what was happening around me.
The event in Wellington, with the insurance agents, taught me never to over-personalise anything. Over-personalisation puts you squarely in the region where you're not the expert. You already have your speech ready, and it's best to do a sprinkling of personalisation and then keep to the original script.
Finally, it was and is important to have our benchmarks when it comes to attendees, whether at events or courses. Making an exception doesn't always lead to chaos, but why bother inviting confusion in the room? Our job is to ensure our clients get the best experience ever and go home with skill. By restricting who's in the room, we end up with a better result every single time.
And then we can enjoy our margaritas. We don't have to guzzle them after an energy-draining day! But these minus two events are only part of the picture.
How do you dramatically increase your rate of learning? And why do we get stuck when we're trying to learn a new skill? Strangely the concept of boxes comes into play. We move from beginner to average—and then we spin in that middle box, never moving to expert level.
So how do we move to expert level? And how can we do that without instruction?
Listen or read about: Not just how to learn, but how to teach as well.
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When you sit down to write a book you and I can waste a lot of time, if we don't take time to outline But what are the elements involved in outlining? And how can we make sure we don't make any silly mistakes?
If you're about to write a book or plan to be an author sometime later, this information is for you. But even if you've already published books, you'll be amazed at how this information speeds up your process and gets better results.
In this episode Sean talks about Element 1: How many points do you cover in your book outline?
Element 2: Why deconstruction is important.
Element 3: Understanding the purpose of the book.
Read online: Outlining Your Book: The Three Crucial Steps
Around the start of 2010, I was very upset with myself. I'd pre-sold a workshop and as I always do, the notes for the workshop are sent to the attendees a whole month in advance. Since the workshop was being held earlier in the year, I had been thinking about the notes right through my summer break in late December and early January.
Uniqueness is a pretty difficult topic and I needed to find a way to ensure that everyone—without exception—got the concept of uniqueness and was able to implement it. The only problem with writing the notes, was that it seemed like the notes were going to be at least 200 pages long.
200 pages is like a security blanket for a writer In the mind of a writer, the chunky volume of notes seem to suggest you have something important to say. And yet my wife Renuka isn't a big fan of a ton of notes. “Why can't you write fewer pages?” she asked me as we were sitting at the cafe. “Why can't you get the same point across, so I don't have to read so much?”
A pointed question like this is truly frustrating for me because I know it's easier to fill a book with a ton of information. But a book, or notes in this case, need to be Spartan. They only need to have enough pages; just enough knowledge for the client to get a result. They don't need to be padded or filled with words no one needs. And this meant I had to go back to my outline several times.
When writing a book, the most difficult task isn't the writing Distilling the ideas down to simplicity is what gets in the way. I have to force myself to leave the office, sit at the cafe for hours at a time, with no Internet connection. Monday's draft gives way to Wednesday's, and will be supplanted by Friday's draft. Sometimes it can take a month of drafts to get my thoughts together.
Except it was already January. The clock was ticking closer to my deadline. I had to make sure I had the book going. Which is why you, and I, we both need an outline.
So how do you outline a book?
What method should you use?
What if you can't write a lot and can only manage a few pages? Should you give up?
Let's explore three elements of book outlining to get us on our way: Element 1: Why you should ideally cover just three points.
Element 2: Why deconstruction is important to get you going
Element 3: Understanding the purpose of the book.
Element 1: How many points do you cover in your book outline? When you think of a topic like “presentations”, what comes to mind?
Let's make a list, shall we?
– Creativity
– Crafting stories
– Simplicity
– Delivery
– Audience connection
– Engagement
– Displaying Data
– Creating Movement
– Time Keeping
Those points above represent a tiny list. If you were to look through the books on Amazon.com alone, you'd find at least fifty, possibly a hundred, even two hundred and ten topics on the singular topic of presentations. It's at this time that a novice or unthinking writer decides to do it all. He or she decides to cram as many items as possible into a single book, just to make sure nothing is missed.
Take watercolours, for instance Back in 2010, I was pretty hopeless at watercolours when the painting bug struck me. How hopeless is hopeless? I painted for three months faithfully following the instructions of my teacher, Ted. After three months, the area had an auction of the artwork. My painting came up on the auction block.
The auctioneer started at $30. No takers $20? Wait, auctions are supposed to go up, not down.
But there was the painting at $10, and still no buyers in sight. Now that you'll have to agree is a hopeless situation. Anyway, to avoid such a high level of embarrassment in the future, I decided to take watercolours a lot more seriously.
I tramped down to the library and came back armed with at least a dozen books on the subject matter. As I opened book after book, a similar scenario unfolded. Every book seemed to feel the need to cover all the possible topics under the broad umbrella of watercolour.
This is the kind of mistake you want to avoid as a writer The journey to outlining a book or just about anything—a book, an article, even the weather report—is better served by working three elements; three main topics and then digging deep into the sub-strata of every one of those topics. Ironically, though, you have to start with the entire mess. You have to begin your journey by being reasonably crazy and listing everything. Which means you've got to roll out two steps.
Step 1: List all the points you can think of
Step 2: Choose three points
Take for example the topic of “pricing” If you were to gaze deep into the crystal ball of pricing, you'd be sure to run into dozens of topics and angles. Covering every possible scenario, even at the brainstorming stage should drive you crazy. Well, let it drive you crazy. Writing a book needs to start with a brainstorm, long before you get to the outlining stage.
So let your imagination go on that rodeo as you list everything you could cover. An exhaustive list is not a bad thing. It demonstrates how much you know and how much you can cover in the future. However, once you're done with that list, it's time to pick the three elements that will go into your book. You have to wiggle your way into Step 2 and choose three points.
The problem with Step 2 is deciding which points to choose You'd probably think it's crazy to choose any random points, but that's usually what I do. Take the “Black Belt Presentations” book for example. I didn't set out to write a series of books on the structure of a presentation or webinar. I set out to write a single book. And when we look at the huge list we can muster from a single visit to Amazon; I decided to simply choose the three elements that I considered to be important.
And so we had:
1: Controlling the visual aspect (how to create stunning slides)
2: Controlling the structure of the presentation (how to build the presentation with amazing flow)
3: Controlling the audience (why a great presentation can be ruined if you're not prepared for the reality of an audience).
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When outlining, take on the role of a GPS. Sure there are a thousand points to cover, but it's easy to get lost. Instead, cover just a few points, ideally no more than three main points.
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Were there more topics to cover? Sure there were. Would I cover it? Maybe in another book, a series of podcasts, articles, etc. But as a writer, creator, weather reporter, you can't really go digging into every single cloud or that spotty bit of sunshine. You have to make a decision to drop stuff. To take a simple analogy, think of a sculptor. Or rather a dozen sculptors all with similar blocks of marble.
The job of the sculptor is to remove the bits that don't matter so that you can reveal the sculpture that does matter. Yet, when you look at the finished work of a dozen artists, you'll notice they all end up with different types of sculpture. Given the same topic, e.g. presentations, you have to get rid of all the sub-topics you can't possibly cover and stick with just three.
Three? Not four? Or five? I've got “The Paradox of Choice” by Barry Schwartz sitting on my desk. First written in 2004, it's gathered a bit of dust, but when I open the Table of Contents, what holds 250-odd-pages of the book together? It's the topics—four, not three.
1: When we choose
2: Why we choose
3: How we suffer
4: What we can do.
And nestled under those four categories are what Schwartz needs to say. Even though you can clearly spot ten, wait, eleven chapters and one prologue, they're still magnificently constrained by the limitations of four topics.
When you look at The Brain Audit, you don't quite see that in the Table of Contents, do you? The Brain Audit is split up quite clearly into seven chapters. And yet there's an overlying structure to the book. The first three chapters are about attraction. They're solely dedicated to getting the client's attention. The next four chapters are all about risk. It's what causes the client to back away, to get all hesitant, even though they seem to be so interested in your product or service.
But what if you don't have such clarity of vision? How are you supposed to know that one topic will seamlessly fit into another? The reality is that you don't need any such seamless fit at all. Three random topics can fit together. To demonstrate this, um, magic trick, let's take that list we created above. Let's first randomly take the first three topics.
– Creativity
– Crafting stories
– Simplicity
The three topics work together, don't they? So let's take the next lot. – Delivery
– Audience connection
– Engagement
That works too, doesn't it? Let's move to the third lot. – Displaying Data
– Creating Movement
– Time Keeping
You may feel that timekeeping may not require an entire chapter. And if that's the way you feel, then simply get rid of the topic, and slide in one that makes you feel more comfortable.
For example:
– Displaying Data
– Creating Movement
– Audience connection
Writing a book may seem like a daunting and reasonably frustrating experience An enormous amount of frustration bellows forth from the need to cover everything in sight. Instead, if you were to cover three topics, almost any three topics, you could seamlessly stitch them together to create a fantastic outline.
You still have to do a fair bit of work to get the book written, but the battle is won or lost at outline stage. Train your outline to sit, beg and play dead, and you've already vaporised away the first—and biggest headache of all.
This takes us to the second bit where you outline the personality of your book To get on this fascinating trip of structuring the personality of your book, you have to dig into a whole bunch of books you love. It's time to use the power of deconstruction to get going.
Let's deconstruct.
Element 2: Deconstruction—How To Systematically Outline A Book (So You Can Get It Off The Ground) Imagine you're the emperor in a far eastern land.
And your son, Kintsukuroi (pron: khintz-ku-roi) is about to go through the ceremony of investiture. The bowl is the most important symbol of this rank being given to the young prince.
And yet, the king opens his cabinet to find the magnificent bowl broken into a hundred pieces. Broken hearted at the wanton destruction of this incredible piece of art, the emperor retires to his private chambers to share his sorrow with his son.
The night passes quietly, but in the morning there's a huge commotion. The cabinet of treasures has been broken into and not only have the pieces of the bowl disappeared but also the bejewelled crown for the prince, which was to be used for the investiture ceremony. What's worse is the thief was seen running towards the prince's quarters. Could the guards break down the door? Why was there smoke coming out of the prince's quarters?
The mystery was solved the next day when the bowl reappeared, whole again, but glistening with veins of gold where the cracks had been. And the prince appeared at his investiture ceremony later in the day. Except he had a thinner crown, depleted of much of its gold.
Kintsukuroi means ‘to repair with gold’ in Japanese, and is the art of repairing pottery with gold and understanding that the piece is the more beautiful for having been broken.
When creating the outline of a book you have to deliberately break, or deconstruct the work of others, so that you can engage in Kintsukuroi, and reconstruct your own book in a way that's far superior.
And that's exactly what I did back in 2002 when I first started writing the earliest version of The Brain Audit I was brand new in marketing and writing just 16 pages of The Brain Audit took me well over a week. Even the introduction derailed me quite a bit. So I turned to a book I loved a great deal called “Don't Make Me Think” by Steve Krug. His introduction seemed to be so un-stuffy, so well put together. And he had a ton of graphics in his book. Right then and there I decided my book would have a similar tone of voice and style.
When outlining your book, it's easy to get caught up in the construction of your own words and pages. And yet, it's pretty important to go through at least six-eight books that you love, if only to understand the underlying structure.
Take for instance most of the Psychotactics books or courses There's a structure to the book that you may have noticed, but not necessarily paid great attention to.
– It starts off with an introduction.
– The introduction is followed by three main topics.
– Every topic goes deep into the sub-topics.
And as you wander though the pages of the book, you'll run into cartoons, captions, stories, examples, fly out boxes, summaries, a food recipe—and so on. This is the underlying structure that makes the book so easy to read.
It's the powerhouse that pushes you forward, making sure you get to the last page. Compare this with a book that has no summaries, no visuals, no captions and examples that are always harping about ginormous companies like Amazon and Apple.
You get the idea, don't you? When you deconstruct a few of your favourite books, you get a wish list of what you'd like the reader to experience in your own books, don't you?
You've gone through the act of Kintsukuroi The books you looked at were already quite impressive by your own reckoning. That's the reason why you chose them in the first place. But then after you've broken them apart, you get to reconstruct them in a way that's more beautiful and more suited to you than ever before.
And this structural break and remaking process is what helps you put your information under a structural format that you can keep and evolve over the years. When you're outlining a book, it's easier to put pieces of content where there's already a category or space. It's a lot less intimidating when you know what needs to go where in the book structure.
Structural inspiration comes from many places I love the music of Sting, and in one particular concert he talked briefly about the inspiration behind several of his songs. For instance, did you know that “Englishman in New York” is not Sting singing about himself? In the video it appears as though the song is about Sting, an Englishman, but in reality the song is about famed gay author Quentin Crisp and his experiences as an outcast.
When I first heard that little bit of information, I was quite tickled. And so I decided to add a little story about how we “wrote our books”. Since then the structure of a Psychotactics course or product has included “the making of this book” that includes photos and a little story.
But if I copy the structure, won't it look similar? Did you know that my introduction and illustrations were influenced by “Don't Make Me Think?” Of course not, and even now if you were to hold The Brain Audit and Steve Krug's book side by side, you're unlikely to find too much of a resemblance. The key isn't to make an identical copy.
Remember the procedure? You're breaking first, then reattaching it together. There's a bit of additional input going into the structure. Whether the structure comes from you or from another source, it all helps to create that Kintsukuroi moment. Construction after deconstruction.
This is the kind of deconstruction you want for your book as well You could see it as a sort of template for all books you create in future. What makes it truly beautiful is that the act of breaking up the structure of other books ends up with a stunning new creation. It's truly Kintsukuroi and helps create a powerful outline structure.
We worked our way through creating just three topics, deconstructed and reconstructed the structure of our book, but finally it's down to purpose. Why are you writing the book? Is it just to put words on paper, or is there some other reason?
Element 3: Purpose Usually from December 20th to Jan 20th every year, I take a summer break.
The days consist of no e-mail, endless episodes of detective series on Netflix, biographies and beer. Eventually, December gives way to January and New Zealand (and I) wake up from our month long vacation.
To ease myself back into work mode, I start reading business books. And this year started out with an outstanding book called “The Content Trap” by Bharat Anand. Just leafing through the introduction takes you well past 30 pages and yet every moment of the introduction is gripping.
But what is Bharat Anand's purpose? This is the question most writers need to ask themselves before sitting down to outline their books. Is the book meant to create consulting? Are you expecting to improve your profile? Would you hope to do a speaking tour as a result of your book becoming a bestseller? Would companies hire you to solve their problems? And would it involve big business or small firms?
In the case of the “Content Trap”, my perception was that the book was aimed at bigger companies The examples within the book were amazing, but there they were: Amazon, the Scandinavian newspaper publisher Schibsted, The New York Times, the sports marketing giant IMG and Harvard Business School's own content management system.
These examples leave me and most other readers in a sort of trap of our own. We have all these utterly outstanding examples, but all of them are companies that are high and mighty. Even if we were to admire the sheer depth of the learning, how would someone like you or me put this information to use?
And this is where the purpose comes right in You need to be clear about why you're writing the book. In Anand's case, he's got a great idea and scintillating data to back up his concept, but it falls apart at the seams because there's no way to use it.
Could it be that the book is designed to give potential clients an idea of what's possible? Could it be that they then call the author in for extensive consulting? Many books are written with the goal of getting consulting in mind. Could this be one of them?
When I sat down to write an outline, I wasn't always clear about the goal The early years saw me create sparse outlines and fill content into the early books. This was my way of battling my seeming insecurity. I didn't see myself as a marketing person and saw myself as a cartoonist. The more pages I had in a book, I convinced myself, the less I had to worry about refunds.
It doesn't help when some early buyers, and we're going back to 2003 or so, said they were returning the books because there were too few pages. Back then, most of the world was still walking into bookstores and stepping out with $20 hardback books. And there we were, selling a PDF for $67 that consisted of fewer than 20 pages. Hence the need to “fix the book” by adding a tonne of material that may or may not have been needed.
Today, when I outline the book, the main goal is to get a precise result If you buy the book on presentations, you could be woken up at 3 am and still be able to put together a very compelling presentation from the ground up. If you spent your hard earned money on the information products course, you'd find an incredibly well thought out template on how to create info-products.
Whether it's photography, article writing or landing pages, the goal is well-defined before I start to write. And this is something you should do. It seems like such a tiny, inconsequential part of the outlining process and yet it's crucial.
What's the end point when the book comes out? Is it to get you more consulting?
Is it to get you more fame?
Is it to create a permanent source of income and nothing else?
Knowing the end point makes a difference to the examples you give and how you structure your book. The end in mind, it's sometimes called. Knowing where you're going. It applies to everything in life, but especially when you're outlining a book.
Once you know exactly where you're going, you can focus your energy better than ever before.
The Three Elements Needed When Outlining Your Book are: Element 1: Why you should ideally cover just three points.
Element 2: Why deconstruction is important to get you going
Element 3: Understanding the purpose of the book.
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We use StressLessWeb.com (this not an affiliate link) for all our websites, and recently they did a seamless job of moving our sites from 'http' to 'https'. Don't ask me how they do it, but everything worked perfectly after they moved us to 'https'. So, if you are not sure if your website is safe or not read more here.
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Why do some landing pages work while others fail? The core of a landing page lies in picking a target profile. Yet, it's incredibly easy to mix up a target profile with a target audience. And worse still, the concept of persona comes into play. How do we find our way out of this mess? Presenting the target profile mistakes we make and how to get around them quickly and efficiently.
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Target Profile Blind Spot
Part 2: Person vs. Persona
Part 3: Target Profile Questions
To read it online: https://www.psychotactics.com/landing-pages-fail/
In Mexico, there's a beach that goes by the name of Rosarito. The rocks on that beach made advertising executive, Gary Dahl over 6 million dollars back in 1976.
Those rocks were a smooth stone that was soon better known as Pet Rock. These rocks were marketed as if they were live pets. They had their own cardboard boxes, straw and breathing holes for the “animal”. People buying the Pet Rock knew fully well what they were buying. And yet they went along with the gag. They leafed through the 32-page official training manual, which included instructions on how to care for the rock. You could, it joked, teach the rock to “sit” and “stay” but “roll over” or “shake hands” was a little harder to explain.
What was important back then and what's just as important right now is that people knew it was a gag; a dummy. They knew they were buying something that couldn't really do much for them. And they went along with the joke. When it comes to marketing or selling our products and services, we often don't realise we're dealing with a dummy.
We think we're doing the right thing when choosing an audience. In the book, The Brain Audit, there's a whole chapter on why this premise of target audience leads you off the path and into dummy land. And yet the one thing we've heard over and over again is the concept of target audience. It's our Pet Rock moment.
We are stuck with something that seems fun and exciting, but won't do anything but “play dead”.
This episode takes on the issue of target profile and why it's so important for your landing page. Thousands of clients have read the book, The Brain Audit, and yet I see so many of them mixing up the concept of target profile and target audience. So how do we separate the two once and forever?
In this article, we cover three parts (as always). – The blind spot with target profile (and why we keep repeating the same mistake).
– We go deeper into the concept of the “dummy” as we examine person vs. persona.
– Finally, we'll take a look at some of the questions to ask in target profile interview.
Let's start with the blind spot, shall we? Why do we keep making the same mistake over and over again?
Part 1: The blind spot with target profile I remember when I took my first driving test in Auckland, New Zealand.
I drove a manual, what you'd probably call a stick shift back then. As part of my test, I was asked by the testing officer to go down a hill. Immediately, I put the gear into neutral and coasted downhill.
You know what happened next, don't you? As exhilarating as it can be to race down hill at top speed, you shouldn't ever put a car in neutral and when heading downhill. There are a whole bunch of things that can go wrong. But that downhill drive was my blind spot. I had done it so many times before, that I didn't see that it would not only cause a problem, but would get me a nice big F (as in Failed) against my test.
Most of us make the same mistake when we get down to working with our target profile When asked about our target profile, we get drawn into the error of describing a target audience. And this mistake is reasonable because almost every marketing book or course talks mostly about target audience. It suggests that we should look for a bunch of people. E.g. people who are afraid of making presentations, or teacher, or people who want to be coaches. It talks about targeting huge groups of people all at once. While this is a great starting point, it's only the starting point.
An audience won't get you very far You may not be focusing on an audience, but instead on a type of person. So instead of ‘people who are afraid of making presentations', you think of a fictional person. And you say: “Ok, let's call him Chris.” And then you go on to rattle off the factor of how this fictional person named Chris may end up being terrified of presentations. And you think you're on the right track at this point.
But a testing instructor would still fail you And this is because you're still not paying attention to that blind spot. When we use the term, target profile, it's not an audience, and it's not a ‘let's call him Chris.' Because if you say let's call him Chris, you're saying the following:
Chris is a fictional person. Kinda like a real person, but not a real person.
He kinda lives in a real house. But not in a real house, but in a fictional house.
And he lives in a real city, but not really.
And his dog. Well, he used to be real.
His girlfriend. She could be Lady Gaga or Ellen DeGeneres (well, it's fictional, so who cares?)
He eats fictional hamburgers, and he can chomp through seven hundred at one go, right after he has fifty-three shots of tequila.
You see the difference between real and fictional? Because the Chris I used to know wasn’t fictional. He lived about 20 minutes from my place. He was a genius at computers. He didn't drink water, only wine and milk. He was grumpy as hell and yet extremely helpful. And if I wanted to go out with Chris for lunch, I know that I'd have to deal with his grumpiness. I'd know exactly what he'd want. And the Chris I used to know wasn't interested in making presentations at all.
But I do know Christina Christina isn't a big fan of making presentations. She would rather bake two-dozen cakes and have kittens, than speak. And we're not even talking about the hard task of ‘presentations'. We're talking about just standing up at a networking meeting and speaking for one measly minute. Christina knows it's critical for her business. She knows she's in a safe space with friends all around her, but she can't overcome the wave of panic that starts the night before.
She prepares like crazy, but it's the same thing over and over again. She can't sleep well. The drive to the event is an ordeal. She looks at all those people at the networking meeting, so cool and relaxed, and wonders if she can ever be like them. And then, when she's done, she feels like somehow she could do a better job. She's happy to go back to the office, turn off the phone, recharge—and just do what she's good at doing—instead of doing these crazy presentations. But now, she has to make a presentation. And she's terrified…
Now that's the emotion and drama you get with a real person. But there's more Fictional people can't tell you when you're going on —or off-target with your message.
An audience can try to get a message to you, but everything gets lost in the din.
The only way you can get to a target profile is to have a real person. Just like that testing instructor in the car with me. If he were fictional, I would have passed the driving test. I'd also be likely to win $50 million in the lottery on the very same day. But instead, I failed. I learned from my mistake; spotted my big blind spot.
And today I'm your driving instructor. Instead of coasting downhill and putting others and us in danger, let's keep the car in gear. Let's use the concept of the target profile as it was meant to be used, shall we?
Let's explore the questions you're going to need when conducting a real client interview. Which is when we run into our second problem. More often than not, we run into a concept of persona. We are told we don't need to focus on a real person, but we can easily base our marketing on a character. It's almost like a fiction novel. We make up the character as we go.
Except what we end up with, is a little Frankenstein. A Frankenstein with random body parts all stitched together. That's the difference between a person and persona. And we're about to find out why a person—a real person matters a lot more than persona.
2) Persona vs. person (Why a person matters more) When my niece Marsha was eight, she wanted a dog for her eighth birthday. Then her parents realised that someone had to walk the dog, come rain or shine. There would be many trips to the vet, they figured. And the dog would need to be trained, so there wasn't poo all over the carpet.
Marsha got a toy dog instead. It barked and you could pull it around. And it sounded like a real dog.
But it was a dummy And that's the problem with persona. Persona is when you assume the role of another person. You try to walk in that person's shoes. And your shoe size is 10, but that person wears a size 13. You might assume things will be fine and you'll somehow manage. But you don't and you can't. Because while we all can try to imagine what that person is going through, we can only imagine.
In short, we get dummy text, dummy words and dummy emotions from dummies. To get real text, real words and real emotions we have to go to a real person. Not real people, one person. Because a real person won't have “dummy thoughts” or dummy words.
So what do dummy words resemble? Dummy words looks like they were written by you and me sitting in our office, looking at a computer screen. We churn out words that are stifled and boring. Or worse, we may copy headlines like “Who else wants to…blah, blah, blah, blah” and slap it into our headline on the landing page.
That's not how a target profile speaks A target profile speaks from a place of real emotion. I remember sitting at a workshop early in the Psychotactics timeline, and explaining my website issues to someone. This is what I said: “I feel trapped with my website. Every little change I have to make, I have to go back to the developer. And then I have to wait, because he's busy, or asleep or something. I feel like I'm at his mercy all the time. And it's a crappy feeling.
I want to be able to have more control over my own website, do my own things and yes, I can understand bits and pieces that need to be added. But for the most part I want the control. I want to be like the person that can drive, instead of being driven.
Feel that raw emotion? Well, with persona-based writing you have to make all that stuff up… For instance, let's take the Nobis Hotel. They have a persona-based website, by their own admission. Here's what it reads like: The personas are frequent travellers who are sick of sterile chain hotels and want something different. They make their own decisions on where to stay using the web and social media. Buyers want upscale luxury but in a modern style, not the old-world traditional style.
And how does their landing page reveal those problems? Nobis Hotel is an independent, 201-room first class, luxury hotel in Stockholm, Sweden occupying a prime spot on Norrmalmstorg square, the single most central and attractive location in the downtown area. Nobis Hotel is a new centre stage of Sweden's Royal Capital, defining our own personal sense of Stockholm hotel luxury.
It calls itself modern, elegant and extremely comfortable, but also ethically sound, warm and moderate. It says it provides their guests with true value for their money in a stylish and pleasant setting designed by award-winning architects.
Does that sound like a real person speaking? A person talks in plain language. He or she has real emotions and real frustrations. And it makes it super-easy for you to take their exact words and put it down on your sales landing page or home page, or any page for that matter.
It's the emotion and the wording that attracts your audience Yes, audience. Because even though you start out with one person, that one person's voice attracts others just like her. So if your target profile is Rita, all the ‘Ritas' of the world are attracted to that message. And so you get a consistent audience. An audience that identifies with that one big problem. And wants to solve that one big problem. So instead of trying to juggle with different personality types and multiple problems, you solve a single problem.
And it's all being handed to you on a platter. No thinking, no research, no fiddling with key words—and it still works for you. My niece Marsha is much older now, but even as a child she clearly knew the difference between a real dog and a dummy one.
When you're dealing with target profile, you have to deal with someone real. Otherwise, you just have a dummy.
3) Questions to ask in a target profile interview The worst problem with a target profile interview is really not knowing where to start.
And logically, we believe there must be some way to have a set of questions. And so we create a bunch of questions. But in reality, those questions don't always work. The target profile interview doesn't always follow a path. Suddenly, you're wondering whether it's a good idea to have the interview at all.
It is.
Even if you botch it up, a target profile interview is an amazing experience.
But how do you create the questions? Well you don't. What you're looking to do is get a bunch of components together instead. I know, I know. It sounds technical. But here's what you're seeking to get:
1) The list of problems. Yup, all the problems that the customer faces when dealing with a product or service like yours.
2) Their biggest problem.
3) Why is it their main problem?
4) What are the consequences of the problem not being solved?
5) Their second biggest problem.
6) Why is it a problem?
7) What are the consequences of the problem not being solved?
8) What are their main objections to buying a product or service—even when they think it more or less meets their needs?
9) What would cause them to give a testimonial?
10) What do they see as a significant risk factor? Are there more than one risk factors? Can they describe it?
11) What would make the product unique (in their eyes?)
So can you ask other questions? Sure you can. But these set of questions enable you to get a tonne of information that can almost literally be slapped right onto your sales page, or in some cases, even your home page. Of course, there's some re-engineering to do, but for the most part, you have all the stuff you've been looking for. All the bags of The Brain Audit get covered in one fell swoop.
So why bother with this interview at all? Because in many cases, you'll find that the client's problems are not what you anticipated. There you are in your cubbyhole, imagining stuff, but the client often doesn't feel that way at all. And there's more, of course. You get to hear the client's exact words. Their terminology. Their emotions come surging through in the conversation. And for the first time, ever you can feel the pain.
But what if you've already felt the pain? Many of us start up businesses because it seemed like a good idea. But often you start up a business because you feel the pain as well. So for instance, I felt the pain of being a cartoonist that was always on call. I wanted to have my vacations—and not just vacations, but substantial vacations. And so yes, I started out trying to help myself. So yeah, I know that pain. I can go back and feel that pain.
Not really If you've ever had a big injury or operation, you'll know what I mean. The pain at the point in time is unbearable. Several weeks later, the memory of the pain is there, but not quite there. After a few years, it's almost impossible to recreate that pain. The target profile has no such problem. They're in the emergency ward right now. They feel the torrent of pain and know what they'd like to see as the solution. They understand why they're not keen to take the risk and will tell you so.
And that's what a target profile interview does Yes, it does sound dramatic, but a target profile can change your world and how you create your landing page and market to your audience.
When Kathy Sierra sat down to write her book on JAVA, it wasn't supposed to be a bestseller.
They had incredible odds with over 16,000 other books on JAVA already on Amazon. And yet they cut through the noise? How did they do it? They didn't pull the stunt that many Internet marketers do. Instead they focused on how people read and why they get to the finish line. The more the readers got to the end of the book, the more popular the book became in programming circles.
Read more: The Unlikely Bestseller (And Why It Sold 2 Million Copies)
Frankenstein's Laboratory by Beef Chavez (audio sourced from "Scar Stuff Blog"). Licensed under Creative Commons "Attributions 3"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_nzKeFbsk0
Why do great inventors, business people, and a ton of smart people have in common? They have many traits, but one specific trait is the ability to crack a problem. When everyone else has given up, these people are able to figure out what no one has done before.
How do they do it? This article shows you how to increase your learning speed by using deconstruction. It shows you how to crack puzzles that seemed too difficult by others.'
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Where to start your learning journey
Part 2: How to find learning patterns when there's no one to help you
Part 3: How to stack the layers and accelerate your learning
To read it online: https://www.psychotactics.com/speed-learning/
How to deconstruct complex topics (and accelerate your learning) What can a single video on YouTube contain?
If you were to look at just six minutes of a NASA video, it might put you off ocean currents forever. In exactly six minutes, the contents of the video contain some of the following:
◦ Atmospheric circulation
◦ Wave formation
◦ Thermohaline circulation
◦ Upwelling and nutrient distribution
◦ Dead zones
◦ Sea surface height
◦ Shifting rain patterns
◦ Population density
That's only the partial list of what's included in the video, and it hits you with rapid succession If you're confused, you ought to be, because the video is approximately how we approach most topics. A topic, any topic, is incredibly complex. However, the complexity can be quickly deconstructed.
That is to say; you can learn a skill or teach someone a skill reasonably rapidly if you're able to break apart the concepts into smaller bits? The question is: where do you begin? What does deconstruction involve? And how do you know you're going about deconstruction the right way?
To understand deconstruction we need to look at three elements: – Where to start your journey
– How to find patterns when there's no one to help you
– How to stack the layers as you go forward
So where do we start our journey? Deconstruction always starts with a choice. But what do you choose? Let's find out.
Part 1: Where to start your journey of deconstruction A tonne of gold costs about $64.3 million in today's prices.
Indians are reputed to own 22,000 tonnes of gold. That's a staggering $1 trillion dollars in gold in a single country. Gold bars and coins are almost alway bought at festivals when buying gold is said to bring luck to the buyers. But the real obsession for gold stems from wedding jewellery. Weddings alone account for 50% of the demand every year.
And in South Mumbai, if you wanted to buy gold, you'd head to a particular area called Sonapur. “Sona” is the Hindi word for gold and in Sonapur, you'd see dozens of gold merchant stores crammed back to back in a specific area. Now bear in mind that Mumbai is a big city that spans 603.4 square kilometres. Yet, someone looking for jewellery, and particularly gold jewellery would know exactly where to go.
We have no such specifics when we're dealing with a vast and complex topic Should we start with wave formation or thermohaline circulation? Upwelling, dead zones or nutrient distribution? Or should we wander right into sea surface height, instead? It's clear that we need to start somewhere and the best way to get started is to pick subject matter at random.
Random? Surely that doesn't seem to be a systematic way to go about deconstruction Let's pick “dead zones” from our list above, shall we? It's a pretty random pick considering how much material the six-minute video covers. However, as we dig into the topic, one thing becomes very clear. It's easier to dig deeper into “dead zones” and see how they occur. In under a minute, this video talks about how we get to mass extinction by focusing on a single topic.
Deconstruction becomes clearer when we move into areas we're more familiar with Let's take a sales page or landing page, for instance. A landing page has headlines, subheads, first paragraphs, problems, solutions, objections, uniqueness, bullets—the list goes on and on. To be intimidated by such a vast amount of moderately unfamiliar information is difficult to cope with. So we go into “random mode”.
We pick something—anything—so that we can get going. Let's ignore the vast majority of the page, and head for the bullets, instead.
What do you notice when you look at the bullets below? – How to assemble all the elements a customer needs to see to buy
– Why template based construction is key to pain-free landing pages
– Why “How to, how, and why” are your best friends in bullet points
– How to use sequence graphics to keep your reader on the page
– Why Bonuses need graphics for maximum impact
– How to write bullets that sell even if you can’t write
– How to avoid ineffective graphics
– How to construct power testimonials even for a new product
– Why FAQs are the place for “fussy” objections
– Why the target profile is central to growing your tribe
paDidn't find a pattern? Well, let's look at it another way, shall we?
– How to assemble all the elements a customer needs to see to buy
– How to use sequence graphics to keep your reader on the page
– How to write bullets that sell even if you can’t write
– How to avoid ineffective graphics
– How to construct power testimonials even for a new product
– Why FAQs are the place for “fussy” objections
– Why Bonuses need graphics for maximum impact
– Why template based construction is key to pain-free landing pages
– Why “How to, how, and why” are your best friends in bullet points- Why the target profile is central to growing your tribe
You noticed the HOW and WHY this time around, didn't you? If you're looking at the entire landing page, you're unlikely to notice the pattern even if someone helpfully placed it in the HOW and WHY format. You'd be focusing on too large an area, and it's close to impossible to deconstruct your subject matter when the area is too vast. Instead, you need to look at all the components available and choose just a tiny area, just like Sonapur, where the gold jewellery is sold. If the entire map of Mumbai were your sales page, Sonapur would represent the “bullets”.
When I was learning badminton many years ago, my coach taught me how to win points consistently My badminton days are a bit of history now, not so much because I'm getting older, but more so because I'm one of those crazy people you see on the court. You know the type, don't you? They lunge at everything. And all of that lunging and diving just to win the point ended up with a tonne of muscle pulls and strains. Being the super-competitive person I am, I hired a coach to help me win points without having to lunge about so much.
But you see the problem looming, don't you? Where do you start? The coach started randomly, getting me to focus on the grip. You can try it yourself, even if you don't have a handy badminton racket around. Squeeze your fingers together as if gripping a racket, while moving your hand forward.
Immediately there's a tension in the shot causing the shuttlecock to go back faster over the net. Avoid the squeeze and attempt to hit the same shot, and the shuttlecock goes a lot slower, thus dropping short of the opponent. By focusing on a subtle component of the entire game, the coach was able to get me to practice the grip, and that alone helped me win a few extra points in every match.
Every topic has multiple layers that make up the whole The reason why we get confused and are unable to decipher, let alone master the topic is that we try and take on the entire 604 square kilometres of real estate instead of focusing on a single area. But what if you focus on a single area, but still can't see the pattern?
What if there's no coach around to show you the grip? No one around to helpfully move the bullets around and demonstrate how HOW and WHY play a pretty significant role in bullet construction? How do you go about seeing the pattern yourself?
Part 2: How to find patterns when there's no one to help you How do you pronounce S-A-K-E?
If you said “Sah-kay” you're right.
If on the other hand, you said “sah-key”, you've failed to see the pattern. In almost every phonetic language the letter “e” creates an “eh” sound. So when you read the word “karaoke”, you don't say, “carry-oh-key”, but “kara-oh-keh” instead.
Once someone points out the pattern, it's easy to correctly pronounce words in phonetic languages such as Maori, Spanish or Japanese. But what if no one reveals the pattern? In such a scenario, you'd miss the sound of “eh” and instead use “e”, instead. How do you find patterns when there's no one else to help you?
Let's try it now. How do you say K-A-R-A-T-E?
And how about S-H-I-I-T-A-K-E?
You have it down pat, don't you? Kara-teh and Shee-ta-keh. And no matter how many Japanese words you ran into from now on, you'd know that the “e” is all about “eh”. This tiny bit of information may make sense by itself, but it's when you see the profusion of the words that have “e”, that you realise how many words you're likely to pronounce incorrectly.
What you might not have noticed is that you've worked out the pattern For deconstruction, the first phase involves taking a tiny piece of the pie, as it were and focus on that piece. However, unless someone points out the pattern, you may not see it right away. The moment you take many examples of that very same pattern, you start to get a clear understanding.
If we go back to the landing page example, for instance, you might not see the HOW and WHY so clearly on one landing page. After all, there are many ways to write bullets and copywriters take care to see they intersperse different types of bullets in an entire set.
Even so, if you were to go from one landing page to another, and keep at it, you'd see a pattern in an incredibly short period. Try it yourself. Go to about 5-7 landing pages on the Psychotactics site alone, and you'll start to see the pattern of HOW and WHY wherever bullets appear.
But there's an additional bonus in going through many examples Once a pattern registers, you are likely to see other patterns as well. For instance, a bullet can be written in a very simple way, or it can be embellished to go a bit further. Let's take an example.
How to prepare the room before the presentation How to prepare the room before the presentation (even if it's already been set up earlier).
How to prepare the room before the presentation (and make sure nothing goes wrong).
We added two other elements in the bullets and you'd notice if you went through a whole set of them We emboldened those bullets with “and” or “even”. As you go through an entire set of bullets, page after page of nothing but bullets, the secrets of bullets reveal themselves to you. It's approximately how you go about deconstructing just about anything, even when there's no precedence.
For instance, during James Hutton's time, the world was thought to have a fixed creation date Apparently on Saturday, October 22, 4004 BC, the world was created, or so it was taught around the time of James Hutton. Hutton is called the “father of modern geology” because he came up with the fundamental understanding of geology as we know it today. Hutton was curious about how the earth was formed. The religious texts of the day were pretty clear.
The earth was 6000 years old according to Archbishop James Ussher of Ireland. And that was that—no further discussion was allowed on the topic. Hutton wasn't exactly convinced and he set about his journey of deconstruction.
Hutton's moment of discovery came indirectly because of his whisky and his women In 1747, Hutton was a young medical graduate, who got drunk and the ladies got too much of his attention. He managed to get his lover Miss Eddington pregnant. The scandal that erupted saw her being rushed off to London to give birth.
Hutton's family too needed to limit the damage to their reputation and he was forced to leave Edinburgh and go off to a small family farm in Slighhouses, Southern Scotland.
It was there that he saw the top soil run off and go downstream If the land were always going to be eroded, there would be no topsoil and crops couldn't be grown; which in turn would cause people to starve over time. Hutton couldn't buy that the earth would be stripped away to nothing. Working in isolation, he rejected the world view at the time and needed to figure out how new land was formed.
And then on his form his great idea about “how new land could be created.” Hutton's examples were cliffs. Around his farm were dozens, hundreds of cliffs. In the exposed parts of the cliffs, he'd have noticed the bands of rocks, laid down like layers one on top of the other, and at different times.
He'd figured out how rock was formed like no known person had done before his time. Sedimentary rock that's taught in school these days was revolutionary back in Hutton's time. How did he do it? He looked at example after example until the rock gave away its secrets.
Surely you and I could look at rock all day and the only result would be a big headache at the end of the day But let's stop to think about deconstruction for a second. You could take apart quite a few things in your house or office today. Over time, and with a little bit of persistence, you'd work out how it was built. The more examples you deconstruct using the very same, or similar product, the more likely you'd be to recognise its structure.
While it may seem that some people are incredibly intelligent at deconstructing and reconstructing concepts, they're probably just as bright as you. The brain works solely through pattern-recognition. If you find enough examples to work with them, and you get working on those examples, the ideas reveal themselves to you over time.
There's no doubt a bit of luck involved Luck plays as big, if not a larger role than hard work, but to deconstruct just about anything you need time and persistence. And lots and lots of examples. It's hard to believe that you, me, anyone of us can deconstruct, but you can look through historical or even modern times and find not tens of thousands, even millions of examples of people who achieve many deconstruction goals every single year.
Nothing is quite as good as a good teacher A teacher's job is to reduce the learning curve and make you smart, smarter than the teacher himself. Even so, you can be your own teacher if you start with Phase one and isolate a tiny part of the big puzzle. When you get to Phase two, you'd need lots of examples, possibly hundreds, before a pattern clearly starts to emerge.
Sake, karate, karaoke. That's a pattern.
Writing bullets. That too is a pattern. Figuring out how the Earth regenerates itself, yes that is a pattern as well. Which then takes us to our last phase: reconstruction. Or how to stack the layers as you go forward.
Let's find out how it's done.
Part 3: How to stack the layers going forward In late October 2016, I gave a presentation at the WeArePodcast conference.
The presentation wasn't about how to grow your audience or monetise your podcast. Instead, the presentation was about the elements of telling a story. For weeks before the event, I struggled with the presentation, and the reason I was so conflicted was due to the length of the presentation.
I had just 30 minutes or so to get the point across.
How do you take a lifetime of storytelling and encapsulate it in a 30-minute module? You don't. When you deconstruct or reconstruct, the goal should be exactly the same. It's always meant to take a tiny piece of the information you have on hand and then go deep. I happened to talk about the elements of a story in that presentation, but if I were making a presentation on how a dead zone shows up in the ocean, I'd use the very same principle. And that's what you should do too as well.
Instead of taking on the entire subject matter, take on a tiny slice If you were presenting about dead zones in the ocean floor, you'd probably cover three elements.
1: The ocean conveyor belt
2: The role of cold water currents and warm water currents
3: How dead zones occur
Granted, this is a tiny part of what you're likely to know about thermohaline circulation and the ocean conveyor belt, but it's enough. And how do you know it's enough? There's a precise benchmark to know when you're overcooking your information. That benchmark is the ability of the audience or readers to recall the information.
If you overdose them with information, they'll recall parts of it, but not all Information that's just re-constructed just right usually allows the client to remember the entire sequence without too much prodding. And covering just three points, even when you have a thousand to cover is usually a good way to go about things.
Three points force you to constrain yourself and go deep into your content. For instance, many podcasts on the Three Month Vacation covers about 4000-5000 words, yet they only cover three points. This article might go well into 4000-5000 words, but it only covers three points. It's likely that the person reading this information may not be able to recall the three points instantly, but give them a summary and it all comes flooding back.
And that's how you know your reconstruct is goody-yum-yum At Psychotactics, we do this reconstruct at our workshops. Take for instance the workshop we had on Landing Pages in Queenstown, New Zealand. It was a three-day workshop, and on the very last day, I got the group to summarise what they had learned. If you've done a solid job, you'll see their eyes, not the top of their heads.
No one will be looking down at their notes scrambling to remember what was taught. Instead, they'll be looking right at you, reassembling the information just the way it was given to them. This technique is also easy to use when making a presentation to a live audience. You can have 200, 500 or a 1000 people in the audience going through the sequence of what you've just taught them. And that's the real feedback—when the audience can remember it all.
So do you remember what you just learned?
Let's see. What did we cover?
Summary: – Where to start your journey of deconstruction
– How to find patterns when there's no one to help you
– How to stack the layers as you go forward
The journey needs to start with a small slice. Instead of taking on a big topic, go down to one tiny part. Want to take apart the car? How about holding back a little and then taking apart just the wheel, instead? If you have someone to help you; a teacher; a guide, then that speeds up the learning process.
But what if you have no one? What if you're like James Hutton and you're faced with the prospect of doing something no one has done before? In such a case, and in every case, really, you should be looking at a tonne of examples.
Examples help you understand the same problem, see the same patterns from many angles. You may or may not hit the jackpot of how to write bullets on a landing page, but if you look at dozens of examples of bullets, you'll find the so-called secret will reveal itself to you.
Finally, when it comes back to the reconstruct, it's just as important to realise that you have to be a bit stingy with your topics. Instead of covering half a dozen topics, just cover three main topics and go really deep.
You know you're not overdoing the information because the audience can easily recall what you've told them without needing to look at their notes. Even 4000-5000 words later, the reader or listener should be able to remember the points you've covered and pass them on to someone else without too much of a problem.
And that is the short and exciting journey of deconstruction. Now it's time for some sake, eh?
Do you know: Focus can cause a massive blindspot in our business.So what's the option? Surely it can't be distraction? Actually it's a mix of both that's required. Using the concept of “spinning plates”, you can avoid the blind spot of success and the mindlessness of distraction. How Success Causes A Blind Spot And Creates A Rip Van Winkle Effect
https://www.psychotactics.com/how-success-causes-blind-spot/
The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere This is an elaboration/review of the book by Pico Iyer.
How do you slow down? What do you mean by going nowhere? And how can we slow down with our busy business and family life?
Sean says, ” I still have the same day I used to have before. But somehow it's different. Now, I have more time.”
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The Passage To Nowhere
Part 2: The Charting of StillnessPart 3: The Internet Sabbath
To read it online: https://www.psychotactics.com/losing-momentum/
4 am is the most difficult part of my day. And it's not for the reason you might be thinking. It's not difficult because it's so early in the morning. For me it's quite the opposite. For close to 20 years I've been rising at 4, sometimes a bit earlier, without the need of an alarm. The sound and feel of 4 am is embedded in my system and I instinctively know when to wake up.
Which is where the problem begins.
Within seconds of waking up, I'm completely awake I feel as though my brain is a train leaving the station, and I, as the train driver need to keep up. Five minutes later, I've walked out of the door, across to the office next door and I'm already at work. At this time of the day, and without the need of any coffee or tea, I can start to write a book, work on a presentation or take on the endless flow of e-mail.
So how do I slow down? That was the question I asked myself as we slid into our December break. We're all so alert, so full of this persistent need to work, to learn, to keep going at high speed. How do we slow down without losing momentum? And if we were to slow down, where would we get the time to slow down? This last question seems to cut right to the core. That we have no time to do what's most important to us. Which is why I started first listening to, then reading a book I'd bought almost two years ago.
Yes, the irony wasn't lost on me. It took two years to get to the book, but as December rolled along I listened to it once, then a second time, before getting a physical copy from the library.
The name of the book? The Art of Stillness: Adventures In Going Nowhere. A book by writer, traveller, Pico Iyer. And let me tell you my short journey about going nowhere in a hurry.
We'll look at three elements of the book, and it's a very tiny book, spanning just 74 pages. When listening to it on audio, I think I was done with listening to it in a few hours. Even so, less is more. That's the agenda of the book and the lesson I learned.
Here are the three things we'll cover: – The Passage To Nowhere
– The Charting of Stillness
– The Internet Sabbath
Part 1: The Passage To Nowhere Sitting still is a way of falling in love with the word and everything around it.
That's an interesting thought, isn't it? And within three pages of “The Passage to Nowhere”, author Pico Iyer makes you want to slow down, but not just feel like you're getting off the motorway, but instead coming to a complete standstill. A stillness so unusual that if you close your eyes, you can hear the computer gurgle, feel the caress of the breeze, even your heartbeat seems so much louder.
Iyer, despite the Indian sounding name, was born in Oxford, England in 1957 By the time he's twenty-nine, he's got an office on the 25th floor in midtown Manhattan; an apartment on Park Avenue and 20th Street and a job that most writers only dream about. He covers apartheid in South Africa, the People Power Revolution in the Philippines, the chaos that enveloped India during prime minister Indira Gandhi's assassination. He wrote extensively for Time Magazine and took long vacations in exotic parts of the globe. The very thought of going nowhere was an incredibly alien concept.
And yet the constant excitement has a finite boundary If you listen closely enough to life, it speaks to you in a whisper. Pico Iyer found that he couldn't hear that whisper. He was racing about so much that he never had a chance to see where he was going, or truly enjoy what he was doing. He never had a chance to check if he was truly happy.
Writers have a funny way of going to their core Some hit the bottle, others write endlessly. Iyer decided to retreat to Kyoto. Now I don't know if you've ever been to Kyoto, but it's one of the most amazing cities in the world. There is a richness in the palaces and temples of Tokyo that's hard to imagine, let alone replicate. Iyer decided to leave behind his dream life and spend a year in a small, single room on the backstreets of Kyoto. He craved a sense of stillness.
In the early part of his book he talks about how not so long ago, our greatest luxury was access to information. There was no such thing as too many books because a book was savoured. Information was a slow drug. Today it's the freedom from information that we seek. The chance to be still is what Iyer calls the “ultimate prize”.
“I'm not a member of any church, and I don't subscribe to any creed; I've never been a member of any meditation or yoga group,” say Iyer. And by the time I had hit this paragraph, it struck me that
I was in a remarkably similar position; we all are, in fact. We're all rushing around, slightly overwhelmed at the amount of information we have to process and implement. We're not necessarily a member of any meditation or yoga group and yet there's this obvious desire to slow down until Pico Iyer takes it one step lower. We need to be still; go nowhere.
The chapter on “The Passage to Nowhere” clarifies the issue It's not about sitting at home and never going anywhere. Travelling opens up our minds, often makes us better, more interesting people. Stillness isn't about a location. You can sit in the middle of a Mumbai street, cars honking and be perfectly at peace, though admittedly the goal isn't about how far you travel but how alive you are.
Stillness it seems is the ultimate adventure; one I'd been on, but certainly not on a daily basis. So as we slid into summer in this part of the world, I took my chance. In December, Auckland goes to sleep. Around the 20th of December, all the Christmas parties are done, kisses exchanged, and the city goes into hibernation. And it's not just Auckland. The entire country goes into an enforced vacation until mid, even late January. It was my chance to go on a trip I'd never gone before.
I started to meditate I tried sitting in a Lotus position on the floor. I can do it quite easily as I sit on the floor most days at some point or the other. But I didn't feel comfortable sitting for long periods of time. My next try was sleeping on the floor, and despite the warmth of the season, I felt a bit chilly. So I climbed into bed, pulled the duvet over and that was my Goldilocks moment. I soon discovered that trips require a bit of planning. I scoured iTunes for suitable meditation music until I found the one that suited me best. I wanted to see what this trip to nowhere was all about.
Stillness like anything in life requires momentum When I first tried to clear my mind, the momentum of the day cluttered it with thoughts of an even higher frequency. I might be sitting and doing nothing, and have no perceptible thought in my head. The moment I meditate, the thoughts, random thoughts burst through trying to shout over one another in an attempt to get my attention. But then the momentum dies down around the 30-minute mark. By the 45-minute mark, it becomes addictive, this meditation stuff.
And that's what takes us to the second part of this review: The Charting of Stillness. In this section, he talks about his friend and songwriter, the late Leonard Cohen. He also talks about Matthieu Ricard, a Frenchman who was called “the happiest man in the world.” What made this Frenchman so euphoric? Let's find out in the next part.
Part 2: The Charting of Stillness When you look at Matthieu Ricard, you don't see a molecular biologist. Because even if you and I have not a clue about what a molecular biologist looks like, Matthieu Ricard doesn't look the part. And that's because he's wearing the robes of a monk, and has this endearing smile.
The University of Wisconsin was deeply interested in that smile They attached 256 electrodes to the skulls of hundreds of volunteers and put them all through a 3 ½ hour continuous functional MRI scan. The researchers were searching for positive emotions at first. In later experiments they looked at areas of compassion, the ability to control emotional responses and interestingly, the ability to process information. The subjects were similar in most respects, except some had engaged in ongoing stillness, while others had not.
There was a marked difference between those who'd practiced the art of stillness vs those who hadn't Those who'd gone through stillness for about 10,000 hours had achieved a sense of happiness that was beyond any records in neurological records.
Their happiness factor was literally, quite off the charts. And Matthieu Ricard explains that happiness is a muscle. That like a muscle it can be developed. His philosophy is based on how Buddhists explain the nature of the mind. And you don't have to be a Buddhist to understand the concepts of the blue sky.
If there are clouds, there is blue sky behind them. All you need is patience to sit still and the blue shows up again.
This blue sky analogy was interesting Don't get me wrong. A blue sky is, at least to me, the most boring kind of sky. I love clouds, all kinds of clouds. My niece Marsha are even members of the cloud appreciation society. So the analogy kind of bugs me, because I think all clouds, without exception, are incredibly stunning. Even so, the analogy of the blue sky is pretty solid. We lead a life based on our terms, travel places I want to go.
Even our websites aren't built with some keywords in mind or driven by client's demands. We do the things that most interest us instead of being governed by what competition does. Still, there are clouds. Clouds of irritation, envy. They roll in quietly going from a nice, fluffy cumulus to a menacing cumulonimbus.
Theoretically, I want them to put those 256 electrodes on my head and I want them to find happiness, compassion, no desire to react to emotional triggers and the ability to process information in an unusual way. It was a journey I was willing to take. As I meditate under that duvet, I start off all busy in my brain and then I get on the road to stillness. There are days when I don't quite feel like leaving the room and heading to work, it's that addictive; that cool.
And yet there's the obvious objection, isn't there? Who has time to stand still, or lie still. To me, at least 30-45 minutes was an intrusion. While on vacation it's fine, because I truly do nothing, we're now back to work and that's a chunky 45 minutes out of the day. There's so much to do. How are we supposed to tackle yet another slice of the day slipping away for yet another activity?
This takes us to the third part: The Secular Sabbath as it's called in the book, but which I've changed a bit to the “internet sabbath”.
Part 3: The Internet Sabbath What happens if you don't check your e-mails one day?
The elves come in, check your e-mails and your inbox is clear the next day, right? We know the price of not being on top of things.
Pico Iyer takes time to talk about the sabbath, but he stresses he's not stepping foot into any religion. Instead he talks about a secular sabbath. About a day every week, when you completely free yourself of work. And incredibly, you get off checking stuff on the Internet.
All this talk of meditation and taking time off gets some people a little upset Iyer talks about the time he was on a live radio show. The woman calling in was clearly upset. “It's all very well for a male travel writer in Santa Barbara to talk about taking the day off,” she said. “But what about me? I'm a moth trying to start a small business, and I don't have the luxury of meditating for two hours a day.”
Two hours is clearly an exaggeration on the caller's part but the point is clear We don't have time to meditate and we don't have time to stop checking e-mails and the internet. Yet it's precisely the people who are most under pressure that need to give themselves a break. Iyer suggests the poor, overburdened mother could ask her husband, her mother or a friend to look after the kids for thirty minutes a day. That would bring back a touch of freshness and delight to share with her kids and her business.
As you hear Iyer's words, it's still hard to accept that you can just walk away from the day I struggled with weekends. My 4 am wake up time doesn't respect weekends and until late 2015 I'd be at work on Saturday and Sunday. “I'm only here for a little while”, I'd say to myself, but I'd often be doing something or the other until 9 or 10 am. On the weekends I was supposedly spending 10 whole hours at work. Whether it was productive work or not is completely debatable and here's why.
One weekend, my niece Keira came over and I was lying on the sofa. She said, “Seanny's always tired”. That was my moment of clarity. The weekends weren't helping me at all. So I stopped coming to work on the weekends. We have courses on
Psychotactics and their Friday assignment is my Saturday. For many years I'd say, “I need to check the assignment on the day itself.” Instead, I just told clients that if they finished their assignment by my Friday evening, I'd check it. If not, I'd be back on Monday. I expected pushback from clients. To my surprise I got none.
Many in Silicon Valley observe an Internet sabbath every week All devices are turned off from say, Friday night to Monday. Kevin Kelly, is a spokesperson for new technologies and the founding father of Wired Magazine. Kevin takes off on month-long trips without a computer so as to get rooted in the non virtual world. “I want to remember who I am”, he says.
Even so, Kevin Kelly's methods seem a bit far fetched. Instead you can simply turn off your Internet connection for a day. My wife, Renuka and I go for a walk every day for an hour and a half. We try and get about 10,000-15,000 steps a day.
On Sundays however, we don't take the “workday walking route” Instead we find another route and take a physical book or a diary in which to write or draw. I try and avoid the iPad or any kind of device that will get me back on the Internet. It's a constant challenge but it's completely invigorating. The simple act of putting the phone off and turning it on, 24 or even 48 hours later doesn't increase your workload by much. However, it does dramatically improve your ability to be more calm, more resilient in life.
What's been the result of all of this meditation and calmness? Like Iyer, I stayed away from meditation for all these years. I convinced myself that my mind was blank enough when going for a walk or painting. And truly it was.
But conscious meditation is different for me. It almost always brings a rush of thoughts; of things that need to be done. Renuka tells me I'm sleeping better and my breathing is less shallow. Instead of reacting to events, I seem to let them pass like clouds, expecting that blue sky will show up shortly.
But easily the biggest change has been the morning train. Remember the train that starts in my brain and races out of the station at 4 am? Well, it doesn't do that any more. I now wake up, meditate and then go to work.
I still have the same day I used to have before. But somehow it's different. Now, I have more time.
Resistance seems like an overbearing force in our lives We want to achieve a lot, but as soon as we get started, resistance kicks in. But did you know there are ways around resistance?
Resistance loves a loner. If you're working alone, you're just setting yourself for an encounter with resistance. Resistance loves to play the game of winner. We need to put resistance in second place. Here's how to go about the task of winning the resistance game.
Part 2 of how working with a partner can be both an upside as well as a downside. How do you cope? How do you take it to a whole new level, without all the drama that goes with partnerships? Find out how to run a two-engine business instead of depending on flying alone.
How easy is it to work with your spouse or partner? What are the upsides and downsides? These are questions that are asked all the time and there's a good way to know if you're going to work well together. Here's Part 1 of a series of 2 episodes.
https://www.psychotactics.com/insider-story-psychotactics/
Everyone loves a fabulous year, but the best years for us are those that aren't terribly great. We learn more, and go through a revolution in such "difficult" years. That was 2016 for me. Life took me on diversions I hadn't expected and to me that became the most interesting element of all. Now I look forward to the diversion. Find out how you can be calm even when life takes you off route. And how the off route can be the one thing you look forward to time and time again.
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why Goals Are Not Enough (And Why Pacing Matters)
Part 2: Time Management vs. Energy Management
Part 3: Dealing With Seemingly Closed Doors
To read it online: https://www.psychotactics.com/power-diversion/
In February 2016, I took a rather interesting vow. I vowed to stop grumbling.
Now let's get one thing straight: we all grumble. Some do more than others, but I'm one of those people who are easily disappointed, and so I'm relatively more prone to grumbling. Why I decided to stop grumbling, I'm not sure, but I know it led me down an interesting path. Instead of spending all my time trying to figure out what was wrong with the situation, it often led me to analyse why I was in that situation in the first place.
And that leads me right into what I learned in 2016. I learned why goals are not enough (and why pacing matters). I've always been clued into the fact that time management is not as powerful as energy management. And 2016 was when I had some solid, practical applications for this concept of time vs. energy.
I also realised that closed doors open, if you're willing to persist. However, at the top of the list of my learning was “the importance of the diversion”. This message resonated stronger within me than anything else.
Let's find out how and why the diversion mattered.
In July 2016, we decided to go to Goa, India. India, as amazing as it is in terms of beauty, food and culture is not quite a vacation for me. My parents live in Goa, which by itself used to calm and peaceful, but now seems like any other part of India, noisy and chaotic.
What makes the visit slightly worse is the location of my parent's house My parents live in a tiny two-bedroom cottage, but it's located at a junction. If you've visited India, you know that horns on vehicles are meant to be used whenever possible. Cars, buses, motorcycles—they all honk while on the move, but almost always honk when at a junction, just to warn others of their approach. You see the problem, don't you? My parents are used to the traffic, as well as the honking, but the sounds of India drive me a little crazy.
To make sure we were suitably removed from that chaos, we decided to rent our own cottage This cottage was about 15 kilometres (about 7 miles) from my parent's place and supposedly a lot quieter. You know how you're not supposed to trust things you see on the Internet, right? Well, we didn't. I got a cousin of mine to check out the place and get back to me. “It's by a narrow road,” she said, “and not particularly noisy. There's a bit of traffic, but it's not too bad.” Going by this assessment, we decided to rent the cottage.
When got to Goa and the cottage was amazing It had a superb lounge area, superb art on the wall, decent food nearby, two large bedrooms and was perfect in every way but one: the sound of traffic. Apparently the road was narrow and seemingly devoid of traffic, but it also happened to be the route to an industrial estate. This meant that when traffic rolled, it was the sound of enormous trucks rolling by.
Normally this would be enough reason to grumble We'd done all our due diligence and there we were in a situation not a lot better than before. Yet this location proved to the starting point of a completely different type of vacation. Normally on vacations we eat, drink and rest a lot. Instead we ended up at an Ayurvedic centre (quite by chance) and were instructed to stay on a diet, with no alcohol and we could only sleep at night.
At night we were often woken up by the barking of stray dogs, so we'd wake up early the next day for the Ayurvedic treatment, yet quite tired. In short, what seemed to be a vacation was not a vacation at all. We got back to Auckland more tired than when we left and could barely function for the first two weeks.
Yet, this was my biggest learning: the role of the diversion We weren't supposed to end up in this cottage. We weren't supposed to be at that Ayurveda centre. We were supposed to eat, drink and make merry. Yet it was the most life-changing vacation we've ever had. Both Renuka and I found that the diversion helped us tremendously with our health. Once we were done, my blood pressure which was soaring, was almost back to normal and my cholesterol levels were the best they'd been in past seven years.
Our food changed If you look at the photos on Facebook, and I post food photos almost every day, you'll notice a marked difference in the food we ate from July onwards. We didn't consciously move towards vegetarian food, but meat is a rarity these days. I'm the biggest fan of bread and yet I've been making dosas (a fermented version of rice and dal) since we got back. All of this has had a massive impact. And the story of our trip to India is just an example of how 2016 has helped me focus on the diversion.
Before 2016, I'd be more driven to getting to the goal Anything that took me away from the goal was a needless irritation. I'd do almost anything to get back on track and to avoid the diversion. The sight of a “diversion” sign would get me needlessly upset. Yet at the end of 2016, I tend to revel in the diversion. If things are not going my way, I tend to find the importance of that diversion.
Don't get me wrong: I don't believe in destiny I used to believe in it, and it's fine if you believe in it, but I don't. I don't believe that things happen for a reason either. I believe that things happen, and we put a reason to it. This diversion angle isn't about life unfolding to a plan. Instead, I see it more as a sense of calm as things go awry.
That instead of grumbling and getting upset, it's about enjoying the diversions. I know this to be true because not all diversions end with lower cholesterol and happy stories. Some diversion are just a royal pain, but when you're ready to accept the diversion for what it is, you're a bit like a walking Buddha, accepting things for what they are.
I'm still very goal oriented I still believe in the concept of getting things done, yet I'm less paranoid about the diversion. To me that's been the biggest learning of 2016. I think I didn't do as well as I expected with the grumbling goal. I could have done better. I've grumbled less than I usually do, but more than I would have liked.
What I do know is that diversions don't faze me as much as they used to. To quote a Jack Johnson song: Swim like a jellyfish, rhythm is nothing; you go with the flow, you don't stop.
That jellyfish lesson; the lesson about diversions and learning from the diversion—that's my first lesson. The second was even more ironic. You know that at Psychotactics we talk about the “Three Month Vacation”, right? Well, in 2016, we didn't take our three month vacation as we should have. And it really impacted our work. Let's find out how.
Part 1: Why Goals Are Not Enough (And Why Pacing Matters) The Article Writing Course at Psychotactics is called the “Toughest Writing Course in the World”. When you make a statement like that, most people assume the course is tough for the person doing the course. Admittedly it's very tough for the student because you have to get from a point of struggle, to being able to write a very good article in less than 90 minutes.
Yet for me it's a bigger struggle A course with just 25 participants generates between 10,000-15,000 posts in just 3 months. All of those comments, assignments and questions have to be answered. Plus there's no such thing as “rolling out last year's course”. Between 10-20% of the course changes every year (and has done so since it first ran in 2006).
However, this year I decided to do something that would put even more pressure on me. I decided to create Version 2.0 of the Article Writing Course. It's not like the earlier version was a dud, but like everything in life, a course needs an upgrade.
Under perfect circumstances, the notes would be rewritten well in advance However, when doing a Psychotactics course, I like to gauge the reactions of the clients. Where do they proceed quickly? Where do they get stuck? And so at least for this course, I decided to write new assignments and notes while the course was in progress.
No matter how good you are at writing or creating courses, it's incredibly hard work. Which is why we have the “Three Month Vacation” in place. We work for 12 weeks, then we take a month off. Then another 12 weeks and then another month off.
In 2016, we didn't stick to our well-oiled routine The “twelve week on, four weeks off” has been the primary reason why we achieve our goals. It allows us to work, then rest and come back with a full charge. The vacation in India, while great for our health and diet, left us more tired than before. And then we did a half-baked vacation to Australia in October.
Instead of taking the entire month off, we tried a two week break, and a work trip at the tail end of the journey. Technically a two-week trip is as good as a month, but having work at the tail end means I never quite relax as much as I should.
And this was my second learning That though there are diversions, it's important as far as possible to stick have a solid pacing. The routine is what's most efficient, which is why it's called a routine. When we stray away from this pace of work and downtime, we are straying away from what's most efficient.
By the end of the year I was quite drained I've managed to do as much as the previous years, probably even more. Yet, it's important not to be so very tired as you head into a break. And yet I could see myself yanking myself to work at 5 am (instead of 4). I could feel the tiredness in my bones simply because we hadn't stuck to the pacing. Taking weekends off was a great move and it helped me to get back to Mondays with a bounce in my step, but even the vacations mattered. What also mattered was how we structured the vacations.
The diversion concept is easy to spot, but how does this pacing apply to you? We often work through the year, expecting that work itself will get us to where we want to be. Yet, it's been proven time and time again that downtime is where the brain really works. A tired brain simply does not function to its highest capacity. A brain is like a modern jetliner. It needs to fly, but then it needs to get down onto the tarmac and refuel before it gets back into the air.
A jetliner's greatest value is not when it's on the tarmac, but when it's in the air. Yet, without the downtime and the maintenance, that plane will crash to the ground. It's the routine that keeps that plane in high performance mode at all times.
It's one thing to have goals. It's one thing to say that it's important to have vacations and weekends. Yet, it's quite another thing to structure that downtime. That in 2016, we failed to structure all of our downtime in the way we normally do. And that the month off from December to Jan will do its thing. Even so, the breaks should be better planned and executed. The goals are one thing, and the pacing is quite another.
That was Lesson No.2. And with a little planning (and some diversions) we'll have more pacing in 2017, so that we go to the break still quite relaxed and not quite so tired. All of this talk about pacing is really a pre-cursor for energy management, isn't it? I've always suspected there's something fundamentally wrong with time management and this year it came home to roost. Energy management is far superior to time management. This was my third lesson for the year.
Part 2: Time Management vs. Energy Management You wouldn't think chefs would solve a productivity problem, would you?
And that's just what stuck with me when I was watching a Netflix's episode called “Chef's Table”. What struck me was the difference between my method of cooking and theirs. Now I may get the ingredients in advance, but usually I'm looking at the recipe just before I cook. Then I'll assemble all the spices, the veggies etc. and start the cooking process. While that cooking is in progress, a whole bunch of utensils get dirty and have to be washed. I'll then finish the cooking, and then it's time for the plating.
The chefs don't operate like me The ingredients are bought in advance, they're chopped in advance, they're located right where they should be when the chef is ready to cook. What struck me is that a professional cooking system had a remarkable similarity to the way I write. I will write topics on one day, outline on the second day, expand on the third, edit on the fourth, and in the case of the podcast, record on the fifth.
It seems like a long process, but the actual writing doesn't take time when I split it all into tiny bits spread over five-six days. If I tried to do it all at once, even a single break in the chain drains my energy and I waste twice or thrice the time.
I know you've heard me write and talk about this energy issue before, but to me it was crucial especially when teaching difficult courses like the Article Writing Course. In the past the emphasis on the course was to turn out dozens of articles. Yet, that often exhausted the participants and more importantly by the end of the course they weren't able to write within 90 minutes.
Some still took 3 hours, some even longer. And if you slog so hard, it's easy to get exhausted and even have dropouts. Now our dropout rate is often restricted to just one or two participants, but even so, I'm responsible for their success. If I'm the teacher, I can't afford to have dropouts simply because they're getting exhausted.
Which is why energy became such a big issue for me in 2016 I started to design my life around energy, not time. Any task was almost always split up into parts—like a chef sequence. Incredibly enough the first day of the sequence involved nothing but planning. Planning all the things I had to do was just day one. And in the courses, that's what clients spent their first day doing as well.
They planned what they were going to write about. This simple shift in energy vs. time management makes a world of a difference both for me, as teacher, writer, trainer, as well as for the learner. Instead of being bludgeoned by having to do it all at one go, the clients were able to learn better. I in turn was able to achieve more and do so consistently.
Overall the year was draining I struggled when I returned from India; didn't have quite the break I expected in October in Australia and technically I should have achieved a lot less. Yet, when I look back at 2016, the only place where I struggled was in when reading books. I didn't get too much reading when it came to books, but otherwise I was able to get through a quite tough year to my satisfaction. Of course I'll never be satisfied. I still want to do twice as much, or thrice as much.
I'm fascinated with a lot of things: cooking, drawing, painting, software, dancing, teaching. The list goes on and on. And to maintain a high proficiency you need to be like a chef. I need to be like a chef. We both need to do the prep work well in advance.
Time management is still interesting to me, but it's energy management that really got my attention. Which takes us to the final point: dealing with seemingly closed doors.
Part 3: Dealing With Seemingly Closed Doors Every day I pick up my niece Marsha from school.
And every day we avoid the mad rush of school girls and exit from the gate on the far side. We have no problem with this gate on most days, until we ran into a certain Friday. We could see the problem unfolding from a distance.
First there was a motorcyclist trying to get the gate to open. Then a woman stepped out from her car and ran into a similar problem. By the time we got to the gate, it seemed like there was a lock on it. If so, we'd have to retrace our steps and go back at least 150 metres to the other gate.
It was a boiling hot day, and I'm no fan of the sun So I decided to fiddle with the gate. As it turned out, it wasn't locked after all. There was a lock on the gate giving everyone the impression that it was locked, but the gate was merely jammed. A bit of a tug in the right manner and it rolled to the right as it should.
To me this was part of my learning for 2016 mainly in my personal life For much of 2016, Renuka was having a lot of trouble with her allergies and partly with breathing at night. On the trip to India, she went through the Ayurvedic treatment that helped her reduce the nodules that were blocking her breathing. We thought with treatment the problem of breathing well would improve—and it did. Even so, we couldn't shake the problem of her allergies.
Around 2008 or 2009 she'd gone to an allergy clinic Without any medicine or fuss, they managed to get rid of her allergy in 24 hours. Instead of sneezing endlessly, using nose sprays or taking over the counter medication, she went from achoo, to being a normal person. Before she got to the allergy clinic her nose would get all clogged, her sinuses would flare and her eyes would get all red. She watched dozens of videos on YouTube and tried to self-medicate. The sinus issue and allergy would back down for a short while and then come right back.
So what's the point of this story? We thought the allergy gate was closed. She'd been to the clinic several years ago, was free of the allergies. Now that they were back, would there be any point in going back? Instead of treating that gates as locked, she went back. And within 24 hours her allergies were gone and have stayed gone for the last few months. What I'm trying to say here is simple.
Through 2016, I ran into friends I thought I'd lost forever. I just had to dig further and deeper to find them and we were reunited. Most of the things I thought were doomed were just stuck on pause. When I worked my way through them, sometimes months later, they seem to magically open gates I thought were permanently locked.
I really wondered if I should add this fourth point of “never giving up” in this piece It seems so very trite. So mundane. Yet, the story of Renuka's allergies, plus being able to find a long-lost friend was a matter of pure chance after giving up. It's not like I hadn't tried before. I did try. But then after a lot of persistence, I gave up. What this message is all about is to try again, a lot later.
That gate at Marsha's school seemed locked to everyone. And yet it needed nudging. Who knows? Maybe the motorcyclist and the driver of the car loosened it just enough for me to yank it free. It's a lesson that you have to keep going long after everyone else (and possibly even you) have given up.
And that was my 2016 in a nutshell.
Epilogue We are already in 2017. Last night I had my zero-gravity dream again.
It's a recurring dream where I simply spread my hands wide and I'm able to beat gravity. Like an astronaut that tumbles and flies in zero gravity, I'm usually in a room, floating to the ceiling. Occasionally I'll go outside. Probably even show off a bit by doing double or triple flips. No one in the room seems to be surprised by my ability, but even in my dream I'm trying to prove that it's not a dream.
Except I didn't have this dream for all of 2016 (as far as I can remember). Was 2016 a bit rough? Monetarily it was like all other years. We made thrice as much as we need and that's more than enough. Our subscriber rate went through the roof, climbing 200% and then 500% or more. And no we didn't do anything dramatic. No advertising or joint ventures or anything of the sort. No hoopla launches.
Though we did sail through a second year of podcasting and I believe that made the difference. Clients continue to listen and learn a lot from the podcasts. And if you haven't already noticed, they're almost little booklets by themselves if you were to print them out. Almost every podcast is about 4000 words and covers just a deeper look into a subset of a topic.
Even so, I felt a bit unsettled by 2016. Now after a whole month of rest, I'm ready to take on 2017, doing better stuff, not just more stuff. And I have my cue. I am flying; I'm in zero gravity. La, la, I'm on the ceiling again. Catch me if you can!
Sometimes life takes you down a diversion.
And you end up exactly where you need to be.
Read more about: What I Learned On My Unusual Vacation
Many of us believe that smartness comes from learning the skills in our own field. And yet, that's only partially true. We can never be as smart as we want to be, if we only have tunnel vision. So how do we move beyond? And how do we find the time to do all of this learning? Amazingly it all comes from limits. Find out more in this episode.
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Learning all you can in your own field
Part 2: Learning all you can in an area where you have no expertisePart 3: Working with limits
Last month I got an invitation from a group asking me to dinner. The dinner it seems was a group of startups. They wanted to spend the evening with Renuka and I and have a conversation about how to get started and to keep that momentum going.
What they wanted most of all was the promise of the “Three Month Vacation.” Yes, they were start ups, but what would it take for them to get going and then not spiral out of control. What would it take for them to become successful without being sucked into the mantra of “more, more and even more.”
The answer to their question was relatively short But as I chugged on my mojito, I got another question that people tend to ask all the time. The question: how do you get really smart? Is there a shortcut? And how do you stay smart? That's what I would like to cover in this piece.
In my opinion, there are two ways to get smart—and one tool to make sure you get there efficiently.
The three elements we'll cover are: – Learning all you can in your own field
– Learning all you can in an area where you have no expertise
– Working with limits
I wasn't always a copywriter. I didn't always write sales pages or articles. While I was in university, I decided to earn some money by selling my cartoons to newspapers. A newspaper called the “Indian Post” had just started up in Mumbai, and I was encouraged to meet the features editor, Reena Kamath. Reena, or “Chips” as she was called, was this incredibly kind and educated person.
I was, in my own head a cartoonist, but not a very confident one. What Chips did was to give me enough confidence to push my art a lot more. She encouraged me to learn how to cartoon even better, so much so that I soon published my work in other magazines and newspapers.
By the time I was headed to graduation day, I had two daily comic strips in two big newspapers.
All of this confidence didn't mean a thing when I joined an advertising agency “Yes, you're really good at cartoons,” said the creative director at the Leo Burnett agency, “but you realise that advertising and cartooning are completely different, right?”
Once again I was back in newbie land. I didn't know enough to get going in the world of copywriting. Fortunately for me, I was given the honorary title of junior copywriter, a small stipend and left alone to do pretty much anything I wanted.
Which is when I found the agency library If you're in advertising, you'll fondly remember these massively thick books called the “One Show.” These doorstepping books contained hundreds of real-world advertising.
And so began my education in the world of advertising. Which brings us to the first point in this article: learning all you can in your own field.
The very concept of learning everything is, as you know, impossible Yet, what choice do we have? Everything seems to rush along madly and just to keep on top of things is quite a task. But do we have a choice? Back when I was in the Leo Burnett agency, the library was enough to keep me busy for months on end, and today we have more in a folder of our computer than we had back then.
Armed with little choice, here's what I do I read as much as I can. I'll plough through as many books as possible. Right now I have eight books sitting on my desk and at least four-five unread on the Kindle.
There are months when I'm reduced to reading books at a snail's pace, so I find it smarter to read magazines articles instead. However, my secret weapon is audio. If I'm standing in a queue at the supermarket, I'll be listening to audio. I go for walks every morning and chomp through an hour of audio.
Even while I'm making breakfast, I'll be listening to a podcast in one earbud. I'll tell you why. On the road, while walking, it's easier to focus on the podcast.
However, when I get home, my wife Renuka will suddenly pop in from the garden and want to give me some news. When I have both earbuds in, it feels a bit like “I'm busy, don't disturb me” and so I have just a single earbud on whenever I want to keep listening, without completely tuning out the world.
Does this mean you have to be learning all the time? No, it doesn't. You can listen to music, watch videos that go nowhere or simply bounce back into Facebook. Even so, one of the key elements that make people smart is that they don't believe in inborn smartness.
The greatest champions on the planet aren't great because they were born that way. The gold medalists keep pushing themselves long after the silver medalist has gone home for the day.
I was pretty hopeless at cartoons If you've seen my cartoons, you might not believe me, but I've seen some of the work coming out of the Psychotactics cartooning course. I can tell you quite categorically that even while drawing for the newspapers back in Mumbai, I wasn't as good at some of the work I've seen on the course.
So what makes a person better? It's constant learning. I was an aspiring copywriter, an aspiring marketer, an aspiring-everything you can think of. And this is the first piece of advice I gave the start ups.
What makes you great at your skill isn't some bolt of lightning coming down from the heavens. What makes you stand out is being super-knowledgeable in your field. Learning the pros and the cons of your profession instead of fluffing around trying to impress everyone else.
Is it obvious advice? Sure it is. Everyone knows that you need to learn a lot in your own field. However, making the most of your time is where it counts. If you can read a transcript while standing in a queue at your supermarket, make sure you do just that. If you can make dosas for breakfast while reading a transcript, then go right ahead.
If on the other hand, you find you're struggling to keep up with your learning, add a bit of audio in your life. You don't have to remember everything you hear and I frankly don't. I have to put down the learning into an Evernote file so that I don't forget. To be brilliant, you have to find the ways t do things that seem impossible.
But do you have to pay attention to everything? No, you don't. You want to get rid of the braggarts. The people who put those dollar signs on their site to entice you. Those people who make you feel like your subscriber list is so puny and how they're sending tens of thousands of subscribers through their funnels.
Even in the world of everything, you've got to pay attention to the people that fit your life and your philosophy. Which means that having a ear bud in your ear all the time may not suit you at all.
You may well be happy with learning a lot less so that you can be who you are. Even so, remember that the learning is non-negotiable. Do whatever it takes to learn a ton of stuff in your field, and you'll find that's what clients pay for.
Incredibly, tunnel vision learning won't get you as far as you could go. For that, you need to diverge and learn about areas where you have no expertise.
Part 2: Why You Need To Learn In Areas Where You Have No Expertise (And Have No Intention of Having Any Expertise). In July 2013, I went through a life-changing experience.
My niece Marsha wasn't doing too well at school and as usual, everyone blames the student. I'm not a fan of that school of thought. I don't believe in bad students; I believe the responsibility of the student lies with the teacher.
It's one thing to make a statement and quite another to work through the problem. In this case, my goal was to make Marsha as good as, or better than any of the students in her year.
What I hadn't counted on was the fact that she was going to give me the lesson of my life Before I started working with Marsha, I knew a lot about copywriting, about marketing etc. What I didn't know didn't bother me because I was in that tunnel focus trying to learn more about the things that affected my business.
When Marsha came along, she brought a thousand questions along with her. How are clouds formed? What are the names of all the types of clouds? Why can we see Venus so clearly at night? These questions led me down a road from which I have never recovered.
Do you know how Prussian Blue got into Hokusai's painting of the “Great Wave off Kanagawa”? How does Google predict the common cold with astonishing accuracy? Why do wildebeest feast on one area of grass while ignoring the other? And what role does the volcano Oldoinyo lengai play in this epic migration? What are cyanobacteria? Why do geologists find the “boring billion” years not boring at all?
These questions have nothing to do with your business Sitting down with Marsha—and we always sit down on the ground—near the sofa, taught me so much about the world around me. Then it went a bit further. My ability to write became better.
My ability to tell stories and do podcasts improved radically. In a short period of three years, I realised that I was a walking dummy. I knew a lot about the world of marketing and business but precious little else.
Creativity is the ability to connect two disconnected situations or objects together As a cartoonist, as a comedian or artist, this something you learn quickly or you're doomed to failure. You can't just go around connecting the dots on your sheet of paper. The dots have to join from another sheet or even no sheet at all. To be creative means stepping into a world that's not your own.
When we look at hundreds of inventions, we see this creative streak of the disconnect showing up time and time again. Velcro, the rubber tyre, popsicles, microwave ovens, Post-it even matches were the result of random accidents.
Being smart involves knowing the world around you History, geography, culture, geology—it all makes a huge difference to your work. Instead of just showing up in Egypt and losing yourself in the Pyramids, you might well notice that almost every block on the Giza pyramid has marine creatures.
There also happen to be sea creatures at the top of Mt.Everest. While this random stuff may seem to make no sense in isolation, you can quickly map the sequence of how things unfold.
Over time you get far more confidence and your brain becomes somewhat like a walking Internet You realise you can see “shallow oceans” and “tectonic plate movements” where others just see “blocks of stone” at Giza. If that's all you could see and experience it would be fabulous. For me it's amazing to look up at a sunny sky and know, based on the number of cirrus clouds that it's going to get cold and rainy in 24 hours.
Just the confidence it brings you, knowing the world around you is fabulous, but it also brings connections to your work in ways you can't imagine until you start to learn about things that are widely divergent from your business.
The question is: Where do you get all of this information? It's always been in books and magazines, of course. The New Yorker magazine has almost always jumped madly from malaria to construction; automation to the Suez Canal; The Beatles to Vermeer. And today they continue to do so like so many other magazines that cover a range of extremely interesting topics.
Equally, though are books that you can get on Amazon. Books that explore the concepts of meditation, puppet masters, alongside the Masai. Books and magazines are only part of the mix and you can learn from podcasts of every kind.
I listen to the New Yorker Hour of course, which tackles anything from Venezuela's crisis to a fascinating interview with Bruce Springsteen.
To be single minded in your pursuit of knowledge in your own field is a good idea However, it's when you step out that you learn a lot more, become more confident and almost always make a connection that leads to a better life. You can almost guarantee that learning more in your field makes for some sort of advancement you can measure.
It's much harder to justify the time spent learning about volcanoes, clouds, Ayurveda and wildebeest. In fact, other than just random facts, it seems like a complete waste of time.
I'd advise you to go down the track of the randomness, even when your work-related learning already demands more time than you have.
To become smart, you need to learn. You need to implement And sticking to the work-related stuff is already quite a task. Putting on the additional burden of learning stuff that's not remotely related to you may seem crazy, but I'd say take it on.
Which brings us to the most pertinent question of all: where do you find the time? Sure it's a great idea to learn about your work and about the world around us, but where's the time? And this was the most persistent question of all at the dinner. The answer is remarkably simple and leads right into the three-month vacation.
Part 3: Working with limits: the real secret to becoming smart Imagine you had four months to write a book Do you think given four months, you'd write the book in three months? This was the question we had to ask ourselves when we started Psychotactics back in August 2002. We were keen to run our business in a way that we had control over the business instead of the other way around. How could we take so much time off and still make our business successful? The answer, it seems, was so simple that it was hard to believe.
Put limits on your schedule—that's it The most frequently asked question I get is: how do you manage to take three months off in a year? The answer is: we assume our year is nine months long. Yes, read that again: we assume our year is nine months long. Now imagine you've finally started up a business or let's assume you've been in business for a while. How long is your year?
The concept of limits is what makes you smart If you look around the Internet today, you get two sets of people. People who seem to be working like maniacs to keep doubling their income or those who are supposedly living the Internet lifestyle but still check e-mail, do work at the beach etc while on vacation.
To each their own, I suppose, but hear me out. What makes your brain smart is downtime. Having time to rest allows all that connected and unconnected stuff come together. The brain works best when it's at rest. The way to give the brain a rest is to enforce limits.
Imagine you have only 90 minutes to write an article. What can you do in those 90 minutes? Imagine you have only a limited number of ingredients in your pantry. How do you whip up a delicious meal?
And imagine you have only 9 months in a year. How do you finish all your work (and a lot more sometimes) without working every single day of the year? If you put limits on yourself, you start to become a lot smarter.
These limits don't have to stop at learning Today we had a couple of people come around to give us new garbage stickers. The Auckland council is testing some sort of garbage system and as part of the trial we had to buy $20 worth of stickers that would last about 2 months.
When these guys came along to give us new stickers, we still had the same original bunch. In over two months we hadn't needed to use the garbage bin at all.
How's that possible, you say? Same as the three-month vacation, isn't it? You think a three-month vacation would be impossible but we've done it almost year after year since 2004. The garbage situation takes a little planning. We take our own cloth bags everywhere. We take a container box when we dine out for takeaways (you may call it food to go).
We refuse all coffee in paper cups and have our own glass/plastic cups or we use the ceramic cups at the cafe. We don't take straws, plastic bags and will not buy stupid cucumbers wrapped in cling wrap. Ergo, little or no garbage. The rest of the stuff goes in the compost bin. Impossible? Of course not.
The key is to have a mind that imposes limits If you really want to change your world, you have to believe you really have no time. Instead of a seven day week, make it a five day week and refuse to work on weekends.
Instead of a 12 month year, nine months should do nicely. Instead of trying to double your income all the time like some senseless woodpecker, try fixing your income to one that allows for tax, savings and a comfortable life.
Smarts come from limits They also come from learning: both learning in the areas of expertise and totally outside the expertise range. The vast flow of humanity just amble along without really putting in the effort to make their work smarter—or even their breaks smart.
And so it goes, year in and year out without too much of change. It's easy to do average work and just be a hero on the Internet (or even off the Internet) today. It takes a smarter mind to do something really outstanding.
So what's the one thing you can do today? Limits. Put limits on the world you live in and you'll see how you might never have much use for that massive garbage can. You may also be able to do almost all, if not more work in just 9 months of the year. You may be able to write, draw, sing and dance in a fixed time frame. And then you might have a much better life. A much smarter life.
All of this discussion came from that dinner with those startups. They set down the path of work; we went off tangent into this topic which was totally disconnected. And we could have stayed all night, but we had to leave. We had limits.
Try it. Get smarter in less time. And yes, start working towards a nine-month year.
You've told yourself you shouldn't be a perfectionist. Yet time and time again you head back to getting things done—perfectly. And in the process you get nothing done.
Find out :How To Smother Perfectionism With A Timer
Did you know that landing pages fail almost at the headline stage?
We’re all told to create landing pages. So why do they fail?
The answer, it seems, can be found at any international airport. When planes land, they don’t land all at once. They land one at a time. Yet on a landing page, we scrunch the issues together. We throw everything at the page. That’s a mistake. And this episode tells you why it’s a mistake and how to fix it.
Click here to read: How To Write A Sales Pagehttps://www.psychotactics.com/writing-sales-pages/
It might seem like perseverance is a good thing. We've been told to persist in the face of odds. Yet, there are times when you should stop.
How do you know when to stop? And why bother to persevere when failure is waiting around the corner?
Find out why perseverance can be a real pain, and when it can be a blessing.
Click here to read: Why Persevere Even When Failure is Certain
https://www.psychotactics.com/why-persevere-fails/
Resistance seems like an overbearing force in our lives
We want to achieve a lot, but as soon as we get started, resistance kicks in. But did you know there are ways around resistance?
Resistance loves a loner. If you’re working alone, you’re just setting yourself for an encounter with resistance. Resistance loves to play the game of winner. We need to put resistance in second place. Here’s how to go about the task of winning the game.
Click here to read: How To Beat The Resistance Game
https://www.psychotactics.com/resistance-detests-groups/
There are two options in life: greatness or mediocrity. But greatness seems so elusive, even so pompous. How do you call your work “great”?
How do you even know or benchmark “greatness?”.
And can a small business achieve greatness or do you have to be a dominant player like Apple, Disney and Walmart?
Click here to read: Good to Greathttps://www.psychotactics.com/good-to-great/
Whenever you run into tips on productivity it’s always this earth shaking advice
You’re advised to make these monumental changes to improve your business or life. In reality all you need are tiny little tweaks.
Important tweaks, but tiny ones. And some of these tweaks are slightly irreverent. Which is what makes these productivity tips even more interesting. You’ll enjoy this episode on productivity—gentle productivity—and here’s a tip. You may end up sleeping a lot more as well!
Click here to read: How Gentle Productivity Gets Astounding Results
https://www.psychotactics.com/gentle-productivity/
If you were to boil down marketing to a single word, it would be “risk”.
When a client is ready to buy they still hesitate. Even when there’s a sense of urgency on their part, they still go through a series of steps before they come to a decision. What are those steps? Why do clients seem to back away at the last minute?
Click here to read: How To Overcome The Hesitation Factor
https://www.psychotactics.com/elements-of-risk/
Why do we learn so slowly? Is it because we’re not good learners?
Is it age? Or is it something quite different? The problem of learning (and teaching) is dependent on the concept of Teacher vs Preacher. When you’re a preacher, you give the feeling of a ton of information, but there’s no true learning, no true application.
A teacher, gets the student to apply the skills. When you’re creating info-products, writing books or articles, this is what needs to be kept in mind.
Click to read: Why Learning a New Skill is So Difficult
https://www.psychotactics.com/why-clients-struggle/
Trying to come up with a suitable name for your book or info-product seems like a nightmare What if you’re wrong? What if the name isn’t well received?
However, there’s a way to make your book really stand out. And guess what? It’s not the title that matters. It’s the sub-title.
Find out why we’ve been tackling things the wrong way and how to get a superb name for your book or information product/course before the day is done.
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why your crappy name will bury your book/information product.
Part 2: The critical role of the subtitle and what makes it stand out.
Part 3: How to use a title and then add random interesting sub-titles.
My friend, Karen, was about to have her first child. As you’d expect, she was a bit apprehensive but also quite joyful. One of the reasons why she was so excited was the whole process of giving a name to her soon-to-be child. She had half a dozen books on “naming the child”.
While we were visiting, we had a little conversation about the naming process and she went into a lengthy explanation about how she intended to name the child. Of course, I expected her son to have an interesting name.
Several months later when I ran into Karen online, I asked her the name of her son. “Jack”, she said.
“Jack?” I responded almost incredulously. “You went through all of those books, and all you could find was, Jack?”
“Yes,” she said. “I was going to find a fancy name when I ran into an article that asked me to go to the doorway and call of the name of the kid 20 times in a day. It seemed easy to shout out “Jack”, then something like “Bertrand, so “Jack” it was.
And that is how my friend, Karen named her first born. Your “firstborn” might need a slightly different process. Especially if your firstborn is a book – and you are called upon to name the book. This is where we go slightly mad. We’re not really sure how to name our products.
Which is why this article is all about learning a structural method that will help you name your products. We will look at books or information products that already exist, and see how they have gone about the process. We will also take a look at what we’re doing at Psychotactics and how even when we understand the concept, we tend to get it wrong. Well, sometimes you can just get lazy.
What are we going to cover? 1 Why your crappy name will bury your book/information product
2 The critical role of the subtitle and what makes it stand out?
3 how to use a title and then add random interesting sub-titles.
All of these three steps are part of the journey that we need to take the name our information product. As always we need to start at the top, and that takes us to the first topic.
1) Why your crappy name will bury your book/information product. The list you see below are the successive names given to a single book.
The author tried repeatedly to come up with a great name, but these were the names he came up with—despite putting in a great effort. See if you like any of the names.
– The Parts Nobody Knows
– To Love and Write Well
– How Different It Was
– With Due Respect
– The Eye And the Ear.
Have you heard of any of these books? Possibly not, because they never made it to the bookshelf. And the author, a “certain guy” called Ernest Hemingway, died before the book’s title was finalised.
So what was the name of the book that made it to the shelves? It’s called “A Moveable Feast”. “A Moveable Feast” caught the attention of the editors and then the readers and became a bestseller (and has stayed high on the ‘books to read’ list). But it could have easily been dead in the water, with a title like “With Due Respect” or “The Eye and the Ear”.
As it appears, it’s not enough to just write a great book—you can kill your book with a lousy name. So how do you name your books? The simple answer is to make it curious. And how do you make it curious? You use both the title and the sub-title to dramatic effect, that’s how. But let’s not start with the title and take on the sub-title instead. In fact, let’s take a few good (and bad examples from the Psychotactics stable itself).
As it appears, it’s not enough to just write a great book—you can kill your book with a lousy name. Title: The Brain Audit
Sub-title: Why Customers Buy (And Why They Don’t)
So is the title interesting? Yes, it’s interesting at once. We’re terribly interested in anything to do with the brain, and so in a sea of books, a name like The Brain Audit stands out immediately. But that’s where the sub-title comes in.
Would you know if The Brain Audit was a medical text or a book on calisthenics? It would be hard to tell, right? If you look up Amazon.com for books that have the term “Brain” in it, you get a range of books including one called “The Brain That Changes Itself”, “Brain Rules”, “Brain on Fire” and you can’t really tell which one is a business book and which one isn’t. And that’s where the sub-title comes into play.
So yeah, that sub-title worked. Time to choose another, eh? The second product we take a look at is a course on Uniqueness. At Psychotactics, we have a homestudy version on “how to make your company stand out in a crowded market place”. So what’s the name of the information product? It’s called:
Title: Pick One
Sub-Title: Getting to Uniqueness
Did that sub-title excite you? If the answer “NO” comes to mind, you’re on the right track. So now that we’re decimating the crappy sub-titles, let’s go digging further and find out some more that could do with improvement. Let’s look at a set of three books that were written on the topic of presentations.
Title: ‘Black Belt Presentations’
Sub-title: No sub-title.
Ugh.
In fact, while we’re here, let’s list at least a few of the products and see why some products are easier to sell than others. And why the sub-titles make such a difference.
Title: Be Kind, Be Helpful or Begone
Sub-title: How To Build A Powerful, Community-Driven Membership Website
Title: Attversumption
Sub-title: The strategy behind attraction, conversion and consumption
Title: Website Components
Sub-title: No sub-title.
Title: The Secret Life of Testimonials:
Sub-title: Simple, Powerful Techniques to Get Better Clients-And Sales
Title: The Power of Stories
Sub-title: How to Turn Average Stories into Cliff-Hangers
Title: Chaos Planning
Sub-title: How ‘Irregular’ Folks Get Things Done
Title: Client Attractors:
Sub-title: How To Write Benefits, Features and Bullets That Speed Up Sales
Title: Design Clarity in Minutes
Sub-Title: How to put some sanity into your design with some really simple tweaks
Title: How Visuals Help Increase Sales Conversion On Your Website
Sub-title: No Sub-title.
Now as you scan those names, you can quickly tell which of the sub-titles work and which don’t You can also tell that those without sub-titles aren’t well thought through, or definitely hampered by the lack of the sub-title.
So let’s just stop for a second and see what we’ve covered: • That the title matters
• But first we must pay closer attention to the sub-title
• That it’s easy to get lazy or rushed and forget to put in the sub-title
• That some sub-titles don’t work as well as they should
Which brings up the question: Is there a simple way to write a sub-title? And the answer is yes. You can indeed create great sub-titles every single time. Let’s find out how.
Part 2: What makes a sub-title stand out? So we’re clear.
We all put our hearts and souls into creating a title for our books and products—but yes, the sub-title is often the one that draws us in. So how do we go about creating this sub-title? The easiest way is to jump right in and create. So what’s the simplest formula possible?
There is no ONE formula. And rightly so, because that would make every sub-title boring. Instead let’s look at just two.
Method 1: Headline-type of sub-title
Method 2: Problem, solution, target
Then let’s head over and pluck out a few bestsellers, shall we?
Method 1: Headline-type of sub-title Let’s first look at what they’re all about and then put in a sub-title that reads just like a headline.
a) LEAN IN, by Sheryl Sandberg with Nell Scovell: The chief operating officer of Facebook urges women to pursue their careers without ambivalence.
Title: Lean In
Sub-title given: Women, Work and the Will to Lead
Sub-title: How Women Can Forge Ahead In Their Careers Faster Than Ever Before
Sub-title: The Untold Story of One Woman’s Career Surge (And How You Can Do It Too)
Sub-title Why Women Need To Pursue Their Careers Without Ambivalence
b) THE ONE THING, by Gary Keller with Jay Papasan: Narrowing your concentration and becoming more productive.
The second book has already done the work for us.
Title: The ONE.
Sub-title given: The surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results
Sub-title: How to narrow your concentration and become more productive
Sub-title: The keys to narrowing concentration and increasing productivity.
c) GIVE AND TAKE, by Adam M. Grant: A Wharton professor’s research discloses that success depends on how we interact with others.
The third book has a vague sub-title but let’s work on it.
Title: Give and take
Sub-title given: A revolutionary approach to success
Sub-title: How People Interaction Creates a Quicker Road to Success
d) THE POWER OF HABIT, by Charles Duhigg: A Times reporter’s account of the science behind how we form, and break, habits.
And the next two books follow as well.
Title: The Power of Habit
Sub-title given: Why We Do What We Do In Life and Business
Sub-title: The Quiet Secret to Making Habits Stick Forever
Sub-title: How Habits Rule Us (And How To Break Bad Ones Forever).
Sub-title: How to Make Good Habits Out Of Bad Ones
Just adding a headline to your sub-title makes the book stand out. It almost doesn’t matter what the title happens to be. Well, not quite true. The title matters, but it’s the sub-title that can be made to do the grunt work. But writing headlines for your sub-title is not the only way. You can have sub-titles with the familiar formula found in The Brain Audit. And that is the problem and solution combo.
String them together and you can pretty some pretty outstanding sub-titles for your book. If we were to take the subtitles of the book that we have just looked at, and put in the problem-solution formula, you would get some pretty interesting subtitles. Let’s give it a crack, shall we?
The total for The Brain Audit is “The Brain Audit” but what is the subtitle? The subtitle has a problem and the solution. It goes like this: “why customers buy (and why they don’t). And that’s a problem and solution strung together.
Method 2: Problem, solution, target Let’s look at the subtitles of the books we just brought up and let’s see how they too could work with subtitles that incorporate the problem and solution.
a)LEAN IN, by Sheryl Sandberg with Nell Scovell: The chief operating officer of Facebook urges women to pursue their careers without ambivalence.
Problem: Doubt/Ambivalance
Solution: Move ahead
Target audience: Women
My Journey Through Career-Doubt—And Beyond
b) THE ONE THING, by Gary Keller with Jay Papasan: Narrowing your concentration and becoming more productive.
Problem: Concentration issues
Solution: Beat the issues
Target audience: People who have trouble concentrating
The art of beating concentration issues (and becoming more productive)
c) GIVE AND TAKE, by Adam M. Grant: A Wharton professor’s research discloses that success depends on how we interact with others.
Problem: Lack of success
Solution: Success through interaction
Target audience: People who want to succeed
The Hidden Secrets of Interaction (And How Successful People Use Them Well)
d) POWER OF HABIT, by Charles Duhigg: A Times reporter’s account of the science behind how we form, and break, habits.
Problem: Form/break habits
Solution: Form/break habits
Target audience: People who want to form/break habits
How To Turn Bad Habits Into Good—And Make Them Stick
As you have just heard, you can quite easily use the problem and the solution to create subtitles. So w hat have we covered so far? We looked at the power of subtitles vs titles. And subtitles pack so much punch. You can create your subtitle by writing a headline or you can use the problem and solution to create a subtitle that is just as effective.
However, just to prove it is the subtitle and not exactly the title that does all the grunt work, let’s change the subtitles of some very well known books. Example: Good to Great
Good to Great: How to turn your potatoes into twice the size, overnight.
Good to Great: The Secret to Non-Boring Garden Landscaping
Good to Great: How Indonesia turns out an endless array of badminton champions
Good to Great: The Story of Singapore Airlines’ Profitability
Good to Great: Why Turkey Is The Second Fastest Growing Economy In The World
Good to Great: Why Bacteria Is Winning The War Against AntiBiotics.
Blue Ocean Strategy: How to turn your potatoes into twice the size, overnight.
Blue Ocean Strategy: The Secret to Non-Boring Garden Landscaping
Blue Ocean Strategy: How Indonesia turns out an endless array of badminton champions
Blue Ocean Strategy: The Story of Singapore Airlines’ Profitability
Blue Ocean Strategy: Why Turkey Is The Second Fastest Growing Economy In The World
Blue Ocean Strategy: Why Bacteria Is Winning The War Against AntiBiotics.
Of course it won’t work for every single title. For example, if you took the name like The Brain Audit and put any sub-title, it wouldn’t work. But these examples are to show you that the title, for the most part, is not the crazy holy grail that you’re looking for.
It’s nice to have a great title.
But it’s a better strategy to have an even better sub-title.
Which brings us to a moment of utter clarity. The sub-title matters. That’s what really gets the attention of the customer both in the book store, on Amazon or on your website. Without the sub-title, we’re handicapping the book or info product. And yet so many of us (me included) have quite easily placed our emphasis on the title, and ignored the sub-titles.
Well, now you know…
So is the title of any use after all? Yes it is.
But should you go nuts trying to get a great title? No you shouldn’t.
The cartooning course we have is called the DaVinci course. Is that a great title? No it’s not. But the greatness comes from its “invisible” sub-title. So what should the sub-title have been? It should have read like this: How to go from non-artist to amazing cartoonist in 6 months (or less).
The same applies to our headlines or Article Writing Course that don’t even have titles and yet are booked out months in advance. The promise they bring is what draws the audience to the product/services. And yet, would I ever swap a title like The Brain Audit for something else? Of course not. Not having a great title is not critical for an infoproduct, but once you get one, it’s an invaluable asset.
So how do you create your titles? In the past, the titles were today’s sub-titles.
– How to stop worrying and start living: Dale Carnegie
– The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Stephen Covey
Then times changed to focus on the subtitle while the title shrunk
– Freakonomics
– The Tipping Point
– Posititioning
Some titles come from every day language e.g. the tipping point, positioning, etc. And some are made up e.g. Freakonomics, Strengths Finder.
So is there a way to find a title? Yes, if you pay close attention. When you’re in a conversation, pay close attention to what’s being said. Every sentence has the potential for some unusual term or word that could become a book title. e.g. the last sentence has “close attention”, “potential”, “in a conversation”, “conversation”, “what’s being said”.
And while you may not have great use for any of those, they are all book titles that can be used.
To get book titles from your own field, open up magazines and books related to your field Immediately you’ll see a whole bunch of terms within a book. A management book will yield titles such as “Myth of the Change”, “Cascade”, “burning platform”, “marines take care of marines” etc.
In fact I just opened up a management site and the words/titles popped out with amazing regularity. So yes, it’s all around you, these titles. And finding a title isn’t so scary as it once was, because we know that while titles are great, it’s the sub-title that really gets the customer’s attention.
So go out there and create your sub-title.
Then your title.
Summary 1 Why your crappy name will bury your book/information product
2 The critical role of the subtitle and what makes it stand out?
3 how to use a title and then add random interesting sub-titles.
Next Step: We all want to create profitable products but aren’t sure where to start We hope for some amazing formula, when all you really need are three core questions. So what are the three questions you need to have in place and how can you get started today? Click here to continue your information products journey: How To Create A Profitable Product (Three Core Questions).
https://www.psychotactics.com/create-profitable-product/
How do we get talented? Part 2 of “How To Get Talented” is a bit of a shocker.
You realise that talent is only the stuff you can’t do. If everyone can do what you can, then it’s not really a talent.
Ok, so that’s the spoiler, but listen or read anyway.
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Pattern recognition and energy
Part 2: How can you achieve a ton of talents
Part 3: Is all talent inborn?
Read online: https://www.psychotactics.com/three-definitions-talent/
Definition No.2: Talent is merely high speed pattern recognition. What is 11 x 13?
143.
What is 11 x 27?
Yes, it’s 297.
And just for good measure, what’s 11 x 45?
If you said 495 in a flash, you’d have the right answer.
However, the chances are you were slightly flummoxed by the questions You could clearly see that we were dealing with the 11 times table, but it made no sense whatsoever when you had to multiply these random two digit numbers with 11. And yet a 10-year-old could do it quite quickly. I know this to be true because I teach willing 10-year-olds this simple maths trick.
Let’s start at the top, okay? First, let’s look at the numbers. What’s 2 + 7? OK, so take that 9 and stick in the centre, of the 2 and 7. What number do you get? Sure it’s 2-9-7. Now, what’s 11 x 27? It’s 2-9-7.
Confused? My brain took a little time to work out the system as well So let’s take a simpler example where you already know the answer. What’s 11 x 12? It’s 132, right? So what we did was take the 1 + 2, and we got 3. We stuck that number 3 in between the 1 and the 2. And we got 1-3-2.
Okay, so what’s 11 x 44?
4 + 4 = 8. So that’s 484.
What’s 11 x 33?
3 + 3 = 6. So it’s 363.
Once you have the pattern, you can pretty much multiply any two digit number by 11 and get an answer in seconds And what you’ve done is acquire a talent. An witty-bitty talent, but a talent nonetheless. And the way we’ve gone about it is to isolate the pattern and then roll it out slowly. At this point, your brain can figure out the pattern no matter what two digit number you multiply with 11.
A similar concept applies to just about any skill Take drawing for example. Many, if not most of us, say we draw like a six-year-old. And you know what? You’re right. You draw like a six-year-old because you stopped drawing when you were six. You can walk into any school on the planet, and you’ll find that kids love drawing.
Give them a set of crayons, chalk, even a piece of coal, and they’ll be drawing endlessly. But ask them to do maths or grammar, and they look at you like you’re a banana.
However, that kid gets a packed lunch and is sent off to school. The years whizz by and those kids are 10. Ask them about grammar, or multiplication tables, and they can give you pretty solid answers. But ask them to draw and notice what happens. They draw like six-year-olds.
Talent is about pattern recognition Those kids were given patterns that involved algebra and grammar, and so they picked up on those patterns. Music? Arts? Clay modeling? All the stuff they did right at the start? Well, that’s for babies, isn’t it? And this is how we go about life. We learn or are given patterns, and we dump the others. Or at least put them in cold storage. Some patterns are crucial, so we keep refining them.
Take eating with a spoon, for instance.
When you were a year old, trying to get a spoon full of mashed potato from the plate to your mouth was a major issue. Given a chance to “do your own thing” the potato mash would be partly on your face, on the ground and the dining room floor would look like a potato war zone.
Now you’re able to use a fork, knife and conduct a conversation while trying to look up Facebook on your phone—and all at the same time. Somewhere along the way, pattern recognition kicked in. What seems like a mundane task of eating a potato was once horribly complicated. But given enough time and pattern recognition, you’re now a pro at potato eating.
And that’s because all of this pattern recognition is costly in terms of energy Think of it as a mansion with lights. When you’re first learning something new, you have to turn on every light in the house. It takes enormous energy just to do the simplest task. Over time the brain figures out the pattern. Instead of every light, it turns on half, then quarter of the lights. Finally, it probably needs almost negligible energy to do a task you’re familiar with.
Take for example the task of walking. You were utterly hopeless at walking when you first started, right? You don’t think much of it now, do this small task for me. Stand up and walk across the room, and say “left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, balance, balance, balance.”
You’ll make it across the room, but your brain is using up so much energy that it instantly rebels. And it does so because it’s already worked out the pattern. It needs almost no power to get you to walk across that room.
All the skills you struggle with are a matter of pattern recognition and pattern execution When you see someone giving an excellent presentation, you wonder how they become such great speakers. And yet, you’re not looking at their feet, are you? If you look at the feet of excellent speakers, they’re not randomly moving around the stage. They’re purposely moving in a triangular shape from one end to the other. When they get to one edge of the triangle, they stop. They scan the audience from one end to the other, thus making eye contact.
So without saying a word, a speaker would have to learn how to walk, how to stop, how to make the sweeping eye contact—all elements of pattern recognition. When you look at the speech, it’s a series of items that include the graphics and content on the slides, the structure of the presentation, great stories and examples, and yes, crowd control. If you thought, “hey,
I’ll never be as good a speaker as that guy up on stage”, you’re right. You’re right because there are dozens of elements that the brain has to recognise and then implement. Just the walking across the stage might take you a few weeks to master, let alone everything else.
But what about those who can pick up patterns instantly? All of us, without exception, pick up patterns very quickly. We do have biases of picking up patterns. Some of us may find reading to be more fruitful than audio, while others may love audio. Some may prefer video and others detest video.
Picking up of a pattern relies strongly on the bias, but also on the way the pattern is laid out. A good teacher can get a student to pick up patterns a lot faster than a mediocre teacher that simply doles out information.
Even so, some of us recognise patterns faster than others Stephen Wiltshire is a pretty good example of instant pattern recognition. Wiltshire is an autistic British architectural artist. He’s gained fame as he’s able to draw an entire city after just seeing in once. In video after video on YouTube, Stephen draws New York, Rome, London and Singapore after just a single helicopter ride.
His work is so precise that he matches every window, pillar, and doorway. And this is the kind of pattern recognition that most of us refer to when we talk about talent. We can’t just waltz into a room, pick up a violin and play complex music.
We feel that only talented people can do this. Yet, there’s a downside to being able to do very complex activities almost instantly. Wiltshire, for instance, struggles with everyday activities: like boarding a train or having a long conversation with people.
The reality is that we “average” people can achieve a ton of talent in various fields We consider ourselves to be pretty average, but with the right teacher, the right methods and the right group, we can achieve extraordinary levels of talent in diverse fields. There’s no instant hit for us, of course, but we can achieve all of the talents we need and still do everyday activities with ease. The moment the talent or skill is broken down into isolated pockets of learning, we can quickly pick up the talent and become exceedingly good at a skill.
Talent is just pattern recognition and pattern execution at high speed And you know it’s a pattern because you can see the works of art. You know a Picasso is a Picasso because Picasso had a style. And what is style? Yup, it’s just science sped up.
Picasso may not have been able to explain how his brush work ended up as a piece of art, but the very fact that we recognise it means he used a system, a style that was his own. For a forger to replicate a Picasso, all he needs is the blueprint of the pattern and we’d be duped into buying a very expensive piece of junk.
It’s easy to believe that all talent is inborn Yet, almost everything we do today is a learned behaviour. Our languages, the ability to write, speak, walk, dance, cook—they’re all a style; a pattern. And while no doubt there’s something, some hardware we’re born with, the vast majority of what we do is all learned through pattern recognition and execution.
Which brings us back to 11 x 22
Yes, the answer is 242.
But what about 11 x 29?
You carry over the digit because it adds up to 11. So it’s 3-1-9.
And one more. What is 11 x 99?
Hah, you’ll have to remember that by heart: It’s 1089.
See, it’s a pattern. Find a great teacher, who has a good system and a group, and you’ll magically become talented. No doubt practice will be involved, but it’s far less practice than you’d imagine. And the results will be far superior to just plodding around on your own.
So we’ve finished two definitions of talent. – Talent is a reduction of errors
– Talent is a pattern recognition system.
Let’s go to the third part, which will stop you in your tracks a bit. Let’s explore talent from quite another angle: something you can’t do.
Definition No.3: It’s only stuff you can’t do. Imagine I told you I was really talented at washing dishes.
Okay, how about sharpening pencils, would you consider that a talent?
And yet when I say: I’m magnificent at cooking or superb at drawing cartoons, you’re instantly interested, aren’t you?
In effect, talent is only something you and I can’t do. If you can wash dishes and I can wash dishes, it’s not a talent.
The moment you can do complex maths equations and I can’t, hey, now you’re talented.
Look around you and see what you consider to be talented people They’re just people who are doing things you can’t do. They know how to write programs, or can sing well, or dance well. And you can’t do it, so it’s suddenly a talent. I grew up in Mumbai, and when we were out on the street, we’d have kids speaking different languages.
I learned about six languages without trying too hard. While I’m not fluent in all those six, I can understand and be understood.
If you showed up from a country where the only language of instruction is English, you’d think I was excellent at learning languages. However, on the streets of Mumbai, almost any kid would know more than two-three languages.
It’s the same in Europe as well. You’ll find most Europeans on the mainland are fluent in two or three languages. And they don’t think it’s something wonderful. They don’t see it as a unique talent.
Now put yourself on the starting blocks of any Olympic sport And almost immediately you see how the competitors consider themselves. They don’t see this vast gulf of talent. Sure, one athlete may hog most of the medals, but it’s not like that athlete is way ahead of the others. They’re just marginally faster, often by a few hundredth of a second. And so are you, by the way. You write slightly better than the next person. Or slightly worse, as the case may be.
But there’s one more pretty insidious point we have to cover Let’s say one person can write, draw, cook, dance, sing, take pictures, garden, and ski very well. And let’s say you can’t do any of the above. It seems like you chose the short straw in life, right? That when you were born, somehow you got deprived of all but the most mundane of skills.
That somehow the other person can excel in half a dozen competencies, and still continues to “discover” more talents along the way. Surely not one of us is so deprived while another person has such a vast number of abilities.
There’s no doubt that we all have different brains, but to have such a high inequality of talents seems utterly bizarre. ”Even so, we’ve come to believe this untruth. Which is where I need to take you down a slight detour of why I feel so passionate about this talent discussion.
Back in 2008, I started up a blog on this topic of talent I had to write things down because the more I discussed this issue of talent, the more people brought up objections. And it’s not like they’d stick to a single point either.
I’d find the topic would bounce wildly from Michael Phelps, to genetics and everything in between. But it wasn’t enough to write a blog. And so I decided to do something that would prove without a doubt that talent can be acquired in an incredibly short period.
The challenge was simple enough If you walk into a cafe and ask: Who’s a writer? Who’s a singer? Who’s a dancer? You’ll get some response. If you were to ask “Who’s a cartoonist?” the place goes quiet.
So we decided to start up the cartooning course. It wasn’t about picking people who could draw. Instead, it was quite the opposite. The challenge was to turn everyone into a cartoonist. Notice I didn’t say, “anyone.” I said, “everyone.”
There would be no failure Every single person in that cafe would become cartoonists if they joined the course. But of course, I had my “cafe” at 5000bc. And so I offered the course free of charge. Today that course costs over $1000, but back then I wanted to prove that this crazy goal was possible. And if you look at the work that comes out of the cartooning course, you will frankly, be stunned.
The same concept needed to be applied to article writing or headlines or copywriting. It wasn’t just about getting one person or two people to be very talented. I wanted to make the training like I got on the streets of Mumbai. Everyone was able to speak “languages.” Everyone had the talent.
It’s incredibly hard to believe that talent isn’t inborn We somehow like to believe we’re special, but for the most part, talent is just a reduction of errors. If you find the errors, you can fix them. The fewer errors you make, the better you are at completing a task. Fewer errors result in greater efficiency.
Instead of the job just being another mundane task, you’re now able to push your limits. So when I took two days to write an article, I had no energy to do much else. Now I can write over 4000 words in a morning, and I still have the energy to find some great stories and make the article come alive in a way I could never do before.
All those errors I used to make back in the year 2000, well, I don’t make many of them anymore. And so hey, I’m a writer. That’s the first point: talent is a reduction of errors.
The second point is simply one of understanding how your brain works It’s all about pattern recognition. You probably couldn’t multiply 11 x 24 before today, but now you can. And maybe you can’t write a sales page without banging your head against a wall, but given the pattern, you will.
Any skill can be broken down into smaller bits, and you can recreate the pattern. Will that make you Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt? No, it won’t. There are a lot of other reasons that we’re not covering right now.
Instead of bringing up objections about why you can’t do something, go out there and find the teacher, find the system, find the group. And understand it’s a matter of recognising the pattern and then executing it.
Yes, you can cook food as well as any other accomplished chef. You can draw just as well as anyone. And you can make an outstanding presentation. All the limits lie in not understanding the pattern.
Finally, the last definition of talent is a closer look at ourselves in the mirror. How come we got passed up when the next guy got not one but a dozen talents? And how come we consider those gifts to be talents only because we can’t do it. It’s time to ask yourself these hard questions.
The concept of inborn talent is a prison. If you believe in innate talent, that’s it; you’re done. You can’t learn any more. You’re stuck forever. Or you can start searching for a teacher, system, and group. And explore a world like never before.
Oh, and yes, I am really talented at washing dishes!
If you missed Part 1, here is the link: Rapid Talent (How To Get There and What Holds Us Back)
To read online: https://www.psychotactics.com/rapid-talent/
To join 5000bc: https://www.5000bc.com/
Why do others seem more talented than we are? Is talent innate? Is it just practice? Or is there something else.
Incredibly the key to talent is in the way you define talent. Change the definition and you see it in a whole new light.
In Part 1 of this episode on talent, you’ll see how mere definitions change the way you see the world of talent (and how it can get you talented faster than before).
Additional rocket launch audio recordings used in this episode are courtesy of NASA (https://www.nasa.gov/)
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Our battle with talented people.
Part 2: Is talent a reduction of errors?
Part 3: What has “Austin’s Butterfly” got to do with talent.
7 miles per second That’s what it takes for a spacecraft to break out of Earth’s orbit. Breaking free of the gravity of Earth and heading into space is called “Escape Velocity” and is easily one of the biggest challenges of space travel. The spacecraft needs an enormous amount of fuel to break free of Earth’s gravity. And yet, that very fuel adds to the weight of the rocket. The more fuel you have, the more thrust you achieve, but the fuel also adds to the weight of the rocket.
It’s almost a maddening Catch 22 situation that scientists have been trying to solve for ages.
And it also drives us crazy when we look around us and see people who are clearly more talented than us We had this problem in school. Some kids were brilliant at writing and others that excelled in maths.
As we grew up, we noticed people who sang better, danced better, are better artists, speakers, pick up languages faster than we could ever imagine.
And then we brush it off We believe we were born with certain skills and it’s best to use them to our fullest capacity. The gravity of our situation holds us back.
That’s not the way scientists look at gravity. For them, gravity is a challenge. Achieving “escape velocity” is simply a matter of breaking through what holds us back.
It’s always about how to go at 7 miles per second in the most efficient manner possible.
What you’re about to read is my battle with talent. You may already know of some of my skills. Writing, drawing, teaching, painting, cooking—that’s what you might have seen. You may not know that I’m also an excellent babysitter, dance exceedingly well, learn programs at very high speed and know more than six languages.
And the reason I’m stating all of this isn’t to impress you. In fact, it’s the reason why I started studying the science of acquiring talent back around the year 2008. I’d be sitting at the cafe, and someone would come up to me and tell me how I was “talented” at drawing. I’d be on the dance floor, and I’d get a compliment about how well I danced.
Compliments are amazing. They were my Jamba Juice. They spurred me on to get a lot better. But they also drove me crazy. It almost seemed like people were suggesting I was born with the skill. And so I started on an uphill climb. To prove that innate talent may not exist. In reality, I don’t care whether it exists at all. But it wasn’t easy to say it out aloud because the very concept of acquiring talent seems improbable. “Not everyone can be Michael Phelps,” they tell me. Not everyone can be Albert Einstein.
The funny thing is I love pushback I love it that people kept putting objections in my way because somehow I had to prove beyond any doubt that talent could be acquired. What made the challenge even more interesting was the concept of 10,000 hours. I was determined to prove that you have didn’t need anything remotely close to 10,000 hours to acquire a very high level of skill.
But you don’t have to believe me—well, not right away.
All I’m asking you to do is listen to three definitions of talent. And then I’ll have made that little dent in your universe. Or at least that’s the theory. So let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of talent and see why mere definitions can make you see the world the way I see it.
It might even make you a better dancer.
Are you ready? Let’s go, then.
Definition No.1: A reduction of errors. No matter where you look, you find people who have talents in one area or another—except one.
Not one person has innate talent when it comes to riding a bicycle.
Definition No.1: A reduction of errors.When you see parents trying to teach kids to ride, they run wildly behind the kid, shouting out instructions that fall on deaf ears. After all the kid is trying desperately to pedal, steer and not go kaboom into the tree. So no one teaches you to ride a bike, and no one (at least no one I know) was born with the ability to ride a bicycle.
Assuming you can ride a bicycle, that leaves us with only one conclusion Bike riding has x. no of errors you can make. Errors that involve steering, pedalling, balancing, etc. And slowly but surely, you started eliminating those errors one by one. The more errors you reduced, the less crashed into trees. Eventually, as you ironed out most of the mistakes, you were able to sail away down the road, chattering with your friends.
Talent is a reduction of errors When you begin to learn a new skill, you make an enormous number of errors. Like a student driver who’s learning to drive a stick-shift, you lurch back and forth, trying to master the skill. Since your brain has no reference point of the errors, it’s unable to cope, and you continue to find the learning extremely tedious. If you were to ask someone how to learn to drive a car or a bicycle for that matter, they tend to answer in a single word: practice.
Yet, practice is not the answer Even deliberate practice is not the answer. Instead, what’s needed is an understanding of errors. When the brain consciously or sub-consciously knows what errors it’s making, it prompts us to take corrective action.
Take for example the act of dealing with a hot pan. There’s only one kind of error that’s possible with a hot pan. And yet a two-year-old child may not realise that glaring error and head right for the pan. But once we’re aware of the mistake, we take scrupulous care to avoid hot pans. We also avoid stepping in dog poo, potholes, and closed doors.
The trick to learning, or talent, isn’t just in practice or deliberate practice. Instead, it’s about understanding the errors. Once you understand the errors, you are closer to fixing them. Once you’ve reduced or eliminated the errors, you effectively are talented.
An excellent example of error fixing is the website building software called Dreamweaver If you were to open up Dreamweaver today, you’d find the option of viewing a website in two different modes. You could see the website in HTML on the left-hand pane, while simultaneously seeing the graphical view of your site on the right. Even if you were completely oblivious about HTML code, all you’d need to do is open up a perfectly good looking website in Dreamweaver.
Then head into the HTML pane, and make a single change. You’d immediately see the change reflected on the right-hand side. Immediately your brain would go into “hot pan” mode, recognising the error. You may run into hot pans in the future, but at least you know better because you’ve learned from your mistake.
Many of us believe that talent is either inborn or acquired by practice Instead, it’s acquired by a reduction of errors. Everything you do today had a huge error rate at one point in your life. Addition, subtraction, spelling and grammar were all riddled with errors. Some people you may know make mistakes such as spelling. They spell “you’re” as “your” or “pique” as “peak.”
When you see these mistakes, you experiencing a situation where the person has not learned to spot and correct the error. You can’t fix a mistake unless you know you’re making one in the first place.
Take for instance my niece, Marsha When Marsha was just three years old she came to visit us in New Zealand for the first time. At the time, her speech was a bit garbled, like most three-year-olds. Even so, one of the letters that foxed her was the letter “r.”
Wherever “r” was prominent, she’d substitute it with a “y.” So “road” became “yoad,” and “room” became “yoom.” And of course, we only ever “yolled in the gyass” (that’s “rolled in the grass”). If you tried to point out that she was pronouncing “r” as “y,” she would look at you with puzzlement. In her brain “r” sounded like “y.”
Then one day I decided to speak exactly like her. I didn’t say “road,” I said “yoad.”
I didn’t say “grass,” I said “gyass.”
Marsha didn’t say anything, or if she did, she probably said it in her garbled method. But within two days, she was pronouncing the “r” perfectly. Her brain, it seems, was able to detect the error when the word was said incorrectly. And within days, and without any training, she was able to fix the problem.
This isn’t to say that all learning is made through trial and error The brain is a pattern-recognition system and will learn efficiently enough by just copying patterns. It’s why we learn to speak a language, then adopt the accent of a parent and then change our accents depending on where we go to school.
A good chunk of learning is purely pattern recognition. What holds us back from learning a skill like dancing, cooking or drawing, isn’t pattern recognition, but knowing what we’re doing wrong.
There’s a video online called “Austin’s Butterfly.” It shows a group of very young children appraising the work of one of their classmates. Austin, who’s probably in first grade, and has just drawn a butterfly. There’s only one problem. The Tiger Swallowtail butterfly looks amateurish, and the kids know it. At that tender age, they’re not about to let Austin get away with such a terrible piece of art.
Then something quite unusual happens.
The teacher takes over and asks the kids to give feedback One by one they pipe up with their critiques, so that Austin can take a crack at the second draft. They point to the angles, the wings, making the wings of the butterfly more pointy. They go on, and on, and the illustration improves with every draft.
Six drafts later, the butterfly looks like something you’d find in a science book. The finished butterfly is so stunning that anyone—you, me, anyone—would be proud to call the illustration our own.
What’s at work is simply a reduction of errors This article isn’t about becoming Michael Phelps or Muhammad Ali. We’re all tempted to diverge into why we’re not winning gold medals by the dozen at the Olympics. And yet, even at that level of super-heroes, there’s only one gold medal winner.
Why is this so? In the Olympic pool, Phelps is often only one-hundredth of a second faster than his rival. That’s hardly an advantage. The only difference is that Phelps is committing fewer errors. And just for the record, Phelps too was beaten by a much shorter, stockier swimmer from Singapore. On that particular day, in that particular race in the Rio Olympic Games, Joseph Schooling made fewer errors.
Talent is merely a reduction of errors.
When you reduce the errors, you get talented.
But that’s only the first definition.
But what of those who seem innately talented? They do things that we could never hope to do. In the next section, we look at the second definition of talent. Where talent is just pattern-recognition at high speed.
(Additional rocket launch audio recordings used in this episode are courtesy of NASA (https://www.nasa.gov/))
Continue reading or listening here: Part 2: Three Definitions of Talent—And Why They’ll Help You Understand Yourself Better
Part 2
The listen: http://traffic.libsyn.com/psychotactics/118b_-_Rapid_Talent_How_To_Get_There_and_What_Holds_Us_Back.mp3
To read the article: https://www.psychotactics.com/three-definitions-talent/
Which is the most frustrating part of an article? Yes, it’s the First Fifty Words. We get so stuck at the starting point when writing an article, that it’s almost impossible to go ahead.
But what if there were not just one, but three ways to create drama in your article? That would be cool, wouldn’t it?
Well, here you go. Not one, but three ways to start your article with drama and get attention.
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In this episode Sean talks about—Three ways to get your readers attention. Part 1: The power of story
Part 2: Disagreement with your premise
Part 3: How to create intrigue withlists
You can read it online here:
3 Ways To Create Instant Drama In Your Articles
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In 1974, New York had a problem that didn’t seem to go away. No matter where you rode the subway in New York, there was graffiti painted both inside and outside the trains. Young men with their spray cans covered the city’s trains with their version of art and soon the subway came to be seen as a symbol of a city on its way to the gutter.
The city put up security fences, razor wire and brought in guard dogs They even went through one amazingly misguided strategy to paint all the trains white. Sure enough, The Great White Fleet as they called it, was soon covered with a fresh layer of graffiti. The city couldn’t seem to think of any way to solve the graffiti problem.
Then along came David Gunn In 1984, Gunn was appointed as the president of the New York City (NYC) Transit Authority. Gunn had a track record of cleaning up subways in Boston and Philadelphia. Even so, the city of New York had been battling the graffiti problem for over a decade. What radical idea could Gunn implement that would turn back the clock to better times?
As it turned out Gunn’s solution centered around a single idea The moment a train was bombed with graffiti, it was to be pulled over and painted. If a train car was being repaired, they’d ensure the car remained graffiti-free.
If they found graffiti on a train overnight, the NYC Transit Authority would sweep in and repaint the train. Even during rush hour if they found a train had been “bombed”, they would pull it back to the yard and clean it up, so that the graffiti was nowhere to be seen.
On May 12, 1989, the city declared victory over the city’s graffiti artists.
Notice what just happened? You started reading this article to find out how to write the First Fifty Words. But before you knew it, you were transported back to New York, the subway and the graffiti dilemma. And the reason why you got to this point is because of the drama created by the First Fifty Words. When your article, presentation or webinar has a powerful opening, the client gets pulled along happily.
And yet, it’s not always easy to know how to go about creating those First Fifty Words. So today, let’s take a look at three ways to create the drama.
Method 1: The power of story
Method 2: Disagreement with your premise
Method 3: Lists
Method 1: The Power of the Story In the 1980’s a persistent drought swept through the African Savannah.
Watering holes dried up, food was scarcer than ever. Yet, one animal, the kudu, wasn’t affected as much. This is because the kudu can continue to get its nutrition from the hardy Acacia tree. Most other animals don’t tangle with the Acacia’s thorns, but the kudu navigates its way between the thorns to get at the juicy leaves.
But suddenly dozens of kudu started dropping dead.
When the kudu were examined, there seemed to be no reason for the deaths. They looked perfectly healthy and didn’t appear to be suffering from any malnutrition. However, the number of deaths soon soared into the hundreds, then into the thousands.
Now we may believe that Africa is one vast open area, but in reality a lot of wildlife lives in vast ranches While it was devastating for the ranchers to see the kudu fall to the ground in heaps, they were also puzzled by the inconsistency of the deaths. On one ranch the kudu continued to thrive. On other ranches, their numbers decreased precipitously. There seemed to be no answer to the question, until they considered the number of kudu on the ranches.
On some ranches there were a lot of kudu On others there were a lot less. As the drought raged on, the kudu had no other vegetation but Acacia leaves. Once the tree lost all its leaves, it would no longer be able to harness sunlight. In effect, the Acacia trees would die. In an act of self-preservation, the tree started producing more tannin.
Not just more tannin, but lethal amounts of it. Biologist and African herbivore expert, Professor Woutor Van Hoven examined the rumen of the kudu and found the digestive system to be in complete shutdown. Now tannin is a compound can only come from a natural source. It wasn’t hard to point fingers at the Acacia tree.
On the ranches with dense kudu populations the Acacia tree was producing 400% more tannin The tannin was getting inside the digestive system and killing the kudu. In effect, the Acacia trees were culling the kudu. On the ranches with sparser kudu, the tannin wasn’t anywhere close to these lethal amounts. The plant was clearly going through a stage of self-preservation.
Story, it seems is easily the fastest way to get a client’s attention And we all know this fact of attention-getting to be true. But we aren’t sure where to find the stories or how to make them work and then how to reconnect them to the article.
Those are three elements in themselves, so let’s start with finding the stories. I tend to find my stories all around me. But if that’s not a good enough answer for you, here are a few links. Go to www.smithsonian.com, or live science.com, history.com, bbcearth or listverse.com.
In effect, what you need to do is to go any of these sites, spend some time reading and then save whatever you need to Evernote.
Of course, as I keep harping on repeatedly, without Evernote, you’re just wasting your time.
I can literally find hundreds of stories in a few minutes, precisely because of Evernote. Finding stories was a bit of a nightmare at first, but I soon realised I could find two or three stories a day that related to history, geology, biology and case studies.
Added to that were my own personal stories, and so the first problem was done and dusted. If I could find three stories a day, I’d have about 21 stories by the following week. And no matter how prolific a writer or speaker I turn out to be, I can’t go through that volume of stories. But how do you know which stories work?
Look for the unfolding ups and downs The most boring story is one that stays on a single track: either up or down. A good story is like the kudu story. It started out with the drought, went to the fact that kudu didn’t care and neither did the ranchers. Then kudu start dying, yet the next ranch with fewer kudu has no such trouble. The biologist comes in, investigates and we have the killer: the Acacia tree itself.
It was an act of self-preservation. That story has bounce all the way, as do most good stories. You’ll probably have noticed the same bounce for the NY subway story. How the situation went from bad to worse, until David Gunn came in and put an end to the graffiti.
Stories make for a dramatic start You know how to find the stories and how to store them in Evernote. You can even find the bounce in these stories. What remains is how to connect them to your main content. Notice how I finished the kudu story? The last line was about self-preservation.
So what would the theme of the article be? Sure, self-preservation. But what if the last line was “speedy response”? Well, then the article would head over to “speedy response”. The last line of your story, whatever you happen to choose, is what creates the bridge towards the rest of the article.
The first port of call should always be a story, or analogy When you go to Amazon.com and read the reviews of The Brain Audit, you’ll find most of the readers seem to agree on one fact. Many of them seem to suggest The Brain Audit is exceedingly easy and refreshing to read. But what makes it refreshing? Or rather what makes content boring? It’s clearly the lack of stories and analogies.
You can’t turn more than two-three pages without running into analogies and stories in The Brain Audit. The Three Month Vacation Podcast has at least three stories or analogies and it could go to as many as six or seven. Articles, webinars, reports—they all have stories and analogies.
To get your article going, you need to start storing stories You need to start looking for those ups and downs.
And then it’s a matter of reconnecting by inserting the last line into the story, so it reconnects with the article.
But stories are just one way of taking on the First Fifty Words. The second method is to disagree with your headline.
Method 2: Disagreeing with your premise In 1949, the ad agency DDB had a reasonably big challenge.
They were given the opportunity to sell the Volkswagen Beetle. This wasn’t just another car. It was a post-war German “people’s car”, connected with development plans that went back to Hitler himself. Plus the car was small, slow and considered ugly.
Added to the challenge was the fact that DDB had a paltry advertising budget of just $800,000. So how do you create instant drama when the odds are stacked against you?
You simply disagree with your premise, or in the case of Volkswagen, the prevailing premise Back in 1949, the war had ended and overblown consumption was the order of the day. American cars were big, bulky and drank tons of fuel. All the advertising pointed to how fast most American cars happened to be. All, except Volkswagen, that is.
One of their earliest ad took almost everyone by surprise. It said: Presenting American’s slowest fastback. And the ads talked about how the cars wouldn’t go over 72 mph (even though the speedometer shows a top speed of 90).
What Volkswagen Beetle advertising did was create intense drama by disagreeing with the status quo.
The very same principle applies to your article writing and gives you the clue as to what you should be doing as well. To snap your audience out of whatever they’re doing, it’s a good idea to disagree with the prevailing situation or idea.
And since you’re the one who wrote the headline, what better way to go than to disagree with your headline? Let’s take an example.
Let’s say your headline says: How to increase prices (without losing customers)
You’d think the article would continue in the vein of increasing prices, wouldn’t you? But instead, it goes the other way. The first paragraph instructs you to reduce your prices in half. Then down to a quarter of the original price.
And then the text goes on to explain something you’re already quite aware of: that reducing prices is a very bad strategy. However, the technique it uses is what gets your attention. Instead of going in the direction you’d expect, it moves in quite the opposite direction. Disagreement works because of the mild shock, and the consequent curiosity to figure out what’s happening.
But it’s one thing to examine an ad or an existing article. How do you create this disagreement in your own articles? Let’s start off with a headline: The 3 Keys To A Perfect Ayurvedic Diet. How could you disagree with this headline in your first paragraph? Start off by thinking how you could sabotage the perfect Ayurvedic diet. Got the idea, yet? All you need to do is think up your headline and think of the exact opposite behaviour.
Let’s try another headline, shall we?
How to get your projects done using an unknown system of time management. Now let’s disagree with the headline.
Time management is an erroneous concept, which is why most of us struggle to get anything done. Haven’t you gone through whole days where you’ve had loads of time, but still failed to get anything done? That’s because we don’t really work with time. We work with energy instead.
See what’s happening? You’re pushing in a headline that seems to talk about one thing but the opening paragraph seems to disagree. But you don’t have to keep the disagreement going.
After you’ve made your point in a paragraph or so, you can go back to the original premise of the article. You’ve completed your mission. You’ve woken up your audience with the disagreement and they’re keen to read more of what you have to say.
So far we’ve looked at stories. We’ve also looked at disagreeing with your premise. But there’s a third way that really helps when you’re feeling blank. And this method is called the “list method”. Let’s find out how we start articles with lists.
Method 3: Lists Let’s take one type of list:
The Netherlands 70%
USA 30%
UK 30%
Ok, so let’s take another list:
A bucket
A spoon
Two ladles of chocolate ice-cream
Lists get attention and especially when you use it within the First Fifty Words. And in case you’re wondering, the first list that comprised of the Netherlands, USA and UK, it was a factor of social trust. In the Netherlands, 7 out of 10 people say they trust each other.
In the US and UK, only 3 out of 10 people seem to have social trust. However, we’re not here to debate the issue of social trust. What we’re looking at, is the power of lists when used in the First Fifty Words of your article.
The moment you slide in a list, the reader is intrigued And rightly so, because a list is a sequence of elements and somehow that sequence needs to end up in a logical place. So if your headline was: “How to get a business up and running in 90 days”, you could start your article with a list.
That list immediately catches the attention of the reader and keeps that attention as you transition over to the main article.
Lists don’t need much preparation Unlike a story that needs all that bounce and mystery, a list is almost sterile in its approach. You don’t even need any disagreement in a list. If anything, a list seems to take the reader right to where they want to go, just like a recipe.
And that’s why lists are so cool, but there is a downside. Lists are so spartan that they stand out. If you’ve used a list to start up an article recently, you’re probably going to have to wait to use a list again. The very format is so conspicuous that it requires a good deal of time to pass before you can re-use the technique in another article, podcast or presentation.
Nonetheless, they are great starting points and in you’re in a tricky situation, start with a list.
Summary In this very article, we ran into the story of the NY subway, the kudu on the African savanna and the story of the Volkswagen Beetle being introduced to America in 1949. Stories are easily the best tool to get the attention of your readers within the First Fifty Words.
It’s what I use consistently in books from The Brain Audit to Dartboard Pricing. If you find it easy to read the books, yes, it’s because of two elements. The first is the structure of the book, but easily the biggest other factor is the sheer volume of stories and analogies that help you understand the concepts faster and more permanently.
However there’s more than one way to skin a cat The method we looked at was the factor of disagreement. And the way to go about disagreeing with your headline is to write a headline e.g. How to buy a second hand computer that will last six years—and then go in the opposite direction. Tell the reader a story about computers that failed. Go the opposite way and you do what DDB did with Volkswagen Beetle. And this method sure gets a ton of attention.
Finally we get to the third way: creating lists This method is the easiest of all. For instance, if I wanted to start this article with a list, I could start with the three points we’ve covered, namely, “The power of the story, disagreeing with your premise and lists”.
And that would get the reader curious enough to want to read more. Then I could continue the article by simply explaining each of the points and fleshing them out in detail.
But where should you start? What’s the ONE thing you can do? If you’re stuck for time, try the list today. But ideally the best thing you can do for the long run is to fire up your copy of Evernote. Start saving stories.
Go to BBC Earth, History.com, ListVerse.com, Smithsonian.com and start saving stories. There’s nothing more powerful than stories especially when you’re starting up the First Fifty Words.
Next Step: You know how they say "first impressions count?"
Well, they do. Within the first three seconds of reading an article or an email, your client is already making a decision whether to read on. Many of us aren’t restricted to email. We use webinars, video, podcasts and presentations. And all of these media have one thing in common: they all need a great start.
Learning how to really create outstanding openings (whether in articles or any media) is deeply gratifying. And powerful.
More details: http://psychotactics.com/first-50-words
What links thousand year old organisations with a bike company like Harley Davidson? What do football teams have in connection with businesses owners that can take time off?
It’s all here in these free set of goodies (yes, 36 audio files) and a PDF. You’ll love how you can implement much of this information right away.
Learn Why Marketing ‘Doesn’t’ Work. And Why You Need Structure In Your Business!
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You will learn in The Brain Alchemy MasterClass: 1) The Spider’s Secret: How to get customers to call you instead of you chasing them.
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Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
Here is the link to get: The Brain Alchemy MasterClass Free (Yes, all 36 audio files and the PDF)
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The difference between you struggling in your business and zooming ahead is understanding the structure of business Working hard is great, but it’s not the solution to your problems. No matter what business you’re in — a structured marketing system is the best way to exponentially increase your sales.
The Brain Alchemy is about tactics and strategy that will form the very core of your business, no matter whether you’re just starting up, or have been in business ‘forever.’
There are over 253 testimonials for The Brain Alchemy MasterClass When I heard the Brain Alchemy MasterClass my immediate reaction was, “Damn, I spent so much on going to business school and they never taught us any of these.”
I had a big paradigm shift in the way I was thinking about business and marketing. I also understood that no matter how much I think I might be communicating clearly, the receiver might not be listening right – this revelation came about listening to participants speak. And it is true the other way round also.
Biggest learning was the power of giving. This really stuck with me – and also to give in the right possible packaging.
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I have been letting the material sink in and I plan to implement few of it. I will keep you posted about it.
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Envy isn’t something we talk about, or even admit to openly. And yet it’s the one thing that all of us feel. We feel that others are going places and doing more than us. We even feel we need their spot and somehow that spot belongs to us.
So how do we overcome this intense envy before it kills us? Find out how even the superstars of the world have to deal with envy. Yes, even people who seemingly have unimaginable wealth and success.
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Is Envy Good or Bad?
Part 2: How do You Cope With Envy?
Part 3: How To Stay Motivated—And Happy.
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
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No one I know is free of envy We all, at some level, are envious of others and even more so in our field of endeavour.
If you were to look at my inbox every morning, you’ll notice about 60-70 e-mails.
Then as the day progresses, another 60-70 will stream in.
And yet not one of the e-mails is from some one in the same profession as mine.
As you probably know, I’m in the marketing profession If you want to put a weird tag on me, you could call me an internet marketer. So why don’t I have any marketing-based e-mails in my inbox? It’s not like I don’t want to learn about marketing. It’s not that I don’t want to read what others in my field are up to.
Instead it’s a lot simpler. The e-mails depress me, sometimes. And I’m using the word, depression, but hey, I’m never depressed. I’m grumbly, upset, maybe even a bit paranoid, but not depressed.
However, I do feel this wave of frustration that takes my day down a few notches. I don’t feel happy and light hearted. And I figured it wasn’t depression after all.
It was envy.
This is my story about how I deal with envy And I kinda know it’s your story too. I think very few of us are free of this problem of envy. We look around us and we see people doing things that we aren’t doing. We see them earning a lot more, and seemingly with a lot less effort.
And then there are those like me, who come along and talk about taking three months off. And I know that there are others who are working their tails off and there’s this joker who’s talking about the luxury of not just a vacation—but three whole months in a year.
How is it that we can have endless bounty and still feel envy? And how do we deal with such a situation?
Part 1: Is Envy Good or Bad? On the chilly night of December 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman approached John Lennon outside the Dakota Apartments in New York. Chapman opened fire at Lennon with a .38 calibre pistol. He fired five shots in quick succession.
The first shot missed Lennon, passing over Lennon’s head and hitting a window of the Dakota building. Two of the next bullets struck Lennon in the left side of his back, and the other two penetrated his left shoulder. By 11 pm that night, John Lennon was dead.
But what was going through Paul McCartney’s mind as he heard the news? These are Paul’s exact words related to Esquire magazine 35 years later. “When John got shot, aside from the pure horror, the lingering thing was, ‘Well, now John’s a martyr. A JFK’. I started to get frustrated because people started to say, “Well, he was the Beatles”. And me, George and Ringo would go, ‘Er, hand on. It’s only a year ago we were all equal-ish.
Paul McCartney, now Sir Paul McCartney was horrified. And envious.
Back in the 1500s, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, was going through the same pangs of envy Michelangelo was no ordinary man, no ordinary painter. He was unique as the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive. In fact, two biographies were published during his lifetime.
This is the artist who created the statue of David, the Pietà, the Last Judgement, the statue of Moses and no less than the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In his lifetime he was often called Il Divino (“the divine one”). And yet he was openly envious of another older contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci.
So is this factor of envy normal? And is it any good or bad?
In the August 2015 edition of The New Yorker, Richard Smith, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky gives us an insight into envy. Smith who began studying envy in the nineteen-eighties, writes that the feeling typically arises from a combination of two factors.
The first is relevance: an envied advantage must be meaningful to us personally. A ballerina’s beautiful dance is unlikely to cause envy in a lawyer, unless she once had professional dancing aspirations of her own. The second is similarity: an envied person must be comparable to us.
Even though we’re both writers, I’m unlikely to envy Ernest Hemingway. Aristotle, in describing envy, quotes the saying “potter against potter.” When we admire someone, we do so from a distance. When we envy someone, we picture ourselves in their place.
So is this factor of envy normal? And is it any good or bad? The closer we get to someone’s capability, the less we seem to admire them. Instead, what might pop up is an intense state of envy. I remember being in school, and there was a friend of mine whose father travelled by Swissair.
Back when I was in school, travelling locally by plane was quite the luxury but a trip overseas was almost out of the question. I remember being upset with the little Swissair booklets my friend brought to school.
It wasn’t even like this kid was taking those flights. He just had a few hand me downs from the flight itself, and yet there was this factor of envy that swept through me every time I saw those booklets.
Envy it seems, is mostly bad for you Admiration is good. Envy is, for the most part, complex and bad. Plus, it’s painful. Which is why my inbox has almost no e-mails from people who are marketers like me. I do read some e-mails, but just a few. I put in long days and I enjoy my work tremendously, yet it’s hard to watch an e-mail pop in about how someone just achieved some goal that you’ve been aspiring for.
Make no mistake. At Psychotactics. we’ve been very successful over the years, and we’ve lived a life that seems unimaginable. And yet, the admiration slips away over time and I feel the weight of envy.
It’s hard to admit it too But eventually if you were pumped with a truth serum, you’d admit it too. You, I, we’re all envious about others. Some to a large extent, some to a smaller extent. And no matter how fabulously wealthy or well know we are. No matter how far we’ve come in our lives, we still have to deal with that envy.
Part 2: So how do you deal with envy? I remember the year 2000.
I’d just arrived in Auckland, New Zealand from India.
I’d never been to New Zealand before And now I was planning to spend the rest of my life on these islands in the Pacific. If someone showed up at the airport, took me to their home, got me a phone, and rented a house for me—well, that would have been beyond my wildest dreams. And that’s what happened.
In Episode #50 of The Three Month Vacation podcast, I talk about our move to New Zealand. And how fellow-cartoonist, Wayne Logue, who I’d only met online, did all of the above for me, and more.
To have such a start when moving to a new country was beyond my wildest imagination
And yet, let’s up the ante a bit. Let’s say someone else showed up at the airport. That person then said that in fewer than two years, I’d be in marketing, not cartooning. Then that person went on to outline how my life would unfold.
And going forward 15 years, that I’d have a membership site, clients, the ability to go where I wanted, when I wanted. What would I make of such a bizarrely rosy prediction the future? I’d think it was wonderful, wouldn’t I?
To understand just how much I have, I have to use the time machine I get on board and take myself back to Auckland airport. I go to that point when I first got to New Zealand and that kills all kind of envy on the spot.
No matter how many waves of envy surge at me, I realise that I could never have envisioned the life I have now. And this is true for a lot of us today. Most of us have lost some hair, gone rounder at the edges, and possibly have a slightly rough life. Yet, almost none of us would swap our lives for yesteryear.
We can’t really stop ourselves from getting envious We look at the neighbours and they have a new car. We look at our friends and they are posting photos of themselves in Tahiti.
And it’s probably worst of all in the professional sphere, because we believe we work harder and better than most of our peers. Which brings in that okinami—a rogue wave—of envy.
Envy can’t be avoided But the time machine trick works. It really works. Go back to the time when you were younger, and for most of us, it represents a time when life was different. And yet, we like the lives we now lead.
We like the gadgets we use today. Our families have grown around us and there are a thousand memories that would vanish in a flash if we went back in time.
I don’t know about you, but this is my trick for envy I go back to my time machine. My time machine has one dial and it’s set to the year 2000. Just the thought of going back in time brings back pleasant memories. And yet, today is the world I want to live in. In a flash my envy is gone.
But I still have one more mountain to climb. I may not be envious, but I need to stay motivated—and happy. How do I pull that bunny out of the hat?
Part 3: How to stay motivated—and be happy instead I don’t know if you’ve ever fed seagulls at the beach
On a sunny day as you head to the beach with your fish and chips, the seagulls are waiting. As you throw out a chip, there’s a mighty scramble, but notice who almost never gets the chip.
Yes, it’s the so-called “leader” of the flock. You know the one I’m talking about. This male (and it’s most certainly a male) spends his time chasing away all the rest of the seagulls.
You throw one chip. You throw another. You throw a third. But the leader never seems to get a chip.
So which of the birds get the chips? The ones that are focused on the chips, not on each other. And this is really the secret of the how stay motivated. When we look around at each other, we’re too focused on the others, and not the chip.
And the chip for most of us is our work. It’s the one thing that brings us the greatest satisfaction in our lives. Whether we run a restaurant, sell strawberry cream, write books or dance for a living, it’s our work that brings us a deep sense of satisfaction. And yet we make a lot of mistakes along the way.
I’ve made a lot of strategic mistakes in my life We were on the internet way back in 1997, and while I did catch on to the e-book phenomenon, I missed out on blogs.
I missed out on YouTube as well, I started the podcast before it was immensely popular and then gave up in 2009, just at the point when it started to take off. And so, as I looked on, others took my spot. Yes, my spot!
The way out of that seagull scrap is to look at your own work At first your work may not seem a lot different from your competition. However, over time you’ll find your own space, your own plum projects. And you’ll get yourself a group of people that love your work. The envy won’t go away, but you’ll stay focused on your chip. And that will keep you motivated.
And that is the real secret of how to sidestep the envy and be happy instead. The envy won’t ever go away. You’ll always be jostling for space in a scrappy flock of gulls. But you’ll know when you get the chip. And you can fly off with your chip, happy as a gull on a sunny day.
Next Step: The Power of Enough—And Why It’s Critical To Your Sanity
http://www.psychotactics.com/power-enough-critical-sanity/
How do you write intensely curious headlines—even if a deadline is looming. When writing headlines, you often get stuck.
Can grammar come to the rescue when under pressure?
Find out how grammar class helps you write outstanding headlines in a jiffy.
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: What has grammar got to do with writing headlines.
Part 2: Why you need to break up your headline writing process
Part 3: What’s the one thing you can implement today in your headlines
You can read this online here: https://www.psychotactics.com/headlines-three-ways/
Every year, 20 billion bottles of wine are produced. And 80% of those bottles are closed with a single substance. A substance called cork.
The cork, as you’d suspect, comes from bark of the cork tree The bark has to be harvested, and then you get the cork for those 16 billion bottles. But there’s no hurrying the process of cork production. A tree must be at least 25 years old before the bark can be harvested.
After that, it can be stripped of its bark every nine years. Even so, the first stripping is totally unsuitable for wine and used only for industrial purposes. The second stripping still lacks the quality needed. It may take well over 40 years before the cork is considered good enough to put into a wine bottle.
As you can see, a cork tree can’t be rushed. Good headlines too need a little time. But in today’s world, we need headlines for our newsletters, podcast titles, webinars, and workshops.
But is it really possible to turn out a great headline almost immediately? Or do we have to wait? What we’ll cover in this article is the concept of headlines in a hurry. We’ll learn three ways to write great headlines and to write them under pressure. But we’ll have fun, and instead of just learning three ways, we’ll go back to grammar class.
Method 1: Headlines with AND
Method 2: Headlines with EVEN
Method 3: Headlines with WITHOUT
Method 1: Headlines With AND Remember Windows 3.1?
I sure do. I was a cartoonist still living in Mumbai, India at the time. And that’s when I got my first computer. It was a 386 and top of the line with programs such as Corel Draw and Photoshop. Right before I got the computer I would go through the tedious task of drawing a cartoon, photocopying it several times and then colouring each version. Clients wanted to see the same cartoon rendered in different colours and I’d spend trips back and forth to the photocopy shop.
Let’s say I got to know the photocopy guy quite well.
But it also wasted a lot of my day Then along came Windows 3.1 and I was able to scan and then colour my cartoons in under half an hour. From paper to the computer was my big leap forward when it came to cartoons. And yet several years later when I moved over from cartoons to copywriting, I struggled a lot with writing headlines. Every time I sat down to write headlines, I’d get the blue screen of death in my brain. Until the day I figured out the incredible power of AND in moving a headline forward.
AND?
When writing a headline, all you have to do is add the conjunction AND and your headline seems to dart forward. Let’s take a few examples, shall we?
How to raise your freelance rates
How to raise your freelance rates (and get a greater number of clients)
How to create magic with your brand stories
How to create magic with your brand stories—and engage new readers every time you publish
How to keep fit over age 55
How to keep fit over age 55 (and still eat everything you want)
What did we notice with those AND headlines? The first was the sheer simplicity of the headline. We start the headline as if it’s going to be a really short one. e.g. How to raise your freelance rates. Then as an afterthought, we add the AND.
What this tends to do is give your headline more oomph. The first part of the headline, without the AND is good enough, yet the second part allows the headline to move your client forward. Which is why the AND headline has a far greater curiosity factor than the headline without the conjunction.
When writing AND headlines I use the parenthesis or the em dash The em dash is the long dash, used when you seem to be breaking a thought mid-flow. It seems like you’ve already finished with the thought. For example: How to create magic with your brand stories. Then suddenly the em dash shows up out of nowhere talking about “new readers”. It’s brought in a new thought—a much richer thought. Now your headline reads as: How to create magic with your brand stories—and engage new readers every time you publish.
But you don’t always have to use the em dash You can just use the parenthesis instead. The parenthesis does something similar to the em dash. It creates a continuation of the thought, and the client feels a greater tug towards the AND type of headline.
Visually too, the headline is more arresting. When you look at the headlines side by side, or even in your inbox, the second headline seems to say a lot more. But because there’s the em dash or the parenthesis, it’s like you’re getting some breathing space as the reader.
If you wondered why you had to sit in boring grammar class, well, now you know. You’re in headline grammar class, and you just found out how to use AND, em dashes and parentheses to good effect. Like Windows 3.1 (bless its soul) which got me from a bit of a struggle to super-fast execution, you too can build a headline in next to no time by using the AND.
But is there a good way of using the AND type of headline successfully? Sure there is. The best way to use the AND headline well is to write the first part. e.g. How to write irresistible calls to action. Then you walk away. Your headline is already super-yummy. But when you come back, several hours later, your brain will have something to add to the headline.
So your headline will read like this: How to write irresistible calls to action (and increase CTR by 30%). The space between writing the first and second part of the headline isn’t necessary, but it does make for better headlines. Keeping a break between activities helps your brain hum in the background and come up with a far superior idea than if you simply jumped on the first possible idea that comes to your head after using AND.
Ok, first part of grammar class is done.
Let’s go to adverb land; the land of EVEN.
Method 2: Headlines with EVEN I’d never heard of the comedian called Michael Jr.
Then one day, I’m lying on the sofa time scrolling through Facebook and this video pops up. In the video, Michael Jr. is talking about how comedy works. And here’s what he says:
This is how it works First, there’s a setup, and then there’s a punch line. The set up is when a comedian uses his talents and resources to seize any opportunity to ensure that his audience is moving in the same direction. The punchline occurs when he alters that direction in such a way that was not anticipated by the audience.
He’s talking about the adverb Yup, Michael Jr. doesn’t know it, but he’s just given a quick grammar lesson. And that’s precisely the grammar lesson you can use in your headlines by using the adverb, “EVEN.” When you use EVEN in your headline, you’re doing what Michael Jr. is talking about. You’re taking the audience in a specific direction—and then moving them to the punchline, which isn’t quite anticipated by the audience.
Hah, you’re eager for grammar lesson No.2, aren’t you? Well here goes:
How to rank high on Bing
How to rank high on Bing (even with low Google rankings)
Why you should raise your freelance rates
Why you should raise your freelance rates (even if you’re not sure you’re worth it)
How to quit your day job
How to quit your day job (even if you’re cash strapped)
How to travel First Class
How to travel First Class (even if You’re dead broke)
See the setup and the punchline? It’s everywhere, you know, this setup and punchline. When you read The Brain Audit, you have the concept of the problem and the solution. That’s a setup and punchline. When you look at nature, you notice a branch, then a twig.
A snowflake has the same set up and punchline. And of course, when we go to headline land, the adverb EVEN creates a powerful punchline. It brings out that extra bit of information that you’re simply not expecting. And in doing so, it gets and keeps your attention.
Just like the AND, it helps to use the parentheses or the em dash And just like the AND, there’s no rule (at least that I know of) whether you use the em dash or the parenthesis. Just be sure to use it because it creates that setup and punch line both visually and intellectually.
Visually you can see there’s a separation, but intellectually you see that extra bit showing up. And you weren’t particularly expecting the headline to go in such a weird direction, were you?
So remember: set up, punchline. That’s the power of EVEN.
We’ve covered AND and EVEN. Should we go to the third grammar lesson? Let’s head to WITHOUT, which happens to masquerade as a preposition adverb and conjunction. Even if you can’t remember where it sits on the grammar hierarchy, WITHOUT does a pretty cool job when you’re tired of using AND and EVEN. Let’s find out how.
Method 3: Headlines with WITHOUT To write a headline with WITHOUT, all you have to consider is the opposite. And you can do it with random headlines.
How to raise your prices
How to raise your prices without losing clients
How to raise your prices without increasing the quantity of product
How to raise your prices without considering the competition
How to raise your prices without the accompanying fear factor
When you write a WITHOUT headline, guess what you’re really doing Yup, you’re bringing up the objection in your head. Notice the second part of the headlines? They brought out the fear of losing clients, of needing to increase the quantity of product, the fear of competition and yes, the fear of fear itself. All of these are obvious objections to your premise or article.
So what’s a grammar headline writer to do? Why it’s perfectly simple, isn’t it? All you really need to do is write some sort of headline and then think of all the reasons why it’s not a good idea. Or at least why you’d have some objections to that idea.
Let’s take an overly simple headline like:
How to lose weight in two weeks.
What are the objections to losing weight? – You’re a foodie
– You don’t want to go on a crazy diet
– You don’t care about exercise
And then you slappity-slap on the objections to the first part of the headline. Ready? How to lose weight in two weeks (without giving up your foodie habits)
How to lose weight in two weeks (without going on a crazy diet)
How to lose weight in two weeks (without needing to exercise endlessly)
And there you have it—WITHOUT comes to the rescue.
Isn’t grammar wonderful?
We should really do a summary, but what would we cover? We already know the three methods to make our headline stand out. All it takes is just three parts of the grammar universe: AND, EVEN and WITHOUT. AND gets your headline moving boldly forward, EVEN does this little setup and punchline trick and WITHOUT, WITHOUT is all about objections.
See, those Grammar Nazis were right.
You should pay attention your grammar because even if your brain feels like it’s running on Windows 3.1, you’ll still be able to turn out super-curious headlines.
So what’s the ONE thing we can implement today? Remember the advice you got about writing part of the headline first and then going away? Well, here’s a reminder. You may be so very excited at your proficiency at grammar class that you may forget to take that break. Leaving that task unfinished ensures that your brain brings up (and rejects) many options. Eventually, when you go back to your headline, you’re likely to get a far superior headline than just the first one you think up.
Put space between all activities. This article was written over a period of three days. The outline on one day, part of the article on another and finally the article was completed on the third. And only after these three days, did it go for an edit. A headline may seem almost puny when compared with an article, but letting the brain relax helps you get a far superior output.
And that’s pretty much it.
Grammar lesson over.
School’s out.
Special Bonus: Why Headlines Fail In under 7 minutes you’ll be able to go through a system that shows you:
• How to write headlines that get results every time
• Why you don’t have to be a copywriter to write headlines
• How to construct headlines, without making a complete mess of things.
Here is the report: Why Headlines Fail
https://www.psychotactics.com/free/headlines-fail/
Imagine a client walked through the door and you could give them the power of X-ray vision. Would that client come back for more superpowers? Of course she would. So how do you create superpowers that attract clients? What three elements need to be in place for the superpower to work? Find out in this the third part of this series on "how to stand out even when the competition is outstanding".
AirBNB was struggling? Was it just start up problems or was it something else? Find out how AirBNB, Zappos and other now-famous brands had to dig, or even stumble upon the biggest problem before they got their business off the ground. And yes, what you've got to do to find the biggest problem as well. It may seem like we know the biggest problem we're solving for our clients, but we're very far from the reality. Find out why this is the case and how to rectify the problem right away.
If there's little or no competition, it's easy to be top dog. But what if there's oodles of competition? And what if the competition isn't just average, but utterly outstanding? What do you do to stand out in such a situation? Can you even make a mark? The answer is quite surprising
Most of us know of the concept of the “guardian angel” They come into our lives and they take care of us. The “kicking angel” is quite different. The angel shows up just to push us over the edge and then he/she disappears from our lives.
In this episode Sean talks about How do we know when we’re being kicked? And what “kicks” do we pay attention to and what do we do.
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer
#112: How Kicking Angels Help To Jumpstart Your Business
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You’ve heard of a guardian angel, haven’t you? But what on earth is a kicking angel?
Yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like.
It’s an angel that does the job of giving you a swiftie on your rear.
We got our first swiftie in the year 2002 We’d just set up Psychotactics. And we were looking to sell our products on the Internet.
Um, did I say products? I meant ‘product.’
But as most of us do, we were waffling. We’d been busy tweaking our website.
We had been searching for a merchant provider for a month or two.
We’d been thinking of setting up a sales page for about three months.
We’d been yiddling and yodelling, and doing diddly-squat.
Then along came the ‘kicking angel.’ This kicking angel happened to be an Internet Marketer. He was kinda impressed with our first product, and promised to help us market it to his list.
“But here’s what you have to do first,” he said.
“I’ll give you a week to set up everything.
You’ll need to get a merchant account.
And write your sales page.
And set up an affiliate account.
And we’ll start marketing your product in September.
And your product will go to my list that’s well over 25,000 prospects.”
You know what we did next, don’t you? Yup, in one week we did everything we’d been waffling about for well over a month. And then we went back to the Internet Marketer. And here’s what he said: “I’m a little busy doing promotions in September. How about October instead?”
October turned to November.
November turned to December.
Santa came and Santa went.
Our Internet Marketer was always too busy; too pre-occupied; too whatever.
We felt betrayed, and angry… And what we didn’t realise, was that this Internet Marketer wasn’t a guardian angel at all. He was a kicking angel. He’d got us moving. And as summer (yes, we have summer in December) rolled around, we started selling our product.
It was a measly 20-page booklet, but hey we were selling… And doing a jig around the room every time yet another product sold.
Amazingly, our kicking angel never came back. Ever.
And that’s when it dawned on us A kicking angel isn’t supposed to come back.
That’s what they’re there for.
To give you a kick.
They kicked us into starting workshops .
They kicked us into writing/creating a series of products.
They even came along, and cajoled us into starting the Protege Program–a biggie for us at the time.
There’s one who’s been kicking into starting up the Brain Audit Trainer program.
And here’s the irony of it all… Kicking angels are classic ditchers.
They promise to help us promote.
They promise to buy into the product.
They promise to join a workshop.
They swear to be there to sign on the dotted line.
But they never ever show up again.
But in our desire to please these angels, we created products And services.
And courses.
And workshops.
And our business grew.
It took us a while to realise the role of the kicking angel That they weren’t our friendly neighbourhood volunteer. Not one of them even turned out to be a strategic alliance or customer. Their only job was to get us off our butts. So we could create stuff. And jig. Jig a lot.
The kicking angel is not a guardian angel by a long shot.
Their only job is to land that swiftie. And the funny thing is that they’ll keep at it, till you listen. If your bum is sore from getting all those swifties, it’s probably time. Time to listen to that kicking angel.
Are you listening?
Next Step: Three Disaster Stories (And How We Recovered and Soldiered On)
http://www.psychotactics.com/three-disaster-stories/
The moment we sit down to write an article, we need to do a fair amount of research. Case studies, stories, they’re all needed to create a solid article. Yet that very research causes us to spend so much time on our article, that we’re exhausted. Is there a way to research without getting tired?
In part two we explore the techniques I use to write extremely detailed articles. Let’s find out how to go about a strategy that works every single time.
-------------- Stage 3: Never research when writing the article If you were to put all the energy drainers together and pick one of them, the biggest of them all would be research.
You need research to prove your point, or to get examples, or even just to get the First Fifty Words going, in your article.
The only time you should not be doing that research is right at the point you’re writing the article.
I have to admit, I’ll still occasionally do some research when I’m writing the article I want to make a great start to the article, so I’ll go looking for a story. And the moment I do, I’m off into the big black hole called the Internet. What’s worse is that many hours later, I may not find the facts or story I need. And the article is still left undone.
Which is why Evernote was invented? Now I’ve covered the concept of Evernote (or if you like, OneNote) before. And the idea is pretty simple. We all collect information, but can’t find the information at the exact time we need it.
Well, that’s what Evernote is stunningly good at doing. No matter if you’re online or offline, Evernote can comb through all the information you’ve saved. It can even read your handwriting if you take a picture. And so, you don’t have to go hunting at the last minute.
I was a cartoonist and cartoonists used to keep reference books Photography was too expensive a hobby when I was growing up, and so all our reference books were based on cuttings. Newspaper cuttings, magazine cuttings, etc.
And when I started in the world of copywriting, again, all those case studies were stored in those Windows folders. But it was a pain to find anything in a matter of seconds. But as you probably know from past articles or podcasts, I store everything in Evernote. And I started storing hundreds of stories and data that I’d possibly need for future articles.
I don’t even know what the notes are going to be useful for in the future I have information about fungus, elephants, Air BNB, The Invention of the Mouse, the Lemon Index—and hundreds of pieces of information that can be easily found in the future. As I write this piece, I am going to need some of that Air BNB information. I’m also going to need some Zappos information.
And it’s all there, already in place. I’m not going to need to go online and waste time. In fact, since I was going to write that article sometime this week, I’ve already reviewed the material and marked out what’s important.
See how much energy is being saved? Most writers spend enormous time in research. The way I go about it is to clip stuff the way I did when I was a cartoonist or copywriter. I clip in advance, store it in Evernote. Then when I need it, it’s already curated, underlined if needed and ready to use.
Even so, there are times when I need information and can’t find it In such a scenario, I tend to use my own case study. Let’s say I wanted to write an article about “how to find the right problem” (which is what the Air BNB story is about).
And I can’t find a story online, or I’m just not prepared. In such a situation, I pop over to 5000bc or on Facebook and ask others for their stories. Often the stories will come thick and fast, but more importantly, their story will lead you to remember a story of your own.
When you’re stuck, use a case study from your own business or life You already know all the facts; you have the details. And a case study brings your business to life. If your case study is about success, clients love that story. If it’s about failure, they realise that you too are human.
In fact, I will use a lot of stories from Psychotactics for that very reason. Instead of this random business sitting somewhere in cyberspace, Psychotactics becomes human.
A good strategy would be to have a mix of both No one is saying you shouldn’t do your research. Nothing is quite as interesting as finding out how Barry Manilow’s drummer played a role in one of the hottest Internet companies today. It’s a super thrill to find out how the NY trains got rid of their graffiti.
And a case study of how a company increased its sales by 33% or lost 47.5% of its clients is always going to be interesting. But then, so are case studies and stories from your life. So mix them up and your articles become far more engaging.
Yet this article is all about energy Any research will suck up all the energy you have, so save the information in advance. Even if you’ve tried to use Evernote before and failed, give it another few tries. Listen to the podcast on Evernote and you’ll see why so many people struggle—and then fall head over heels with this software.
Oh, and get yourself the premium version because you’ll want offline access too. That offline access means you’ll be able to browse through your case studies while at the cafe or that hut in the woods.
And this brings us to the end of this series on “How I Write an Article.” I’ve got about 4 minutes before my timer goes off.
Summary When you look at article writing, you possibly look at it as sitting down to write. Instead, the goal should be to maximise your energy so that your article doesn’t go up in flames.
When I started writing articles, I didn’t realise the importance of energy. I’d want to get to the end point, and that was why I’d end up utterly drained after writing. Even as you’re reading this summary, you may not realise that it’s yet another day.
That I wrote the topics on one day, the outline on another, the article on a third and the summary on a fourth. Why? Because by the time I finished writing the article yesterday, I needed some pasta arrabbiata, gluten and all.
Besides, writing summaries drives me crazy. I would rather write two or three articles than a single summary. As you can probably figure out, I needed to be fresh. So here I am at 4:50 am, writing the summary before I bail out and do something else. I’m doing what needs the most energy, because if I don’t, well, there’s no pasta at this time of the day.
So what did we cover?
Topic 1: Putting space between activities We’ve already gone over this a fair bit, even here in the summary, but the main thing to consider is this. Think of your writing as a journey, not a dash to the next room. Plan it, and then roll it out day by day.
First the topics, then the sub-topics, then the outline. And it’s only at this point that you should start writing the article. When you write, just write. If you write, edit, write, edit and write, you’ll spend more time editing than writing. And we know how that story ends, don’t we?
The edit needs to be on another day, and this article you’re reading has followed that process too. Even this summary is unedited. It may look fine to you, but we all profess to be perfectionists, and so I’ll find a fair bit to edit. But the edit will come later; once I’m done with this summary, not before.
Topic 2: Using a timer There’s a huge difference between a timer and a deadline. A deadline is something far off in the future, or maybe tomorrow morning. But a timer fixes the slots for each of the activities.
So you have 10 minutes for your topics, then stop. Then it’s 30 minutes for the outline, then stop—and so on. The timer regulates every section of your article so that you start and stop.
You may not be totally convinced about the timer and yet there have been dozens of clients who’ve been through the Article Writing Course. At first, they’re skeptical about the timer, but as the course continues they see it as energy saving.
They understand the value of having that energy because they have lives to lead and businesses to run. Writing is an energy-intensive task. Without a timer, I was asking for trouble.
Now I write to a timer and then I stop. Even now, as I was writing, I had a friend, Stefano, from Italy chatting with me on WhatsApp. And I realised that I was running out of time.
So once I saw two movies and a few pictures of Stefano’s kids, I went back to writing. We all have to bow to the timer Gods because the distraction is so intense. Stefano is a great guy, but then so is my timer.
Topic 3: Never research when writing the article Research is the most amazing part of an article. I watch Netflix, and there’s this chef that’s doing something amazing. I make a note of it. I read yesterday about this couple that were making a low-cost house, and they had a great demand for it. I made a note of it.
Volcanoes, the giant daisy forests of the Galapagos Islands, how Air BNB made it—it’s all interesting. But I will not go hunting for all this information when I’m writing. All of this has to be found in advance and stored away like some digital packrat.
Stored away in Evernote—or OneNote. And then when you need the information, you can find it not in minutes, but in seconds. You don’t need another cup of Starbucks; you need the premium version of Evernote.
Start using it on your phone, on your computer, on your tablet. Store everything incessantly. That’s what I do. That’s how I have so many hundreds of stories, case studies, and facts at my disposal. So get Evernote and start using it like it should be used.
Despite the fact that I write over 4000 words a week, writing is still ridiculously time-consuming. What I need, what we all need is energy on our side.
Save energy and you’ll save time.
In case you missed Part 1: How I Write 4000-Word Articles Without Getting Exhausted
http://www.psychotactics.com/write-articles-howto/
Next Up: How To Fight Envy (And Stay Motivated Instead): Episode 115
http://www.psychotactics.com/envy-stay-motivated/
The biggest problem with article writing is the exhaustion factor It’s write, delete, write, delete and the endless cycle goes on. So how do you go about article writing? Can you really write articles and not get exhausted?
In this series you get to see how I went from getting really frustrated, to writing 800 word articles and then 4000 word articles. What’s the secret to such an enormous output? And how do you do it without getting exhausted?
In this episode Sean talks about Topic 1: Spacing out your article
*Topic 2*: Is the timer an energy saver when writing articles?
*Topic 3*: Why you should never research when writing the article
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
When I was growing up in Mumbai, India, I thought pizza was sweet. No one I knew had ever eaten a pizza and all the references to pizza were from Archie Comics. Archie—and especially Jughead—always seemed to be eating a pizza. And for some reason, I associated pizza as a sort of candy, or sweet dish.
Imagine my surprise when I ate pizza for the first time in my twenties.
I sense a similar sense of surprise when I talk about how I write an article. Every time I talk about article writing, clients are usually taken aback. It’s almost as though they’re experiencing a disconnect between what they perceived to be true, and the reality.
You may or may not know that I turn out about 3000-4000 words of fresh content every week. I do all this writing in between cooking and painting and everything else.
So how do I write an article? Is it really a writing gene? Well, it can’t be a gene because I struggled like everyone else. I’d take two working days to write an article, back in 2000. Today I can complete an 800-word article in about 45 minutes. So what’s changed?
Strangely it’s got not a lot to do with article writing itself, and a lot to with how I manage my energy. So what are we going to cover?
Topic 1: Putting space between activities
Topic 2: Using a timer
Topic 3: Never research when writing the article
Stage 1: Spacing out your article Here’s how I cook a meal.
I get fresh vegetables and ingredients from Huckleberry—the organic grocery store up the road.Then I do nothing.
Later that day, I’ll assemble the ingredients and then do a second bout of nothingness. Finally, when I’m ready to cook, several hours may have gone by. But cooking is quick, painless and the dish is incredibly tasty.
What you’re reading about seems to be my method of cooking, but it’s not. It’s my method of conserving energy. To me, energy is what allows me to write so much. And the best way to expend energy is to do everything all together. The rookie writer will sit down, try to dream up the idea for the article, then try to write and get frustrated on a consistent basis. Instead, what you should do, is do as little as possible.
So here’s how I go about my writing I’ll write down a topic, or if I’m, um, prolific, several topics.
Then, before the idea slips away, I’ll write down three sub-topics. And in this article, the topic was about “How I Write” and the sub-topics were about:
– Putting space between activities
– Using a timer
– Never research when writing the article
Once that’s done I let my brain take a well-deserved rest It may seem like it’s important to keep the momentum going, but the best thing you can do when writing, is not to write anything at all. If you feel obliged to do so, maybe you can take those three topics and outline them.
An outline will have a lot more detail because it’s the structure of the article and shows the flow. My outlines usually cover these main points.
– What are we talking about?
– Why is it so very important?
– Other questions such as when/where etc?
– Examples
– Objections
– Mistakes, if any
– Summary
– Close
A week usually starts off with me writing one or many topics and sub-topics Then once I’ve let a day or two go by, I’ll write the outline. Another 24 hours will slide before I start to expand the outline. This part takes the most amount of time. If I write an 800-word article, it may take me about 45 minutes (it used to take me two days to do this part when I first started writing articles).
And if I take on a 3000-word article it might take about 3-4 hours. But here’s the thing: I don’t sit down to write everything all at once. And you shouldn’t either. You should break up your writing into bits.
There’s a very good reason for all this breaking up It’s called energy. Every step takes energy. When I’m cooking, (and believe me I love cooking), just getting the ingredients is a minor mission. Then the cutting, chopping—again, stuff I’ve come to love over the years—it’s all takes time. And anything that takes time also drains energy.
But the moment I split up the activity and come back later, it seems like someone else has done the prep work. And all that’s left is to finish it off.
Energy needs to be your biggest focus Time is what we focus on a lot, but hey, you have time; I have time; we all have time. We flop down on the sofa at 7 pm, and we’re not in la-la land until three, four, even five hours later.
So we have time. We just don’t have the energy. Which is why breaking up your article into bits is what makes it manageable. Writing is an incredibly demanding skill, even for an accomplished writer, and it’s best to get back when you’re reasonably charged.
But there’s more to it, and you know it When you put space between your topics and outlining, your brain gets a chance to mull over the ideas. While you sleep, your brain is doing its thing. It sorts out the bad ideas, keeps good ones, and when you get back to writing, nothing has changed. And yet something has. It doesn’t stop there.
When I go for a walk, I’ll run the ideas past my wife And especially on days when I’m really confused, this seems to work well. Even if she’s not quite awake at 6 am, and she mostly isn’t, just voicing the ideas lets the ideas distill.
At times, if Renuka doesn’t agree with me, she’ll snap right out of her slumber-walk and rattle out a list of objections. These objections force me to think, to refine the article. At this stage I’m still on the tightrope between article topics and outlining, and nowhere close to writing the article.
Eventually I will have to tweak that outline, and it’s time to write.
This article was written in parts as well I wrote the topics earlier in the week.
I then wrote the sub-topics.
Finally, today, Thursday, is when I’m sitting down to write it.
I may fudge a bit and try to edit it as well once I’m done—but only when I’m done I realise that many newbies edit and write at the same time and in the process, they never get to the finish line. As you get better at writing, you realise that the deadline is all that really matters. And today, Thursday, my deadline is clearly to finish, not edit this article.
If I do get to the end point, I’ll run it through Grammarly, edit and we’re ready to go. But some days I might add one more step. I’ll e-mail a client or a friend whose judgment I trust. And ask them to look over the article. So now I have to wait even longer.
This break adds to the pause factor, and I mull over the ideas until the suggestions come bouncing back. When they do, there’s always some clarity that’s needed and some bits that need fixing. Which is slightly frustrating, but it almost always makes the article better.
When you’re just starting out as a writer, you’re likely to be amazed at how quickly seasoned writers turn out a finished piece All my sob stories about how much time I used to take to write an article doesn’t wash well with you. Your goal is to write faster, instead of slaving over the article for hours, even days.
You want to get to the finish line, and that’s the biggest problem. Instead of trying to write the entire piece, break it up. Just thinking of these stages might drive you crazy because you’re likely to be thinking: who has time to go through all these steps?
And that’s the whole point of this section on spacing out your article You don’t have time and drinking that bottle of whatever is in your fridge isn’t going to give you energy. By spacing your article, you’re not using up more time at all. I use 10 minutes to write topics and sub-topics.
Another 30-45 minutes goes into outlining. And finally, it’s another 45-60 minutes of writing, and I’m done. In all, even if you add editing time, an article takes about 2 hours back to back.
And when I’m done, I’m not drained. I’m ready to take on another task and keep going with my day. To me, that’s the biggest joy of all. I feel a deep satisfaction when my article is complete.
But I also know I have the energy to keep doing other work-related tasks. And that feeling is totally different from when I first started writing articles and was exhausted by the end of the article writing exercise.
But that’s not the only pizza moment I had in my life. I ran into a second concept quite by chance. It sounds like a deadline, but it’s not a deadline at all. It’s called a timer.
Stage 2: Using a timer Notice how you’re all excited when you get a new computer?
It’s a blank slate; there’s practically nothing on the hard drive.
And at least on the Mac, there’s a special section called “Downloads” Whenever you start to download something from the Internet, the file goes right into the Download folder. When I last checked a few minutes ago, there were 74 files there. In a month from now, there may be 85.
And give or take a year and the folder will continue to accumulate junk that I never look at. In short, the more space I have in that folder, the more I’m likely to fill it with something.
On the Article Writing Course, clients, tend to fill it with hours of writing The Article Writing Course at Psychotactics is like no other writing course I know of. Clients who join the live course, and this is the live course online, often have to write two about two articles a week.
The first half of the week is spent on topics and sub-topics. Then it’s a day of outlining and finally it’s time to write. The writing stage is when they labour over their work for hours on end. Until 2015, clients would often take 3, even 4 hours to write an article.
Then in 2016, I gave them a fixed amount of time The instructions were clear. Every assignment had a finite amount of time, and when the timer went off, they had to stop and submit their work. Even though the participants were given a fairly chunky bit of time, writing is not always easy.
You have to write often enough so that the structure becomes second nature. Once that structure is in place, it’s relatively easier to complete the article in time. But at the start, most of the clients didn’t finish in time.
It didn’t matter.
They had to submit their work Once the timer went off, it was akin to an examination hall. You had to hand over your assignment. As you can imagine, this causes a fair level of frustration among the writers. They feel they need more time to complete their work; more time to edit it and perhaps polish it. And yet, it doesn’t matter.
If you write to a timer, you are acutely aware that you have to finish before your deadline. As I’m writing this piece, I know that I have to finish about 1600-2000 words in the next hour and a half and then the timer goes off.
The timer is an energy saver Let’s do it your way for a change. Let’s say you keep writing until the article is done. And let’s assume that journey from start to finish took you four hours. You’re now wasted for the rest of the day, aren’t you?
You took on such a monumental task, but you’re completely drained and headed to the fridge to scoop up the remaining ice cream. But if you stopped in about 90 minutes, you’d be tired, but certainly not exhausted. You’d have to take a break, there’s no doubt about it, but you’re ready to go after a while.
Understanding how to manage your energy is a big deal in life This article is about writing, but without a timer, your cake gets burnt, food has to be tossed, and articles are just about as inedible. The reason why most writers keep going for hours on end is because they believe they’re improving their article.
But I can tell you from years of experience, and having read close to a few thousand articles on the Article Writing Course itself. Time doesn’t make your article better. If you spend 50% more time on your article, it doesn’t get 50% better.
Instead if you break away, you do yourself a big favour I had to learn this lesson because I didn’t realise the value of a timer. I just looked at the deadline and kept working towards it. And the deadline is a mirage. The only thing that counts is a timer. When the timer goes off, you’re done. On the Article Writing Course, clients don’t get a chance to keep tweaking their articles.
Instead, they just get better at writing, so that by the time they’re done with the course, they’re able to write at close to, or at the amount of time allocated. In your world, you may still need to meet that article deadline. Even so, let your article lie unfinished for today.
Tomorrow, set yourself another timer Then come back, finish the article, give it that spit and polish and you’re done for this round. People often ask me how I get so much writing done in a week. The answer is not simple because it involves so many factors, but one of the biggest weapons in my armoury is the timer.
And just to be sure that I don’t get distracted, I put on a Facebook and Gmail block. I can’t surf the Internet, can’t do anything but write.
Get a timer It’s hard to believe a timer can change your writing life, but it will.
You will learn to write faster because your timer demands it. And in doing so, your quality will improve.
You’ll have fewer articles in the article graveyard. You hear the bing, and you get up. Your work is done for the day.
Which takes us to the third part: No research when writing the article.
Click here to read part 2 of this series: How To Write Extremely Detailed Articles Without Getting Exhausted http://www.psychotactics.com/article-writing-research/
Having a vision is hard enough, but where most plans go off track is we scramble after every possible target. To keep our focus we have to have a hatchet person. But what is the role of the hatchet person? In Part 2 of this episode, we take a deeper look at focus.
Part 3: The Hatchet Person (And Why It Helps Focus) When you’re making a leap into the unknown, fear is the biggest factor.
Fear of making enough.
Fear of justifying the decision you’ve just made.
Fear of not knowing enough—of wanting to learn more.
It makes you eager to press every “buy now” button online, just so that fear can go away.
But fear is only one part of the leap. The other is focus.
And focus to me, is less about persistence and more about “getting rid of the distractions”
Which takes me to my first mentor Dough Hitchcock—also my first hatchet person I didn’t know much about marketing, and at the time, Jay Abraham was easily one of the most well-respected marketers on the planet. There were other marketers, no doubt, but Jay seemed to be more eager to teach; to give.
Among those hundreds of books I borrowed from the library, there was one by Jay Abraham. That led to me getting on his list, and buying a book—a big, thick, blue book—that cost $300. We knew so little that the first thirty pages of that book took us months to implement. But now we were well and truly on Jay Abraham’s list. I wanted everything he put out, so imagine the day I got this long sales letter (and yes, sales letters came in the mail back in 2003).
He was having a seminar and to get a seat I needed to pay $5000 I should have been horrified. I lived in New Zealand. I was paying off this huge mortgage. $5000 in US dollars was approximately $11,000 NZ dollars back then. Plus there would be airfares, accommodation, transport and food costs involved. Yet I was happy to go and I excitedly told Doug Hitchcock about it.
You know what happened next, right? Doug brought down his hatchet. He forbade me (as kindly as he could) from embarking on such a silly adventure. “What are you going to learn that’s worth $10k-15k?” he said. In effect he wasn’t stopping me from learning or buying into products, but he was certainly helping me focus. And being a hatchet person is not just restricted to money—which is the biggest struggle at the start—but also to other aspects.
Most entrepreneurs tend to be restless They want to do it all. And I wanted to learn everything, do everything and promise everything. And that’s where my wife, Renuka, took over where Doug left off. To this day, I’m the one who conjures up dozens of possible products, workshops etc. and she gently cancels it off the list.
t doesn’t mean we don’t push ourselves. We take the weekends off, take our breaks and our vacations, but when we’re at work we still put in a decently long day. I am so happy for those who say they spend just 15 minutes in the office, but I know that to create great work you have to labour over it and make it better all the time. And yet, this restless nature you need to have a hatchet person.
Someone in your networking group could help Maybe a friend who you could meet. It could be a coach, but it doesn’t need to be a coach. In 5000bc itself we have a taking action forum and people post their three goals (yes, only three) and they work through it bit by bit. You’ll find that if you ask for help, you’ll get it, but expecting to figure out everything yourself is the hardest task of all.
Your hatchet person has to have a single role To get you to cut the stuff that you don’t need, so you can focus on what you have to do. And trying to find a mentor like Doug, is a laudable task, but it’s often not necessary. Clients often mention that it would be wonderful to have a “Renuka” around, but when they say that, they’re missing the point.
The point is that you live in a world where you may not have Doug or Renuka And that you still have to make the leap and keep the forward movement. You can’t hope and wish. You have to find someone who’s good at getting you to stick to the three things you need to do. Once you get that momentum, you can add more, as long as you’re only ever working on three things at any given time. And should we forget, it’s the job of that hatchet person to bring us back on track. Focus is about elimination—that’s it.
Most people are too scared to make the leap and rightly so I was afraid to go through putting El Capitan—the new operating software—on my computer. And guess what? There was this nervous wait and then it turned out to be almost fine. One of my programs wouldn’t work but it could be easily replaced. And that’s what you’re going to find as well.
Despite this leap into the crazy world of entrepreneurship, you’ll find that some “programs” may not work. But you’ll manage and then start to prosper. Most of all, you’ll never want to go back to a job ever again.
However, let’s see what we’ve learned because these three points are important.
Summary: 1) The leap into the unknown is always scary If it’s any consolation, I made it extremely hard for myself. I moved countries, changed into a career where I had almost no experience and then added the burden of a mortgage on top it all. You may find that you don’t want to do something so crazy. And so you give yourself a deadline and put away some money so you can last six months to a year.
Or fate may step in and throw you in the deep end like it did with Paul Wolfe—and with me when I was made redundant. However, one thing is clear. The fear is greater when you’re waiting than when you’re in the thick of things. When you’re in the thick of the action, you have to start executing and changing strategy to keep above water.
Start with consulting but then also do a bit of training and leverage. Please don’t buy into this idea that you can simply buy a program and you will have endless clients and income. And if you make the mistake of buying into it, it’s a lesson well learned. Move on and go out there in the real world and meet clients. The internet is fine too, but it’s not the only source of work.
2) Your vision will be pretty clear at the start and then greed may set in You can’t help it. You read how some guy is making millions and you want to do the same. Or you may start to work endlessly and the things you set out to do, like spend time with the family, or just have some downtime—all that will get lost in the pressure to get your work done. This battle with work never stops and you have pull out your vision from the rubble and put it up on the wall yet again.
Keep the vision simple. My personal vision is The Three Month Vacation. My work vision is to care, guide and protect my clients. I may go off the road when life brings on its challenges, but the simplicity of the vision brings me right back to where I need to be.
3) Finally get a hatchet person All this talk about focus seems more about keeping your head on the task. But how can you do that if you keep scampering off in every direction? This is where a hatchet person comes into play. You don’t need a fancy coach. You don’t have to find the perfect mentor.
All you need to do is find a friend in your networking group (someone you can meet once a week) or someone in an online group (like 5000bc). And that’s all you really need. You want to focus on three things and the job of the hatchet person is to ask awkward questions, and to cut down that scampering.
In India I grew up listening to a fable: called the Monkey’s Curse
To catch a monkey, a trapper would put lots of warm, fragrant rice in an earthen pot. The mouth of the pot was small enough for the monkey to slip an open palm, but the moment he clutched the rice, he couldn’t free himself. To be free he needed to let go. But the monkey was desperate for the rice and stayed long enough for the trapper to throw a net. And then the monkey was trapped for life.
We had to battle the Monkey’s Curse many times. We wanted to hold onto what was safe, what we knew. It was no fun stepping into the unknown. I can’t speak for you, but I know that if I could go back in time, I would still be afraid.
Then, I’d jump.
Next Step: 1) Have a look at The Brain Audit to start your journey:
http://www.psychotactics.com/products/the-brain-audit-32-marketing-strategy-and-structure/
2) Join us at 5000bc and make the leap from a job to starting your own business.
http://www.5000bc.com/
The leap may seem physical, but it's mostly mental. In your head you don't know if it's the right time to jump into being an entrepreneur. What about the mortgage, the family and the bills? And how do you deal with the fear? How do you stay steadfast to your vision? And what about focus? These are the questions that spin in your head over and over again. This episode isn't an answer to your question. No one can answer the questions, but you. However, it helps you understand how to keep true to your vision, how to keep your focus in a distracted world. And then, how to take that leap.
Today I sat down to install one of my most-used programs: Dragon Naturally Speaking. I use Dragon a lot in the membership site, on our courses and also for e-mail. So when I got a notification that a newer version of Dragon was available, I paid my $99, downloaded the software and started to install it.
Except it wouldn’t install The software informed me I needed to upgrade from Yosemite to El Capitan —which is the Mac’s current operating system. And therein lay the problem. All my computers were humming nicely on Yosemite, and there seemed no need to rock the boat and install a new operating system. At least if I were having some trouble with the existing system, it would be worth the trouble, but I was doing just fine.
Then along came this new version of Dragon and it was forcing me to do something that involved a whole lot of risk.
When you’re in a job, it’s like living in Yosemite land It’s not the best thing ever and you know there’s a world of entrepreneurship you’d rather explore. But it’s safe in Yosemite-land so why make the leap into the unknown? And how do you know things will work out anyway? You don’t. That’s the whole point of being an entrepreneur. You have no clue if or when things will work out. The only thing you know for sure is that change is happening. That the Dragon wants to be let loose in your world and you’re holding back.
I understand there’s a huge difference between taking a leap from a job into the world of business. I know that the fear is a lot greater when you have a family, a mortgage, and bills to pay. Yet, there comes a time when your hand seems to be forced. You can stay where you are, or you can take the leap.
In this series we deal with three recurring questions 1) Managing the fear
2) Keeping the vision strong
3) Focus—And why you need a hatchet person
Part 1: Managing the Fear I hated my job as a web designer.
I’d just immigrated to Auckland, New Zealand in Feb 2000 and my priority was to find a job. Compared with India, where I came from, Auckland was terribly expensive. And anyway, I couldn’t see myself starting up in business right away. To my utter amazement, I found a job that was going to pay me $50,000 a year to build websites.
By the second day, I was ready to quit.
My wife, Renuka, wasn’t so sure To get a job that was reasonably well-paying was not an easy task. At the time she was still in India, and she asked me to hang on until she showed up in the following month and got a job of her own. “Then you can quit your job if you like, ” she told me.
However, things don’t exactly pan out the way we imagine When Renuka got to New Zealand, she found it hard to find a job that fit her position. For the next few month, she bounced between temporary jobs and at least at the time, my job was the one that paid the bills—and the mortgage. Barely three months after we entered the country, we bought ourselves a house and had a mortgage of $200k.
The week after we bought the house, I was made redundant.
The fat, it seems, was in the proverbial fire.
What I experienced was a no-choice situation It wasn’t entirely no-choice. I could have clambered back into the job market and got myself another job. After all, I was pretty good at Photoshop, illustration and had a decent track record in copywriting. Instead, I decided to say goodbye to the workplace once and for all.
Put yourself in my shoes for a second: new country, we had no family in New Zealand, Renuka had only temporary jobs (that she hated just as much). Plus there was that small matter of a $200,000 mortgage.
A no-choice situation doesn’t give you time to be fearful All of the fear comes from waiting. While you’re waiting to quit your job, a thousand thoughts go through your head. You wonder if you’re making the right decision. You worry about your future and the future of your family. And you look for a bit of a safety net online.
This morning as I wrestled with the Yosemite vs. El Capitan operating system, I went through a similar tug of war. I looked for a safety net as I have for the past year or so. I read through the reviews. And there were over 5000 reviews, some new some old.
Some saying the upgrade was a breeze, others claiming it was an absolute nightmare. All of this build up fear and frustration. You’re put in a position where you don’t really know what to do or whom to trust.
And yet the outcome has already been decided well in advance The reason you’re reading this article is because you too want to escape from that cubicle but you don’t know how. And no one can answer the question for you. No one can tell you the right time to quit. To find out if it’s going to work, you have to force a redundancy.
Bass guitarist, Paul Wolfe had a real problem back in 2008 or so Paul was a bass player in a band that played at weddings and functions. While the going was good, the band was kept busy and profitable. Then along came the recession of the 2000s. Paul talks about a situation where the floor seemed to disappear under his feet.
Soon gig after gig began to dry up. Paul was in a state of limbo, unsure what to do next. Unlike my situation where I was in a job one day and out on the street the next, Paul’s situation dragged out for months. However, faced with no option and rising debt, he decided to teach what he knew.
And what did he know? He knew how to play bass guitar. Paul then set about creating a simple site which talked about how to play bass guitar. Then he started buying some rudimentary equipment to record videos. Posting video after video online, he created a sort of catchment area.
Aspiring bass guitarists would see his videos, and Paul used a bit of his marketing knowledge to drive them to his website and list. Today, Paul Wolfe does just fine with his guitar site. He’s into writing fiction novels on the side, bikes to work and lives a life that’s different from the one he once knew.
Part 2: Having a no-choice situation is probably the only way to deal with fear You have to take the plunge, and so you do. The longer you wait, the more fear keeps you paralysed. When a Psychotactics subscriber, Kai Huang, asked me to write about “how to make the leap” this was one of the first questions: how do you deal with the fear? And the answer is, you can’t.
Once I was made redundant, I enjoyed the quiet for a few days and then I started knocking on doors. I went back to what I knew best and decided to sell my cartoons to advertising agencies, magazines, and newspapers. I was lucky that the Internet was still an unviable place back then.
I was lucky that e-books and fancy software were still to take off. If that were the case, I might have built a website and sat around and waited for a stream of clients to come through the door.
But I didn’t have that luxury And so I decided to go out and do what freelancers do to this day: they go out and meet clients. They get freelance assignments. They spend time working on those assignments and get paid. If you sit around hoping that something magical will happen, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll be back in your cubicle faster than you think.
If that so-called guru is exploiting your fear and telling you that his program will certainly get you to sell thousands of books, then you’re buying into the wrong idea. And it’s the wrong idea because the failure rate is extremely high. You can’t just waltz into a business and expect everyone to pay attention.
I got work freelancing, I taught some people how to use Photoshop, and then slowly but surely I had my first presentation. That presentation was a disaster, and the fear came rushing back.
But with some practice that fear went away. I spoke at tiny events like at a Rotary club. And with every outing, I tried to sell the spindly version of The Brain Audit (back then it was just 20 pages). And the fear diminished.
In 2001, a year after we moved to Auckland, Renuka quit her job She had a high paying job at the giant beauty and cosmetic giant, L’Oreal. She had a two-hour daily commute; a rancid workplace atmosphere and a boss that took credit for everything. If you’ve met Renuka you know she’s a happy, jumpy person with a mischievous smile on her face. Some days she’d come home with tears in her eyes.
Then one day, she had enough She just quit. We were still saddled with our mortgage. With all the freelancing it wasn’t like I was earning a lot. But we decided we couldn’t deal with the jobs. We needed to cover our bills, and that’s what we’d do. We cut back on our spending (just $150 for entertainment per month), and we did what we needed to keep ourselves happy.
And yet, Renuka wasn’t quite done with her career.
Even back then we’d go for a walk every day. And every day it seemed like I asked her the same question: “What will you do if something happens to me?” I’d ask. And her response was the same every time. “I’ll just get a job.”
This is 2016.
That was 2001.
We were more scared when we had the jobs than when we had no safety net at all I’m not saying your story will turn out like ours. I’m just saying that the fear is greatest where you are right now—in that job. That once you get out of that job you’ll have to do something. It won’t be easy, and it may take a year, and definitely more. But the fear, that will be gone.
Gone forever.
That brings us to the end of the first factor: Dealing with fear. But let’s say we make the leap. How do we then maintain a sense of vision and focus? Let’s get started with vision because that’s probably the one thing that will keep you going when things get tough.
Keeping the Vision Let me give you the short version of my vision.
You probably know this, but back in 2000, my website had the embarrassing name of “million bucks.”
That, in short, was my vision.
And yet that wasn’t my vision at all Back in India, when I got my first job at Chaitra Leo Burnett, I had a very kind and protective boss: Tannaz Kalyaniwalla. All around me, there were creative people whose company I enjoyed.
And yet, despite the generosity and warmth of the people around me, I yearned to be free to do what I liked, when I wanted to do it. Which meant that if it were a rainy day and I wanted to stay at home and do nothing, that’s exactly what I could do. If I asked for leave, my boss never said no, but I didn’t like the thought of asking.
My earliest vision was to simply be free to do whatever I pleased.
This vision clashes strongly with reality In the first few years, I could do whatever I pleased, but I had to pay the price for goofing off. I had to make sure I met with potential ad agencies and editors (when I was a cartoonist). When I moved over to marketing, it was all about getting in touch with potential clients and some incredibly mindless meetings.
Meetings where you spent three hours debating whether the logo should go ⅛th of an inch to the left or right. Add early morning drives to make presentations and the endless needing to learn new skills and the vision seems to be nowhere in sight.
Vision starts off being a tiny spark of an idea In 2004, we’d only been selling The Brain Audit online for little over a year. We’d done two workshops for companies, and one workshop of our own. The few people we had on our e-mail list weren’t always enough, and we reached out to networking groups and friends of friends.
Even so, there was no reason to be optimistic because we were still working quite a lot. We worked all week and then on weekends too. Getting a business off the ground seemed to quite rough, and it’s not like we had a lot of expenses.
We were operating from a spare bedroom We didn’t even have a computer of our own. Renuka would sit at the computer for an hour; then it would be my turn. And then an hour later, it was her turn again. We didn’t go around buying fancy equipment; even the books we read were all from the library (and we read hundreds of them).
The vision was shriveling. In that year alone we seemed to be moving away from the reason why we started the business. We started it to get more free time, not to double our income or get a squillion clients.
Which is why 2004 became our benchmark year We were going to do something incredibly crazy: we were going to take three months off—just like that! Your vision may not be to take three months off. It may be to buy that mansion on the hill and take over half the countryside.
You may revel in the fact that you have 100,000 people on your list. We didn’t care much for all those trappings. For us, the vision of the three-month vacation embodied who were—and who we are.
When we take three months off, we have to make the other nine months really count As a result, we got more efficient. It might seem like it’s easy to just scoot off on vacation, but like any project, it takes a lot of planning. And then when you get back, you need another plan, because you’re so relaxed that you don’t feel like working for quite a while.
I’d like to say it was all in place right at the start—this vision of the three-month vacation. But it wasn’t. And we still keep tweaking the way we work and we take our vacations.
Most businesses lose sight of their tuna sandwich You’ve probably read or heard about this tuna sandwich episode because it was covered in articles and podcasts before. There’s this story in the comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes.
And how Calvin is drawing up his list for Santa Claus. At which point, Calvin turns to Hobbes and says: What would you like for Christmas?
And Hobbes says: I’d like a tuna sandwich. Calvin thinks Hobbes is crazy because Calvin has a list that seems to have rocket launchers, trains, boats, and a whole bunch of stuff he wants for Christmas. And all Hobbes wants is a tuna sandwich.
As is inevitable, Christmas morn arrives And Calvin is now throwing a massive tantrum because Santa hasn’t brought him all he wanted. And Hobbes sits with a big smile on his face and says: “I got my tuna sandwich.”
The tuna sandwich of your life can be incredibly simple. Hold on to that vision. Never let it go.
We too have our tuna sandwich But there’s no telling when the winds change. In 2005, Renuka had an accident in the garden that required hospitalisation and three months off work. In 2009, we took on a personal project to help a family member. That made a big dent in the way we did things. And I think about the tuna sandwich every single day, even after all these years.
I’m super-generous with my time and advice (I know that), but I also need that down time to recuperate, to learn or just to enjoy a rainy day (and yes, we both love rainy days. Sunny days can be kind of boring).
Vision is hard to hold on to when you’re making the leap.
It sounds insane to do what you set out to do when there’s so much other stuff to be done.
But we kept the vision simple and worked around it.
You know the funny part about that million bucks? Today we could stop working, and we could live the life of The Three Month Vacation for the next thirty years or more. We ditched the million bucks idea, and it came right after us.
Instead, we focused on what was important, our work, our clients and our break time. And in doing so, we continue to create the products we want, go to places we want, do the things we want. The vision, if you keep it strong, will breakthrough at some point in time. It had taken almost four-five years before we felt comfortable regarding revenue and clientele.
Even then there were some ups and downs. But the vision was always robust and straightforward. Keep it simple so that you can focus on it every single day. So that you know exactly what your tuna sandwich is all about.
Which takes us to our third question—our third point: why focus is going to need a hatchet person.
Click here to listen to: Part 2-How To Make The Leap From A Job To A Business
http://traffic.libsyn.com/psychotactics/Episode_110-How_To_Make_The_Leap_From_a_Job_to_Business_Part_2.mp
So Kathy Sierra and her husband have a bestseller on their hands but we've only seen two of the ideas being explained. What is the third, if slightly confusing idea? Here's Part 2.
When Kathy Sierra sat down to write her book on JAVA, it wasn’t supposed to be a bestseller. They had incredible odds with over 16,000 other books on JAVA already on Amazon. And yet they cut through the noise? How did they do it?
They didn’t pull the stunt that most Internet marketers do. Instead they focused on how people read and why they get to the finish line. The more the readers got to the end of the book, the more popular the book became in programming circles.
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To find out about their open secret, let’s take a trip into Kathy Sierra land. Part 1: Dependence on memory
Part 2: Not Identifying Confusion
Part 3: The Perfect Life
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It was the around the year 2000 Technology companies that just months prior were considered extremely, reported huge losses and folded. These losses created a economic cascade which came to be known as the dotcom crash. Stuck in the middle of this seemingly thermonuclear disaster were thousands of programmers.
One of them was a woman called Kathy Sierra.
If you’ve ever dipped your toes into the programming language, JAVA, you’re likely to have heard of Kathy Sierra Her book series “Headfirst Java” has sold well over a million copies. If you look back at the past ten years or more, there’s Sierra’s book—one of the longest running bestsellers of the decade.
Yet, Sierra isn’t like one of those in-your-face Internet marketers. Her blog is untended. She jumped off social media back in 2007 and only reluctantly got back online in 2013. She speaks at conferences, but it’s a rare treat.
But back to Sierra’s disaster story According to Sierra, back in the late nineties and in the year 2000, anyone landing a job in a dotcom company could get stock options. And then along came the implosion of the dotcoms, and her shares were worth nothing. And this is what Sierra says: “Anyway, I needed a job. I am probably as old as most of your parents.
If you are trying to get a job as a programmer when you are competing against people who are half your age — and granted, I was not the most awesome programmer. I was very decent. And we needed regular income. I said we because, my husband, also a programmer, also the same age, same problem. And we had two kids and a dog.”
In short, Kathy Sierra was seemingly at a dead end when she wrote her first book, “Headfirst Java”. Yet, Sierra believes in the concept of consumption. Consumption is when you create a product or service that’s so easy to understand and use, that progress is inevitable. Instead of floundering and flipping back to Page 3 or 6 or having to refer back, the reader is able to move forward confidently.
Today we’re going to dig deep into that concept of consumption from a Sierra-point-of-view If you’ve followed Psychotactics, you’ll probably be more than aware that consumption has been a driving force of our business since 2006, possibly even earlier. However, I really like Kathy’s work. I really like her passion. I even like the name “a brain-friendly guide”—that’s the title on all her books.
And though I won’t ever bother with Java, there are three concepts of Sierra’s consumption model I’d like to share with you.
Ready? Well, here goes: Why do people/readers get stuck? Factor 1: Dependence on memory
Factor 2: Not Identifying Confusion
Factor 3: The Perfect Life.
Let’s get cracking with the first element: dependence on memory.
Factor 1: Dependence on Memory In a BBC documentary, Michel Thomas, master language teacher, looks around a classroom filled with desks. The sunlight is streaming through the windows, but Thomas’ face is slightly grim, as if he’s reaching for a painful memory.
“This reminds me of my own classrooms”, he says. “As a child, as a youngster in high school. And it was (education) always under stress. One had to associate learning with work, with concentration, with paying attention, with homework. Work, it’s all work. But learning shouldn’t be work. It should be excitement.
It should be pleasure. And one should experience a constant sense of progression with learning. That is learning to me. A teacher is someone who will facilitate and show how to learn.”
Thomas’ classroom looks very different from the traditional classroom The desks are gone. The students help cart in their own furniture, mostly sofas. Plants show up, so does a carpet and the scene resembles a cozy version of your living room than a classroom.
Yet what Michel Thomas says at the start of every learning session is far more important This is what he says: I’m going to set up a very important rule, a very important ground rule, and that rule is for you never to worry about remembering. Never to worry about remembering anything and therefore not to try.
Never “try to remember anything from one moment to the next. This is a method with the responsibility for your remembering and for learning is in the teaching. So if at any point there’s something you don’t remember, this is not your problem. It will be up to me to know why you don’t remember, individually, and what to do about it.”
Kathy Sierra calls this phenomenon “the Page Vaporiser” moment So what is the Page Vaporiser moment? Sierra describes it this way: “Imagine that you’ve written a book, and when the user turns the page, the previous page vaporises. There is no going back.
No one can ever turn back. It’s not even an option. What would you do differently to make this work for them? If you knew they couldn’t go back? Or if it was a video, they can’t—there is no rewind. It’s just one time. It’s like they’re sitting in a theatre, watching a movie. What would you do?
Michel Thomas died in 2005, but the message lingers on: Never “try to remember anything from one moment to the next. That’s almost exactly what Kathy Sierra is saying. That the dependence on memory is a problem. It means that you as a teacher, writer, video creator—you’ve not done your job as well as you should.
Kathy Sierra and her husband weren’t writers They just loved Java so intimately. It was the one thing they adored and so they decided to write about it. They didn’t know squat about writing or publishing. They even ran headlong into a mountain of rejection slips until finally the publisher, O’Reilly decided to give them a chance.
But the real magic, or madness, is that they needed the money desperately. With both of them out of a job, they needed to get their revenue from the book sales alone.
When Sierra and her husband, sat down and expressed their source of income, they got a hearty laugh in return.
Their editor said: You’re going to have to be in the top two or three selling books for this programming language. So they look up Amazon and there are not 500, or a thousand results. There aren’t even 10,000.
There are a whopping 27,078 results. They decide to filter the search string to two words, “Java Programming”. And there are still 16,348 results.
“Nobody knew us. We weren’t writers. We had no marketing budget. And the whole Internet said it was just mostly luck.”
But Kathy and her husband knew that the book needed to work. They had kids. There was the dog and being middle-aged meant their prospects of work were terribly bleak. They started out the process by looking at the competition and it staggered them how many books were just fabulous.
They couldn’t beat over 16,000 books by making their book slightly better. So they went for a goal that most books—and I mean any books, not just Java Programming books—miss to this day. They set out to write a book where the page would vaporise the moment after you read it.
The problem was that most people weren’t finishing the books “They were getting stuck. And everyone accepted that,” says Sierra. Nobody reads programming books all the way through. We thought… How can they actually possibly learn if they don’t keep reading it? It doesn’t matter how great the book is. We realised that a lot of these things don’t really matter if people don’t keep going.
So now we knew what it was that we’d have to do. We could compete on forward flow. Just getting people to keep going.”
Michel Thomas started training language students in a manner that requires no memorisation. Kathy Sierra’s book—same thing. No need to memorise anything. It’s all forward movement. Of course if you’ve been following Psychotactics for a while, you’ll know how this forward movement works. All of the memorisation problems arise because of intimidation. If I ask you to go down to the store and buy me a bottle of full fat milk, you don’t have much to remember do you? There’s zero intimidation involved. But imagine you’re in a foreign country.
Now you have the burden of having to figure out the location of the store and trying to say full fat in German, or Italian or Hindi for that matter.
The moment you break down things into small bits, your client moves forward instead of being frozen on the previous page When you look at why you seem to fly through reading The Brain Audit, you can see how the seven red bags create an analogy. Do you have to remember the analogy? No you don’t. But what about the red bags? As you progress through the book, every bag is not only explained in detail but every so often there are graphics and reminders of what you’ve learned.
Not only what you’ve learned but what you’re about to learn The reason why you find Psychotactics books so easy to read is not because of some great or amazing writing. It’s because of the structure of the book; the way the cartoons remind you about what you’ve learned; the way the summary helps you remember; the way the graphics stick around, not just for decoration but with a perfectly good reason in mind.
That reason is the lack of dependence on memory It’s not like we haven’t created bad products or training before. We have. When I first started out at Psychotactics, I remember giving a workshop in Auckland. The workshop was two days long, and had a barrage of information. One person literally fell asleep after lunch. And yet I ploughed on with the training. I felt it was my job to keep the workshop going until the very last minute. I felt that books needed to be 200 pages long.
And now I know better The goal is not information. It’s skill. If you, as the client read Kathy Sierra’s books and don’t learn how to program in Java, she’s failed in her job. If you take on French or Italian or German and Michel Thomas doesn’t make you feel like a native speaker, he’s failed.
I started out with books that were 200 pages long. And sometimes the book needs that much depth and sometimes it doesn’t. The uniqueness course notes were a little over 90 pages (I think). And the Storytelling course notes were a lot less than that.
“We found people were going backwards” says Kathy Sierra. “And they were getting confused. And that takes us to our second point. What causes the confusion? Let’s find out.
Factor 2: Not Identifying Confusion The moment you bring up the term, “Bermuda Triangle”, many of us think of the word “disappear”.
There’s a reason for why we associate disappearance with the Bermuda Triangle. Back in 1964, writer Vincent Gaddis wrote in the pulp magazine Argosy of the boundaries of the Bermuda Triangle: three vertices, in Miami, Florida peninsula, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and in the mid-Atlantic island of Bermuda. And it was in this “triangle” that planes and ships seemed to mysteriously disappear.
Imagine you’re a captain out at sea in the mid-Atlantic You probably don’t believe a word about the Bermuda Triangle. You know it’s a myth. There’s no basis for ships or planes disappearing. Yet you know that should your vessel disappear, this would be the place where the crazy stuff happens. You know you’re in crazy waters and you’re expecting the worst and preparing for the best.
Kathy Sierra recognised the Bermuda Triangle of Java Programming She knew that to-be programmers were getting hopelessly lost at certain points in time. The reason why they lost their way was because they didn’t know they were in rough seas. As you go through a book, for instance, you move ahead progressively. Then suddenly you find yourself struggling. And the way we work through the struggle is to try and barrel our way through the problem. But then the confusion persists and it’s at this point that we just give up.
When we conduct the Article Writing Course, there’s one point where everyone struggles It’s called the First Fifty Words. The First Fifty Words are the opening portion of your article. We all know how hard it is to get started on an article, but even so, when you’re on a course, you expect that the guidance will keep you going. You’ve read the notes; listened to the audio; gone over the assignment. And the assignment isn’t just a hit and run. The assignment stretches over a whole week. Surely, that’s enough to understand and implement the lesson.
But it’s not. It’s rough work And as a teacher, I should have realised it earlier. But until 2015, a whole nine years after I first offered the Article Writing Course, I didn’t have the insight to spot the problem. Only in 2015, did I allocate two whole weeks to the First Fifty Words. Only in 2016 did the First Fifty Words section move earlier in the course, instead of later. It was the roughest, toughest patch of ocean and I didn’t tell clients it was difficult.
And when I mean “tell”, I mean I did tell them. But it’s not enough to tell. You have to make changes so that the client doesn’t give up.
A book is different from a course A book doesn’t have a teacher hovering around your assignment. You’re out on your own and you don’t realise that everyone is struggling at Page 45. You think it’s just you. And if you knew well in advance that Page 45-85 was going to be a Bermuda Triangle, you’d be more watchful, but you’d also know you’d finally be out of the Triangle. And that would give you the impetus to battle through.
This point—this one point—it’s a real pain for me as a teacher As a teacher, a trainer, a writer—it’s like a big slap in the face. I know there are points in every course where you run into difficulty. Well, sometimes you know and sometimes you realise it when you see clients struggling. And yet, you’re not sure what to do. If you were to tell the client that they’re approaching a difficult patch, would it make things a lot harder? Or do you let them sail right into that stretch and get hammered?
And today I tend to agree with Kathy Sierra I tell clients: this First Fifty Words stuff, it’s hard. It’s going to make you feel like you can never get to the other side. And yet it’s not you. You’re not the one that’s the problem. The problem is the problem. Of course, the way to get through a difficult learning is to make sure that you break things down into smaller bits. Like my badminton coach did when I was playing badminton back in 2008.
I struggled with overhead shots The moment the opponent would hit the shuttlecock high in the air, there was a good chance I’d lose the point. Either I’d find the shot to hard to take, or my return was so poor that the opponent would smash it back onto my side of the court. What I didn’t know was that many rookie players struggle with the overhead shot. My coach told me so and proceeded to break up the shot into four stages.
Stage 1: Sight the shuttle and get under it.
Stage 2: Raise left hand up and grip the racquet a bit harder.
Stage 3: Step forward just a little bit, as if to smash (this puts your opponent on the defence).
Stage 4: Smash or just do a tiny drop shot (the opponent would be too far back to get to the drop shot).
In my estimate, we did this routine about 800 times Not all at once, of course. We’d do it for a while, go back to playing a bit and then it was back to the four stages. At first I was completely foxed with all the four stages, but he’d always get me to do one thing at a time. To make sure I wasn’t distracted by the entire routine, he’d get me to hit an imaginary shuttlecock, over and over again. What you’re noticing here is what Kathy Sierra seems to emphasise upon.
You have to tell the client that what they’re about to embark upon is difficult.
You have to break it up into smaller bits, so that the client can manage the routine.
This step of identifying the confusion doesn’t make the learning easier. But the client knows the stage is temporary, and typical. And that struggling is appropriate. And it’s not just you, but everyone who struggles.
Confusion is part of the learning process Kathy Sierra’s book started out as a rank outsider, then moved to a million copies. Today it’s closing in on two million copies. In the last decade she’s written just one other book—that’s it. That first book alone has helped her live the life she wants, with her kids and dog and from what I hear, horses.
Telling the client that they’re facing a potential Bermuda Triangle seems to be, um, so tiny. It seems almost insignificant. And yet it’s what we all want, right? That’s the second point that Kathy Sierra figured in her journey to write a book that beat all those 16,000 books on Amazon. Sure we dealt with the Page Vaporiser and making things so simple that the client doesn’t have to remember. And that when things get difficult we need to tell them and use isolation to break down the steps.
But it doesn’t stop there.
There’s a third point and it’s called “the rest of their life”.
What does that mean?
Factor 3: The Rest of Their Life When I bought my fully electric car, the BMW i3, I was excited beyond words.
I’ll tell you why.
The car I drove before the i3 was a Toyota Corolla. Dark blue; never given us a day of trouble in close to ten years, but yes a Corolla. A Corolla with a CD player, no fancy bits and pieces and yes, not even a USB. Which is why I felt like Neil Armstrong going to the moon when I first got into the i3. All these whiz bang buttons, automated parking, and yes, the USB—and bluetooth.
Then my head went for a swim. Overwhelm filled my brain. And I had to read the manual.
This is precisely what Kathy Sierra has been railing against in the past 10 years or so When you buy a camera, you get all these glossy representations of what the camera can do. Then you pick up that big juicy DSLR camera and you’re stuck in auto mode. So why won’t you go from auto mode to taking pictures like all those great photographers.
It’s because of the camera makers and car makers —and we the book writers and course creators. We pretend that the rest of our clients life doesn’t exist. We somehow expect that a client will buy our book, and that the dishes will get washed. While the client reads our book, the plants will get watered and a perfect three-course meal will be set so we can pick at our food—while reading that book.
We create products and services for unreal people Instead of seeing them as a readers, we need to see our clients as users. When I buy a car, I need to use it, not read a manual. When I bought your amazing camera, I was already in auto mode, I didn’t need a fancy DSLR auto mode. I need to be thought of as a user, not a buyer, not a client, not a reader. I need to be able to use what I just bought.
But no, we run into stupid manuals (and I can assure you the BMW manual is a real downer) So then we turn to the Internet. To access the fun features of my car on an app, I had to find the VIN number. That’s the Vehicle Identification Number (no I didn’t know what it meant). So I did a search on Google and guess what? I ran into a bunch of forums.
And I don’t know about you, but there are some real creeps on forums. A newbie like me was asking where to find the VIN number on the car. And these guys on the forums were mocking him. No one seemed to want to answer the question. They simply said, “it’s everywhere”.
Don’t get me wrong: I love my i3 I found how to use it with an amazing video on Youtube (made by BMW themselves). But I wish they’d have treated me more like a user than a buyer. And this is what you’ve got to realise when you create a product or service; a book or course; and yes, even a presentation or webinar.
I should be able to use your advice right after I experience your product or service. I don’t have time to go through yet another manual, because the garbage has to be taken out and dishes are waiting to be washed.
Kathy Sierra goes on and on about this user experience So does Michel Thomas.
And this idea of “the responsibility of the learning” is important. It lies with the teacher, not the student. When they buy your book or do your course and they can’t get to the end, it’s because they have a life and you didn’t consider that life. You just created something that suits your needs and ego. When you consider that the clients have a life beyond your product, you design it differently.
You stop writing your books like they were a manual You start writing it as you were talking to a friend at a cafe.
Of all the three points, Kathy Sierra covers, this one, about the “rest of their lives” is the most conceptual. It seems almost like it needs more breathing space and growing space. But there’s a germ of an idea which is why it’s here in this article. The idea that if your product isn’t sort of self-explanatory, then the rest of my life takes over. And I, as the buyer of your product, don’t get to enjoy it as much as I should or could.
Considering that users have a life makes you a more compassionate creator of products; courses; webinars and presentations. That you somehow need to write or create things in a way that bestow a superpower—just one superpower if needed—so that the client can use that power to get another power and another power. And this is despite life sneaking in.
Yes, this last point is a bit shaky. But it’s something we need to think about, because even if we were to ignore this last point, the entire message is strong. So let’s review what we’ve just learned, shall we?
Summary Factor 1: Get yourself a page vaporiser.
Can I remember what you just said? If I have to go back several times, your message was probably too complex. To sort out the problem of memory, you can use graphics, cartoons, captions, and yes, a summary like this one.
Factor 2: The second point is remarkably simple: Tell the clients when they’re headed to dangerous waters.
Clients feel like they’re the only ones who are not getting it, when in fact everyone doesn’t get it. If something is difficult, tell them it’s difficult. Like for instance this last point about “having a life”, yes, the third point. I get the point conceptually, but it’s hard to understand what to do. So I have to let you know that it’s a difficult point and that it’s not just you.
Factor 3: Of course we get to the last point: the one I had the most trouble with. The distinction is between a user and client. Your client needs to be seen as a user so they can use that camera, use that software and not have to wade through a manual. They have a life and if your product or service is not easy, that life takes over.
Of all the three points above, there’s one point you can use right away: Telling your client when things are going to be difficult and then telling them when the all clear has been sounded. That is the simplest, most effective thing you can do today.
Epilogue: The responsibility for the learning lies with the teacher.
If you don’t understand something, it’s not your fault. It’s mine.
So said Michel Thomas.
As a parent, trainer, presenter, coach or writer, it’s easy to blame the student. Michel Thomas would disagree. I’d recommend you watch some of the videos on YouTube by Michel Thomas and also read Kathy Sierra’s non-Java book called “Badass: Making Users Awesome”.
Next Up: How We Sold $20,000 On Stage (In Under An Hour)
http://www.psychotactics.com/sell-on-stage/
Writing a sales page can be a real drag You start, stop, start and stop. But is it possible that you’re writing a sales page in an inefficient way?
What if you started writing the landing page from the bottom up? What if that bottom up method got you to create a quicker and far superior sales page for your product or service?
Find out a simple, tested method that works time after time using the bottom up technique of writing sales pages.
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26 Olympic medals 22 of those medals were gold.
You know his name because almost anyone following the Olympics knows his name.
As Michael Phelps stepped up to the starting blocks, the eyes of the world bounced between Phelps and his biggest rival in the race: South African Chad Guy Bertrand Le Clos. Their short and intense rivalry had fired the imagination of the press.
No one was particularly fixated on Singaporean, Joseph Isaac Schooling Schooling it seems was the underdog. No pushover in the pool, Schooling had won the bronze at the 2015 World Championships. He’d been clocking up wins in the Asian, Commonwealth and South East Asian competitions. But at the finals 100 metre butterfly event, he seemed slightly outgunned.
When you’re dealing with copywriting and a sales page, the spotlight always seems to veer between the headline and the opening paragraphs. Other elements of the sales page seem to have a much shorter, less important stature. Yet it’s these seemingly obscure elements that are the powerhouse of the page.
If you’ve been frustrated with the process of writing a sales page, there’s a quick, more efficient way to the finish line. And it starts not from the top down, but instead from the bottom up. And this is why we’ll look at three factors in this article.
Factor 1: The bullets
Factor 2: The features and benefits
Factor 3: The target profile (even when you don’t have one).
Factor 1: The Bullets Last week I bought a new car.
Not just another car, but a kind of car I’d waited for since I was 12 years old. An electric car.
An electric car that was tiny, responsive and had a rich pedigree of car engineering.
I bought myself a BMW i3 and plugged into the socket to charge—yes, just like a toaster.
I’m no car fanatic I don’t revel in terms like torque.
But a week later if you asked me to describe the car, I’d go into a slight rhapsody. I’d do what most of us would do when asked about a product or service. I’d spit out the bullets.
It’s the greenest car on the market It’s the most efficient electric car you could buy at this point in time.
It’s not a monstrous hulk. It’s sub-compact.
Did I tell you that you can park it by using gestures? Imagine doing that in a car park.
You could do the same for any product or service You could describe your house using bullets.
Your computer? Your home town? The cafe you visit? All of them could be described with a series of bullets.
And seasoned copywriters tend to avoid the headline and opening paragraphs of a sales page They start with bullets instead. They sit down and write 10, 20, 30, even 60 bullets for a single product or service. And that’s what you should do too. When you write bullets, you get into a brainstorming trance of sorts.
Try it. Try it right now.
Sit down and make a list of a service like a cafe. The way to go about it is to break up the service into sections. So if you’re writing bullet points about a cafe, for instance, you’d have main topics. e.g. the food, the drink, the ambience, location etc. It’s pretty much what you’d expect to see on an AirBNB listing online. Those points, they’re bullets.
When you tackle a product, a similar method applies Several years ago I wrote a series of books that I was very proud of called ‘Black Belt Presentations’. I realised that people get on webinars all the time and do a terrible job. They also have to make presentations either in person or via audio.
And they tend to be so verbose and unfocused. So this series of books were about three main topics (yes, it’s always a good idea to break up any product into sections). The topics were about “slide design”, “presentation structure” and “crowd control”. And every single one of those books had different elements that when compressed, formed bullets.
For example:
Part 1: Controlling Presentation Design or DIY Slide Design: How to create stylish slides without driving yourself crazy.
Understanding the ‘proximity of elements’ and why it avoids visual chaos
The power of invisible lines and how they help avoid distraction—and increase focus
Why a simple colour palette saves you endless amounts of preparation time
How to avoid ‘unwanted noise’ by choosing uncluttered backgroundsWhy 95% of your slides need just one thought for max impact
The palm test: How to get rid of unwanted and distracting graphics
How to use the power of size to make graphics pop on your slides
Two core methods to instantly increase curiosity on every slide
Why most photos/graphics are flat on slides and how to bring them to life instantly!
How to avoid busting your budget on photos/graphics
Easy ways to stretch your budget without compromising on qualityHow masking and transparency make graphics stand out
Why most graphs are confusing—and why to avoid 3-D completely
How to transform graphs into powerful visual data that make audiences sit bolt upright
How to avoid the downsides of animation
The secret of how ‘invisible’ animation helps reduce surprise
Handy presentation resources to help improve your presentation skills
Every product or service has dozens of points that can be covered If you look at the pencil lying right in front of you, you could cover at least 10 interesting points. In your case, the product or service you’re selling is going to be way more complex. You could easily generate between 30-50 bullets on that product or service alone—provided you break it up into sections first.
I know I’m repeating myself here, but bear with me I’m looking out of my office and I see a shed. I see the sections: the roof, the exterior, the interior etc. I can’t stress how important it is to break up a product or service into sections before writing the bullets. If you lazily look at the shed, you’ll have very little to write. Break it up into sections and your brain starts to co-operate. Suddenly you have a ton of bullets.
And once you have a mountain of bullets you’re done with Stage 1 of writing your sales letter.
It’s time to move to the second stage: the features and benefits.
Factor 2: The features and benefits At one point or another, we’re likely to have been to a buffet.
Spread in front of us is a variety of food all beckoning to us at once.
And so we decide on a temporary strategy where we try just a little of everything. The bridge from bullets to features and benefits is somewhat like a buffet
About 15-20 minutes later, we realise the futility of such a strategy, because we’re clearly overeating. No matter how little we take of everything, the little bits add up to a lot.
With a little work we can drum up between two-three dozen bullets.
And if we try to turn every single bullet into a feature or benefit, we end up with a sales page that’s an overkill. There’s way too much for the reader—they’re stuffed too quickly. The best strategy when moving between bullets and features is to pick about 7-8 of the most valuable bullets.
But how are you supposed to know which ones to pick? The act of writing bullets is akin to brainstorming. You have some great points and some that are less interesting. In an ideal situation the best judge of what’s interesting or not is the client. But let’s assume you’re working all by yourself, you’re going to have to trust your own judgement.
Let’s go back the ‘Black Belt Presentations’ series yet again and pull up some bullets
How examples can save your bacon when you’re running out of time
How to get a good chunk of your audience to sign up for more information
Why a break in the middle of your presentation improves conversion
Out of those three bullets which ones got your attention? The least interesting was the “sign up for information” bullet. The “examples” and “running out of time” ranked higher. But there’s not a shred of doubt that the “break in the middle” and “improving conversion” is the most powerful of all. That’s what you need to pull aside because we’re going to take that bullet and turn it into a feature or benefit.
When writing a feature or benefit, use a simple formula The formula goes like this: problem + curiosity.
Hence the bullet we chose might read like this: Wondering why the audience claps but you get poor conversions? Speakers thrive on audience applause, yet some speakers get a thunderous applause, plus have a high conversion rate. How do you increase your conversion rate by using a little known “break in the middle” technique? How can you improve your webinar or seminar conversion rate almost overnight?
You could clearly spot the problem and solution couldn’t you? It’s about speakers that get applause but the sales don’t match the audience response. And then right after the problem we had a set of points/questions that ramped up your curiosity. You may have been a little keen to know what the “break in the middle” technique was all about. You’d have been chomping at the bit to figure out who to improve your webinar or seminar conversion rate.
If you’ve got a slightly expensive product or service, go with 7-8 features and benefits Features and benefits are usually a paragraph of 3-4 lines long, so don’t stuff too much on the reader’s plate. 4 x 8 = 32 lines to read and that’s more than enough for the prospect to make up his or her mind. If you have a less expensive or simpler product, you may want to reduce the features and benefits to about 4-6.
There’s no right figure and if you choose to run with 7-8 every single time, that’s perfectly fine. The only criteria you have to consider is the problem + curiosity. If you have those elements in place, you’ve managed to write some great features and benefits.
What’s even more vital is you’re not stuck at this point Remember the times when you tried to approach the sales page from the top down? Remember how long it took you to get started? When you start at the bottom with the bullets and work your way to the features and benefits, you’re moving at a relatively frenetic pace. You could spend the morning writing the bullets, take a lunch break and by 5pm you could be well on your way to finishing the features and benefits.
There’s just one itty-bitty problem Having a client would make this process simple and reliable. But what if you don’t have a client? What if you can’t do a target profile interview in advance? Let’s find out how we clamber our way to the top of the sales page despite having a terrible disadvantage.
Let’s move to Part 3: Getting the top of the sales page (even without a target profile).
Factor 3: Getting to the top of the sales page (even without a target profile) Do you know when the world had a massive recession that lasted over 19 months?
If your mind automatically went back to the Great Depression, you’d be slightly off the mark.
The correct year was 2009 2009 was what the International Monetary Fund called the Great Recession—the worst the world had faced since World War II. So guess what headline was topmost in my mind as I planned to conduct a workshop in Campbell, California? Yes, you probably guessed correctly. I was conducting a website masterclass workshop, the headline was about how your website could beat the recession.
Until a client told me I was hopelessly off the mark and that she wasn’t interested in the recession at all.
When we write a sales page, we often make a fundamental mistake We don’t talk to or interview a client about our product or service. Instead, we often write what we perceive to be true. Like for instance the headline I wrote about the recession which had zero interest for the client. And it’s a mistake I made many times over before I realised that the best way to write a sales page is to interview a client.
But what if you don’t have a client? This is the problem that many of us face when we’re just starting up, or even when starting up a new project. And finding a prospect, let alone a client might seem quite impossible. A lot of business owners start to go around in circles at this point. They can’t find the prospect so they can’t write the sales page and without sales, well, you know how the story goes, don’t you? Which is where you the bottom-up structure comes to our rescue yet again.
We started out with the bullets, chose 6-8 features and benefits From those 6-8 features, 2-3 may turn out to be really powerful. When going through the brainstorming stage and churning out bullets, it’s hard to know which bullets are great and which are not.
But by the time we get to the features and benefits, we seem to pick the ones that resonate more strongly than the rest. And finally, if we were to narrow it down to 2-3, we could eventually get to just one point and make that the biggest problem on the sales page.
When I first wrote the text for the sales page of The Brain Audit, I didn’t have a target profile It was early 2002, and hardly anyone was selling products, let alone e-books on the Internet. I had just one client, the owner of a sofa store, who though very friendly and helpful, wasn’t going be of much use with the sales page of The Brain Audit. And so I took a stab at the most important point—the most important feature—and made it my headline.
Which is why you see the headline: Have you seen a customer back out of a deal at the very last minute? on the sales page. I didn’t have anyone in mind when I wrote that headline. But it was the strongest headline out of the list of bullets. And so it went to the top. It formed the basis of a headline. Once the headline was in place, I continued to write the rest of the text.
And no, you don’t have to believe me because the proof of how I got to the whole conveyor belt story is sitting on Archive.org. You can see how the features and benefits have the very same idea and how that concept got transferred to the headline and the opening paragraph.
And you can do the same if you don’t have a target profile or prospect You can work your way up from the bullets to the features and benefits. You can then pick the one that most resonates and drive home that problem and solution. However, this advice isn’t what I’d recommend. The sales copy for The Brain Audit worked and has stayed reasonably consistent since 2002. Yet, it could have gone horribly wrong.
The text I wrote for the 2009 workshop didn’t do any of this “resonating bit” with anyone Luckily I had the client who said her biggest problem was that her list was too small. She wanted to know whether I could show her a way to run a business even though she had a tiny list. In the case of The Brain Audit, the bottom up method worked—and it might work for you in a pinch. But my advice is to keep searching for a prospect—for two specific reasons.
Reason 1: If you can’t find a prospect, there’s a good chance your product or service is a non-starter The biggest reason why a product or service fails isn’t because of the quality of the product or service itself. Often it’s because the writer doesn’t understand the pressing problem. If you have the best product or service in the world but there’s no clear need for it, your product or service is unlikely to succeed. If you are endlessly searching for a prospect, it’s a good chance your product or service is a dud.
Reason 2: While you can guess your way to the headline and first paragraph by using the bottom up method, you’re also missing out on the emotional language of the prospect or client. When a client speaks, they go back in time to the time when they were deeply frustrated. Their language is laced with deep rivers of emotion. This emotion is what makes your sales page come alive.
The reason why many sales pages are boring is simply because they lack the power of the client’s language. Finding a prospect or client is critical to making sure your sales page (and sales text) gets other clients to respond and buy your product or service.
Something is better than nothing When you’re not going anywhere in a hurry, the most efficient and speedy way forward is to build your sales page from the bottom up. Start with the bullets, work your way to the features and benefits. Finally pick one of the most powerful points in the features and benefits and use that to start your sales page.
And that’s how you quickly get a sales page up and running.
When the media looked at Schooling, we didn’t think about him being an underdog.
They didn’t think of him at all.
They were focused something completely different.
And that’s the problem we have with writing a sales page. We tend to start with the big dogs: the headline and the opening paragraphs. We don’t ignore the bullets but we don’t realise the value of working your way upwards.
The next time you’re writing your sales letter start from the bottom up. In the race to the finish, it’s the fastest most efficient way to go.
If you’re keen on reading more detail about bullets and features, there’s a really good book called Client Attractors.
http://www.psychotactics.com/products/client-attractors/
Most of us have grand plans to succeed Yet, the moment we start there are a million distractions in our way. Chaos lurches around in our doorway and there seems to be no way out.
At Psychotactics, we had managed to get around most of the chaos but then I was in charge of mentoring my niece. As she moved from Year 6 to Year 7, it seemed like we were hit by an okinami of chaos. What did we do to find our way out? How did we manage to avoid the madness that we had no control over? Find out in this article.
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In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Part 1: Non-negotiable items
Part 2: Part 2: Just say no
Part 3: The power of drills
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
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How To Get Things Done In The Midst Of Unending Chaos
“J’ai beaucoup de devoirs aujourd’hui.”
That’s French for “I have lots of homework today”.
And it’s what my niece Marsha informs me almost daily, when I pick her up from school.
Three years ago, my wife Renuka and I started mentoring my niece, Marsha While school work is never easy to cope with, there was always time to beef up on spellings, learn about clouds, earth’s subduction zones and the wondrous mysteries of solar system.
Then Marsha moved to year seven (what you’d call seventh grade) and we were suddenly swamped with homework. English, social studies, maths, even that little bit of French came rushing at us from out of nowhere. It seems so maddening when every day you’re thrown deep into yet another onslaught of homework.
This is the kind of chaos that hits us as we go through our business lives We have every intention to learn more, do more and yet we find ourselves in this spin cycle that we don’t understand. At this point, it’s important to pull back and notice that nothing else had changed in our lives.
The Psychotactics newsletter still went out on time; The Three Month Vacation podcast rolled out on schedule. Every post at the membership site at 5000bc, and the Article Writing Course went out just as planned. But in Marsha’s world such order didn’t exist. The homework seemed to pull us away from what we believed to be important.
Somehow, something had to change.
In this series we look at how to achieve the seemingly impossible To break free from gravity, we have to have a strategy that enables us to forge forward even under trying conditions. The three things that we’re going to look at are seemingly pedestrian, but it’s something we’ve had to use ourselves—for our business and now for Marsha.
They are:
– Non-negotiable items
– Just say no
– Drills
Part 1: Non-negotiable items I just finished conducting the Article Writing Course
On that course you have 25 participants all headed towards one goal: to be able to write articles that are far superior to what you’d see on the internet. And to do so in under 2 hours. At the end of the course, I ask every one of the participants to relate their experiences as they went through the course. And that’s when you hear the stories you’ve never heard before.
Stories of how one of them almost lost a child—and still finished her homework Or the story about how one person had been working until 2 am, then sat down to write an article at about 3 am, so that they could meet the deadline for the day. Every one of these stories starts off in an almost identical manner.
In their world, article writing was all about struggle, about frustration and chaos. And then, 12 weeks later, every single one of the participants who’ve made it to the end point can write an outstanding article, complete in almost every respect.
And do so within that two-hour period. Some of them were taking days, one even took four weeks to write an article and yet at the end of the course those very same people were achieving the seemingly impossible in under two hours.
Not surprisingly, you do the same In the early part of the 20th century, 1912 to be precise, tooth decay was a massive problem. People simply didn’t brush their teeth. They do so now, twice a day. In the USA, the Boy Scout handbook from the mid-1950’s had a section on personal hygiene.
It stated that ideally a boy should bathe twice a week and shampoo his hair once a week. What we’re doing today, all of us is achieving the seemingly impossible. We’re engaged in time-wasting activities; activities that were considered unimportant for almost of all human history. Our modern lives have made it easier to brush and shower, but you know the reason why we do what we do.
We’ve made it non-negotiable Marsha’s reading, spelling, and solar system learning became terribly negotiable. The homework rushed in, took control of the evening and soon the important elements were swept away. And it’s not a lot different from what happens in our own lives.
We start off wanting to achieve precise goals, but suddenly a client dumps a truckload of work. And we’re off scampering.
The reason why the graduates of the Article Writing Course can write in under two hours is because they drew their line in the sand. They realised their assignments were non-negotiable. And that meant they got their reward in just 12 weeks.
At Psychotactics, we too have to make a few of our activities non-negotiable.
Renuka and I went for a walk as we almost always do every morning We lead super-busy lives, and it does get a bit cramped when we’re about to go on vacation. That’s because we need to queue all the newsletters for the time we’re away. This applies to our membership site at 5000bc, Psychotactics, and the podcast. But not just for the time we’re away but also for at least a few weeks until we get back.
The vacation adds a dimension of chaos that’s abnormal
Yet we manage it quite well and do so every three months before we go on vacation. We had to take a similar sort of learning and apply it to Marsha as well. We had to make spellings, reading and learning about subduction zones non-negotiable.
Making something non-negotiable implies just one thing You carve out a piece of time, and you put up a force field. Every other activity goes around that time. The participants on the Article Writing Course didn’t have two or three extra hours each day (they have to do other things on top of just writing).
Their results are a direct determination to make their performance non-negotiable, even through sickness, late nights and disruptive clients.
Life doesn’t give us time on a platter. The people who believe they will have time in the future are living in la-la land. Life doesn’t care squat for your goals. You have to snatch a chunk of time from your very busy day and then put a force field around it.
You’re reading this article not because I have to write it. You listen to the podcast that takes up almost a whole day of production. It’s not like I have eight days a week, and neither will you. You have to make some things non-negotiable. And you have to do it right now.
And one of the best ways to get anything done is to say no. Saying no to some things and yes to others is what makes you progress.
So how do we say no? And what do we need to reject? This takes us to part two.
Part 2: Just say no “Seanny is always tired when we come over for playdates”.
That was a random, but a bone-chilling comment from my niece, Keira. She would have been just six-years-old at a time, and every month or so we have playdates for Keira and Marsha. At one such playdate, Keira made the “Seanny is tired” comment.
Until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me that a six-year-old would notice After all, Keira and Marsha were always running around and playing. Why would they need me to participate? I simply used that downtime to lie on the sofa and get back my breath. But then come the statement and to this day it ricochets somewhere in my brain. It was at that point I decided to say no.
We all realise there’s nothing new in the concept of “saying no.” We’ve heard it a million times before. We use it a lot when we’ve had enough. And we say no. However, that’s not the lesson we need to learn. What we really need to understand is that we have to endlessly keep the “no” re-negotiations open.
This year, for instance, we announced we’d announced an info-products course It was the start of the year, and among the various courses and products, it seemed plausible to have a series of classes where you learn about information products.
Where you learn what it takes to create an outstanding information product right from the start, though the construction and finish. And yet as April set in, and the Article Writing Course putting a fair bit of pressure on me, we decided to pull the plug on the information products course.
We said no.
Historically we’ve said no to very lucrative offers, some of them our own You’ve already heard how we said no to affiliates; how we’ve barely done any joint ventures (probably three in sixteen years); how we’ve not gone down the path of speaking at dozens of events, travelling all the time; trying to make our book bestsellers, etc.
Like some chef in a tiny little restaurant on the wrong side of the world, we’ve beavered on our own creations, content to say no to everything else.
A similar theme applies when we look at Psychotactics You’re likely to have heard of the Protégé Program. We started it as an annual program back in 2006. Then in 2007 and 2008 we had it yet again. Each time we took on just 15 clients, but together they earned us close to half a million dollars.
Would you have walked away from such a lucrative option? Most people wouldn’t have, but we decided the program was too intense for the clients. They weren’t implementing the learning as deeply as they should. And so we said no.
But this series you’re reading about, wasn’t about Psychotactics, was it? Yes, Renuka and I face a lot of decisions and we say no at a fairly regular clip. However, this series was about Marsha’s sudden burst of homework. Like any of you, she was faced with this weird situation. It’s not like she could pick and choose what she could say no to. And so we had to make those decisions for her.
She gets a lot of maths games as part of her assignment She loves playing those games endlessly and yes we know, her maths improves. But even at the risk of hearing back from the teacher, we let Marsha play the games for a short while; then she has to stop.
Take for example the recent assignment about the solar system.
She had to find 50 facts about the solar system, then write them down on a sheet of paper. If she took just 2 minutes per fact, it would take almost two hours.
We decided to say no We’d find the facts; we’d give it to her. She’d write it down. We said no to the mundane manner in which the homework was doled out and the time saved can be used to learn something more valuable.
The reason for chaos in business is simply the inability to say no When Keira made her “Seanny is always tired” statement, I couldn’t continue to let things stand as they were. I had to refuse to work on weekends. I had to take a nap every afternoon.
The volume and range of the work I was taking on required a ton of energy and if I wasn’t rested enough it wasn’t Keira alone who was disappointed. My clients would find inconsistency in my work. And worst of all, I had to look at this tired face in the mirror.
You’re going to have to do this too You’re going to have to say no to a lot of those newsletters that are full of fluff. Unsubscribe from newsletters that just keep pummelling you with how rich you’ll be, or how you’ll get 10,000 clients overnight.
That’s crap. Life doesn’t work that way, and neither does business. Your business takes years before it can get the momentum it needs. When you start out, you’re not even clear which direction you’re headed in, until several tax returns have ticked by and you start to forge your mission in life.
When Renuka and I go for our walk, we do so to listen to keep fit We exercise and listen to podcasts and audio books. But on Fridays we talk about the things that go on our stop-doing list. Things we need to say no to, both in Marsha’s world and our own. We sit down and make a list of the core things we want to achieve.
We made the weekends and afternoons non-negotiable to work and dedicated it to rest. We take three months off because we said no to endless work. It’s all about re-negotiating the things we have to do, but constantly battling what we need to drop.
Which is why when Keira comes over for her playdates, I’m no longer sprawled on the sofa I’m running the girls ragged. I’m not exhausted like I always was. And to really get things done, find a way to use Friday to your advantage. Make Friday your say no day. Work out the things you’ve done and what you need to drop. If you can, find a friend to go on a walk with, if not every day, at least on Friday.
Just say no.
Chaos understands. He’ll be back on Monday, but you’ve won the battle for the weekend at least.
This takes us to our third part: Drills
Part 3: Drills When we think of talent, we think of something inborn.
We assume that one person may be talented in one area because of genetics.
This assumption, however, right or wonderful, is pointless when you stop and think about how the brain works.
The brain is a pattern-seeking device If you think of talent as something inborn, then good luck to you. It means that you can never be talented in anything else but what you were born with. I, on the other hand, have this aversion to inborn talent. And it’s one thing to say something; it’s quite another to prove the point.
We started mentoring Marsha because she was struggling with her studies at school She’s a bright girl, and I’ve known her since she was three, but it was clear that she needed help. But while I love maths, languages, and science, there were two fronts to work on: confidence and knowledge.
So we set about going through drills. Day in and day out we’d learn about clouds. We learned about cumulus, cirrocumulus, roll clouds, cumulonimbus, cap clouds, mammatus, and one of our favorites—clouds that look like space ships, lenticularis, and clouds that look like waves on the ocean: Kelvin-Helmholtz (yup, that’s a weird name for a cloud).
We rolled out drills for everything Clouds, then countries and capitals. At the age of nine, Marsha knew 150 countries and 150 capitals, but not randomly. She worked her way from Iceland, all across Europe, then across Russia and the Middle East, down to Africa, up to Asia and so on.
Every country in order from left to right. And she’d spit it out so quickly that if you followed her list with a sheet of paper, you’d find it almost impossible to keep up with her.
So how does this apply to getting things done? Without drills, your brain doesn’t have the chance to learn a lot. Take the upcoming headline course, for example. In a short period of eight weeks, a client has to go from struggling with headlines to be astoundingly good.
But what does astoundingly good mean? It means that the client can write dozens, even hundreds of headlines if needed. Every headline is genuinely curious and not click bait.
But at the same time, every client (without exception) should become an auditor. They should be able to look at any headline, across any industry and be able to fix the erroneous headlines in a minute or two.
This level of ability calls for drills With Marsha, we had drills for her “times tables”. Renuka would sit down and write over a hundred tables-based questions in a day. In a week, Marsha was going through over 500 questions, in a month over 2000. Do you think her ability to calculate figures in her head improved?
When you look at the cartooning course, the headlines course, the Article Writing Course—they all have drills If you’ve done the course, you know how the drills are anything but boring. They’re hard work, but they’re not boring. And yet, when you’re called on to execute the exercises, you do so almost flawlessly. One of the biggest reasons why I see people struggling is because they don’t have the ability to run at high speed.
If you’re going to run a business, no one needs to tell you about the importance of drills The drills take a lot of effort, but they are only necessary for a short time. Marsha and I started learning a few countries a day in December and by Easter, barely three months later, she knew the countries and capitals in sequence.
At Psychotactics, we’ve done well for a simple reason. We keep to the drills and add skills as we go along, and that’s really how you become smarter. But smarts are just the icing on the cake. What drills really do is help you quickly go through your day.
You learn the skill, you implement it Talent is a reduction of errors. The fewer errors you make, the more talented you become. Instead of battling with headlines all day long, you get an outstanding headline done in a few minutes.
Struggling with writing an article over a four week period? Drills help you reduce those errors to a point where you can write an engaging, complete article in under two hours.
When we look at what we’re good at doing it’s because we learned a drill To get things done, you can’t believe in magic. You have to run the same sequence over and over until it’s not something you think about any more.
It’s just something you can do with the minimum amount of energy. In 5000bc there’s a Taking Action forum. If you track the actions of those who report back every day, you’ll notice a vast improvement over time.
What they’re doing is reducing errors They’re following the pattern of the brain.
It’s down to drills. Engaging drills that help you learn and execute faster than you’ve ever done before.
Marsha knows about clouds, geology, science and yes, countries She may appear smarter than you and in some ways that may be true.
But how did she do it?
You know the answer.
Summary When I pick up Marsha from school she always has a big grin on her face.
And yes, she’ll tease me by saying: “J’ai beaucoup de devoirs aujourd’hui.”
I know that’s my signal for chaos.
I also know that we can tame that chaos by using the three core elements: 1) We make some things non-negotiable.
2) Say no, no matter how enticing the distractions.
3) Drills. Drills make us amazingly fluent at our skills
Food, drink and sleep. That's my dream for every vacation. And yet this trip to Goa, India was quite the opposite. So what did I learn that almost turned my life around? That's what this podcast is about. And it might just turn your life (and health) around as well.
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Sometimes life takes you down a diversion. And you end up exactly where you need to be. This is the story of my trip to Goa, India.
It’s where my grandparents came from.
Where I spent many summers under the mango trees in the sweltering heat.
It’s also the place that has led me back to where I need to be. So what did I learn? I learned a few things:1- The importance of digestion (and sleep)
2- The importance of food and types of food
3- Breaks are not enough to avoid extreme stress.
Part 1- The importance of digestion (and the avoidance of sleep) “When you turn 40,” my dentist said to me, “you should go for an annual medical checkup.” There I was on the dentist’s chair having a bridge fixed and my dentist wasn’t giving me dental advice. Instead, he was telling me to go see my doctor, even though I hadn’t been sick a day for almost 20 years.
And since my negligence with my flossing was causing me a small fortune, I decided to take the dentist’s advice. I went and visited my doctor and did my first ever medical test.
It wasn’t good. My blood pressure wasn’t high, but it wasn’t normal either.
My cholesterol and blood sugar was creeping up too.
And like clockwork, year after year, those numbers edged upwards. Sometimes, they nudged their way downwards, but the general trend was not looking terribly good.
You know me. I’m the 3-month vacation, take weekends off guy. I work hard, but I take a lot of breaks to rest, think and just do nothing.
And yet all of that nothingness wasn’t dropping the pressure, cholesterol or blood sugar. And then I did something that made a huge difference to my life and health. I went yet again on vacation and this time to India.
I have a love-hate relationship with India I grew up in Mumbai, vacationed in Goa and travelled through many parts of India before I finally moved to New Zealand. India seeps within you as you hang around that sub-continent. The food, the culture, the languages, history and science going back thousands of years. This trip was about the monsoon (something that’s worth experiencing), the food and most of all to see my parents (who I hadn’t visited in five years).
Yet within days of landing in Goa, my agenda was hijacked Oh sure I started out with the food and drink, but we also wanted to get a few massages. And that search for massages got us to an Ayurvedic centre. Now you’ve probably heard of Ayurveda, an ancient system of natural healing from India. Some think it’s 5,000 years old, others believe it to be older, going back a whopping 10,000 years.
But I wasn’t there for any medical checkup—I was just there for the massages…
Yet life takes you down this diversion, and it’s just where you need to be.
It was July, the rain was coming down in torrents and the doctor at the Ayurvedic centre was available. And we found out that my blood pressure and cholesterol was pretty high (conducting the article writing course and working through 12,000 posts helps, I guess). But even as he was telling me about the course of action to take, he brought up one important, yet obscure point.
“The reason why we have a lot of problems with our health isn’t the food we eat,” he started.
Food makes a difference, but the bigger problem is digestion. If we don’t digest the food completely, it sits in our system and it becomes like the inner side of a kitchen pipe. It’s got all this junk that starts to accumulate over the years. And it’s that junk that causes a huge number of problems. So he put me on an Ayurvedic course to get rid of the junk.
It was interesting, this course Spanning over 11 days, it started mildly. All I had to do for the first three days was avoid oily food. But then it got really weird. For breakfast, all I could have was liquid ghee (mixed with some herbs). I don’t know if you know what ghee is, but it’s high in saturated fat. And if you’re trying to get someone’s cholesterol down, it sure seems like the last thing you want to dole out. And yet, it wasn’t just a sip of ghee. On the first day it was 30ml, then it went progressively to 80, 130 and 180 ml (almost a full glass).
As it turns out, the ghee is supposed to permeate all the parts of your body down to your fingers and toes. And then to cut a long story short, the ghee pulls all the impurities and chucks it into the stomach. And you know what happens next, right?
So did it work? If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a “quick fix”. I detest Lemon diets and detox diets of any kind. I don’t care to believe in quick and easy. But there I was, on vacation, and keen to get the cholesterol and pressure down. And 11 days later, we had our results. The blood test before and after could not have been more dramatic. There was a plunge from abnormal to well within normal range and in the process I’d even lost about 3 kilos (about 6 pounds).
But I’m skeptical about quick fixes So when I got back to Auckland I did another blood test. And I weighed myself again. By now I was down 5 kilos and the blood test showed something remarkable. My current cholesterol and blood pressure was not only normal, but it was the best it’s ever been in 7 years.
“It’s the digestion” said the doctor who put me through this treatment.
Get the digestion right and you’ll find that a lot of things go perfectly well. And part of the issue of digestion was eating foods that digest well, that we all know. But the second part was giving the food time to digest.
I love my sleep because I sleep so little anyway And I will take an afternoon nap when I can. Yet, it flies in the face of digestion. The moment you wake up, the body is running like a machine and having any nap causes it to slow down. What doesn’t help is that nap is usually right after eating a meal. Now it’s not like I’ve not taken a nap since I got back to Auckland, but the concept of digestion is clear in my mind.
That was the first learning for this trip. I never realised how much digestion mattered.
I ignored it as much as I could.
And then it proved that once your body is clear of the junk, it works more efficiently.
But that’s only the first part of this learning experience. The second factor was one of food and types of food.
Part 2- The importance of food and types of food I’m no vegetarian.
If you look at my Facebook page, I’m updating it almost daily with some sort of food. And when you read The Brain Audit or many other books from Psychotactics, it’s quite clear that Butter Chicken takes a place of prominence. Even so, this trip changed my mindset a bit simply because I wasn’t allowed to eat any meat—or fish for that matter.
My diet for at least seven days was pretty spartan In India, we have a dish called Khichdi. It’s a combination of spices, cumin, ghee, rice and yellow moong dal. It’s a dish that is very easily absorbed by the body, which is why it’s often recommended to older people and for very young children. The version of khichdi I was allowed to eat was more basic. It consisted of no spices, no ghee and on most days all I ate was yellow moong dal and rice, tossed into a pressure cooker.
So when I got to the other side even the simplest vegetarian dish was amazingly tasty. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of vegetarian food and if you’ve ever had the chance to visit India, you’ll know there are over 150 types of vegetarian food for breakfast alone. Once I was off the spartan diet, I wasn’t that keen on meat any more. It’s not like I haven’t eaten any—it’s just that Im not keen any more, especially since I found so many different recipes.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been sidetracked by a diet Back in 2011, I was told not to eat spicy or oily food. And yet we were on our way to Vancouver and Washington D.C. to do our workshops. That’s when I discovered another side to Chinese, Ethiopian and other foods. But to go back into my own culture—my Indian culture—and find so much to eat took me totally by surprise.
I don’t know if a vacation will make such a change for you But I think it just might. A trip like this to India or even to an Ayurvedic centre somewhere could change your mindset a bit. I wake up everyday and enjoy exploring food I can make in just 10-15 minutes. Food that may involve something as simple as rice flour and semolina. Food that’s easier to make and digest. Food that’s still extremely delicious and nutritious. And amazingly good for you.
It’s a change, but the biggest change of all was simply following the diversion.
Part 3- Breaks are not enough to avoid stress 11,645.
That’s how many posts were generated in just three months of the Article Writing Course. And though the course has just 25 clients, there’s a ton of activity and assignments. So to have that many posts is pretty normal for a Psychotactics course. What’s not normal is having to write a whole new set of notes, new assignments and re-recording all the audio.
In short, it was too much—yes, even if you’re a crazy person like me. And that’s one of the recurring themes from most vacations. Almost always I’ll work myself to a frazzle, then go on vacation. And that’s because I like to do so many things. I like to paint, write, deal with 10,000+ posts on the forum—and most of it fits into my work day. I realised that the additional bit, like having to write the notes and re-recording was just too much.
It seems obvious to you, doesn’t it? It’s obvious that too much work is too much work. And that all that extra work leads to unwanted stress. Stress that directly leads to health issues. And that while I may take time off on weekends and vacation, there needs to be more paring back. To be hit with such a blatantly obvious idea seems odd.
And yet it’s taken me a long time to figure this one out. For starters, taking weekends off was not obvious but in late 2015 and then in 2016, I got it all under control. This trip underlined why my health was not quite as good as it could be. There’s a direct link between too much stress and cholesterol and pressure.
I get it.
It took a while.
It took many vacations, many weekends.
But now I get it. I get that we all need to be less frazzled. I get the fact that vegetarian food and fruit is good for me.
And I get the digestion bit.
This vacation was supposed to be about food, drink and sleep. We didn’t get to eat the food we wanted.
We were told to avoid alcohol during the treatment.
And yes, no sleeping in the day time.
And yet, it’s been one of the best vacations I’ve ever had. Sometimes life takes you down a diversion.
And it’s exactly where you should be.
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Who's Doug Hitchcock? And in a world full of goal-setting exercises, why does Doug's system stand out? Find out why most goal-setting goes hopelessly off the mark and Doug's plan works almost like magic year after year. Find out not just how to set goals, but how to create a stop-doing list (yes, that's a goal too). And finally, learn why most goals are designed for failure because they lack a simple benchmarking system. Find out how we've made almost impossible dreams come true with this goal-setting system. http://www.psychotactics.com/goal-setting-successfully/ ------------------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why most goal-setting goes hopelessly off the mark Part 2: How to set goals, but how to create a successful stop-doing list Part 3: Learn why most goals are designed for failure because they lack a simple benchmarking system Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer. Useful Resources Chaos Planning: How ‘Irregular’ Folks Get Things Done Learning: How To Retain 90% Of Everything You Learn 5000bc: How to get started on your goal setting ------------------------------- The Transcript “This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.” This is the Three-Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. Doug Hitchcock was my first real mentor and he had been bankrupt thrive. When I first moved to Auckland in the year 2000, I didn’t really know anyone. I was starting up a new business, I was starting up a new life. I joined a networking group and within that networking group I asked for a mentor. Well, no one in the networking group was willing to be a mentor, but someone did put me in touch with Doug. The only problem with Doug was he had been bankrupt thrive. Now, when I say he was bankrupt thrice, it doesn’t mean he was still bankrupt. He just pulled himself out of the hole three times in his life and there he was, at about 70 plus, and he was my first mentor. Before he starts to talk to me about anything, he asks me, “Do you do goal setting?” I’m like, “Yeah, I have goals,” and he goes, “No. Do you have goals on paper?” I said, “No.” He says, “We have to start there. We have to start with goals on paper.” That’s how I started doing goal setting, all the way back in the year 2000. Almost immediately, I got all the goal setting wrong. You ask, how can you get goal setting wrong? After all, you’re just putting goals down on a sheet of paper. How can you get something like that wrong? You can’t write the wrong goals, but you can write too many goals. That’s exactly what I did. I sat down with that sheet of paper and I wrote down all my work goals, my personal goals, and I had an enormous list. That’s when Doug came back into the scene, and he said, “Pick three.” I said, “I could pick five.” He goes, “No, no, no. Pick three.” I picked three goals in my work and three goals from my personal life. You know what? By the end of the year, I’d achieved those goals. Ever since, I have been sitting down and working out these goals based on Doug’s method. Doug may have lost his business thrice in a row, but he knew what he was talking about. Most of us just wander through life expecting things to happen. When they happen, we say they happen for a reason, but they don’t happen for a reason. They happen, and we assign a reason to it. In this episode, I’m going to cover three topics. The first is the three part planning. Then we’ll go the other way. We’re create a stop doing list. Finally, we’ll look at benchmarks and see how we’ve done in the year. Let’s start off with the first one, which is the three part planning. Does the San Fernando earthquake ring any bells in your memory? Most people haven’t ever heard of this earthquake, and yet it was one of the deadliest earthquakes in US history. It collapsed entire hospitals, it killed 64 people, it injured over two and a half thousand. When the damage was assessed, it had cost millions of dollars, and yet it could have been the disaster that eclipsed all other US disasters. That’s because the earthquake almost caused the entire Van Norman Reservoir to collapse. The dam held, and yet, if it had collapsed, the resulting rush of water would have taken the lives of more people than the Pearl Harbor Attack, the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, 9/11 and 1900 Galveston Hurricane combined. In barely 12 seconds, the top section of the dam had disintegrated and yet, the surrounding areas were extremely lucky. The reservoir was only half full that day. The aftershocks of the earthquake continued to cause parts of the dam to break apart. A few feet of free board was the only thing that stopped a total collapse. This total collapse is what many of us come close to experiencing as we try to clamber up the ladder of success. We try to do too many things and we don’t seem to go anywhere. In effect, this is like water cascading down a dam. There’s too many things and we have no control over it. What’s going to stop it? The only thing that seems to stop anything is some kind of focus and goal setting is focus. The way we go about our goal setting is the way Doug showed me. The first category of goal setting is what we want to achieve at work. The second set comprises of our personal goals. The third, this is the most critical of all, what we’re going to learn. Should we start off with the first one, which is our work goals? Well, that’s not the way we do it as Psychotactics. The way we work at Psychotactics is we look at our personal goals. Our own lives are far more important than work. What we do is we sit down, and first, we plan vacations. As you know, we take three months off. We’ve been doing this since 2004. We started our business at the end of 2002. Yet by 2004, we had decided we were going to take three months off. The thing is that your vacations also need planning. Our vacations are broken up into big breaks, small breaks, and weekends. Now the big breaks are the month long vacations, and then the small breaks are in between that. We’re go away for a couple of days somewhere, and that’s our small break. I’m saying weekends, because before I wouldn’t take weekends off. I’d be working on the weekend at least for a few hours on Saturday morning and a few hours on Sunday morning, and I don’t do that any more. Now that’s almost written in stone. It’s very hard for me to get to work on weekends. I’ll slide sometimes, but it’s very hard. The most critical thing to do is to work out the long breaks. When are we going to have those, and then the shorter breaks. That comprises that whole vacation concept, but you also have to have other personal goals. Maybe I want to learn how to cook Mexican dishes, or maybe I want to learn how to take better photographs. Now, these are personal projects. They’re not not pseudo work projects. They’re things that, at the end of the year, I go, “Wow, that’s what I’ve achieved. That’s how much I progressed.” That’s how you start off with personal goals. You plan your breaks. You plan what you want to do personally. Once you’re done with that, then you go to your work goals. We have a lot of work goals, we have the article writing workshop coming up, we’ve got the 50 words workshop, which is, how do you start up an article. We’ve got a whole bunch of things, because we’ve got products, we’ve got courses, we’ve got workshops. All of this has to sit nicely between, so that we work for 12 weeks and then we go on a break. We’ve decided that we’re not having any workshops next year. We’ve had a lot of workshops this year, no workshops next year. Now, this leaves us the chance to focus on the courses and the products. Now my brain is like that dam, there’s always water rushing over. I want to do a million projects, but then I have to choose. The article writing course is one of the things that I want to do for sure. I want to do a version 2.0 of it. The cartoon bank, I’ve been putting that off for a long time. That’s definitely something I want to do. Then I’ll pick a third one. Do I stop at three? No, but I make sure that I get these three down. The three that I’m going to do, they go down on paper. Some other projects will come up, a lot of stuff that I might not expect, and yet I’ll get all of this done, but these three, they’ll get done. Those three vacations, they will get done. Then we get to the third part, which is learning. What am I going to learn this next year? Maybe I’ll learn a software, or maybe I’ll learn how to use audio better. The point is, I have to write it down, because once I write it down, then I’m going to figure out where I have to go and what I have to do to make sure that learning happens. This is not just learning like reading some books or doing something minor like that. This is big chunks of learning, so that by the the end of the year, I know I’ve reached that point. When it comes to planning, the first thing that we’re always doing is we’re looking at these three elements, which is work, vacation, and learning. If we have to do other sub projects, we’ll do it, but these nine things get done. Year after year after year. This is what Doug taught me, he gave me this ability to focus. I consider myself to be unfocused, I consider myself to want to do everything and anything. That was the gift of Doug. In the year 2008, we had a program, it was a year long program. You probably heard of it. It was called a Psychotactics Protégé program. We would teach clients how to write articles, how to create info products, public relations. Lots of things along the way in that year. As you’d expect, it was reasonably profitable. 15 students paid $10,000, and so that was $150,000 that we would have in the bank before the year started. In 2009, we pulled the plug on the Protégé system. Why would we do that? We started it in 2006, it was full, in 2007 it was full, in 2008 it was full, in 2009 there was a waiting list. We decided not to go ahead with it. We decided it was going to go on our stop doing list. We were going to walk away from $150,000, just like that. Yes, some clients were unhappy, because they wanted to be on the next Protégé program. They had seen the testimonials, they had seen the results. They knew that it was good enough to sign up for. They knew that $10,000 was a very small investment, for a year long advancement. On our part, we realized that we had to walk away from $150,000 that we were getting on cue, every December. This is what’s called a stop doing list. We’ve used this stop doing list in our own lives. When we left India, and got to Auckland, it wasn’t like we were leaving something desperate. We were leaving something that was really good. I was drawing tattoos all day, going bowling in the afternoon, having long lunches, Renuka’s company was doing really well. They were picking up all expenses, and the only thing we really had to pay for was food but, at that point in time, we decided we had to make a break. We had to stop doing something so that we could do something different. We don’t know whether that different is better, but at that point we have to stop it, so that we can explore what is coming up ahead. There are two things that you put on your stop doing list. One, something that is working exceedingly well. The second thing, something that’s doing really badly. Or something that’s getting in your way. Now, the first one doesn’t make any sense. If something is doing exceedingly well, why would you stop it? Well, the point is that if you continue to do something, then you can’t do something else. You don’t know how good that something is until you stop doing it and then you go on to do something else. Last night, I was reading The New Yorker, and The New Yorker is one of my favorite magazines. There’s James Surowiecki saying exactly the same thing. He’s saying that Time Warner should sell HBO. HBO has now 120 million subscribers globally. It has earned over 2 billion dollars in profits last year. It’s stand alone streaming service has got over a million new subscribers since last spring. What does the article recommend? It recommends that they get rid of it, they sell it, they get the best price for it at this point of time, when they’re doing so well. What if it doubles in its value? That’s the answer we’ll never know, but the article went on. It talked about ESPN and how in 2014 it was worth 50 billion dollars. Disney owned it, they should have sold it, they could have banked the money. They could have focused on something else, but no, they kept it. ESPN is still doing well, it’s still the dominant player, but you can see that it’s not exactly where it was in 2014. The Protégé program was doing really well for us, clients were with us for the whole year. They would then join 5000 BC, we’d get to meet them. It was a lot of fun, and it generated a sizable revenue and we walked away from it. It enabled us to do other stuff that we would not have been able to do. When you say stop doing list, it’s not just the bad stuff that you have to stop doing. Sometimes you have to stop doing the things that are very critical, like next year we’re not doing workshops. Workshops are very critical to our business, but we’re not going to do the workshops. Instead, we’ll do online courses. Instead, we’ll do something else. We’ll create that space for ourselves, even though the workshops are doing really well. The other side of the stop doing list is stuff that’s driving you crazy. You know it’s driving you crazy, but you’re not stopping it. For instance, in September of this year, we started rebuilding the Psychotactic site. Now, there are dozens of pages on the Psychotactic site and I want to fiddle around with every single one of them, and do things that are interesting, different. The problem is that there are other projects, like for instance the storytelling workshop. Of course, vacations that get in the way. The point is that, at some point, you have to say, okay, I really want to do this, but I’m not going to do this. I’m going to put it off until later. This is procrastination, but it is part of a stop doing list. You can’t do everything in the same time. Last year, this time, we had the same dilemma when we were going to do the podcasts. I wanted to write some books for Amazon, and I wanted to do the podcast. Every day, we would go for a walk, and it would run me crazy. I didn’t know where to start, when to start, what to do first. I had to sit down and go, okay, what am I going to stop? I just dumped the Amazon books and started on the podcast. Now we’re on podcast number 70, and it’s not even been 52 weeks. It shows you how that stop doing list can help you focus and get stuff out of the way. Sometimes you have to procrastinate to get that point. Now the stop doing list is not restricted to work alone. You can take it into your personal life as well. For instance, I used to get my hair cut by a hairdresser, and I was dissatisfied for a very long time. You come back in, you grumble, and my wife, Renuka, she said, “Okay, stop grumbling. Go and find another hairdresser.” I ran into Shay, now Shay was cutting my hair so well, it was amazing. I wasn’t the only one who thought that was amazing. Usually, I was on a waiting list at a barber shop. I would get there, and there were two people in front of me, waiting for Shay. While a few of the barbers just stood around, doing absolutely nothing because no one was interested. Then, one day, involuntarily, Shay went onto my stop doing list. Kimmy was around and Shay wasn’t and so Kimmy cut my hair. She was better than Shay. I thought, “Oh my goodness. I should have done this a long time ago.” Then Kimmy got transferred to another branch, and now there’s Francis. You’ve heard about Francis in other podcasts. Now Francis is my top guy. There you go, even in something as mundane as cutting hair, there is a stop doing list. You have to push yourself a bit, and at other times you have to pull back and go, “No, we’re not going to do that.” The stop doing list is for good times, as well as for pressurized times. You have to decide, I’m going to stop doing it, I’m going to move onto the next thing. This takes us to the third part of planning, which is benchmarks. Now what are benchmarks? Often when we set out to do a project, say we’re going to do that website. What we don’t do is we don’t write down all the elements that are involved in doing that website because a website can go on forever, can’t it? It expands exponentially. When you are saying, I am going to write books for Amazon. Well, how many books are you going to write? How many pages are the books going to be? What’s the time frame? Where are you going to get the cartoons from? Who’s going to do all the layout? Having this kind of benchmark in mind makes a big difference. When we plan for something, for instance if I’m planning for the article writing course, which is version 2.0. I’m going to have to sit down and work out what I’m going to have to do. When I’m doing the stock cartoons, I’m going to have to sit down and work out what kind of stock cartoons, how many. It’s perfectly fine to write a top level goal. You should do that, you should say, “Okay, I’m going to do the website,” but then you have to get granular. The granular bit tells you, have I reached my destination. Otherwise, people don’t get to their goals, and that’s why they’re struggling, because there’s no clarity. Usually, you’re going to get the clarity when you have only three things to do, but even so, if you don’t have benchmarks you’ll never know when you’re reaching your goal or if you’re going to reach your goal. That brings us to the end of this episode. Summary What did we cover? We looked at three sets of goal setting, and that is your personal goal setting, your work goal setting, and your learning goal setting. Instead of having 700 of them, you just have three things that you want to achieve in the year. Three major things that you want to achieve in the year. Logically, you start with the work, but don’t handle the work. Just go to the breaks. Organize your breaks first, because you get reinvigorated and you come back and then you can do better work. First, fix the breaks and then go to the work, then go the learning. That takes care of the first set. The second thing that you want to do is you want to make sure that you have a stop doing list. Sometimes, things are working, they’re going your way, and they still have to be dropped. That’s what we did with the Protégé program, that’s what we did with our move to New Zealand, and a lot of good things have become better, because we’ve decided to move along. Sometimes, you’re just confused because you have too many things to do, and procrastinate. Go ahead. I mean, I know this about planning, not procrastination, but procrastination is a form of planning, when you have too much to do. Finally, have the benchmarks. Make your goals a little more detailed so that you know when you’re hitting those benchmarks. Plan it in a little more detail. That’s how you’ll reach your goal. This is what goal setting is about. It’s very simple. People make it more complicated than it needs to be. What’s the one thing that you can do today? Very simple. Work, vacation, and learning. Get your paper out, get your pen, and start writing. Three goals. You can start off with seven, or ten, but whittle it down to three. Oh, and make sure you write it down. When you write it down, things happen. It’s like magic when you write it down. Keep it in your head, it’s not as powerful. Write it down, it happens. If one of your goals is to join 5000 BC this year. That’s 5000 BC, our membership site. You’ll find that it’s quite a nice place to be. It’s a very warm and friendly place. It would be great to see you there. It also gives you the opportunity to be first in line for any of the online courses that we’re having. That might not seem like a big deal until you see how cool the online courses are at Psychotactics. It’s not just another information dump, you actually get the skill. If you set out to be a cartoonist, you become a cartoonist. If you set out to be a writer, you become a writer. It’s not just information that you’re getting, it’s all very practical. Being a member of 5000 BC gives you that little edge to get in there before everybody else. You have to read The Brain Audit, however. You can get that at psychotactics.com/brainaudit or on amazon. Com. If you’ve read The Brain Audit and you would like a special collector’s edition, then email us at Psychoanalytical. We’ll give you instruction on how to get the special collector’s edition. That’s it from me at Psychotactics and the Three Month Vacation. Bye for now. One of the biggest reasons why we struggle with our learning is because we run into resistance. Resistance is often just seen as a form of laziness, but that is not true at all. There are hidden forces causing us all to resist doing what we really should do. This slows us down considerably. Find out how to work with resistance, instead of fighting it all the time. Click here to get the free report on ‘How To Win The Resistance Game’. http://www.psychotactics.com/free/resistance-game/
What's wrong with this statement? Instead of wondering when our next vacation is we should set up a life we don't need to escape from.? There doesn't seem to be anything wrong, is there? And yet this entire line is based on a myth. And that's not the only myth that circulates so well and widely. Another myth is that a business has to grow; has to increase clients; has to increase revenues. But is that why you really got into business? Did you set out to create a life that's work, work and more work? Join us as we explore three big myths, and destroy them: Myth 1: That your business needs to constantly grow bigger. Myth 2: Somehow you'll have more time, and your business will be on auto-pilot / Myth 3: That we need to set up a life where we don't need to wonder about our vacations. / / Yup, incredibly silly business myths. Let's take them head on and get some sanity back into our lives, instead. http://www.psychotactics.com/three-business-myths/ ================ In this episode Sean talks about Myth 1: That your business needs to constantly grow bigger Myth 2: Somehow you’ll have more time, and your business will be on auto-pilot Myth 3: Vacation is the enemy and work is everything Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer. Useful Resources The Power of Enough: Why It’s Critical To Your Sanity Three Obstacles To Happiness: How To Overcome Them 5000bc: How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems ================ The Transcript “This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.” This is the Three Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. Imagine you’re a band, but not just any old music band. Instead, you’re the most popular band in the whole world. You’ve sold over 200 million records. You’re in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and probably only five or six bands have sold more than you in the entire history of pop. Barry Gibb has never done this before, never taken the long walk to the stage by himself. Speaker 2: Is it important for you to do this? Barry: Yeah, it’s everything to me. It’s all I’ve ever known. I don’t know how to do anything else. Speaker 2: t went pretty well, though. Barry: I can’t get a job. Speaker 2: He’s the only surviving member of one of the 20th century’s greatest vocal groups, and this night, at the TD Garden in Boston, he’s about to begin his first ever solo tour. You have to ask yourself why. Why would Barry Gibb, with all his success and all the money that they’ve earned over the years as the Bee Gees, do his first solo tour. It’s not like he needs the money or the fame, because they’re the only group in history to have written, recorded, and produced six consecutive number one hits. As Barry Gibb himself boasted, “We weren’t on the charts. We were the charts.” In that spring, as he hit the road across North America for six solo shows, every show was costing him half a million dollars a night. He said he would be lucky to break even. But that’s not the point. “I have to keep this music alive,” says Gibb. To me, that’s what embodies what I do. I want to keep the music alive. I think this is true for most of us. Most of us aren’t really looking for this magic pill. We’re not looking to double our customers, triple our income, do any of that kind of nonsense. What we’re trying to do is keep our music alive. We’re trying to get some purpose in our lives. The money, the fame, all that stuff’s really nice, but does it matter in the long run? At the height of The Beatles’ fame, John Lennon said, “Work is life, you know, and without it there’s only uncertainty and unhappiness.” When you look at someone like the guy who runs Uchida, a little restaurant in Vancouver Island, the restaurant is only open from 11:00 to 2:00. When you get there you eat some of the most delightful Japanese food I’ve ever eaten, and I have traveled to many places, including Japan. That magic is expressed in his work. He gets to work and he stays until the restaurant closes at 2:00. It doesn’t open for dinner because from 2:00 to 9:00 he’s preparing the next day’s meals. Every day the meal is just so amazing. It’s different every single day. It’s a big surprise, and it’s always amazing. Today I’m going to talk to you about three myths about business. We’ve run Psychotactics for the past 13 years, but the business goes back a long way when I used to be a cartoonist. I’m going to bring to you these three myths which I think are important. I think they’re important because everyone is talking about the other side, about more money, more customers, doubling your income, doing all that stuff. As I said, that’s really nice, but is there a flip side to it? That’s what we’ll cover in today’s episode. First up on the menu today is the fact that you have to grow. That’s myth number one. Myth number two is that things get easier as you go along. Myth number three is that you have to create a life that you don’t need a vacation from. Let’s start off with the first myth, which is you have to grow. Once a year, we have a really important meeting at Psychotactics. My wife Renuka and I meet with our accountant Steve, and we go over our accounts. We look at how much money we made in the year. How much are our profits? What are the expenses? All the stuff that you do with an accountant before you sign off everything. We’re in 2015, but when I look at the accounts, it looks exactly as it did in 2007. 2007 was a really good year. We earned twice, maybe thrice as much as we needed. Of course a third goes to the government. That’s just what you do; you pay tax. Even so, you had twice as much as you needed, and our needs are not much. We take our breaks. We go on vacation. We buy little goodies here and there, but we’re not flash people. We don’t have the flashiest car. We don’t fly business; we always friendly economy. We keep our expenses under control. But even so, having twice as much as you need, that’s quite a lot. The way that a lot of businesses go about this situation is to say let’s double it, let’s triple it. Here’s what I’m telling you. You don’t have to double it. You don’t have to triple it. You don’t have to enter that rat race. All you have to do is stay comfortable. That was your goal in the first place. Your goal as a business owner was to start up a business, to have control over your life, and be comfortable. It was not to struggle anymore. It was never to double and triple your income. In fact, when you read the stories of business owners that have doubled and tripled, and I don’t know, quadrupled, quintupled their income, you find that there is a huge sacrifice. That sacrifice is their family, their life, their health, everything else. When people talk about all of the extra stuff, the extra money that comes in, the extra fame, they don’t talk about that part until a lot later when they’re doing their memoir. The reality is you have to double or triple nothing. When we look at our list, for instance, our list grew from 200-300 people. Now there are 37,000 people. It might seem quite small when you think about it, because we’ve been around since 2002, to have only 37,000 people. I know it sounds like a lot if you don’t have 37,000 people, but if you’ve been around since 2002, you should have 350,000 people. Here’s the reality. Those 37,000 people don’t open the newsletter. Maybe 4 or 5,000 people open the newsletter at any given point in time. This is a reality. Out of those 4 or 5,000 people, probably 400 people generate more than 90% of our income. Most of them are our members at 5000bc. At this point, this whole message seems very conflicting, even hypocritical, because what we’re saying is we’re very comfortable. We are earning thrice as much as we need. We’ve got this huge list. I’m saying to you, don’t do that. Don’t go crazy over stuff. We could have had a list of 350,000 people. We could have ten times the income. What would we do with it? How many sacrifices would we have to make to just do that kind of stuff. Instead, the sacrifice comes from other places. This is where the growth really matters. When you look at many of the products at Psychotactics, you will find that they have been polished over time. When you look at The Brain Audit, it started with version 1, and then version 2, and then version 3, and then 3.2. that’s where we grow exponentially. When you look at the courses, they improve by 10% or 15% every year. How do we know this? Because we get feedback. Every course has one full day of feedback where clients tell us what we did wrong and how to fix it. We have to fix it, and that takes a lot of time. There there is the growth. We still take exactly the same number of clients for every course as we’ve always done. We never exceed 25. If you’re in a workshop, it’s never 30. There is never this need to continuously grow and grow bigger, and grow fatter, and grow … I don’t know. There is no need. The need is in making magic, in getting your work better. Why is this need so important? Because you as a person, you feel satisfied. You feel wow, my work has got better over the years. You’re fixing it and it’s improving and it’s evolving. Then you look at your clients and see that they are achieving these skills. Their business is growing. They’re more satisfied. They’re taking more vacations. You think, my mission is on its way. It’s not finished. It’s on its way. The benchmark needn’t be the fame and the benchmark needn’t be the money, and the benchmark needn’t be the growth. That’s one of the first myths that I want to take apart. Because almost every book out there is talking about something quite the opposite. In fact, yesterday I was on Facebook and there it was again: double your income, lessen your work. No, your work is interesting. Your vacations are interesting. I get the point. You can’t sell a book that says stay stagnant with your income. Stay stagnant with your revenue. Stay stagnant with your clients. It’s not going to sell. Maybe it will, I don’t know, but the point is it’s a myth. You have to be satisfied first. Your work has to bring great satisfaction and you have to be comfortable. That’s all that really is required from you as a small business. Let the Apple and the Google and all those big companies do whatever it is that they want to do. Let them double and triple and do whatever they want to do. That’s probably not for you. If you’re the person that enjoys your family time, and enjoys your life, and enjoys the little things, then this is how you go about it. Because, as we saw with the Bee Gees and Barry Gibb, the fame didn’t make that much of a difference. It made a difference, but at the end of the day, it’s about keeping the music alive. It’s about keeping the magic alive. That brings us to the end of the first part. Now we go to the second myth, which is things get easier. Back in the year 2000, if you went to a site called millionbucks.co.nz, you would find our site. Yes, I’m embarrassed by the name, but that was what I wanted to do right at the start. I wanted to grow the business, make a million bucks, do all the stuff that we’re told we are supposed to do. Unfortunately, no one, or very few people were making money online at that point in time. The online space was not seen as some place where you could go and by stuff. It was always about information and sharing that information. It’s not until 2002 that we launched Psychotactics. That’s when we sold our first copy of The Brain Audit. That was a big surprise. We were forced to setup our credit card system by someone else who kicked us into doing it. Then someone showed up and bought the first copy, took us completely by surprise. Then my wife Renuka would do a happy dance. She would get up from her chair and do a dance in the room. Then of course, as the months passed, we would get some more sales, and every time a sale came she would do a happy dance. It does get to the point where you can’t dance anymore and you have to sit down and do your work. You also buy into this idea that things will get easier. Because when we started out, we were working five, six, seven days a week. I realise there are only seven days in a week. But we were working all the time. We thought things will get easier, and they have got easier. But wait a second, we still put in five full days. We take the weekend off now but we still put in five full days, so how much easier has it got? The point is that if you want to do superb work, things don’t get easier. Because you’re always making it somehow better. You’re always learning. You’re always getting feedback, and feedback kills you. Because feedback tells you that your work isn’t as superb as you think. That dish that you just cooked, that you’ve been raving about, that you think everyone should praise you for, it’s too oily. There’s too much salt in it. Or maybe there’s just over the top salt and it tastes good but that’s too much salt for human consumption. You cannot take that feedback because that feedback means that you have to fix something. Clients will come back right after we’ve written a book and they’ll say, “You should fix this part or you should move that part.” They’ll get onto our courses and they’ll start to move things around. They’ll suggest different types of technology. We have to listen. All of that listening means all of that doing, and doing means that things never get easier. It’s like the story of the Golden Gate Bridge. They say they start painting at one end and by the time they get to the other end, they have to paint it again. I don’t know if the story is true, but that’s approximately what your business is going to be like. It’s going to have lots of ups and downs, but more importantly, it’s not going to get easier. If you want to improve your work, if you want to make it magic, you’re going to get that feedback. You’re going to ask for that feedback and you’re going to get that feedback, and you’re going to have to fix things. When you fix things, it’s work. When you create new stuff, it’s work. All of this work brings an enormous amount of satisfaction. I can look back at a lot of the things that we’ve done, and if it weren’t for the clients, I wouldn’t have done it. If it weren’t for the deadlines, I wouldn’t have done it. But all of it is work. You look at the storytelling workshop that we’re doing now in Nashville and Amsterdam. I would never have written the notes. I’ve written a series on storytelling. It’s available as a book. But this is more comprehensive. This is more in-depth. I’ve had to spend weeks working it out. I sit at the café looking pensive, drinking my coffee. Then it’s work. To me, it never gets easier, because you’re always trying to explore that depth, as it were. You’re trying to get that magic. You’re trying to keep that music going. We all start out with this dream of sitting on the beach and doing nothing. That’s not how the brain works and that’s not how the body works. In fact, if we sat at the beach and did nothing, we’d soon be a vegetable in no time at all. If we don’t do our daily walks, and we don’t exercise, and we don’t meditate, and we don’t do all the stuff that we’re supposed to do, we don’t do all this “work,” there’s no satisfaction in life. Today I can write an article in 45 minutes. I can do the podcast. I can do webinars. I can do a lot of stuff. What happens is you get much faster and better at doing stuff, and you want to get faster and better all the time because it improvements your work. You put more cartoons in the books. You tweak the workshops. You do stuff that only brings more work. Of course that’s why you need the vacations as well. Because you need to wind down. You need the weekends to wind down. That’s really how life continues. It’s not about the beach. The beach, that’s vacation time. There’s a separate time for it. The third myth is that vacation is the enemy and work is everything. Because we’ve been talking about work, haven’t we? Let’s look at this third myth, which is that vacation is the enemy. But is vacation really the enemy? It seems like it, doesn’t it? Because wherever you go on Facebook or on the internet, you run into this little saying by Seth Godin, and it says, “Instead of wondering where your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.” When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense to have a great life and you don’t need a vacation. It doesn’t make sense to me at all. Because when you look at that saying, what it’s saying is that your job, whatever you’re doing right now, or your business, whatever you’re doing right now, is so tedious that you’re not enjoying yourself. It’s saying that the enemy is that bad job, that unsatisfying job, that unsatisfying business that you’re running right now. And that you need to find something that is satisfying. That’s the enemy. Look what happened here. Vacation came in. Vacation came in as the enemy when vacation is not the enemy at all. That bad job, that’s the enemy. The good job, that’s your friend. Vacation is the time where you get better at what you do. You take time off just like a flight takes off, and it lands, and it has to refuel, and it has to be maintained. That’s what vacation is all about. It’s about going to new lands, learning about stuff, learning the different types of food, enjoying yourself, reading, sleeping, drinking, doing stuff that we did as kids. When we grew up, we weren’t working all the time. We’d go to school and then we had vacations. Vacations weren’t the enemy back then. How did they become the enemy all of a sudden? It’s because we’ve got this crappy job or we’re doing this business that is deeply unsatisfying. Then you have a statement like this, which is probably just off the cuff, but it has made vacations the enemy, and vacations are not the enemy at all. They are the friend. That’s myth number three, that you don’t need vacations. You need the break. Think of yourself back when you were a kid and you just enjoyed the time of absolute nothingness. You would like to get that again, wouldn’t you? What’s the point of sitting at work the whole time? There is really no point. You can fool yourself, but the reason why we sit at work the whole time is because we get what is called work momentum. We work and we work and we work and we work, and then that momentum takes us into more work. The moment we go on vacation, we’re thinking of what? Work of course, because that’s what we’ve been doing for so long. Then when you go on a vacation, if you have enough time on your vacation, you get into vacation momentum, and then you get more and more relaxed. Then when you get back to work, it’s very hard to get back to work. This management is important, this management of work and life. It’s important not to just take anything you see on Facebook, this nice little phrase, just because it came from Seth Godin or some other guru, and then take it at face value. You want to deconstruct it and understand why you did things the way you did. You want to see it from your perspective as a human being. You want to see it how you were when you were a child. Because vacations are like a drug. Once you take vacations, work becomes so much more satisfying. Okay, I’ll stop ranting and raving. This brings us to the end of the episode. What have we covered in this episode? We covered three things. The first thing we covered was this factor of doubling and tripling your income, and your customers. At Psychotactics we’ve grown organically. We’ve just done things and the list has grown to quite a sizeable number, but it’s very slow. It does matter. If you do what you love and you do it really well, and you will over time, then you will find that there are clients and there’s enough revenue, and you live a very comfortable life. You’re spending time with your family. You’re doing things that you really want. That’s what’s important. That takes us to the second myth, and that is that life doesn’t get easier. It gets easier if you do nothing with your work, if you don’t take feedback, if you’re not big enough to take that feedback. Because most of us are insecure and we feel like someone is attacking us when they give feedback, so we don’t ask for feedback. We ask for praise all the time. But praise doesn’t improve your work so much; feedback does. When you get that feedback, you have to do some more work. Of course that takes more time, and so things don’t always get easier. You just get better at it and your work gets better, but never easier. The final thing is that vacation is not the enemy. It has never been the enemy. We’ve made it the enemy because of crazy sayings that float around the internet. When you look into your childhood and your early years, vacation has always been your friend. You’ve just forgotten the friend and decided to adopt another friend, who’s a workaholic. Well, get rid of the workaholic and go back to your childhood. Go back to your young years and you’ll see that it’s a lot more fun. That brings us to the end of this episode. What’s the one thing that we can do today? Well this episode was not quite the things to do episode, but even so, one of the things that you can do today is make more work for yourself. Whether it’s in your personal life, the hobbies that you have, or whether it’s in work, you want to ask for feedback. You want to ask people to tell you what you can fix. Stop asking for so much praise. The praise is important, but the feedback is just as important. Create a little more work for yourself and then take a vacation. Because, as Barry Gibb said, you want to keep the music alive. When you listen to this podcast, we’re likely to be on vacation. We’re going to Morocco. Our trip is across the United States, then to Europe, then to Africa, then to Asia, and then back to New Zealand. Amsterdam is one of our favorite cities on the planet, and after our trip Nashville we’re going to be in Amsterdam for quite a while before heading to Morocco. It’s going to be fun in Morocco. No tourists because it’s not as hot this time of year. We’re going to be at a seaside place, really nice place, do nothing, just relax, just paint, eat, drink and sleep. The reason we’re headed back to Auckland in a bit of a hurry is because Auckland is amazing at this time of the year. It’s summer; there’s no one in the city. We go for long walks. When we get back after our vacation, we’re going to take another month off until February. That’s when we get back to work. If what I’m describing to you sounds so unreal, then remember that it was unreal for us as well. We decided that this is what we want to do. We want to take time off. We want to take weekends off. We put these things into place, and that’s what you should do as well. That’s exactly what the next episode is about. It’s about goal setting, but goal setting our way, and you would expect it to be different, so listen to it and tell your friends about it. If you haven’t given us a rating on iTunes, then please do so. If you would like to give us a one-star rating or a two-star rating, that’s fine. But give us a rating. If you haven’t done that already, go to iTunes, give us a rating, and total your friends about the Three Month Vacation. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye from Psychotactics and the Three Month Vacation. Bye bye. Still reading? Find out—The Three Obstacles To Happiness (And How To Overcome Them) http://www.psychotactics.com/three-business-myths/
How do you make your product or service irresistible? With tens of thousands of similar products or services in the market, can you use simple techniques to create a great offer? This episode shows you two psychological methods that we can't turn down?as humans. We love both the buffet and the specialty. No matter if you're a small business or a big one, you can use these techniques and increase your product and service sales. In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Buffet vs. Specialty Principle Part 2: How Studio 54 put out a buffet of fantasy Part 3: What does this mean for you when you’re selling a product or service? Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer. What Are The Factors in Play Behind An Irresistible Offer: Part 1 of 3 Imagine you’re Frank Sinatra. No matter where you go on the planet, people know of you. Doors open magically for you. People can’t help but gape in wonder as you show up at an event. So imagine a place where the great Frank Sinatra can’t enter. It’s inconceivable, isn’t it? And yet it happened. When Frank showed up at Studio 54, he was turned away. So was the president of Cyprus, the King of Saudi Arabia’s son, Roberta Flack, and several young Kennedys. Even the famous movie star, Jack Nicholson was unable to enter on opening night. Studio 54 was like no other place in New York From the moment it opened its 11,000-square-foot dance floor, it was packed with celebrities dying to get in. Olivia Newton-John, Michael Jackson, Woody Allen, Andy Warhol, Elizabeth Taylor, Dolly Parton, Mick Jagger, Tine Turner—you get the idea—they were just some of the visitors to Studio 54. Almost every night since it opened its doors on April 26, 1977, it was packed to its capacity—almost 2000 people a night. If you considered yourself cool, you wanted to get into Studio 54—but there was no guarantee you’d get in. There was someone stopping the flow… This someone was at the door Studio 54 night after night. He’d show up at the door at 11:30 pm and get on a step stool above the crowd. He’d pick who could get into the club that night—and who was to be turned away. His name is Steve Rubell, part-owner and the person who made sure the Studio was one of the most irresistible places in New York! So what made Studio 54 so irresistible, when there were so many cool places in New York at the time? And what makes any product or service irresistible, even without star power? Let’s take a look at three core elements. Buffet vs. Specialty Exclusivity Build Up Buffet vs. Specialty Principle If you were to go to Lynda.com you’d be faced with a buffet. On Lynda.com there are hundreds of tutorials on software, business and creative skills. In 2004 alone, there were over 100 courses on the site. And that course number has gone up exponentially. For the past few years, Lynda.com been adding more than 18 hours of content, almost every single day of the year. That means you’re likely to run into thousands of hours of tutorials topics such as Photoshop, computer animation, 3-D animation, photography—in all about 224,413 tutorials to date. That’s a huge buffet, don’t you agree? And as humans, we’re primed for buffets. We love the “eat all you want” concept and it’s even better if the “food” is of an extremely high quality. This means that a potential client of Lynda.com can access all their content for just $250 a year. Immediately you see why this kind of deal is incredibly irresistible. If you decide to learn a program like InDesign, you can easily do so, because there are at least a dozen courses on InDesign alone. If you want to learn to work with WordPress, hey, there’s a mountain of video instruction already in place. No matter where you look, the volume and quality of content tantalises you. Which brings us to our first principle—the buffet principle If you’re offering your clients an enormous amount of something, they’re instantly drawn towards it, whether they can consume it or not. When given a buffet option, few of us can stop ourselves from feeling the need to buy the product or service. When you look at 5000bc.com, you get a buffet option 5000bc is the membership site at Psychotactics.com. The moment you get to the sales page at 5000bc, there’s a feeling of a ton of information at 5000bc. There are cumulatively, hundreds of articles on topics such as copywriting, web design, branding, lead generation etc. Which is why most clients tend to sign up to the membership site at 5000bc. It’s more than likely they’ve been a subscriber at Psychotactics for a while, bought and read The Brain Audit, possibly even bought some other books from Psychotactics—and then they’re exposed to 5000bc. And the buffet concept kicks in. At $259 a year (remarkably similar to Lynda.com), clients can get not only a ton of curated content, but also have the opportunity to ask me dozens of questions—some of which are answered within hours, if not minutes. This concept of a buffet becomes impossible to resist, and has been the main factor in attracting clients to 5000bc since it started way back in 2003. Studio 54 put out a buffet of fantasy The magazine, Vanity Fair, describes it as the “giddy epicenter of 70s hedonism, a disco hothouse of beautiful people, endless cocaine and every kind of sex. Once you were within the velvet ropes, you were exposed to raunchiness, debauchery and creativity of an unimaginable scale. “It felt like you were going to a new place every night,” says Kevin Haley, then a model, now a Hollywood decorator. “And you were, because they changed it all the time for the parties. Remember the Dolly Parton party? It was like a little farm with bales of hay and live farm animals—pigs and goats and sheep. The designer Karl Lagerfield’s party: an 18th century paty with busboys dressed up as courtiers, powdered wigs and then—a live reggae concert at 3 am in the morning. Another night might bring Bianca Jagger popping out of a birthday cake. Some nights might bring in a sea of glitter, another night Lady Godiva on a horse—or Hell’s Angels on Harleys on the dance floor. Ironically, the buffet-concept represents just one way to create an irresistible offer. The other way is the exact opposite—where you take away everything and create a specialty offer. Remember Lynda.com where you get over 200,000 tutorials? Remember the price? Yes, it’s $250 a year. And yet, at Psychotactics we sell an InDesign course that’s $269. It’s not an entire course in InDesign. It’s not even a partial course. All the course promises is ONE thing. It shows you how to create an e-book in InDesign in less than an hour. If you were to learn a course in InDesign, you’re likely to take at least 18 hours—and that’s the first time around. It’s likely you’d have to go through the entire course (or at least part of the course) a second time. And then when you’re ready to create your snazzy e-book, you have to work out which part of InDesign will help you get the result you seek. It’s not inconceivable to spend 40-50 hours just to get your e-book going. Now the specialty offer makes a huge difference to the client Instead of wading through hours of material, they get right to the point. And this specialty concept applies to more than just courses or training. A phone. Most of us want smartphones that have all the bells and whistles. But what if you want just a cell phone that makes calls? The Doro Phone Easy 626 does just what you’d expect a cell phone to do—it makes calls. Like the InDesign course, it’s not meant for everyone, but just a smaller audience that finds it irresistible. What does this mean for you when you’re selling a product or service? It means you can have your cake and eat it too. When we sell the book, The Brain Audit, it is akin to a buffet (like most books). It has several chapters and spans 180 pages. Yet, elements of The Brain Audit are then isolated. For instance, one of the elements, uniqueness, is a complete course. Another element, testimonial is a 100+ page book. Clients who buy The Brain Audit are extremely satisfied with the content and applications. However, when they want to go deeper on an isolated topic, they will buy the other products as well. Studio 54 catered to almost 2000 people a night—yet there was isolation in place If you were part of the select few, you could go down to the basement. The basement was essentially a storage area connected by zigzagging passageways. The in-crowd was in the basement, away from the party upstairs, mostly talking through the night and drinking bottles of a vodka brand— Stolichnaya. Even if you’re no Studio 54, you can have a smörgåsbord of goodies while at the same time putting a velvet rope over other product or services. And since we’re talking about buffets, a restaurant could have the buffet, while at the same time offering a special meal for just a tiny audience. A website designer could put together a website with all the bells and whistles—then create a service or product that was very niche and hence, irresistible. To be irresistible, you don’t have to choose between buffet and specialty items In reality a specialty item is easier to put together (because it’s less stuff, rather than more). In the grand scheme of things, it’s also easier to market as it has a clear point of focus. While we’ll look at all three elements: buffet/specialty, exclusivity and build up, it’s important to note that specialty is a great starting point. So start small—and charge more. This takes us to the second element: Exclusivity. Have a look here—for the continuation on How To Make Your Product or Service Irresistible: Part 2 and 3.
What's wrong with this statement? Instead of wondering when our next vacation is we should set up a life we don't need to escape from.? There doesn't seem to be anything wrong, is there? And yet this entire line is based on a myth. And that's not the only myth that circulates so well and widely. Another myth is that a business has to grow; has to increase clients; has to increase revenues. But is that why you really got into business? Did you set out to create a life that's work, work and more work? Join us as we explore three big myths, and destroy them: Myth 1: That your business needs to constantly grow bigger. Myth 2: Somehow you'll have more time, and your business will be on auto-pilot / Myth 3: That we need to set up a life where we don't need to wonder about our vacations. / / Yup, incredibly silly business myths. Let's take them head on and get some sanity back into our lives, instead. http://www.psychotactics.com/three-business-myths/ ================ In this episode Sean talks about Myth 1: That your business needs to constantly grow bigger Myth 2: Somehow you’ll have more time, and your business will be on auto-pilot Myth 3: Vacation is the enemy and work is everything Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer. Useful Resources The Power of Enough: Why It’s Critical To Your Sanity Three Obstacles To Happiness: How To Overcome Them 5000bc: How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems ================ The Transcript “This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.” This is the Three Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. Imagine you’re a band, but not just any old music band. Instead, you’re the most popular band in the whole world. You’ve sold over 200 million records. You’re in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and probably only five or six bands have sold more than you in the entire history of pop. Barry Gibb has never done this before, never taken the long walk to the stage by himself. Speaker 2: Is it important for you to do this? Barry: Yeah, it’s everything to me. It’s all I’ve ever known. I don’t know how to do anything else. Speaker 2: t went pretty well, though. Barry: I can’t get a job. Speaker 2: He’s the only surviving member of one of the 20th century’s greatest vocal groups, and this night, at the TD Garden in Boston, he’s about to begin his first ever solo tour. You have to ask yourself why. Why would Barry Gibb, with all his success and all the money that they’ve earned over the years as the Bee Gees, do his first solo tour. It’s not like he needs the money or the fame, because they’re the only group in history to have written, recorded, and produced six consecutive number one hits. As Barry Gibb himself boasted, “We weren’t on the charts. We were the charts.” In that spring, as he hit the road across North America for six solo shows, every show was costing him half a million dollars a night. He said he would be lucky to break even. But that’s not the point. “I have to keep this music alive,” says Gibb. To me, that’s what embodies what I do. I want to keep the music alive. I think this is true for most of us. Most of us aren’t really looking for this magic pill. We’re not looking to double our customers, triple our income, do any of that kind of nonsense. What we’re trying to do is keep our music alive. We’re trying to get some purpose in our lives. The money, the fame, all that stuff’s really nice, but does it matter in the long run? At the height of The Beatles’ fame, John Lennon said, “Work is life, you know, and without it there’s only uncertainty and unhappiness.” When you look at someone like the guy who runs Uchida, a little restaurant in Vancouver Island, the restaurant is only open from 11:00 to 2:00. When you get there you eat some of the most delightful Japanese food I’ve ever eaten, and I have traveled to many places, including Japan. That magic is expressed in his work. He gets to work and he stays until the restaurant closes at 2:00. It doesn’t open for dinner because from 2:00 to 9:00 he’s preparing the next day’s meals. Every day the meal is just so amazing. It’s different every single day. It’s a big surprise, and it’s always amazing. Today I’m going to talk to you about three myths about business. We’ve run Psychotactics for the past 13 years, but the business goes back a long way when I used to be a cartoonist. I’m going to bring to you these three myths which I think are important. I think they’re important because everyone is talking about the other side, about more money, more customers, doubling your income, doing all that stuff. As I said, that’s really nice, but is there a flip side to it? That’s what we’ll cover in today’s episode. First up on the menu today is the fact that you have to grow. That’s myth number one. Myth number two is that things get easier as you go along. Myth number three is that you have to create a life that you don’t need a vacation from. Let’s start off with the first myth, which is you have to grow. Once a year, we have a really important meeting at Psychotactics. My wife Renuka and I meet with our accountant Steve, and we go over our accounts. We look at how much money we made in the year. How much are our profits? What are the expenses? All the stuff that you do with an accountant before you sign off everything. We’re in 2015, but when I look at the accounts, it looks exactly as it did in 2007. 2007 was a really good year. We earned twice, maybe thrice as much as we needed. Of course a third goes to the government. That’s just what you do; you pay tax. Even so, you had twice as much as you needed, and our needs are not much. We take our breaks. We go on vacation. We buy little goodies here and there, but we’re not flash people. We don’t have the flashiest car. We don’t fly business; we always friendly economy. We keep our expenses under control. But even so, having twice as much as you need, that’s quite a lot. The way that a lot of businesses go about this situation is to say let’s double it, let’s triple it. Here’s what I’m telling you. You don’t have to double it. You don’t have to triple it. You don’t have to enter that rat race. All you have to do is stay comfortable. That was your goal in the first place. Your goal as a business owner was to start up a business, to have control over your life, and be comfortable. It was not to struggle anymore. It was never to double and triple your income. In fact, when you read the stories of business owners that have doubled and tripled, and I don’t know, quadrupled, quintupled their income, you find that there is a huge sacrifice. That sacrifice is their family, their life, their health, everything else. When people talk about all of the extra stuff, the extra money that comes in, the extra fame, they don’t talk about that part until a lot later when they’re doing their memoir. The reality is you have to double or triple nothing. When we look at our list, for instance, our list grew from 200-300 people. Now there are 37,000 people. It might seem quite small when you think about it, because we’ve been around since 2002, to have only 37,000 people. I know it sounds like a lot if you don’t have 37,000 people, but if you’ve been around since 2002, you should have 350,000 people. Here’s the reality. Those 37,000 people don’t open the newsletter. Maybe 4 or 5,000 people open the newsletter at any given point in time. This is a reality. Out of those 4 or 5,000 people, probably 400 people generate more than 90% of our income. Most of them are our members at 5000bc. At this point, this whole message seems very conflicting, even hypocritical, because what we’re saying is we’re very comfortable. We are earning thrice as much as we need. We’ve got this huge list. I’m saying to you, don’t do that. Don’t go crazy over stuff. We could have had a list of 350,000 people. We could have ten times the income. What would we do with it? How many sacrifices would we have to make to just do that kind of stuff. Instead, the sacrifice comes from other places. This is where the growth really matters. When you look at many of the products at Psychotactics, you will find that they have been polished over time. When you look at The Brain Audit, it started with version 1, and then version 2, and then version 3, and then 3.2. that’s where we grow exponentially. When you look at the courses, they improve by 10% or 15% every year. How do we know this? Because we get feedback. Every course has one full day of feedback where clients tell us what we did wrong and how to fix it. We have to fix it, and that takes a lot of time. There there is the growth. We still take exactly the same number of clients for every course as we’ve always done. We never exceed 25. If you’re in a workshop, it’s never 30. There is never this need to continuously grow and grow bigger, and grow fatter, and grow … I don’t know. There is no need. The need is in making magic, in getting your work better. Why is this need so important? Because you as a person, you feel satisfied. You feel wow, my work has got better over the years. You’re fixing it and it’s improving and it’s evolving. Then you look at your clients and see that they are achieving these skills. Their business is growing. They’re more satisfied. They’re taking more vacations. You think, my mission is on its way. It’s not finished. It’s on its way. The benchmark needn’t be the fame and the benchmark needn’t be the money, and the benchmark needn’t be the growth. That’s one of the first myths that I want to take apart. Because almost every book out there is talking about something quite the opposite. In fact, yesterday I was on Facebook and there it was again: double your income, lessen your work. No, your work is interesting. Your vacations are interesting. I get the point. You can’t sell a book that says stay stagnant with your income. Stay stagnant with your revenue. Stay stagnant with your clients. It’s not going to sell. Maybe it will, I don’t know, but the point is it’s a myth. You have to be satisfied first. Your work has to bring great satisfaction and you have to be comfortable. That’s all that really is required from you as a small business. Let the Apple and the Google and all those big companies do whatever it is that they want to do. Let them double and triple and do whatever they want to do. That’s probably not for you. If you’re the person that enjoys your family time, and enjoys your life, and enjoys the little things, then this is how you go about it. Because, as we saw with the Bee Gees and Barry Gibb, the fame didn’t make that much of a difference. It made a difference, but at the end of the day, it’s about keeping the music alive. It’s about keeping the magic alive. That brings us to the end of the first part. Now we go to the second myth, which is things get easier. Back in the year 2000, if you went to a site called millionbucks.co.nz, you would find our site. Yes, I’m embarrassed by the name, but that was what I wanted to do right at the start. I wanted to grow the business, make a million bucks, do all the stuff that we’re told we are supposed to do. Unfortunately, no one, or very few people were making money online at that point in time. The online space was not seen as some place where you could go and by stuff. It was always about information and sharing that information. It’s not until 2002 that we launched Psychotactics. That’s when we sold our first copy of The Brain Audit. That was a big surprise. We were forced to setup our credit card system by someone else who kicked us into doing it. Then someone showed up and bought the first copy, took us completely by surprise. Then my wife Renuka would do a happy dance. She would get up from her chair and do a dance in the room. Then of course, as the months passed, we would get some more sales, and every time a sale came she would do a happy dance. It does get to the point where you can’t dance anymore and you have to sit down and do your work. You also buy into this idea that things will get easier. Because when we started out, we were working five, six, seven days a week. I realise there are only seven days in a week. But we were working all the time. We thought things will get easier, and they have got easier. But wait a second, we still put in five full days. We take the weekend off now but we still put in five full days, so how much easier has it got? The point is that if you want to do superb work, things don’t get easier. Because you’re always making it somehow better. You’re always learning. You’re always getting feedback, and feedback kills you. Because feedback tells you that your work isn’t as superb as you think. That dish that you just cooked, that you’ve been raving about, that you think everyone should praise you for, it’s too oily. There’s too much salt in it. Or maybe there’s just over the top salt and it tastes good but that’s too much salt for human consumption. You cannot take that feedback because that feedback means that you have to fix something. Clients will come back right after we’ve written a book and they’ll say, “You should fix this part or you should move that part.” They’ll get onto our courses and they’ll start to move things around. They’ll suggest different types of technology. We have to listen. All of that listening means all of that doing, and doing means that things never get easier. It’s like the story of the Golden Gate Bridge. They say they start painting at one end and by the time they get to the other end, they have to paint it again. I don’t know if the story is true, but that’s approximately what your business is going to be like. It’s going to have lots of ups and downs, but more importantly, it’s not going to get easier. If you want to improve your work, if you want to make it magic, you’re going to get that feedback. You’re going to ask for that feedback and you’re going to get that feedback, and you’re going to have to fix things. When you fix things, it’s work. When you create new stuff, it’s work. All of this work brings an enormous amount of satisfaction. I can look back at a lot of the things that we’ve done, and if it weren’t for the clients, I wouldn’t have done it. If it weren’t for the deadlines, I wouldn’t have done it. But all of it is work. You look at the storytelling workshop that we’re doing now in Nashville and Amsterdam. I would never have written the notes. I’ve written a series on storytelling. It’s available as a book. But this is more comprehensive. This is more in-depth. I’ve had to spend weeks working it out. I sit at the café looking pensive, drinking my coffee. Then it’s work. To me, it never gets easier, because you’re always trying to explore that depth, as it were. You’re trying to get that magic. You’re trying to keep that music going. We all start out with this dream of sitting on the beach and doing nothing. That’s not how the brain works and that’s not how the body works. In fact, if we sat at the beach and did nothing, we’d soon be a vegetable in no time at all. If we don’t do our daily walks, and we don’t exercise, and we don’t meditate, and we don’t do all the stuff that we’re supposed to do, we don’t do all this “work,” there’s no satisfaction in life. Today I can write an article in 45 minutes. I can do the podcast. I can do webinars. I can do a lot of stuff. What happens is you get much faster and better at doing stuff, and you want to get faster and better all the time because it improvements your work. You put more cartoons in the books. You tweak the workshops. You do stuff that only brings more work. Of course that’s why you need the vacations as well. Because you need to wind down. You need the weekends to wind down. That’s really how life continues. It’s not about the beach. The beach, that’s vacation time. There’s a separate time for it. The third myth is that vacation is the enemy and work is everything. Because we’ve been talking about work, haven’t we? Let’s look at this third myth, which is that vacation is the enemy. But is vacation really the enemy? It seems like it, doesn’t it? Because wherever you go on Facebook or on the internet, you run into this little saying by Seth Godin, and it says, “Instead of wondering where your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.” When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense to have a great life and you don’t need a vacation. It doesn’t make sense to me at all. Because when you look at that saying, what it’s saying is that your job, whatever you’re doing right now, or your business, whatever you’re doing right now, is so tedious that you’re not enjoying yourself. It’s saying that the enemy is that bad job, that unsatisfying job, that unsatisfying business that you’re running right now. And that you need to find something that is satisfying. That’s the enemy. Look what happened here. Vacation came in. Vacation came in as the enemy when vacation is not the enemy at all. That bad job, that’s the enemy. The good job, that’s your friend. Vacation is the time where you get better at what you do. You take time off just like a flight takes off, and it lands, and it has to refuel, and it has to be maintained. That’s what vacation is all about. It’s about going to new lands, learning about stuff, learning the different types of food, enjoying yourself, reading, sleeping, drinking, doing stuff that we did as kids. When we grew up, we weren’t working all the time. We’d go to school and then we had vacations. Vacations weren’t the enemy back then. How did they become the enemy all of a sudden? It’s because we’ve got this crappy job or we’re doing this business that is deeply unsatisfying. Then you have a statement like this, which is probably just off the cuff, but it has made vacations the enemy, and vacations are not the enemy at all. They are the friend. That’s myth number three, that you don’t need vacations. You need the break. Think of yourself back when you were a kid and you just enjoyed the time of absolute nothingness. You would like to get that again, wouldn’t you? What’s the point of sitting at work the whole time? There is really no point. You can fool yourself, but the reason why we sit at work the whole time is because we get what is called work momentum. We work and we work and we work and we work, and then that momentum takes us into more work. The moment we go on vacation, we’re thinking of what? Work of course, because that’s what we’ve been doing for so long. Then when you go on a vacation, if you have enough time on your vacation, you get into vacation momentum, and then you get more and more relaxed. Then when you get back to work, it’s very hard to get back to work. This management is important, this management of work and life. It’s important not to just take anything you see on Facebook, this nice little phrase, just because it came from Seth Godin or some other guru, and then take it at face value. You want to deconstruct it and understand why you did things the way you did. You want to see it from your perspective as a human being. You want to see it how you were when you were a child. Because vacations are like a drug. Once you take vacations, work becomes so much more satisfying. Okay, I’ll stop ranting and raving. This brings us to the end of the episode. What have we covered in this episode? We covered three things. The first thing we covered was this factor of doubling and tripling your income, and your customers. At Psychotactics we’ve grown organically. We’ve just done things and the list has grown to quite a sizeable number, but it’s very slow. It does matter. If you do what you love and you do it really well, and you will over time, then you will find that there are clients and there’s enough revenue, and you live a very comfortable life. You’re spending time with your family. You’re doing things that you really want. That’s what’s important. That takes us to the second myth, and that is that life doesn’t get easier. It gets easier if you do nothing with your work, if you don’t take feedback, if you’re not big enough to take that feedback. Because most of us are insecure and we feel like someone is attacking us when they give feedback, so we don’t ask for feedback. We ask for praise all the time. But praise doesn’t improve your work so much; feedback does. When you get that feedback, you have to do some more work. Of course that takes more time, and so things don’t always get easier. You just get better at it and your work gets better, but never easier. The final thing is that vacation is not the enemy. It has never been the enemy. We’ve made it the enemy because of crazy sayings that float around the internet. When you look into your childhood and your early years, vacation has always been your friend. You’ve just forgotten the friend and decided to adopt another friend, who’s a workaholic. Well, get rid of the workaholic and go back to your childhood. Go back to your young years and you’ll see that it’s a lot more fun. That brings us to the end of this episode. What’s the one thing that we can do today? Well this episode was not quite the things to do episode, but even so, one of the things that you can do today is make more work for yourself. Whether it’s in your personal life, the hobbies that you have, or whether it’s in work, you want to ask for feedback. You want to ask people to tell you what you can fix. Stop asking for so much praise. The praise is important, but the feedback is just as important. Create a little more work for yourself and then take a vacation. Because, as Barry Gibb said, you want to keep the music alive. When you listen to this podcast, we’re likely to be on vacation. We’re going to Morocco. Our trip is across the United States, then to Europe, then to Africa, then to Asia, and then back to New Zealand. Amsterdam is one of our favorite cities on the planet, and after our trip Nashville we’re going to be in Amsterdam for quite a while before heading to Morocco. It’s going to be fun in Morocco. No tourists because it’s not as hot this time of year. We’re going to be at a seaside place, really nice place, do nothing, just relax, just paint, eat, drink and sleep. The reason we’re headed back to Auckland in a bit of a hurry is because Auckland is amazing at this time of the year. It’s summer; there’s no one in the city. We go for long walks. When we get back after our vacation, we’re going to take another month off until February. That’s when we get back to work. If what I’m describing to you sounds so unreal, then remember that it was unreal for us as well. We decided that this is what we want to do. We want to take time off. We want to take weekends off. We put these things into place, and that’s what you should do as well. That’s exactly what the next episode is about. It’s about goal setting, but goal setting our way, and you would expect it to be different, so listen to it and tell your friends about it. If you haven’t given us a rating on iTunes, then please do so. If you would like to give us a one-star rating or a two-star rating, that’s fine. But give us a rating. If you haven’t done that already, go to iTunes, give us a rating, and total your friends about the Three Month Vacation. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye from Psychotactics and the Three Month Vacation. Bye bye. Still reading? Find out—The Three Obstacles To Happiness (And How To Overcome Them) http://www.psychotactics.com/three-business-myths/
What is the meaning of life? This utterly vast and philosophical question pops into our lives with amazing frequency. But is it the right question to ask? What if we move the words around a bit and asked another question. Like: What gives your life meaning? Hmm, that changes things a bit doesn't it? And even when we change the words, we may still move towards the specific. So why does the abstract help more? Find out in this episode. http://www.psychotactics.com/meaning-of-life/ ---------------------------
------- The Transcript What gives your life meaning? It was 6:20 AM. I was close to the beach, halfway through my walk, listening to this podcast on Transom.org. There was this reporter who was asking older people how they went through their lives. They were 100 years old. She started out with this question, which was: What is the meaning of life? I’ve grappled with this question before, and it sounds very philosophical, but then somewhere in the middle, the question changed. Those words just interchanged somehow and it became: What gives your life meaning? I had to stop. I had to stop on the road just to absorb what that meant. Just by that little interplay in the words, suddenly the whole sentence, the whole construct changed. It was amazing to me. As you tend to do, you tend to try to answer the questions. I tried to think of the people in my life and I tried to think of the things that I do. Then I realized I was going about it the wrong way. In today’s podcast we’re going to cover three elements as always, but the way I’m going to cover it is, I’m going to talk about me me me. I’m going to talk about the three things that give my life meaning and why I approached it the wrong way. But I think it is the way that we need to approach it. Of course you might choose to borrow these, or you might choose to bring up your own three elements, but this is the way I think that you’ve got to approach the question: What gives your life meaning? Part 1: Space I think the right way to approach it is to go through an abstract sort of thinking. The three things that give my life meaning are space, deadline, and elegance. Let’s start out with the first one, which is the factor of space. About a month ago, it was August in New Zealand. Well, it was August everywhere, but it’s wintertime here in New Zealand. I had this little piece of paper in my pocket. I’d been carrying it in my wallet for well over a year, maybe a year and a half. This piece of paper had been given to me by my doctor. I’d done my annual checkup the year before and I was supposed to get the blood test done. I had been procrastinating for quite a while, as you can tell. That day I decided I’m going to park the car and I’m going to walk to the lab and get the blood test done. I wasn’t expecting anything. I’d been walking every day. I’d been eating sensibly, I think, drinking sensibly. Yet, the very next night I got some news from my doctor. He said, “Your cholesterol is high.” I went and looked it up, and I found that there was no real linkage to what you eat and cholesterol, but there is a very distinct relationship between stress and everything, not just stress and cholesterol but stress and everything. That is when I started taking the weekends off. Now we fool ourselves. We say we’re taking the weekend off but we check email and we work for a couple of hours, or do this and do that. Suddenly, the weekend is not really off. I found this to be true for me. I used to get to work, even on the weekend, at 4 AM because I wake up at that time. Before I knew it, it was 9:00, 10:00. I put in five or six hours on the weekend, on Saturday and Sunday. Of course I had my excuses. The podcast takes so much time, and we’re doing this course, and I have to write this book. When I got this report, I suddenly realised the importance of space. I realised that there is no point in me doing this stuff on a consistent basis and driving myself crazy, and that the weekend was invented to give us space. Now we take three months off, and you know that, but these minor breaks become very major breaks on the weekend. I had to find a practical use for this, because at the same time we have courses going on, like we have the headline course going on. Now our courses are not about just information. They’re about practical usage. Clients will come in five days a week and they’ll do their assignment every single day. This is a problem for me, because in the US it’s Friday, but here in New Zealand it’s Saturday. That means I have to look at the assignment on a Saturday. That’s what I was doing. I convinced myself it was only going to be a couple hours here or there. I had to then go to all the participants and say, “I’m going to take the weekend off, but my weekend, is it okay if I take it off?” I had to take their permission. No one had a problem. I don’t know I was expecting that they would have a problem, but no one had a problem. This is the concept of space. I’ve had to use this concept of space over and over and over again. Every time, it drives me crazy when I don’t. For instance, now I’m preparing for the storytelling workshop and I have to write the notes and do the slides. I have to create this space. I have to go away from the office and sit in a space that is quieter and less disturbing, and then work through that. This factor of space had an effect that I didn’t expect. Whenever you’re in any business, you’re always going to be slightly envious of someone else. If you’re a writer you’re going to be envious of other writers. If you’re a dancer you’re going to be envious of other dancers. It’s just natural human behaviour. Now a lot of people interview on their podcasts. Once we finish what we’re covering, they will talk to me just casually. Occasionally someone will say, “Oh, I’m so excited. We’ve just finished 1.8 downloads,” or, “Oh, we’ve got 5,000 more subscribers.” This used to drive me not crazy, but you think about it. You think, how come? We’re putting in as much effort into this podcast. How come? The question changed the moment I realized that space was important to me, the moment I realised that weekends were important to me. I started asking myself, are you getting the weekend off? I’d listen to that person saying that they made so much more money or they got so many subscribers. I couldn’t get myself to be envious. This was a change for me. This was a big change for me, because I thought that somehow that would never go away. The space became the benchmark. It was no no no, this is more important to me than the money. It’s more important to me than your subscribers or your downloads. Having that space allows me to think and relax. I have not felt this way, like I’m feeling right now, in a very, very long time. It’s taken me about a month to slow down completely, as in to feel really relaxed. It’s just because of space. This takes us to the second element, which is in direct contrast to space and quiet. That is deadline. Part 2: Deadline In 2014, we had one of the most harrowing years of our lives. It wasn’t harrowing personally, but professionally it was a real pain. That was because we had hacker attacks. It first surfaced on psychotactics.com. Now that is a very popular site, and for over a decade it has been in the top 100,000 Alexa ratings. It’s natural that hackers like that site. We put a little Band-Aid on the system and we fixed it, but they came back, and they came back, and they came back. They wouldn’t stop until the entire website had to be completely reorganised and rebuilt from the ground up. Then after that, they went after 5000bc.com, which is our membership site. They did the same thing. Then they went after the training site, which is training.brainaudit.com. You can just tell how frustrating this is. You’re going about your business as passively as possible, trying to keep your head above water, and these hacker attacks continue to come and disrupt your life and drive you crazy. When I think about it, the hacker attacks were the best thing that happened to us because they gave us a sense of deadline. When we think of deadline, we only think of writing books or an article or finishing this project, but the hacker attacks were so cool. They forced us to do what we hadn’t been doing for several years. We’d been putting off tidying up the website and making it just resistant to these fun-filled creeps. They came there and they went through the system, and then we had to pull up our socks. We just had to do whatever we had to do. This is the beauty of deadlines. A lot of people consider me to be a pretty crazy person, as in I’m doing a lot of projects. I don’t see myself that way at all. I see myself as a very lazy person. I see myself as someone who loves to lie on the sofa and get a lot of that space and not a lot of deadline. Yet, without the deadline nothing happens. All the books that you read on Psychotactics, starting withThe Brain Audit, they were written because someone forced me to do it. The cartooning course, I didn’t want to do it. Someone said, “Oh no no, you have to do this. I’ve tried all the cartooning courses. They don’t work for me.” I’ve written a book on storytelling, but to do the course was something completely different. I’m discovering elements of storytelling that I didn’t know existed, or I’m discovering depths that I didn’t know existed. Of course it’s frustrating to have to build a whole course from nothing, to write notes, to create slides, to get all the event venue, to get everyone to sign up. We could do without it, but putting that deadline in place gives my life a lot of meaning because it enhances what I do and it forces me to do it by a specific point in time. Take this podcast for example. In October we’re going to Australia to Uluru. For those of you that don’t know, this is Ayer’s Rock, that big red rock in the middle of Australia. This brings up its own set of deadlines, which is I have to write extra newsletters. I have to put in extra vanishing reports for 5000bc, and of course podcasts. I have to do more of these podcasts so that it covers all of October. Then in December we’re going to Morocco. I know, I know, it’s a hard life. The is that the deadline brings meaning to my life. Without the deadline I wouldn’t achieve as much as I do. Those creeps, those hackers, I wish I could send them chocolate, like howwe send our clients chocolate. Because they made such a difference to my life. They brought in this deadline, this “you have to do this right now.” It’s made our life different and I would say a lot better. The first thing that we talked about was space, and having the space creates so much of quiet in your life, and of course a lot less stress. The second thing is this factor of deadline, which forces you to rush, rush and create that stress. They both coexist together just like music. There is quiet in music and there is this huge flurry of notes. They both have to be that way because that’s what makes music. This takes us to the third element, which is one of elegance. Part 3: Elegance Now I thought about it a lot. Why elegance? Why not simplicity? Simplicity is so difficult. Why elegance? In 1990 I was still living in India. A pen panel from the United States came across. She was there for a couple of weeks. She created a deadline of sorts for me. I hadn’t seen a lot of India at that point in time and she wanted to see India, so we booked a trip. We got to the Taj Mahal. Now by this point in time I wasn’t doing very well with this pen panel. When I was in university we were sending each other letters, ten pages, 12 pages, really long letters. It seemed like we would get along fine with each other. Yet, the moment she landed that wasn’t the case at all. Something about her drove me crazy. Something about me drove her crazy. By the time we had reached Agra, which is where the Taj Mahal is located, we were pretty much going our own ways. She’d set out later, but me, I wake up early in the morning. I decided one day to go to the Taj Mahal as early as possible. There was this huge fog that was in front of the Taj Mahal. I couldn’t see it until I was very close, and it was amazing. It was stunning beyond my understanding. I’ve seen thousands of pictures of it over the years, but nothing came close to standing there right in front of it in that fog. As I got close to it, what struck me was the elegance. It was just so beautiful. It was simple. There wasn’t anything fancy about it. Sure, it was big, it was really big, bigger than I ever imagined, but elegant. It was so elegant. As we’ve traveled the world, we’ve run into places like Japan. When you buy something in Japan, it’s amazing. It’s like you never want to open it. You can buy the smallest thing in Japan and they put it in this little box and this little wrapping. Then they put this ribbon on it. Everything in Japan is so beautifully packaged that you never feel like opening it. There is this elegance to it. It’s not just thrown at you. As I started to be more aware of the world around me, it struck me that there are three ways to do pretty much anything. When you look around you, you see stuff that’s really crappy. We don’t want to go there because that’s just crappy and sloppy. That’s just how it is. Then you go to the next stage, which is where it’s simple. When I look at a book on Kindle, it’s simple. There’s just text. It’s been thrown in Microsoft Word. It’s out there, nothing to it. Then you look at something’s that’s elegant and you know that someone has spent some time and effort and simplified it so it looks beautiful and it reads beautiful. The words work together and the pictures work together. Suddenly you have this feeling of the Taj Mahal. It’s beautiful. It’s a monument. There are thousands of monuments in the world, but some stand out for their sheer elegance. To me, that’s my third principle, that when I create this podcast I somehow have to be dissatisfied with it. I’m happy, but I still want to improve it. That quest for improvement becomes quest for elegance. The best example of elegance is a software program, because when you look at a software program it comes out as slightly crappy. You have version one and it’s not so great. Then version two and it’s a little better. Then it gets bigger and more bloated and it stops being elegant. Now you have to improve things without making it bloated and terrible. You have to bring in elegance. That is the thing that gives my life meaning: to create information, or to create product, or to create a cartoon, or to do anything that is more elegant. The beauty of elegance is that sometimes it doesn’t get noticed, like when you’re watching a movie and there’s this music that enhances the movie and you don’t notice the music. That is elegance: that feeling of creating something that’s so beautiful that it doesn’t matter that no one notices it, as long as you know. Summary This brings us to the end of this podcast. I know it was about me, but I think it resonates with you as well. To me, the most important things, the things that give my life meaning, we could summarise them with three words, and that is space, and deadline, and elegance. Your three words might be similar, they might be different, but I think we have to stop asking ourselves what is the meaning of life, because that question is too big. Instead, it’s what gives our life meaning. Then bring it down to this whole abstract feeling. I think that’s the one thing you can do today. I think you can just sit down and write down these three terms on paper and start to think about it. What are three things that give your life meaning? Because even hackers can give your life meaning. So how can be solve the eternal problem—The Meaning Of Life? Or A Life of Meaning? Especially when Chaos hits us everyday. Click here to find out—Why and how to make chaos your friend. http://www.psychotactics.com/chaos-planning
When you're giving away bonuses, it's easy to believe you don't need to give away your best product or service. The best information always needs to be sold—so you can earn a decent living. And yet, this podcast episode takes an opposite stance. You need to put your best stuff out in front—free. Yes, give away the goodies, no matter whether you're in info-products or content marketing; services or running a workshop. Giving away outstanding content is the magic behind what attracts—and keeps clients.
Resources
To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/100
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
In this episode Sean talks about
Part 1: The Concept of Consumption
Part 2: Why Package Your Free Content
Part 3: Why You Must Feel Pain
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources
5000bc: Where smart people come together to help each other honestly
Goodies: How to design a visual “yes-yes” pricing grid for all your products
The Brain Audit: Why clients buy and why they don’t
The Transcript
“This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.”
What are the three benchmarks that you need to create this magic?
Many years ago when I started my cartooning career, I used to get all kinds of jobs. What I really loved was the plum jobs, the jobs where you had this fabulous stuff that you could do and used to get paid really well. I would spend hours and days and weeks doing those kinds of jobs. Then you had the recurring jobs. These were tiny cartooning assignments which didn’t pay very well, so I’d just work very quickly through them because well, they weren’t paying that much anyway. One day, my neighbor, who happened to be an art director of Elle Magazine, he stopped in and said, “Sean, why are you doing such a bad job with these cartoons? Why is it that this work looks so shoddy?”
Of course I said, “Well, they don’t pay much.” He said, “I don’t really know how much they pay when I look at your work in the newspaper. I only look at the work and I say, ‘This work is shoddy. This work is sloppy. As a reader, I’m not supposed to know how much you get paid. I only see the end result.'” This is true for us as well. In today’s world, where we’re giving away free stuff, we look at the stuff we’re giving away and we think, “Wait, we need to put in all our efforts into creating great products and great services. But if it’s going to be free, then we need to pull back about it. We can’t put in all the effort into free.” My art director friend would tell you, “I don’t see it that way. It cannot be shoddy. It cannot be sloppy.”
That’s what we’re going to cover today. We’re going to cover how you need to make your free product as valuable or even more valuable than your paid product.
What are the three benchmarks that you need to create this magic?
Part 1: The Concept of Consumption
The first thing that we’re going to cover today is the concept of consumption. The second thing is how it needs to have that unhurried look, that unhurried texture, that unhurried feeling. Finally, we need to feel pain, real pain. Let’s cover these three topics. Let’s start off with the first topic, and that is one of consumption.
In case you didn’t already know it, Netflix has been monitoring your behavior for a very long time. Netflix is big time into consumption. The reason for that is very simple. The more they get you to come back and watch serials and movies, the more likely you are to renew your subscription month after month, year after year. For ages, the television industry has suggested that the pilot episode is the most critical of them all. If someone watches the pilot episode, they’re going to watch all the rest, or at least that’s how the philosophy went until we ran into Netflix.
Netflix started pinpointing the episodes for each show season in which 70% of all users went on to complete the entire series. Here’s what they found. When they looked at Breaking Bad, the hook was not episode number one; it was episode number two. When they looked at the prison comedy, Orange is the New Black, they found that episode number three was the one that made the difference.
In some cases, it was episode number eight that made the difference; in some, four; in some, three; in some, five. What they found, however, was that people wanted to get to the end, and that if they got them to binge watch, they would watch all of them one after the other. What does this tell us about our clients? What does this tell us about our reports and our newsletters? It tells us that people are a lot more willing to give us a chance than we think, if we can get them to the end. This is why consumption becomes so critical.
When you look at all of those signups, you know those little boxes that say just give me your name and your email address, and let’s do this quickly. Well, that’s not how people really behave. When you do the study, people behave differently. They want to consume stuff. They want to spend more time at your site. They want to read a little more before they commit. When you’re creating a product, maybe it’s just a report, maybe it’s an article, a series of articles, maybe it’s a webinar or a podcast, people will take their time. They will give you more than one chance. It’s not like you need to have a sloppy first time, but it’s not like you have to convince them either. Because they take their time.
What you have the ensure is that they get from point A to point C at the very least. You have to get them through the stages. This is what we do with the Headline Report. When you get 2 Psychotactics and you subscribe to the newsletter, you get a headline report. It shows you how to write headlines, just taking three easy steps. But there is no hurry. You go through the introduction. It gives you the philosophy. Then it takes you to step one, and you’re able to create a headline, and then step two, and you’ll be able to create another headline, and step three and the third type of headline.
In under ten minutes, you can create headlines just reading the report, but it gets you to the end. When you get to the end, you already have this superpower. You have this ability to write headlines, to figure out which headlines are missing those components. It’s complete. What’s happened there is it has been designed for consumption. It has been designed to make sure that the client gets that superpower, that ability to do something.
When you look at a lot of the webinars online or the podcasts, a lot of the stuff is based on information. It is more and more and more information, but not stuff that you can directly apply. This is what we have to work at, because we’re not in the entertainment business like Netflix. Their goal is to make sure that you get to the end of the episode, of the next episode, and then right to the end of the series. They’re totally in the entertainment business, and we are in the information business, but we need to make sure that we’re not just giving information but we’re giving that client a superpower. We’re giving them the ability to write headlines. We’re giving them the ability to do something specific at the end of it. We need to start off with the end in mind. That’s probably what Netflix is doing anyway. They’re going, “What is the end point of this series?”
That end point is then creating all of the series back to back so that you get hooked. You need to ask yourself that question as well. When you’re creating a report, when you’re creating an article, when you are doing anything that you’re giving away free, the shoddiness comes from the fact that you were just going to give away information, more information. In reality, if you think about it from a perspective of when they finish this, what superpower will they have, that changes everything doesn’t it? That makes your client more likely to binge read, binge listen, binge watch, whatever it is that you’re going to throw. Then the free becomes more important than the product itself because they haven’t paid for anything and they’ve got this value which they just didn’t expect.
Consumption comes in very quickly and consumption becomes more critical than attraction and conversion, which gets bandied about all over the internet. You need to know how to attract. You need to know how to convert. Once you’ve gone through that, the third stage, consumption, that’s the most critical of all. You can start off with your free product or your report, or just about anything, as long as you know what is the end in mind and how will it help the customer get to that end and have the superpower.
That brings us to the end of this first section. Let’s go to the second section.
Part 2: Why Package Your Free Content
Let’s explore why your free product content needs to look very unhurried, and yet, very unpackaged. On Fridays, something very strange happens at our café. The usual baristas disappear and someone else takes their place. Now it bugs me when baristas get changed on Friday, because you’re starting to settle in, you’re starting to relax a bit, and then your whole routine has changed because of this change in barista.
Anyway, this new barista, she’s making the coffee and she places it in front of us. She goes away and the café is reasonably quiet, almost too quiet for a Friday. She comes over and she’s asks for my opinion. She’s says, “How did you find the coffee?” Of course I’m the wrong person to ask for an opinion because I will give it. She’s standing there for about 20 minutes listening to what I have to say, because I’m telling her how I evaluate the coffee. The way I evaluate coffee is I look at the barista themselves and I look at how they’re dressed. Maybe this is just me, but every time I see an untidy-looking barista, I get bad coffee.
The first thing I’m looking for is how tidy does the barista look. Then the second thing I’m looking for is how tidy does my cup of coffee look. Is there art on it or is it just coffee in a cup? Before I’ve even tasted the coffee, I have a pretty good idea whether the coffee is going to be good or bad. Then of course there are variables; that can be humidity, the temperature of the milk. There are so many variables in the coffee, but at the very core I’m looking for this unhurried professional cofee that comes out in the midst of a deadline. This is what your client is looking for as well. They’re looking for this report, this article, this information that is unhurried. They know that you’re busy, but they don’t care. They’re the clients. They want this product or this service to look professional long before they open it.
Packaging becomes very critical, and packaging needs to look unhurried. It needs to look like someone has spent a little time despite the deadline. You see this a lot in Japan. I have mentioned this before on the podcast, that Japan is probably the best place in the world to buy pretty much anything. You can go to the smallest store and ask for food, and you’ve seen how sushi and sashimi has been packaged. It’s always very cleanly packaged. There’s this design element around it. You can go and buy some sweets. You can go and buy a little pendant. You can buy pretty much anything in Japan and you get packaging. You get this look of unhurriedness.
When you have this product, whether it be a webinar or a podcast, you need to feel that packaging. What sets off that packaging? For instance, in this podcast. The story that starts up right at the beginning, that tells you that some amount of research has gone into the whole Netflix story. The fact that there are three points that we’re going to cover, that tells you that’s a very clear outline. This is like the barista. You’ve not really listened to the episode yet, but you get this feeling. You get this feeling that there is a logic and there is work put into this, and it’s unhurried.
That is what is critical, because it sets you up for the rest of the binge listening or the binge reading or the binge experiencing. You can tell the difference between a great presenter and a crappy presenter. You can tell the difference between a good writer and a bad writer. There’s always this factor of unhurriedness. We need to get the client to feel this packaging long before they get to the meat of the content.
Netflix, their research has shown exactly that: that clients are willing to go the distance before they decide this is really good or this is really crappy. We will walk into cafes and look at the barista, and either stay or walk out. It’s based on this factor of unhurriedness. How do they present themselves? How do they present their coffee? It’s the same thing for your product. You cover your introduction, your structure. That needs to be very clear before I get into the meat of the matter. That’s what you really need to work on.
That’s what makes the difference between a free product and a paid product. It needs to look like a paid product. It needs to look like something you paid a lot of money for, and yet you got it free. Now you don’t have to spend months and years working on this free product, but make it tidy. This takes us to the third part, which is the pain that you must feel when you’re giving away your free product.
Part 3: Why You Must Feel Pain
As you know, I like to cook Indian food. Two dishes that make me very happy are butter chicken and a dal. A dal is a lentil, by the way. If you were to ask me to give away the butter chicken or the dal, I would hesitate. Now I like them both as much, but I like one better than the other. Well, not really, but here’s the thing. I still would hesitate to give away the chicken, the butter chicken. That’s the kind of dilemma that you’re dealing with. You’re dealing with a situation where you’ve got this really good stuff and you’re not really that keen on giving it away.
You think maybe it would be a good idea to give away something that is not quite so salable. Because when you look at what you’ve done, you’ve spent a lot of time and effort, and somehow it seems like a shame to just give it away. You’ve got to feel that pain. You really have to feel that pain, because when you feel that pain, that’s when you know that the client is going to feel wow, this is amazing. It’s almost too easy to give away something that is not quite up to that standard. You know the standard. It doesn’t matter where you are in life, you know your standard and you know what’s possible, and you know your best. When you’re giving away your best, you feel that pain.
I remember the time I went and met a friend of mine. He is a world-class watercolorist. He had just finished a workshop in Auckland. Of course we met, we had a beer, etc. After that, he gave me one of his sketches. He just pulled it out from his bag and he gave it to me. What did I do with the sketch? I look at it, I said thank you, I took it home. Do you think it was his best sketch, his best watercolor? Of course not. It was just something that he was doing, just a rough sketch. It stayed around the office for a while, and then it went under the bed. Then I don’t even know where it is anymore.
Now, even if he were listening to this podcast, he would not know that I’m referring to him, because I know quite a few watercolorists. If you’re a watercolorist and you gave me a painting, there’s a pretty good chance that I don’t know where it is right now because it wasn’t your best. This is the whole point. When you give away stuff, give away the best stuff, or at least part of the best stuff.
Now we sell a course called the Pre-Sell Course. This teaches you how we sell our courses, how we sell our workshops, how we sell our products. We sell our products faster than pretty much anyone on the internet. Courses that cost $3,000, in 20 minutes the course is full. No strategic alliances, no ads, no joint ventures, no nothing. How do we do it in 20 minutes? The Pre-Sell Course shows you that. It’s not cheap; it’s almost $400. But we wanted the audience, our members, our subscribers, to understand how powerful this course was. What we did was we sliced it up into about a fifth of the course and gave it away. You know someone wrote back to me and said, “You know, I didn’t buy the rest of the course, but just using that one-fifth, I was able to launch a product very successfully.”
Are you thinking what I’m thinking right now? We’re giving away stuff that is so powerful that the client might not even need to come back for some more, but they will come back. That’s what we’ve found consistently. We’ve found that when we give away stuff which is useful, that is consumable, that is powerful, the client comes back. Because that’s what happens in real life when you give away a sample.
Something that’s amazingly tasty, it’s not like the diner goes away and just doesn’t come back. We’ve found time and time again, and this isn’t the Pre-Sell Course by the way … There’s a whole section on sampling. It talks about how sampling increases sales by 200, 300, 400%. It’s incredible. I didn’t think that sampling could do that, but it does it. There are statistics to prove it. But if the sample itself is not so powerful, not so outstanding, why is the client going to buy a product or service from you in the future?
Summary
This brings us to the end of this podcast. We covered three things. The first thing was the factor of consumption. You need to get the client from one point the other. Interestingly, as we saw in Netflix, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to speed up the process. You don’t have to get people to sign up right away. They read, you know? They read a little bit. They read the introduction. They look at how it’s constructed. That takes us to the second one, which is your packaging needs to be great and unhurried. It’s like every time we go to the café, we look at the barista and we say, “How are they? Are they neat? How’s the coffee presented? Is it perfect?” That’s how you know you’ve got a great coffee. That’s how you know you’ve got a great product.
Finally, you have to feel that pain when you’re giving away your product. If you don’t feel that pain, it’s like giving away the dal instead of the butter chicken. It’s not that the dal is bad; it’s just that the butter chicken, well, you would rather be eating it yourself, right?
What is the one thing that you can do today?
The one thing that you can do today is to look at whatever you’re giving away and see is it built for consumption. Can they go from A to B to C and then have that superpower? If no, then you’re just giving information. We don’t need more information. We’re done with information. Just give me some skill that I can sort out in the next ten minutes, or 15 minutes, or 20 minutes, whatever, but quickly.
We’re done with this podcast episode. I store all my podcast ideas in Evernote, so if you’ve got some ideas, some questions you want to ask me, send them to sean@psychotactics.com, or on Twitter @Sean D’Souza, and Facebook at Sean D’Souza. If you’d like to join us at 5000bc.com, then please do so. It’s a place where introverts gather, and we talk and we discuss, and there’s a huge amount of information. I’m there 17,000 times a day answering questions, writing articles in response to your questions. It’s a cool place to be.
Still Reading? Now that you understand why free products need to be better than paid products or services, do you know how to price your products? Here is a detailed visual “yes-yes” pricing grid, to help you—Dartboard Pricing: Yes and Yes Grid. You’ll see how to construct the pricing grid (it’s easy), and then you can adapt the concept on your own slides, pricing sheets, or website. And yes, increase your prices! (http://www.psychotactics.com/cb)
When you start writing articles, you get advice from all sides. But there's advice you don't want to hear. It's advice that goes against the grain. And yet, it's this advice that forms the hallmark of great writing. So how do you get from average to great? You take the road less-taken. It's harder and yet far more satisfying. Here's advice you probably don't want to hear.
A friend wrote to me today and asked me what seemed like a pretty normal question. She expected 5 lines, maybe 6.
Instead I ended up with 1800 words.
So what was her question? What traits do you consider to be hallmarks of quality in a piece of content?
The answer is something that most writers may not want to hear. It’s an answer that demands sacrifice, going against the grain and being persistent when things are going horribly wrong.
Still interested?
Well, here’s the question again: What traits do you consider to be hallmarks of quality in a piece of content? The answer
1- contrast
2- lack of pandering
3- the gap between style and ability.
———— 1) Let’s start with contrast It’s the year 1986. John Heritage and David Greatbatch have an itch to scratch. They’re studying applause and what causes it. So they embark on what could be considered one of the most boring tasks in the world: they analyse politician’s speeches.
476 of them.
And what were these two poor souls looking for? Applause, that’s what they were keen to find. Why was it that one speech received total silence, while other speeches got applause? But not just applause, but applause twice per minute!
Nineteen thousand sentences later they had a clue It was contrast. The moment the audience encountered applause, the brain was no longer dormant. Contrast brought a smile to their faces, and cheering followed.
Contrast requires you and me to work so much harder But contrast also puts you in a strange and precarious position. If everyone says: You should go this way and there’s a writer that says, “Nope, you’re headed into sheep land. This is the way to go”. Now that is going out on a limb. Contrast is scary. It’s much easier to say what everyone else is saying.
If you want to start with the hallmark of quality, contrast is where you start.
Let’s take an example of contrast Let’s say you’re writing about a subject such as productivity, for example. Now productivity doesn’t bring to mind any sort of rest or sleep does it? Instead the enduring message of productivity has almost always been one of focus and concentration.
It’s always been one of working out astounding efficiencies to do more work than ever before. At this point in time, let’s say your article talks about sleep. It talks about taking the weekends off. It even goes on to suggest that you take several months off in a year.
You’ve shaken up the force a bit, haven’t you? You’ve created a counter force that may at first seem impossible to defend. Yet, that’s what great writing is about. Conceptually, it stands out and picks a topic that’s contrarian. But not all topics need to be contrarian to have that hallmark, do they? You could write articles on topics that have none of this rebellious nature and still bring out the big guns.
This calls for a bit of a roller coaster in your writing An article needs to have a flow so the reader can move forward, but just as important is a counterflow. So let’s say you’re writing about how to “grow a curry leaf tree”, you also need to bring in the counterflow as you’re writing.
That counterflow would be a possible glitch in the planting process. It could be a couple of mistakes you’re about to make. To be able to speed ahead, brake and go in a counterflow direction isn’t easy. Some writers do it while creating the material. Others create it later during an edit process.
Flow by itself is super boring Try this paragraph for example: We went to the airport, there was no traffic on the highway. We got through check in and immigration in next to no time. And then we sat down to have a beer.
So what are you thinking at this point in time? I’ll tell you what. You’re wondering if the story has any purpose. And yet, the moment counterflow comes into play, you’re alert again. Let’s go back to the story. You’ve had your beer, when a policeman walks up with a grim face.
That’s drama, that’s contrast. And the hallmark of a great article is the ability to insert contrast into various sections of your article. Case studies can have an up and down. The concept can start out being all in favour of something and then diverge without warning. Now you’ve created contrast and lifts the tempo of your words.
Counterflow needs to head back to flow, however Too much counterflow and your reader is turned off. The grim policeman, the spilling of beer on your white shirt, the missing of the flight—and the article seems to be falling right out of the skies. Which is why contrast matters so much. Contrast is about a constantly evolving set of words that get you to slip slide through like—yes—a roller coaster. Up, down, up and down.
But contrast is only one hallmark of good writing. The second is a lack of pandering.
2) The second hallmark of great writing is a lack of pandering. Clients often ask me if I write articles with keywords in mind.
The answer is no.
I never have. I’ve been told I can get ten times the traffic if I pandered to keywords, but frankly I don’t care.
The moment you pander, you’re not really writing for yourself Most of the greatest writing is not done for another. Most outstanding writing is done to clear the cobwebs in your own mind. You know this feeling well if you’ve tried to do a bit of a project like writing a report, presentation, or a book. There are a million thoughts floating through your mind and none of them seem to sit well until you put them down on paper.
The reason why I wrote a book on the Secret Life of Testimonials wasn’t because a client asked me to do so.
I wrote because I had these floating ideas in my head. And when I started writing the book, I expected to complete between 20-30 pages. There was good reason for me to have this pagination estimate. I’d already written a book on testimonials earlier and the first edition stopped quite firmly at 30 pages. Imagine my surprise when I went past 30, onto 50, then over 75 and sailed past 100, before settling at 125 pages.
When you pander you lose your soul You stuff keywords into your headlines, write less than interesting opening paragraphs and do things that just don’t resonate with being a writer. And we know this to be true with one simple test. Would you use those same words if you were writing the article back in 1995? Pandering means a compromise that’s not necessarily walking step by step with producing the best possible work.
No one is saying you have to be this crazy, independent soul forever All of us end up pandering in some shape of form. The great artist and sculptor, Leonardo da Vinci was known to be a lover of nature and hated war. Yet he created some of the most destructive weapons.
And his patron, Cesare Borgia was one of the most hated men in all of Italy. Pandering at some level is almost inevitable, yet Leonardo didn’t stay in pander-land forever. He moved on creating work that was enduring and mostly for him. He didn’t want or expect you to see La Gioconda, better known as the Mona Lisa. He did that for himself, to make himself happy.
Galileo stopped pandering. The father of geology, a Scot named James Hutton, refused to pander.
Charles Darwin wrote 400 pages of stuff that rocked our world forever.
The biggest exposés, the most interesting movies, they all refuse to buckle down and pander even when they know that pandering is profitable.
So where’s the happy medium between doing what you love vs. pandering? It’s impossible to tell, but when you create a benchmark for yourself, you can decide whether you have time and the resources to create better work, or just work that’s good enough for the masses. At first you may have no option.
You’ve got a mortgage to pay, mouths to feed and life is about meeting those obligations. To go down in flames before starting is not a good strategy. But then as you get a little more comfortable, it’s time to go out on a limb.
At Psychotactics, we set a benchmark for ourselves: we wanted to work nine months a year and take three months off.
Our income has been almost identical since 2007. We don’t need to double our income, double our clients or do any of that stuff that others find so endearing. This allows us not to pander. We know we can reach our goals easily and still do only the projects that are exciting and rewarding.
Pandering is an obstacle we all have to learn to overcome. It applies to life, just as it applies to your writing.
You can be enslaved by headlines like “7 Ways to attract clients”. You can stuff keywords into all your content to attract the search engines. But every time you do you’re running your soul on the pander-grater.
That’s the second hallmark of great work: the move away from pander-land. Which takes us to our third hallmark of great work “achieving style through cross pollination”.
3) Which takes us to the third element: The gap between style and ability When you first start writing, getting an 800-word article on paper is enough to drive you to devour a tub of ice-cream. In time, however, your brain works out what needs to be done. A combination of writing, learning, resting and confidence bubble up to the point where writing is never exactly a joy, but no longer a frustration.
Yet, when you’re done with the writing it seems to have no soul It reads pathetically like the work you see all over the Internet. Yet as Ira Glass, host of “This American Life” says: “The reason we get involved in something is because we have good taste. But there’s a gap. For the first couple of years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good.
It has ambition to be good, but it’s not that great. But your taste—your taste is still “killer”. And your taste tells you that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people give up. A lot of people quit. And it’s only by going through a volume of work that you can close that gap.”
Ira Glass is referring to the gap in your brain But what he doesn’t say in that video is what he and every other great writer or creator knows to be true. That style is about getting worse before you get better. Your work is bad but then turns crappy.
The reason why you give up is because you’ve pushed your boundaries and ended in crappy land. And you figure out: well, if I’m going to go from bad to worse, I must have no talent whatsoever.
And you’re right Talent isn’t inborn. Talent has to be acquired. You have no talent whatsoever. And that seemingly stupid thing you just did when you pushed your boundaries—well, that just made the gap between your ability and taste so much greater.
There’s a reason, of course, why your work goes downhill The brain is stepping outside its comfort zone. When the brain steps out into this frosty land it has to read a lot more. But not just a lot more in your own field. No, who told you that nonsense? Read about how continents were created, how birds took flight, why diamonds should logically never exist.
When you read, read many authors, copy many authors. But also push your reading and copying way beyond your immediate field of knowledge.
If you’re a designer, put your design books in a safe If you’re an architect, go look for books on gravity.
If you’re going to really learn style you have to push up and wide at the same time. You’re going to have to learn your craft, yes, but you’re also going to have to get into other worlds. And there’s a good reason why. Style is an amalgamation of thoughts. You may consider your style to be unique, but every style is simply a melting pot, bubbling slowly and deliberately.
A lot of style seeps in when you’re reading, but there’s also a factor of copying The greatest works of our times have involved copying (not plagiarism, but copying) to the point that you become a sort of style-clone. Then when you’ve had your fill of one, you copy someone else—and then a third, fourth and fifth.
One day you wake up and you have a style You know this to be true because everyone around you says so. They comment on your unique style. They say it’s so different. And what they’re commenting on isn’t just a look.
It’s a culmination of your taste and your skill. A combination of the ideas of the masters that have gone before you. An amalgamation so deep that you feel the style is all your own but know deep down, that it’s come from that cavern of knowledge that’s too deep to go back into.
And then just as you’ve reached your pinnacle of taste, you realise you’re not the guru you aspired to be. You’ve climbed one mountain and there before you lie the Himalayas of taste. You have so many mountains more to climb. The gap continues to exist.
Let’s summarise, shall we? Contrast is crucial. There must be flow, then counterflow and back to flow again. This is what makes for great content.
The lack of pandering is scary but that’s where originality springs forth. Pander if you must, but move away from the evil as quickly as you can.
The gap between style and ability is incredibly frustrating, but sooner or later you close that gap enough to be amazing, but never quite at the level you want to achieve. And that eternal gap is what keeps you interested in the game forever.
Useful Resources:
1) Why Inspiration Can Be The Key To Winning The Resistance Game
2) The Secret of How To Get Clients To Keep Coming Back Repeatedly
3) Three Unknown Secrets of Riveting Story Telling
We all want to create profitable products but aren't sure where to start. We hope for some amazing formula, when all you really need are three core questions. When you are clear about the answers to the three questions, you can take an amazingly pedestrian, everyday concept and make it hugely profitable. So what are the three questions you need to have in place and how can you get started today?
How to Create a Profitable Idea for Business Around July 2000, I was made redundant from my job at a web design firm.
Life wasn’t supposed to unfold this way. I’d just moved to Auckland, New Zealand from Mumbai, India a few months prior. And here I was, barely a few months later, without a job and with a mortgage that hovered around $200,000 (yes, we’d just bought a house).
What do you do when you’re hurled into such a situation? I turned to Photoshop, but not quite. There’s a story behind the Photoshop story and it began back in India, in July. Back in Mumbai, I freelanced as a cartoonist and work was pretty steady through the year, except around July.
For some inexplicable reason, the phones would stop ringing at that point in the year. At first, it drove me crazy and I’d do everything I could to drum up business. I’d rant and rave and complain about the fickle nature of July when my mother pointed out that things were always quiet for me in July.
From that point on, we’d use July to learn how to use Photoshop One of the big games at the office (yes, I had staff) was to learn to use Photoshop in Tab, F mode. If you were to turn on Photoshop and hit the Tab key and press F (full screen) you’d find that all your toolbars disappear.
The game at the office was to keep working in Photoshop without any toolbars. A bystander would look in awe as you were able to use the brush tool, increase opacity, decrease brush sizes etc. You could do almost anything in Photoshop without needing the tool bar. It looked like pure magic.
It’s this magic that I had to use when I was made redundant The moment I was made redundant, I went back to trying to get work as a cartoonist. Since most cartoonists at the time were still using pen, ink and paint, my work in Photoshop stood out when I went to meet art directors at the advertising agencies.
One particular art director got a bit chatty and as we talked she realised that she too could use the magic of Photoshop in her work. And so, while I started out trying to sell cartoons, I ended up charging $60 an hour, teaching art directors how to use the core tools of Photoshop without the tool bar.
Notice something very interesting in the last sentence? I wasn’t teaching them Photoshop. I wasn’t going into the 2,459 rabbit holes that Photoshop presents to a beginner.
Instead I was just teaching them a subset—the core tools of Photoshop without the need for a tool bar. And this is precisely the kind of advice I’d give to a client if they called me up and asked how they should start a profitable business.
I’d say you need to ask yourself three questions: who, what and when.
So why do these three questions matter?
Why Who Matters I’ve been pretty good at drawing since a very young age. Like every other kid around me, I did the usual doodles and scribbling, and when the rest of the kids decided to give up drawing at the age of four or five, I kept at it.
So you can say I’d be pretty good at drawing after all these years, wouldn’t you? And you’d be right because I’ve never really stopped drawing for a day. But drawing is a bit like cooking.
Just because you’re good at cooking Italian food doesn’t mean you’re going to be any good at Japanese food Over the years I became exceptionally good at drawing cartoons, loved the structure of buildings and architecture, even dabbled in a bit of caricatures. But there’s one thing I avoided: drawing animals. I’d decided very early in my life that I wasn’t too good at drawing animals.
Then, recently, I was saddled with about 400 amazing envelopes. There’s a story behind those envelopes, but for now let’s just say it was much too hard to throw away those envelopes. So I started drawing animals on them, tentatively at first, but then with a sense of a mission.
The moment I started posting the photos of these envelopes online, there was a flurry of interest People from different parts of the globe started giving me advice on what I should do with them. You should print them, said one. You could create a collector’s item box set said another. And the advice kept pouring in, and did exactly what advice usually does: it confuses you beyond belief.
The reason you’re hearing this story is to give you a framework of how a profitable idea doesn’t arise from an ability to do something well. A profitable idea arises from the first question you need to ask: Who.
The envelope art I just started working on in early June 2016.
So why is who so important? Without the “who” in mind, struggle is almost inevitable. Think about the boxed set of envelopes, for example. There’s no doubt that they make a great product, but well intended as the suggestions were, there’s no clue who would buy it.
Or why they would buy it? Yet if we took the Photoshop example, we notice there’s an enormous amount of clarity. Sure, the clarity came about by a fluke discussion, but as we’ll find out a lot of profitable ideas are pure fluke.
To get back to the art director, I now had a clear person (what we call in The Brain Audit as the target profile). That one job of teaching the art director not only went on for several months, but led to another job—with the daughter of another art director. I didn’t go down the path of teaching Photoshop to other art directors, but you could clearly see how the “who” helped.
The “who” matters whether you’re writing an article or creating a product or service Let’s say you’re creating an online product on storytelling. Before you start writing a word, you are peripherally aware of the volumes of story-related material in books, videos and audio. To write another series on storytelling would be nice, but how would it stand out.
Now let’s be fair: there’s a lot of terribly average material online and offline that is very profitable regardless of uniqueness. All the same, when uniqueness is relatively easy, why would you want a me-too product when you can have one that’s clearly outstanding? When you create a product or service for someone in particular, they give you their own specific bent on the problem they’re facing.
Take for example a service on presentations There are hundreds of books on presentations and services that promise to show you how to be amazing on stage. Yet, when I spoke to this presenter, she felt competent, but not quite.
She felt she needed that last 10% that would take her from good to great. And there you have it. That subset is what gives you the clue. Instead of writing a book, creating a course, inventing a service on “presentations”, you work on the subset of how the “last 10% can take you from a good to great speaker.”
Fluke plays an incredibly important part in this game of finding the “who” We’re so hell-bent on finding the right person, the right target profile that we don’t dare venture far from our computer screens. When I ran into that chatty art director, I had no clue that she’d talk about Photoshop.
When I spoke to that presenter, I had no idea that a cup of coffee would lead to an idea about “the last 10%”. It may appear that a lot of products or services are built around strategy, but they’re often built around a person.
The mistake we make is we hope we run into the ideal “who” right away And more often than not, the “who” is a complete fluke. At first, almost every product or service is like Version 1.0. And the feedback you get from that person is going to be relatively limited.
Even if you were to create a product or service for “last 10% presenter”, the product would need refinement to get to Version 1.1 and from there to 1.2 and so on. With every product or service that’s been profitable, we’ve had a Version 1.0 and then moved along refining as we go along.
Every time you fix things, your product becomes better and more profitable and there’s always a “who” who’ll give you feedback and help you take the product to another level.
But even if there’s a “who” in place, how do you deal with the “what?”
The what depends on a simple concept: the idea of a superpower.
Why When Matters 1838
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For over 20 years Charles Darwin postponed the publishing of his theory Then, on 24 November, 1859, Darwin published his theory on, “Origin of Species”. Priced at fifteen shillings, 1250 copies were sold. Yet, Darwin wasn’t keen on the book being published until his death. In a letter to his religious wife, Darwin asked that 400 pound be set aside and enough promotion of his book be done after his death.
Yet, Alfred Russel Wallace got in the way of these plans Alfred Wallace, a naturalist, spent eight years in Singapore and South East Asia between the years of 1854 and 1862 and is known to have discovered evolution by natural selection as well.
He wrote an essay while in Indonesia (while living on the island of Ternate) and sent it to Darwin in 1858. When Darwin saw the contents of the letter, he knew the “Origin of Species” couldn’t wait any longer. It needed to be published right away or all of Darwin’s work would be attributed to another man.
We are similar to Darwin in many ways Our work may seem insignificant when compared with the work of Darwin, but if your work changes a single person’s day, it’s significant. You know from your own experience how a single line in a book may have caused you to stop and reexamine what you were doing.
Or a random comment that may have changed the way you went about your life or business. Our work seems insignificant only because we know it so well. For others it can be a major moment in their lives.
Which is why you need to start now As you’ve probably heard or read elsewhere on the Psychotactics site, most of our work started out unpolished. At this very moment, as I’m writing this article, Renuka is laughing at one of my articles that I wrote several years ago. However the best example of the unpolished nature of our work must be attributed to The Brain Audit itself.
As you’v probably heard before, the “book” started out as just 16 pages of notes. We made over $50,000 selling that book simply because we got pushed into selling it. And when we sold it offline we weren’t ready to sell it online. Again, someone pushed us and our online business got underway.
If you think your work is crappy, there’s a good reason why Your work is crappy. The Brain Audit was crappy at the start. All our courses and workshops were crappy at the start. Not by choice, of course. We did the best we could but now I can’t even bear to go back and look at the early versions. You too will need to bolster up your confidence and get your work going whether it’s through text, audio, video or presentations. Because if you don’t do it, someone else will.
Darwin had all the material he needed but was still reluctant to publish his work And here I am giving you this advice but I’m reluctant as well. I’ve been working on the concept of talent since 2008 or earlier. So many years have passed and while I’ve written the odd article here and there, there’s no program, no book, no webinar, no podcast.
Let me ask you this question: Would you like to read about how to become talented in just about any field? Would you like to read about what holds us back?(and no it’s not genes). It’s not like I’m comparing my work to Darwin’s or any one else for that matter. But as a reader or listener, would the information be important to you?
Your work is more important than ever
It may appear raw to you, but you need to start and fix it later. You’re hoping for that one great idea but you need to start with a little idea. Will the little idea fail? It might, but from those failures you keep moving ahead and fixing things. Even Darwin’s work was just the start of his journey. During Darwin’s lifetime the book went through six editions, with cumulative changes and revisions to deal with counter-arguments raised.
In 1871 he examined human evolution and sexual selection in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, followed by The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. His research on plants was published in a series of books. His final book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Actions of Worms (published 1881), he examined earthworms and their effect on soil.
When he died he was honoured by a burial in Westminster Abbey where only royals, generals, admirals, politicians, doctors and important scientists are buried. And to think Darwin almost never started on his journey.
Do you still want to wait? Or are you going to start today?
Summary So how do you create a profitable idea for business?
When you started reading this information, you may have thought there’d be a formula. And that’s the formula you’ve been missing. The formula is so simple that somehow you feel like there’s something wrong.
Like as if you have to pay $2000 to some Internet guru to get the formula. But think about it for a second. Let’s say you’ve got a really good way to grow tomatoes. You can grow thousands of tomatoes in an extremely small space. Is that a superpower? Sure it is.
So let’s start with the who: Who is going to be interested in your tomato idea?
Then let’s get to what: The “what” is about growing thousands of tomatoes in a very small space.
Then let’s get to the when: And this is where it all falls apart, isn’t it? You should start now, but there are reasons why you can’t start now. If Darwin could have reasons, so can you and I. We can all have our reasons.
The biggest problem isn’t necessarily that you need a great idea for business
You just need to start but there’s something holding you back. And we’ll explore what holds you back—yes we will. But understand that there isn’t going to be a moment when you’ll get a great idea.
The Brain Audit was not a great idea, it was just a presentation. Every product or service you’ve experienced at Psychotactics wasn’t a great idea and even today is just work in progress. Most ideas are half-baked when they start and it’s in your interest to get started.
Start now!
Identify whom you think will buy the idea, then work on the what you’re going to sell. Make it a superpower, as far as possible. And start now. If you keep at it, the road will change along the way. You’ll make mistakes and you’ll get smarter too. And that’s when the profit will roll in.
Teaching Photoshop wasn’t a new idea. It wasn’t even a great idea.
Heck, you could even borrow the idea by learning Photoshop and finding art directors.
And the best way to get started is to get started. You’re a member of 5000bc aren’t you? Well, get to the Taking Action forum where others just like you have decided to take their ideas and run with it. They’re on their way and so should you.
Useful Resources:
1) How A 3-Step Pre-Sell Creates Product Irresistibility
http://www.psychotactics.com/presell-creates-irresistibility/
2) Three Unknown Secrets of Riveting Story Telling
http://www.psychotactics.com/three-elements-storytelling/
3) The Brain Audit
http://www.psychotactics.com/products/the-brain-audit-32-marketing-strategy-and-structure/
It's super-easy to tell stories of success and how everything went from good to great. But what about the events when you had to eat humble pie?
Or the times when you were scared out of your mind? Here are three stories which by some coincidence involve presentations. Nonetheless, there's a solid lesson behind each story and it's well learning from.
Imagine your website has just gone live and the next thing you know, you’re on a radio show. That’s exactly what happened to me one week in June 2001. After weeks of hard work and lots of back and forth, my website had gone live. By today’s standards it wasn’t a very flashy website. It had tiny fonts and was extremely spartan, but finally it was up and running.
That very afternoon, I was at a store when I ran into the presenters of a popular radio show. They asked me a few questions and then asked me what I did. At the end of the question set they announced my website on air.
I was excited beyond belief
I called my webmaster, Chris Parkinson, and told him to expect loads of traffic.
You know what happened next, right? Yes, nothing. No one showed up to the site despite the popularity of the show. My excitement turned to disappointment as the hours ticked by. But what was I expecting? I’ll tell you what I was expecting. I was expecting a “miracle moment”. And I learned that events don’t always roll out the way you’ve planned. Which is why this series is about the startup stories we’ve experienced at Psychotactics.
They’re a series that give you an understanding of how we went about our early days. How we didn’t just sit behind our computer and hope that clients would sign up. It wasn’t just about starting a blog or putting a website. There are stories that I haven’t quite told before.
These are three of the stories: Three startup stories from the early days at Psychotactics.
Story No.1: The One Person “Australian” Workshop In 2004, we did something quite bold.
We’d been in business for just a year and eight months when we decided to have a workshop in Los Angeles.
That workshop, priced at $1500 per person sold out.
Which prompted us to have our second workshop closer to home.
When a client suggested we have a workshop in Australia, we jumped at the opportunity and the deal for this workshop seemed almost too good to be true. This client wasn’t asking us to do all the promotion. Instead he was going to get over 60 people to attend our two-day event and all we needed to do was show up.
Workshops are notoriously hard to fill at any point in time When you start marketing a workshop you get a few early sign-ups and then it gets deathly quiet for a long time. Finally, as the final date approaches, you get another spurt of sign-up activity which usually fills the remaining seats. For this particular workshop, we hadn’t got any early sign-ups, and even though that was a worry, we weren’t terribly concerned. After all, the client was going to get those 60 people to attend. Even if just half of them showed up, we’d still have a sizeable number of attendees.
Even so a uneasy calm set in The e-mails from the client weren’t encouraging. He kept bringing up stories of local disasters. There was a drought in the area, a big fire in the city—things that seemingly had no bearing on the workshop. When we didn’t react to the doom and gloom, he sent us more e-mails. The numbers receded from 60 to 30, then from 30 to 10.
It was too late for us to change our minds We’d already committed to the workshop and we decided to go ahead anyway. When the client knew we were determined to go ahead, he decided to book a venue and some accommodation nearby. And here’s the interesting bit: We just knew the workshop was in Victoria somewhere and assumed it would be in a big city like Melbourne.
Imagine our horror when we were driven over 116 km to a little town called Hepburn Springs
We must have been naïve at the time anyway, because it never occurred to use to ask where the workshop was being held. Our workshop at Los Angeles had been so successful that it didn’t cross our minds that anything could go wrong. Yet here were with no clue as to who was going to turn up to the event and not even a faint idea about the venue.
Which is when we got our next shock The venue was a bed and breakfast with what seemed to be a billiards room. There in the middle of the room was—as you’d expect—a billiards table and I was somehow supposed to present with that monstrosity right in the room. I asked if the table could be moved. The owner grinned and said, “That table hasn’t moved in a hundred years, and it’s not going to move now”. The only option we had was to put a big sheet over the table and chairs around it as it if were a conference table of some kind.
But the surprises didn’t stop at the venue and the table On the day of the event, two people turned up: the client and his non-paying friend, called Margaret. Nonetheless, we were there to do a workshop and if one person turned up, the workshop would go ahead. As we always do, we started on time at 8:32 am. Then, at 8:45 the doors burst open and another participant showed up. Yup, it was our first paid participant and one who’d seen the announcement of the workshop on our e-mail newsletter and decided to come to the workshop.
We were going to recover some of our costs after all.
However, this paying participant was no ordinary participant She happened to be the General Manager of a $500 million company that was located in Melbourne. In the break she spoke to me and expressed her surprise at the lack of attendees, but also expressed her admiration. “I was amazed that with just two people in the room, you started right on time”.
Over the next two days we went through the elements of The Brain Audit workshop and by the end of the workshop we had a bit of a reward. The GM wanted us to come and present to her company while we were still in Victoria and she was willing to pay us for the trouble.
And so, we broke even We could have given up at the stage when the client was sending his depressing e-mail reports. Instead we decided to persevere and yes we had a happy ending, but what are the lessons?
Three lessons here: Lesson 1: Duds are part of the game
The reason I’m relating this story to you is because I see so many people today who want to start a business, but they want to be successful in a very short time—and preferably with no downsides.
If you’re starting up a business today, how many duds are you willing to embrace? The biggest reason why I see businesses failing is because they don’t want to fail. They play safe. They want clients to come to them via a blog or website. They don’t want to go out on a limb and fail a bit. Failing isn’t a nice feeling but it teaches you a great lesson. And sometimes, like we did, you get lucky.
Lesson 2: Cover your costs
We bought our plane tickets and paid for the venue before we had enough information. We trusted that things would work out in the end and it didn’t. Since then if we’ve had a workshop that involves costs (and they all do), we make a temporary booking of the venue.
Until we sign up at least a few clients, we don’t book or buy anything. We’ve never made a loss on an event, but we came terribly close with this Hepburn workshop. It taught us to pre-sell and then commit to an event. We use the same concept for our product launches. We pre-sell and only once we have sign-ups do we create the product.
Lesson 3: Work your own contacts
When we started out, we didn’t have much of a list. We built that list though writing really good articles. Not just your run of the mill articles, but insightful, funny articles.
Despite the presence of a list, we didn’t have many names from Australia. And we decided to work with the client who’d promised to get 60 participants. That was obviously a mistake. When you give away that much amount of control, you don’t know for sure how things are going to work out. In the end we had no control of the venue, the participants and were stuck with a billiards table in the middle of the room.
But that trip to Australia was only one of our early adventures. The second scary one was definitely the insurance company speech.
Story 2: The Insurance Company Speech I don’t remember how I got some of the early speaking assignments—or maybe I’m just trying to forget.
This early assignment was in Wellington where I was supposed to speak to a large group of insurance agents. The presentation was about The Brain Audit, but I tried valiantly to get case studies about the insurance business. I met with the client many times at their local office, I did my research and found many examples about the insurance industry.
And that’s where I made my first mistake.
Well, anyway, I flew to Wellington and started my presentation As I got through the first 15 minutes or so, I realised the audience was not reacting the way I expected them to do so. Instead of being interested in the case studies, they seemed to be bringing up objections and interrupting my presentation. And rightly so. I was the outsider in the room. I didn’t know squat about insurance and the insurance industry and there I was giving them case studies that left me open to attack.
That’s when my second mistake became apparent I was still very much a rookie at presenting so I took whatever advice I could get in that field. And one presenter told me never to use slides. He suggested that slides were like the kiss of death. As it turned out, slides would have saved me from going to pieces on that particular day. As the audience grew restless, I got extremely nervous on stage.
And then someone walked out Who knows why they walked out. Maybe it was just to go to the toilet or to get a drink. But as my eye moved towards the exit, I could see the entire audience walking out in droves. And though no one else was walking out at that point, I couldn’t focus and forgot what I had to say next. If I had slides, I could have used them as a guide and moved along. Maybe the presentation would have still been a disaster, but it would have been a lot better than a professional presenter standing on stage with his mouth open and his mind blank.
I still had twenty minutes to go and nothing came to mind, so I fled. I left the stage, went down the corridor and locked myself in the room until the taxi came to pick me up to the airport, later.
But that’s not the end of the story Three years later I was asked to speak at quite a different event, but at the very same venue, on the very same stage. To say I was mortified was putting it lightly. I could see myself forgetting what I had to say, and fleeing for the second time in a row. You know how it is when you’re all wound up, don’t you? You don’t sleep very much at night and I counted every ambulance and police siren that roared by on the street as I lay high up in my hotel room.
Except I’d learned from my mistakes The first mistake was trying to appeal to the audience. That wasn’t a mistake I was going to make ever again. When you try to appeal to an audience of people in your industry, you have at least some authority to do so. But when you’re facing an audience from another industry, it’s like walking into the jaws of a steel trap and I’d had one experience and it was enough. I presented my information as is, and the audience drew their own conclusion.
The second mistake I’d made was to speak without slides It may sound like a good idea, but if you’ve spent the previous night counting sirens, you’re likely to be tired and prone to mistakes. That one event made sure I never left home without my slides. I’d even take a backup on an external drive and print out a sheet of the main points—just in case technology failed at the last minute.
But easily the biggest experience to draw upon was walking back on that stage. It was scary but I realised if I backed out I’d always fear that venue and stage. The venue wasn’t the problem, it was the way I handled my presentation that caused all the trouble. Going back into that seeming danger zone made me more resilient than ever before.
Which takes us to the third story: the boat cruise.
Story 3: The Bouncy Boat Cruise I’m not a big fan of “believing in the universe”.
I believe you need to put in the effort and you get the result. And yet I couldn’t explain how I ended up on this cruise from New Zealand to Australia. At the start of the year I’d written my goals and one of the goals was to get on a cruise ship. But as I ploughed through the year no cruise ship had my name on it.
Then in May I had a meeting with a CEO of a bed franchise “I’d like you to make a presentation at our annual event”, he said when I met him at his office. You know what’s coming next, right? Yes, the annual event was on a cruise ship. As excited as I was about the “universe pitching in”, I still had a job to do. And the presentation wasn’t bothering me too much because I’d just made many similar presentations in the months running up to the cruise.
The first night, as we sailed away, there were incredibly calm seas But calm seas and the Tasman don’t go together, especially in June. June is the start of winter in this part of the world and winter brings stormy seas. Added to that, the Tasman Sea is considered to be one of the roughest stretches of water. But we were in a good mood and we had bacon and eggs for breakfast. Oily bacon and buttery-eggs. And then all hell broke loose.
The ship started bouncing about like crazy The bacon and eggs—well, let’s just say you shouldn’t eat oily stuff under normal conditions—but on this rough sea it was pure hara kiri. Renuka and I were not only sea sick, we were throwing up for a solid hour. And later that morning, I had to make my presentation. Somehow, Renuka staggered to the medical centre to buy some overpriced pills to quell the seasickness.
And then it was show time Luckily the presentation was in the lower part of the liner which happened to be the most stable. But I was feeling terrible and had a hard time standing up, so I didn’t get on stage. Instead I made the presentation from the bottom of the stage (at seat level) and held the stage for support. 45 minutes later I was done, and the CEO came up to continue the proceedings.
“You didn’t look too well,” he said to me as we passed. “Did you drink a little too much last night?” “No I didn’t”, I informed him. I never drink the night before I have to make a presentation. What he didn’t know of course, was that Renuka was responsible for that advice. She warned me to stay away from any alcohol the previous night, no matter how many free drinks were being offered. And so I stayed sober, which was a very good lesson in itself.
Often you’re judged not by what you can do, but other people’s perception of you. If I had been drinking the pervious night, it wouldn’t have mattered that I was sea-sick. My pale demeanour would have been attributed to the fact that I wasn’t a professional. I’ve found this to be true with not just speaking engagements but in every area of my life.
When there’s a course on, I don’t tell clients what’s happening in the background. If I have a workshop, I focus on the slides and not about any other issues. When you let your audience know that you have other issues, they automatically attribute some slip up to that issue, even though that issue may not be connected.
Oh, and that universe thing.
I still don’t believe too much in it, but I write things down anyway.
I put in the effort and then it comes true.
Funny that!
Epilogue Often in life we’re waiting for that miracle moment. We are sure that if we simply put up the website, or start writing that blog, things will happen.
What I’ve found is a bit different. With the Australia one person workshop we found that persistence paid off, but it was less a story of persistence and more about learning how groundwork and preparation avoids failure. We still need to get out from our office. We still need to push ourselves into the unknown, but we can do so without taking nutty risks.
The Wellington presentation story was also one of willing to go beyond the computer screen. But it was also one of facing your demons and conquering them. Once I found that I could win that battle against fear, I feel comfortable taking on a scary situation time and time again.
Finally the boat cruise could have gone horribly wrong if Renuka wasn’t around to give me advice. Her advice kept me in the good standing of the CEO. Perception is far greater than reality. And I’ve learned over the years to manage perception, because what people believe is what they feel to be true.
No one is saying you need to be fake or feed your audience what you think they should hear. I openly share what we do, where we’ve succeeded and where we’ve failed. But in the middle of an assignment, you need to focus on the assignment and keep any additional stories for later, much later.
That’s it. Stories from the Psychotactics vault.
Don’t forget to listen to or read: #50: The Early Years-Psychotactics-Moving to New Zealand
17 questions? Why have 17 questions in a testimonial? And what if the client won’t answer the questions?
The reason for the 17 question testimonial is simple. It’s not a testimonial any more, it’s a experience on paper. When other clients read it, they can sense the ups and downs. They can see the final result.
It makes your testimonial stand out. In order to get this 17 question testimonial going, you have to have a strategy in place. This podcast shows you exactly what you need to do so that you can get the answers your business deserves.
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why you need to send instructions before asking the questions
Part 2: Creating compartmentalisation: Bento Box Style
Part 3: Why it’s a mistake not to send examples
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
A few billion years ago something quite amazing—and destructive—occurred on Earth. Oxygen was produced for the first time.
If you were to go back into Earth’s history, you’d choke and die quickly And that’s because the Earth’s atmosphere mostly consisted of Nitrogen, water vapor, carbon dioxide—plenty of carbon dioxide from all those erupting volcanoes—and methane. And then between 2.3-2.4 billion years ago, life began to undergo an amazing transformation on the ocean floor.
A bunch of photosynthetic microbes called cyanobacteria started harnessing the Sun’s energy and converted the carbon dioxide and water into food. And what was the waste product of these cyanobacteria? Yes, it was oxygen. Life-harnessing bacteria began to spread to any surface in the sea and creating huge amounts of oxygen. But this oxygen didn’t go very far.
The oceans were packed with dissolved iron, and you know what happens when iron mixes with oxygen? Sure you do. You get rust. The oceans literally rusted and for hundreds of millions the iron in the ocean sucked up the available oxygen. For about 700 million years of rusting, the oceans ran out of iron. There was just one minor issue: the cyanobacteria were still producing immense amounts of oxygen.
Where would all this oxygen go? Into the atmosphere, that’s where it all went The oxygen had to escape and it made its way into the Earth’s atmosphere. In the billion years that were to follow the Earth began to change from a place where you could hardly breathe, to one that had a bounty of oxygen.
Something similar applies you’re dealing with testimonials for your business At first the testimonials you get are weak, almost impossible to use. Then as time passes, and if you use the six-questions from The Brain Audit, you’ll get testimonials that are more oxygenated. But for you to create a great oxidation event, you need the power of the 17-Question testimonial. And the reason why you need this 17-Question testimonial is because it catapults your testimonials into an experience. Instead of just reading yet another testimonial, the prospect feels the ups, down, twists, turns and final result.
Let’s go into the land of the 17-Question testimonial and explore three elements: 1) Why you need to send instructions before asking the questions
2) Creating compartmentalisation: Bento box style
3) Why it’s a mistake not to send examples
First, what are the seventeen questions? We’d want to get that out of the way, so here goes: 1) What was your primary reason for taking this course?
2) Describe how you used to approach writing before this course began
3) Describe how things changed about mid-way into the course
4) Describe how you feel now, towards the end of this course
5) Can you tell us about your experience with the group and the difference it made?
6) Can you tell us why the forum helped? And where it helped?
7) Can you describe to a newcomer how this course is taught? ( teaching methodology)
8- Describe Sean as a teacher
9) Did you have any personal experience (e.g. The moment I understood the one-word, it was a special moment because in the past….etc).
10) What would you say are the big benefits of this course?
11) How did the extra classes? Audio on Mistakes etc. help?
12) Why would you recommend it?
13) The course is called the toughest in the world. Can you describe how tough it was, and what sacrifices you had to make to keep going?
14) What was your toughest moment? How did you overcome it?
14) Have you done other courses with Psychotactics? OR have you signed up or considered signing up for another course? Why?
15) What advice would you give to future participants?
16) How did the course personally help you?
17) Anything else you’d like to add?
Part 1: Why you need to send instructions before asking the questions Yesterday my wife Renuka was filling in a form for an online visa. She’d fill in a page of details only to be confronted with yet another. Then she’d fill a second page and the third would show up. Mother’s name, father’s name, previous visa number—details after details popped up to the point of frustration.
When you’re asking clients for testimonials it hard enough when you ask a few questions, but a seventeen question form can be quite tiresome. Which is why you need to prepare the client in advance. This preparation calls for instructions.
When we ask clients for testimonials, we forget one important fact We forget that for many, if not most of clients, giving testimonials is not a common activity. Even if they’ve agreed to give you a testimonial, the sight of seventeen questions may appear a little over the top. Yet, without that voluminous amount of detail you’re unlikely to draw out the entire experience. To make sure the testimonial plan goes well you have to prepare the client.
It’s important to send them information in advance Whether the testimonial is done via the phone, in person or via the Internet, you need to make sure the client knows they’re going to go through a 17-question testimonial. And if you suspect the client is going to be reluctant to write, you should immediately reach for the phone or in person.
There’s a big advantage to getting a testimonial over the phone When we write, we tend to edit. And if a client is sitting down to write answers to a bunch of questions, you’re asking him to invest a lot of not just writing time, but editing time as well.
On the phone or in person, you have no such problem. The client is merely answering a bunch of questions and is likely to be happy to speak for between 10-12 minutes. In comparison, a written testimonial may take well over 45 minutes to an hour. Which is why you need to let the client know you’d like to speak to them, and that you’ll be recording the session. This is the first level of preparation involved.
The second level seems minor but it’s just as important When clients agree to giving a testimonial, I also send them this information:
This isn’t just a client testimonial. It’s more of a case study describing your ups and downs and final result. The experience is what counts and so I would really like you to answer these questions in as much detail as possible. Short, one-line answers become pretty useless as they lack detail.
They also can’t really be used, so I’d prefer you put in as much detail as possible in your answers. This detail helps me understand your journey better and is also a really ego booster. So I would appreciate the maximum amount of detail in the answers.
There’s really no reason to have a twiggy, anaemic testimonial You want one that’s well rounded, full of juicy experiences and stories. And when you put the client in a situation where they can quickly give you the information (via phone or in person) you’ve made the first and most important move. When you clearly bring up the issue of detail, you’re priming them to be effusive—and yes, it does make for some pretty cool testimonials.
If the testimonial isn’t via the phone or in person, things get a little dicier Well, not quite. It really depends on what you’ve delivered in terms of product or services. If a client buys a product like “Chaos Planning” which is a short, yet intense book, there’s really no point in sending the client a seventeen question questionnaire. However, if there’s a lot of involvement and a slightly long drawn process, you’re more than likely to get a far better response.
Let’s say you’re a web designer. You’ve just spent two months of back and forth movement building a client’s website. Now there’s been a bit of a relationship and it’s far more likely that an e-mail based set of questions will work.
We tend to use the 17-Questions only for courses We conduct courses such as the cartooning course, the Article Writing Course, copywriting, First Fifty Words etc. These aren’t courses where you sign up and then the teacher disappears. They’re pretty hands on courses and with just a few clients a ton of back and forth is involved.
To give you an example, in the 2016 Article Writing Course we have our normal limit of 25 participants. And we’re now in Week 8 of the course and so far 9,374 posts have been generated. Yes, it’s impressive at over 1000 posts per week, but what’s important to note here is the involvement. If the client is fully involved, then it’s more than likely that either a phone call or an online questionnaire will get an equally powerful response.
Of course if you have 25 clients, it’s better to have them answer via an online medium because the exercise gets very complicated. You have to figure out available timings and time zones and anyway the exercise may take several days. But if you have just a few clients, it’s a better idea to use the phone or record via Skype.
We started this journey to get our 17-Question testimonial but realised there’s a lot more to consider.
We realised that planning the strategy and choosing whether to use the phone or an online questionnaire is important. And that while the online questionnaire is definitely less time consuming, it depends a lot on the involvement of the clients. The more involved, the more likely you are to get great testimonials for such a lengthy questionnaire.
This takes us to our second part: The logic of the questions. Do we really need 17 questions? Would 13 be just fine? Or could we go up to 19? The answer lies in the logic. What are you trying to achieve? That’s what we’ll have a look at next.
Part 2: Creating compartmentalisation If you were to head back in time to Japan—no, not 2.4 billion years but closer—around the 12th century, you’d have run into quite a different sort of evolution: the start of the Bento box.
During the Kamakura period, dried meals or hoshi-ii was introduced and bento was nothing more than a small bag to store dried rice. But if we speed up through the Azuchi Momoya Period, in the 17th century, we find bento boxes everywhere. Wooden, lacquered boxes that consisted of rice, chestnut, seafood, mushroom, pickles and yes, bamboo shoot.
And that’s what a bento box does best With all those tastes and textures and different types of food, it’s critical to compartmentalise the food. Similarly, if you want to get results with your 17-Questions, you have to compartmentalise the questions so that each set tackles different issues.
Bento at one of my favourite Japanese restaurant in Auckland Let’s take a look at the compartments for one of our courses, for starters.
They’re split into:
– The experience: Before, during, on completion of course
– The elements of the course: the group, the forum, the notes, the audio.
– The teaching system: How it’s taught, the responsiveness of the teacher etc.
– Comparison: How they’re compare with other courses
– Advice/Recommendations: Would they recommend the course to others? Why?
– Any other comments
And while we ask 17-Questions, what’s really vital is the creation of the bento box. You need to create the compartments for your own product or service first, before considering what to put in the individual boxes.
Let’s go back to the web designer: What would the compartments look like? – The experience: Before, during, on completion of website
– The elements of the website: the layout, functionality, ease of use etc.
– Dealing with the developers: The responsiveness, ease of instructions etc.
– Comparison: How they’re compare with other website developers or even other similar service providers
– Advice/Recommendations: Would they recommend the service to others? Why?
– Any other comments
While most of the compartments of the bento box has already been created for you, you may still need to work on a compartment of your own. Or, you may need to add, subtract or change some of the questions. This compartmentalisation allows us to get the information we need and it allows the client to see at a glance what they’re expected to answer.
We started out this journey by sending the instructions in advance. We then moved into compartmentalisation.
And if you stopped right at this point, you are likely to get an outstanding testimonial. But why stop here? Why take the chance that something might still go wrong? The way to ensure a mind-blowing testimonial is to something so simple, it’s easy to miss. It’s called: sending an example.
Part 3: Why it’s a mistake not to send examples Let’s say I step into a bar.
I have no intention of drinking that cold glass of beer.
But there in front of me is someone drinking a cold glass of beer.
Guess what happens next?
The reason why I’m sipping a beer is because of a mirror effect. This mirror effect also plays out to your advantage when you’re getting a client to give you a 17-Question testimonial. To understand why the mirror effect is so important, we simply have to take away the example. Now the client has no benchmark and their testimonial can be similar to what you’re expecting or wildly off course.
A simple way to solve this problem is to send an example As you’d expect the example will be long and detailed. And the moment you send it to the client, they realise what’s expected of them. Despite this example, some clients will still give you terse testimonials. There’s really not much of a point in running such testimonials. However, most clients have a look at the example and proceed to give one just as good.
But what if you don’t have an example in place? Well, it’s a good question but the answer is more than obvious. Be persistent and go in search of a client who’s willing to give you a longer testimonial. Just throwing your hands up in the air isn’t going to get you the testimonial you seek.
If you need to do an assignment free of cost just for the sake of the testimonial, then make sure you get it done. Without that example testimonial in place, you can still get good 17-Question testimonials, but an example almost always guarantees great results.
And once we’ve covered that last bit, it’s time for the summary.
Ok let’s summarise The first point was one of instructions
When you give clients instructions well in advance. Letting them know that they need to give lots of detail is very important. Without the detail you may have a testimonial but not a complete experience. The whole purpose of the 17-Question testimonial is for it to be like an oxygenation event. It needs to bring life to a testimonial in a dramatic manner.
The issue of phone vs. online questionnaire is also something that needs to be tackled. Using the phone is far superior if you have fewer clients. If you have a large number, then you have to make sure it’s all online or it may take too much time and never get done.
The second point was one of compartmentalisation
You need to split the main facets into something resembling a bento box. For us, we break up things into the experience, the teaching system, comparison, advice etc. And your compartments may be slightly different but still remarkably similar.
All you need to do is sit down and create the compartments before putting in the questions in each bit. You can have fewer than 17 questions and possibly more. But you should get tons of material with 17. We’ve filled up entire booklets (just the Article Writing Course prospectus has over 80 pages of testimonials).
The final point is one of beer—sorry, examples
Send an example to a client. When she can see the example it’s a form of instruction. She knows what’s expected of her and will deliver accordingly. Without an example a client may meet your expectations, but equally they may go wildly off in some weird direction or not meet your quota. The example needs a mirror effect and it’s your job to provide the mirror.
Start with the bento box.
Create the compartments
Fill it with questions.
An example of the questions and answers Example: Alison’s answer
1)What was your primary reason for taking this course?
I wanted to write in a much more engaging way. And to write faster. And I wanted to know when I had succeeded and failed in my attempt – to have some way of assessing for myself the quality of my output.
2) Describe how you used to approach writing before this course began
I had the Psychotactics Outline stuck to my wall behind my computer screen. And I had tried like heck to implement it but I was trying to do it all at once. So it was hard and I knew I was failing or making such slow progress. And I did not really know how to get better on my own.
I tried to outline and write in the same session. And I did not plan ahead, I just tried to write. And it took a long time, but I just thought, “hey, that’s life.”
3) Describe how things changed about mid-way into the course
Mid way through the course we were doing disconnectors and the first 50 words. And man, that was hard. Trying to figure the right way to disconnect, trying to reconnect smoothly, trying to ‘bottle’ the drama and tip it onto the page at just the right point. It was hard, hard work.
4) Describe how you feel now, towards the end of this course
Now I’m feeling confident. I can get a sense of my ‘One Word’ quite easily and once I have it, it’s pretty simple to come up with a disconnect. And I have a more trained eye, so I can quickly goback and ‘audit’ my work to make sure I have put in all the elements I need. It’s much, much easier.
5) Can you tell us about your experience with the group and the difference it made?
I was the only girl in my small group, so sometimes I would ‘sneak out’ and read what was going on in the other groups, with people I knew from the Cartoon Course.
But my small group was fine, and we kept nudging each other along and the accountability to do the work was excellent. We didn’t lose anyone!. Now that the forum has opened up to Group 2 I really appreciate being in a smaller group most of the time – sheesh, having all of us buzzing around would have been overwhelming.
6) Can you tell us why the forum helped? And where it helped?
I love working in the forum because it’s so flexible. And you get almost instant feedback because of the different time zones. Instant feedback is so motivating. And you could get so many different comments on your work. And go back and correct it to make it better.
And read other peoples work to learn from their mistakes
7) Can you describe to a newcomer how this course is taught? ( teaching methodology)
It’s like working with a gemstone – you are polishing a single facet of the gem before you worry about any other facet. And you just trusting the process that when you finish, the gem will look magnificent. That’s where you have to trust Sean (and I did, because I had seen great results cartooning!)
Describe Sean as a teacher (yes, even the irritating part).
I did not find Sean irritating at all. I found him to be unfailingly (and surprisingly) patient and prepared to revisit things and help even further (like the extra calls, the Mistakes audios etc) and explain again and differently. He was very insightful and excellent at deconstructing errors and showing how to vapourise them.
I also noticed on other threads that he is very robust and unprovokable. A very mature teacher who does not take complaints personally.
And overall, he was just everywhere. Don’t ask me when he sleeps or how he keeps up with everything. I’m just grateful he does. And inspired to push my own envelope more to achieve what I want to.
9) What was your toughest moment? How did you overcome it?
I did not have a particularly low point. I knew it was going to be hard, I had been warned, I expected it to be hard and it was! But I made a pact with myself that I would show up every day and post an article. So in my mind I was never going to miss a day, even if I wrote a crappy piece that I was not happy with and just could not stay up any later.
10) Did you have any personal experience (e.g. The moment I understood the one-word, it was a special moment because in the past….etc).
‘One word’ was certainly my biggest breakthrough because a break through there flows into everything else.
I have been reading Sean’s stuff for a couple of years now and struggling to pin down this One Word thing. But it suddenly clicked and I don’t know why. It’s not that I hadn’t seen its prominence on the first chapter of notes and audio – I just could not wrestle it into submission. And with writing mostly travel stuff, different angles etc felt elusive.
So the breakthrough came when I was outlining about different towns . And each place had a very particular character. So I realized that what I wanted the reader to take away was what the feeling or vibe of that place was. And that was my one word. So one place was ‘party place’ and another was ‘tranquil’ and so on. I have now managed to capture that for other types of topics the baby stuff and the finance stuff. It’s a really powerful feeling.
10) What would you say are the big benefits of this course?
Being able to assess my own stuff better, to know where I am most likely to fall short and hone in on that.
Outlining so fast! And seeing the outlines more clearly and easier.
I think the most unexpected learning was the work process/ work flow. Of choosing a series, and outlining it, and then writing. That is of immense help to me, I struggle with strategic planning.
11) How did the extra classes? Audio on Mistakes etc. help?
The Audios on mistakes were invaluable. And having the calls recorded. The extra calls, these last 2 Thursdays, were very valuable too. Surprisingly so, who would believe so much benefit could come from recapping stuff this late?!
12) Why would you recommend it?
It works. If you are prepared to follow the process through, Sean gets you to the other side.
13) Can you describe why you (personally) find it unique?
I love the ‘Psycho’ approach Sean uses to punch you through the Bully Brain zone.
I love working with people from all over the world. And I love working hard with others who are determined to work hard and succeed too.
14) Have you done other courses with Psychotactics? OR have you signed up or considered signing up for another course? Why?
Cartooning – for fun and to get my creative brain working and to challenge myself to do something I had never thought I could do.
I would consider doing the Info products and the Copywriting and Pre-selling course once my bank balance has recovered from AWC.
15) What advice would you give to future participants?
Decide beforehand that you will not quit.
Clear your decks if you can, and expect it to be hard
16) How did the course personally help you?
It gave me a good realization of how often we make excuses.
So I started asking myself in other areas of my life “Do I want to do this? Yes? Then how will I make it happen?” instead of putting things off and being passive. Getting an insight on Sean’s personal program has encouraged me to push my own personal envelope to achieve what I want to.
17) Anything else you’d like to add?
Thanks. A huge whole lot. It’s been great and I would do it again in a heartbeat.
Useful Resources 1) Do you know why some businesses get wonderful clients, while others seem to get clients that are a pain in the neck? Find out more here.
2) Find out: Why Clients Don’t Buy (Understanding The Elements of Risk)
3) About 5000bc: How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems
Whenever you run into tips on productivity it’s always this earth shaking advice You’re advised to make these monumental changes to improve your business or life. In reality all you need are tiny little tweaks.
Important tweaks, but tiny ones. And some of these tweaks are slightly irreverent. Which is what makes these productivity tips even more interesting. You’ll enjoy this episode on productivity—gentle productivity—and here’s a tip. You may end up sleeping a lot more as well!
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: How to work with a timer
Part 2: The power of sleepPart 3: Why you need to focus on the road, not the destination.
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
I’ve always assumed you needed a nut cracker to open a walnut. Then I learned you could easily use the rear end of a screwdriver. A couple of hard whacks along the ridge, and the nut cracks open easily.
To prove the point, I gave my niece Marsha to crack open the nut.
She’s just 12 and her gentle taps were driving me crazy until I realised that once again I was assuming erroneously. I found out you don’t need to whack the nut at all. A few Marsha-taps and it opens just as effectively—and without any splatter.
We assume we have to do something great and wonderful to get productive. In reality, the changes needed are Marsha-taps. They’re gentle, almost negligible changes that enable us to get a lot done with little or no effort. In fact, one of the biggest productivity tools is to do nothing.
Intrigued? Well, follow along.
The three points of gentle productivity are:
1) Working with a timer
2) Sleep
3) Focus on the road, not the destination.
Part 1: Working with a timer The Psychotactics Article Writing Course is billed as the toughest writing course in the world. And rightly so. In fewer than 12 weeks a participant has to go from a “frozen state” to being able to write an article exceedingly well. When you look at all the components involved in article writing, you run into a mountain of elements to master.
A single course covers “topics, sub-topics, outlines, how to start an article, different types of formulas of writing, subheads, objections, examples, summary, sandwiching and yes, the incredibly important task of starting an article.” And in the process of juggling all these components, the participants do something that jeopardises the entire learning process.
They will try to write an article that seems to meet their own standard Participants complain about the quality of their article. After they write their articles, they somehow feel something’s missing. So they go back to write and rewrite until they reach some sort of “quality standard.
No one starts off wanting to spend three or four hours on an article, but invariably that’s how we go about trying to get our work to a higher “quality”.
In reality, all that’s happening is the build up of exhaustion If you spend four hours writing an article today, and four hours writing an article tomorrow, will you be awake on the day after? The chances are you’re just going through the motions as the tiredness seeps into your bones. When you’re tired, you’re not only robotic, but you miss out on very important learning cues.
It seems very much like a Catch 22 situation. You can’t create a “great” article unless you work hard at it. And yet, working hard leads to so much exhaustion that the rest of your work suffers. Is there really a way out of this mess?
The answer lies in a timer The Article Writing Course runs to a timer. You have a fixed time to do the outlines; a fixed time to do your assignment; and yes, a fixed time to spend your time on the forum looking at the work of others in your group. When your time is up, you’re done.
But does this make any sense at all? With a fixed time would the quality not get a lot worse? After all, when you labour over your work, you get time to fix the glitches, tidy the work and make it better.
A student that is given just 90 minutes to write an article may well be dissatisfied with their work, but give them 180 minutes and they don’t turn out 200% better work. Their work is probably improved by a mere 5-10%. But their exhaustion level goes sky high when they take more time to do the task.
Tasks that have fixed deadlines may not be the best in the world but they’re the key to productivity I draw a daily diary of cartoons in watercolour. I’m fastidious about doing one watercolour every day. Then a big project comes along and I’m suddenly lost. I skip a day, which turns out to be a week. Soon a month has slipped by without any work being completed.
What’s worse is that I ache to do that watercolour every day, but hey, a watercolour takes me anywhere between 45 minutes to an hour. Which is why I can’t handle the watercolour when that project rolls along.
But what if I only painted for 15 minutes in the day? Instantly I feel the need to rebel. I know it takes 45 minutes so how on earth can I achieve something in 15 minutes? Anyway, I made the rule, so may as well use it, right? And so I did. I did what I could in 15 minutes. Was it as good as the 45 minutes painting. Probably not, but that’s what we found on the Article Writing Course as well.
At first, there’s this intense sense of rebellion coursing through the logical part of our brains. Yet, the moment we realise there’s no way out, the creative side seems to take over and we work out how we can achieve the task in a shorter duration.
Will it be as awesome as the 45 minute watercolour? Let me be very clear with you. I’ve slaved over a watercolour for 5 hours and it’s not like additional time makes a better painting. Granted there are going to be deficiencies in the final product, but if you keep up the speed every single day, something interesting happens.
You manage to put out not average, but some really good work in a fraction of the time. And most importantly, where there was a blank canvas, there’s work.
Not only did I do my painting, but I’m proud to have something, instead of nothing. Instead of giving up, I’m moving ahead by putting a restriction on how much time I can allocate to the project.
Amazingly this has reflected in the dropout rate of the Article Writing Course When you call a course the “toughest writing course in the world”, it usually lives up to its billing. And at least 20% of the students drop out (most other courses online have a drop out rate of 80-95%).
Yet, once we put the timer system in place, we are in Week 7 of the course, and only one student seems to be teetering. Will that student come back? We don’t know for sure, but a lack of exhaustion is the key to productivity.
It seems ridiculous to let a timer dictate your output Yet, the timer system works for our courses, for workshops, for our personal productivity and even when Marsha’s doing her school assignments. Given endless time, she fills in the time in some magical way. Put her on a timer and she astounds everyone, including herself. In trying to get more productive we’re looking for that super-big tool that will change our lives.
Instead the first of those tools is the humble timer You may go overtime—but you’ll finish your work quickly enough. Will it be amazingly good? No it won’t. But if you don’t use the timer, nothing gets done, which is a lot worse.
And that’s the first gentle tool of productivity. So what’s the second tool? You know this one well. It’s called sleep.
Sleep? How are you productive when you sleep?
Part 2: Sleep enhances productivity—but how? Sleep helps us in many different ways, but we don’t relate garbage disposal to sleep, do we?
Lack of sleep affects brain function, reduces learning and impairs performance It also seems to prevent us from transferring short term memory to long term memory. However, researcher, Dr. Maiken Nedergaard has a mind-blowing theory (he submitted a paper to the prestigious journal called Science). His research shows that the brain apparently goes through a garbage clearance when we’re asleep.
Nedergaard’s team showed brain cells shrink during sleep. This shrinking of the brain cells opens up the gaps between neurons, which in turn allow fluids to wash the brain clean. The research also suggests that failing to clear away some toxic proteins may play a role in brain disorders like dementia.
But let’s put brain disorders aside for a moment, and focus only on the and think of what happens when you don’t sleep. With every sleep deprived hour, more toxins keep building up in our brain, impairing our productivity.
We’re more sleep-deprived than ever, and we have the idiots to prove it Everywhere you look, you’ll have the so-called gurus berating you for dreaming about the weekend. Very few people seem to take breaks, let alone weekends.
Sleep is associated with laziness, and there’s utter disdain for the afternoon siesta. In many countries, they derogatorily call it the “nana nap”.
Yet Nedergaard is pretty clear about the value of sleep and how it affects the clearing of junk from your brain. “You can think of it like having a house party. You can either entertain the guests or clean up the house, but you can’t really do both at the same time.”
Productivity is the house party! The more productive we are, the harder we work, the greater the amount of “garbage” we seem to accumulate. And boasting about little sleep is hardly the way to go about getting rid of the garbage.
I know this seems ironic seeing that I’m the 4 am guy, but I’m well into counting sheep by 10 pm or earlier. Then there’s a solid hour or even two hours of sleep in the afternoon. This regime of getting more sleep, rather than less is what counts towards productivity.
But what if you feel groggy after an afternoon sleep? Many people do. And it’s good to measure how much sleep is restorative and how much makes you groggy. Some people nap in sleep cycles. I’ve found I can sleep in 45 minutes or 90-minute cycles. If I’m woken up in between, I feel groggy.
But here’s the really interesting bit. I sleep longer when I’m more rested. On workdays, I’ll sleep for about 45-90 minutes, but on vacation that sleep gets extended to an enormous 3 hours. While no one is asking you to sleep three hours or even 45 minutes, you should try a 20-minute nap at the very least.
Instead of trying to create yet another to-do list, your biggest item should be garbage clearance Lauren Hale is an associate professor of preventive medicine at Stony Brook University. She reckons screens of any kind inhibit our sleep. Whether it’s a phone, tablet, computer or TV, it affects our sleep.
Getting rid of all those devices at least 30 minutes before you sleep is one way of getting a sounder sleep. Anyway, it stops us from checking e-mail or looking at Facebook, which only increases the churn in our brain instead of letting us sleep well.
Sleep may be on everyone’s to-do list and no one’s productivity list We don’t see sleep as important, and yet it’s been amazingly useful when training clients in courses.
In the 2008 version of the Article Writing Course, for instance, clients needed to write five articles a week, with no limits on time. And they all turned out decent articles.
In the 2016 version of the Article Writing Course, clients are required to write 2-3 articles a week, and there are limits on time. In every instance, the 2016 batch is writing far superior articles in smaller portions of time.
And how do I know this to be true? A skill like writing can never be treated like an objective science and it’s always going to be subjective. Yet, I think I could easily slide into a bit of a judging role as I’ve written between 3000-4000 articles in the past 16 years. It includes 52 articles for the Psychotactics Newsletter and between 3-5 articles for 5000bc per week.
It doesn’t include several books or reports. And every Article Writing Course generates between 800-1000 articles. Seeing I’ve conducted over ten consecutive courses, that’s about 10,000 articles read over the past ten years.
Add it all up and we’re looking at least 14,000 articles over the past 16 years. I know it still makes the skill subjective, but I’d say I have a pretty good handle on good vs. not so great article writing.
And the more rested the student, the better the articles. I’d like to say writing more articles per week would make the client a better writer, but it doesn’t. Not in the early stages, at least. Once they’ve got a good handle on the elements of article writing, they write quickly, create less garbage, and they’re able to write every day, if necessary. And yes, without too much of a strain. Even so, sleep helps tremendously which is why weekends and breaks are crucial.
This improvement in productivity doesn’t need a team of researchers does it? It’s not just a finding when it comes to article writing. You know from your experience how much you stagger about like a drunk when you’re sleep deprived.
You don’t need to get into a lab coat to figure out that sleep does beautiful things for your productivity. Knowing that it helps with removing all that garbage, helps, doesn’t it? Now you can sleep a lot more and contribute to your productivity.
This, of course, takes us to our third element: staggering the task.
Part 3: Most of us are told to start with the end in mind. The goal.
The destination.
The dream.
And it’s that end point that more often than not, unravels our entire sequence of productivity The end point is why we get involved with any undertaking. We join a cartoon course to learn to draw cartoons. We get into karate class so we can protect ourselves should we find ourselves in a bit of a bother. And yet for most of us, the end point is fuzzy. What would the cartoon you draw in six months from now look like? What kind of moves would you make in karate a year from now?
No one can answer that question, no matter how prescient we happen to be.
So the end point is important, but in reality it’s just a point in the road. A better way to see an end point is to visualise the drive to your weekend picnic spot. You clearly know your destination, but as you get in the car and get going, what are you looking at?
Yes, it’s the road right in front of you. Every turn of the wheels forces you focus not on the endpoint, but the process instead.
Michael Phelps is the most decorated Olympian of all time Behind Phelps’ amazing track record is his coach, Bob Bowman. And here’s what Bowman has to say about process. “Champions value the process more than any outcome. Because that’s what controllable and within our ability to deal with”. What he saying is that the journey itself is the benchmark—not the destination or outcome.
For example, if we were learning how to write a sales page, we shouldn’t be focused on the end point. We should be more aware of managing the process. On a sales page there are so many elements: headlines, bullets, features and benefits etc. If you’re learning to write headlines, you should be focusing on the headlines. If you’re writing bullets, they should be your benchmark.
You shouldn’t be asking: How is my sales letter doing? That’s the wrong question to ask. Instead, you should say: Am I benchmarking what I learned today? Or this week?
The moment we shift our focus on the end point, we’re easily frustrated That’s because every journey has diversions or speed bumps. And if we haven’t accounted for those diversions, we get upset and start to wander away from our destination. And rightly so, because the destination is still a zillion miles away. However, if we focus on the immediate road, things change. Even if you hit diversions, that’s part of the journey.
Productivity is often measured by what you do Instead, we also need to measure it by what gets in the way. The moment we’re focused on the end point, we come up with rather silly statements like, “My work isn’t up to the quality I expected”.
The reason for this seeming failure is you’re evaluating the entire project, and we’re not there yet. Frustration sets in, and you end up berating yourself, thinking everyone else is better than you. And can you believe being productive when your mental state is in a shambles?
The way to approach productivity is to break up your journey into smaller bits When clients write an article, I advise them to first do the outline. Then do nothing for hours on end. After those hours have ticked away, write the First Fifty Words.
Again, you can walk away from the article. Bit by bit, mile by mile that article gets built until a day, even two days have passed. But how much time has the client spent on the article? Often it’s just a little less than two hours in all.
Yet, how do many writers attack an article? They sit down and try to do what I used to do. I’d be adamant that I wanted to get to the end point, so I’d spend all day on the article. As the hours ticked away, I’d get so lost that many articles never made it to the finish line.
Instead, I’d throw yet another article in my article writing graveyard. What seemed like a good idea—the finish line—was, in reality, a terrible mistake. I lost energy, didn’t work with a timer, didn’t have the nerve to take a nap to replenish that energy. And so that article never did make it to the finish line. I was trying to be productive but ended up doing quite the opposite.
The end point is just a point.
There are points all along the road.
No one point is more important than the next.
If you managed to get 70% to the end point, it’s better than dropping out.
And since productivity is about getting things done, 70% is a lot better than nothing.
Next Step: Read or listen to How To Beat Inertia And Why Logic Doesn’t Work
http://www.psychotactics.com/beat-inertia/
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There seem to be two sets of clients: really painful ones and amazing It’s the painful ones that seem to drain an enormous amount of energy and time. They’re the ones that you constantly have to battle with. But how do you know in advance how to avoid these clients? There are red flags in place.
In this episode you’ll learn how at Psychotactics (for the most part) we avoid painful clients.
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why and how to add barriers
Part 2: How to filter through testimonials
Part 3: How to spot ‘Red Flags’
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
How We Avoid Energy-Sapping Clients at Psychotactics Which ants have more offspring?
The ants that forage more and hence have more food supplies?
Or the ants that are do less foraging and hence have less food?
Incredible as it may seem it’s the ants that restrain their foraging that fare better Biological studies have almost always believed that species that have the greatest food supply tend to do better. A Stanford study by Deborah M. Gordon demonstrates how harvester ants experience greater success when they’re picky.
This picky, picky, picky habit applies quite neatly to client acquisition When you first start out in business, it seems like a good idea to go out and forage for new clients all the time. Over time, you’ll learn that there are good clients and energy-sapping clients. And that by appealing to everyone you may get success, but at Psychotactics, we’ve found that seemingly counterintuitive behaviour seems to work a lot better.
That instead of trying to increase our reach, we’ve narrowed it down In the ant world, success is measured by a greater number of offspring. In our world at Psychotactics, success is measured by the amount of control we have over our lives. The ability to work with the clients we want, earn a profit that’s sizeable, yet within a pre-defined limit.
Most importantly, it has allowed us to take three months off and travel the world on vacation. In a world that’s increasingly driving itself crazy, we live with an island mentality. And a significant part of this success lies in the fact that we have great clients. But no one just has great clients. You have to pick great clients.
So how do we pick our clients? Over the past 16 years, we’ve used three core methods. And these methods have worked amazingly well for us. They are:
– Adding barriers
– Filtering through testimonials.
– Red flags
Part 1—Barriers: The First Step To Avoid Energy-Sapping Clients at Psychotactics Let’s say you tried to buy the copywriting course off our site.
You randomly go to the sales page, plop down a couple of thousand of dollars and then wait for your download.
The download might never show up.
Instead there’d be a back check on your record Yup, just like an employer does a check on your past before hiring you, a check is done on your history with Psychotactics as well. Have you been a subscriber? For how long? Have you bought The Brain Audit yet? When did you do that? Have you bought other smaller products? If the answer is no, it’s likely that you’ll get your couple of thousand dollars right back in your bank account.
So why is the case? It’s a barrier in place. And we have rules. And the rules are simple. You need to have subscribed. You need to have read The Brain Audit. Without jumping over those barriers, you’re not truly qualified to be part of our system. So yes, we may check if you’ve bought and consumed the products with another email address, but if the answer is no, then the money goes bouncing right back to your account.
I remember an event in Chicago quite clearly I’d just spoken at the System Seminar. I’d just given a presentation, and a member of the audience approached me to buy our info-products course. Was he a subscriber? Did he have The Brain Audit?
Would he buy The Brain Audit? His said he wasn’t planning to buy The Brain Audit. He just wanted the info-products course. And he was willing to spend his couple of thousand dollars if I just swiped his credit card.
You can tell how this story goes, right? To this day, customers can’t understand why we’d walk away from thousands of dollars over a measly subscription and a copy of The Brain Audit. But think about it for a second. Would you marry someone who you’d never had a first date with? Would you even consider marrying them without engaging with them at least a couple of times?
And if you’re not the marrying kind, it doesn’t matter. We still understand the concept of testing the waters, putting up the barriers just to see how the other person reacts.
At Psychotactics, we know how the other person reacts The greater the barriers the client has to climb, the more they stick around. The more they stick around, the more we get to know each other and help each other move forward. And that is why we have a 3% or less refund rate on bigger products. It’s because the client has qualified themselves repeatedly.
It’s not like there’s a zero-refund rate. Sometimes, despite all the due diligence between the client and us, there’s still a mismatch of the product. A client may expect the product to do one thing, and it may do another. That’s fine in our books. We know the client has gone through the steps and one rainy day doesn’t make a monsoon.
The opposite is true as well The refund rate climbs to about 98% if the client is not a subscriber. Yes, read that again. A whopping 98% of those who easy come, also easy go. If the client hasn’t subscribed or bought The Brain Audit, they still can’t buy our bigger products.
They can buy the smaller, specific products like Website components or ‘Black Belt Presentations’, and they do. The moment we see that order come through with no history of client/Psychotactics interaction, we can be almost sure that a refund will follow.
It gets worse… Some of those folk won’t just ask for a refund. They simply ask for a chargeback. It means we get a black mark against our name (Too many chargebacks and your merchant account can be closed down). Plus there’s a $20 penalty that we have to pay. That’s not nice at all, is it?
This punk, whoever he is (and it’s usually a “he”) is running rampant picking up stuff only to refund it or ask for a chargeback. Even if the person simply asks for a refund, that’s another 10 minutes of your life down the drain as you go through the process of refunding the amount and responding to the “customer”.
So why not put the barrier in place for the smaller products as well? Remember that you’re running a small business. And so are we. Some things can be monitored and others can’t. A stream of small products go out of the door every single day, but less so with the bigger products.
So while we push hard for clients to have a relationship, some of them are just walk in with every intention of sneaking away in the morning. Everything can’t be monitored, but as the products and services get bigger, the barriers can indeed be put in place.
Having barriers in place is a good thing The moment someone puts a few thousand dollars in your bank account, you feel pretty entitled to it. And some folks have put in $10,000 into our account (when we used to do the Protégé sessions) and yes, you feel entitled to that as well. But don’t cozy up to the dollars just yet. You need to do the background check. Find out if the person is a good match. Do your due diligence.
A little due diligence goes a long way Clients that jump over the barriers stick around for years to come. You don’t have to be like all those marketers out there chasing endlessly after new clients. Instead, you can have a group of clients that trust you and will be more than happy to buy your products or services in future. And yes, there will be the occasional refund, but nothing very dramatic. And that’s what barriers will do for your business.
Yes, it’s scary Yes, it’s necessary.
Do the background check. Put up the barriers. It makes good business sense. But barriers are only one way to avoid energy-sapping clients. Most trouble shows up well in advance, and we just ignore the red flags.
So how do you learn to work with red flags? Let’s find out in this second part.
Part 2—Red Flags: How We Avoid Energy-Sapping Clients at Psychotactics Do you know where the word “vaccination” comes from?
It’s derived from the Latin word for “cow” (which is “vacca”). And there’s a strong connection between cows and viruses. For 3000 years, smallpox was wantonly killing people. In the 18th century alone, over 400,000 people died of smallpox.
But in 1796, a British doctor named Edward Jenner noticed that dairymaid got cow pox Cowpox was a less dangerous virus but still related to smallpox. Once they contracted cowpox, the dairymaids were completely immune to smallpox.
So Jenner injected a young boy with the cowpox virus and then later inoculated him with smallpox.
And the boy didn’t get sick because the body has an immune system. And that immune system was able to figure out the virus with the lowly cowpox. When smallpox came knocking, the body had the red flags in place. It was able to identify and destroy the virus before it was able to do any more damage.
At Psychotactics we’ve learned to look for red flags when dealing with clients -Not showing up on time
-Not doing what they said they’d do
-Not returning calls or emails
-Clients that want quick results or to bypass the usual barriers.
These are all red flags for us at Psychotactics And sometimes you get caught unaware by a situation. Just like an unknown virus that may attack your system, it’s possible for clients to make seemingly mundane requests. Like the one that a client made at one of our workshops.
“Can I bring my teenage daughter along to the workshop?” he asked.
He promised she wouldn’t be a problem, and since he was going to be in the workshop for three days, he asked if she could sit at the back of the room. She wasn’t going to participate, just quietly sit and watch the presentation.
Can you see a problem in that request? Well, neither could we. That seemingly simple request caused an enormous amount of grief. Instead of simply sticking to the back of the room, she went along with her father for the group sessions and began to participate. Not only was the group unhappy with the introduction of the daughter, but the father started to get aggressive. He’d defend whatever the girl said, much to the frustration of the group.
Most red flags are consistent in a business You’ve experienced the issues before, and you can see the problem approaching at a great distance, yet sometimes we lower our guard and let the virus in. And this creates great havoc and sucks up a lot of energy.
I had to tell the client that his daughter could no longer sit in the workshop or participate in any way. This got him all upset and both he and his daughter left. Now, if a client asks for exceptions, we walk through what can go wrong and make a decision accordingly.
However, the least energy-sapping plan of action is to have everything down on paper You need to let the client know what they can do, and what they can’t do. Writing down what they can’t do allows you to anticipate the issues before they pop up. It’s like a form of cow pox injected into the system, so that if a problem should arise, you’re ready with your paperwork. Incredible as it may sound, the moment something is down on paper, clients tend to play along.
When we choose clients, we make sure we put barriers in their way, but paying attention to the red flags makes sure that once we avoid disruptive clients. However, these are only two of the methods to getting good clients. The third one does all the grunt work without us lifting a finger. Incredibly, this system of choosing clients comes from the usage of testimonials.
Testimonials? That doesn’t make sense. How is a testimonial a filtration system? You’ll be surprised at what a photo and text can do. Let’s find out in this third part where we take a deep dive into testimonials.
Part 3—Testimonials: How We Avoid Energy-Sapping Clients at Psychotactics If you ever had the need to go to a dating site, you wouldn’t start reading the information, would you?
You’d first look at the photos We instinctively look at photos because we recognise ourselves in the photos. A photo tends to reflect who you are. And you get a live demonstration of this phenomenon when you go to a marketing site where they have exaggerated promises. They may promise you’ll make a lot of money, or get results quickly.
But don’t read the information, just gaze at the photos You’ll find to your amazement that you don’t like the look of many of the people in the testimonials. You don’t know those people, yet there’s something about them that sets off tiny alarm bells.
Yet, there are others who want a quick result. They want to become millionaires overnight. They are desperate, and unlike you, they find the photos very appealing.
Photos send out a powerful message to potential clients If you put photos of clients that are reliable, ethical, clients that you like and want to work with in future, that’s what you’ll get.
Which is why we have photos of people that we like, clients that we’ve worked with, clients that we’ve gone out with, clients that we would love to have all the time.
And what’s the result of this photo strategy? If you’re a client or have been on our courses, membership site or workshops, you know what’s coming next. The clients on our courses are easily the most helpful and the kindest people you’re likely to find on any course. Clients often ask: “How do you get such great people in your courses?” What kind of filtration system do you have in place?”
The answer lies in the photographs In the past, we’ve made the mistake of putting a photo of a client who didn’t meet with our picky nature.
Almost immediately, we’d get other painful clients. If you’d like to try this experiment for yourself, put photos of painful clients on your site and you’ll start to attract similarly migraine-inducing clients.
If you put in the photos of clients you like to work with, you’ll attract great clients too. It’s a simple filtration system, and it works amazingly well.
But photos alone will not do the job You will also need testimonials that read like an experience. When you look at the testimonials of our membership site at 5000bc, you’ll see they don’t just say “wow”. They read as if someone were talking to you. When it comes to more expensive products or services, the testimonials are sometimes 500-1500 words long. And the entire testimonial is about the user experience.
A testimonial that says, “that was the hardest course in my life” gets attention But it also attracts the right kind of audience. It drives away those wimpy people who don’t want to put in the effort and think that business is just some magic trick. It drives those people to the “gurus” of the Internet.
When those “get rich quick” crowd clear, what we have are kind, friendly, hard working people. People who have similar goals, similar ethics, and behaviour. And most of all, we at Psychotactics have no trouble. We get to do the things we love. Clients admire that we work hard and that we take our three months off as well. They cheer us on because that’s their goal as well.
And that’s pretty much how the Psychotactics strategy for getting great clients.
Time to summarise, eh?
Summary We started with barriers
Barriers may seem counter-productive and yet they’re a filtration system. The biggest reason why you have to wait to join 5000bc, or pay to be on a waiting list or can’t do a workshop until you’ve read The Brain Audit, is because we’ve put a barrier in place.
And the bigger the price of the product or service, the bigger the wall. If clients don’t get over that barrier, they’re not serious about succeeding. That speed bump drives out the “quick and easy” crowd and leaves us with clients that appreciate steady progress and hard work.
The red flags that show up are the next factor to consider
When you’re in business, you get taken aback by client requests. And at first, you want to make the client happy. But you’ll find some situations are consistent red flags. It’s not like we don’t ignore the red flags.
We do, and when we do, we pay the price. But by and large, when a red flag goes up, we pull up our rules and regulations and stick firmly what’s written on paper. Putting down what we will do and won’t do enables us to predict the future a bit.
So yes, we get out that paper and write down what we will not do. Putting down our red flags on paper, ensures we get clients that stick to our guidelines and not spoiled brats who want to make their own rules.
Finally it’s the role of testimonials
Testimonials have many aspects to them, but the main aspects are the photos and the experience. We pick and choose photos of clients who we adore. We put their testimonials on our site, and not surprisingly we get similar clients (Note: If your photo is not on our website, it’s not because we don’t adore you. It’s just a space issue).
We also don’t just put testimonials, but put in experiences instead.
An experience is a before and after scenario. And it may go on for a few sentences but often for over 1000 words. And this again filters out clients. Those who are in a hurry don’t read the experiences and just leave in the hope of amazing riches. And we’re happy to see them leave because our goal is to create clients who value not just information, but skill.
It’s the skill of writing, of creating your sales page—it’s these skills that matter in business. There’s no easy way and when our clients describe the effort they need to put in, it drives away those who want shortcuts.
Ants that succeed forage less often We at Psychotactics have grown our list very slowly over the years. We’ve done almost no affiliate-sales, no advertising, don’t have Google AdWords and joint ventures. And yet, we’ve had a lifestyle that most others only dream off. We take weekends off; we take three months off, and we have clients that keep coming back to do our courses, workshops and buy products and services.
Like the ants we’re picky Which is why we’ve had a blast. Over the past few years, we’ve had lunches, dinners and had wine and beer, individually, with over 1000 clients. We’ve gone on vacations with clients too. They’ve been invited to our home and in turn have made us comfortable in theirs.
Being picky has its rewards.
You get the cream of the crop. And you get to lead a satisfying life on your own terms.
What else could you want?
Next Step: Read or listen to—The Meaning Of Life? Or A Life of Meaning? How To Solve This Eternal Problem
http://www.psychotactics.com/meaning-of-life/
P.S. Do you sometimes wonder if planning books are written just for the ‘organised’ people?
So year after year you sit down and create a list of things you want to achieve. Then suddenly it’s April, and you’ve not really moved ahead as you’d expected.And hey, this phenomenon isn’t new. It’s not like you’re not trying to achieve stuff, but something always seems to derail your goals. How do you stop it from happening yet again?
Find out if Chaos Planning is for you. http://www.psychotactics.com/products/chaos-planning-forget-business-planning-and-goal-setting-start-with-chaos-planning/
In an interview with Tim Ferris, marketer, Seth Godin says that 97% clients drop out from his online courses. And under good conditions, 80% drop out. Yet there's are three core reasons why clients drop out and unless you tackle those issues, it's impossible to stop the dropout rate from spiralling.
At Psychotactics, our dropout rate is a measly 10%. Which means that 90% of the clients finish the course. How is that possible? How come there's such a massive difference? This episode shows you what you can do to achieve far superior goals than many, if not most trainers online.
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The power of energy management
Part 2: Why the Safe Zone is important
Part 3: Why you need group filtration and how to design it
The Dropout Factor 97% of client drop out in most online courses.
80% of clients drop out from my courses.
– Seth Godin
The responsibility of the learning depends on the teacher.
– Michel Thomas
When you think about dropouts, you almost always think about the student. Yet, the responsibility lies with the teacher. It’s this seismic shift that rattles most trainers because in their mind it’s clear that they’ve done the best they could. Despite their best efforts, students still drop out. So why does this dropout occur? And what could you do as a teacher to avoid this dropout?
There are three core areas which cause a dropout 1) Energy management
2) Safe zone (or the lack of it)
3) Group filtration and design
Dropout Factor 1: Let’s start with energy management Back when I was about 12, my uncle gave me a Nintendo video game called Snoopy Tennis. The game was pretty simple. Snoopy, the dog, had to bat off the tennis balls being hit at him by Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown had this languid, easy-going serve that was easy to handle.
And then Lucy would show up and hit the tennis balls at high speed.
If you survived the Lucy barrage, she’d go away, and it would be back to the nice and easy Charlie Brown serves.
So what’s Snoopy Tennis got to do with energy management? Energy management involves designing your training module. Does it just have modules that jostle each other for prominence or is it designed like Snoopy Tennis? A training module that has Snoopy Tennis in mind will have modules that are easy, slightly difficult and then screamingly tough. But you can’t sustain the screamingly tough part for too long. You have to go back to easy once again.
If you don’t, you get dropouts When the going gets too hard for too long, your clients are going to have an enormous amount of energy depletion. Handling Lucy in that video game is fine for a while, but if the intensity isn’t reduced, the client gets tired.
Tiredness, not your course, is the biggest reason for dropouts.
Once the fuel needle goes consistently down to zero, dropouts are guaranteed. To avoid this situation from ever occurring, you’ve got to sit down and design your course.
But design is often not enough because you’ve also got to consider flexibility in your agenda Take for example the Article Writing Course that’s in progress right now. The entire course has been designed to be like a Snoopy Tennis game. From Week 1 to Week 4 there’s a gentle progression.
Week 5 is a bit of a jolt. After spending the first four weeks building up topics, outlining and working on the start of their article, the writers now have to turn out a chunky part of the complete article.
Almost immediately the “truancy” rate spikes The writers are frozen because the jump is so great. And yet there are times when you can’t help but bring on Lucy into the game. In the past, I’d make sure Lucy stayed on for a long time, and it would cause an enormous amount of exhaustion.
Exhaustion is one thing, but I noticed that if I reduced the intensity shortly after, the work would get better. So once the intensity is turned on, you keep it on, but then you get Charlie back into the mix. Which means that one week will involve writing 3-4 articles, but the following week will slide down to just two.
What you’re working on all the time as a teacher is managing energy You’re making sure you keep designing and re-designing the assignments, so that it’s not too easy, or too challenging. And that you have to keep your teaching agenda flexible if you see a considerable spike in “truancy.”
This energy management doesn’t apply solely to online courses or training It applies to workshops as well. If you get to a Psychotactics workshop, you’ll find we have lots of breaks. There are a ton of tea breaks, group breaks, walking assignment breaks. All of them are designed to lower the Lucy factor and let the brain absorb what it’s just learned.
We also have a scavenger hunt and depending on the type of workshop, we may have a day-long break. For instance, for the New Zealand workshop in Queenstown, we have a four-day workshop, but we work for two days, then go off to eat, drink and be merry. It’s only then that we return to our work.
All these breaks may seem frivolous to the untrained mind Why bother with breaks when you have so much content to cover? It’s because of how your brain functions. As you spend time thinking and learning, your brain starts to accumulate a ton of waste product. The more waste product you have, the harder it is to function. You’re now in Lucy mode all the time. But the moment you get a break, the brain is back in Charlie mode and absorbing the information.
This brings us to the end of the first reason why we have dropouts It’s a lack of course design.
A lack of the trainer to watch what’s happening and to mindlessly plough ahead.
When trainers blame the student, they’re going against the Michel Thomas principle: The responsibility of the learning depends on the teacher.
And energy management is just one of the issues. The second issue is the safe zone—or rather the lack of it.
P.S. We have about 2-3 clients drop out from every course. To me, that’s high. That’s a whole 10-12%. I take responsibility for that.
Dropout Factor 2: The Safe Zone (Or The Lack of It) Ask a seven-year-old to learn Photoshop, and they’ll happily play along.
Ask an adult to do the same and they hesitate.
So what’s changed between the adult and the seven-year-old? The answer is time. A seven-year-old has little or responsibility and therefore endless time. If they get the instructions wrong, they can keep at the learning until they get it right—if they get it right. Adults don’t have such luxury at their disposal.
And so we learn to fear mistakes As we grow up, we realise that mistakes not only rattle us but cost us an enormous amount of time and energy. Having to learn new skills seem essential, but all of it is at the expense of precious time and energy. Which causes every zone we enter, to theoretically, become an unsafe zone.
Step into a new forum, that’s unsafe Learn a new software; that’s unsafe too.
Any new venture of any kind is paradoxically exciting and frustrating at the same time.
Which is why you have to create a safe zone The first step towards safety is understanding that everything is intimidating—especially when you’re learning a skill. If you’re just a passive learner in a course, there’s no need to apply anything you’ve learned. The moment you have to apply the skill, intimidation is all pervasive.
And the only way—yes the only way—to reduce intimidation is to break down everything into smaller bits.
Let’s take the cartooning course, for example Even in a seemingly fun-filled course like cartooning (that’s the DaVinci cartooning course), you have almost instant intimidation. There’s nothing to look over and learn, but there are intimidation factors aplenty.
The first week isn’t about learning to draw cartoons Instead, a student gets to know their groups, is guided on how to post in the forum and is given instructions on how to link their cartoons to the forum. The entire week is about settling in and getting comfortable. Then, once the course begins, no one goes about drawing Donald Duck. Instead, you have a series of tiny increments that start with drawing circly circles.
For many, a cartooning course is far more intimidating than any other course Think of how you feel when you draw something. You feel like you’re a seven-year-old again. Your artwork seems almost Neanderthal—and yet the goal is to become a highly accomplished cartoonist by the end of the course. And hundreds of students have done just that. They’ve done the course, and gone from Cave painting to polished artworks.
A lot of this progress is achieved through precise instructions, but the biggest factor of all is the creation of the safe zone.
The way to go about the creation of the safe zone is to ask yourself three questions: 1) Is the course being conducted with tiny increments or big jumps? How do you know?
2) Do the clients have time to settle in before the class as well as during the course?
3) Is there a constant feedback mechanism in place?
And there’s a benchmark to know if your course is safe Do clients come back to do another course, another training? At Psychotactics, most—yes, most—end up doing two and three courses. Some do as many as five online courses as well as attend live workshops. At the point of writing this article, we’ve announced a live workshop in New Zealand. With no sales page, no real details about the course, six clients have already paid for the workshop.
Why would they make such a seemingly irrational move?
Why sign up for workshops with no sales pages, attend so many back to back workshops, do so many online courses? There are many cheaper courses both online and offline. So, why bother?
A big chunk of the answer lies in the safe zone Unless a client feels safe, they’re unlikely to learn. And your job as a trainer is to create that safe zone through tiny increments, through getting clients to settle in and most importantly to allow them to reach out to you.
When they reach out to you through a feedback mechanism, and you make changes, they know they’re being listened to. They know they’re not just a cog in the wheel, but an integral part of the course.
The fear goes down The safety goes up.
Now there’s less of a reason to drop out, isn’t there?
And yet the dropout factor looms large So what keeps the client coming back? The answer lies in the power of the group and how you as a trainer filter the group. What’s this filtration all about?
Dropout Factor 3: Group Filtration and Design Back in 2010, we conducted a workshop around Washington D.C and we did something we’d never done before.
We decided not to have any filters when letting clients sign up for the event.
How wrong could things go, we thought to ourselves?
As you can guess, things went terribly wrong Only one person at the event hadn’t read The Brain Audit. That one person happened to cause an enormous amount of confusion, not only during the workshop proceedings but also in the group. And it was all because we didn’t do our usually “pedantic” system of filtration. When you don’t filter the group, you create a wild card, and that can disrupt the entire learning experience.
Which is why you need group filtration When you put specific barriers in place, the group members have to qualify themselves to be part of the group. This changes the parameters considerably. In most of the courses and workshops at Psychotactics, all you have to do is read The Brain Audit. Even so, it’s a barrier and attracts people who are united in purpose. It seems bizarre that just a book should make such a difference, but a book often expresses more than just information. It can express your philosophy, method and attracts clients who have a similar ethical standard.
However, group filtration doesn’t stop there Whether you’re looking at live onsite workshops or online courses, people aren’t thrown willy nilly into a group. Every group is segregated by:
– Existing members alongside non-members
– A balance of women and men
– Those who we know well vs. those we don’t know as well.
In every situation the groups are chosen, which is why there’s so much activity in every group Groups only work together if they feel safe, enjoy each other’s company and then it seems like a party, rather than intense work. In such a case, dropout rates plunge. Clients show up every day, several times a day, helping and spurring each other on.
At the end of Week 5, a group of 25 clients generated an average of 1200 posts a week. Of course, I’ve contributed to at least half of those posts, but even so, it’s quite an achievement in group dynamics, don’t you think?
The size of the group also matters The group size is ideally between 5-7 members. If you have fewer and just a couple of clients from that group dropout, the entire group can go into a spiral. If you have more than 7, it’s hard to keep up with what everyone’s up to, and the group soon loses the tight-knit feeling.
That feeling of knowing each other well is what causes the group to edge forward together as they take on the tiny increments. And when faced with a tough assignment, they all hunker down and boost each other’s spirits. Leaders emerge within every group, as is the case anywhere, but these leaders are kind and helpful.
Why would you want to drop out of such a group? Your goal isn’t to be part of the group. You don’t even know how the group is put together, and yet when you discover the group dynamic working for you, you realise that it’s the group that will get you to your destination. When someone has helped you, your human nature kicks in and you want to give that help back in any way possible.
As a teacher, your job is to filter the group Your job is to design the group.
And most of all, it’s to get the group to know each other very, very well. The more they interact with each other, the more they bond and the further they’ll go. Not surprisingly, the drop out almost ceases to exist.
You’ll still get dropouts But if you look closely at the those that dropout, you’ll see a very clear pattern. They didn’t stay around long enough to bond with the group. In our courses, at least, the maximum number of dropouts (online) occur within the first or second week.
If the members haven’t show up consistently within the first two weeks, they’re the most likely to drop out. Which is why, as a trainer, working on the group is almost as important as energy management and creating the safe zone. These three elements become so vital that to ignore any one of these three is like begging for trouble.
This brings us to our summary: – Design your training with energy in mind. Let clients have a mix of Charlie Brown weeks before giving them Lucy weeks. And always go back to Charlie Brown.
– The safe zone is critical to avoiding dropouts. Tiny increments, feedback loops, getting client to settle in are all very crucial. You know you’ve created a safe zone when you get lots and lots of questions; when clients e-mail you as well as ask questions on the forum; when they bring up issues that might be even slightly confrontational.
That’s when you realise you’ve created a safe space. Your final benchmark is the repeat client. If they come back repeatedly, that is the one factor that tells you you’ve made them a lot safer than your competition.
– Finally, it’s the group that matters. A teacher can only do so much. The group feels a great warmth towards their members, but only if the members are equally kind and helpful. If you notice a group member not interacting with the group, there’s a very high chance of that member dropping out. And you, as the teacher have to design and filter the group so that they’re a good mix.
The dropout rate on Internet based sites is phenomenally high It’s as high as 97% in some cases.
But Michel Thomas (if he were alive) would say something quite different.
He’d say: The responsibility of the learning is with the teacher.
And he’d be right.
When you take the responsibility on yourself, you stop blaming the student and redesign your teaching in a way that suits them, not yourself. And that’s when you have almost no drop out rate!
P.S. Read or listen to—How To Avoid Blindspots In Your Business: The Rip Van Winkle Effect
http://www.psychotactics.com/how-success-causes-blind-spot/
Should you lower your prices? In Part 1 of Persistent Myths of Pricing (And How To Overcome Them), we looked at Myth 1: Ending prices with 7 or 9 (e.g. $97 or $99 instead of $100) Now, let’s look at Myth 2: The Fear of Pricing—You can feel the “right price” in your gut.
Should you lower your prices to get greater sales? Listen to this podcast as we explore the second part on the myths of pricing.
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Imagine you’re in New Zealand right now. And you’re about to jump off a bridge—with a bungee cord, of course.
What can you feel in your gut?
Yup, fear. But how do you know it’s fear? And more importantly what would you need to do to get rid of the fear?
Remember the fear you had when you first rode a bicycle? You probably don’t, but the fear existed. It exists when you’re learning to drive a car, going for a first date, and there’s even a trace of that fear when you first land a new job or show up on vacation in a city you’ve never visited before. The moment you are dealing with the unknown, the fear surges to the surface.
And yet you’re on auto pilot if you’re visiting that city for the twentieth time Bicycles don’t scare you as much as they should.
And driving to the supermarket while juggling a mobile phone isn’t something you do, but you’ll sneak in a call or text anyway.
Pricing brings the same sense of queasiness to our systems And the way we justify it, it by burying the fear. We bring our “woo-woo” systems to the surface and say we’ll know the price is right based on our “gut instinct”. But what if your gut is just good ol’ fear? Because you know it is, don’t you? And the only way we can prove this point is to take something that you own and try to sell it.
What’s the gut instinct for selling your house? There’s zero gut instinct in play the moment you have to sell something that is already known. If all the houses in your area are selling at $500,000, would you listen to your gut instinct and sell at $300,000? Never mind that three years ago, you bought the house at a lower price. You still want to sell at $500,000, don’t you? And if you can, you’ll happily accept $550,000 or $600,000.
A client of mine used this gut instinct in his business He works hard—much too hard to earn what he’s worth. And the reason why he’s struggling so much, is because his pricing is based on gut instinct. He has to put those products and services on sale, on his website. And when he puts those prices up, he feels like he’s in the middle of New Dehli, and needs to find his hotel. He can’t speak the language and though there are helpful folks around, he’s not quite sure. His brain is racing for a situation that’s a lot less stressful. A vacation closer to home, perhaps.
There’s no such thing as “gut instinct” in pricing We’ve used a dartboard to price our products and services for well over 12 years. It’s a method where you put your prices on a dartboard, and you find some darts. Then you throw them on the board. And you have your pricing. If that sounds flippant, well, yes, it is. But it’s a lot less flippant than using your “gut instinct”. ”
Take for instance, the cartooning course. We started the course at no charge (if you felt like it, you gift an Amazon voucher). That course was $500 the next year, and today it’s priced at almost $1000 (for about 20 weeks). The Photoshop course (to help you colour your artwork) is just 4 weeks and costs $500. The article writing course goes for 12 weeks and hovers at $3000. The headlines course goes for 10 weeks and costs $800.
Want more? “The Brain Audit” has 185 pages and costs $139. The book on “Testimonial Secrets” has 125 pages and costs $45. The same applies for any course, product or service. No matter where you look, there’s no logic to the pricing at all. And yet there’s fear.
Every time we’ve raised the prices there’s enormous fear When we raised the price of the Article Writing Course, we moved it from $1,500—to where it is today at $3,000. How do you know how much is too much? When we sold the Protégé course at $10,000, how would we know if it was overpriced or if we were underselling ourselves? The answer lies in fear. You make these price decisions in a vacuum—dart-board style. And this is scary. Even if you’re comparing yourself with the marketplace, the client is not doing the same tour of the marketplace before settling on your product.
The only way out of this fear is to keep pushing yourself out of the comfort zone You read about the cartooning course we conducted, right? Why offer it free? My clients already know that I’m a good teacher. They already know I’m a good cartoonist. They also know that they should be paying a substantial fee for something that’s going to take them on a six-month journey. And yet, I was unsure—fearful, even. So yes, you can let the fear get a hold of you. And yes, you can price as low as your “gut” will tell you.
But remember, your “gut instinct” is your comfort zone It’s the lowest possible price you can afford to charge. Once you’ve listened to your gut, it’s time to move upwards. Raise your prices bit by bit, or in large chunks. As you get amazing testimonials, get more confident about your ability to deliver, you need to stop looking towards the “gut” and start looking up at the dart board.
And yes, this brings us full circle to our summary Myth 1: Ending prices with 7 or 9 (e.g. $97 or $99 instead of $100). There’s no basis for this crazy figures. Use whatever you like.
Myth 2: You can feel the “right price” in your gut. Nope. You never could. That’s just fear talking. And once you’ve sold a product or service at a higher price, you’ll feel the price is just right—until you have to raise the prices again. Raise it anyway.
You know how you had to suffer wearing those coats because your parents thought you’d get a cold? Well, the same suffering can bring you down with myths in pricing.
Stay clear of the myths, and you’ll find that you can get better prices for your products and services every single time.
And here is part one if you missed it—Persistent Myths of Pricing (And How To Overcome Them): Part 1.
**Top Selling Products Under $50
Dart Board Pricing: How To Increase Prices (Without Losing Customers) The Brain Audit: Why Clients Buy And Why They Don’t
Chaos Planning:** How ‘Irregular’ Folks Get Things Done
When you’re giving away bonuses, it’s easy to believe you don’t need to give away your best product or service. The best information always needs to be sold—so you can earn a decent living. And yet, this podcast episode takes an opposite stance. You need to put your best stuff out in front—free.
Yes, give away the goodies, no matter whether you’re in info-products or content marketing; services or running a workshop. Giving away outstanding content is the magic behind what attracts—and keeps clients.
Read: ww.psychotactics.com/myth-pricing-overcome/
Tell a friend: http://www.psychotactics.com/tellall
“Don’t go out in cold without your coat—or you’ll get sick”. Which one of us haven’t heard our parents insisting on us wearing a coat? Almost every parent on the planet firmly believes that a cold is sure to descend upon you, if you don’t have that coat on. And yet, you don’t get colds because of the temperature outside. You get a cold from viruses—and guess what? Those viruses are more likely be indoors than anywhere else. So yeah, getting that jacket or coat on, is just a myth, but it sure keeps you warm.
In pricing we also have myths that keep us warm And two myths prevail, causing us to lose out on charging higher prices over time. They force us to put on a coat, when it’s perfectly good to go outside without one. Let’s take a look and find out what these myths are, and how to overcome them.
Myth 1: Ending prices with 7 or 9 (e.g. $97 or $99 instead of $100)
Myth 2: You can feel the “right price” in your gut
Let’s start with Myth 1: Prices ending in 7 (E.g. $97 or $99 instead of $100) Back in the 70’s or 80’s, a marketer called Ted Nicholas is said to have suggested that prices ending with the number 7, do better than other ending digits. This means that, theoretically speaking, you’d sell more at $9.97 than $9.99. Sure, it’s only two cents, but does it actually sell more product or services? The answer is that price rarely if ever depends on your magic figure.
So we decided to test the pricing on our site at Psychotactics When we started out, way back in 2002, our prices all hovered around the $7 ending. But then we decided to test if the ending prices made any difference whatsoever. And you know where this is going, right? Yup, we ended prices with 8, or 2, or just any old figure that came to our heads. And we waited with bated breath.
And nothing happened.
The sales didn’t go up, and they didn’t go down So we started putting any price endings that came to our head. One of our best-selling books (it’s sold over $500,000 worth of copies) sold for $109.22. Our courses and workshops had all sorts of odd price endings and it didn’t make one whit of a difference.
Yet what would you notice if you go to our website today? If you were to do a systematic sweep, you’d find to your surprise that most of the price endings are 7, 9 or 5. So how on earth did that happen? If the price endings don’t matter at all, how did we end up with such oft-repeated figures? It’s a factor of laziness, really. When creating a price point, it’s easy to just not have to think about the price too much at all. And so we revert back to our 7 and 9, without much thought.
So how do we overcome this first myth? First, recognise that it’s a myth. That if you’re spending time wondering if you should price your product with a 5, 7 or 9, you can go right ahead. In all pricing experiments online and offline, you’ll find that a mere ending rarely has any bearing on sales. Some sites like Target will hover madly around the 7 or 9, but then slip in an 8 here and there.
On equally large sites such as Expedia, the prices for an airline ticket can be $1331 or $791—or even $798 or $644. If you head to buy houses, say in Washington DC, you’ll find that houses sell at round figures of 4,500,000 or 2,750,000. If you buy movie tickets, you’ll find routinely that the prices may be $12.50, $14 or some round figure with not a 9 or 7 in sight. In fact, the closer you look around at different products and services, the more you find there’s no logic for a 7 or 9 to exist.
In fact, despite the widespread use of 7 or 9, scientific studies (and these are mostly retail examples) have shown the following:
– At least among US retailers (where the study was done), there is no evidence of their effectiveness.
– While the use of 9 as an ending increased demand, it was only for new items than any items sold in previous years (this suggests a novelty effect).
– That in some situations where there is a “sale” cue, the 9 ending becomes less effective.
– In cases where the retailer wants to create an impression of a sale, they price at the 7 or 9 price ending. When they sell “regular merchandise”, the prices are always rounded prices, so that customers see the products as valuable and not underpriced.
So with all this conflicting information, in which direction do we go? Most of us in either selling a product, service or training of some kind. Training or services are bought one at a time, and after considerable evaluation of the the consultant or trainer. If you’re having a workshop, no one is jumping up and down simply because you decide to put in a magical number. In fact, we have conducted The Brain Audit workshops over several years, pricing the very same workshop at $USD 1500, $NZ 1500, NZ$1499, $800, $500—and because we do workshops worldwide— € 879 or £835.
And the very same workshop, with the same content and the same speaker sells out because of the content, and not the price. If it were the price, and especially the “so-called” magical 9 price ending, the lower prices might have triggered quicker sales (since the workshop sells out anyway). And granted it’s not industrial scale testing of the pricing, but that’s how most of us are—we’re selling small programs, workshops, training and services. And the customer has made up their mind whether to go ahead—or not—long before they see the price, let alone the magical 7 or 9 price ending.
So what are you to do?: What’s your action plan Try it out for yourself by pushing your price up from say, $29 to $32. And all you’ll be is $3 richer, every time you sell that particular product. It may sound like it’s just $3, but it’s a whopping 10% increase—and your customer won’t even notice it. So the sooner you get off the myth of 7 or 9 pricing, the better. And if you’re still fussed about sticking to 9, well, sell it as $32.99. That way you can have your 9 and your increased profit as well.
How do you systematically raise prices without losing customers?
Is it possible to raise prices and still keep customers? And how do you keep those prices going up, up and away—and still keep customers coming back? Click to find out more.
http://www.psychotactics.com/products/trust-the-chef/
It might seem like perseverance is a good thing. We’ve been told to persist in the face of odds. Yet, there are times when you should stop.
How do you know when to stop? And why bother to persevere when failure is waiting around the corner?
Find out why perseverance can be a real pain, and when it can be a blessing. Enjoy this episode on perseverance and yes, enjoy the music.
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The link between failure and perseverance
Part 2: Is there a way to know when to stop?
Part 3: Why perseverance could do with a coach
To read this online: http://www.psychotactics.com/why-persevere-fails/
To tell a friend: http://www.psychotactics.com/general/podcast-friend/
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Should You Give Up? Or Should You Persist? When you get to your office and want to print some material, what do you do?
You’re likely to turn on your computer, hit the print button and then voilà, out come a crisp, laser-printed copy of whatever was on your computer screen. Back in 1969, an optical engineer called Gary Starkweather thought the same way.
“One morning I woke up and I thought, why don’t we just print something out directly?” Starkweather said. “But when I flew that past my boss he thought it was the most brain-dead idea he had ever heard. He basically told me to find something else to do. The feeling was that lasers were too expensive. They didn’t work that well. Nobody wants to do this, computers aren’t powerful enough.
And I guess, in my naïveté, I kept thinking, He’s just not right—there’s something about this I really like. It got to be a frustrating situation. He and I came to loggerheads over the thing, about late 1969, early 1970. I was running my experiments in the back room behind a black curtain. I played with them when I could.
He threatened to lay off my people if I didn’t stop. I was having to make a decision: do I abandon this, or do I try and go up the ladder with it?”
A Starkweather kind of decision is the kind of decision we have to make, when facing our lives, but also our business How do we know whether we should persist or give up? Will we meet with success or failure? And is failure one of the goals? Should we really accept failure as a benchmark that we’re moving ahead? In this series we’re going to take a hard-nosed look at three areas of perseverance.
We’ll examine 1) The link between failure and perseverance
2) Is there a way to know when to stop?
3) Why perseverance could do with a coach
1) Let’s start with the link between failure and perseverance Imagine you were a company that failed repeatedly.
You create a tablet device that was at best, disappointing.
You try your hand at a peer-to-peer payment system like Paypal, and it fails.
You start up an auction site similar to eBay, and that too needs to be shut down.
You then get into the phone business but lose over $170 million in a single year.
And ten solid years after you’ve run the business, your net profit is barely 2.8%.
Should you give up?
Well, this company chose to soldier on despite the odds Almost all of us are likely to have used the services of this company at one time or another. We’re not talking about some unknown, nondescript company. We’re talking about Amazon.com, the retailing giant.
The reality is that Amazon’s profit margin is wafer thin and has continued to be that way for an agonisingly long time.
In early 2016, CEO Jeff Bezos announced that his gamble had paid off. He spoke excitedly about Amazon Web Services (AWS) which had reached $10 billion in sales and was now generating 52% of Amazon’s total profit for that quarter. What this meant was that a single arm of Amazon, no, not the retail arm, but the cloud hosting section was the real winner. In short what Bezos was mildly gloating about was the fact that his perseverance had paid off.
A similar perseverance experiment paid off in Cupertino, California In 1993, Apple Inc. launched the Newton MessagePad. The MessagePad, the first series of personal digital assistant devices, developed by Apple Computer and was a reasonably spectacular failure. Sales of the original MessagePad were weak, with Apple moving a mere 50,000 units in the product’s first four months on the market.
On June 29, 2007, the first iPhone was launched. Despite failing miserably on the NewtonPad front, Apple decided to go ahead with the production of a phone. And so far they’ve sold 821 million phones. The iPhone is now slightly over 68% of the entire Apple revenues while the Mac is just 8.89%
And while it’s easy to see these cases as big companies with deep pockets, history is full of artists, inventors, musicians, athletes—in fact, all kinds of people in all sorts of professions—who never gave up despite the odds. And there’s one crucial reason why we should persevere even when there’s no guarantee of success.
The reason? What fails right away might work on an unrelated project In April 2105, Lynda.com was sold for $1.5 billion to LinkedIn
When we look at that price tag, we tend to see enormous success. Lynda and her husband, Bruce Heavin came incredibly close to the precipice of failure. Lynda.com wasn’t the online training giant that it is today. Instead, it was an offline training company with week-long workshops. They did well over the years building their business to 35 employees and $3.5 million in revenue.
Then came 9/11 and the dot-com crash Almost overnight they had to lay off 75% of their staff. According to a report in Fast Company, they had to downsize their home and give up classroom leases.
Which is when they decided to go online.
“Right now with broadband, it’s easy to run online video courses,” Lynda told me when we met for dinner. “Back in the early days, it was hard going. Internet bandwidth was extremely narrow, and it was hard to see how we’d keep the business going.” And yet, the perseverance paid off. But what do we learn from this story?
Lynda and Bruce weren’t looking to have an online training business, at that point in time The only reason they were forced to move in a bigger way online was because of massive and instant failure. That seeming failure in the offline classroom-based training business led to the creation and growth of Lynda.com. Lynda and Bruce persevered, taking the lessons of their failure into another domain before the business took off.
While these success stories are powerful motivators, perseverance works on unrelated project in day to day life as well Around 2010, we were having real problems with our membership site at 5000bc.com. We’d moved from a hosted membership site to Joomla! (A content management system), and had some software put in that would make it a lot easier to create “magazines”. The software was meant to enable the site owner could create content that would allow clients to read the content.
The only problem was that the software we were using was super-klutzy. It would take me about 3 hours or so to write the articles and then over 3 hours just to get them posted. I know it sounds terribly bizarre to all of us spoiled by the ease of WordPress, but back then this software was the option presented to me—and I took it. Week after week, I’d do battle with this frustrating content management system, and there seemed to be no solution on the horizon. In effect, what was supposed to save me time and effort was turning out to be a complete and utter failure.
Failure can teach you to move to an unrelated project I persisted for a while but was forced to move to an unrelated way of presenting the information. I started posting all the articles in the forum. The forum helped tremendously because clients could ask questions, get clarifications and do things they just couldn’t do before. Instead of a top-down, “here’s the article series”, they got a chance to interact on the forum.
But not everyone likes chatter on the forum, and in a way, the forum experiment became a sort of “failure”, when I considered those clients who were not happy with forums. And so we created reports and called them Vanishing Reports. The Vanishing Reports were a result of seeming failure after failure. And yet with persistence, we got a product that to this day is among the top three most-loved benefits of being a member of 5000bc (the other two are almost instant replies from me, and the first priority to courses and workshops).
Perseverance in the face of failure may often lead to unrelated projects. The Post-It you use today was never supposed to be invented. Arthur Fry and 3M were supposedly working on a project of super-strong adhesives. And yet, as they met with failure on one front, they inadvertently discovered an adhesive that could be peeled off easily without damaging the paper. And the Post-It was born.
At first, it seems like the original project is a very good idea Then it’s possible that failure comes along. But failure forces you to be persistent. Which is when you’re more likely to get to a different level—often one that’s far superior to the existing level. This is the core lesson of failure. It’s there to teach us a lesson of how to improve our products and services.
If we persist, we get to a whole new level.
Just like Apple. Or Lynda.com. Or 3M.
It’s doable. You just have to be persistent.
But wait, there are just as many examples of persistence leading to ruin. How do you avoid being so blind-sided by your project that you avoid falling into a black hole of perseverance?
2) The black hole of perseverance: Can we avoid it? When we first moved to New Zealand, I had a job in a web design company. I fancied myself as a web designer because I knew the program, Dreamweaver, quite well. Plus I had been studying another hot program at the time called Flash. I was hired in July, made redundant by October.
There I was, not even a year in New Zealand, and things weren’t going so well. To make matters slightly worse, we’d just bought a house and had a $180,000 mortgage (which was a lot back in the year 2000). It’s at this point I realised that there was no way out of the mess but forward. Since I knew few people in New Zealand, I called dozens of ad agencies and walked in with my cartooning portfolio. In most cases, I returned home empty handed. Until one day, an agency gave me an assignment, which turned out to be a full-blown campaign.
So what’s the point of this story? The point is that around mid-December, New Zealand tends to shut shop. Almost the entire country decides to go en masse on vacation, and it seems that no one seems gets back to work until mid-January, even early February. Which means as a cartoonist you have no work for all those months. It’s a bit of a forced hibernation period, and you need to get used to it.
I refused to accept that I couldn’t get work
I tried to call. No one answered.
I showed up. No one was around.
And so it became a bit of a black hole of frustration.
Perseverance can have its downsides You can easily keep at something in the hope that things will get better, and you fail to notice that the rules of engagement have changed. To give up would be madness, yet to stay at the task would be just as bad, if not worse.
It’s at this point that you have to learn to change your strategy. It wasn’t that the agencies weren’t hiring cartoonists anymore. They just weren’t around to meet anyone. What I was doing with my dogged behaviour wasn’t perseverance at all.
Strategy is when you lie low and prepare for the moment that is to come As I kept running into closed doors, I decided to change my strategy. Instead of trying to get work, we decided to cut down on our spending. Instead of going out more often, we kept ourselves tied to a limited budget. And on the work front, I enjoyed the rest period and also spent time doodling, learning Photoshop a lot better.
Gary Starkweather ran into endless trouble at Xerox Parc He knew he was onto a good thing, but the odds were against him. His boss was threatening to fire him and his entire staff. So he changed his strategy. He heard that Xerox was opening a research centre in Palo Alto, which was pretty much right across the country from where he lived in New York. So he threatened to leave for IBM if he didn’t get a transfer. He moved in January 1971, and the first prototype of the laser printer was up and running.
In many cases, we have the opportunity to move to Plan B Yet we continue to be like the fly that keeps hitting itself against the closed window pane when the next window is wide open. The reason why we keep digger a deep hole and not getting results is partly because a lack of perseverance is seen as weakness. We somehow need to battle on, or we will fail, or so we think.
The solution has often been right in front of me, and I’ve often kept doggedly ahead getting more frustrated all the time. This is why we need more than just perseverance. We need a friend, or better still, a coach.
3) Why perseverance could do with a coach When you look back at the period between the 14th and 17th century, you have an incredible flowering of art, architecture, politics, science and literature. Some of the finest work found in museums today are from that period. Two centers stood out in Western art for the enormous number of artist and innovation of their work: The Renaissance in Italy and the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century.
But how did all of this astounding work seem to appear all at once? The answer lies in the gradual reform of the political structure and the patronage of the time. The cities were also the most urbanized culture of their time. To nail down the magnificence of the Renaissance to one factor would be churlish, and yet there was one element that stood out.
It was the factor of guilds and apprenticeship that came into their own. In short, artists had coaches. Granted that the apprenticeship was often long and arduous, but it meant that there was a constant sense of guidance. This system of coaching is considered to be one of the primary factors why such amazing results were obtained.
In Holland alone, it has been estimated that about five to ten million works of art were produced during the century of the Golden Age of Dutch art. That’s not counting the work that poured out from Italy. And yet it wasn’t just artists toiling by themselves. They had a coaching system in place.
Perseverance is often seen as a solo skill, but it’s also the reason why we get so exhausted in our efforts Take for instance the problem that I had with formatting in the forum. All our courses are conducted via the medium of notes, audio but live courses have one more component—a forum. This online forum is where clients do their daily, yes daily, assignments and they’re reviewed by me on a regular basis.
A small group of 25 clients can generate as many as 1,000 posts a week (no, that’s not an exaggeration). Hence, it’s not unusual for a course to produce between 10,000-15,000 posts.
The problem is that posts need formatting You need to make a title look like a title. And yes, there’s forum formatting but what if you want to do three things all in one second? Let’s take for instance the fact that I want to make the title bold, 18 points and in maroon.
Those are three steps, and when you assume that I’ll be posting on at least a third of those posts, you suddenly have triple the work. Every time you’re moving through bold, 18 points and maroon. But hey, I was going to persevere. I wasn’t going to have shoddy formatting and so I’d go through the three actions.
But a coach or outsider can see things in a different way One day while I was mumbling about this tedious method, a client told me how I could fix the problem. Using Text Expander, a software I already owned, I could format a title, a sub-head or any text in a matter of seconds. My perseverance wasn’t helping at all. All I needed was a different set of eyes.
What seems like talent is a coach catching unforced errors while they’re occurring The coach realises you’re like the fly on the window. He or she knows that there’s another window open. And that’s what they do. They gently advise you to move one step back or one step to the left or right. And instead of digging yourself into a hole, you’ve changed your strategy. When I look at clients in 5000bc or in courses such as the cartooning course or Article Writing Course, they’re working very, very hard. But working hard is not enough.
You need someone else.
Back when I was trying to call those ad agencies, and not getting results, I didn’t have a coach. But I did have a friend, Wayne Logue. And Wayne advised me to wait until February or even March. He informed me that I wasn’t really persevering, but just driving myself crazy. And luckily I listened.
Albert Einstein is reported to have said: We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
To me that sounds like it’s time to get advice, to get a group that I trust or a coach.
And then I can persevere and reach my goals faster and better than ever before.
So let’s summarise. What we learned was: 1) The link between failure and perseverance
2) Is there a way to know when to stop?
3) Why perseverance could do with a coach
Next Step: Why Inspiration Can Be The Key To Winning The Resistance Game
http://www.psychotactics.com/key-resistance-game/
Where do we draw inspiration from? When we try to beat resistance, we tend to look at what wehaven’t done and what needs doing. Yet sometimes resistance can bepushed over with a simple concept of inspiration.
Where do we draw that inspiration from? And how do we keep theinspiration constant?
In this episode we look at inspiration, but also at the “lousycarpenter” and “trigger” concept.
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It’s said that a bad carpenter blames his tools But what’s not said is what makes a good carpenter.
A good carpenter isn’t always the one who has the bestequipment. But a good carpenter makes sure he learns how to usethat equipment fluently. And there’s a reason why you need to spendtime learning how to use the equipment.
It’s called tiredness.
Let’s take my early battles with InDesign, for instance InDesign is a layout program with which I do all my e-books andreports. I learned InDesign, but not quite well enough. So if I hadto do a simple task like updating the Contents Page, I had tomanually update it every time. If I added more pages to mydocument, I’d have to go back, and re-assign all the pagenumbers.
And even if you haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about, youget this feeling of stupidity coming through. Stupidity and hardwork. And all because I refused to learn how to maximise theprogram’s capability.
But forget maximisation, let’s just talk about fixing theimmediate problem No matter what you do right now, there’s a better way to do it.And there’s someone out there on the Internet who can help you finda better way. For all you know there are probably ten thousandtutorials and fifty videos on solving your exact problem.
But guess what? You’re doing the same old stuff in the same oldway. And resistance loves you for it.
It loves that you have great tools and lousy habits Because if you did what I did with InDesign, it would take youthrice as much time to do the same job. Maybe even ten times asmuch. Well, guess what? If it takes you five minutes to do a jobvs. fifty minutes, which job is going to tire you out? No prizesfor guessing, but you’ve just opened the door for exhaustion tocome rushing through.
And it’s not just exhaustion but frustration as well. If you didtwo jobs side by side, and finished a ton of stuff vs. finishingjust one measly contents page, there’s no doubt which one bringsmore satisfaction.
The more dissatisfied and tired you are, the better resistancefeels It doesn’t have to do any work at all. You’ve been a completenincompoop and done all the work yourself. You are the badcarpenter. You blame your tools when you should be working veryhard to maximise the power of the equipment you have.
And let’s face it, you need better tools as well If you’re running outdated tools, it doesn’t help. But we’reoften just glitzy-eyed for the best tools without ever puttingaside time to learn them well. But the question does arise: Mosttools are so complex.
How do you get the time to learn them well?
The answer lies in doing continuous sweeps, kinda like aradar If you try and learn something the first time, you only pick upso much. So you come back again for the second sweep, then thethird, then the fourth and so on. I spent a lot of time (about aweek) first trying to work out how to use InDesign.
Now I know it well, but I still spend a good hour or two everymonth to learn tiny bits of stuff. And it helps me improve myproductivity. Of course, InDesign keeps getting better, so now notonly am I faster, but I’m equipped with superior equipment.
And resistance doesn’t like that one tiny bit It would prefer to see me swearing.
It would love to see me frustrated with just doing a simplecontents page.
But nope, I won’t let it win. And neither should you.
If you’re a good carpenter you’ll learn how to maximise yourtools Then you’ll earn more, because you’ll be in demand. And thatwill help you get the fanciest, most sophisticated tools that willput you head and shoulders above everyone else. And mostimportantly it keeps resistance away from your door.
Next: How John Forde (and Sean D’Souza) Got Me To WriteArticles
(http://www.psychotactics.com/john-forde-write-articles/)
P.S. Do you sometimes wonder if planning books are written just forthe ‘organised’ people?
So year after year you sit down and create a list of thingsyou want to achieve. Then suddenly it’s April, and you’venot really moved ahead as you’d expected.And hey, thisphenomenon isn’t new. It’s not like you’re not trying toachieve stuff, but something always seems to derail yourgoals. How do you stop it from happening yet again?
Find out if Chaos Planning is for you.
(http://www.psychotactics.com/products/chaos-planning-forget-business-planning-and-goal-setting-start-with-chaos-planning/(
Is resistance a game? It can feel a bit like that when you're almost always on the losing team. But often the reason why we lose to resistance is because we don't realise how the brain works. And this brain stuff was studied by researchers at the University of Cincinnati. What they found was astounding. In just over 10 minutes, our brains start to waver and we lose focus. So how can we make sure we don't give in to resistance? Find out in Part 2 of the Resistance game.
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Imagine you had two loans to pay back Loan A was $100,000 at 19% interest per annum. Loan B was $200 at 1% interest. Which loan would you pay back first? Loan A or Loan B? If you chose Loan A, then almost every financial consultant on the planet would agree with you.
Except Dave Ramsey To everyone, but Dave, the logic is clear. Loan A has a much higher rate of interest. Logically you should pay back the higher rate of interest first. But as you’d expect, Dave disagrees.
That’s because Dave understands inertia better than most other financial consultants So what is inertia? I learned a funny definition in physics class at school. It went like this: A body in the state of rest or motion is inertia.
Hah, that made me laugh. How can you be stuck and moving, and still be in the same state? But apparently that’s how inertia works. And this is Dave’s advice to people who are struggling with debt.
First list all the debts on a piece of paper All debts need to go down. Student loans, credit card, mortgage, blah, blah. Then you need to rearrange the loans based on the size of the loan. So the smallest loan goes right at the top and the biggest one right at the bottom.
And everything else in between (depending on the size of the loan). And then he instructs you to pay only the minimum payment on every debt–with one exception. After the minimum payments were made, every available dollar needs to be put towards the first debt on the list.
Incredible as it may sound, Dave is telling you to wipe out that tiny, itty-bitty $200 debt with the pathetic interest, instead of taking on the painful big amount/big interest debt.
Logically it makes no sense But your brain doesn’t always work logically when it comes to inertia. While you’re lounging on the sofa, watching endless and pointless political debates on TV, your logic is telling to get off your butt. It’s telling you that the debates are endless (and did we say, pointless?).
Your logic is also telling you that you should be doing some work or exercise instead of engaging in mindless drivel. So logic doesn’t work. And the same applies to the debt. When Dave’s clients wipe out the first debt it’s not necessarily logical, but it creates a factor of momentum. First the $200 is wiped out. Then the $350. Then the $800. And so on, right up to the ‘monsta’ $100,000.
The motion is what matters A body in a state of rest or motion is inertia. And going from rest to a state of motion is impossible if you decide to take on the biggest task first.
Logic tells you that you should fix your website right now. Logic tells you that you should write that 300 page book. But Dave would say, “Go brush your teeth first.” That simple act of doing something–anything at all–gets you off your caboose and into another state of inertia: a state of motion.
So if you need to get something done, fool yourself -Don’t go for a 60 minute walk. Instead put on your shoes and decide to walk for just 7 minutes.
-Don’t try to write a complete article. Just write for 14 minutes. Then stop.
-Avoid trying to clean the entire bathroom. Just attack the sink.
These tiny bits help you get to the bigger bits. Because even as you go for the 7 minute walk, you know very well that you’re not going to turn around in 7 minutes.
You’ll go longer and further. But the goal always needs to be 7 minutes or 14 minutes or the $200 debt. The itty-bitty bits are important, more important in fact, than the bigger goals.
When people say they feel inertia, they mostly refer to a state of laziness Of not wanting to do anything at all. But as my physics teacher would tell you: “There’s inertia and there’s inertia.” And to get from one stage to another, you need to make the list in descending order of importance. Then attack the list.
And as Dave would say: Start small.
Acknowledgements Dave Ramsey’s ‘Snowball Debt’ and ‘Switch’ by Chip and Dan Heath. P.S. Yes I know. You’re headed to Google these names, aren’t you? You think you’ll find out more about this book and this method of reducing debt, aren’t you? But you already have the tools.
You have a piece of paper. You have a pencil or pen. And you have the methodology. So don’t muck around. Get to work. You need to change that state of inertia right now.
Next Step: Listen to or read Part 1: Can Resistance be Beaten?
http://www.psychotactics.com/resistance-detests-groups/
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5000bc: How to get answers and move ahead in your business.
http://www.5000bc.com/
Why Do Most Plans Fails? Find Out The Critical Importance of Chaos in Planning.
http://www.psychotactics.com/products/chaos-planning-forget-business-planning-and-goal-setting-start-with-chaos-planning/
The Brain Audit: Why Clients Buy And Why They Don't
http://www.psychotactics.com/products/the-brain-audit-32-marketing-strategy-and-structure/
Resistance seems like an overbearing force in our lives We want to achieve a lot, but as soon as we get started, resistance kicks in. But did you know there are ways around resistance?
Resistance loves a loner. If you’re working alone, you’re just setting yourself for an encounter with resistance. Resistance loves to play the game of winner. We need to put resistance in second place. Here’s how to go about the task of winning the resistance game.
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Resistance loves a loner Because loners have limited energy.
They start out on a project, all excited about what’s about to unfold. Then, for some reason or the other, they lose their way. And that’s when resistance gangs up on the loner big time. It’s not much of a fight.
The loner is already exhausted. One tiny tap on the head from resistance, and the loner falls into a heap on the floor. But this miserably one-sided bout could be avoided with the understanding of group work.
In Africa there’s a saying: If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go with a group. And resistance detests groups. And there are several reasons why a group helps you get a project done with far more efficiency and a lower failure rate.
So how do groups help? 1) Release of Pressure
2) Exponential Learning
3) Support
1) Release of Pressure The toughest part of a project is dealing with the pressure. And a release of that pressure is needed to give you a breather. When you rant and rave alone, it’s kinda depressing. When you’re suffering alone, you think it’s something to do with your talent, or your genes, or that you’re a loser (yes, everyone feels super-lousy often enough).
And having someone to just listen to your rant is amazing therapy. You rant, you’ve been heard and now it’s time to get back to work, because you have a ton of mistakes to make, and learning to look forward to.
2) Exponential learning Mistake making is frowned in our society. We love to get things right the first time. And yet all of us know that it’s impossible to learn without making a ton of mistakes on any project, no matter how familiar we are with the project. The problem is that mistake-making, instructive as it is, is also terribly depressing.
When you’re going round in concentric circles, your exhaustion builds up rapidly. However when you’re in a group, you learn from someone else’s mistakes, thus getting a bit of respite from the exhaustion factor.
When a group shares its learning and mistakes, everyone learns and everyone gets a little samba in their steps because you’re not just learning, but it’s exponential learning. You’re learning from four-five mistakes every day, and guess what? Most of those mistakes aren’t yours.
3) The third factor is just one of support While resistance can take on a loner, it’s a lot harder to take on a group. If someone falls, there’s usually someone to pick you up. If someone is struggling, there’s someone to help. If someone has questions, there are answers that help you move along.
Working by yourself, you not only miss the ongoing support, but the struggle wears you out. And inevitably you give up.
Now this kind of group support doesn’t necessarily work for all kinds of projects Sometimes the project is just to clean your desk. You could do with ranting and group support, but it’s an overkill. Besides it probably takes under an hour to get even the messiest desk tidy.
But if this seemingly mundane desk has to go on over a longer period of say, six to eight months, then you definitely need the power of the group.
In fact at Psychotactics, groups form a critical part of the project experience If we take just the Copywriting Course for instance, the three months of learning and implementation are physically exhausting. If you were to try and replicate the same pace by yourself, you’d give up in a week or less.
But with a group, 75-80% make it to the finish line. When you consider the sheer intensity of the Copywriting Course, you should have the figures the other way around (namely 75% should fail to make it to the end). And yet it’s the group that helps you through.
But how do you work with projects where the group doesn’t have a common goal? Admittedly it’s harder to pull off a project where everyone is headed in different directions. When the African saying suggested you go a lot further with a group, they were indeed suggesting the group had a common goal.
And if everyone in the group isn’t headed towards the same deadline, or using similar tools etc., then they have nothing in common. Then it’s relatively easier for the group to be counterproductive, as no one is learning from group-mistakes, and everyone has their own agenda.
It’s important for the group to set out a common agenda and at least have some common guidelines. So even if you have ten different writers, writing ten different types of books, they should ‘meet’ online every day and post their learning for the day, as well as a minimum of 800 words.
If they’re a group working on a gardening project, there needs to be the shared learning, the shared support moments, and shared implementation.
But don’t you need the right group for things to work? Yes, having the right group is important. But how do you choose the right group? Groups need to be chosen primarily on the basis of attitude. Which is why for instance, at Psychotactics, we call our courses the World’s Toughest Courses. This weeds out the excuse-makers and ensures that you get the cream of the attitude crop.
And just as you get a great group, you can also get a lousy group. Then whining, whingeing and depression will be constant, and progress will be impossible. So just having a group isn’t enough.
You need to put in some filters to ensure that at least 75% (or more) of your group will make it to the finish line. And it’s a bit of work putting a group together, but hey it’s a lot less work than starting endless projects only to see them go up in flames.
Resistance likes fires All this namby-pamby, touchy-feely stuff makes resistance look really bad. If prefers the loner. And most projects are done by loners. And resistance is happy. Now it can wield it’s little finger and push you over.
And resistance laughs and walks away contentedly.
When it comes to feedback, almost of us hit a blank wall. Ask a client to "help you fix" your product or service and you get two or three small suggestions. So how about a 1500 word answer instead? What if you could get the client to go into every nook and cranny and give you feedback that would drive you crazy? Yes, of course it drives you crazy, because you have to go about fixing everything? Or do you?
This episode on feedback goes deep into what you should ask, why and when you should ask for the feedback. And then how to cope with feedback when you can't fix things. It also talks about how feedback causes the clients to come back repeatedly to buy your products and services.
Sounds exciting? Well go on, listen to the episode.
And if you missed part one here is the link.
Read and Listen:
http://www.psychotactics.com/secret-feedback/
Listen: http://traffic.libsyn.com/psychotactics/86_Feedback-The_Secret_of_Returning_Clients-Part_2.mp3
Most of us are like crazy chickens, focused solely on attraction and conversion. They fail to see the biggest resource in our business—returning clients. If you're able to keep your existing clients and they buy everything in sight, you may never need new clients again. But what magic spell would cause them to buy everything in sight? Incredibly, the answer is "feedback". Wait, not testimonials—feedback. Feedback is that ugly sound of "complaint". It's screechy and seemingly yucky. But we're not just aiming for a bit of feedback, but feedback that's 1500 words or more. Yup, how do you get a mountain of the "yucky stuff?"
Let's find out why you need to get deep into the world of feedback. And put your Teflon suit on. You're going to need it.
Join us as we explore
Part 1: How do you get feedback? And when do you get feedback?
Part 2: Why safety plays a big role in feedback
Part 3: How to copy with feedback
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I’d been driving for about 5 years before I got to Auckland, New Zealand When we moved here, however, my Indian driving license wasn’t valid and I had to sit for both the written and driving test. And I failed the first driving test within minutes. We barely got on the road, and down a slope when the assessor failed me. Ten minutes later, we were back where we started. As you’d expect, I was perplexed and wanted to know what I’d done wrong.
He wouldn’t tell me. “I’m not supposed to tell you what you’ve done wrong,” he said brusquely. “You’re supposed to drive correctly and when you make an error, I note the error and fail you, if necessary. And you’ve failed this test.”
This is often how we feel when clients won’t give us feedback on our products, services or courses. But whose fault is it? Is it the client’s fault or ours? In most cases, we’re at fault, and this is because of a primary reason. We fail to figure out the difference between testimonials and feedback. We use the words interchangeably, and it gives the client the feeling they’re supposed to praise you all the time.
Praise is hard, because you want to reserve it for special occasions and anyway a constant stream of praise feels worthless. So the first task is to separate the concept of testimonials from feedback. The client should know clearly—and unequivocally—that they’re not praising you, but giving you feedback. Then, they should know that you’re going to do something with the feedback.
So how do you get feedback? And when do you get feedback? Let’s take a look at three main areas of feedback and see how we can ensure we get the feedback that we need.
The three areas are:
1) The safety issue—and reward issue
2) The implementation issue
3) The specificity of your questions
1) Let’s start off with the safety—and reward There’s a video online called “Austin’s Butterfly”. It shows a group of very young children appraising the work of one of their classmates. Austin, who’s probably in first grade, and has just drawn a butterfly. There’s only one problem. The Tiger Swallowtail butterfly looks amateurish and the kids know it. At that tender age, they’re not about to let Austin get away with such a terrible piece of art.
Then something quite amazing happens. The teacher takes over and asks the kids to give feedback. One by one they pipe up, with their critiques, so Austin can take a crack at the second draft. They point to the angles, the wings, making the wings of the butterfly more pointy. They go on, and on, and the illustration improves with every draft. Six drafts later, the butterfly looks like something you’d find in a science book. The finished butterfly is so stunning that anyone—you, me, anyone—would be proud to call the illustration our own.
And yet this article isn’t about whether we can draw butterflies or not, is it? Instead it’s about safety. The reason why those kids walked Austin through every one of those five subsequent drafts, is because they felt safe. So what made them feel safe? And how do you get your clients to feel safe? Incredibly that safety didn’t start on the day of the Austin butterfly demonstration. It started long before the teacher walked into the room. Safety needs to be created miles before you get to your destination.
So what do we do on Psychotactics? Notice the “What Bugs Me” on every page of the website? That “bug” is designed to create safety. Yet, you’ve seen organizations ask for feedback before. Why does that bug bring in over 200 clients writing to us every single year (that’s about 2500 bugs since we started). The answer lies in the statement that accompanies the bug.
The statement says: We’ll give a reward of $50 for the best bug of the month. Have we been diligent about this reward? No, I can’t say that we’ve been super-diligent in doling out the reward. But at a primary level, 99% of the clients aren’t interested in the reward at all. They’re just interested in us fixing the problem.
We have something similar in our membership site at 5000bc. The moment you get into the Cave (which is our forum) you are faced with a question thats says: What makes you unsafe in 5000bc? And even a casual glance at that post-—and it is a post in the forum—shows you that members have vented their feelings and there’s been an immediate response. When you get on an online course, like the information products course, you have an Ask Sean—again in the forum, as well as the ability to contact us at any point in time.
But contacting us can be a little intimidating. It’s easier to ask the question in the Ask Sean post. When you examine the posts, you’ll find that clients aren’t always asking questions. They’re often giving a bit of feedback and mostly testing the waters. Is it safe to give feedback? When I answer the question, I’m always aware of everyone watching. When you treat one person with disdain (no matter what the issue) you create a factor of lack of safety.
Without safety you’re not going to get feedback—not the feedback you’re looking for, at least. The clients aren’t exactly looking for rewards either. Those kids in the classroom weren’t getting any candy for their feedback. Their candy came in the form of change. Their opinions were valued and they were instantly rewarded with another draft. When they made suggestions, another draft showed up. They wanted to be heard, to see change.
And this takes us to our second part: The implementation The Article Writing Course has been held since around the year 2006—and in the early years, we’d have three or four batches a year—now we have just one. This means we’ve had several hundred clients on this immersion course—and several hundred chunks of feedback.
Why chunks? Because at the end of every course, we reserve a whole day—as part of the assignment—to get feedback. But why do clients give feedback? They do, because of the first reason: safety. They also want to make the course better—just like the kids in the classroom. The reward is the ability to be part of the change. It’s been almost 10 years. We should have stopped getting feedback by now, don’t you think? I mean how much feedback can you get on a course?
And yet here is the highlight of last year’s feedback—in brief Action: Go over all the material and remove elements or testimonials that are confusing.
Action: Go over the autoresponders and fix them.
Action: Reconstruct the syllabus to move from learning components to actually writing complete articles.
Action: The weeks that aren’t part of the main course need to be treated as “starters” or “dessert”.
Action: Create Level 2 Course
Action: Fix the notes.
Action: I could, however, mention how the 55 minute club works—in the sales letter.
Action: Be clear that the connectors are sub-heads and sign posting.
Action: Review all instructions to make sure there’s no inconsistency. And consistent language.
Action: Get writers to post their goals on the forum.
Action: Syllabus goes first.
Action: Feedback: What do they specifically look at?
Action: Remove any connection to the 9-month course (Wiz Withers)
Action: Tell participants in advance that there will be changes mid-stream.
Action: Live call not needed.
Action: Sean handles several projects at once. This is a perception and needs to be tackled.
Action: No templates, checklists or worksheets (it would have been so helpful to have an article template in order to see the overall structure)
Action: The materials we received weren’t linked to the weekly assignments
Action: You’re not writing EVERY day.
Action: There will be a 55-minute club at the end. And it will cost $87.
Action: Have a day just for feedback.
Action: Have reference material that sums up all of the different components of a great article
Action: Show how to write shorter articles
Action: Drop headlines from the course.
Action: Put in all the elements that we don’t cover.
Action: Make sure to ensure that there are only two methods I use to write articles.
Action: Make sure there’s an introduction to the transcript and clients know it’s a transcript and not the notes.
Action:The book by George Leonard titled Mastery: the Keys to Success and Long-Term
Fulfillment (instead of Karate Kid)
Action: For final feedback include a question about what was working, as well as improvements and what needed to be fixed
Notice what you just read? It was an action list, based on a feedback list. The clients came up with this immense list of things to be fixed—and spelt it out in great detail. We then compiled the list, and put in the action plan to fix the elements that needed fixing. Almost as soon as the clients came up with the feedback, we demonstrated we were not just asking for feedback, but we were going to take action—and we wrote what action needs to be taken.
The same applies to any feedback we get off the “what bugs me” You probably heard about Rosa, didn’t you? If you didn’t here’s the story. Rosa goes and buys a product off our website. It’s the “Dartboard Pricing” series and she loves it, but has something to say. She says I need to have the books in ePub. Now this is a tiny nightmare, isn’t it? Because while it’s relatively easy to transform books into ePub, our books are filled with cartoons and captions. Those cartoons and captions need specific coding and yes, the nightmare is revealing itself, isn’t it?
But we got in touch with Rosa, said we’d work on it and then we posted Rosa’s feedback in the podcast. And shortly after, another podcast listener said he’d do the job (I’ll give you the link to this ePub genius at the end of this piece).
So he set about the task of fixing the books—one by one—but first worked on Rosa’s request. This week, I wrote to Rosa and told her we had not only taken her seriously, but we were going to send out the PDFs and the ePub documents, so she could happily read on her tablet or phone.
Do you think Rosa feels safe?
Do you think she’s bound to give feedback again?
Do you think she was rewarded, both by the initial response as well as the implementation?
But what if you can’t implement something? Take for example, the courses we hold offline—at workshops such as the one in Amsterdam, or Vancouver or Nashville. The workshops are designed not t give you information, but to give you skill. Clients come up with all sorts of feedback, even during the workshop.
At the storytelling workshop in Amsterdam, Ellen—one of the participants, suggested a walking group. “We walk in the Netherlands”, she said. Now, if you get to our workshop, you’ll notice you’re not in the room a lot. That’s because you learn the least in the room.
We get groups to leave the room and sit by the pool, by the stair, in the lobby—just about anywhere they wish to sit and discuss the assignment they’ve been given. And yet, here was Ellen talking about “walking groups”. So we sent them off for a walk. And half of them took our advice, while half chose to sit instead.
So yay, the feedback went like clockwork, but it’s not always so hunky-dory—this implementation bit—is it? And when you can’t change things, you head off the objections off at the pass. For instance, if you look at the feedback we got from the last course was “Sean is handling too many projects at once”.
Now that’s like saying “fire is hot”. The reason you’re even reading this article is because I like to write articles, but I also like to paint, cook, take photos, dance, learn languages, mentor my niece—and take a nap in the afternoon (that’s a project too, you know). So what would you do with such feedback, especially when you know nothing is going to change?
I mean I handle projects but then I know what to keep and what to drop. Yet, the perception may exist and a client that’s going through a rough patch may find an easy target—me—the guy with ten million projects. That client may not have any idea that I’m not dancing right now, or I’ve put my Japanese and photography on hold. They’re working off a supposition—their perception. And to make sure this problem doesn’t arise, we head it off at the pass. I bring it up early in the course, or the book, or the workshop.
It’s on a slide, or in an introductory page, or somewhere it cannot be missed. And it needs to be repeated several times, so it sinks in, because not everyone sees or understands everything the first time around.
If you cannot or will not implement something and you have your reasons for it, you need to be very clear why you’re avoiding that course of action. Rosa’s suggestions were doable, and we went ahead with the plan, but it’s also quite a task to convert every book on the site to ePub. If this were the case, and we couldn’t fix every PDF, we’d just have to head off the objection before the client bought the product.
However, to get back on track—the implementation is what matters Implementation creates safety. Implementation tells your client that they matter. That their opinion is important. And if you can’t fix it, at least put out an action plan, so they can see that you’re hard at work. Then cross out the elements as we’re doing with this new Article Writing Course. Will we be 100% successful? No we won’t but we’ll keep at things until they get fixed. And then we’ll have another big list to go through.
So we looked at safety and reward. Then we had a long dive into implementation and at least the need to communicate with the client; the importance of having an action plan. Which takes us to the third part: The specificity of your questions.
Check back next week for Part 2 of The Secret of How To Get Clients To Keep Coming Back Repeatedly
http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast/
What’s one of the biggest “rookie mistakes” when putting a landing page together? It’s the rookie, sitting down and writing the entire page at their desk. If you want a reasonably boring landing page, write it yourself.
But what if you didn’t write it yourself? Who would write it for you? Find out more in Part 2 of this series.
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In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: How do you find the ideal client?
Part 2: What happens when you dig into a single problem?
Part 3: What do you do with all the other problems?
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There’s a reason why I moved from PC to the Mac. In 2008 I had to do a series of presentations for a radio station. Since the clients of radio stations are always looking for ways to get the attention of their clients, the presentation of The Brain Audit seemed like the perfect match. If there’s one thing I’m very possessive about, it’s the slides for my presentation.
I tend to make changes, simplifying the content and moving the slides around until the very last minute. Even if I have done the presentation dozens of times before, you can be sure I will be making changes at the very last minute.
In this case, the terms of my contract prohibited me from making those changes at the last minute. The radio station was putting all their slides together in advance, so all slide decks had to be submitted the week before the presentation. This rattled me enough to show up three hours before I had to make my presentation. The technical crew was more than happy to let me go through a run through of my presentation on the big screen.
As I clicked through the slides, I realised that something was wrong. The presentation I was seeing on the screen looked a bit like my presentation, but somehow it was different.
The weird part was that it looked better than what I had done. After I had got over the shock of someone tampering with my presentation, I asked the crew how they had gone about changing the presentation. “We didn’t do anything with the presentation itself,” they said. “We just ran it through keynote — which is a presentation software for the Mac.”
That one idea was enough to get me hooked onto the Mac, even though I had used the PC for close to 15 years. The Mac had solved a problem that I didn’t know existed. It had taken the best possible presentation I could muster, and made it far more beautiful than I could imagine.
Since then, I have dumped all my PCs and stuck to the Mac. So does this make me the ideal client?
It does not, because I wasn’t aware of the problem in advance To find the ideal client, you have to find someone is already deeply aware of the frustration they are facing. If you find someone like me—someone who’s surprised and delighted, you’re going to get a very shallow rendition of the set of problems the client faces—and most certainly never get to the depth of the biggest problem.
You have to find someone who already has a problem And the best place to start could be a random place like Facebook. Since everyone already has an opinion on Facebook, you may shortlist your ideal client based on a friend that responds to your question.
You may have a tiny list of subscribers on your e-mail list, and if you send out a request, there’s a good chance that at least a couple of responses will show up in your inbox. If you already have clients like we do, you’re often still like a newbie, especially when you want to launch a new product or service.
Let’s say we want to launch a product on how to take outstanding photos with your iPhone In many cases it’s easy enough to locate a great client, and it’s more than likely that they would like to take great photos, but don’t know how. Once you interview them over the phone, or in person, you’ll quickly find a series of issues.
– Taking great food pictures with an iPhone
– How to improve your vacation photos
– How to use manual controls with your software
– How to shoot close up or macro photography
– Great portrait photography with Your iPhone
– How to dump the SLR at home and take outstanding photos with your iPhone.
The problem is obvious, isn’t it? How do you choose? All of these problems seem headed in divergent directions.
The answer is: You don’t choose. You get the client to choose.You focus on the problem at hand and dig deeper.
The questions would hinge on the single problem:
– Why do you want to take your iPhone instead of a Nikon?
– What frustrates you when you take the Nikon?
– Can you describe a day on your vacation?
– What are the consequences of taking a heavy camera along?
If you own a Nikon 7000 like I do, you’ll find yourself leaving the camera back in the hotel room a lot. The Nikon 7000 is a great camera, but it feels like you’re lugging a brick along—and when you take three months off every year, that’s like lugging a brick for 90 whole days. So unless I’m going on a trip—like the time we went to see orcas in Vancouver, or camels on the road in Australia, I keep the DSLR—that’s the Nikon—in the hotel room.
And once you get me started, I can keep going on and on about the problems of a heavy camera. However, as the interviewer digs deeper, she may find that I like the iPhone for other reasons as well. I can use a slew of software, improve my photos, use filters, create depth of field (that’s a feeling of fuzziness for objects in the distance)—and do that all before I get back to the hotel. With the Nikon, I have to get back, download the photos into a program like Lightroom, and then I’m chained to my computer, instead of enjoying my vacation.
When you dig deep into a single problem, you get the client to give you a ton of details. You get them to describe their frustration on that one problem.
You also get a sense of what they experience with that one problem when you ask them to describe their day.
And finally, you get the consequences—a truckload of consequences.
You then take the biggest problem and put it in your headline and sub-head on your page The frustration and the sense of what the client experiences: that needs to go in the first couple of paragraphs, followed closely by the consequences. Which leaves us with a sort of dilemma, doesn’t it? What do we do with all the rest of the problems the client brought up? Do we just get rid of them?
This takes us to the third part—what to do with the rest of the problems.
Element 3: What do you do with the rest of the problems? The answer is simpler that you think. Remember the Portabooth—that portable recording booth that you could take on the road with you? Well, it didn’t have one benefit or feature, did it? It has a series of them. And yet, the client is most interested in the biggest problem. Once you’ve solved the biggest problem, the rest of the features are really a bonus for the client. They are a nice-to-have, but not a deal breaker.
The way to use the rest of the problems brought up by the client is to see whether you want to tackle them in the first place With the Portabooth, we could bring up the rest of the features and benefits and explain why there was a problem and how the Portabooth solves that problem. Unlike the biggest problem, where you have to go into a lot of detail, you can just use a paragraph or so to explain the rest of the main features.
You bring up the problem—for example: Assembles in seconds Just close two zippers—and describe the problem briefly, before bringing up the solution. Now you’ve taken every one of the remaining features, turned it into a problem, and brought up the solution.
But what if the problems were incredibly divergent, like in the case of the iPhone photo book? Think about it for a second: Is the book going to show you how to shoot portraits, use manual controls, take pictures of butterflies—as well as show you how to take great food photos? If so, then hey, the product already solves the problem, so simply use the remaining features on the sales page itself.
If the problems the client brought up, don’t fit in with your product or service, then you have to ask yourself: Am I going to include them in this product or service or do I simply focus on one thing?
In Psychotactics land, we’ve focused on one thing Instead of writing a book of 200 pages, we may restrict ourselves to 59 pages. We’ve come to the conclusion that clients want to get a skill, not more information. But if you’re selling a product like a mixer, for instance, you have a ton of features and benefits. Even so, it’s better to restrict yourself to just four-five problems being solved.
In today’s world it’s easy to get overwhelmed very quickly, and keeping the features and benefits to just a few is the best way to go. If, however, you still have a ton of features and benefits and would like to talk about them, then restrict them to bullet points. Bullet points are amazingly effective, because they form a quick summary of the product or service.
And there you have it—the series of steps you need to give your product or service the limelight it needs. You focus on one.
One plane landing on the tarmac at a time.
It makes for a tidy airport and a very successful landing page!
So what did we cover? 1 How to choose one problem.
2 Defining why the problem is important.
3 What to do with the rest of the problems.
We looked at the racehorses—and how they bolt out all at once. It seems like a good idea to introduce all our benefits and features, but instead of benefits and features, we need to use a problem. We get to the problems, by inverting the features and benefits. And then once we have the list of problems, we get the client to choose one. Which is the client’s most pressing problem?
– Trying to write this landing page all by yourself is usually a big waste of time. You struggle to write it and then the problems are not that which the client experiences. Plus, it’s hard to figure out the emotions the client feels. I’ll ignore my own advice only to come back later and realise what a fool I’ve been. It’s so much easier to call a client and record their experience. Or better still, take them out to lunch—because you’ll get to drink some wine too. And that’s always more fun. Take your recorder with you and make notes as well. Both are very important.
– Finding a client is always daunting. The best kind of client is a client that’s already deeply frustrated. Someone who’s been going through a heck of a lot and can describe in great detail what they’re experiencing. I’ve lugged my camera around a lot to tell you what that feels like and why I leave the camera behind. You may think Facebook isn’t the best place, but you’ll be amazed at how much feedback you can get on Facebook. Are they the best clients ever? Of course not, but once you launch your product or service, you can always tweak your landing page.
– Go deep into the problem. Ask the questions. – What frustrates you the most? Why does it frustrate you?
– Can you describe a day on your life?
– What are the consequences of postponing this decision? How does it make you feel?
Finally, what do you do with the rest of the problems? If they fit in with your product or service, then simply put them in as features and benefits. Or as bullets. Talking about features and benefits, there’s a way to write them a lot better than just listing them, and here is where you can find out more about how to maximize the power of features and benefits. (https://www.psychotactics.com/products/client-attractors/)
Did you know that landing pages fail almost at the headline stage? We’re all told to create landing pages. So why do they fail?
The answer, it seems, can be found at any international airport. When planes land, they don’t land all at once. They land one at a time. Yet on a landing page, we scrunch the issues together. We throw everything at the page. That’s a mistake. And this episode tells you why it’s a mistake and how to fix it.
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In this episode Sean talks about Element 1: How to choose one problem
Element 2: Defining why the problem is important
Element 3: What to do with the rest of the problems
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources Find out: Why clients buy and why they don’t.
Listen: The biggest “rookie mistakes” when putting a landing page together?
Read or listen: How To Design A Sequential Landing Page—Part 2
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When you’re at a derby, you notice something interesting. Every single horse bolts out of the gate all at once. But wait, that is not interesting, is it? That’s what the horses are supposed to do. They are expected to race madly towards the finish line so that they can win the championship. Which is fine for horses, but terrible for landing pages.
On a landing page, the first thing you present your client with is “the biggest problem”. If you were to treat the landing page like the horse derby, then all the problems would try to outdo each other in the very first paragraph. Like horses thundering towards the finish line, they would all attempt to get ahead of each other.
And this causes a problem for the client looking at your landing page. Suddenly that client is faced with a ton of information hitting him all at once. It’s why clients leave your landing page; they become disoriented, but mostly overwhelmed.
On any sales or landing page – your job is to present the client with the biggest problem. A client gets interested in your product or service because you’re taking on a specific problem. And it’s that problem that needs to rise to the surface. A landing page is more like a layered cake than horses at the horse derby. There needs to be a sequence of ideas presented one after another based on their importance.
And yet, this restriction causes a real headache, because most products and services solve multiple problems, don’t they?
How do you choose which problem to use? And what do you do with the rest of the problems? Do you just drop them or do use them elsewhere?
That’s what we are about to find out as we go on this journey on isolating the problem. However, it’s not a very long journey. We got three simple steps that will enable us to create a more precise landing page — and one that will get and keep the customers attention. We will find out where the customer gets confused and how to eliminate that confusion.
The three elements we will cover, are: Element 1: How to choose one problem
Element 2: Defining why the problem is important
Element 3: What to do with the rest of the problems
When I was about ten years old, I wanted to be a pilot. In fact, I can’t remember anyone at school who didn’t want to be a pilot. However, for most of us growing up in India, a trip to the airport was out of the question. This is because air travel was not as frequent or inexpensive as it is at this point in time. However, on the rare occasions that I did get to the airport, it was fascinating to watch the planes land and take off. But what was most interesting of all, was how the planes circled the airport.
Planes circle for a reason; Air-traffic controllers exists for a reason. You too are an air-traffic controller when it comes to your landing page. In fact, it’s pretty ironic that it’s called a landing page in the first place, isn’t it?
Ironic, because so many of us are more than keen on making sure all those planes land at the very same time. Circling planes don’t run out of fuel in a hurry, so why not let them circle a bit while you get the most one plane safely on the tarmac!
So what are the “planes”, anyway? The “planes” are simply the problems you’re presenting to the client. When we say problems, a negative connotation pops to mind, doesn’t it? But that’s what you’re doing on your landing—you’re bringing to light the biggest problem so that you get the attention of the client. For instance, Let’s take the headline from the product on pricing – called “dartboard pricing”.
The headline reads like this: How do you systematically raise prices without losing customers? Did you notice the “problem” in the headline? You can feel the pain of not raising prices, can’t you? You know that you would like to raise your prices, but are holding back because you are not sure how your clients will react.
It’s possible that you will lose some of them, or maybe the entire clientele will walk out in droves. What we have done in the headline — and that little bit of explanation — is define the main “problem”. When you read that headline, it seems pretty straightforward, and you can feel the emotion and get the point.
However, you can only get the point when you look at it from the air traffic control system tower.
When you sit down to write your headline, you are suddenly faced with all these circling “planes”, and feel the need to land all of them together. An inexperienced writer will try and bring out all the problems within the first few lines — or within the first paragraph itself. As you can tell from “an air traffic controller point of view,” this is a recipe for disaster.
Element 1: The first thing we have to do is to decide which “problem” is the most powerful of them all. It’s only the most evocative problem that will get the attention of the customer. But how do we know what is interesting to the customer? The way we go about this exercise, is to list all the solutions — or the bullet points together. We now have a bunch of bullet points or feature is that we can work through. Let’s take an example of a product that I use for recording the podcast.
If you decide to do any recording, you’re going to get a sort of echo When you sit in a restaurant and find it extremely noisy, what you’re experiencing is the amazing ability of sound to bounce off surfaces. And to reduce the noise factor, you have to have some elements that absorb sound. A tall shelf of books behind you helps. The uneven nature of the books seems to absorb a fair amount of bounced sound. To avoid sounding like you’re recording in the bathtub, you have to either put foam tiles on your walls (like they do in professional studios) or have some noise reduction system.
My Google search led me to Harlan Hogan’s Porta-Booth-Pro Yes, it costs a whopping $350 to buy the Porta-Booth, but hey, I would rather cook a six-course meal for two weeks in a row than put a nail in the wall. To get some foam tiles, put them up, worry about disfiguring the wall—and getting random results—that didn’t sound like my idea of fun. So I got the Porta Booth. But wait, this isn’t a story of why I bought the Porta-Booth. What we’re looking at is how the benefits and features can be turned around to help you create your headline—and your first few paragraphs of text.
When we look at the Porta-Booth-Pro on Amazon, it reads like a lot of Amazon pages There are a few bullet points and you have to make a decision to buy a $350 product based on these bullet points. And like horses at the derby, all four (or five) bullet points seem to dart out simultaneously. Let’s take a look at the Amazon page and see what we find.
– Rugged 600 denier fabric / Only 7 pounds / Air travels as checked or carry-on luggage
– 120% larger than the Porta-Booth Plus / Unique sonic stage “Auditorium” design.
– All interior surfaces treated with Auralex Acoustics Studiofoam #1 choice recording pros worldwide
– 2 way zippered bottom and rear slots for shot-gun mics cables boom arms. Corner straps add rigidity
– Anti-sway strap & Booth Lifter for boom arm mounting. Assembles in seconds Just close two zippers.
Notice the derby syndrome? What are you going to choose as a prospective client? If you’ve already decided the problem that needs solving, it’s still hard to figure out which of the bullet points remotely get your attention. If you look closely, it’s part of the third bullet point—and slinking at the back of the sentence. So let me light up the importance of the third point for you. It says #1 choice of recording pros worldwide.
That’s it? That’s all that’s required to get the attention of the customer? When you look closely, you realise what is happening when that specific solution or benefit is turned into a problem. As a solution or bullet point, the fact that it’s a number one choice of recording professionals worldwide doesn’t stand out. But when you turn it into a problem, it immediately gets the attention of the prospective client.
The problem would read like this: when you’re on the road, do you end up in the closet trying to get a great recording? The subhead would be: when you’re a voice-over artist, only the best sound will do for a recording studio.
We’ve all tried to reduce the noise by propping up pillows, searching desperately for rooms with thick curtains and occasionally even clambering into the closet. All of these techniques work, but there are terribly inconvenient when you are a professional. Instead, the Porta-booth Is like the equivalent of a mobile recording studio, reducing all those unwanted sounds and annoyances.
However, even a very quiet room—and this applies to homes and apartments, too—can sound like a “big, boomy box” to your microphone, instead of the tight sound booth quality we are used to in purpose-built studios. That’s because in addition to picking up the sound of your voice directly, the microphone also “hears” the ambient sound of the entire space. And this becomes the room from “hell”.
Instead of battling with pillows and getting stuck in dark closets, here’s what many professionals do on the road—they take their studio as carry-on luggage—no matter where they go.
See how different you feel about that very same bullet?
The Problem—the biggest problem is the key to getting the client’s attention. Yet, how do you choose the biggest problem?
Most of us are too close to our product or service and in many cases, can’t see why clients choose us. We think we know—and that’s what we put on our sales page, but often (more often than not) we’re hopelessly wrong. For instance, let’s look at the page on ‘Black Belt Presentations’.
That’s an extremely powerful product because it shows you why you fall asleep when most presenters get on stage. It shows you how to design your slides, how to control the audience, how to structure your presentation—and yet, look at the headline. The biggest problem says:
When you make a presentation, wouldn’t it be amazing to completely control the room—without turning anyone off? Then the subhead says: (It’s rough enough to have to speak to an audience, but aren’t you always in awe of presenters who can bring the room to life? How do you create presentations that enthrall, hold and move an audience to action)?
Notice how excited you were by that headline and sub-head? It’s not exciting, is it? Because instead of doing a target profile interview; instead of going out there and understanding what clients want, we’ve continued to sell the product as if everyone is doing predestinations on stage. And yes, for years since its release, the product has been bought by people doing presentations.
But the world has changed in the sense that many of us do webinars. We do podcasts, don’t we? And ‘Black Belt Presentations‘ is perfect for both—but more so for webinars. A reliable webinar software like GotoMeeting costs over $250 a year, and yet if your presentation isn’t amazing, what have you lost? You’ve lost the money you pay for the software, the time, the effort—and all because your presentation isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do.
Now webinars aren’t news They’ve been around for ages. Many of our clients could tell me right off that they rarely, if ever, get on stage. Yet, they’re likely to give a webinar to a client or be part of a webinar series. And guess what? The lack of focus in that headline and sub-head—it’s not only causing us to sell less product but also depriving you—the client—of increasing your sales, improving your credibility. And how did I figure out that the headline needs to be changed?
I got an e-mail from a client. He told me how he used it for his webinar and how it got the audience to respond amazingly well. And there I am, trying to procrastinate. I know I should get to changing that headline; that sub-heads; the first paragraph—and I’m betting you have the same affliction. You want to put off talking to your client and then making those quick changes.
But we’re circling the airport, aren’t we? We still haven’t got to the point where you know how to pick the biggest problem. So how do you do that? How do you pick the biggest problem, the sub-head and the first few paragraphs of your text?
The answer as we know—doesn’t lie with you It lies with the client—your best client—or possibly any random person. How on earth does this make sense? It makes sense to approach a great client, but why approach a random person? What would you expect to find with any random person?
This takes us to our second part and: What’s one of the biggest “rookie mistakes” when putting a landing page together?
Why do we struggle to write? The ONE word? What’s that? And why does it play such an incredibly important part in article writing? That’s what we explore in this second part of what I’ve learned in article writing.
We also look at why we struggle to write—Yes, we seem to get in our own way most of the time.
How do we get others to help us? Find out more here.
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In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why the ONE word concept is your compass in the darkness
Part 2: Whywhen we sit down to write, we often get into a state of randomness
Part 3: How can you be sure you have the right ‘One Word’ ?
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resource 5000bc: If you suspect that your business could be bringing in a lot more revenue but you don’t have a clue how to make that happen without hype or hassle, 5000bc is a must-have resource.
Listen or read: Part 1 of Three Interesting Things I Know About Writing
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Element 3: Why the ONE word concept is your compass in the darkness
ALMOST half of the goals scored in football—or soccer—are virtually random! So says Martin Lames of the Technical University of Munich.
Raphael Honigstein’s new book, “Das Reboot” talks about the non-random side of football. It talks about how a well-prepared team can rise from the depths and win the match, even the tournament. And especially if that team is Germany—which is considered to be a world-class team, but was at the bottom of the football heap in 2000.
Germany’s randomness arose from complacency In the European Championships in 2000, they failed to win a single game—and even lost to the English team (which was considered pretty terrible in the first place). And yet, 14 years later, Germany would rout Brazil 7-1 and make its way to the ultimate prize defeating Argentina in the World Cup final.
What Germany did—and did effectively—was reduce the randomness. Right after the 2000 Euro disaster, Germany’s top professional clubs were ordered to set up academies—and this was a considerable cost to the clubs, so they actively resisted the directive. Ten years later, this move proved to be a boon saving the clubs millions of dollars in transfer fees, because more than half the players in the top division were academy graduates.
In short, the moment they got rid of their randomness, the German team started to see results. A similar concept applies to article writing.
When we sit down to write, we often get into a state of randomness And you know it’s random because you can’t sum up the article in one word or one idea. The moment you have one idea—it becomes that wall around your article. You know exactly what you’re going to write about, what are the sub-topics under that main topic—and how to get the stories and case studies to support the piece. For instance, this section is about why the article can’t be random. Instead of starting the article with a boring line that says: “The worst thing you can do is write a random article”, the article starts with a story of disaster—well, a disaster for the German football team, anyway.
Yet, most writers never sit down and write down their one word because they’re not sure if it’s the right word There is no right word. The word is what you want to communicate. In the introduction, the story was about the journey. Well, that’s where the story of Isambard Brunel came to light. The second part was about the coach—and we ran right into Wolfgang Amadeus’ father—Johann Leopold Mozart. The third part was about why writing for yourself is so very hard, and the two female conductors told their story. And finally, we have the story of randomness—and the German football team.
When you have a single word to focus on—or a single idea—it’s not hard to get stories But it also forces you to stay within the parameters of that single word. I have to stay within the walls of randomness as this part of the article unfolds. It becomes my binding agent. And ironically, the one word can be picked randomly.
The one word in this piece could have been completely different. It could have been about “binding”—and the story would be different; the angle different. It could have been about “boundaries” and yet again we’d see different stories and a different angle?
But isn’t it cheating to decide one word and then write an article? No, it’s not. Put yourself in the shoes of noted author and TV personality, David Attenborough. Do you think the TV crew goes into the jungle, finds whatever footage they can find, before returning to write the script? That would be a nightmare because you’d have to go through hundreds of mismatched shots to build a coherent documentary.
As radio personality Ira Glass describes: “You write the story, and then you go out and ask the questions. You have the idea in your mind; the questions down on paper long before you get to the person you’re interviewing. That way you get a coherent structure. And the same concept applies to article writing.
If you simply sit down to write an article, you’re doing what a lot of crummy writers do Sure, you can pick the one word or one idea randomly, but that becomes your binding agent; your wall; your barrier. Now you have focus. The direction of your article is no longer random. You follow the lead of the one word, and your article isn’t a mish-mash of ideas thrown randomly on paper.
You become like the German football association-focused and getting results every single time!
===== So let’s summarise what we’ve learned. Article writing is a journey. And you can limp into the harbour or arrive in great shape.
To sail into the harbour in glory, I’ve learned three things over the years. The first is you need a coach—this can be a course, a book, a workshop—but you need that coach. And that coach needs to be a teacher, not a preacher. Then you need an editor. Everyone needs an editor. I have five or six—but even a single editor makes a world of a difference.
The second element is one of writing for yourself.
It’s a head banging, frustrating process. The best way out of this mess is to get questions. I get questions from clients in 5000bc, from e-mails, from consulting, from almost everywhere. But they’re not random questions on the Internet. They’re from a person—a person I know—and this makes all the difference. I don’t have a cocktail party in my brain because I’m focused on answering the questions of the client. My entire mood, mode and method changes when I’m focused on them, instead of myself.
And finally, we have the one word.
Without the one word, you’re in random land. Define what you want to say in a word, and then look for examples that fit that word. The only thing that’s random is the choice of the one word itself. You can choose any word or idea, but once you do, everything in the article must align to that one word or idea.
And that’s what I’ve learned—three things I know about article writing. That it’s a journey—and Isambard Brunel would have been proud to be on this crazy, exhilarating journey!
You can also listen to or read this episode: Part 1 of Three Interesting Things I Know About Writing. (http://www.psychotactics.com/three-writing-strategies/)
Writing isn't easy-but it isn't hard either
The key to writing is to know what strategy to follow, so the road isn't bumpy all year long. This episode isn't about going down memory lane. Instead, it's practical advice I wish I'd had—Like how to choose the right coach or the right editor.
Writing isn't all about you. Writing depends on the coach, the editor and the client. This podcast is about a strategy that's not commonly expressed and approaches writing in a more philosophical, yet practical way.
In this episode Sean talks about Element 1: Why a Coach And Editor Are Incredibly Crucial
Element 2: Why Writing For Yourself is A Tedious Process—And To Be Avoided
Element 3: Why the ONE word concept is your compass in the darkness
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources 5000bc: There is a lot of information on the internet. You can read and learn from it. But in 5000bc the discussion is about you. About your specific problem. And how to go about your specific situation. And Sean is around answering all your questions. Find out more here—5000bc. www.5000bc.com
Hi, this is Sean D’Souza and you are listening to the Three Month Vacation Podcast.
Who is considered the second greatest British person of all time? When the BBC did a poll in 2002, they expected somehow that Winston Churchill would be in that top ten list. But there in the second position was someone whose name was reasonably unfamiliar. A name that didn’t belong in this century, nor from the previous century. A man who was born in 1806, somewhat mysteriously found his way to the second spot.
His name? Isambard Kingdom Brunel—one of the most famous engineering minds of all time. And Brunel built a magnificent ship—and it was called the Great Western
At the time of its construction, the Great Western was the longest ship in the world. There she sat at 236 feet, with one stunning goal in mind—to cross the Atlantic. The trip was to start from Bristol, in the UK, and terminate in New York city in the United States. The goal was audacious because no one believed in the commercial viability of such a long journey. In 1838, despite many technological developments, shipbuilders presumed that a ship had limited capability. They believed that no ship could carry both—commercial cargo as well as enough fuel—and make the long journey across the Atlantic.
Brunel was a person who thought differently about long journeys For one, his heart was set on engineering. He developed a theory—a sort of formula that involved the amount a ship could carry and how a ship could be built so that it faced a lot less resistance from the ocean. Armed with his formula he set about building the Great Western, but then added more technological improvements.Instead of a ship, made mostly of wood. Brunel added bolts; he added diagonal iron reinforcements. He increased the strength of the keel and carried four masts for sails.
And so the ship—the Great Western—embarked on her maiden voyage from Bristol with 610,000 kilos of coal, cargo and seven passengers.
The Great Western on her maiden voyage to New York—powered by steam. A feat never achieved before!
Despite all the plans and engineering, Brunel’s ship hadn’t got off to a great start In the 1830’s there was a competition to be the first to cross the Atlantic powered by steam alone. The Great Westernshould have been well on its way, but ran into difficulties before leaving Bristol. There was a fire on the ship, a minor fire, but Brunel was hurt in the fire and wasn’t able to make the journey. As a result of the fire, 50 paying passengers cancelled their trip. Finally, the ship made it out of Bristol’s harbour with just seven people on board. What was worse is that it was four whole days behind it’s competitor—another steam ship called the Sirius.
The Sirius left as scheduled, leaving the fire-stricken Great Western still in dock. Now, the Great Western and her crew were well and truly behind—and Sirius would get all the glory.
But Sirius’ trip was anything but glorious Along the way to New York, Sirius ran into serious trouble. They started to run out of fuel. Her crew was forced to burn cabin furniture, spare yards—even an entire mast because they ran out of fuel. And they took 19 days to get across the Atlantic. The Great Western, in comparison, arrived like the queen of the seas. She took just 15 days and five hours and with a third—that’s almost 200,000 tons of coal to spare.
This is a story about journeys—a writing journey, in particular. I didn’t want to write. My story is one of being nudged and pushed into writing. When we started out Millionbucks.co.nz (yes, that was our pathetic first shot at a brand name), I was writing for a fledging portal called MarketingProfs.com. Back in 2000, everyone was a fledging—and there wasn’t as much content online, as there is at this moment in time. Which is why the founder of MarketingProfs, Allen Weiss, would e-mail me and ask me for an article. This meant I had to write. I didn’t want to write, but I didn’t have much of an option. We were new in the business—and had just moved to New Zealand. The only way I could get any credibility in the marketplace was to get better known.
And how you can have two sets of people—one battling almost vainly against the headwinds, while the other reaches its destination with amazing grace. When you embark on the task of writing, the headwinds start almost immediately. I know because I ran smack into trouble when I started writing articles.
Every article was a chore; something I detested and yet I persisted. Over the years, I’ve learned that sheer determination and persistence is not enough. That engineering and planning make a big difference to the journey.
And on that journey, there are three elements that stand out… Element 1: Why a Coach And Editor Are Incredibly Crucial
Element 2: Why Writing For Yourself is A Tedious Process—And To Be Avoided
Element 3: Why the ONE word concept is your compass in the darkness
Element 1: Why a Coach And Editor Are Incredibly Crucial Whenever the topic of a child-genius is brought up, one name rises above them all: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. This kid, we are told, was a prodigy. Before the age of six, he was already composing music.
Most kids barely are barely finding their way around school at this age. And yet, we are told, Mozart was already competent at playing the piano and the violin. He’s also rumoured to have transcribed entire scores of music on a single hearing. How much of this is true, and how much was stage-craft, we’ll never know. But one thing we know for certain—Mozart had a coach.
You don’t think of a coach when you hear the name of Mozart, do you? Yet, Mozart’s coach was his dad—Johann Georg Leopold Mozart. And Leopold Mozart wasn’t your average-let’s-play-music-dad. He was already a famous author on violin playing and celebrated enough to be the deputy director of music to the Archbishop of Salzburg. Plus there was Nannerl, Mozart’s sister. When Nannerl was just seven, her father decided to give her piano lessons because he believed she was gifted. So there was Mozart—baby Mozart—surrounded by all these incredible musicians—but primarily—coaches.
Without coaching, you can go far—but it takes a lot of time When you read studies that quote the concept of 10,000 hours to mastery, what fails to emerge is the factor of mistakes. As a beginner, you’re expected to make mistakes. You aren’t aware when or where you’re making the mistakes. All you feel is this frustration—this resistance that ships often felt back in the day of Isambard Brunel. Something is wrong with the engineering, but you’re not sure what to fix. And if you can’t figure out where the mistake lies, the journey ends up with furniture and masts being burnt up—so that you can complete some sort of journey
Coaching is valuable—that we already know—what’s hard is knowing how to find a great coach For me, this process of finding a coach has been streamlined to a single factor: skill vs. information. I call it “preacher vs. teacher”. Is the coach going to give you more information, or is he/she going to give you a skill? Alex Blumberg, ex-Planet Money, now co-founder of Gimlet Media is a coach. How do I know? Because in the world of telling radio stories, Alex doesn’t pound you with needless information. Instead, he has a method, even a formula of sorts. For example, when telling a story, he shows you how to evaluate the story.
Let’s say you’re writing a story about homeless people—how would you use the formula? The formula runs like this: The story is about X, and it’s interesting because of Y.
So the story is about “homeless people” and it’s interesting because “20% of them are college graduates”.
Immediately that stands out from a line that goes like this: The story is about homeless people, and it’s interesting because “many have mental problems”. What Blumberg teaches us is how to eliminate the vagueness and lack of interest in the story. In his courses, he goes about things systematically, taking about editing, music, etc., in the world of podcasting. And you end up not full of information, but with specific skills.
When you look at Mozarts, the Phelps, the Brunels of the world—they all had coaches. Coaches that enabled them to find their mistakes and move forward. And in article writing, going it your own way is the slowest boat to anywhere. I know because I took that boat. I took that boat in the field of cartooning; in the field of article writing too. And it took me ages to figure out the connectors, the “First 50 Words,” the endings, the beginnings, the structure—all of that misery could have been reduced if I had a coach. A coach that had a system; who would point out the errors—and get me quickly down the road.
To me, of all the skills you have to learn as an entrepreneur, article writing stands out because you have to have a precise structure when writing. You have to be interesting; you have to tell stories; you have to stand out in a sea of content.
Which is why, even today, I will go to workshops, buy a course, read books—because that’s how you get better at what you do.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that without a coach, you’re floundering even when you’re pretty good. To get outstanding at what you do, you have to find Johann Georg Leopold Mozart to help you along.
And you’re going to need not just a coach, but an editor as well You can be the best writer in the world, and you’re going to need an editor. I have five or six, at the very least; sometimes more. There’s David, Pamela, Teresa, Renuka, Alia, Philip—and Zack (I can hear Zack’s voice here). And every one of these editors come from a different angle; they have a different perspective. They force me to relook at what I’ve written so that I fit their needs. I remember the time I was writing a book, and I’d written more than ¾ of the book when I showed it to Philip.
But Philip wasn’t impressed “All your books, they show me how to do things,” he said. This one is all information. Nice information, but not a lot I can implement.” There’s no use fighting these editors. And I’ve tried. There was a time when I went “hand-to-hand” in a battle with Pamela. She wanted me to chop out two whole pages from my pre-sell book. Those two pages were about how crummy marketers use pre-sell.
Pamela wasn’t interested in reading about the other marketers—even though no names were mentioned. I fought back. I kept it down to a page. She came back and told me to get rid of it. I kept half a page. No dice. I tried a paragraph—and then finally buckled in. Pamela was right all the time, but I couldn’t see it at the start. I was too busy and too in love with what I’d written.
But we’re talking about articles, not books. So would I do this for every article? Going back in time, yes, it’s what I did for every article. One of our earliest clients, Chris Ellington, would pore through all my work and shred it a bit more than I liked.
It made me a better writer. But even now, I’ll post a series in 5000bc.com, and there are questions; lots of questions. The questions are a form of edit. They show what’s missing from the series and what needs a repair job. Plus, alongside every article we have a “what bugs me” on the website. So years after an article is written, you can have retrospective feedback.
This is my first learning in article writing That at all times you need a coach, finding structural mistakes, helping you to get better at the core skill of writing. And then once you’ve written, you need someone to pick out the holes and make the work get to the level it deserves.
Yet, to get to complete the article, you have to write it. And there’s a big barrier in the way.
It’s you.
You are the barrier.
Why are you the barrier? This takes us to Element 2.
Element 2: Why Writing For Yourself is A Tedious Process—And To Be Avoided Simone Young is a world-renowned conductor from Australia. Alondra de la Parra is also a world-class conductor—from the other part of the planet—Mexico. In a BBC podcast interview featuring the two conductors, there is a moment when they describe fear—Fear and anxiety.
Young pipes in first. “I’m always anxious before I get on stage,” she says. “And that’s because I’m thinking about myself. The moment I get on stage, I start thinking about the audience, and my fear goes away.” At which point, de la Parra chimes in. She talks about the “cocktail party” in your brain. About how everyone is seemingly talking about you, and they’re not saying good things. The “cocktail party” chatter never seems to end, or so it seems.
This is what you’d call “writing for yourself”—or at least what I call “writing for myself.”
When I write an article, my first act is to ask a client for a question. If they ask more than one question, I’m a lot happier. If they have a list, I’m the happiest. Why? Because now I can stop the silly “cocktail party” in my brain. This cocktail party pops up every single time, no matter how good you get at the craft of article writing. Most times, I’m just writing an article, but sometimes that article becomes a book.
Like the time I wrote the book on “Dartboard Pricing”, for instance I couldn’t figure out whether it was good enough. I couldn’t understand why anyone would buy the book when I’d written so many articles and done so many podcasts on the topic. Of course, I knew—I knew it’s an entirely different experience reading a structured book vs. random articles.
But even so, you think about the “cocktail party” a lot.
I had no such trouble when coming up with answers for a future book on “The Three Prong System.” A client and friend, Paul Wolfe, decided to do a series of three interviews with me on the topic of how I take breaks; how I manage to take a three-month vacation; how we handle vocation and vacation. And Wolfe had a series of questions—some prepared in advance, and some that organically sprouted from the discussion in progress. It’s not like I haven’t tried to write the book before. I’ve created an outline, started on the project and then abandoned it repeatedly. And it’s not because of a lack of skill, either. I can easily write the book—possibly in under a week.
The problem is that I’d have to clamber into my brain to write that book.
When Wolfe asks me the questions, I’m not trying to think about me. I’m thinking about the person asking the question—and occasionally other clients too. And the interview brings up a wealth of information—practical information too! When a client (or interviewer in this case) asks the questions, the cocktail party syndrome disappears, and it’s replaced with a focus on the audience. To write quickly and write a lot, I need questions—a lot of questions.
But where do we get the questions? I get most of my questions in 5000bc. Clients ask a ton of questions and get articles in response (yes, I know, it’s a mad system). However, I also get a lot of questions through the podcast, e-mail, through consulting (I rarely consult, but every time I do, it’s amazing). Questions com from chats, after I make a presentation, and through just listening and reading.
What I’ve learned is that I can’t just look for a random person asking a question online. That doesn’t fire me up at all. Instead, I have to have a specific person asking me a specific question. And when I’m writing the answer, I’m thinking of that person. Which is what gets me to talk a walk in those shoes and write with far more fluidity than if I sat down with a blank screen staring back at me.
But where do we get the questions? We all wonder: Hasn’t this question been answered before? Aren’t there fifty thousand and three variations of this question already on the Internet? And the answer is NO. No one is going to answer the question like you do. For instance, there are whole books on the topic of focus. But my angle on focus—and focus in a distracted world—is different.
I take three months off every year, still meet our “fixed revenue” goals and still manage to write books, conduct courses, do workshops, paint, cook—in short, do whatever I want, despite the distractions. So my angle is always going to be unique; my voice is going to be unique. And yours will be too. Your voice, your tone, your language—even the structure of your answer will be different. The question may have been asked a million times before, but the answer—your answer—is different.
And you get questions from many sources, but you have to listen—that’s what I’ve learned. When others speak, they’re asking you the questions and doing so in many forms. You’ve got to listen, answer those questions and then keep a writing pad right next to you. Why a writing pad and not a recording? Well, have a recording, but the writing pad is vital because it captures the gist of the conversation. Then, while the ideas are still fresh in your head, you sit down and write.
And the orchestra in your brain begins to play.
You may not be a great writer yet. You may struggle as I did. But even in the middle of that struggle, you’ll notice the emotion. You’ll realise that everyone has gone home from the cocktail party, but you’re not quite alone. You’ve got words on paper.
Writing for yourself is disgustingly difficult. It’s hard to reach into your brain and work out how to write an article, a report or a book.
But write for others and you get the feeling that Young and de la Parra talk about.
Suddenly, you feel free.
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A coach, an editor. They help you along.
The client and her questions—they bring out the orchestra in your writing.
And there’s the article itself. It is also a guide—a big guide.
So how do you use the article to stay on course? It’s a concept called the “One Idea.” This takes us to the last element. Click here to continue reading about—Three Interesting Things I Know About Writing-Part 2
http://www.psychotactics.com/writing-for-yourself/
Whenever you hear the story of products and services, it’s always a sugar-coated, goody gum drop story. You rarely get to hear the not-so-great side of things; the mistakes; the second-guessing. In this episode, you get to hear what’s happening behind the stage. How—and why—we started the article writing course; how we decided to go to the Netherlands and do a workshop; and how we launched several of our products without a sales page.
If you like back-stories as much as I do, you’re going to love this episode.
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The Transcript “This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.”
Hi. This is Sean D’Souza, and you’re listening to The Three-Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn’t some magic trick about how to work less. Instead, it’s about how to really enjoy the work that you do and to enjoy your vacation time.
Billy Joel: I dreamt the song. I dreamt the melody, not the words. I had a dream, and then I remember waking up in the middle of the night and going, “This is a great idea for a song,” and going back to sleep, and waking up, and not remembering what I dreamt and going, “What was that? I had a really good idea, a really good idea, and then I forgot.”
In a couple of weeks later, I’m in a business meeting talking to accountants or lawyers, some kind of boring stuff, and the dream reoccurs to me right at that moment because my mind drifted off from hearing numbers and legal jargon, and I just drifted off. Boom, it came right back into my head. I said, “I have to go. I have to go right now. I think I have an idea for a song,” so the accountants and lawyers were, “Go, go, go. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, go.”
I ran home, and I started playing the theme that had reoccurred. On my way home, I was thinking, “Okay. How am I going to remember this? Da, da, da, da. Da, da. Don’t be crazy. Don’t be stupid.” They’re called “[bail out lyrics 00:01:34],” but you have to use them to remember the notes, remember the theme you’re saying that you came up with. I got home, and I ended up writing it all in one sitting pretty much about … It took me maybe about … I don’t know, two or three hours to write the lyrics. I probably reshaped them a little bit in the studio, but yeah. I remember writing that very well. It was a dream that reoccurred, which happens a lot on me.
What you were listening to is the backstory of Billy Joel and The Stranger.
As I was listening to this on my walk yesterday, I thought, “This is a good idea. This is an idea where I can talk about the backstory of a product, a course, and a workshop.” I can bring it to life to let you know what’s the backstory instead of just hearing the success story. The reason why I thought it was so cool was my niece, Marsha, and I, we watched the series on BBC by David Attenborough, and the thought that gets us really excited is when they tell us the backstory, how they started, the trouble they run into, and I hope to bring some of that excitement into you all listening today by telling you the backstory about a course, a workshop, and a book series. Let’s start off with the first one, which is the course, and let’s deal with the article writing course.
Part 1: We’re going back to 2005. In 2005, there was no Article Writing Course. In fact, there was no plan to have an article writing course. You see, in the year 2000, I was writing an article maybe a week. I would struggle over it for one or three days, and then eventually, get it corrected and edited, and then finally, it would get published. By 2003, I started up 5000bc. For some reason, I promised the members at that time that I would write five articles a week. Did they care that I wrote five articles a week? I don’t know, but that’s what I promised, so that’s what I did. Because I did that, I started to write every single day, and my article writing got quicker and better as the years ticked along.
By 2005, I was pretty sure that anyone could do what I did, which is sit down, work it a few years, and then you could write good articles. Did I think there was a demand for an article writing course? No, I didn’t think there was a demand for an article writing course. So then, why announce an article writing course? What we decided was that we’re going to take a chance. We’re going to put up a sales page, and we don’t really care if anybody signs up this year, but it would be like an advertisement for the next year. That was our goal, to have an advertisement for the coming year, and the article writing course filled up.
That was a big surprise, and if there’s one thing that is streaming through this entire backstory, it’s this factor of surprise. Now we have all the strategy at Psychotactics, but surprise seems to jump up at every point in time, so there we are. We have signed up all these people for the article writing course. There’s only one problem. The problem is there are no notes. The problem is there was no audio. What are we going to do? What I did was I conducted the entire course through teleconferences and forums. There were no notes, and there was no audio, and the clients knew it, but they were still keen to the course.
When you look at the article writing course, the sales page today, one of the testimonials, that really long, detailed testimonial, it’s from the very first course. It is from the course where we had none of the stuff ready, where we weren’t prepared mentally for it, but we knew what we were doing. Even back then, we knew what we were doing, and we went ahead. Surprise, surprise. It turned out fine. Since then, we’ve had courses in 2006, 2007, and then we got a little greedy.
We started to do several courses, so we did … In one year, we did two courses simultaneously, so 25 people in one course, 25 people in the other course. Then, later on the year, we did 25 people and another 25 people, so 100 people went through that article writing course in that year, and it killed me. It was too much to handle because I’m there all the time in the article writing course, and if you write and tweak your articles several times a day, then I will be back telling you what to do, how to do. It’s pretty hands-on, and I had to learn from that lesson.
I had to learn to space out the article writing course, so now, we have it just once a year, and sometimes, we don’t even have it for a few years like in 2013, we had the course, and then the next one was in 2015. If you want to take the jest of the backstory of the article writing course and put it into a nutshell, it is that we were surprised. We were surprised that it would turn out like it did. We were so surprised that we had to now deliver the course, and we didn’t have notes, but we did it our way anyway.
Finally, the fact that we overdid it, and then had to pull back, and these are the lessons that we had from the article writing course. It’s one of the most fascinating courses for me because there’s so much depth to writing. Writing is not just a factor of, “Hey, let me string these words together.” It is communication. Once you can write, you can speak. You can do a lot of other things based on the structure of writing. To me, the article writing course is like you can’t do without this course, and yet, back in 2005, I thought, “Who would need a course like that?”
I was wrong. Surprise, surprise.
Part 2: Psychotactics Netherlands Workshop This takes us to our second surprise, and that is the workshop in Netherlands. Around the year 2011 I think, we decided to go to the Netherlands. Why did we decide to go to the Netherlands? For one, we started getting a lot of subscribers from the Netherlands, and we thought, “How are these subscribers coming in?” We went online, and we found that a lot of our products, especially the Brain Audit, and the website master class, and several other products were being pirated. Where were they being pirated the most? In the Netherlands.
We decided that there were so many customers that were buying products from the Netherlands, and there were so many people that were pirating from the Netherlands that somehow we need to go to the Netherlands, and so we decided to go to Amsterdam. Now, the good thing about the Amsterdam trip is that I’d already done the Brain Audit workshop in the US. I’d done the Brain Audit workshop in Auckland, New Zealand, and so I had the page ready. I just had to activate the page, and then send it out to the list.
Again, we weren’t expecting a thunderous response. What we did was we set up the page, we sent out the email, and we went for a morning walk. By the time we got back, 7 people have signed up, and that took us totally by surprise. We were expecting some people to show up from different parts of Europe, but 90% of the people that showed up were from the Netherlands itself, and this was a really good lesson, and this is the lesson that we’ve learned other companies use as well.
There is a rumour that Netflix follows the same strategy. They look at these sites where they’re streaming movies and series, and they see the series and the movies that are the most popular on the pirate sites, and they decide, “Okay, that’s what we’re going to put on Netflix.” Because it’s already popular, and that’s what it told us. It told us that the Brain Audit, and the website master class, and the copyrighting class, they were already popular, so there were people that were buying it, good clients, and there were the not so good clients who were pirating it.
Instead of getting mad at the not so good ones, we decided to work with the good ones, and we decided to have the Netherlands workshop. It went really well. Amsterdam, of course, is beautiful. It’s wonderful to walk around Amsterdam, so we had an outstanding workshop in the Netherlands, but it was a surprise. What this is teaching us is that we have all the strategy, but there will be a surprise, and this takes us to our third part, which is about a book series, which is the Black Belt Presentation Series.
Part 3: Black Belt Presentation Story One of our favourite places in New Zealand is Nelson, and Nelson is on the northern tip of the South Island, and it’s got the Abel Tasman Park. It’s a wonderful place to go, but one of the reasons why we go there is food. We love our food, and there is this restaurant, which is sitting right on the edge of the bay, and it’s called the “Boat Shed.” Now, at the Boat Shed, you get this fabulous view, but you also get this fabulous food, and they have a regular a la carte menu and a trust-the-chef.
Trust-the-chef is as you’d expect, the chef decides what you’re going to eat tonight, and they put it in front of you. You have no idea what it’s going to be. Every time we go to Nelson, we go to the Boat Shed, and every time we go to the Boat Shed, we have a trust-the-chef, so what’s the business application of trust-the-chef? We got back to Auckland, and I wanted to write a book on presentations. I love presentations. I love to make presentations, and I love the structure of presentations.
When I looked at all the books out there, they weren’t covering it like the way I wanted to cover it, so I decided to write a series on presentations. In reality, there were 2 problems. The first is the books weren’t written, and the second is that there was no sales page. I didn’t have any time for the sales page, so what I did was I decided to use the Boat Shed’s philosophy of trust-the-chef.
I wrote an email. I said, “I’m writing a book series on presentations, and it’s going to cover 3 elements. The first is, how do you design your presentation so it looks absolutely stunning, absolutely yummy? How do you have 200, or 300, or 500 slides, and the client doesn’t even know? They think they’ve just been through 25 slides? How do you make every one of those slides work for you in a way that’s amazing?” That was the first part of the book or rather the first book.
The second part was the structure of the presentation. How do you get the presentation to flow from one end to the other, so it’s absolutely seamless, and then you have these summaries? Pretty much like you’re listening on this podcast. You have a structure, and what is that structure? That’s what the second book was all about. Finally, it was about the crowd, the audience. What do you do with the audience that enables you to get their attention, to keep their attention?
I felt that was very critical because you can have a great presentation, you can have great slides, but if you don’t know what to do with the crowd, how to get them to do what you want them to do, then you’re not going to get the results that you’re looking for. So, all of these dreams, all of these plans, but there’s no sales page, and we just send out email. We said, “The book costs about $200. If you would like to get a refund because you find it useless at the end of it all, we’ll be happy to do that, but here’s the trust-the-chef offer.” Only 200 people signed up, but do the math, 200 into 200 is $40,000.
Now, a lot of people talk about, “I sold to 400,000 people. I sold to 100,000. I sold to 50,000 people.” You don’t need to do that. You can sell to 15 people and be fine with it. Think about it, 200 into 15 is $3,000, $3,000. That’s good revenue for a book. We happened to sell to 200 people with that email, but the point was that it surprised us. It was surprising how clients were willing to trust you even though you had no information or very little information about those books.
Summary This is the theme of today. When we summarise, we look that surprise becomes a strategyin its own way, that you want to surprise yourself, and that’s what happened with the article writing course, which we didn’t expect people to sign up. They’re still signing up 10 years later. We didn’t expect anyone in the Netherlands to sign up. It was just a random email, and people signed up. Finally, the trust-the-chef. That was the weirdest one of them all, and clients still bought into that. We’ve done several trust-the-chef offers ever since, and all of them have worked the same way.
This happens when you have respect for the client, when you act like a GPS system because that’s what the client really wants. They don’t really want more information, do they? They want you to be their GPS just like a GPS works. No matter whether you get to Rome, or Auckland, or Berlin, you switch on your phone, and your GPS is working, and it takes you to your destination, and that’s what clients want you to do. They want you to take them to their destination. They want you to be the guide. They want you to show them the sites, and that is why the article writing course worked, and that is why the presentation book series worked, and that is why the Netherlands workshop worked. It’s because clients expect us to care, protect, and guide them just like a guide does.
In that, there is no surprise.
What is the one thing that you can take away from today’s podcast? The one thing that you can do is to surprise yourself, so we can believe in planning, and we plan every Friday. We’d go to the café, and we work on a plan, but one of the things that really works in our favour is this factor of surprise. Now, you have the backstory of the article writing course, and the Black Belt Presentation Series, and one of the workshops, which is the Amsterdam workshop.
Go and surprise yourself. You don’t know what you will get. That’s what life is all about, that’s what business is all about, and that’s what The Three-Month Vacation is all about. One of the things that’s not going to be a surprise is when you sign up to the article writing course. When you do that, you’re not going to sleep all of April, all of May, and all of June. The reason for that is we don’t want it to be surprise. We want you to be able to write and to write well, to have a skill and not to have more information.
The article writing course is starting in April. March 5th at 3:00pm Eastern, that’s when we open the doors. As you know, we have only a few seats. Everyone says we have limited seats. We put a number on those limited seats, not more than 25. If you would like to surprise yourself and figure out how good a writer you are, then join the article writing course. Later in the year, we’re going to have the cartooning course, and that’s at psychotactics.com/davinci, and you can learn how to be a cartoonist too.
Most people are surprised when they can write so well, when they can draw cartoons, when they can make great presentations. They think that somehow this skill has to be inborn, and it doesn’t have to be. There are no inborn skills. You can learn from a good teacher. You can learn from a good system. You can learn a lot from a good group, and that’s what the Psychotactics training is all about. It’s not about information. It’s about skills, so get yourself on a course this year, and you will surprise yourself.
That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now, but wait a second. If you run into postcards anywhere while you’re walking, send me a postcard. I’ll send you a postcard back. To send a postcard, send it to PO Box 36461 Northcote, Auckland 0748. You can also find us on the website, on the “Contact Us” page. The address is there. Send a postcard, and bye for now.
Useful Resource 5000bc: There is a lot of information on the internet. You can read and learn from it. But in 5000bc the discussion is about you. About your specific problem. And how to go about your specific situation. And Sean is around answering all your questions. Find out more here—5000bc. (5000bc.com)
Risk doesn't just come in one flavour, yet The Brain Audit takes away a ton of that risk. In this second episode on risk, we take a forensic look at what happens when you release a new version of your product or service. Is it still the same product or service? Or is the risk magnified many times over? And how do you overcome such an unwarranted risk?
We also look at pre-sell and why it reduces, almost eliminates risk. Why pre-sell done right is like a soothing balm that doesn't seem to bother the client (or you) very much. This episode is loaded with the biggest reasons why clients don't buy, and why pre-sell works like magic. You'll love it, guaranteed (Ok, that was a joke). But really, you'll like it a lot!
In ‘part 2 of this 2-part series’ Sean talks about Part 1: What’s the link between risk and pre-sell
Part 2: How pre-sell works like magic
Part 3: The big reasons why clients don’t buy
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources Read: How Pre-Sell Sold The Article Writing Course In Fewer than 24 Hours
Listen and read: How A 3-Step Pre-Sell Creates Product Irresistibility: Episode 69
5000bc: How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems
If you’ve ever seen a Bollywood film (Hindi movies from India), you’ll notice there’s a lot of music and dancing. And a film release in India is like movie releases anywhere in the world of cinema. Trailers, interviews with the actors, publicity and the hoopla. It’s all part of the strategy to ensure that the movie is a stunning success. While back in 1964, a movie would be release six to eight weeks before the film release. However, by the 1990s, the music was being released three months or more—before the official launch of the movie.
But what’s the link between risk and pre-release of the music? Since most Hindi movies are musicals, the songs are the primary reason most people go to the cinema. If the songs are catchy—and become hits, the movie’s success is guaranteed.
When you look at it, an overwhelming number of Hindi movies have a similar plot. There’s a good guy, a bad guy, a romance between the hero and heroine—and lots of dancing and singing. There’s so little variation in scripts that the only risk for the moviegoer is—will I be entertained? When they listen to the songs in advance, the risk is removed. Pre-sell reigns supreme and the movie is a super hit!
So what is pre-sell? Pre-sell doesn’t involve sales at all. In fact, it’s a systematic dispensation of information. A simple example of pre-sell would be a wedding being held next summer. At first, there’s no information at all. Then, one day the bride and groom-to-be announce they’re going to get married. And now we have a countdown of sorts. There are announcements along the way and events. What you’re getting is a drip feed of information that goes all the way to the wedding day itself. The reason you and everyone else shows up on the day—and at the event, is because of pre-sell.
When you pre-sell, there’s limited risk because the very act of pre-sell is drip, drip, drip One of the biggest reasons why clients don’t buy is because they feel pressure. They feel they’re about to make a decision they could regret. And it’s more than likely their brains have been drummed with messages of “sleep on it, sleep on it, sleep on it”. In most cases, sleeping on anger may help a great deal. If you’re irritated and angry, it’s a jolly good idea to sleep on it. However, when buying a product, or service, the information rarely changes from one day to the next. What holds clients back, most of the time, is the fear of making a decision they’ll regret.
The run up to anything reduces this pressure Take for instance the 2017 workshop in New Zealand. It’s in beautiful Queenstown—in the South Island. Now you may have heard of the beauty of New Zealand, but you go south, and it rocks. Queenstown is incredibly beautiful, has stunning views, and there’s one more thing you have to do when you’re in Queenstown. You need to take the road to Glenorchy. It doesn’t matter where you’ve been on the planet, and no matter how many amazing things you’ve seen—the road to Glenorchy is breathtaking.
What you just heard was a pitch for 2017 But it didn’t sound like a pitch, did it? And the reason it doesn’t sound quite that way is because approximately 363 odd days stand between now and the workshop. As the workshop is mentioned more often, you start to feel this urge to visit the last stop before Antarctica—yes, New Zealand. You think, well, it’s now or never. Sure it’s going to be a long trip. Sure it’s going to cost a small fortune, but it’s a workshop—and you think—well, I can write it off as a business expense.
What are the chances of me visiting New Zealand and finding a business reason to do so? In your head, you’re selling the event to yourself. Now make no mistake. This place called Queenstown is no mirage. It doesn’t matter how many pictures and videos you see—it will still blow your socks off. And because of the distance between the event and your decision, you feel no risk, only great expectations.
Pre-sell is the best way to sell a product or service At Psychotactics, we roll out a pre-sell for almost every product or service. There’s the pre-sell right before a course or product launch—like the one we’re doing right now for the Article Writing Course. But there’s also the long pre-sell. If you were on the Psychotactics list, you would have received a simple chart that gave you details about all our courses and products for the year. That too—it’s a pre-sell. And the moment a course finishes, alumni are encouraged to post their experiences of the course in our membership site at 5000bc.
The pre-sell for the next year’s course starts almost the second the previous one has finished. What’s interesting to note is that no details are mentioned. No prices, no dates—it’s all pretty vague. So yes, you know about Queenstown, and you know about New Zealand. And you know there’s a workshop, but you don’t know the month or the name of the workshop or even how much it will cost.
And yet, notice how you want to find out more—even if you have no plans of getting to New Zealand That’s what pre-sell does: It reduces risk like crazy simply because it’s way out there in future-land. It has this feeling of being risk-free and what it’s doing is creating a slow but steady percolation of information. No pressure, no hard-sell, but just this tiny little snippet of information coming your way.
It’s the way Hindi movies make their way to the launch date. It’s how weddings attract a full house when a simple Sunday lunch can be a problem.
It’s how most of the products and services are sold by us at Psychotactics. It’s also the reason clients sign up so quickly. Once you’ve been given information in bits and pieces, you don’t need any more. The risk has left the building, and you’re ready to buy!
And that brings us to the end of this series on risk. Let’s take a quick run around the block and do a little summary! Coming Soon.
Don’t forget to read this article—How Pre-Sell Sold The Article Writing Course In Fewer than 24 Hours.
http://www.psychotactics.com/pre-sell-article-course/
If you were to boil down marketing to a single word, it would be "risk". When a client is ready to buy they still hesitate. Even when there's a sense of urgency on their part, they still go through a series of steps before they come to a decision. What are those steps? Why do clients seem to back away at the last minute?
In this two-part series, we examine the "big boy"?risk. And we find out how it sits on its end of the see-saw and dominates the buying process. We then use The Brain Audit (yes, it's a book you should read) to remove those barriers that cause risk.
Find out for yourself how we get to the end point and do so much more than just risk-reversal!
In ‘part 1 of this 2-part series’ Sean talks about Part 1: Why Clients Don’t Buy (Understanding The Elements of Risk)
Part 2: Why The Risk Factor Changes With Every Version Of Your Product/Service
Part 3: How Pre-sell Dramatically Ramps Down Risk
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy (And Why They Don’t)
5000bc: How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems
Read or listen to: How To Attract Truckloads of Clients
Last month I decided to buy some software for sound editing. And with that decision, I started a merry dance.
You know that dance, don’t you? It’s called the “should I, shouldn’t I” dance.
First, I spent an enormous amount of time reading up on what I was about to buy. Did it fit my needs? Was it just a duplication of the software I already had in place? Would it be easy enough to learn? Then, I delved deep into the testimonials. 20 minutes later, I was still reading—not quite sure what I was looking for, when every testimonial clearly seemed to signal the software was right for me. Almost an hour later, not entirely sure of my decision, I pressed the “buy now” button.
So what was the price of the software? It was $350. And you think—“Ah, that makes sense You have to do a fair bit of research before plonking down that much money.” And you’d be right. When faced with a slightly risky decision, we have to make sure we do our due diligence, don’t we?
I spent another hour going through the very same process: The features, benefits, testimonials, comparison—all while assessing whether I needed the product. The only issue was this new product was priced at two dollars and ninety-nine cents!
So why spend the same amount of time and effort on a product that costs less than the price of a coffee? Welcome to the tangled universe of risk, where logic seems to go into a blackhole. Where we spend as much time debating whether to go ahead with a decision, even if a product or service is offered free. We explore why risk isn’t always connected to money, or even the size of the transaction. And while it may seem that we behave unpredictably, our actions are remarkably consistent every time we have to make a decision. Worst of all, despite knowing it’s pointless spending hours debating whether a $2.99 purchase is worth it, we can’t help ourselves. We go through similar actions over and over again.
If we’re so hopeless when we’re aware of our actions, how can we predict the behaviour of our clients? And how do we reduce or even eliminate risk? How do we get to the stage where the client doesn’t even read your sales page and buys your product completely on trust—even when it’s an expensive purchase? Let’s dig into this crazy universe of risk—shall we?
We’ll delve deep into three topics – Why Clients Don’t Buy (Understanding The Elements of Risk)
– Why The Risk Factor Changes With Every Version Of Your Product/Service
– How Pre-sell Dramatically Ramps Down Risk
Part 1: Why Clients Don’t Buy (Understanding The Elements of Risk) Modern see-saws are kind of boring. You don’t even need someone to sit on the other side. They have all these fancy spring mechanisms so that—in effect—you could see saw your way to your heart’s content. What the modern see-saw misses is the fun that came with understanding balance. As kids, the see-saw mechanism was quick to demonstrate how balance made an enormous difference. And when we decide to look at risk, we must first understand balance.
Now if you’ve read The Brain Audit, you’ll know that you need seven elements to take the client from “hmmm” to “yes, I want to buy your product or service”. The first three of those seven are the problem, solution and target profile. The next four are objections, testimonials, risk reversal and uniqueness. What we’re experiencing in The Brain Audit is a factor of balance. The first three elements of problem, solution and target profile balance out the next four elements. The first three elements are all about attraction—the next four are about risk.
Risk, as you can see, is the big boy on the see-saw No matter how good you are at attracting a prospect, there’s an enormous risk factor always lurking on the sales playground. To understand how we need to reduce that risk, let’s examine each of those four elements, one at a time. On our list, we have objections, testimonials, risk-reversal and uniqueness. And of course, that list makes no sense at all, does it? Because we just saw risk-reversal as one of the elements in the list. If this topic is about risk, then isn’t risk-reversal supposed to take care of the risk? Interestingly, no. Risk-reversal is only a part of the whole “gang of four”.
Let’s start with the first of the four—objections Objections are the harbinger of risk. They’re like vultures waiting to land and chomp off the sale. But just like vultures, the reputation of objections is misplaced. Every possible purchase has not one—but many objections. But even if we were to sidestep the sales process and just look at your life, you’d see that objections play a big role. If someone said to you: Come over on Sunday—notice, notice how your brain goes for a little spin. That’s because your brain is bringing up the objections—even if you you’re semi-keen to go over. Is it just a “come over” situation, you wonder. Or will there be lunch? Will you have to have lunch in advance. All these questions go circling madly in your brain. Should you make an excuse, and just stay home, you wonder? And the moment you do all of this wondering, you’ve entered the world of objections.
There are two big reasons why objections show up The first—and most important reason objections are roused—is because necessary information is missing. As we noticed in the “come over to my place” situation, the complete lack of information drives the prospect crazy. Most objections arise directly from the fact that you’ve held back the most important information—the information needed to make the sale. Whether you’re buying a car or software for $2.99, the objections are what will hold the client back repeatedly.
And we may say, “I know this stuff. Objections are marketing 101”. And yet, time and time again, a client will come right to the point of buying the product or service—and then back away. In some cases, this is because the information is not available, but in today’s world, there’s also a pretty good chance that the client hasn’t seen the information. Because we’re all drowning in information, we start to skim—and miss out on certain points—points important to us. This builds up the risk tremendously—and more so for an expensive product or service.
At this point in time, the Article Writing Course is about $3000 $3000 is a fair bit of money, even when you’re absolutely sure of the results. There are a ton of objections that come up almost immediately.
– Will Sean be present at all times?
– Will there be specific assignments and will they be looked at daily?
– Will the group I’m in work out—after all, I don’t know any of them!
– Will there be specific guidelines for the course?
The answer to all of this is yes, yes and yes. And yes. The sales page must, in graphics and text—take apart the objections. And this brings us to a very important juncture. No matter what you say on your sales page, it’s just you saying stuff to sell your course. What an audience looks at, right after you’ve reduced their risk is the very next element—testimonials.
Testimonials are the opposite of objections Yup, you heard right. Testimonials are not the wonderful things client write about your business. Instead, they have a clear and definite purpose. That purpose is to destroy the objections—and the risk—but from a third party point of view. Which is why you need first to list all the objections you receive—and continue to receive from clients. Once you get these objections, get your current clients to address the risk with their testimonials.
When you look at the Article Writing Course, for instance, we realise that it’s expensive. We realise there are courses that are $1000 or even $500. They may not be the competition for Psychotactics, but you have to know that first hand from a client who’s done the course. Someone who’s taken the journey. They need to tell you how the course has tiny increments; how it has groups that magically work together; that I—Sean am there all the time, almost never sleeping, always hovering, always moving you ahead.
But they also need to compare it with courses they’ve done before; experiences they’ve been through and found to be less than satisfactory. And to make sure this happens, we ask the alumni of every course as many as 17 questions. In return, we get a 1500 word answer. Notice what’s happening to you as you skim through the prospectus? You suddenly notice there are over 80 pages of testimonials.
You read maybe one or two, possibly even getting to three—but those walls of risk are coming down very quickly indeed. But why? Because the testimonial attacked the risk from three angles—first it took on the objection head on, it was a third-party experience, but most importantly, it wasn’t just a few lines. 1500 words mean a lot to a prospect. They paint a picture that 20-30 words could never do. And the risk factor starts to reduce considerably.
But we’re not done yet—because we’ve only dealt with the objections and testimonials.
Part 2: Why The Risk Factor Changes With Every Version Of Your Product/Service It’s now time for the risk reversal Seems odd, doesn’t it? Why have a risk-reversal when you’re already dealing with the objections? This is the question we had to ask ourselves as well when we ran into the concept of risk-reversal. Back in the early days of Psychotactics, we would sell home study versions of our courses and workshops. Back then in the good ol’ days, clients were more than happy to get a big box in the mail.
That box would contain a binder with a ton of notes and yes, CDs. As we continued to sell the product, we’d get a few returns now and then (every product gets returns). When we’d open the returned products, we were foxed at how immaculate the contents of the boxes happened to be. The CDs looked like they’d never been touched—or touched and wiped clean. The notes—not a smear or tear in place. The boxes looked almost identical to the condition they were shipped out. And that made us realise that risk-reversal is not the same as objections. Risk-reversal is the biggest fear the client has—a fear that must be addressed and put in bold, bright lights so it can’t be missed.
The risk wasn’t that clients wanted their money back The risk was they were afraid to go through the package in detail as they feared they wouldn’t get their money back if the materials were soiled in any way. From that came the “The Lawn Mower Guarantee”. A guarantee that stated: If you don’t like the product, you’re free to take your lawn mower, run over the CDs and notes—then put them in the box and ship it back. The moment clients set their eyes on that guarantee; the sales went up exponentially.
When Zappos.com started selling shoes online, there were smirks Who would buy shoes online? Sure, shoes were a $40 billion market, but shoes online? As you can see, Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com was voicing his objections. But his eventual partner, Nick Swinmurn, was prepared. “It’s a $40 billion market”, Swinmurn repeated, and the most interesting thing was that 5% of shoe sales was already being sold by mail order catalogs. But what was their risk-reversal? A money back guarantee, right? After all, shoes may not fit; they may not look as good as they do online—or you may just change your mind.
But no, that wasn’t the guarantee The risk was that you’d have to figure out how to ship the shoes back. So Zappos put in a 365-day return policy with free shipping both ways. Free shipping both ways! That’s the biggest risk of all. And this is the part that most of us may not take the time to figure out. What is the client’s most significant risk? In some cases, it’s a simple money back guarantee, but in most cases, the clients will voice their biggest risk.
To find the real risk, you have to dig. To find the biggest risk, you have to get clients to list all the possible risks and objections—and get the clients to pick their greatest risk.
And sometimes even that may not be enough. The packages that came back to us untouched told us a precise story—a story that the client might never have voiced. To get to a real risk-reversal and reduce that risk, you can’t just hope that a shiny money-back guarantee will work. You have to dig, and dig deep.
But nothing needs more digging than the last element—the uniqueness We’ve covered objections, testimonials and risk-reversal, but all that does is set up a client to go to the competition. And that’s where uniqueness comes in. Once you’ve covered all the other elements, the client needs to know why they should buy from you and not from anyone else.
If we were to drag the Article Writing Course back into the picture, we’d notice that the competition may be offering courses at a far lower rate—and promising quicker results. After all the Article Writing Course takes 12 weeks—that’s three whole months. You have assignments, and these are checked daily. This means you have to run your business and do your assignments every single day.
This makes the course baby-tough So what’s baby-tough. If you have a cat, you have to put out their food, their water, and that’s probably all you need in terms of work. A dog—now that would involve a walk, some play time—it’s a lot more work. A baby on the other hand—a newborn—that means you’re sleep deprived for quite a while. That is the uniqueness of the Article Writing Course. It’s baby-tough. It means you work extremely hard for the three months—and that hard work shows up as a skill on the other side.
Right before we had this uniqueness in place, it was a lot harder to sell the course We tackled the objections, had reams of testimonials and the risk-reversal (not money-back, but that you’d only tackle tiny increments every day). Still, it was a lot harder to sell the course. The moment we added the uniqueness, the seats were filled in a day, then half a day and in some cases as little as 25 minutes.
A client wants to get the most unique product or service possible. To get anything but the best is hardly acceptable. The moment the Article Writing Course became baby-tough, the clients knew they were in for some real work. And real results. The other courses with their “easy” and “quick” results now became a liability.
In fact, uniqueness can stand alone—and clients may ignore the other elements of risk if the uniqueness is strong enough. When you think of Domino’s pizza delivering in “30 minutes or it’s free”, there could have been many other objections, zero testimonials, and well, we’ll accept the risk-reversal. But it’s the uniqueness of screamingly quick delivery that got the attention of the client. When you look at products and services that clients choose—even when they’re not the best in the market place, it’s usually because of the uniqueness.
And that’s because the uniqueness creates extreme clarity. When you’re faced with why you chose one computer over the next, why you chose one chartered accountant over the other—you don’t need muddiness. The more fuzzy the message, the less likely your audience is to pick you over the other. Working on your uniqueness is your top priority, and every product or service should have their uniqueness. The company may have one level of uniqueness, but every product or service needs to have their uniqueness as well.
When we think of risk, it’s easy to isolate ourselves to just the risk-reversal There’s no doubt the risk-reversal is very important—once you find the real risk involved. Just like Zappos figured out the both-ways free shipping was more important, you too have to dig into the nuances of your product or service. The objections can’t be left out because they cause too much chaos in the mind of the client.
Even a simple Sunday outing without the proper information, becomes a matter of “should I, shouldn’t I?”. And testimonials are a science that’s worth delving into. Getting long, detailed answers turn your testimonials into an experience, not just some sugary, nice things your client is saying about your product or service.
But what’s the one thing you need to work on as quickly as possible? It’s always the uniqueness. What makes your product or service unique? What makes it different from the competition? That’s the question clients want you to answer right away as it creates clarity. The client can justify to themselves and others in their world, why they bought the product or service.
In The Brain Audit, there are two distinct parts: the attraction factor—and the risk.
It’s like a see-saw—an old-fashioned see-saw. It’s fun when both sides are balanced—well, almost balanced!
Coming Next: Part 2—How Pre-sell Plays A Crucial Role In Risk-Reduction.
http://www.psychotactics.com/82
When Jim Collins wrote "Good To Great", he did talk a fair bit about the Hedgehog Principle. But what he stresses more on, is quite another concept called "Preserving the Core and Stimulating Progress". Why does this concept matter so much? And how do you combine the Hedgehog Principle with this concept? And where does the big, hairy, audacious goal fit in with everything? This episode shows you how to tie all the elements together in a neat little bundle.
Time to escalate that route to greatness, don't you think?
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Preserving the Core + Stimulating Progress
Part 2: The BHAG
Part 3: Your Action Plan To Greatness
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Why Happiness Eludes You: 3 Obstacles That We Need To Overcome
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Preserve the Core AND Stimulate Progress Recently a client called Rosa wrote to us with a request.
“I would have preferred to read the series on Dartboard Pricing in ePub,” she said. She made it clear it was a request, not a demand. Which brings up a whole new set of problems for us at Psychotactics. Most business books are designed with text in mind and may contain a few graphics. Our books aren’t designed that way at all. They have dozens of cartoons and under every cartoon is a caption. In The Brain Audit alone there are almost 100 cartoons and corresponding captions. In a PDF, this layout is easy-peasy. Create the book in InDesign and export it as a PDF and it maintains its design integrity. Try to do the same thing for an ePub and it’s like stepping in poo.
It’s a tedious, frustrating process to get all the graphics to align the way they should
The easier way is to just make a quick excuse, apologies and move on. After all, it isn’t like 90% of our audience is asking for an ePub. It’s just a stray request, isn’t it? It’s simple to ignore the request and get on with the important task of doing whatever it is we do. But that’s where the problem lies, doesn’t it? We’ve ignored the concept of progress. Almost all of us today read on a tablet or our phones. I know I do, my wife does, even my mother in law who ranted and raved about computers—she now loves her iPad. And PDFs work on tablet devices and phones, but they’re super clunky.
Sadly that’s not the only problem
Jim Collins talks about two elements: preserving the core and stimulating progress. And he goes to great lengths to stress the AND in between both of them. So all of us have to stand back and ask ourselves: What’s our core? The core of Psychotactics has been the factor of “consumption”. Any one can create attraction and conversion. It’s super-hard to get clients to consume what they’ve bought from you. Books, courses, workshops—we spend hours, days and weeks trying to figure out how to achieve a skill.
The cartoons, the captions in the book—they’re not just a design concept. They’re placed there as memory hooks; as a method of summary. They need to be exactly where they are in the books and courses. We could remove them and easily create an ePub like most ePubs, but that would fit in with our core. Collins says it has to be an AND. We have to preserve the core AND stimulate progress.
This principle is clearly frustrating and pulls in opposite directions.
When you’re starting out, you don’t have any legacy issues in place. You create a business the way you want to shape it. And the core and the progress moves along nicely. It’s when you “grow up” that you have to worry about how all the past has to fit in with the future. The longer you’ve been in business, the greater the past, and the more the past has to merge with an ever changing future.
Take Nokia for instance
You can almost hear the sound of the Nokia ring, can’t you? In the early 2000s, all of us would have at one point in time run into, or owned a Nokia. Nokia was no slouch in realm of being super-progresssive. They were into paper, then electricity and bounced from there to rubber, galoshes and finally were the most dominant phone manufacturer on the planet. In the early 1990’s they had a clear and accurate vision of the future. They saw the coming of the cell phone, dumped all their businesses and stuck with the cell phone. And then, just for good measure, they invented the first smart phone. That amazing device you take photos with, use to find your way around and yes, make phone calls—Nokia was on the ball way back in 1996. They even built a prototype of an Internet-enabled phone at the end of the 90’s.
And then they got stuck in a loop
They failed to see the link between their core—which was to make really simple phones—and the future. The future was software. The core of their legacy was hardware. They spent millions of dollars turning out failure after failure. They believed so much in their hardware that they just couldn’t figure out the software issues. And down they went, ring and all, finally selling their company to Microsoft.
To go from good to great we have to ask ourselves
What’s the core of our business. What do we stand for? What will we never change, never compromise on—and yet how will we step into the future when it presents itself to us. Most of us rarely have a problem with core values. Once we’ve spent enough time in our business, we know what we stand for, but what we fail to prepare ourselves for is the oncoming storm. We keep doing things the way we’ve always done.
The worst three words we repeat over and over, when faced with change is: I know that, I know that, I know that.
I thought I knew a lot about podcasts
After all I’d rode the early wave of podcasts when Apple first introduced them. And then in 2008/09 we decided to pull the plug on the podcast. When clients—and one client in particular—kept asking me to create a podcast, I’d ignore the comment. As far as I was concerned, podcasts were a thing of the past. I wasn’t ready to listen and the years ticked away while we busied ourselves with the core of what we’d always done.
Today, the “Three Month Vacation” podcast is one of the biggest joys in my day
I love writing, I love presentations, but it’s the podcast that connects me to a medium I love. And in turn the podcast connects us to our clients in ways that not possible on paper, or through books. The podcast is the closest we come to an offline workshop. But I wasn’t interested in the “future”. As far as I was concerned, podcasts were the distant past. And today we know those thoughts, that strategy was wrong. We see the enormous number of clients who find the podcast, then sign up to the newsletter. At our offline workshops over 50% of the audience listens religiously to the podcast. The podcast fit in so nicely with our core. And was the medium of the future.
Even so, it’s not possible to chase every rainbow
Technology moves ahead at a blinding pace. You can’t play with every new phenomenon. Which is why we have to go back to the Hedgehog principle. What can you be the best in the world in? What are you deeply passionate about? What drives your economic engine? In the subset of podcasting, we achieve all three.
And this is what you’ll have to do as well. Find your core AND stimulate progress, with your eye always on the passion. The passion is what drives your business today and will continue to do so in the future. If you don’t wake up crazy with happiness, then you’re not headed towards greatness. It’s the reason I moved on from cartooning back in the early 2000s. I wasn’t waking up happy as a lark—and so I had to find something else.
Which, interestingly, takes us to our third element: The hairy, audacious goal—oh, it’s big too. That makes it the BHAG (pronounced: bee-hag).
The BHAG Until the moment Greig Bebner set to work on his kitchen table with a glue gun and some kite material, the basic design of the modern umbrella hadn’t changed since 1928. They come in all sorts of colours, shapes and fancy gizmos, but the core elements of the umbrella are the same—and they don’t work. The moment a gust of wind comes along, you hear cursing, then more cursing and finally the umbrella being thrown on the pavement.
So Greg set about on a big, hairy, audacious goal—a BHAG.
He wanted an umbrella that would stand up to the crazy wind and rain on One Tree Hill.
Now if you’ve ever visited Auckland, New Zealand, you’re likely to have your hair tossed around wildly on a windy One Tree Hill day. It’s certainly no place to open an umbrella. Then to push that BHAG even further, he tested the Blunt at Force 12 (117 km/h) which is the maximum setting of the test wind tunnel. The umbrella stood up to the punishment with ease.
But why did the umbrella work so flawlessly?
It starts with the BHAG. It’s almost a Star Trek kind of goal—to go where no man gone before. It’s not a namby-pamby set of goals. It’s one overarching factor that scares the heebie-jeebies out of you as a business owner.
A windy day on One Tree Hill in the middle of a storm. That’s a good testing ground for an umbrella.
Sometimes this goal is restricted to your product, sometimes it’s a lot bigger.
Like Akio Morita, the co-founder and former chairman of Sony Corporation. He was working on a revolutionary product called the Walkman. Until the Walkman was introduced on July 1, 1979. Until the Walkman showed up, portable music players were non-existent. Even though the Walkman stuttered with disappointing sales in the first month, it went on to sell over 400 million units.
But Morita’s goal wasn’t just to sell a ton of Walkmans
His goal was a lot loftier. Before Sony introduced a ton of extremely sophisticated equipment, Japan was considered to be a backward country. It was associated with paper parasols and shoddy imitations. Akio Morita wanted to turn that perception around so that “Made in Japan” commanded respect and was associated with high quality. And he succeeded, with Sony at the forefront of his BHAG. In 2014, A Harris poll showed Sony was the No. 1 brand name among American consumers, ahead of American companies like General Electric and Coca-Cola.
At Psychotactics, we have a BHAG too
The goal is to get rid of information for information sake and replace it with skill, instead. We’re drowning in information, and yet every book, every course brings even more information to the table. But is that what we really want? Or do we want the skill instead. We want to write articles, create sales pages, be able to sell at higher prices. We want to learn to cook, draw, paint or acquire skills that make us look, feel and be smarter. A BHAG has to be hairy, audacious, and bigger than anyone thinks possible.
Starbucks had a BHAG too
It was to open up a new Starbucks cafe every single day of the year. But soon enough, Starbucks was running into trouble. Can you see why? It’s big, hairy and audacious to open up a Starbucks every single day, but does it inspire any passion? Does it feel like you’re somehow changing the world you live in, let alone the world around you?
The BHAG wasn’t to make Sony the star, but instead to make Japan and Japanese products top-notch once again.
Every business should have a BHAG.
Something that sits there in the corner challenging you to become better—not necessarily bigger—than you are. To create a Ferris Wheel or an Eiffel Tower. To create artworks of enduring magnificence as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt did. And the way to create that BHAG is to scare yourself. To know that everyone says there are things you’re not supposed to achieve. That these things are impossible.
And yet, you do it, because it’s the most inspiring thing to do!
Combined with the Hedgehog principle, preserving the core and stimulating progress, you have a system in place that can take your business from good to great. And even as you embark on this journey, you know that you will forever be on the road to making things better, not necessarily bigger, but always better.
Better—it’s a great place to be!
Action Plan: What is the one thing you can do today? Check back tomorrow. Sean is still writing it.
There are two options in life: greatness or mediocrity. But greatness seems so elusive, even so pompous. How do you call your work "great"? How do you even know or benchmark "greatness?". And can a small business achieve greatness or do you have to be a dominant player like Apple, Disney and Walmart. In this episode we get right to the root of greatness and how the book "Good to Great" by Jim Collins changed my life. But instead of the massive journey to greatness, this episode shows you a tiny path. A path most of us can manage with just a little bit of effort.
A life of mediocrity is hardly worth living. Here's the pathway to greatness.
Useful Resources / To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/79 / / Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com / / Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza / / Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
Part 1: The Hedgehog Principle
Part 2: Preserving the Core + Stimulating Progress
Part 3: Big, Hairy Audacious Goal—The BHAG
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Why Happiness Eludes You: 3 Obstacles That We Need To Overcome
Find out: Do We Really Need To Start With Why?
The Transcript “This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.”
Around the autumn of 1890, Daniel Burnham was given a project. Burnham was an architect—an extremely well known architect—in Chicago. And he’d been given a job like no other. He was expected to turn a boggy square mile into what would be the spotlight of the world. He was put in charge of the World’s Columbian Exposition.
He just had one tiny problem—the Eiffel Tower.
On March 31, 1889, Paris had had it’s own Exposition. And it quickly surpassed the Washington Monument to become the then tallest man-made structure in the world. Burhnam had the unenviable job of surpassing the hoopla around the Eiffel Tower, but no one had a clue what to do.
“Make no little plans”, he said to his team of engineers, but they could come up with little to rival the magnificence of the Eiffel Tower. Of course there were proposals: a tower garlanded with rails to distant cities, another tower from whose top guests would be pushed off in chairs (pretty much like today’s bungee jumping). And Eiffel himself proposed an idea for the Chicago exposition—a bigger tower than the one in Paris.
How could the Chicago Exposition outshine the now most famous monument in the world—the Eiffel Tower? It seemed almost impossible to come up with something that would rival the French monument. An engineer called Ferris has the answer.
The ideas were going nowhere and the Chicagoans were pulling their hair out, when a 33 year old engineer from Pittsburgh came up with an idea: how about a huge revolving steel wheel? He came up with sketches, added additional specifications and then shared the idea with Burnham.
But Burnham was not impressed.
The slender rods of the wheel were too fragile. It would be madness to carry people to a height taller than the Statue of Liberty in such a fragile wheel. But Burnham wasn’t just dealing with any ol’ engineer. He was dealing with George Washington Gale Ferris Jr—who would forever be associated with the Ferris wheel. Ferris was so convinced his idea would work that he spent $25,000 of his own money, hired more engineers and recruited investors. And consider that $25,000 would be worth over $650,000 in today’s money.
Over a 100,000 parts went into the Ferris wheel. And an 89,320 pound axle had to be hoisted onto two towers 140 feet in the air. On June 21, 1893 when it was launched, it was a stunning success. As the exposition went through the next three week, more than 1.4 million paid 50 cents for a 20-minute ride.
George Washington Gale Ferris had literally reinvented the wheel. The year we moved to New Zealand, I had to reinvent my own wheel. You see, I wasn’t in marketing. I had no plans of being in marketing. I was already an established cartoonist back in Mumbai, India and when I moved to New Zealand I pretty much expected to continue to draw cartoons. In fact I was so determined to take that cartoon career forward, that when we moved I had over 100 kilos worth of books shipped. These were no ordinary books. These were the books on graphic design and cartooning that I’d accumulated over the years. Plus, there were brochures. Before I left India, I had no idea what New Zealand held for me.
So I printed business cards—as you do
But also lavish four colour brochures, postcards and yes, stationery that I could use when I got to New Zealand. All of this material had to be shipped by air—not by sea—because I was in a big hurry to get going in this new country.
Yet, almost a year later, I had to reinvent what I was doing—and it was all because of one book.
That book, “Good to Great” has sold over 2.5 million hardcover copies. But more importantly, it was the catalyst in my own reinvention. In 2000 as I got on a plane back to India (I had to go back and tidy up things I’d left undone), I had loads of time to read the book and mull over the ideas. And as I’ve mentioned before in articles and podcasts, I realised that I would never reach my greatness in cartooning. To me, the pinnacle of cartooning was the comic strip, “Calvin and Hobbes” by Bill Watterson. If I couldn’t get up to those lofty heights, it wasn’t feeding my greatness appetite. And so I turned to something I was getting exceedingly good at doing—creating taglines for small businesses. Without realising it, I was wandering down the aisle of marketing. The book—and that 19 hour flight—it did it for me. It put me on my quest for what I’d consider my “greatness journey”.
But just as it set the benchmarks, it also raised a ton of questions.
Are there benchmarks to know that you’re moving from good to great? How do you know what you’re choosing will end up being great? With all the stories of greatness bouncing around Apple, Boeing, Disney and Walmart, how can a small business owner get to greatness, without becoming big and dominant?
Big questions—and it’s best to keep the answers simple. Deep, yet simple.
Let’s take a trip and explore the three core elements required to get your own Ferris wheel going—even when the odds seem stacked against you.
The three elements we’ll cover are: The Hedgehog Principle
Preserving the Core + Stimulating Progress
Big, Hairy Audacious Goal—The BHAG.
Avis—the car rental company—was pretty much in the doldrums. Back in 1961, it was losing $3.2 million a year and there seemed to be no way to beat the domination of their biggest rival—Hertz. And the two companies had been at each others throats since the mid-1940s, when Air Force officer, Warren Avis created a niche out of thin air. As he travelled around, Warren Avis realized that most car companies were downtown—not a very convenient place to get a car if you just flew into a city. Business travel was growing steadily and many executives would touch down, rent a car, drive to their meetings and drop the car back at the airport on the very same day.
Hertz was not impressed
They continued to run their rental car business downtown, as if Avis didn’t exist. Yet, over time, they found Avis gobbling up chunks of their business. It seemed logical to simply replicate what Avis had done. With this move, Hertz signalled the start of the rivalry that exists to this day. But then, along came 1962 and an creative agency called Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB). The copywriter team of Paula Greene and Helmut Krone created an advertising campaign that would take Avis from losing $3.2 million to earning $1.2 million. What’s more, it would rock Hertz’ smugness to its very core.
From 1963 to 1966, Hertz smug look turned to paralysis
The market share percentage gap between the two car companies shrunk from 61-29 to 49-36. The “We’re only No.2. We try Harder” immediately captured the attention of the public. But why did this “We try harder” campaign really work? When we look at the Hedgehog Concept outlined in “Good to Great”, the answer is more than apparent.
The Hedgehog principle consists of three pertinent questions:
– What can you be the best in the world at?
– What drives your economic engine?
– What are you deeply passionate about?
Avis could easily answer those questions—but only once it had the new ad campaign going
It was the best in the world at “bending over backwards” to make car customers happy. After all it was only No.2, and couldn’t afford to rest on its laurels. This concept of “trying harder” got the entire company to indeed try harder. And yes, we all know how their bleeding balance sheet made a sharp U-turn into decent profitability. They got the “best in the world” covered, the “economic engine” was purring away. Only one thing remained—the passion. The “we try harder” might have been just a slogan, but it was a slogan that drove the passion—and if the slogan is right, it often does drive the passion! Avis ticked all the three boxes, and they were well on their way to scaring the heebie-jeebies out of Hertz.
Notice how money—or the economic engine—isn’t really the focus of greatness?
Money is important, that’s for sure. A company gasps and coughs it’s way into oblivion if it can’t fire up that economic engine. And yet, it’s more than clear that for most of us, at least, money is not the driving factor. All those website owners that show you how their income doubled and quintupled are still sitting on the same sofa; they’re still typing on that same yellowed keyboard. Yes, they may have doubled or quintupled the size of their house or boat, but when money becomes the only focus, there’s no time to enjoy the good stuff in life. Which is why the “best in the world” journey needs to start with what makes you deliriously happy. It’s the stuff that wakes you up and keeps you going, no matter what. Your work becomes your passion and the complete opposite of trying to outsource everything and doing as little as possible. Money helps enormously in getting you to your goal, but the passion and desire is what’s behind the wheel.
And this is where confusion comes bouncing through the door
When I quit my career in cartooning, I was doing very well indeed. I’d moved to New Zealand and despite being in a brand new market, the profit for the first year was $75,000. Picture me sitting at my computer, drawing cartoons, listening to music and then taking a nap and you get the idea. It wasn’t exactly like I was struggling to put food on the table. Still, the moment you decide you want to change things—the moment I decided I couldn’t beat “Calvin and Hobbes”, I was in trouble.
I’m good at a lot of things. I whizz my way around Photoshop, I can cook exceedingly well, you’ve probably seen my food and travel photos on Facebook—and you’re getting an idea of the looming problem, aren’t you? The moment you can do more than one thing, you’re not sure where to go. The journey to greatness seems to run right into a pool of quicksand.
So how do you get yourself out of this mess and back on track?
I’d decided I didn’t want to do cartooning—at least at that point in time—and I wanted to take this leap into marketing. I didn’t know much about marketing, but that minor detail wasn’t keeping me up at night. Still, I was in a fog—after all marketing is this big, nameless, faceless profession and I hadn’t a clue what the journey to greatness was going to look like, or whether one existed at all.
And that’s when I ran into a subset of marketing.
A subset is what starts the journey to greatness
My story was quite accidental—as yours may well be. I joined this networking group called BNI. We’d meet every Friday, enjoy breakfast and hand out referrals. And crucial as all this referral giving was to me at the time, one factor was even more pivotal to help me on my journey. BNI has this strange custom called “the dance”—as in “dancing with a partner”. In this so-called “dance”, you go across to visit another of the members. For instance, I might go and meet the real estate agent at her office. Or another week I might end up talking to the financial planner in the group.
Being new and enjoying this extroverted behaviour, I binged on the “dance”
I started meeting several members of the BNI group in relatively quick succession. They’d tell me what they did—often spending between 10-20 minutes explaining the details. Then I’d ponder over what they just said, and boil it down to a single line. In effect, I’d given them a tagline—a working tagline that would elicit curiosity and get their prospects interested.
The first time I encapsulated their 20 minute speech into a single line, I wasn’t aware of what I was doing.
Twenty or thirty tagline later, with everyone telling me how “great” I was at taglines, I decided to make that my entry point into marketing. I wasn’t going to be the best in the world at marketing—and no one can ever take such a title. But I could create a subset. And that’s because a subset is simpler than a well-laid out, world domination plan. Which means that you’re going to make a career out of teaching a program like InDesign, don’t take on every tool bar in the program. Just teach clients how to create an amazing e-book in under an hour.
The Hedgehog Concept If you’re going to be the best in the world at WordPress sites, you’re headed for chaos.
But take on a subset and you could be the designer that gets clients to their destination in just three steps. Even the all-time greats in the history of mankind—take Michelangelo for instance—he made the statue of David his subset. He was headed towards the magnificence of the Sistine Chapel in time, but to start on that journey of greatness, he had to take on carving just the statue of David.
Once you deal with a subset, passion almost force-feeds you with energy
Avis found its passion once it had the subset of “trying harder” instead of the grand scheme of “trying to do everything”. I found my subset quite by accident while taking on taglines. And the moment you streamline your idea into one tiny bit, you’ll get enormous control over that bit—and the passion faucet will begin to flow. You’ll read more about the subset, practice it longer and harder and it will take over your life. Which effectively means you’re done with two elements of the Hedgehog principle all at once. You have your passion—thanks to your subset—and it’s put you well and truly on the road to personal and professional greatness.
That leaves just the looming question. Will it drive your economic engine? Will it pay the bills? And how soon?
I didn’t know the answer to that question of the economic engine
In fact, I did something very silly in my quest for “being the best in the world”. I quit cartooning—yup, just like that. One fine day, I decided I wasn’t going to do any cartoons. And then something extremely strange happened. No one called me for a cartoon project any more. Right until that moment I’d been filling that balance sheet with a decent profit, and suddenly I didn’t get a single call or e-mail for another cartoon project.
Be aware that I was drawing stuff for ad agencies, magazine covers, local councils and private clients. And yet, it stopped almost as if I had taken a full page ad in the newspaper that said, “Sean D’Souza doesn’t want to draw cartoons any more. Stop bugging him.”
My dream had come true, but I didn’t have a buffer.
The buffer isn’t just money
It’s also the buffer of knowledge and of confidence. Remember, I wasn’t a marketing guy, I was a cartoonist. That thought stays in your head and seriously undermines your confidence. Getting to the library, stacking up 30 books at a time was top priority. We’re talking about economic engines here, and knowledge plays a big role in how you get paid. Having the skills to run a business is what allows you to make that engine vroom. I had to teach myself how to write great articles, how to create compelling copy—and yes, how to speak. That buffer was important for my economic engine, but money played its role too.
I jumped right into marketing and out of a business
I’d spend a chunk of time beefing up on the learning and the skills. But I hadn’t considered the factor that everything takes time to turnaround. It was a rash move, and luckily Renuka had a decent job. That paid the bills, the mortgage and let me fumble forward toward this “greatest in the world” dream.
Um, Renuka also quit her job and joined Psychotactics a few months later, but that buffer was all we needed. We were now on a trajectory to align ourselves with the Hedgehog Principle. Like Michelangelo, we had to carve one David at a time. Like Avis, we had to “try harder” one car at a time. We were passionate about what we did. And the clients started to trickle in.
But the Hedgehog principle itself, isn’t enough
Jim Collins stresses a second more important factor. In fact, he considers this second factor to be the most important of all the material he’s written over the years. It’s called: Preserving the core AND stimulating progress.
Let’s find out just what this means for you and your small business.
Preserve the Core AND Stimulate Progress Recently a client called Rosa wrote to us with a request.
“I would have preferred to read the series on Dartboard Pricing in ePub,” she said. She made it clear it was a request, not a demand. Which brings up a whole new set of problems for us at Psychotactics. Most business books are designed with text in mind and may contain a few graphics. Our books aren’t designed that way at all. They have dozens of cartoons and under every cartoon is a caption. In The Brain Audit alone there are almost 100 cartoons and corresponding captions. In a PDF, this layout is easy-peasy. Create the book in InDesign and export it as a PDF and it maintains its design integrity. Try to do the same thing for an ePub and it’s like stepping in poo.
It’s a tedious, frustrating process to get all the graphics to align the way they should
The easier way is to just make a quick excuse, apologies and move on. After all, it isn’t like 90% of our audience is asking for an ePub. It’s just a stray request, isn’t it? It’s simple to ignore the request and get on with the important task of doing whatever it is we do. But that’s where the problem lies, doesn’t it? We’ve ignored the concept of progress. Almost all of us today read on a tablet or our phones. I know I do, my wife does, even my mother in law who ranted and raved about computers—she now loves her iPad. And PDFs work on tablet devices and phones, but they’re super clunky.
Sadly that’s not the only problem
Jim Collins talks about two elements: preserving the core and stimulating progress. And he goes to great lengths to stress the AND in between both of them. So all of us have to stand back and ask ourselves: What’s our core? The core of Psychotactics has been the factor of “consumption”. Any one can create attraction and conversion. It’s super-hard to get clients to consume what they’ve bought from you. Books, courses, workshops—we spend hours, days and weeks trying to figure out how to achieve a skill.
The cartoons, the captions in the book—they’re not just a design concept. They’re placed there as memory hooks; as a method of summary. They need to be exactly where they are in the books and courses. We could remove them and easily create an ePub like most ePubs, but that would fit in with our core. Collins says it has to be an AND. We have to preserve the core AND stimulate progress.
This principle is clearly frustrating and pulls in opposite directions.
When you’re starting out, you don’t have any legacy issues in place. You create a business the way you want to shape it. And the core and the progress moves along nicely. It’s when you “grow up” that you have to worry about how all the past has to fit in with the future. The longer you’ve been in business, the greater the past, and the more the past has to merge with an ever changing future.
Take Nokia for instance
You can almost hear the sound of the Nokia ring, can’t you? In the early 2000s, all of us would have at one point in time run into, or owned a Nokia. Nokia was no slouch in realm of being super-progresssive. They were into paper, then electricity and bounced from there to rubber, galoshes and finally were the most dominant phone manufacturer on the planet. In the early 1990’s they had a clear and accurate vision of the future. They saw the coming of the cell phone, dumped all their businesses and stuck with the cell phone. And then, just for good measure, they invented the first smart phone. That amazing device you take photos with, use to find your way around and yes, make phone calls—Nokia was on the ball way back in 1996. They even built a prototype of an Internet-enabled phone at the end of the 90’s.
And then they got stuck in a loop
They failed to see the link between their core—which was to make really simple phones—and the future. The future was software. The core of their legacy was hardware. They spent millions of dollars turning out failure after failure. They believed so much in their hardware that they just couldn’t figure out the software issues. And down they went, ring and all, finally selling their company to Microsoft.
To go from good to great we have to ask ourselves
What’s the core of our business. What do we stand for? What will we never change, never compromise on—and yet how will we step into the future when it presents itself to us. Most of us rarely have a problem with core values. Once we’ve spent enough time in our business, we know what we stand for, but what we fail to prepare ourselves for is the oncoming storm. We keep doing things the way we’ve always done.
The worst three words we repeat over and over, when faced with change is: I know that, I know that, I know that.
I thought I knew a lot about podcasts
After all I’d rode the early wave of podcasts when Apple first introduced them. And then in 2008/09 we decided to pull the plug on the podcast. When clients—and one client in particular—kept asking me to create a podcast, I’d ignore the comment. As far as I was concerned, podcasts were a thing of the past. I wasn’t ready to listen and the years ticked away while we busied ourselves with the core of what we’d always done.
Today, the “Three Month Vacation” podcast is one of the biggest joys in my day
I love writing, I love presentations, but it’s the podcast that connects me to a medium I love. And in turn the podcast connects us to our clients in ways that not possible on paper, or through books. The podcast is the closest we come to an offline workshop. But I wasn’t interested in the “future”. As far as I was concerned, podcasts were the distant past. And today we know those thoughts, that strategy was wrong. We see the enormous number of clients who find the podcast, then sign up to the newsletter. At our offline workshops over 50% of the audience listens religiously to the podcast. The podcast fit in so nicely with our core. And was the medium of the future.
Even so, it’s not possible to chase every rainbow
Technology moves ahead at a blinding pace. You can’t play with every new phenomenon. Which is why we have to go back to the Hedgehog principle. What can you be the best in the world in? What are you deeply passionate about? What drives your economic engine? In the subset of podcasting, we achieve all three.
And this is what you’ll have to do as well. Find your core AND stimulate progress, with your eye always on the passion. The passion is what drives your business today and will continue to do so in the future. If you don’t wake up crazy with happiness, then you’re not headed towards greatness. It’s the reason I moved on from cartooning back in the early 2000s. I wasn’t waking up happy as a lark—and so I had to find something else.
Which, interestingly, takes us to our third element: The hairy, audacious goal—oh, it’s big too. That makes it the BHAG (pronounced: bee-hag).
The BHAG Until the moment Greig Bebner set to work on his kitchen table with a glue gun and some kite material, the basic design of the modern umbrella hadn’t changed since 1928. They come in all sorts of colours, shapes and fancy gizmos, but the core elements of the umbrella are the same—and they don’t work. The moment a gust of wind comes along, you hear cursing, then more cursing and finally the umbrella being thrown on the pavement.
So Greg set about on a big, hairy, audacious goal—a BHAG.
He wanted an umbrella that would stand up to the crazy wind and rain on One Tree Hill.
Now if you’ve ever visited Auckland, New Zealand, you’re likely to have your hair tossed around wildly on a windy One Tree Hill day. It’s certainly no place to open an umbrella. Then to push that BHAG even further, he tested the Blunt at Force 12 (117 km/h) which is the maximum setting of the test wind tunnel. The umbrella stood up to the punishment with ease.
But why did the umbrella work so flawlessly?
It starts with the BHAG. It’s almost a Star Trek kind of goal—to go where no man gone before. It’s not a namby-pamby set of goals. It’s one overarching factor that scares the heebie-jeebies out of you as a business owner.
A windy day on One Tree Hill in the middle of a storm. That’s a good testing ground for an umbrella.
Sometimes this goal is restricted to your product, sometimes it’s a lot bigger.
Like Akio Morita, the co-founder and former chairman of Sony Corporation. He was working on a revolutionary product called the Walkman. Until the Walkman was introduced on July 1, 1979. Until the Walkman showed up, portable music players were non-existent. Even though the Walkman stuttered with disappointing sales in the first month, it went on to sell over 400 million units.
But Morita’s goal wasn’t just to sell a ton of Walkmans
His goal was a lot loftier. Before Sony introduced a ton of extremely sophisticated equipment, Japan was considered to be a backward country. It was associated with paper parasols and shoddy imitations. Akio Morita wanted to turn that perception around so that “Made in Japan” commanded respect and was associated with high quality. And he succeeded, with Sony at the forefront of his BHAG. In 2014, A Harris poll showed Sony was the No. 1 brand name among American consumers, ahead of American companies like General Electric and Coca-Cola.
At Psychotactics, we have a BHAG too
The goal is to get rid of information for information sake and replace it with skill, instead. We’re drowning in information, and yet every book, every course brings even more information to the table. But is that what we really want? Or do we want the skill instead. We want to write articles, create sales pages, be able to sell at higher prices. We want to learn to cook, draw, paint or acquire skills that make us look, feel and be smarter. A BHAG has to be hairy, audacious, and bigger than anyone thinks possible.
Starbucks had a BHAG too
It was to open up a new Starbucks cafe every single day of the year. But soon enough, Starbucks was running into trouble. Can you see why? It’s big, hairy and audacious to open up a Starbucks every single day, but does it inspire any passion? Does it feel like you’re somehow changing the world you live in, let alone the world around you?
The BHAG wasn’t to make Sony the star, but instead to make Japan and Japanese products top-notch once again.
Every business should have a BHAG.
Something that sits there in the corner challenging you to become better—not necessarily bigger—than you are. To create a Ferris Wheel or an Eiffel Tower. To create artworks of enduring magnificence as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt did. And the way to create that BHAG is to scare yourself. To know that everyone says there are things you’re not supposed to achieve. That these things are impossible.
And yet, you do it, because it’s the most inspiring thing to do!
Combined with the Hedgehog principle, preserving the core and stimulating progress, you have a system in place that can take your business from good to great. And even as you embark on this journey, you know that you will forever be on the road to making things better, not necessarily bigger, but always better.
Better—it’s a great place to be!
The action plan and summary coming in the next episode. Click here to listen to part 2: Good to Great: How To Escalate The Path To Greatness
http://www.psychotactics.com/path-to-greatness/
Storytelling has a lot of guidelines and rules. Yet, some of the critical elements slip under the radar. You don't realise storytelling elements and secrets that are hiding in plain sight. And storytellers can't always explain what they're doing?and so these elements of storytelling get left out. And yet, they're incredibly powerful. Like for instance, the concept of "anticipation" before the "problem". It's nowhere to be found? Unless of course you listen to this episode on how to tell riveting stories. Welcome to Goldilocks land!
http://www.psychotactics.com/three-elements-storytelling/
In this episode Sean talks about how to create stories that are very powerful. Part 1: How the ‘The Wall’ changes the pace of a story
Part 2: The power in using the ’The Reconnect’
Part 3: Why anticipation is so critical in storytelling
Earlier Recording: Right click and ‘save as’ to download this episode
Re-Release: Right click and ‘save as’ to download this episode
Useful Resources and Links The Brain Audit: How tointroduce your product in a language the customer understands
Read or listen to: How to double your writing speed
Special Bonus: How to design the pricing grid for your product
This is The 3 Month Vacation, and I’m Sean D’Souza. I was about 2 years old when I first had a bout of convulsions. It didn’t start up as convulsions. I was standing there on the balcony, looking out on the road, and then I fell off the stool that I was standing on. As the story goes, I ran to my mother. She noticed that I was having convulsions, and she panicked. Now, panic would be the wrong word to use because what she did next was bundled me in her arms and ran with me to the hospital.
To put you in the frame of mind of what India was when I was growing up, there were no phones or most people didn’t have phones. They didn’t have cars. You probably had a scooter if you were well off. That’s just how things were back then. What she had to do was run a distance of 2 kilometers, maybe 3 kilometers to get to the nearest hospital. When she got to the hospital, they wouldn’t admit me because I had meningitis and the hospital was not in the position to deal with cases of meningitis. Somehow, she managed to get them to admit me.
At that point in time, they asked for the mother. Now, my mother was very young at that point in time and they assumed that she was somehow the sister. They said, “No. No. No. You have to get the mother.” This is very odd in India because people tend to get married very early in India and yet they were insisting that they had to have the mother before they could go ahead with anything. There I was, not doing so well and the hospital authorities wouldn’t go ahead without dealing with the mother. Now, she convinced them but once they admitted me, there was one more problem. The doctor wasn’t so sure that I would survive the meningitis. He told my parents, and by that point, my father was there as well. He said, “I have to tell you this. Your son will either die or he’ll go mad.”
What you just heard was the story of my youth. The question is, why did you keep listening? Why did the story work? What is it that caused you to pay attention and not move away from the story?
In today’s episode, we’re going to cover storytelling elements: How to Avoid Boring Articles? The core of avoiding boring articles is to be able to tell stories, but stories are useful for presentations. They’re useful for books. They’re useful for webinars. They’re useful for pretty much everything. What happens is most of us load up our information with facts and figures, and those are very tiring but stories, they encapsulate everything. We’re going to learn how to create stories that are very powerful.
The 3 things we’re going to cover today are one, the wall; second, the reconnect; and third, the anticipation.
Part 1: The Wall Let’s start off with the first one which is the wall. Every afternoon, every weekday, I go through the same routine. I pick up my niece from school. She’s now 11, that’s Marsha. We speak about stuff in the car. We do multiplication tables. Recently, we’ve been doing storytelling. I usually when I asked her, “Tell me of story about what happened in the weekend.” She goes, “Nothing.” Then I say, “What happened in class?” She goes, “Nothing.” This is the interesting part. You think that there’s nothing happening in your life, but there is a lot happening all the time. Then, we have to zero in onto one little thing and make it interesting, just about anything becomes interesting in the way you dealt it.
I said, “Tell me about your piano class on Saturday.” Her little face brightens up and the smile comes on, and she goes, “I didn’t practice before going to piano class on Saturday. Then when I got to the piano class, I was really afraid because I thought I would the play the piece really badly. But as it appears, I played quite well. In fact, I played it so well that the piano teacher said, ‘I’m going to put you on a more advanced piece.’ Of course, once she gave me the advanced piece, I couldn’t play it. She said, ‘No. No. No. No. No. You’re playing it in the wrong key.’ I should try to play in the right key, but it didn’t worked.”
The piano teacher gave her another chance. Of course, she was not playing the piece well, so they went back to the old piece, which is what she had practice. Marsha was quite happily playing her old piece, but playing it by ear, not reading the notes. Happy as a luck when she looked at the corner of the room and there was her mother. According to Marsha, her mother was glaring at her because Marsha hadn’t improved and she was back to square one. How could the day have been worse for Marsha?
Now, that was a really short story. Why would you hook in to the story? The reason the story works is because there were these little blips along the way, what we call the wall. What is the wall? The wall is … Think of it as like a heart monitor. The heart monitor, when it’s absolutely flat, will go “Beeeep.” There is no sound. Then when the heart is beating, it will “Dub dub, dub dub, dub dub.” There is this little spike that jumps in every now and then, and that creates a wall. That creates that fact that you know that your heart is actually working. This is what happens in storytelling. Most people tell a story in a very boring fashion. The reason why they tell that is because there story would just go from one end to the other without the spikes.
What were the spikes in Marsha’s story? The first spike was the fact that she was afraid she hadn’t practiced. That got your attention. Then she went on to a new problem, which is that she had to go there to the class and then play a new piece. Then when she couldn’t play that new piece, she ran into a whole bunch of problems. She was thrown back to the old piece, which was a good thing, at least, to Marsha’s eyes but bad thing in the mother’s eyes, which is why the mother was glaring at her from the corner of the room. Then as Marsha finished the story, she says, “How could the day get worse?” This is a perfect, little story just told from one end to the other with all of these little blips, these little blips, the other wall. The other wall that you have to climb across so you can get into the alley and there’s a wall there and you have to climb over that wall to get to the other side. This is what creates interest.
The wall can be an obstacle. It can be something funny. It can be something unusual. As long as it changes the pace of the story, it becomes the wall because you now have to get over that wall onto the other side before the story can continue. More stories don’t run that way. For instance, if we look at Marsha’s story, we could say, “We went to piano class. On the way, I almost slipped in a banana peel, but then I recovered because I wasn’t feeling so well. Anyway, I got to the class and I played my piece. Then, I played the second piece.” You can see where the story is going, but at one point in time, when she slipped in the banana peel, you got that spike in your head. Even though you might not have thought about it at the time, there was that spike and you see the spike everywhere.
What’s more important is the spike has been with you right since you heard your first story being read to you as a kid. If you look at something like Red Riding Hood, it’s a very simple story. The girl goes to her grandmother’s house and she’s got this bag of goodies that her mother has packed for the grandmother. What happens along the way? Red Riding Hood runs into the wolf. Before that, there was no problem at all. The forest was not that intimidating. She got flowers along the way. Then, along came the wolf. The wolf creates the spike in the story. Now, this is a wall that she has to get over. She has to solve that problem.
If you look at all the stories that you heard or have told your kids, you will find a consistency in this wall, this obstacle, which means that we have to create stories with these spikes, with these obstacles. Then, we have to climb over these obstacles or rather take the reader or the listener across the obstacle and then to the other side.
Here’s what I do with Marsha. I make her sit down with a sheet of paper. Then I get her to draw a line across. At the starting point, she has, say, maybe she’s going to piano class. The ending point is whatever happens at the end. In between, I get her to draw little dots or little spikes, whatever you want to call them, and she has to put in those obstacles. As soon as she puts in those obstacles, we fill in the rest later. The point is once you identify those obstacles, you are able to turn out far better stories because now what you’ve done is you have created that bounce, you have created an obstacle, you have created a wall, and of course, people have to then go over it.
When I started out this podcast, I started out with a story about meningitis. I didn’t spend time explaining to you how I was looking out of the window. I went straight into the bounce, straight into the wall. I had convulsions. I fell down. I then had to run to my mother. You have been thrown right in the middle of this bounce. Of course, the bounce didn’t stop until we got to the hospital because now you’re thinking, “Okay, things are going to get okay.” Then, we have another wall. They won’t admit me to the hospital. Then, we get over that wall. Now, they were asking for the mother because they don’t believe that my mother was the mother, that they thought that she was the sister. Then, when all of those problems have been resolved, the doctor says the chances are not good. What we have of these bounces all along the way, these walls all along the way, and you have to cross over, get over these walls to create a great story. This is just the first element of storytelling.
Part 2: The Reconnect The second one is the concept called the reconnect. What is the reconnect? Right at the end of the previous section, which is when I was talking about the wall, I went right back to the story of meningitis. Immediately, your brain went from wherever it was right back to that original story. This is what storytellers use very effectively. They use the reconnect. They connect back to something they told you a while ago. It’s very powerful because that creates a bounce of its own. It takes you from where you are to where you used to be. If you’re to watch the movie Star Wars, there is this concept called the force. It’s used the force. Luke used the force. How many times does the word force show up in Star Wars? Apparently, more than 16 times. There you are in the cinema or watching the movie on a DVD or maybe on your computer, but you run into this concept of the force. Every time that reference to the force shows up and you don’t really notice it, but it just shows up, it takes you back to wherever you originally heard it or saw it.
Why is this reconnection so cool? The first thing is that often, it makes you feel very intelligent. The story is set up in a way that you know what is coming. When it does arrive, it makes you feel extremely intelligent. That’s what storytelling is about. It’s about making the reader feel a lot happier or a lot sadder, that they use to feel. You can feel that happiness or sadness as I edge into the meningitis story. You know what is coming next. You know how that story ended. It makes you feel very intelligent. It makes the reader or the listener feel very intelligent.
The second thing it does is it creates bounce. It bounces you back to wherever you were, and that creates that spike. It’s doing a dual job, but it does one more thing. It closes a loop. You can start off a story, and then knot in the story. Noticek what happened with my story. I can close that loop. I told you that the doctor said I would die or go mad. The loop wasn’t closed. What you can do is if you’re reconnecting at some point, you can close that loop. It’s very trendy to keep the loop open, but it drives people crazy.
This morning, I was on my walk and I was listening to an audio book about the brain. This author was talking about how he was at a David Attenborough conference. He was sitting there with someone else. They were having a discussion. Then he went into the discussion. About 20 minutes later, I’m going, “What did David Attenborough had to do with it?” He never closed that loop, and he will never close that loop. It will leave that gap in my brain, and that’s not a good thing. You want to create that disconnect, but then you want to reconnect later, you want to close that loop. That is the power of the reconnect.
Part 3: The Anticipation With that, we go to the third part, where we talk about anticipation and why it’s so critical in storytelling. We were doing our workshop in Campbell, California around the year 2006. One of the participants stood up. She was going to tell her story. She told us that her mother was very, very beautiful. She also told us that her sister was a lot like her mother. She then went on to tell us how her father would take photographs, but photographs of the mother and the sister. Notice how we haven’t completed that story. We haven’t really told you what comes next, but the anticipation is killing because you know what comes next. This is the beauty of anticipation. You create anticipation knowing fully well that you’re not leaving any gaps, but that the client, the listener, your reader is filling in the story, that 10%.
This is what Anil Dharker told me when I was growing up and I was just starting out in my cartooning career. Anil was the editor of a newspaper called Mid-day. I was drawing cartoons for that newspaper. One day, he came up to me and he says, “Sean, you’re giving too much away. You need to get the customer, the reader to anticipate that 10%. You’re giving away 90% of the story, but you are getting them to anticipate the 10% because readers and listeners and clients are very intelligent. What you should do is leave out the bits. Don’t give the entire story.”
Now, when you think about the advice you’re getting here on this podcast, you think, “Wait a second, you just said not to leave out gaps.” Yes, you don’t leave out the gaps. You reconnect, but you don’t tell the entire story upfront either. We’re taking the example, you got the story about the meningitis. You’ve got the story about how I got admitted to hospital. What happened next, you don’t know the rest to that story. That gap hasn’t been closed and yet you’re intelligent enough to figure out that there was an ending and how that ending shows up, that we’ll find out.
The reason why we have anticipation is because it creates suspense, it creates unknowing suspense. When you say the boy got on the bus, he would never get off. What you’re doing is you’re going into the brain of the customer and they can see something bad unfolding. When I told you about that father that never took photographs of one of the daughters, you could see that insecurity building up. You could see that loneliness, that detachment. No one had to explain that you, but you can do this very simply by saying, “I woke up expecting it to be a great day.” Within those few words, you have already created anticipation. The reader knows, the listener knows that it’s not going to be a great day.
How is it going to unfold? These are the lines that you have to put in your speech, in your presentation, in your writing because when you put in these lines, they create that pause, they create that white space, they create that breathing space. It allows the reader to anticipate what’s going to happen next. How is it going to twist and turn? Into Marsha’s story, where she talks about just how she went to piano class, she could say, “I thought it was going to be a very bad day.” Immediately, your mind goes [whizzing 00:19:00] forward to, “Wait, she said bad day but she didn’t sound like it was going to be a bad day. Did it turn out to be a bad day or not?” When she got to the piano class and she was able to play, now you’re relaxing. Then she puts in the other spike, and she goes, “I played that piece really well.” That created another problem for me. You notice what’s happening, the anticipation is setting you up for that spike, the problem that comes next. For us, the anticipation, then the problem. The anticipation, then the problem.
Really this is what you have to do when you’re writing great stories. You have to get the reader in the framework, in that frame of mind so that they know that there is something going to change, something I was about to open the drawer when or I walked down the garden, expecting it to be a completely miserable day. It had been raining all morning. You know, even though you don’t know the story is going to unfold, you know that there is going to be a change. You’re creating anticipation. You’re creating that space for the reader and the listener to fill in the gaps in the head. That makes them again feel very intelligent. It also sets it up for that spike that we talked about in the first section.
Summary What we’ve covered in today’s podcast has been 3 things. The first thing has been the wall. The wall creates those spikes. It creates that drama. It creates all of those blips that cause you to pay attention to the story. The second thing we looked at was the reconnect. How we start of something at the beginning; then somewhere in the middle, we connect; and then, we connect at the end, and there are these connections all over.
If you listen to Episode #54, you can hear all of these connects. Go back to Episode #54 and you can see all these reconnects, walls, and anticipation. Of course, that takes us to anticipation, which is that moment that tells you that something is going to change. It creates the suspense. It’s very, very powerful in storytelling. It’s this breathing space, this quiet just before the storm.
What’s the one thing that you can do today? The one thing that you can do today is go back to Episode #54 and listen to that episode because I listened to it just a few days ago. It has all of the stuff. Most of the podcast have it, but I just listened to Episode #54, so I know it’s there, so go back and listen to it. You will see that the wall, the reconnect and the anticipation is there. You’ll get a much better idea because you’ll be able to know in advance when that’s showing up.
I had mentioned that we were going to do some workshops in Nashville, Tennessee and in Amsterdam, which is in the Netherlands. We are still looking for a venue. If you know some venues, let us know. In the meantime, if you would like to sign up for a storytelling workshop, then just email me at sean@psychotactics.com. We will send you more details. It’s still work in progress. As you know, we still haven’t found venue, which is the first step. If you know something, let us know.
Storytelling is incredibly important. A lot of us leave out storytelling. We give facts and figures. This is why most books and presentation and webinars are so boring. The reason why you find the Brain Audit so interesting is the number of stories and analogies and examples, and then go back and read your copy of the Brain Audit or go to www.psychotactics.com/brainaudit and buy a copy, and you will see how critical it is to have these stories and how it reminds you of what you learned weeks, months, years after you learned it.
In the end, statistics don’t sell. The story, the emotion that’s built in within that story, and a story well told is what sells a product or a service. You go for this year and the years to come must be to tell better stories, not to give more information. That brings us to the end of this episode. If you’re in 5000bc and you’re a member, then, please go in and ask questions about storytelling and I’ll be more than happy to answer your questions. If you haven’t joined 5000bc, then get your copy of the Brain Audit first, read the stories and then join 5000bc.
You know how I started this episode with the doctor saying that I would die or go mad. I didn’t die. That’s me, Sean D’Souza from The 3 Month Vacation saying bye for now. Bye-bye.
Still reading?
When we try to tell stories, we get stuck. When we try to learn a new skill, we get stuck. So, how do you dramatically increase your rate of learning without getting stuck? Find out here—Accelerated Learning: How To Incredibly Speed Up Your Skill Acquisition: Episode 52
http://www.psychotactics.com/accelerated-learning-skill/
When your client picks up your report, can you guarantee they'll read it from start to finish? No matter how good the content, there are precise elements that cause a client to completely consume the report. This episode delves into three of the most important elements that makes your report stand out and more importantly, get read.
http://www.psychotactics.com/secret-getting-your-report-read/
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: What makes a report powerful?
Part 2: What are tiny increments?
Part 3: How to empower your reader
Earlier Recording: Right click and ‘save as’ to download this episode.
Re-Release: Right click and ‘save as’ to download this episode.
Useful Resources and Links Dart Board Pricing: How To Increase Prices (Without Losing Customers)
The Headline Report: Why Headlines Fail
The 70% Principle: Why It Knocks Procrastination Out of the Ball Park
Back in the year 2003 I wrote an article where you just had to take three steps to write a great headline. You could test the headline and you could find out in minutes that it worked for you, and it also got the attention of your customers. I wasn’t prepared for how popular that article would be. As we were looking at the statistics of the Psychotactics site, we saw that the article got picked up over and over again. Then we decided, let’s make this a report. Surprisingly, when I took that same article, which was just about 800 words, and I put it into a PDF and put some graphics and an introduction and some cartoons, it became close to a ten-page book. That is the headline report.
This is the interesting part. The report was nothing more than an article. Can we all do the same? Can we just write an 800-word article, put it in a report, and make it powerful? Not quite. You have to understand why the report works. We’re going to break up that headline report here today on this podcast. You’ll see for yourself, there are three elements that make it work. Let’s explore those three elements.
What makes the report so powerful? The key factor is not the elements but the overall concept. The overall concept is one of empowerment. We are so hung up on the concept of information that we forget what we really have to do as teachers. As teachers we have to empower. We know we’ve done our job correctly when the client is able to do exactly what we’re doing, and possibly even better. Frankly, when I was writing the headline report I wasn’t thinking of this. I wasn’t thinking of empowerment. I wasn’t thinking of the elements. But when you deconstruct the report you can see there are three very specific elements that make it that empowerment tool. The first of the elements is tiny increments. The second is the length. The third are the examples in the report. Let’s explore each one systematically. Let’s start off with the first one, which is the tiny increments.
What are tiny increments? About a month ago I got myself some recording hardware. It has all these buttons and it’s very hard to figure out which button to press and when to press it. Of course you don’t want to look at the manual because that’s really badly written. Maybe you go online like I did and you go to YouTube. There are lots of tutorials on how to use it, but there is all this unboxing and then something else and something else. 35 minutes later, you have no clue what you’re supposed to do. Then I found a video that was only three minutes long. The video only covered turning on the device. Now, it was three minutes long. How much can you learn about turning on a device? It’s a little switch. But it was so cool. I could actually do it. It was a tiny increment.
You don’t have to put in a ton of information for people to be impressed. You have to empower. At the end of the video, what could I do? I could turn on the device. So I go to the next video. In the next video, they cover a little bit again. This is the concept of tiny increments. When we’re teaching, we don’t understand that the client doesn’t get what we’re saying. Let’s say you’ve come to one of the Psychotactics workshops and we’re doing an experiment. We’re saying we’re going to take steps now. I say, “Okay, let’s take a step.” Then you watch the people in the room. What do they do? Almost everyone will take a step forward, but someone will take a step to the left, or someone will take a step to the right, or someone will take a step back. Now we have all these permutations where people are going off-tangent. If they just take one step, they just make one mistake, you can pull them back and then say, “What I meant was take a step to the left.” Now the whole group can go one step back, one step to the left, and now we’re on target.
When you have something that has a very tiny increment, the customer can only make a very small mistake. You can spot the mistake and pull them back, or you can show them that mistake in your report and pull them back. When you have this wealth of information, all these buttons to press and all these things to do all at once, suddenly the customer is lost. When they’re lost, they’re intimidated, and intimidation doesn’t create a safe zone, and when you don’t create a safe zone then of course you don’t get empowerment.
The first factor you have to look at when you look at the headline report is this concept of tiny increments. You only have to take a very tiny step to get from point A to point B. When you’ve taken that step, you can go from point B to point C. This is what struck me when I stepped into an Apple store many years ago. It’s one of the reasons why I bought an Apple even though I’d been using a PC for ages. When I got into the store, I just had to do one thing. That one thing led to the next thing, and that next thing led to the next thing. This is very cool. You see it on the iPad where you just have to press a little button, and that one thing leads to the next thing. This is the concept of tiny increments. You see this in the headline report. It’s what you’ve got to do in your report: just one little step.
Now this takes us to the second one, which is the concept of length. Length really helps in empowerment. Every time I speak to someone about this podcast, I will say, “The podcast is only about 15 to 20 minutes long.” But what if were to say, “It’s only two to three hours long’? There would be a very clear difference. When you say 15 to 20 minutes long people think, “I could go for a little walk and I could listen to the podcast.” This principle of length is critical, especially when a customer doesn’t know you that well and you have to get your message across without going crazy on them. It has helped me when I was trying to work out that audio hardware. I just had to deal with three minutes, and then after that the next three minutes, and then the next three minutes. Every one of those three-minute capsules, they empowered me. They moved me forward. The headline report does this in a really fascinating way. It moves youforward. Within ten pages, you’re done. Now the question arises: Is that it? Is that all you could write about headlines? No, of course not. You could write 300 pages or 500 pages. There is a wealth of information in the world of headlines. But do you have to put in the report?
The core of empowerment is simply one of length. When there is not too much of it, someone is able to consume it. Once they’re able to consume it, you have empowered them. You know that because you can get them to teach you what you’ve just taught them and they will do that spectacularly well. We take the first concept, which is tiny increments, and we take the second concept, which is length, and that leaves us with just the third one.
What is the third concept? The third concept is simply one of examples and case studies. When you listen to this podcast, you got a whole bunch of examples about the recording device and how I had to fiddle with it. You also got the example of how the iPad worked, and of course my visit to the Apple store for the first time in 2008. Those were examples. Why were those examples there? They weren’t just random stuff. For one thing, the example lowers that intimidation factor.
Immediately you’re taken on a little side journey, a little detour. That helps you to focus on the idea, but it also helps you understand the concept in greater detail. When you look at the headline report you’ll find that there is an example of how the headline is being built stage by stage. If all you had was a concept of how to write a headline without the example it would be so much more dreary and harder to achieve the same result. As a teacher, that’s your goal. Your goal is to empower. Examples empower. Case studies empower. Stories empower. Go down that path and put it in your report. Whether you’re reading The Brain Audit, or Pricing,or any book, you will find that we use this concept. That’s what clients read and go, “Wow, I should delve more into this stuff.” The biggest problem that we have is we know too much. We try to put all that too much into our reports, into our books, into our presentations. Does it empower? It’s easy to give information. A lot of people are giving a lot of information. It’s all stuff coming at you left, right, and center, and you don’t know where to go. Your client doesn’t know where to go either.
Have this little guiding light of empowerment and everything changes. We started out with a report. We started out with just a little article, but that article had steps, and it went from one step to another to another. When it got into the report stage it was clearer because of the graphics, because of the layout. That’s how you should go about writing your report. Think about empowerment and think about the three things that we’ve covered today. The first thing that we covered today was tiny increments. Remember that even if you say take one step, people can steps in all directions, show you take very tiny steps. The second thing is one of length. A three-hour podcast, a 300-page report, very interesting but no one’s going to read it. You want to keep it simple. You want to keep it within ten or 12 pages. Finally, you want to reduce that intimidation factor. It’s very hard to understand the new concept. Having examples, having stories, having case studies, this really makes it easier for me to figure out what you’re saying.
Which brings us to the end of this podcast. What is the one thing that you can do? I think the one thing that you should do is to just boil it down to three things. You’ve seen how this podcast just covers three elements. If I wanted to write a book on how to create a great report, I could write 200 pages. But this podcast, it’s a report. It’s just got three points, three simple points, and you’ve been empowered. I think you should do the same. Just jot down three points. I know there are 700 points on the topic. Just focus on three and you’ll have a report that someone actually consumes. Now isn’t that a novel idea?
What have we been doing in the past six weeks or so? If you’ve been following this podcast, you know that we went off to Washington D.C. to have the information products workshop. It’s just 25-30 people in a room. Everyone gets to know each other. Everyone works with each other. It’s an amazing event. We don’t do the Psychotactics workshops very often, so if you ever get a chance to get to a Psychotactics workshop, you should come. It’s empowerment at its very best. You’ll see it at the workshop. From there we flew to Denver and I presented at the Opera House in Denver and lost my voice, got it back, struggled through the whole episode. My wife gave me an eight on ten. She has given me a -2 in the past, so I think I did a pretty good job. That comes down to practice and getting all your act together.
During the event, some things went wrong for speakers. The video didn’t show up at the right time, or it didn’t sync with the audio. The way to solve this problem is to do all of the groundwork. I was there a few days in advance, getting over the tiredness factor, making sure that I knew the length of the stage, looking for any light distractions. Because when you’re on a stage a lot of lights hit you, especially on a stage of that size. You need to know where you need to stop before light hits you in the face and you can’t see a thing. You also need to speak to the audio and the video people, because they recommended stuff to me that ensured our whole presentation was absolutely flawless. There’s a lot of background stuff that you have to do, and that marks you out as a professional. I was completely hampered on stage there. I was sniffling and I could barely speak, but that eight on ten, that was because of all the groundwork that went before. As much as I would have liked to get full marks from my wife, at least I was able to struggle to an eight. You know it goes well because when you step out of the auditorium, people come up to you and go, “I’m going to make this fix today. I’m going to make this change today.” You have empowered them.
Once we finished with all of the work and the presentations, we went on to Sardinia. We had a great time. Sardinia is this big island off Italy. You’ve probably heard of Sicily. If you look to the left, there is Sardinia. The food is absolutely stunning. We go on vacations because of the food. We really don’t care that much about the monuments. The food has to be good. We gorged a lot and we walked a lot of slopes. That’s how we keep our weight in check. Three weeks in Sardinia, a stopover in San Francisco, and now we’re back in New Zealand. I have to admit it’s been hard getting back to work, even though it’s been a week. This nasty cough that started in Washington D.C. followed me through Denver, through Sardinia, through San Francisco. It’s okay now but it’s been a long run. Nonetheless, it was worth doing the info products course in Washington D.C..
If you missed that, then I would strongly suggest that you get the home study. It’s not cheap but it helps you construct that book. You go from this report and you can create audio, video or webinars, but not just any old webinar or any audio or book, but stuff that empowers and empowers in a big way. You can find that in the product section of the Psychotactics site. If you’re not looking for something quite that big, you might want to check out Dartboard Pricing, because if nothing else you want to increase your prices without losing customers. You can find that at psychotactics.com/ttc. If on the other hand you want to send me a message, I’m at @SeanD’Souza on Twitter, Sean D’Souza on Facebook, and of course on Psychotactics at sean@psychotactics.com. If you’re wondering how you can deconstruct the headline report, you can go to psychotactics.com and subscribe, and you will get the headline report. If you’ve already subscribed, go to psychotactics.com/psychoheadlines.pdf, and there it is just for you. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now. You can also listen to or read this episode: #8:The Power of Enough—And Why It’s Critical To Your Sanity http://www.psychotactics.com/power-enough-critical-sanity/
The Three-Month Vacation, that's one of the things that make me really happy. But what else is required to keep that happiness level up? The key lies in identifying the obstacles. When we remove the obstacles, we know how to get to happiness. This may seem like a weird topic to take on, but check it out for yourself. Happiness isn't some weird pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It isn't some Internet marketer promising you endless clients. It's reachable, you know. So check it out.
Useful Resources
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
Transcript:http://www.psychotactics.com/three-obstacles-to-happiness/
When I was 8 years old the highlight of my week was “coconut water”. On Saturdays, I’d go with my father to get all the provisions for the week. There was no drive to the supermarket ten times a week. Instead, once a week, we’d get on the train, then walk into a market filled with fresh vegetables, meat, fish and fruit. And in the middle of this market was a guy who sold coconuts—and coconut water.
Almost nothing brought a smile to my face as much as the thought of drinking coconut water on Saturdays. It was my moment of pure bliss.
And that, just that, is the secret of life We go around trying to find the purpose of life, when the answer is right in front of us all the time. The purpose of life is to be “happy”.
Except I wasn’t entirely happy with just the coconut water After we bought a ton of meat, fish and vegetables and headed back to the train station, we’d eat a potato snack dipped in a mixture of green mint chutney and tamarind sauce. Now that too, was my moment of bliss.
So wait, this happiness story is getting weird, isn’t it? I mean here we are trying to establish happiness, and it seems we’re jumping from one point to another. And that’s exactly the point! No one thing makes us happy. For me, my current moments of bliss are the walk to the cafe with my wife, the coffee, let’s not forget the coffee. There’s also the time I spend with my nieces. My painting, my work, the music on my podcast, single malt whisky—and yes, the 3-Month vacations.
And yet, most of us never write down what makes us happy So do it as an exercise. Get out a sheet of paper. Make the list. It won’t necessarily be a very long list. And the funny thing is that it will consist of rather mundane things like gardening, a walk on the beach—I even know someone who is super contented by ironing. Making the list enables us to know what we really want from life, so we can start heading in that direction.
Because frothing, right in front of us are the obstacles. They’re determined to reduce, even eliminate our happiness.
So what are these obstacles? They are:
– Inefficiency
– Greed
– Self-doubt
Inefficiency? Really?
Yes, really! Though you’d never expect to see inefficiency in a happiness list, it’s the No.1 killer of happiness. That’s because if you were to look at your list again, you’d find that everything that makes you happy, also takes time.
Time that you’re spending being inefficient Look at the software you’re using. How efficient are you at it? Let’s take for example the “Three Month Vacation” podcast that I create. Well, the podcast recording itself is just 15-17 minutes. And I can usually do it in one take. But each podcast is matched to music—often as many as eight different pieces of music (you have to listen to it, to believe it). And all this music, and production, and editing—well, it takes 3 hours.
So the question that arises is just this: How do you save 10 minutes? Just 10 minutes in a three-hour exercise, adds up to 20 a week—about bout 100 a month. Which totals up to 1200 a year. That’s 20 hours of happiness deprivation and for what? For inefficiency? That’s a stupid, yes stupid, way to go about things isn’t it?
But we do it routinely—we stay inefficient We know that one of the best ways to get clients is to write a book, or a booklet. To create information that draws clients to you, instead of you chasing after them. And we know that the book can’t just be “written”. It needs structure. But no, no, no, no and no. We just sit down and write the book. And many, many hours later, we’re not sure why we’re struggling so much with the book. Or why a client is even going to read it. And we’re stepping deeper in the doo-doo of inefficiency.
So what are we to do? Well, we have a list of what makes us happy, right? How about a list of the things we do; the software we use; the books, video, audio we have to create? How about a list—and not a very long list, that enables us to see where we can get more efficient? Instead of slogging for a year over a book, would there be a way to write it using structure? That alone could shave off 10 months of twirling round and round.
If you’re using a piece of software, how about learning just two shortcuts a week? Just two a week! See how that brings inefficiency down to its knees, two shortcuts at a time. Yes, inefficiency is a big problem, but greed isn’t far behind is it? Let’s examine greed, shall we?
So what’s the big deal with greed? I think greed is good. Whenever I’m greedy, I’ve almost never felt bad. I’m pretty happy when stuffing my face with one more helping of biryani (that’s a rich, rice dish) or another heap of maccha ice-cream. So greed itself isn’t a problem.
But it sure can get in the way That’s because it takes time to wash off the greed. Too much ice-cream, too much wanting this and that—it all takes time. Because I now have to balance out that greed and atone for it in some way. I have to walk more, exercise more, work more. It doesn’t make sense, does it?
Yet we have all the dollar signs in our face We have marketers that show us how much they earn. This month I earned x. no of dollars. The month after, I earned so much more.
Oh, look a dip in income!
That’s not good. Let’s work twice as much to obliterate that dip. And so we follow along like idiots expecting that the dollars will show us the way.
And they do. Without the dollars we’re just spinning our wheels.
But there’s a point of enough. Again, this comes down to a definition, perhaps even a list. What’s your enough? Do you know? Even though I love my nieces dearly, I do have a point of enough. Coconut water? Even an 8-year old could tell you what was enough. And yes, the dollars. Do we really have to keep doubling them? Are we working for the joy of working, or are we slaves to the smile of our bank managers?
Greed is nice in small bursts, but terrible as a strategy We pay the price and it becomes a form of inefficiency—and the second barrier to our happiness. Which slides us into the third big hurdle, which is just as surprising. Namely, self-doubt.
Self doubt is a big rocking chair, isn’t it? You know the concept of a rocking chair, don’t you? It gives you the feeling of movement, but it goes nowhere. Self-doubt is like that, doing cartwheels in the velodrome of our brain.
But run into a person who’s always second-guessing themselves, and you realise that you can’t do much about it. And it’s terribly inefficient, this self-doubt. It fills your brain with a load of nonsense that keeps you from being happy. And there’s nothing much you can do it about it, because the damage isn’t new. It’s something that has been part of you for a good chunk of your life.
So learn to say thank you. That’s it. The inefficiency comes from the fact that someone won’t like your article, your book, your painting, your garden, the muffins you just baked , etc. And if you just assume that you’re at the point of “thank you,” you’ve saved yourself a lot of grief. Because if you’re saying “thank you,” it means you just got complimented on something. Even just the thought of saying thanks is making you smile right now, isn’t it?
Now you no longer have to apologise, or back track. The thank you is your way out of the mess, every single time.
The secret of life is in knowing what you want—what you really want It’s the inefficiencies, the greed and the self-doubt that get in our way. Can we save 10 minutes of inefficiency? Can we define our “enough” so we can earn what we want, but then stop? Can we get off the rocking chair by envisioning the “thank you” that is to follow?
Just recognising the barriers and getting out of their way, that’s the goal, isn’t it?
The secret of being happy isn’t as hard as it seems.
Well, it can be.
Right at this moment I can’t decide: coconut water or coffee?
Still reading? Have a look at—How To Slow Down—And Why It’s Critical: Episode 17
http://www.psychotactics.com/to-slow-down/
Is the 10,000 hours principle true? And if it's true, what are your chances of success? And what are the biggest flaw? How do you take the concept of Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 Hours story (He took it from a K.Anders Ericsson study) and reduce the number of hours? Is talent really attainable in fewer hours?
http://www.psychotactics.com/expertise-fewer-10000-hours/
Hi. This is Sean D’Souza from Psychotactics.com, and you are listening to the Three-Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn’t some magic trick about working less. Instead, it’s about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. Have you ever watched a 16-year-old go for a driving test? They probably practice for two or three off and on, and then after that, they drive. Now, imagine they changed the rules of the driving test. Imagine they said that you needed 10,000 hours to drive. How many of us would be on the roads today?
Several years ago, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called “Outliers”. Within that book, there was this concept of 10,000 hours, and the concept was very simple. It said that if you wanted to be exceedingly good at something, you needed to spend at least 10,000 hours. As you can quite quickly calculate, that’s about 10 years of very had work or 5 years of extremely hard work.
The interesting thing about 10,000-hour principle is that two sets of people jump on it, the people that had already put in their 10,000 hours in something and those who hadn’t; but what if you hadn’t?
What if you hadn’t put in those 10,000 hours? Were you doomed to be always untalented? Understanding this concept of the 10,000 hours is very important, especially if you want to take vacations. You have to get very skilled at a lot of things very quickly. If you don’t understand the concept, then you struggle for no reason at all.
In today’s episode of the Three-Month Vacation, we’re going to cover three things. The first is, why is the 10,000 hours true?
The second, what are the biggest flaws in the 10,000 hours?
The third is, how do you go about shortening that process, so that you just do maybe a thousand hours?
Let’s start out with the concept of why the 10,000 hours is absolutely true. Now, nothing is absolutely true, but the 10,000-hour principle works for a simple reason. That is we don’t know that we’re making mistakes. If you take a guitarist, say someone like John Mayer, or Eric Clapton, or B.B. King, and you look at how long they spent with their guitar, they probably spent an excessive 10,000 hours.
When you’re starting out and when you’re playing that guitar, you don’t really know what mistakes you’re making, and you don’t really care. You’re there just to play the guitar, and this is what a lot of artists do. This is what a lot of writers do. They spend enormous amounts of hours just fooling around, just playing the guitar, just drawing a cartoon, just writing something, and they make mistakes. They make a lot of mistakes, but the problem is they don’t know that they’re making a mistake.
Take for instance my own life. When I started drawing cartoons, I was probably just out of school, and I was drawing cartoons that are pretty flat. One day, my friend, Howard, he said, “Well, there’s something wrong with your drawing.” I said, “What’s wrong?” He couldn’t explain, but he said, “They’re really flat.” It was then I realized that I wasn’t using perspective. Until that moment, I didn’t realize. I’ve been drawing for hundreds, maybe thousands of hours, but I didn’t realize I was making a mistake.
Several years later, I started doing commercial projects, and someone mentioned that my lines were too weak. Lines are too weak? What do you mean by lines are too weak? They couldn’t explain, but I had to do my own research, and then I found that great artists have this variation in their life to take and attend. This is what most musicians, artists, painters, people who are talented at anything that you think are talented at something, they’ve spent thousands of hours just making mistakes. If you take the mistakes out of the equation, we don’t have 10,000 hours. We have a thousand hours, maybe less.
If you go strictly by the rulebook, you can fly a commercial aircraft after 1,500 hours. Now, admittedly, you’re not going to get a job for 1,500 hours, but you can fly it. You can fly one of those big jets after having done just 1,500 hours. This is true for cartooning as well. This is true for writing. It’s easy to say that it’s true, but the proof or the footing is in the eating, so we decided to prove the point.
In 2010, we started a course that we knew for sure no one or very few people to do, and that is to draw cartoons. People into the course is saying, “Well, I can’t draw a straight line.” The ironic thing is that to be a cartoonist, you don’t have to draw a straight line. You have to draw wobbly lines all over the place. Nonetheless, within 6 months, those people that joined the course and stayed for those 6 months were drawing so well that people were commissioning work from them. They were asking them, “Are you a professional cartoonist?”
It’s amazing because when you think about it, these are all business owners. They probably have an hour a day, five day a week. That makes it about 25 hours in a month. In 6 months, that’s 150 hours. Within just 150 hours, they changed the perception of someone looking at them. Suddenly, to the outside world, these guys were cartoonists since they were little.
It doesn’t take 150 hours to learn to drive a car, and that’s because there are fewer moving parts as it were. There are moving parts with cartooning. You have to learn perspective, and thick and thin, and background, foreground. Lots of things. Lots of little, little things that make a great painting, and the same applies for writing, and the same applies for any language that you’re learning. There are lots of these moving parts.
The difference between a guitarist that just picks up a guitar and plays, and this person who’s learning how to draw cartoons or write, they are running into mistakes, and those mistakes are being picked up very quickly and fixed. Yes, the 10,000 hours work, but they don’t work when the mistakes can be picked up very quickly and fixed. This is the reason why pilots don’t crash planes every day. It’s because they sit in a simulator, and the simulator picks up those mistakes, and it enables you to fix those mistakes. Yes, the 10,000 hours works, but only if you don’t know what mistakes you’re making.
When you’re younger, there is no pressure to earn money, or win any competition, or do anything, so you’re allowed to make those mistakes, and then fix them in your own time. This is why it takes 10,000 hours to get to that level of mastery. While this brings us to the end of the first part, we have to explore the second part which is, why does the flaw exist? Why don’t we pick up these mistakes?
The biggest reason why we don’t pick up the mistakes is very simple. As we grow up, we’re not supposed to make mistakes. We’re supposed to get things right. When you do a test, nobody says, “Hey, you have to get 30% of your test wrong.” You’re expected to get it all right. Once you have this situation where there is pressure to always get things right, then we have a real problem. People will routinely tell you, you should make mistakes. Then, you can learn from your mistakes, but you’re not allowed to make mistakes, so it becomes a catch when you do situation.
When we sit down to write a book or a report, or we sit down to write an article, or we sit down to draw, or we sit down to learn Photoshop, we run into this situation where we are not making enough mistakes, and not being able to pick them up quickly, and not being able to fix them. The only way out of this problem is to have a system where you can make mistakes, and so this is what we do on the headline course, for instance.
There is one week where you learn how to write the headlines and another week where you write the wrong headlines, and you would say, “What’s the deal?” Why should you learn to write the wrong headlines? Think about it for a second. It’s the same thing that pilots go through. They go through a simulator exercise where the plane is crashing. They have to learn to identify the mistake because mistakes are not apparent. The mistakes have to be highlighted. You have to run through the mistakes, and that’s when the speed increases.
The reason why we struggle and think that everyone else is talented is because somehow, they’ve had time to get to those mistakes and fix those mistakes, and we don’t have that time. As we grow up, we have more responsibilities, and we have more activity, and we have more things that we have to do. Getting straight to the mistakes and fixing those mistakes is what makes it powerful.
If you look at talent as something that is inborn, you will struggle all your life because it means you can never have it; but if you look at talent as a reduction of errors or reduction of mistakes, then you realise that you just have to find the mistakes and eliminate them, or at least reduce them, and you have talent. The flow exist in the system that doesn’t allow you to make mistakes, and this takes us to the third part of this episode which is how to get there quickly.
There are three elements to get to a talent very quickly. The first is the teacher, the second is the system, and the third is the group. If we start up with the teacher, then the teacher must have a method, and that method should be about creating safety. If you’re intimidated, it is much harder to do anything because you’re scared all the time, so the teacher must be able to create a safe zone for you.
They must have the second element which is the system, and the system must take you through tiny increments. When you say tiny increments, they need to be very small moves like one inch today, one inch tomorrow. Very, very small moves. The reason for that is, supposing you were given a big move to make and say I said, “Move a few steps,” well, you can move three steps left, three steps right, three steps forward or backward. Now, you have to come back three whole steps. Instead, if you make a very small move which is one step, you only have to move one step back, and this is not usually the case.
If any of you have done a photography class, you know exactly what I mean. In that one class, they will talk about exposure, and F-stops, and aperture, and everything; and then, you’re completely confused. You’re not able to take one step, and so you go back to your auto-mode. Most photographers will tell you, “You shouldn’t be on auto-mode. You should be in manual mode. That’s the way to be. You should know your camera like your left hand or your right hand.”
Wait a second. Did you actually take one step at a time when you were teaching? Because even when you take a single step, you can be sure that at least a good section of your students have got it wrong, and now you have to bring them back. You have to bring them back to parity, and then take them one step forward. That’s not how training is built. Training is not built by these tiny little increments. Books are not written with these tiny increments. There’s chapter after chapter, after chapter. Of course, we get lost, and so then we think we’re not talented where in fact, the system is at fault.
There aren’t enough opportunities to make the mistake for the mistake to be detected, and then for you to rectify that mistake. The way to fix this flaw is to learn in a group. The reason why a group setting is so powerful is because the traditional way of testing someone is really bad. Remember when you were in school, and everyone did their test, and you got some things wrong, and somebody else got some things wrong; but eventually, nobody got to see what the other person got wrong.
You’d do your assignment, and you’d hand it to the teacher, and she’d mark it and give it back to you, and only you could see what you got wrong; but if the entire group could see what you got wrong, they could learn from your mistake and you could learn from their mistakes. This is the fundamental flaw in most training. We’re not allowed to see everybody else’s work, but when you see other people’s work, you can learn from their work.
It seems quite obvious when someone tells you this that you could learn from other people, but that’s not how the system is built, and this is why it takes 10,000 hours to reach anywhere or 10,000 hours to reach that level of mastery. People are not stupid. People are very, very intelligent. People have the ability to acquire talent. People have the ability to reduce their errors; but often, it’s the teacher, the system, and the group, or the lack of group that lets them down. If you believe that someone else is more talented that you at cooking, at drawing, at painting, at writing, the reason is you haven’t figured out the mistakes and removed them. Once you do that, you have talent.
Let’s summarize what we’ve learned so far. The first thing we covered today is the whole concept of the 10,000 hours, and was it true? We found out yes, it is true. It takes a long time because we don’t know the mistakes. If we don’t know the mistakes, then we make them, and we don’t realise we’re making those mistakes. The second thing we covered was the flaw that exist, and that is people tell you to make mistakes, but no one gives you the chance to make the mistakes. There is no system emplaced. There is no whole week of, “Let’s make these mistakes, so that we can learn from them.”
This takes us to the third part which is you have to have a teacher, you have to have a system, and you have to have a group. When you have these three elements, the teacher will work out the tiny increments and move you forward. The system will be not just how to, but how not to. Finally, the group will expose the errors of another 20 people; so now, you’re able to look at 20 errors, and at least learn from them, and possibly not make those errors in the future. The exposure to errors, that is the critical part of talent. Talent is simply a reduction of errors.
What’s the one thing that you can do today? Probably, the best thing that you can do for yourself is to stop looking at how to. Start looking at courses, and training, and systems that talk about how not to because unless they have both the how-to and the how-not-to component, you’re going to make errors that you don’t even realise you’re making, and then you get stuck. In the moment you get stuck, you think, “Well, this is not for me. I’m not good at this. I’m not talented;” and it’s not that at all.
When the system is built with mistakes as part of the assignments, that’s when you know that you’re in the right path, and that’s when you know what you can quickly acquire that talent. Talent acquisition is really cool because you can now do the very same thing in half the time or a lot of the time. Of course, this gives you more scope to do other stuff, achieve more stuff, and go on vacation.
If you have any questions then email us at sean@psychotactics.com. You’ll find this on the website or sean@5000bc.com.
Also, I’m giving away something free that is a report on outwitting resistance.
If you’ve ever been stuck because you don’t know how to battle resistance, there’s this really cool report, and it’s free—How to Win the Resistance Game.
http://www.psychotactics.com/free/resistance-game/
Imagine you had a program that generated over $150,000 a year. Let's also imagine that this program always had a waiting list and that clients loved it. Would you stop the program, or let it run? In 2006, we started the Protege Program and by 2009, it came to an abrupt halt. But was it abrupt? And why did it stop in the first place?
These stories and more show up in the Psychotactics story. There's not a moment of boredom as we head into the roller coaster of 2009 and beyond. Where we explore the crazy world of workshops, this time outside the safety of California. It's one nutty, exciting ride. Buckle up, because it's action-packed and full of lessons for your own small business.
http://www.psychotactics.com/stopped-protege/
Psychotactics Workshop Story: Part 2 “This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.”
It was February 2006 I’d just started a crazy venture called the Protege. Well it was crazy for me at least. I’d written a sales letter promising that I would teach six courses in one year. The courses were Article Writing, Copy Writing, Information Product Strategy, Website Strategy, Core Marketing Strategy and PR (Public Relations). And no sooner than the Protege sessions started up when I had this idea of holding a workshop for the Proteges in California.
There was only one problem This workshop was not part of what I’d promised. It was an extra workshop of five days. For the first three days we’d be working on Website Strategy and the next two days would be closed-door Protege sessions. So the problem that arose instantly was one of scheduling, money, effort and a few dozen assorted issues. For me it meant that I had to book a room somewhere in the U.S., book flights and do an entire workshop in slides in less than eight weeks. What’s more interesting is that the workshop didn’t exist. Notes didn’t exist and neither did the slides.
This was compounded by a few interesting facts The Protege year was something that was just dreamed up in a salesletter. No material existed for any of the six courses (today they all exist in audio/text, but back then I was creating it as the courses rolled along). So I had this cute little challenge of hosting live teleclasses (training calls), creating content on the fly, managing a forum with 15 proteges and preparing for a workshop all at once.
Admittedly those were problems that were pretty rough but that was the least of my problems I also had a bit of a mutiny on my hands. I hadn’t made the workshop a compulsory attendance issue (you could attend if you like to) but I sure stressed it was important. I also required each of the proteges to cough up an additional $500 for the workshop (it was just to cover the costs of the venue etc.) This additional payment didn’t go down well. What made it worse was they had to travel to Campbell, California, stay in a hotel and had all of this additional expenditure—not to mention they all had to take at least a week off from work. They were not happy in the least. It was almost like a bit of bait and switch.
But in my mind it wasn’t bait and switch at all
I really felt that those five days would be of immense help to the Proteges. For one there was the factor of learning in a compressed state (over five days). There was also the factor of connecting with each other because when people connect, they work better after the connection. To me it seemed quite sensible to have a meeting like this totally out of the blue (just kidding). But this sudden move kicked up a ton of dust and I then spent a fair bit of time on the phone, and via the forums and email sorting things out.
Once things were sorted out the real work began We had to find a venue and get on with the job of getting the show on the road. Because Renuka’s sister, Audrey lived in Campbell, she did some scouting around for us and we soon located a meeting room at the adorable Pruneyard Plaza just 5 minutes away from Audrey’s house. And unlike the earlier workshops there was absolutely no drama at all this time around.
All we had to do was land in San Francisco, and we were picked up from the airport. We were chauffeured around from Kinko’s (where we got our binders and notes photocopied) to Costco and just about everywhere. In fact the hotel even picked us up at 7am from the house every morning and dropped us back every evening (I bet no one has ever done that before or since). And the workshop went like a dream. Oh I forgot to tell you how we made a profit on the workshop.
So here’s how we made a profit $500 per Protege wasn’t even barely going to cover the airfares and costs of the workshops, and if you’re going to do a workshop might as well make a profit. That’s only part of the issue. When you’re doing a workshop, you want to make sure you have a full house. Having just ten or fifteen people in a room is nice, but having about 25-30 people in the room really creates enormous energy in the room. So we decided to sell 15 -18 seats (we only ever take 33-35 attendees—never more). And the good thing was that we had already “sold” 15 seats because all the Proteges decided to show up. This created an instant urgency because 50% of the seats were taken. Bear in mind this workshop was selling at $2200 per head or thereabouts, so it wasn’t an easy sell. Even so, the workshop was soon filled. The Campbell workshop was well on its way.
The Campbell workshops and the Protege Program went on till the year 2008 The Protege Program was a reasonably profitable program generating anything between $100,000-$150,000 a year. And year after year we’d have the workshop in Campbell, CA and there were never any hitches. And it became part of the Prot’g’ Program. What was even cooler was we started speaking at the System Seminar in Chicago, which was often held around the same time as ourProtege sessions, and so we’d finish the Protege and head to Chicago, do a speaking engagement and head for a well deserved break either within the US or to Europe.
But then in 2008 we decided to pull the Protege Program As I said, the Protege Program was a reasonable sum of guaranteed income year after year. But to my mind it wasn’t good for consumption. Expecting a client to learn five or six new skills in a year was like learning five or six new languages a year. It wasn’t just bad for consumption, but it wasn’t (in my mind at least) doing the customer any good. So we pulled the Program. And people often asked me what I would replace the program with. And I didn’t plan to replace it with anything. As far as I was concerned, I was more interested in teaching and getting the clients to learn and implement. To me the Protege Program, wonderful as it was, wasn’t achieving exactly what I set out to do. And so when we pulled the Prot’g’ Program, we pulled the workshops as well.
Not all workshops of course We’d still do some workshops in Auckland, where we live in New Zealand. One or two a year if at all. But the workshops held locally didn’t require the same level of planning and precision as the international workshops. Plus there were no travel costs, hotel costs or any fancy costs. Even our core costs of the room hire and expenses were lower here (There’s no gratuity or tipping required in New Zealand and all costs are inclusive of taxes, so there are no surprises whatsoever).
And then the year 2009 rolled along. It was the first year we’d didn’t do any workshops. Not in the US. Not in New Zealand. And I hadn’t really planned to do any in 2010. In fact I was pretty much happy to be back in New Zealand after a three week vacation in Argentina and Uruguay. And we were sitting at our favourite cafe when Renuka suggested we do the US/Canada trip.
In every situation, I have an idea and Renuka says no In this situation, I was saying no and Renuka wanted me to go ahead.
And we had a lead time of just four weeks. In four weeks we had to get at least 35 people to sign up at two venues: Vancouver and Washington D.C. And I wasn’t even keen on doing the trip. But Renuka said we had to do it.
Um did I say 35 people? I meant 70 people (35 at both venues).
It was a start of a mini nightmare.
The nightmare wasn’t so much getting the sign ups for the workshop The nightmare was getting the venue for the event. You see, all those years of California sun had made us pretty complacent. Getting a venue for the workshop simply meant that we fixed a date, called the hotel and got our room. And bear in mind the booking is always temporary. Even though our workshops have always been solidly booked, we still will always make a temporary booking—just in case.
This time around there was no temporary booking to be had Unlike the usual California venue, we were looking for places in Washington D.C. and Vancouver, Canada. And two instant problems cropped up. One was the obvious one: we’d never had a workshop in any of these places, so we were totally unfamiliar with the territory. The second one was that we had no relationship with the hotel—and hence not a clue of what to expect.
But at first it all seemed simple enough I went online, and looked up hotel meeting rooms and there they were—dozens of options just waiting to be picked. What surprised me was that most of them were costing as little as $200 + taxes per day. I was astounded—truly astounded, because these were hotels in prime areas. Some of them were within walking distance of downtown areas, even the White House. But hey, I wasn’t going to complain. I now had a pick of hotels and I was going to do my cherry picking all right.
So I did what any sensible person would do I emailed half a dozen hotels and asked them if they would be willing to book a meeting room for the dates we’d decided upon. And with that job done and dusted, I moved along to making sure I had the sales pages ready, because we needed to get participants to sign up as well. And the first email that went out was pretty darned heartening. Over 50% of the seats got taken in just a few days. This was looking better than I thought, until I checked my email.
The inbox was swamped with responses to my queries But the common question I kept getting was: How many rooms can we block for your guests? Hmm, I figured 35 people were going to show up, so I told them we’d have at least 15-20 rooms taken up by the guests. But I couldn’t be sure, I admitted. After all, the guest may choose to stay at the hotel or elsewhere. So I asked them to block a temporary 15-20 rooms and as we signed up participants, we’d direct them to the hotel and they could sign up. Of course there would be a cut off date, so the hotel wouldn’t have to keep the rooms booked forever.
But the hotels didn’t want to play ball They wanted us to guarantee the rooms. And guarantee at least 80% of the rooms. So if you consider 35 participants, then 80% is about 28 rooms. Consider that every guest stays 3 nights, and that’s about 84 bookings. Each room may be in the range of $100-$200. You get the idea, don’t you? The hotels were asking us to guarantee between $8500-$17,000 worth of bookings. And if the guests didn’t show up, we’d have to foot the bill.
So I changed the question.
I asked: If I don’t guarantee the rooms, what will you charge for the meeting rooms? $6016 came the answer from one of the hotels. That’s $6,016 per day. A lot better than paying $17,000, you’ll agree, but still not a risk worth taking. And now we were in a real soup. Most of the participants who’d signed up were told that we’d have the workshop in Washington D.C. and Vancouver, Canada, but the exact details were going to be revealed later. Now we had sign ups but not a meeting room in sight.
It was time to fill in every hotel form we could find I don’t know how many forms I filled up, but I hated every one of them. It was the same boring set of questions over and over again, and because they’re all forms, both Renuka and I were cutting and pasting endlessly. And then the responses started coming in by the truckload. Every time we’d check our email there was a whole bunch of emails with counter questions: How many rooms will you book? Will catering be involved? What is the minimum catering you’d require. The answer was none, no and nothing. But it still took up hours and more hours every day. I was feeling like a zombie dealing with what seemed like an endless barrage of queries.
That wasn’t the only problem The other problem was they were so many hotels (some with similar brand names) that they all started merging into one in my head. It was at this point that three saviours stepped right up. In Vancouver, Leanne asked if she could help. In Washington D.C., Marina and Natalya volunteered as well. By this point we were exhausted, but we’d managed to get a few hotels to agree to our terms. So yes, we’d do a temporary booking. And no, there’s no need of any fancy catering. And no we can’t guarantee the rooms. And some agreed. So now it was a matter of creating a shortlist.
Excel and me aren’t the best of friends In fact we hardly know of each other. In all my year on a computer—and I’ve been on computers since around the early 1990s, I’ve never so much as opened up Excel, let alone do a spreadsheet. But as I said, I was desperate. Someone (I forget who) created a Google docs spreadsheet and we started to fill in whatever details were available. And things were starting to look good. The sign-ups had slowed down considerably since the early burst, but to be fair we’d only sent out one or two emails. Now that the hotels were kinda falling in place, we could have the luxury of filling in the rest of the seats.
Actually things were looking better than good We’d settled on hotels that were in great areas: In Georgetown, Washington D.C and downtown Vancouver. At which point Marina and Natalya volunteered to look up the hotels. Natalya was in Washington with her husband and kids, so she jumped on the metro and very magnanimously checked out the hotels we’d shortlisted. And she came back with a “F” on the hotels. She wasn’t impressed. The one we’d set our hearts on, was in the basement, very squeezed and with a distinct odour of mildew.
But Natalya wasn’t giving up Right at the start she’d hinted about a hotel called Hampton Inn, located near the Reagan National Airport. Now she set about checking it out as an alternative. And yes, the “shoe” fit. She approved of the meeting rooms and the hotel accommodation. But this close miss had set our hearts racing. What if we’d made the same mistake in Vancouver? This time it was Leann’s turn. She made the long drive from Whistler to downtown Vancouver just to recce the various options. And yes, lightning does strike twice. The one we’d originally chosen was a bit of a dump. Slightly tacky. Not so hot.
But just like Natalya’s story there was a happy ending The Listel on Robson Street, Vancouver was actually happy with our crazy terms. And they were ready to make a booking for those meeting rooms. That Excel spreadsheet was finally down to two choices, one in D.C and one in Vancouver. But it’s not like the emails stopped. You see we’d contacted (I don’t know) maybe 40-50 hotels (maybe some twice, even). And they were all writing in asking to confirm. We even had some long distance calls to top up the emails. For a change it was nice to say NO. And yes, our trip was finally getting underway.
And not a moment too soon Participants had to fly in—and some from tiny airports, so they needed to know quickly which airport to fly into. By this point we knew the answers. Luckily from that moment on, nothing much went wrong, but that week or two was pure misery. I’d go to bed completely drained—even frustrated. To have those rooms booked and the event underway was such a relief. All I had to do was make sure that the rest of the seats were filled and I got down to the business of making sure we got the blog rolling (to create a factor of excitement and anticipation) and the slides and the music for the event.
The Brain Audit workshops were kinda unusual For one it wasn’t just a workshop. Every four years, we have a Cave Party + workshop. At this Caver Party, we not only learn, but we go out on a day trip, do a treasure hunt, sample the wines in wineries and spend lots of time over lunch and dinner. But I was still a bit apprehensive. Some of the participants had been with Psychotactics and 5000bc for a long time. And some of them had read The Brain Audit in Version 1, Version 2 and also Version 3. They were members. They’d been on our courses. And there I was, talking about The Brain Audit. I was afraid it would be super boring for them. I mean we’d gone over this stuff before in the books, audio and video. How could I straddle the expectations of those who’d just read the last version of The Brain Audit vs. those who’d read every version.
Sleep wasn’t easy to come by And it wasn’t because of jet-lag either. Sure we’d flown in from New Zealand to California, woken up at 4am and got onto a flight bound for Washington DC. Sure we were tired and crossing squillions of time zones. But exhausted as I was, I couldn’t sleep. I’d wake up at 2am to practice my presentation and go over it again and again, making dozens of changes. Even the second day (which was the day off) had me a little perturbed. I wasn’t sure how we’d go about the treasure hunt. Were we going to play dodge ball? How would people react to having to spend an extra day for no apparent learning? These things bothered me a lot. And it wasn’t till Day 3 that I truly started to relax just that tiny bit.
I wasn’t well either I was definitely very exhausted. Not sleeping well. Apprehensive. And yes, I had a reasonably irritating acidity problem as well. This meant instead of gorging everything in sight, I had to restrict myself to “baby food”. Anything that was bland, non-oily—as I said, baby food. Alcohol, chocolates, coffee, icecream: they were all off the menu. Of course I wasn’t paying much attention at first. So I went out. I ate Ethiopian food, then Mexican, then Italian—yes, back to back meals.
And I was in more than slight discomfort. That didn’t help me overall. And now I’m sounding like a real wus, but I managed to stiffen my shoulder and neck as well. So why am I telling you all this? Well there’s sympathy (ha, ha) but more because you need to know that these things happen. That you’re not going to get this free ride into everything turning out just hunky dory. And yet if you listened to the recording of the workshops or were there at the workshop itself, you’d notice little or nothing unless I told you about it.
The last night in D.C. We’re all packed and ready to catch an 8am flight the next day to Vancouver, Canada. It’s an international flight, so we have to be at the airport by 5 am or so. And so we make sure we get to bed before 10pm. Then at 10:30pm, the fire alarm goes off. There’s this insistent beeping, and we’re roused from a deep, tired sleep racing around the room madly. I tried to call the reception, but the phone seemed dead.
Renuka ran barefoot into the corridor only to find it completely peaceful (Folks were coming back from dinner, and seeing Renuka barefoot, another woman took off her shoes). No one seemed slightly disturbed. It was like we were the only ones panicking. Then I looked at our bags. They were sitting right under the sprinkler. And I thought it was a good idea to move the bags before the sprinklers went off and soaked all the equipment.
As I moved the bag, the sound of the fire alarm shifted Aaaagh! It was our travel clock. There was no fire. Somehow the travel clock had shifted and an alarm had been set for 10:30pm. And that’s what was going off. I know it seems funny to you. And it was funny too us. We enjoyed the madness for five minutes and then hopped back to bed and dozed off immediately.
By the time we got to Vancouver, my diet was doing really well. The workshops were far more relaxing for me. I smiled a lot more. And then, after a few days in Vancouver, we were ready to go back to San Jose, California for a week, before heading back to New Zealand. The original plan was to have three workshops. One in Vancouver, Canada. One in Washington D.C. and one in London, UK. Thank goodness we stopped at two. I was exhausted. I was ready to see sheep and head back on my Air New Zealand flight back home. And we did. We had a little hiccup or two (the flight was delayed by 12 hours; I acted like an idiot and ate spicy Indian food and re-started up the acidity) but all in all it was just part of the game.
Workshops are stressful There’s so much to do. So little time. It involves pre-selling, getting venues, making sure everyone’s comfortable, getting great content and running a tight ship in terms of budgets—amongst other things. Things go crazy in workshops. And not so crazy. And these experiences may intimidate you a bit. Believe me, you should have workshops. They’re what helps you connect with your audience in a way that no Internet browser can do.
They’re what help you become a better teacher, presenter and consultant. And it forges a bond that causes clients to become friends. We went with Marcus Stout for sushi. Stew Walton spent close to 6 hours to come and say hello, join us for dinner, and then went back the next day (another six hour journey). Greg Lee brought his daughter, Rabia and his wife Penelope along to meet us for dinner. Marina Brito took us to lunch, showed us around, and hosted another lunch for several of us. Steve Washer helped us with the video shooting, production and editing. Tom Clifford helped us by being the perfect interrogator.
Karen Tiede and Warren Hayford made sure I ate sensibly at the workshops. The list goes on and on and these are just folks I’m mentioning from the D.C. Workshop. Everyone plays a massive role—way more than you can imagine. This isn’t just some passive “show up and learn” workshop. Everyone gets “goodies” from their hometown. Everyone takes pictures. They have long chats. Dinners. This is like Thanksgiving or Christmas lunch (without all the tension ;)). It’s magical. Often even very emotional. And yes it’s a moment in time that you can’t recreate by just being a speaker at some event. You have to wade in and it’s not always pretty, but it’s always exciting and memorable. And so far, it’s always had a happy ending.
These are events you can’t recreate sitting at your desk in the comfort of your office. You have to be a little brave. A little scared. A lot hassled. And you’ll find rich rewards in hosting workshops.
So there you have it. A glimpse into just some of the episode into our workshops. Let’s head off to the next chapter: the story of 5000bc.
Footnote: You always want enough people in the room, and it’s not because of cost and profit factors alone. There’s also the factor of having enough people in a room. If there are too few participants, it’s much harder for both the presenter and the audience. For the presenter, having a group size of between 20-30 ensures a high level of energy in the room. You get all sorts of folks when you have about 30 of them in the room, and invariably you get introverts, extroverts, funny folks, more serious folks. In short you get a good mix. This is critical for a presenter, because not only does it assist in the actual presentation, but also in group sessions where a good mix is pretty darned essential.
Still reading? Don’t miss the Psychotactics Workshop Story: Part 1
Imagine being a hostage at your own workshop! Imagine not having access to your own venue; having to take permission from someone else just to conduct your event. This is the crazy story of the very first Psychotactics U.S. Workshop. And while it's an entertaining story all by itself, there's a lot to learn as well.
What went wrong with the strategic alliance?
What did we do when the credit card company went bust?
And how did a hurricane come to our rescue?
Let's go on this on part one of this crazy roller coaster ride into Psychotactics land.
http://www.psychotactics.com/crazy-workshop/
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In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: What went wrong with the strategic alliance?
Part 2: What did we do when the credit card company went bust?
Part 3: And how did a hurricane come to our rescue?
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources The Brain Audit: Why Clients Buy (And Why They Don’t)
Another Psychotactics Story: The Early Years-Psychotactics-Moving to New Zealand
The Power of Enough: And Why It’s Critical To Your
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Psychotactics Workshop Story: Part 1 “This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.”
“You want a room for 150 people? Is that correct?”
“Yes that’s correct,” I said. “150 people.”
And then I put down the phone.
That was the booking I was making for our first ever Psychotactics workshop in the US. And I did some quick calculations. I had watched other marketers fill up rooms with 1500-2000 people. And I figured, naively of course, that I could easily manage to sign up at least a hundred and fifty folks. And if you know anything about workshops, you’ll get to know one thing quickly: You don’t have a workshop unless you have a room. Because that’s the first thing a client will ask. They always ask you where you’re going to host your workshop, and ask for the dates.
And those dates need to be set in stone long weeks, sometimes month in advance. But hey, it wasn’t like we weren’t prepared.
We were so nervous about this event, that it was critical we planned about six months in advance. It didn’t help that I had never been to the U.S. before. It sure as heck was scary that I had an Indian passport. Now it’s not like I wasn’t already a permanent resident in New Zealand. I was, but you don’t get New Zealand citizenship for five years, and so I was stuck with the Indian passport. And the passport matters. With an NZ passport I can just jump on a plane at five minutes notice. With the Indian passport, I needed a visa.
I was petrified because I was selling seats at a workshop, and wasn’t even sure I’d get a visa It’s not for want of trying. I got in touch with the American embassy a few months in advance. They didn’t process visas that much in advance, they told me. All I could do was buy my ticket, get the requisite paperwork and book an appointment to get the visa. There was only one glitch. They would let me know about the visa a week before I was due to travel.
And that was only part of the “problem”… On the other front we had the issue of signing up clients for the workshop. This as you can tell, was no easy task. The price of the workshop was $1500 per person. That didn’t include any meals, stay or travel costs. If a client was to agree to come to the workshop, they’d have to fly or drive to get to Los Angeles. And it’s safe to say that you’d end up spending another $500-$750 on top of the price tag of the workshop itself. I somehow had to make this workshop too hard to miss. I had to make it enticing enough so that people would somehow decide they just had to be there.
And so we did the Free 16-Week training course in advance. In case you didn’t work it out, that’s four months of training week after week (kinda of tells you how much in advance we were getting prepared). And every week we’d have an hour’s worth of teleconferences. Each of the teleconferences had their own agenda. And their own set of complications.
The complications arose from not knowing how many people would show up on the call It was the year 2004. And back then, if you had a teleconference, you had a lot of no-shows, but still a heck of a lot of people would show up. And when we announced the 16-Week Course we got over 2000 people signing up to the free course. Should we book 500 teleconference lines? Or 300? Or 150? It was not only difficult to take a decision on the numbers but it also cost a fair packet to reserve those many lines at a time. And don’t forget, we were just getting started at Psychotactics. Every dollar was extremely precious to us. Throwing dollars on excess conference lines wasn’t my idea of fun at all.
Reluctantly, very reluctantly, I booked 500 lines And roughly 150 people showed up for the first call. I instantly slashed the number of teleconference lines down to 150. Sometimes the call was packed to the brim. Sometimes not. But I figured I wanted 150 people and the most interested of the lot would show up anyway. And yes we were recording all the calls as well, so the number of downloads were still reasonably impressive. If you looked at the operation from the outside, it looked like a well-oiled machine.
Yet it was rough for us at Psychotactics We were putting out fires on many fronts. One big front was the content that had to be drummed up week after week. On most weeks, I had no clue what we were going to cover the following week. And despite the fact that it was free, customer expectations were sky high. We’d get dozens of emails asking for the topics for all the calls. We’d get emails asking for the agenda of each call. People even asked for transcripts. And creating content week after week was only part of the problem.
The other problem was our “alliances” As I said: I was scared. This was our first trip to the US. I had no idea where to go, what to do, and whom to trust. So I created some sort of alliance with some US based marketers. And in doing so, created a bit of quicksand for myself. I asked them to book the conference room, and the hotels on my behalf. Bing! Another mistake. When you book the room, the hotel only deals with the person who’s booked the place. Any changes you need to make have to be routed through the person who’s made the booking. As you would expect the hotel was dealing with the alliance. I was paying the bill but they were taking the decisions and calling the shots.
The workshop hadn’t even started, and the alliance was starting to go pretty sour And it was all my mistake in a way. I didn’t do my homework. I got into a discussion with another marketer in the US and told him of our ‘newbie in the US’ predicament. And he assured us that he’d help. In fact, he wanted to be part of our workshop. He would actually market it to his list as well, and he wasn’t really interested in making any money.
I didn’t think it was fair If he was going to put in time, fly to the venue, market it and even do some public relations then in my opinion he deserved to be paid. I told him we’d pay him a percentage of profits. I forget how much it was: something like 20% or 30%. And so we got off to what seemed a decent start.
But looks can be deceiving We were in trouble almost right away when deciding the number of teleconference lines. I wanted to have fewer and then ramp up the number if a lot of people showed up. He was adamant we needed to have more lines, seeing how many people had signed up. And while I could see both sides of the picture, there was a hitch. He wasn’t paying for anything. So if we had twice as many lines, I would end up paying twice as much.
The trouble should have stopped there, but it didn’t The room was booked in his name, even though I was paying the bill. At first I thought I’d be able to attract huge numbers, but it soon became apparent that we’d only ever get to about 20-30 people. So I called up the hotel and asked them to change the room to a smaller size. Makes sense, doesn’t it? You don’t pay for a massive room if you’ve got a smaller group. That didn’t sit well with our alliance. He was furious that I’d changed the room without consulting him first.
The tough part was that I had to tread carefully For all practical purposes, the room was booked in his name. If he decided to prevent me from having the room (for whatever reason), I’d be in big trouble. I’d be at the venue (if I ever got my visa) with all those attendees, and he could effectively lock me out. The pressure was building on all sides and it wasn’t hard to see a worst-case scenario for everything.
Just when you think the worst is going to happen, it doesn’t Well it didn’t for us at least. We managed to sign up about 25 people. And the alliance brought along about six-seven of his clients (they didn’t pay, and I was OK with that. I’ll explain why later). And so we had a potential 30 or so people coming to the workshop. And a week before our visit, we went (nervously) to the American Embassy, and walked out with 10-Year business and tourist visas.
And then something completely unexpected happened PaySystems went bust. You see PaySystems was the merchant account we were dealing with. And normally we didn’t have a large amount due to us. Our clients would pay through the website, and the payment would go to PaySystems, who would in turn settle most of the bill by depositing it in our bank account. There was always a fifteen day lag between the collection of the money by PaySystems and the deposit. So for fifteen days we were in limbo. As it happened, in the last two weeks before the workshop, many clients paid their amounts and their “food coupons” through PaySystems.
The fortnight we were collecting a huge chunk of money, they decided to go bust. I don’t know how much we lost. It may have been about $6000 or more. It wasn’t just the money accumulated in those two weeks. Merchant account routinely keep a small percentage of every transaction as a “security” in case there’s a chargeback of sorts. Well, guess what? They keep that percentage amount for several months. So not only did we lose the money collected in that fortnight, but also a decent chunk of “change” collected over the months.
This was proving to be a regular rollercoaster ride… And while it was at points very frustrating, it was also hugely exciting. There was nothing to do but stay on the rollercoaster and make the best of the ride. In fact, to reduce the stress we took a few extraordinary measures. One of those measures was to take all the three-ring binders with us, along with the printed covers.
I know it sounds insane Imagine trying to put 30+ two-ring binders in a suitcase. Because it doesn’t fit in one suitcase It takes two whole suitcases. And though a binder doesn’t weigh much by itself, it really starts to add up once you put thirty or more of them in suitcases. And so off we went, on our epic workshop trip to the US of A non-stop to San Francisco.
Why San Francisco and not Los Angeles? Because Renuka’s sister lived near Campbell (a town near San Jose) at the time. We needed some time to get used to things. And get over whatever jet lag were were going to run into. Besides we still had to do a fair number of things before the workshop began. Some of these things included getting the notes printed, making sure the audio guy knew what to do etc. But at least by that point we were ready to tuck into a nice lamb roast on board, Kiwi wine and good ol’ Kapiti ice-cream on Flight NZ8 to San Francisco.
It’s nice to arrive in a place where you have someone waiting for you Having Audrey (Renuka’s sister) and Mangesh (her husband) around was a real blessing for us. We walked into a ‘chauffeur-driven’ set up. If we wanted to go here, there or anywhere, we would be willingly ferried around. We didn’t have to work out how to get an internet connection. We just walked into their home and connected our computer to their wi-fi. The fridge was loaded with more food than we could possibly eat (though we did give it our best shot). And as we settled into the California lifestyle, our days were filled with endless wine, rum, margaritas and massively-sized chip packets (all food was jumbo-sized, at least by New Zealand standards).
Once the partying slowed down it was time to get back to work We didn’t know what to expect in Los Angeles. After all we were arriving there just days before the event. So we decided to print out all the sets of notes at a local Kinko’s (Kinko is a stationery chain in the US). Remember we had two-ring binders? Well it seems that the US had mostly three-ring binders. And while we got Kinkos to photocopy the set of notes, we forgot to tell them that they would go in two-ring binders. As you can imagine, they had to work out some additional costs, but hey at least they got the notes to fit in our “Kiwi” two-ring binders.
We also had to make sure we recorded the event So we managed to hire a professional sound guy (he was from Oakland). And after some cordial chats we were able to get him to understand what we needed. It was still going to cost us about $3500 or so to record and edit the audio, but hey let’s face it: In the workshop we were talking about recording what you do (the three prong system). There was no way we were going to goof up on the recording. We just had to get it right.
Our alliances wanted to get it more right than us, as you would expect They demanded three microphones. One for me, and two for them. They wanted massive speakers in a room, when in fact a room for thirty people isn’t that large at all and even computer speakers do the trick. We were beyond arguing at this stage, so we gave in to the demands no matter how crazy. We had bigger fish to fry.
Remember the stuff we printed at Kinko’s? We printed about 35 sets of notes. Each set consisted of about 100+ pages or so. And the math is easy. That’s 3500-4000 pages. Ever tried stuffing about four thousand pages into suitcases? It makes me laugh now thinking about moving that much paper around (and let’s not forget the three-ring binders). What we did next was even more nutty.
We decided to get on a Greyhound bus Why Greyhound? Why not hire a nice car and drive to Los Angeles? Or at least take a flight? I don’t know what possessed me, but as a child I had brochures and booklets about Greyhound. And for some weird reason I wanted to get on a Greyhound. This presented a whole bunch of new, unwanted problems. The trip itself was fine. It was getting to a Greyhound station and then from the Greyhound station that was a bit of drama in itself.
The Greyhound bus station was far away from everything Of course at the San Jose side of things, it was easy enough. Audrey dropped us off. And the trip was very pleasant (despite everyone asking us why on earth we were going by Greyhound). By the time we got to Los Angeles, we were quite edgy. I went off to get a cab or shuttle and some guy kept pestering Renuka. Nothing too dramatic, but she was glad when I got back. I can’t exactly remember how we got to the hotel, but it was some crazy circuitous route that involved Los Angeles airport. I know this because I reckon I saw LA airport about five or six times while we were in that city.
I can tell you I was nervous I’d done workshops in New Zealand. Yet somehow I expected Americans to be different. I can’t explain what I expected. But I was nervous despite the fact that no one could see it. I wasn’t sure how things would turn out, and where we’d run into our next hurdle. We found our room, and it was absolutely wonderful. Clean, neat. Very nice bed. And as we opened the drapes, there it was: The most welcoming sign of all.
It said: Air New Zealand Our room was facing what seemed to be some sort of Air New Zealand building. And instantly a smile crept onto my face. I could see that things were really going to swing our way from here on. It’s funny eh? Little things calm you down. Under different circumstances, I could have seen that sign, and not be in the slightest bit interested. And here it was, a mere sign, acting like a lighthouse on what I perceived to be a stormy night.
Stormy? It was balmy… From then on almost nothing went wrong. The biggest drama of the next few days was the Atkins diet. Apparently this new diet was out, and people were gobbling “protein” instead of “carbohydrates.” Apparently the hotel’s breakfast was too “carb-based”. But it really wasn’t my problem. It was the hotel’s problem. You see we used to serve some sort of meals at our workshop. At least a muffin at breakfast and some lunch and then coffees through the day. And you may never realise it till you do a workshop, but these meals eat into your bottom line like you can’t imagine.
What’s worse is that the feedback forms then switch to food When you cater, and ask someone about the workshop, they invariably have something to say about the food. If the food isn’t up to their mark, or they’re on some crazy yo yo diet, they’ll find all sorts of holes to pick. What you’ve gone and done is reduced the impact of their workshop experience, because you catered. So long story short: No catering. This was the last workshop we ever catered for. Truly speaking it wasn’t catering. The participants had bought “meal coupons” and they were using them accordingly, but we were still being told about catering issues.
Other than food we had some minor hiccups Footnote:
It’s easy to run up a coffee bill of $1000 or more for a three day workshop And small additions of meals or cookies can all add up considerably. It may sound petty to worry about expenses and you have to remember why you’re in business. You’re in business to make a profit. You don’t spend months ramping up to a workshop, then do the workshop and then hoof it back home—only to find you’ve lost money on “catering”. Catering can absolutely eat into your profit and leave you in the “red”. And that’s not a pretty sight. Or a nice feeling.
So the simple solution is no food. Find a venue which has plenty of food around it and then let the participants find their own food. They don’t overeat (and hence stay awake) and there’s no grumbling. And you don’t go home broke. Now that’s a happy story, isn’t it?
The aftermath of the Workshop So we were done with our workshop in Los Angeles. And we’d planned to go east heading to Chicago where we were scheduled to do some speaking engagements. And then off to New York, Florida, New Orleans before heading back to California. Chicago was a good stop because we got to see the city for the first time—and liked it too. Except that the speaking engagements were all over the place. One engagement was to a group of business owners. The other was to some folks in real estate investing. Both went incredibly well, but only one paid any dividends. And there’s a lesson here, of course.
If you want to do free speaking engagements, pick them carefully It may seem all very obvious to you that you need to speak to the right audience, but when you’re starting out you’ll clutch at any straws. And in the process you’ll speak to audiences that simply have no need for your product or service. Now this isn’t a waste by any stretch of the imagination. Every speaking engagement is worth its weight in gold. You know how some idiot coined up that term “people fear speaking more than death”. Well the big reason for the fear is just a lack of practice speaking to all kinds of audiences. If you keep speaking on a consistent basis, the fear does go away (And if it doesn’t go away, there are EFT techniques that will help you relax yourself and make the fear go away). But I digress…
So there we were headed east and then onto this grand tour of the US till a hurricane stopped us in our tracks We did our sightseeing in New York, taking a nice break in New Jersey and then planned to head to Florida. And when we looked around, we were the only ones heading in that direction. Everyone else was headed away from Florida. So prudently we changed our plans, did a little detour to meet an old acquaintance in Washington DC and then headed back to California.
And good thing too, because we’d have been in a lot of trouble if we hadn’t turned around You see we’d recorded the workshop in California. And we’d promised there’d be a recording for those who’d paid for the recording. Well all hell broke loose when we got back. We found the sound guy (we had this professional sound guy, remember?) was editing the workshop audio to exclude all ums and ahs from the recording.
Today I have barely a few ums and ahs but back then there were hundreds of them. And as he edited he kept track of the time, inflating the editing bill considerably. At one point he also decided to put in some opening music to each audio. No problem there till we realised he wanted to charge a royalty on every copy we ever sold (yes, in perpetuity). It was time to pick up the credit card, buy some royalty-free audio and put it into the audio. And at least that fire was put out.
But there was still the issue of listening to every audio file This activity had to be done because we had to put the content details and the time stamp on the CD. So we needed to know which files were going on which CD, do the design of the CD and blah, blah, blah. There was also the “tiny” issue of paying our strategic allianceswhat we’d promised. Which was all very fine, except they insisted on an item by item costing.
So there we were having to dig up every single cost to present to the “alliances”, when in fact we were paying them from our profits (They hadn’t brought in a single paying customer, so we were paying them from the profits made as a result of selling to our own list). Anyway, Renuka is a bit of a maniac when it comes to storing even the cost of a single staple. So we had the information needed, but it was still galling (and very frustrating) to have to give this silly account when we shouldn’t have had to do anything like that at all.
And the months ticked by. We ate, we worked. We did a few trips. And then we ate and drank some more. Till it was time to leave. And get back to New Zealand. No Greyhound this time Just good ol’ Air New Zealand—and almost in time for summer too!
So what’s the moral of this story? Every workshop has three core components. The pre-sell. The workshop itself and at least a week of post-workshop stuff (if you sell products/services or recordings of the workshop). Taking into consideration all of these factors is pretty important because it takes the stress off you. We got lucky with that hurricane. If we’d not turned round and gone back, we’d have dragged all the work back to New Zealand and been a lot more stressed. Because we worked in “vacation time”, we were able to simply tidy up the good, bad and nasty bits with minimal effort.
And that was International workshop No.1. There wasn’t going to be Workshop No.2 till the year 2006. Amazing as it may sound, that workshop wasn’t even planned. It was just something I thought up on fine day in February. And yeah, there’s a story in that too. And you’ll find out soon enough…
Coming Up Next: The Psychotactics Story—Part 2
Another Interesting Psychotactics Story: The Early Years-Psychotactics-Moving to New Zealand
When you're speaking to a client or presenting your product or service, do you have a ton of "ums" and "ahs"? Do you find it frustrating, but don't know how to get rid of that irritation? And if you're recording an event, a whole bunch of ums and ahs can cause a major headache in editing?plus push up editing time and frustration levels. So how can you get rid of all your ums and ahs in under 15 minutes?
http://www.psychotactics.com/speaking-professionally/
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: How to get rid of ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ when podcasting or speaking in under 15 minutes
Part 2: The sound of spit and how to get rid of it
Part 3: Why you need variation in your voice
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources Read about: Why A Relaxed Brain Works Faster Than A Tired Brain
Preacher or Teacher? Why Our Clients Struggle To Learn Skills Quickly
Other techniques: Why Variation Is The Hallmark of Outstanding Presenters
The Transcript “This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.”
This is The Three Month Vacation, I’m Sean D’Souza.
We’ve been podcasting since around November of 2014. One of the things that I never seem to cover is anything to do with podcasts. That’s not on purpose, it’s just something that I’ve never covered. Today I’m going to have this very short podcast, no stories, just a little technique that will help you as you’re going about creating audio or even speaking in public.
Little Technique To Help Creating Audio There are a few things that we do when we’re recording podcasts that are very frustrating. The first thing that we do is we cannot help it and we go um, uh, um. These ums and uhs seem to infiltrate our speech whether it’s in a podcast or in an interview or just presenting to your client. On podcasts, you also get the sound of spit, yes? Moisture in your mouth. It sounds like [chump chump 00:01:06], like that. It’s very frustrating for you, not so much for the listener. After awhile even listeners start to tune in to that spit kind of sound. How do we get rid of that?
Finally the third thing about the podcast is just this variation in your voice. It’s very easy to start recording and forget that there’s an audience out there. You’re never speaking to an audience, you’re always speaking to one person and this is the mistake that we make. These are the three glitches that we make when we’re podcasting. Today I’m going to get rid of all three of them.
How to get rid of ‘ums’ when podcasting or speaking Let’s start off with getting rid of all the um and the uhs that we have when we are podcasting or speaking to anyone at all. It doesn’t matter whether you use a PC or a Mac, you’ve seen that spinning ball on your computer haven’t you? When the computer’s trying to access something, it’s going through that, hey let’s get to this something. You can’t do anything and you’re just sitting there waiting for it to do it’s thing before you can continue working.
That’s approximately what your brain is doing, but at a much higher speed. It’s a better processor, your brain. What it’s doing is it’s trying to access the information. Every time a speaker says um or ah or like, that’s approximately what they’re doing. They’re accessing their database. How do you stop it? At all points in time, especially if you’re not reading off the screen, like right now I’m not reading off the screen. My brain has to work out what I’m going to say next and yet there are no ums or likes or ahs coming out.
The reason is, I’m pausing. I could say “Um what we need to do next is um” or I could say, “So … what we need to do next is …” It’s a little break. You’re noticing it now because I’m bringing it to your attention. That’s all I do. Whenever I’m making a presentation, whether it’s on stage or it’s a webinar or any kind of recording, I’m conscious about the ums and the pauses. All I do is stop speaking. Just let your brain access the information it needs and let a natural pause come in.
Now if your podcast is anything like this podcast, then there will be music in the background, and sometimes not even music in the background, but a lot of music, and the pause won’t be noticeable. If you’re speaking in public, it’s critical to get rid of the ums. If you’re doing a recording like this, it’s a nuisance to remove all the ums.
When I started out many years ago, when we did our first workshop in Los Angeles in 2004, there were ums and ahs all over the place. The more tired I got, the more ums and ahs just popped up out of the woodwork. I just had to learn to pause. I’m not saying that in a live workshop, which lasts two or three days, you’re not going to get ums and ahs. It’s just that you can reduce it dramatically. In a podcast or a speech like this where you’re nice and fresh, you can eliminate it completely. Just practice that for 15 minutes. Just pause whenever you think you should be saying an um and sooner or later you get rid of all the ums and the ahs. If one or two creep in, that’s easy to edit.
The second factor that we are dealing with when recording podcast is this sound of moisture in your mouth. Whenever you sit down to do an interview, often you’ll find that the person on the other end of the line will say hey wait I’m going to get a glass of water. That’s because they want to keep their mouths nice and moist. Your voice doesn’t crack and it’s a really good idea, especially if you’re on a call for maybe an hour, like later today I’m on a call for an hour and a glass of water really helps.
When you’re doing something like a recording, you’re very close to the mike. Every little [click click 00:05:29] sound just clicks in as one more click. It’s very frustrating for you. What I tend to do is I record in short bursts. I’ll keep my mouth very dry, which is totally counter intuitive. I’ll keep it extremely dry, actually try to suck out all the moisture, and then I’ll record in short bursts. One sentence, two three sentences at a time and then I’ll stop and then continue.
It’s funny but if you concentrate on it, you will find that the moisture doesn’t enter your mouth at all. You can go for several sentences, as I’m doing right now. I haven’t really stopped, even though you don’t know, the tape is just rolling. The funny thing is that if you train yourself to speak for long periods without having to access any moisture in your mouth, you will find that you can speak for quite a long time without any of those clicks that you get from the moisture in your mouth. The trick is to just keep it dry. That’s the trick I use rather than moisten it. The moment I get access to water, I’m in trouble again.
This is not foolproof. Obviously some of the clicks are going to escape and they’re going to get on tape, but it doesn’t matter. You can go and edit it. You just have to do a lot less editing and you’re more aware of the clicking sound.
The third and final issue is one of speaking to an audience. Often when we get in front of the mike, we think that we have the whole audience listening in. Good presenters and people who have been on radio know that you’re always speaking to a single person. When you’re speaking on stage, you have lights in front of you and often you can’t see much. You can’t see more than a few people in the front row. What you’ve got to do is start to pick on one or two people in the audience and speak to them as if you were having a conversation with them.
The same thing applies to the podcast. When you start to speak as if you’re speaking to an audience, it becomes less of a discussion, a conversation. Think of it more as someone sitting in the same room with you or at a café. Always use the word you.
The second thing that we forget is that we have to change our tone, our pitch, our speed. If you listen to this podcast you will notice that I will suddenly speak quickly and then really slow down. In real life we have variations. We speak quickly or slowly, we get all excited and go louder and then go really quiet. You can do this on stage, you can do this in your podcast, you can do this in your presentation. You have to be aware of it. You have to have this space or this sudden movement through it, and then it becomes like a conversation and it’s no longer this single paced monotone podcast where you’re speaking to an audience.
One last tip. When you’re recording audio, you want to smile. When you smile, I don’t know, something in your voice changes. When I announce this is The Three Month Vacation, I’m smiling. You can feel that smile. You can’t see me, but you can feel that smile. Smiling when you’re speaking- not all the time, just some of the time- the audience figures it out. I don’t know how.
That’s pretty much it for this podcast. Three things that we covered. Let’s do a quick summary. The first thing that we did was the ums and ahs. It’s very simple to get rid of the ums and ahs. All you have to do is pause. It sounds like a crazy long pause, but it doesn’t matter. Just pause. It’s fine.
The second thing is this moisture in your mouth which causes all these clicks. The way to do that is not to have water around, or at least to keep speaking, don’t worry about your mouth getting dry, and if you get some clicks in, you can go and edit them later. Anyway, the clicks seem to come just before you start speaking or just after, so start speaking, leave a little gap, and then continue speaking. You’ll be able to edit out those clicks quite easily.
Finally remember you’re not speaking to an audience. You’re always speaking to one person, maybe two people. You’re always using the word you. It’s a good idea to vary your tone. When you press the pause button more often, the tone changes automatically. When you come back again, your tone has changed just a little bit. Because all of my recordings are done without a script, I have to hit the pause a lot of times. That’s why you’ll find the tone shifting a lot. I’m also conscious of the fact that sometimes I’m slowing down and sometimes I’m going really fast. Sometimes you go softer and sometimes you get more excited and you go a little louder. All of that creates for this variation that you find in normal every day speech. That makes it so much better to listen to a podcast.
There you go.
Finally some tips on podcasting. What’s the one thing that you can do today? The one thing that you can do today is to put these gaps. It doesn’t matter where you speak, you’re going to have the ums and ahs come in because that’s how we access the database in our brains. If you just put in these pauses just like I’m doing right now and train yourself to do it, you’ll find fewer ums and ahs on a regular basis.
Another trick is to make sure that you have examples. For instance I will get a lot of ums and ahs when I’m doing an interview and I’m trying to work out some examples to give in that interview. If I’m talking about The Brain Audit, I need to have examples of the problem and of the solution. I need to have examples of the objections. When the person asks me about the problem or the solution, my brain is trying to access the examples and then I go um and ah. That’s another way to avoid it when you’re in a live call, when you’re in a live interview. To have the examples prepared in advance.
This is podcast number 72. That’s at psychotactics.com/72 where you can get the transcript and the audio. You’re listening to this podcast while we’re in Amsterdam. It’s going to be cold and freezing in Amsterdam. This podcast is being recorded while we’re still in Oakland and it’s warm and sunny out there.
We’re going through the United States, Amsterdam, Morocco, Singapore, before we get back to New Zealand. It’s going to be a long trip, a month away, and we’ve got to have everything cued up in advance. All the podcasts have been cued up and all the newsletters and all the 500bc newsletters, which is our membership site. That’s a lot of work, but once we’re done with that work we can go on vacation. We don’t have to check email, we don’t have to do any of that stuff.
If you have any more questions on podcasting, or you have tips on podcasting, send them to me at sean@psychotactics.com. I’m also on Twitter @seandsouza and on Facebook at Sean D’Souza. Bye for now.
Still reading? Don’t miss—Why A Relaxed Brain Works Faster Than A Tired Brain
http://www.psychotactics.com/relaxed-brain-faster/
Who's Doug Hitchcock? And in a world full of goal-setting exercises, why does Doug's system stand out? Find out why most goal-setting goes hopelessly off the mark and Doug's plan works almost like magic year after year. Find out not just how to set goals, but how to create a stop-doing list (yes, that's a goal too). And finally, learn why most goals are designed for failure because they lack a simple benchmarking system. Find out how we've made almost impossible dreams come true with this goal-setting system.
http://www.psychotactics.com/goal-setting-successfully/
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why most goal-setting goes hopelessly off the mark
Part 2: How to set goals, but how to create a successful stop-doing list
Part 3: Learn why most goals are designed for failure because they lack a simple benchmarking system
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources Chaos Planning: How ‘Irregular’ Folks Get Things Done
Learning: How To Retain 90% Of Everything You Learn
5000bc: How to get started on your goal setting
The Transcript “This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.”
This is the Three-Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza.
Doug Hitchcock was my first real mentor and he had been bankrupt thrive. When I first moved to Auckland in the year 2000, I didn’t really know anyone. I was starting up a new business, I was starting up a new life. I joined a networking group and within that networking group I asked for a mentor. Well, no one in the networking group was willing to be a mentor, but someone did put me in touch with Doug.
The only problem with Doug was he had been bankrupt thrive. Now, when I say he was bankrupt thrice, it doesn’t mean he was still bankrupt. He just pulled himself out of the hole three times in his life and there he was, at about 70 plus, and he was my first mentor.
Before he starts to talk to me about anything, he asks me, “Do you do goal setting?” I’m like, “Yeah, I have goals,” and he goes, “No. Do you have goals on paper?” I said, “No.” He says, “We have to start there. We have to start with goals on paper.”
That’s how I started doing goal setting, all the way back in the year 2000. Almost immediately, I got all the goal setting wrong. You ask, how can you get goal setting wrong? After all, you’re just putting goals down on a sheet of paper. How can you get something like that wrong? You can’t write the wrong goals, but you can write too many goals. That’s exactly what I did. I sat down with that sheet of paper and I wrote down all my work goals, my personal goals, and I had an enormous list.
That’s when Doug came back into the scene, and he said, “Pick three.” I said, “I could pick five.” He goes, “No, no, no. Pick three.” I picked three goals in my work and three goals from my personal life. You know what? By the end of the year, I’d achieved those goals. Ever since, I have been sitting down and working out these goals based on Doug’s method.
Doug may have lost his business thrice in a row, but he knew what he was talking about. Most of us just wander through life expecting things to happen. When they happen, we say they happen for a reason, but they don’t happen for a reason. They happen, and we assign a reason to it.
In this episode, I’m going to cover three topics. The first is the three part planning. Then we’ll go the other way. We’re create a stop doing list. Finally, we’ll look at benchmarks and see how we’ve done in the year.
Let’s start off with the first one, which is the three part planning. Does the San Fernando earthquake ring any bells in your memory? Most people haven’t ever heard of this earthquake, and yet it was one of the deadliest earthquakes in US history. It collapsed entire hospitals, it killed 64 people, it injured over two and a half thousand. When the damage was assessed, it had cost millions of dollars, and yet it could have been the disaster that eclipsed all other US disasters.
That’s because the earthquake almost caused the entire Van Norman Reservoir to collapse. The dam held, and yet, if it had collapsed, the resulting rush of water would have taken the lives of more people than the Pearl Harbor Attack, the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, 9/11 and 1900 Galveston Hurricane combined. In barely 12 seconds, the top section of the dam had disintegrated and yet, the surrounding areas were extremely lucky. The reservoir was only half full that day.
The aftershocks of the earthquake continued to cause parts of the dam to break apart. A few feet of free board was the only thing that stopped a total collapse. This total collapse is what many of us come close to experiencing as we try to clamber up the ladder of success. We try to do too many things and we don’t seem to go anywhere. In effect, this is like water cascading down a dam. There’s too many things and we have no control over it. What’s going to stop it?
The only thing that seems to stop anything is some kind of focus and goal setting is focus. The way we go about our goal setting is the way Doug showed me. The first category of goal setting is what we want to achieve at work. The second set comprises of our personal goals. The third, this is the most critical of all, what we’re going to learn.
Should we start off with the first one, which is our work goals? Well, that’s not the way we do it as Psychotactics. The way we work at Psychotactics is we look at our personal goals. Our own lives are far more important than work. What we do is we sit down, and first, we plan vacations. As you know, we take three months off. We’ve been doing this since 2004. We started our business at the end of 2002. Yet by 2004, we had decided we were going to take three months off.
The thing is that your vacations also need planning. Our vacations are broken up into big breaks, small breaks, and weekends. Now the big breaks are the month long vacations, and then the small breaks are in between that. We’re go away for a couple of days somewhere, and that’s our small break. I’m saying weekends, because before I wouldn’t take weekends off. I’d be working on the weekend at least for a few hours on Saturday morning and a few hours on Sunday morning, and I don’t do that any more. Now that’s almost written in stone. It’s very hard for me to get to work on weekends. I’ll slide sometimes, but it’s very hard.
The most critical thing to do is to work out the long breaks. When are we going to have those, and then the shorter breaks. That comprises that whole vacation concept, but you also have to have other personal goals. Maybe I want to learn how to cook Mexican dishes, or maybe I want to learn how to take better photographs. Now, these are personal projects. They’re not not pseudo work projects. They’re things that, at the end of the year, I go, “Wow, that’s what I’ve achieved. That’s how much I progressed.”
That’s how you start off with personal goals. You plan your breaks. You plan what you want to do personally. Once you’re done with that, then you go to your work goals. We have a lot of work goals, we have the article writing workshop coming up, we’ve got the 50 words workshop, which is, how do you start up an article. We’ve got a whole bunch of things, because we’ve got products, we’ve got courses, we’ve got workshops. All of this has to sit nicely between, so that we work for 12 weeks and then we go on a break.
We’ve decided that we’re not having any workshops next year. We’ve had a lot of workshops this year, no workshops next year. Now, this leaves us the chance to focus on the courses and the products. Now my brain is like that dam, there’s always water rushing over. I want to do a million projects, but then I have to choose. The article writing course is one of the things that I want to do for sure. I want to do a version 2.0 of it. The cartoon bank, I’ve been putting that off for a long time. That’s definitely something I want to do. Then I’ll pick a third one. Do I stop at three? No, but I make sure that I get these three down. The three that I’m going to do, they go down on paper. Some other projects will come up, a lot of stuff that I might not expect, and yet I’ll get all of this done, but these three, they’ll get done. Those three vacations, they will get done.
Then we get to the third part, which is learning. What am I going to learn this next year? Maybe I’ll learn a software, or maybe I’ll learn how to use audio better. The point is, I have to write it down, because once I write it down, then I’m going to figure out where I have to go and what I have to do to make sure that learning happens. This is not just learning like reading some books or doing something minor like that. This is big chunks of learning, so that by the the end of the year, I know I’ve reached that point.
When it comes to planning, the first thing that we’re always doing is we’re looking at these three elements, which is work, vacation, and learning. If we have to do other sub projects, we’ll do it, but these nine things get done. Year after year after year. This is what Doug taught me, he gave me this ability to focus. I consider myself to be unfocused, I consider myself to want to do everything and anything. That was the gift of Doug.
In the year 2008, we had a program, it was a year long program. You probably heard of it. It was called a Psychotactics Protégé program. We would teach clients how to write articles, how to create info products, public relations. Lots of things along the way in that year. As you’d expect, it was reasonably profitable. 15 students paid $10,000, and so that was $150,000 that we would have in the bank before the year started.
In 2009, we pulled the plug on the Protégé system. Why would we do that? We started it in 2006, it was full, in 2007 it was full, in 2008 it was full, in 2009 there was a waiting list. We decided not to go ahead with it. We decided it was going to go on our stop doing list. We were going to walk away from $150,000, just like that. Yes, some clients were unhappy, because they wanted to be on the next Protégé program. They had seen the testimonials, they had seen the results. They knew that it was good enough to sign up for. They knew that $10,000 was a very small investment, for a year long advancement. On our part, we realized that we had to walk away from $150,000 that we were getting on cue, every December.
This is what’s called a stop doing list. We’ve used this stop doing list in our own lives. When we left India, and got to Auckland, it wasn’t like we were leaving something desperate. We were leaving something that was really good. I was drawing tattoos all day, going bowling in the afternoon, having long lunches, Renuka’s company was doing really well. They were picking up all expenses, and the only thing we really had to pay for was food but, at that point in time, we decided we had to make a break. We had to stop doing something so that we could do something different. We don’t know whether that different is better, but at that point we have to stop it, so that we can explore what is coming up ahead.
There are two things that you put on your stop doing list. One, something that is working exceedingly well. The second thing, something that’s doing really badly. Or something that’s getting in your way. Now, the first one doesn’t make any sense. If something is doing exceedingly well, why would you stop it? Well, the point is that if you continue to do something, then you can’t do something else. You don’t know how good that something is until you stop doing it and then you go on to do something else.
Last night, I was reading The New Yorker, and The New Yorker is one of my favorite magazines. There’s James Surowiecki saying exactly the same thing. He’s saying that Time Warner should sell HBO. HBO has now 120 million subscribers globally. It has earned over 2 billion dollars in profits last year. It’s stand alone streaming service has got over a million new subscribers since last spring. What does the article recommend? It recommends that they get rid of it, they sell it, they get the best price for it at this point of time, when they’re doing so well.
What if it doubles in its value? That’s the answer we’ll never know, but the article went on. It talked about ESPN and how in 2014 it was worth 50 billion dollars. Disney owned it, they should have sold it, they could have banked the money. They could have focused on something else, but no, they kept it. ESPN is still doing well, it’s still the dominant player, but you can see that it’s not exactly where it was in 2014.
The Protégé program was doing really well for us, clients were with us for the whole year. They would then join 5000 BC, we’d get to meet them. It was a lot of fun, and it generated a sizable revenue and we walked away from it. It enabled us to do other stuff that we would not have been able to do. When you say stop doing list, it’s not just the bad stuff that you have to stop doing. Sometimes you have to stop doing the things that are very critical, like next year we’re not doing workshops. Workshops are very critical to our business, but we’re not going to do the workshops. Instead, we’ll do online courses. Instead, we’ll do something else.
We’ll create that space for ourselves, even though the workshops are doing really well. The other side of the stop doing list is stuff that’s driving you crazy. You know it’s driving you crazy, but you’re not stopping it. For instance, in September of this year, we started rebuilding the Psychotactic site. Now, there are dozens of pages on the Psychotactic site and I want to fiddle around with every single one of them, and do things that are interesting, different. The problem is that there are other projects, like for instance the storytelling workshop. Of course, vacations that get in the way.
The point is that, at some point, you have to say, okay, I really want to do this, but I’m not going to do this. I’m going to put it off until later. This is procrastination, but it is part of a stop doing list. You can’t do everything in the same time. Last year, this time, we had the same dilemma when we were going to do the podcasts. I wanted to write some books for Amazon, and I wanted to do the podcast. Every day, we would go for a walk, and it would run me crazy. I didn’t know where to start, when to start, what to do first. I had to sit down and go, okay, what am I going to stop? I just dumped the Amazon books and started on the podcast. Now we’re on podcast number 70, and it’s not even been 52 weeks.
It shows you how that stop doing list can help you focus and get stuff out of the way. Sometimes you have to procrastinate to get that point. Now the stop doing list is not restricted to work alone. You can take it into your personal life as well.
For instance, I used to get my hair cut by a hairdresser, and I was dissatisfied for a very long time. You come back in, you grumble, and my wife, Renuka, she said, “Okay, stop grumbling. Go and find another hairdresser.” I ran into Shay, now Shay was cutting my hair so well, it was amazing. I wasn’t the only one who thought that was amazing. Usually, I was on a waiting list at a barber shop. I would get there, and there were two people in front of me, waiting for Shay. While a few of the barbers just stood around, doing absolutely nothing because no one was interested. Then, one day, involuntarily, Shay went onto my stop doing list. Kimmy was around and Shay wasn’t and so Kimmy cut my hair. She was better than Shay. I thought, “Oh my goodness. I should have done this a long time ago.” Then Kimmy got transferred to another branch, and now there’s Francis. You’ve heard about Francis in other podcasts. Now Francis is my top guy.
There you go, even in something as mundane as cutting hair, there is a stop doing list. You have to push yourself a bit, and at other times you have to pull back and go, “No, we’re not going to do that.” The stop doing list is for good times, as well as for pressurized times. You have to decide, I’m going to stop doing it, I’m going to move onto the next thing.
This takes us to the third part of planning, which is benchmarks. Now what are benchmarks? Often when we set out to do a project, say we’re going to do that website. What we don’t do is we don’t write down all the elements that are involved in doing that website because a website can go on forever, can’t it? It expands exponentially. When you are saying, I am going to write books for Amazon. Well, how many books are you going to write? How many pages are the books going to be? What’s the time frame? Where are you going to get the cartoons from? Who’s going to do all the layout?
Having this kind of benchmark in mind makes a big difference. When we plan for something, for instance if I’m planning for the article writing course, which is version 2.0. I’m going to have to sit down and work out what I’m going to have to do. When I’m doing the stock cartoons, I’m going to have to sit down and work out what kind of stock cartoons, how many. It’s perfectly fine to write a top level goal. You should do that, you should say, “Okay, I’m going to do the website,” but then you have to get granular. The granular bit tells you, have I reached my destination. Otherwise, people don’t get to their goals, and that’s why they’re struggling, because there’s no clarity.
Usually, you’re going to get the clarity when you have only three things to do, but even so, if you don’t have benchmarks you’ll never know when you’re reaching your goal or if you’re going to reach your goal.
That brings us to the end of this episode.
Summary What did we cover? We looked at three sets of goal setting, and that is your personal goal setting, your work goal setting, and your learning goal setting. Instead of having 700 of them, you just have three things that you want to achieve in the year. Three major things that you want to achieve in the year. Logically, you start with the work, but don’t handle the work. Just go to the breaks. Organize your breaks first, because you get reinvigorated and you come back and then you can do better work. First, fix the breaks and then go to the work, then go the learning. That takes care of the first set.
The second thing that you want to do is you want to make sure that you have a stop doing list. Sometimes, things are working, they’re going your way, and they still have to be dropped. That’s what we did with the Protégé program, that’s what we did with our move to New Zealand, and a lot of good things have become better, because we’ve decided to move along. Sometimes, you’re just confused because you have too many things to do, and procrastinate. Go ahead. I mean, I know this about planning, not procrastination, but procrastination is a form of planning, when you have too much to do.
Finally, have the benchmarks. Make your goals a little more detailed so that you know when you’re hitting those benchmarks. Plan it in a little more detail. That’s how you’ll reach your goal. This is what goal setting is about. It’s very simple. People make it more complicated than it needs to be.
What’s the one thing that you can do today? Very simple. Work, vacation, and learning. Get your paper out, get your pen, and start writing. Three goals. You can start off with seven, or ten, but whittle it down to three. Oh, and make sure you write it down. When you write it down, things happen. It’s like magic when you write it down. Keep it in your head, it’s not as powerful. Write it down, it happens.
If one of your goals is to join 5000 BC this year. That’s 5000 BC, our membership site. You’ll find that it’s quite a nice place to be. It’s a very warm and friendly place. It would be great to see you there. It also gives you the opportunity to be first in line for any of the online courses that we’re having. That might not seem like a big deal until you see how cool the online courses are at Psychotactics. It’s not just another information dump, you actually get the skill. If you set out to be a cartoonist, you become a cartoonist. If you set out to be a writer, you become a writer. It’s not just information that you’re getting, it’s all very practical.
Being a member of 5000 BC gives you that little edge to get in there before everybody else. You have to read The Brain Audit, however. You can get that at psychotactics.com/brainaudit or on amazon. Com. If you’ve read The Brain Audit and you would like a special collector’s edition, then email us at Psychoanalytical. We’ll give you instruction on how to get the special collector’s edition.
That’s it from me at Psychotactics and the Three Month Vacation. Bye for now.
One of the biggest reasons why we struggle with our learning is because we run into resistance.
Resistance is often just seen as a form of laziness, but that is not true at all. There are hidden forces causing us all to resist doing what we really should do. This slows us down considerably. Find out how to work with resistance, instead of fighting it all the time. Click here to get the free report on ‘How To Win The Resistance Game’.
http://www.psychotactics.com/free/resistance-game/
What's wrong with this statement?
Instead of wondering when our next vacation is we should set up a life we don't need to escape from.?
There doesn't seem to be anything wrong, is there? And yet this entire line is based on a myth. And that's not the only myth that circulates so well and widely. Another myth is that a business has to grow; has to increase clients; has to increase revenues. But is that why you really got into business?
Did you set out to create a life that's work, work and more work? Join us as we explore three big myths, and destroy them:
Myth 1: That your business needs to constantly grow bigger.
Myth 2: Somehow you'll have more time, and your business will be on auto-pilot / Myth 3: That we need to set up a life where we don't need to wonder about our vacations. / / Yup, incredibly silly business myths. Let's take them head on and get some sanity back into our lives, instead.
http://www.psychotactics.com/three-business-myths/
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In this episode Sean talks about Myth 1: That your business needs to constantly grow bigger
*Myth* 2: Somehow you’ll have more time, and your business will be on auto-pilot
*Myth* 3: Vacation is the enemy and work is everything
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources The Power of Enough: Why It’s Critical To Your Sanity
Three Obstacles To Happiness: How To Overcome Them
5000bc: How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems
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The Transcript “This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.”
This is the Three Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. Imagine you’re a band, but not just any old music band. Instead, you’re the most popular band in the whole world. You’ve sold over 200 million records. You’re in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and probably only five or six bands have sold more than you in the entire history of pop.
Barry Gibb has never done this before, never taken the long walk to the stage by himself. Speaker 2: Is it important for you to do this?
Barry: Yeah, it’s everything to me. It’s all I’ve ever known. I don’t know how to do anything else.
Speaker 2: t went pretty well, though.
Barry: I can’t get a job.
Speaker 2: He’s the only surviving member of one of the 20th century’s greatest vocal groups, and this night, at the TD Garden in Boston, he’s about to begin his first ever solo tour.
You have to ask yourself why. Why would Barry Gibb, with all his success and all the money that they’ve earned over the years as the Bee Gees, do his first solo tour. It’s not like he needs the money or the fame, because they’re the only group in history to have written, recorded, and produced six consecutive number one hits. As Barry Gibb himself boasted, “We weren’t on the charts. We were the charts.”
In that spring, as he hit the road across North America for six solo shows, every show was costing him half a million dollars a night. He said he would be lucky to break even. But that’s not the point. “I have to keep this music alive,” says Gibb. To me, that’s what embodies what I do. I want to keep the music alive. I think this is true for most of us. Most of us aren’t really looking for this magic pill. We’re not looking to double our customers, triple our income, do any of that kind of nonsense.
What we’re trying to do is keep our music alive. We’re trying to get some purpose in our lives. The money, the fame, all that stuff’s really nice, but does it matter in the long run? At the height of The Beatles’ fame, John Lennon said, “Work is life, you know, and without it there’s only uncertainty and unhappiness.” When you look at someone like the guy who runs Uchida, a little restaurant in Vancouver Island, the restaurant is only open from 11:00 to 2:00. When you get there you eat some of the most delightful Japanese food I’ve ever eaten, and I have traveled to many places, including Japan. That magic is expressed in his work. He gets to work and he stays until the restaurant closes at 2:00. It doesn’t open for dinner because from 2:00 to 9:00 he’s preparing the next day’s meals. Every day the meal is just so amazing. It’s different every single day. It’s a big surprise, and it’s always amazing.
Today I’m going to talk to you about three myths about business. We’ve run Psychotactics for the past 13 years, but the business goes back a long way when I used to be a cartoonist. I’m going to bring to you these three myths which I think are important. I think they’re important because everyone is talking about the other side, about more money, more customers, doubling your income, doing all that stuff. As I said, that’s really nice, but is there a flip side to it? That’s what we’ll cover in today’s episode.
First up on the menu today is the fact that you have to grow. That’s myth number one.
Myth number two is that things get easier as you go along.
Myth number three is that you have to create a life that you don’t need a vacation from.
Let’s start off with the first myth, which is you have to grow. Once a year, we have a really important meeting at Psychotactics. My wife Renuka and I meet with our accountant Steve, and we go over our accounts. We look at how much money we made in the year. How much are our profits? What are the expenses? All the stuff that you do with an accountant before you sign off everything. We’re in 2015, but when I look at the accounts, it looks exactly as it did in 2007.
2007 was a really good year. We earned twice, maybe thrice as much as we needed. Of course a third goes to the government. That’s just what you do; you pay tax. Even so, you had twice as much as you needed, and our needs are not much. We take our breaks. We go on vacation. We buy little goodies here and there, but we’re not flash people. We don’t have the flashiest car. We don’t fly business; we always friendly economy. We keep our expenses under control. But even so, having twice as much as you need, that’s quite a lot.
The way that a lot of businesses go about this situation is to say let’s double it, let’s triple it. Here’s what I’m telling you. You don’t have to double it. You don’t have to triple it. You don’t have to enter that rat race. All you have to do is stay comfortable. That was your goal in the first place. Your goal as a business owner was to start up a business, to have control over your life, and be comfortable. It was not to struggle anymore. It was never to double and triple your income.
In fact, when you read the stories of business owners that have doubled and tripled, and I don’t know, quadrupled, quintupled their income, you find that there is a huge sacrifice. That sacrifice is their family, their life, their health, everything else. When people talk about all of the extra stuff, the extra money that comes in, the extra fame, they don’t talk about that part until a lot later when they’re doing their memoir. The reality is you have to double or triple nothing.
When we look at our list, for instance, our list grew from 200-300 people. Now there are 37,000 people. It might seem quite small when you think about it, because we’ve been around since 2002, to have only 37,000 people. I know it sounds like a lot if you don’t have 37,000 people, but if you’ve been around since 2002, you should have 350,000 people. Here’s the reality. Those 37,000 people don’t open the newsletter. Maybe 4 or 5,000 people open the newsletter at any given point in time. This is a reality. Out of those 4 or 5,000 people, probably 400 people generate more than 90% of our income. Most of them are our members at 5000bc.
At this point, this whole message seems very conflicting, even hypocritical, because what we’re saying is we’re very comfortable. We are earning thrice as much as we need. We’ve got this huge list. I’m saying to you, don’t do that. Don’t go crazy over stuff. We could have had a list of 350,000 people. We could have ten times the income. What would we do with it? How many sacrifices would we have to make to just do that kind of stuff. Instead, the sacrifice comes from other places. This is where the growth really matters.
When you look at many of the products at Psychotactics, you will find that they have been polished over time. When you look at The Brain Audit, it started with version 1, and then version 2, and then version 3, and then 3.2. that’s where we grow exponentially. When you look at the courses, they improve by 10% or 15% every year. How do we know this? Because we get feedback. Every course has one full day of feedback where clients tell us what we did wrong and how to fix it. We have to fix it, and that takes a lot of time.
There there is the growth. We still take exactly the same number of clients for every course as we’ve always done. We never exceed 25. If you’re in a workshop, it’s never 30. There is never this need to continuously grow and grow bigger, and grow fatter, and grow … I don’t know. There is no need. The need is in making magic, in getting your work better. Why is this need so important? Because you as a person, you feel satisfied. You feel wow, my work has got better over the years. You’re fixing it and it’s improving and it’s evolving.
Then you look at your clients and see that they are achieving these skills. Their business is growing. They’re more satisfied. They’re taking more vacations. You think, my mission is on its way. It’s not finished. It’s on its way. The benchmark needn’t be the fame and the benchmark needn’t be the money, and the benchmark needn’t be the growth. That’s one of the first myths that I want to take apart. Because almost every book out there is talking about something quite the opposite.
In fact, yesterday I was on Facebook and there it was again: double your income, lessen your work. No, your work is interesting. Your vacations are interesting. I get the point. You can’t sell a book that says stay stagnant with your income. Stay stagnant with your revenue. Stay stagnant with your clients. It’s not going to sell. Maybe it will, I don’t know, but the point is it’s a myth. You have to be satisfied first. Your work has to bring great satisfaction and you have to be comfortable. That’s all that really is required from you as a small business. Let the Apple and the Google and all those big companies do whatever it is that they want to do. Let them double and triple and do whatever they want to do. That’s probably not for you.
If you’re the person that enjoys your family time, and enjoys your life, and enjoys the little things, then this is how you go about it. Because, as we saw with the Bee Gees and Barry Gibb, the fame didn’t make that much of a difference. It made a difference, but at the end of the day, it’s about keeping the music alive. It’s about keeping the magic alive.
That brings us to the end of the first part.
Now we go to the second myth, which is things get easier. Back in the year 2000, if you went to a site called millionbucks.co.nz, you would find our site. Yes, I’m embarrassed by the name, but that was what I wanted to do right at the start. I wanted to grow the business, make a million bucks, do all the stuff that we’re told we are supposed to do. Unfortunately, no one, or very few people were making money online at that point in time. The online space was not seen as some place where you could go and by stuff. It was always about information and sharing that information.
It’s not until 2002 that we launched Psychotactics. That’s when we sold our first copy of The Brain Audit. That was a big surprise. We were forced to setup our credit card system by someone else who kicked us into doing it. Then someone showed up and bought the first copy, took us completely by surprise. Then my wife Renuka would do a happy dance. She would get up from her chair and do a dance in the room. Then of course, as the months passed, we would get some more sales, and every time a sale came she would do a happy dance.
It does get to the point where you can’t dance anymore and you have to sit down and do your work. You also buy into this idea that things will get easier. Because when we started out, we were working five, six, seven days a week. I realise there are only seven days in a week. But we were working all the time. We thought things will get easier, and they have got easier. But wait a second, we still put in five full days. We take the weekend off now but we still put in five full days, so how much easier has it got?
The point is that if you want to do superb work, things don’t get easier. Because you’re always making it somehow better. You’re always learning. You’re always getting feedback, and feedback kills you. Because feedback tells you that your work isn’t as superb as you think. That dish that you just cooked, that you’ve been raving about, that you think everyone should praise you for, it’s too oily. There’s too much salt in it. Or maybe there’s just over the top salt and it tastes good but that’s too much salt for human consumption.
You cannot take that feedback because that feedback means that you have to fix something. Clients will come back right after we’ve written a book and they’ll say, “You should fix this part or you should move that part.” They’ll get onto our courses and they’ll start to move things around. They’ll suggest different types of technology. We have to listen. All of that listening means all of that doing, and doing means that things never get easier. It’s like the story of the Golden Gate Bridge. They say they start painting at one end and by the time they get to the other end, they have to paint it again. I don’t know if the story is true, but that’s approximately what your business is going to be like.
It’s going to have lots of ups and downs, but more importantly, it’s not going to get easier. If you want to improve your work, if you want to make it magic, you’re going to get that feedback. You’re going to ask for that feedback and you’re going to get that feedback, and you’re going to have to fix things. When you fix things, it’s work. When you create new stuff, it’s work. All of this work brings an enormous amount of satisfaction. I can look back at a lot of the things that we’ve done, and if it weren’t for the clients, I wouldn’t have done it. If it weren’t for the deadlines, I wouldn’t have done it. But all of it is work.
You look at the storytelling workshop that we’re doing now in Nashville and Amsterdam. I would never have written the notes. I’ve written a series on storytelling. It’s available as a book. But this is more comprehensive. This is more in-depth. I’ve had to spend weeks working it out. I sit at the café looking pensive, drinking my coffee. Then it’s work. To me, it never gets easier, because you’re always trying to explore that depth, as it were. You’re trying to get that magic. You’re trying to keep that music going.
We all start out with this dream of sitting on the beach and doing nothing. That’s not how the brain works and that’s not how the body works. In fact, if we sat at the beach and did nothing, we’d soon be a vegetable in no time at all. If we don’t do our daily walks, and we don’t exercise, and we don’t meditate, and we don’t do all the stuff that we’re supposed to do, we don’t do all this “work,” there’s no satisfaction in life.
Today I can write an article in 45 minutes. I can do the podcast. I can do webinars. I can do a lot of stuff. What happens is you get much faster and better at doing stuff, and you want to get faster and better all the time because it improvements your work. You put more cartoons in the books. You tweak the workshops. You do stuff that only brings more work. Of course that’s why you need the vacations as well. Because you need to wind down. You need the weekends to wind down. That’s really how life continues. It’s not about the beach. The beach, that’s vacation time. There’s a separate time for it.
The third myth is that vacation is the enemy and work is everything. Because we’ve been talking about work, haven’t we? Let’s look at this third myth, which is that vacation is the enemy. But is vacation really the enemy? It seems like it, doesn’t it? Because wherever you go on Facebook or on the internet, you run into this little saying by Seth Godin, and it says, “Instead of wondering where your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.” When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense to have a great life and you don’t need a vacation.
It doesn’t make sense to me at all. Because when you look at that saying, what it’s saying is that your job, whatever you’re doing right now, or your business, whatever you’re doing right now, is so tedious that you’re not enjoying yourself. It’s saying that the enemy is that bad job, that unsatisfying job, that unsatisfying business that you’re running right now. And that you need to find something that is satisfying. That’s the enemy.
Look what happened here. Vacation came in. Vacation came in as the enemy when vacation is not the enemy at all. That bad job, that’s the enemy. The good job, that’s your friend. Vacation is the time where you get better at what you do. You take time off just like a flight takes off, and it lands, and it has to refuel, and it has to be maintained. That’s what vacation is all about. It’s about going to new lands, learning about stuff, learning the different types of food, enjoying yourself, reading, sleeping, drinking, doing stuff that we did as kids.
When we grew up, we weren’t working all the time. We’d go to school and then we had vacations. Vacations weren’t the enemy back then. How did they become the enemy all of a sudden? It’s because we’ve got this crappy job or we’re doing this business that is deeply unsatisfying. Then you have a statement like this, which is probably just off the cuff, but it has made vacations the enemy, and vacations are not the enemy at all. They are the friend.
That’s myth number three, that you don’t need vacations. You need the break. Think of yourself back when you were a kid and you just enjoyed the time of absolute nothingness. You would like to get that again, wouldn’t you? What’s the point of sitting at work the whole time? There is really no point. You can fool yourself, but the reason why we sit at work the whole time is because we get what is called work momentum. We work and we work and we work and we work, and then that momentum takes us into more work.
The moment we go on vacation, we’re thinking of what? Work of course, because that’s what we’ve been doing for so long. Then when you go on a vacation, if you have enough time on your vacation, you get into vacation momentum, and then you get more and more relaxed. Then when you get back to work, it’s very hard to get back to work. This management is important, this management of work and life. It’s important not to just take anything you see on Facebook, this nice little phrase, just because it came from Seth Godin or some other guru, and then take it at face value.
You want to deconstruct it and understand why you did things the way you did. You want to see it from your perspective as a human being. You want to see it how you were when you were a child. Because vacations are like a drug. Once you take vacations, work becomes so much more satisfying. Okay, I’ll stop ranting and raving.
This brings us to the end of the episode.
What have we covered in this episode? We covered three things.
The first thing we covered was this factor of doubling and tripling your income, and your customers. At Psychotactics we’ve grown organically. We’ve just done things and the list has grown to quite a sizeable number, but it’s very slow. It does matter. If you do what you love and you do it really well, and you will over time, then you will find that there are clients and there’s enough revenue, and you live a very comfortable life. You’re spending time with your family. You’re doing things that you really want. That’s what’s important.
That takes us to the second myth, and that is that life doesn’t get easier. It gets easier if you do nothing with your work, if you don’t take feedback, if you’re not big enough to take that feedback. Because most of us are insecure and we feel like someone is attacking us when they give feedback, so we don’t ask for feedback. We ask for praise all the time. But praise doesn’t improve your work so much; feedback does. When you get that feedback, you have to do some more work. Of course that takes more time, and so things don’t always get easier. You just get better at it and your work gets better, but never easier.
The final thing is that vacation is not the enemy. It has never been the enemy. We’ve made it the enemy because of crazy sayings that float around the internet. When you look into your childhood and your early years, vacation has always been your friend. You’ve just forgotten the friend and decided to adopt another friend, who’s a workaholic. Well, get rid of the workaholic and go back to your childhood. Go back to your young years and you’ll see that it’s a lot more fun.
That brings us to the end of this episode. What’s the one thing that we can do today? Well this episode was not quite the things to do episode, but even so, one of the things that you can do today is make more work for yourself. Whether it’s in your personal life, the hobbies that you have, or whether it’s in work, you want to ask for feedback. You want to ask people to tell you what you can fix. Stop asking for so much praise. The praise is important, but the feedback is just as important. Create a little more work for yourself and then take a vacation. Because, as Barry Gibb said, you want to keep the music alive.
When you listen to this podcast, we’re likely to be on vacation. We’re going to Morocco. Our trip is across the United States, then to Europe, then to Africa, then to Asia, and then back to New Zealand. Amsterdam is one of our favorite cities on the planet, and after our trip Nashville we’re going to be in Amsterdam for quite a while before heading to Morocco. It’s going to be fun in Morocco. No tourists because it’s not as hot this time of year. We’re going to be at a seaside place, really nice place, do nothing, just relax, just paint, eat, drink and sleep.
The reason we’re headed back to Auckland in a bit of a hurry is because Auckland is amazing at this time of the year. It’s summer; there’s no one in the city. We go for long walks. When we get back after our vacation, we’re going to take another month off until February. That’s when we get back to work. If what I’m describing to you sounds so unreal, then remember that it was unreal for us as well. We decided that this is what we want to do. We want to take time off. We want to take weekends off.
We put these things into place, and that’s what you should do as well. That’s exactly what the next episode is about. It’s about goal setting, but goal setting our way, and you would expect it to be different, so listen to it and tell your friends about it. If you haven’t given us a rating on iTunes, then please do so. If you would like to give us a one-star rating or a two-star rating, that’s fine. But give us a rating. If you haven’t done that already, go to iTunes, give us a rating, and total your friends about the Three Month Vacation. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye from Psychotactics and the Three Month Vacation. Bye bye.
Still reading? Find out—The Three Obstacles To Happiness (And How To Overcome Them)
http://www.psychotactics.com/three-business-myths/
In the last three episodes we considered what makes a product or service irresistible. In this episode we tidy up things with a complete summary. Hooray!
When you're so focused on a sales page, it's easy to forget that that sales page/landing page is just one tiny step in the whole sequence. There's a sequence that precedes the landing page. Most of us that create products or services ignore that sequence. We assume the product or service alone should have the spotlight. Which, as you're probably guessing, is a mistake. You need all the steps that come before the landing page. The landing page is the event? What comes before? Let's find out in this episode on the steps involved in creating an awesome buildup.
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: How do you create a build up for your product?
Part 2: Why you have to create a ‘moment in time’ for every product?
Part 3: What is the one biggest reason our product launch fails?
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources Something cool to read: Why “Failure” Is Just A Pre-Sell For Success
More cool reading: How Pre-Sell Sold The Article Writing Course In Fewer than 24 Hours
The Irresistibility Factor: A complete summary of this three part podcast.
What Are The Factors in Play Behind An Irresistible Offer: Part 3 of 3
Build Up “You do realize, you will never make a fortune out of writing children’s books?”
These were the words Joanne Kathleen—better known as J.K. Rowling heard from her agent when she first put forward the idea of Harry Potter. By 1999, Harry Potter was a global phenomenon. But how you take a phenomenon and make it even more phenomenal? You put it in a cage—that’s what you do!
At Waterstone’s in Birmingham, the third in the series, “Prisoner of Azkaban” was in a cage guarded by two mannequins dressed like Men in Black. The kids—and their harried parents—could see the book, but they couldn’t get at it. All over the globe, a similar rollout was in progress to create a build up for a particular moment in time. That moment was the release of the next Harry Potter book.
Let’s assume our products and services don’t have the cult-status of Harry Potter In such a case, how are you supposed to create this moment where you get clients to sign up for a product or service? The wrong way to have a launch is to shout, “Surprise” and present your product or service to the client. The right way to do it would be to create a build up. A build up that may have started weeks, months, even years ago.
When you see a Psychotactics course sell out in less than an hour, there’s something important you don’t see You don’t see the pre-sell in action. And yet if you were to read this article, you’ll spot the fact that the Article Writing Course is coming back around June next year. You’ll also get notifications of the fact that this extremely popular course is getting a big upgrade. It’s Version 2.0 of the course with brand new notes, audio and assignments. Bit by bit the information trickles out, with very few specifics until the date gets closer.
Build up is critical for both products and services If you’re a web designer, and you sit around waiting for something to happen, well, something might happen. But it’s also likely that nothing might happen as well. That clients don’t come rushing to you. If you’re a copywriter, it’s the same scenario. You’re waiting and hoping, and hope is a pretty iffy strategy. When you look around you, the biggest names in the business don’t play the game with iffiness in mind. If the big new Bond movie is coming out, you’ll hear about it for weeks in advance. You’ll see videos on YouTube, magazines splashed with the actors from the Bond movie. They’ll be eating, drinking, be on the brink of affairs, separation—and who knows what else! But they’re building up for the event.
To make something—anything— irresistible, you have to create a moment in time Like a lunar eclipse that causes everyone to dust off their telescopes at the precise time, you have to control the build up. Bit by bit the information needs to peter out from you to your clients. Almost without exception, clients should know of your product or service—and the day of the launch. It’s this rigour that allows a product or service to become an “instant success”.
Pre-sell involves buildup and the biggest reason for failure are that we’re too trigger-happy. We expect to launch something and then it needs to take off like a rocket. And yes, there are exceptions to every rule, but by and large you’re going to struggle a lot if you don’t go through the steps of pre-sell and build up. It’s the patience and planning that counts.
The steps to a launch are: 1) Work on a date of the launch well into the future
2) Create steps along the way—and what you’re going to drip feed to your clients.
3) Keep adding different elements until the clients get caught up in the fever of the product or service. That’s when the product or service becomes irresistible.
This brings us to the end of the three elements that make your product or service irresistible.
So let’s summarise: The Irresistibility Factor?A Complete Summary In the last three episodes we considered what makes a product or service irresistible. In this episode we tidy up things with a complete summary. Hooray!
http://traffic.libsyn.com/psychotactics/69a_Irresistible_Offer_Summary.mp3
Still reading? Have a look at #45: The Secret To Getting Your Report Read (From Start To Finish)
When we think of exclusivity, we often see sales pages that seem to have these ticking clocks. They're creating urgency by forcing our hand. And as small business owners, we often buy into that urgency. Yet, you don't need to resort to these cheap gimmicks when you have the twin factors of exclusivity. So how do you use these twin factors to your advantage. Here's Part 2 in a series of 3 on "How to Create the Irresistibility Factor".
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The Power of Product Exclusivity
Part 2: The Benefit of Working with Smaller Numbers
Part 3: The Myth that you have to be Big to be Successful
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources 5000bc: How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems
The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy (And Why They Don’t)
Special Bonus: How To Win The Resistance Game
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What Are The Factors in Play Behind An Irresistible Offer: Part 2 of 3
The Power of Exclusivity There’s an anecdotal story about the late Gary Halbert.
Gary Halbert was one of the best known direct-mail copywriters on the planet and so he decided to have a copywriting workshop. Even those he charged nose-bleed prices for the workshop, it was absolutely full.
So he hosted a subsequent workshop. That too was full. He was on a roll, so another workshop was announced. Yes, it was full again.
And then it went quiet.
Deathly quiet, in fact.
You’ve probably figured out the reason why the workshops stopped filling up My guess was that Gary ran out of people to attend his workshop. But remember this—Gary was super well-known. He had a list of thousands of subscribers. What he ran into was a problem of exclusivity. The workshops were being held at such a high frequency, that it seemed easy enough to put off attending the next workshop, because another one would always show up.
This is why we last had the Psychotactics Headlines course in 2013—then nothing until 2015 The headlines course is extremely popular—and hence full every single time we announce it. It’s not hard to see why, either. As a business owner you’ve got to send out newsletters, possibly make a presentation, write sales letters for your product or service, and if you produce podcasts or webinars—yes, you need headlines. Almost all marketing activity is directly linked to writing great headlines. Instead of guessing whether a headline is outstanding or just average, you know precisely why it works and how to fix it. The question to ask is this: Should you conduct the course on a frequent basis?
The answer depends on whether you want to create exclusivity or not If you want a product to be exclusive, you have to create scarcity, because scarcity creates exclusivity. This exclusivity is exactly what Studio 54 used to their advantage. It’s what caused people to want to jump that “velvet rope”. There was a sense of desperation to get into Studio 54 night after night. If you don’t or won’t have exclusivity around your product or services, you’re telling clients they can have it at any given time. As you can tell, that lack of exclusivity reduces urgency. The client can come in any ol’ time and get the product or service—and often they do. They put off the purchase until later.
At Psychotactics, we haven’t tried to reinvent the wheel… Instead we work on just two parameters to create a factor of exclusivity.
1) Reduce frequency
2) Work with small numbers.
Reduce frequency If you look at the courses we host online (for e.g. the Article Writing Course, headlines course, copywriting course etc), they’re all held with a substantial gap. That gap is at least a year apart. It means if you miss signing up for the course, you have to wait at least a year, sometimes two. There’s no guarantee that the course will be held on a recurring basis, and this creates a factor of exclusivity. Let’s take the Article Writing Course for instance. Let’s just say we’re going to have a course in May next year (and right now we’re in November). When will we have the next course? We don’t know for sure. All we know is it’s not going to be in June, or July, or August—or even in that year.
But won’t that drive clients away to the competition? There’s always a possibility that the clients would want to learn a skill desperately and hence head elsewhere. And yet, that’s not what a lot of our clients do. They’re clear they want to do the course with us, and so they wait for the announcement and they sign up. As you’re reading this information, you are clearly being pre-sold for the Article Writing Course being held next year. You are aware that there’s a sort of sales pitch in what you’re reading and yet you’re also keen to know why the course is so exclusive.
Why would clients wait? Why would they pay a hefty fee of $3000 for the privilege? Why would they sign up for something that’s known as the “toughest writing course” in the world? It’s not like clients won’t try the competition. Even if you have the best products or services in the world, the clients will still buy into competitor’s products or services. Yet, we all want something that’s exclusive—something we can’t have.
Make no mistake Just putting a tag of exclusivity on a product or service isn’t going to help you sell better.Your product or service has to be top-notch. No client is silly enough to spend $3000 on a course. They’re not going to get on a plane, take a whole week off from their work to get to your workshop. They certainly aren’t going to just throw money at whatever product you’re selling, if it’s not top notch. And while all product or services start off a bit less than great, with time they can all become exceedingly good.
That’s when the demand starts That’s when you need to put a “velvet rope” around the product or the service. The greater the demand the more you’ve got to protect your property. Instead it’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to make our product or service easily available. Yet, in some cases, availability is exactly what’s needed. Some products or services may need to be put in place so that clients can get to them at any point in time. These products and services provide a doorway to your business.
In our case, The Brain Audit is the doorway Prospects find The Brain Audit on Amazon.com or on our site. And once they read it, they go on to buy more “doorway products”. We know this to be true because we track their progress. They’ll buy books such as “The Secret life of Testimonials” or “Chaos Planning” or “Story Telling”. Then they move up to buying more expensive products such “Black Belt Presentations”. But then they hit a wall. To join 5000bc, they can’t just waltz in. They have to pay to be on a waiting list.
Who pays to be on a waiting list? It’s just $10, but you have to get on the list and then after we check out your history a bit, we let you in after 3-4 weeks. The same applies to any of the workshops or courses. Not only are they less frequent, but our members at 5000bc get the first chance to sign up. There have been numerous occasions where the product or service is sold out before the rest of the list can even have a crack at it.
The more expensive the product or service, the less the frequency of availability.
So yes, you want to start with looking at your product or service Is it a doorway product? If so, it may not need that tag of exclusivity. But as it goes up in price, create a barrier—create several barriers—and make it exclusive. Even if you have a digital product that should be easily available, you can offer it only once a year and make it exclusive.
This takes us to the second factor: working with small numbers.
Working With Smaller Numbers A 947 person waiting list.
That’s the Tory 2.0 dress by MM LaFleur. MM. LaFleur is a direct-to-consumer fashion retailer started by a former financial consultant Sarah LaFleur and Zac Posen designer Miyako Nakamura. At $235 it’s not cheap, but the very fact that you can’t get it right away—that’s causing the waiting list to keep soaring.
The same applied to my Nakaya Naka-ai in Araishu pen The pen is handcrafted from ebonite and Urushi lacquer, and comes a solid gold 14k nib. I ordered this handcrafted pen from Japan back in May 2014 and it arrived a year and a half later. My wife, Renuka, jokes that there’s some wizened old man in Japan somewhere working day and night bent over the nib. The price? After all the taxes, it hovered close to NZ$1000—for a fountain pen!
And yet, there’s a waiting list.
As if to underline the Japanese connection, here’s a third example Jiro Ono runs a sushi restaurant under the Ginza railway station in Tokyo. Jiro has been honoured by Michelin—and gets Michelin’s highest three star rating. A meal costs approximately US$380 per person. So how many people would you expect to see at Jiro’s restaurant? A hundred, fifty, thirty—perhaps?
The correct answer is ten.
Night after night only ten diners sit in for a twenty minute meal. So does a restaurant that makes over $1 million a year sound like a good business?
It’s a myth that you have to be big to be successful In reality, being small—and having small groups as your clients can be as, or even more successful than getting bigger all the time. This in turn creates an enormous amount of exclusivity—and makes your business irresistible. If you’re a woman who’s keen on a superb office dress, you’ll be checking out the Tory 2.0 dress. The foodie in you would want to experience Jiro’s food and the pen—no you can’t have it. There’s only one kind of it on the planet. In short, smaller numbers play a massive role in creating exclusivity.
And this factor of working in smaller numbers has a big, almost-guaranteed benefit Let’s take the membership site at 5000bc, for example. 5000bc has been running since 2003 and yet it has fewer than 400 members. That may, at first, seem like an awfully small number when you consider that the Psychotactics list runs into several tens of thousands. Yet, that small number is responsible for generating almost 90% our income. The members know the benefit of being a member. They get first access to the courses or workshops. They get personalised attention. Being a member has its privileges both for the client as well as for the person running the membership site. The moment the membership site gets big, it almost always gets hard to handle. There are no personal relationships, everyone is trying to hawk something to someone else and there’s a constant show up of upmanship.
This concept of having smaller numbers applies not just to services, but training as well At Psychotactics, we may boast that we don’t do joint ventures, affiliates, advertising etc., but why have we been able to get away with this for so long? The reason is because clients keep coming back. On average, if a client does one workshop (at a venue) or one live course online, they come back to do as many as four-five courses, buy several products and services. Even the clients who don’t do many courses, end up doing at least a couple.
I think you know where this line of thinking is going The smaller numbers cause the product or service to be exclusive. The exclusivity leads to urgency. Add a good helping of lesser frequency and you have an even higher factor of irresistibility kicking in. But more importantly, this tiny number also allows you to pay closer attention to the needs of your clients. And if you’re reading this, there’s a pretty good chance you’re not even remotely expecting to rule the world. Your core goal is to live a comfortable, satisfying life; to have really good clients; to have a solid cash flow and money reserves.
But you can have your cake and eat it too All your products and services don’t need to be out of reach. Some products may be produced in larger numbers. You may choose to have some events with 500 people—while others are just for 25. Not everything needs to be small, but you can put a ring around some products or services and decide to keep them small forever. Or, like Jiro Ono, you may decide you never want to have 11 people for dinner.
Smaller numbers work magnificently well to create a factor of exclusivity You get to live your life on your terms—and because you have such small numbers your product or service is always in demand.
Go smaller, not bigger. Reduce frequency, don’t increase. These are the keys to creating a real exclusivity for your product or service.
This takes us to the third element: Build Up Have a look here—for the continuation on How To Make Your Product or Service Irresistible: Part 3 and 3.
How do you make your product or service irresistible? With tens of thousands of similar products or services in the market, can you use simple techniques to create a great offer? This episode shows you two psychological methods that we can't turn down?as humans. We love both the buffet and the specialty. No matter if you're a small business or a big one, you can use these techniques and increase your product and service sales.
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Buffet vs. Specialty Principle
Part 2: How Studio 54 put out a buffet of fantasy
Part 3: What does this mean for you when you’re selling a product or service?
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What Are The Factors in Play Behind An Irresistible Offer: Part 1 of 3
Imagine you’re Frank Sinatra. No matter where you go on the planet, people know of you.
Doors open magically for you.
People can’t help but gape in wonder as you show up at an event.
So imagine a place where the great Frank Sinatra can’t enter.
It’s inconceivable, isn’t it? And yet it happened. When Frank showed up at Studio 54, he was turned away. So was the president of Cyprus, the King of Saudi Arabia’s son, Roberta Flack, and several young Kennedys. Even the famous movie star, Jack Nicholson was unable to enter on opening night.
Studio 54 was like no other place in New York From the moment it opened its 11,000-square-foot dance floor, it was packed with celebrities dying to get in. Olivia Newton-John, Michael Jackson, Woody Allen, Andy Warhol, Elizabeth Taylor, Dolly Parton, Mick Jagger, Tine Turner—you get the idea—they were just some of the visitors to Studio 54. Almost every night since it opened its doors on April 26, 1977, it was packed to its capacity—almost 2000 people a night. If you considered yourself cool, you wanted to get into Studio 54—but there was no guarantee you’d get in.
There was someone stopping the flow… This someone was at the door Studio 54 night after night. He’d show up at the door at 11:30 pm and get on a step stool above the crowd. He’d pick who could get into the club that night—and who was to be turned away. His name is Steve Rubell, part-owner and the person who made sure the Studio was one of the most irresistible places in New York!
So what made Studio 54 so irresistible, when there were so many cool places in New York at the time? And what makes any product or service irresistible, even without star power? Let’s take a look at three core elements.
- Buffet vs. Specialty
- Exclusivity
- Build Up
Buffet vs. Specialty Principle If you were to go to Lynda.com you’d be faced with a buffet.
On Lynda.com there are hundreds of tutorials on software, business and creative skills. In 2004 alone, there were over 100 courses on the site. And that course number has gone up exponentially. For the past few years, Lynda.com been adding more than 18 hours of content, almost every single day of the year. That means you’re likely to run into thousands of hours of tutorials topics such as Photoshop, computer animation, 3-D animation, photography—in all about 224,413 tutorials to date.
That’s a huge buffet, don’t you agree? And as humans, we’re primed for buffets. We love the “eat all you want” concept and it’s even better if the “food” is of an extremely high quality. This means that a potential client of Lynda.com can access all their content for just $250 a year. Immediately you see why this kind of deal is incredibly irresistible. If you decide to learn a program like InDesign, you can easily do so, because there are at least a dozen courses on InDesign alone. If you want to learn to work with WordPress, hey, there’s a mountain of video instruction already in place. No matter where you look, the volume and quality of content tantalises you.
Which brings us to our first principle—the buffet principle If you’re offering your clients an enormous amount of something, they’re instantly drawn towards it, whether they can consume it or not. When given a buffet option, few of us can stop ourselves from feeling the need to buy the product or service.
When you look at 5000bc.com, you get a buffet option 5000bc is the membership site at Psychotactics.com. The moment you get to the sales page at 5000bc, there’s a feeling of a ton of information at 5000bc. There are cumulatively, hundreds of articles on topics such as copywriting, web design, branding, lead generation etc. Which is why most clients tend to sign up to the membership site at 5000bc.
It’s more than likely they’ve been a subscriber at Psychotactics for a while, bought and read The Brain Audit, possibly even bought some other books from Psychotactics—and then they’re exposed to 5000bc. And the buffet concept kicks in. At $259 a year (remarkably similar to Lynda.com), clients can get not only a ton of curated content, but also have the opportunity to ask me dozens of questions—some of which are answered within hours, if not minutes. This concept of a buffet becomes impossible to resist, and has been the main factor in attracting clients to 5000bc since it started way back in 2003.
Studio 54 put out a buffet of fantasy The magazine, Vanity Fair, describes it as the “giddy epicenter of 70s hedonism, a disco hothouse of beautiful people, endless cocaine and every kind of sex. Once you were within the velvet ropes, you were exposed to raunchiness, debauchery and creativity of an unimaginable scale.
“It felt like you were going to a new place every night,” says Kevin Haley, then a model, now a Hollywood decorator. “And you were, because they changed it all the time for the parties. Remember the Dolly Parton party? It was like a little farm with bales of hay and live farm animals—pigs and goats and sheep. The designer Karl Lagerfield’s party: an 18th century paty with busboys dressed up as courtiers, powdered wigs and then—a live reggae concert at 3 am in the morning. Another night might bring Bianca Jagger popping out of a birthday cake. Some nights might bring in a sea of glitter, another night Lady Godiva on a horse—or Hell’s Angels on Harleys on the dance floor.
Ironically, the buffet-concept represents just one way to create an irresistible offer.
The other way is the exact opposite—where you take away everything and create a specialty offer.
Remember Lynda.com where you get over 200,000 tutorials? Remember the price? Yes, it’s $250 a year. And yet, at Psychotactics we sell an InDesign course that’s $269.
It’s not an entire course in InDesign. It’s not even a partial course. All the course promises is ONE thing. It shows you how to create an e-book in InDesign in less than an hour. If you were to learn a course in InDesign, you’re likely to take at least 18 hours—and that’s the first time around. It’s likely you’d have to go through the entire course (or at least part of the course) a second time. And then when you’re ready to create your snazzy e-book, you have to work out which part of InDesign will help you get the result you seek. It’s not inconceivable to spend 40-50 hours just to get your e-book going.
Now the specialty offer makes a huge difference to the client Instead of wading through hours of material, they get right to the point. And this specialty concept applies to more than just courses or training. A phone. Most of us want smartphones that have all the bells and whistles. But what if you want just a cell phone that makes calls? The Doro Phone Easy 626 does just what you’d expect a cell phone to do—it makes calls. Like the InDesign course, it’s not meant for everyone, but just a smaller audience that finds it irresistible.
What does this mean for you when you’re selling a product or service? It means you can have your cake and eat it too. When we sell the book, The Brain Audit, it is akin to a buffet (like most books). It has several chapters and spans 180 pages. Yet, elements of The Brain Audit are then isolated. For instance, one of the elements, uniqueness, is a complete course. Another element, testimonial is a 100+ page book. Clients who buy The Brain Audit are extremely satisfied with the content and applications. However, when they want to go deeper on an isolated topic, they will buy the other products as well.
Studio 54 catered to almost 2000 people a night—yet there was isolation in place If you were part of the select few, you could go down to the basement. The basement was essentially a storage area connected by zigzagging passageways. The in-crowd was in the basement, away from the party upstairs, mostly talking through the night and drinking bottles of a vodka brand— Stolichnaya.
Even if you’re no Studio 54, you can have a smörgåsbord of goodies while at the same time putting a velvet rope over other product or services. And since we’re talking about buffets, a restaurant could have the buffet, while at the same time offering a special meal for just a tiny audience. A website designer could put together a website with all the bells and whistles—then create a service or product that was very niche and hence, irresistible.
To be irresistible, you don’t have to choose between buffet and specialty items In reality a specialty item is easier to put together (because it’s less stuff, rather than more). In the grand scheme of things, it’s also easier to market as it has a clear point of focus. While we’ll look at all three elements: buffet/specialty, exclusivity and build up, it’s important to note that specialty is a great starting point. So start small—and charge more.
This takes us to the second element: Exclusivity. Have a look here—for the continuation on How To Make Your Product or Service Irresistible: Part 2 and 3.
Success is good. Focus is good. Until it’s bad. Incredible as it may seem, focus can cause a massive blindspot in our business.
So what’s the option? Surely it can’t be distraction?
Actually it’s a mix of both that’s required. Using the concept of “spinning plates”, you can avoid the blind spot of success and the mindlessness of distraction.
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Once upon a time in New York’s Catskill Mountains lived a man called Rip Van Winkle. You’ve probably heard of this story. I heard it when I was a kid. I’ve kind of forgotten what the story was all about. As the story goes, one autumn day he wants to escape from his wife’s nagging so he wonders up the mountain with his dog. He hears his name being called out.
He sees a man with antiquated Dutch clothing. This man is carrying a keg up the mountain; he wants help. They proceed to a hollow in which Rip discovers the source of the noises. There are a group of bearded men who are playing nine pins. Rip doesn’t ask how they know his name but they offer him moonshine, which is a kind of whiskey, illicit whiskey, not legal. He decides to drink and then he falls into a deep sleep.
When he wakes up, it’s pretty strange. His musket is rotting; it’s rusty. His beard is a foot long. His dog is nowhere in sight. He returns to the village and he finds he recognizes no one. His wife has died. His close friends have fallen in a war; they moved away.
This is often what happens in business, especially if you’ve got a successful business. You get a blind spot.
You start focusing on what works for you, and then you work at it and you work at it, and it works even better for you. The longer you work at it, and the more successful you get, the more you have a blind spot to everything else.
Now, almost instantly you’re wondering where is this going. Focus is supposed to be good, right? If focus brings success, then what’s the problem with having the blind spot? There is a downside, and that’s what this episode is all about. It’s about understanding that you can have focus and you can have success, but that you can also have a blind spot.
In this episode we’re going to explore three elements. * First is the concept of the Rip Van Winkle effect. * The second is the opposite, which is the danger of not having that focus. * The third is the solution. How do we solve this problem of focus and not focusing at the same time?
Let’s start off with the first, which is understanding the concept of the Rip Va Winkle effect. If you look around you, you will find that a lot of blogs have shut off their comments. Why have they done this? This is not just little blogs, but big blogs and mega-sized blogs. They’ve just shut off their comments.
Why is this the case? The obvious reaction is maybe they’ve decided that they’re big enough they don’t need the comments, but that’s not true. Everyone likes to hear back from their customers. Nothing boosts the ego more than having 50, 70, 100, 200 comments on a single post that you made. Remember, when people comment they also send it off to Facebook and Twitter and every other place.
Why turn off that channel? Why turn off the chance for people to experience your blog at a different level? The reason is very simple: that group has moved on. When you look at the most of the blogs today, even the really big ones, they have far fewer comments. It’s embarrassing, so they have to turn it off.
Same thing with Facebook. At one point in time you could effectively run a business off Facebook. Slowly but surely, that tide is changing. Suddenly you find that Facebook has all these restrictions in place. Suddenly there are too many people looking at your stuff, but not the people that you want, so the tide keeps changing.
If you made a successful out of blogging Or Facebook or any other medium, then it’s very simple for you to focus on that medium and not pay that much attention to everything else, so suddenly someone comes around and says, “Hey, podcasting is a big thing.” You look at them with skepticism because you tried podcasting four or five years ago and now this stuff, whatever you’re doing right now, is still working for you, so you get into that moonshine mode. You fall fast asleep, and that becomes your blind spot.
This is true even for us at Psychotactics. We had a blog going around 2003 before blogs became popular in 2005; we dropped it. We had podcasts going around 2008-2009 before podcasting became popular; we dropped it. We never really stepped onto YouTube or Facebook or Twitter in a big way, or even a small way. The reason why we did that is because we had a blind spot.
We had courses that were filling up super fast. I mean every single course fills up in less than an hour. We’ve had workshops in New Zealand, in the US, Canada, Netherlands, the UK, and they all fill up almost instantly.
Of course we send out a newsletter weekly. We’ve done so since 2002 without missing a single week. We’re able to sell products for as little as 9.99 all the way up to $400, $500. When you look at that kind of model, you say, “Well, that’s good, isn’t it? It’s great focus,” and it is.
But the ecosystem is connected. When we first started out in 2002, if we wrote an article and we published it on another site we’d get 200 subscribers. Yes, for a single article. Then we had the blogs come out and we’d get about 50 to 60 subscribers per article. Recently, with all those comments of the blogs turned off, we probably get 2 or 3. We’re talking about really big blogs.
You would think that the really big blogs would drive traffic towards you. It’s not true anymore. They’ve had to relook their strategy; we’ve had to relook our strategy. Focus is a great thing, but things can change around you and you’ve got to be watching for what’s happening around you.
This takes us to our second part of today, which is chasing everything that is around you. The opposite of focus is distraction. Most of us are not very good at focus. We are very good at being distracted. Every time someone comes up and says, “Hey, here’s a new method,” they just put the word new, improved, and we’re off like a bullet. It’s almost like the diet syndrome: the South Beach Diet, the paleo diet, the Atkins diet, the Zone diet, every single diet. We think that the next diet is going to solve our problem, but it never does.
It’s the same thing for business. If you get into doing, say, podcasting, then you have to be prepared to enjoy it. You have to be prepared to love what you’re doing so that you can do it for the next five years or ten years. When we do our courses, they’re very tough. They’re very tough for me. They’re very demanding for me. When we do our workshops I’m on my feet for three days.
I never sit down. I’m always running around teaching and doing stuff. Even these podcasts, I’ve already told you before, they take between three to four hours to produce even though they’re just 15 minutes or 20 minutes long.
If you want to make a success of anything you’re going to have to be willing to be there for the long run But as we found out, the long run can change over time. It can twist and change, and suddenly blogs are no longer fashionable and Facebook is no longer fashionable. Maybe podcasting will not work out as effectively as it does today. It might still be good. It might not be as effective.
…to continue listening or reading the transcript of this podcast
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There’s a difference between the “four-hour work week” and magic. You can create revenue in a short week. You can’t create magic.Magic is what we all want to create with our work. Most of us love our work. It gives us purpose and satisfaction. And yes, we’d love a “three-month” paid vacation—or just any vacation at all. And that’s the goal. The goal is to work hard, but to also have a great time.
http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast/
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I don’t mow the lawns. I outsource it. I don’t do my accounts. It’s what keeps my accountant in business. I bake my own bread, cook my own food, but at least half of the time it’s all outsourced. In fact, when I think about it, a good chunk of my life is outsourced.
I don’t build my own computers, code my own programs, generate my own electricity. I didn’t even bother to weave my own carpet.
So yes, you could safely say that outsourcing is a good part of my life.
What I don’t outsource is magic It’s magical to write my own articles. Do my own books. Draw my own cartoons. Answer my own email.
When I think about those who keep yearning for a “four-hour” work week, I find it incredibly weird and unsettling. I think of Leonardo da Vinci spending only four hours a week, painting. I think of Michelangelo goofing off on David and just putting in the least amount of time.
I think of the wine I drink and how it would taste if the wine maker decided not to put in 50-60 hours a week. I remember the movies that moved me, the food that tantalised my taste buds, the books that have elevated my senses. I think of all the magic the world has seen, felt and experienced over the years and a “four hour” workweek makes zero-sense to me.
You can create money in four hours You can’t create magic. Money isn’t magic. It may seem that way, when you’re slogging in a job that you have no control over. A life that seems to pull and push you in all directions. At that point, money and magic may seem like one and the same thing. And yet it’s not.
Work is magic Work well done, is something we all yearn for. And try as you may, you can’t outsource the important stuff in life. So when some internet marketer comes along and tells you that a four-hour work week is magical, they’re just equating work with money. That somehow you could work for four hours in a week, and make all the money and you’d be happy.
I can assure you that you’d be happy for a while, but then you’d seek magic.
And magic yup, that takes a lot more time and effort.
I wake up at 4 am every day and have done so for many years I don’t have to wake up. We’ve done well over the years. We have a business which attracts really phenomenal customers. Some of them have been with us for over 12 years (considering we’re Internet-based, that’s like a hundred years).
Our workshops are always full. Our courses often sell out in an hour or so sometimes 20 minutes. We’ve banked enough, own enough, travel three months in a year. Truly speaking, if we were to stop working now, we could go for at least another 20-30 years, living our comfortable lifestyle.
So why wake up at 4 am? Why put in 99 cartoons in a book when people are happy to just buy text? Why bother to re-write, re-engineer our courses by 20-30% every year? It’s all extra work, isn’t it? More hours in a day, month and year that seems to slip by increasingly faster.
The answer lies in magic You can outsource some stuff, and you should. But to create the Mona Lisa, David and some fine wine yup, that’s going to take a chunky 50-60 hours a week. Get used to it!..to continue listening to or reading the podcast
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When we sit down to write a landing page, we usually have a ton of confusion in our heads. We have so many elements on that landing page. What should we put first? What should we leave out? The sales of our product or service depends on us having incredible focus. So how do we get that focus? The answer lies in the "pebble system". The moment we apply the "pebble system" we are able to prioritise what's important to our client—and to ourselves. The sales page gets crystal clear and we stop going around in circles. So what is this "pebble system" and how do we use it right away?
Useful Resources
To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/64
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
Improve your planning (with chaos): http://www.psychotactics.com/chaos
Write your home page/about us page: http://www.psychotactics.com/web
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: How To Find The Confusion On Your Sales Pages
Part 2: How To Use The Pebble System On Your Sales Page
Part 3: How To Expand The Sales Message
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources 1) How To Avoid Dragging Out A Well Known Story (And Boring The Reader)
2) Why Stories Are Great For Sales Copy
3) How to put that Zing-Kapow in your articles (with story telling)
The Transcript “This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.”
This is the Three Month Vacation, and I’m Sean D’Souza.
Every evening at about twilight in New Mexico and Arizona, thousands of bats stream out from caves. One of the most famous of them all, at least among biologists, is the Mexican free-tailed bats, because they’re known for their hunting sprees. Like all animals, bats communicate with each other. But these Mexican free-tailed bats, they not only communicate; they also confuse. Aaron Cochran is a biologist who’s at the Wake Forest University. He was studying the hunting habits of Mexican free-tailed bats in Arizona and also in New Mexico. What he found was that his ultrasonic equipment was picking up two completely different sounds. When the free-tailed be able to was trying to communicate it was one sound, and then, the moment they had competition in the area, they would send out a send that was totally different. What these bats were doing was jamming the signals of other bats.
Usually when a bat is hunting, what it does is it sends out a signal. It sends out what is called a feeding buzz. That bounces off the prey, and then they know, “Hey, it’s time for dinner.” What these free-tailed bats were doing was jamming the signals. It reduced their capability of capturing moths from 64% down to just 18%. This confusion, this reduced capability is a lot like what happens on our sales pages. When we are trying to write sales pages, we’re trying to get too much information across. It sounds like there’s one buzz and a second buzz, and now there is confusion and we miss the point.
Today what we’re going to do is we’re going to stick to the point and we’re going to use pebbles. We’re going to use pebbles to figure out how we get to exactly what we want to say to the client, and then how we continue to say that over the rest of the sales page. The three things that we’re going to cover are, one, we find the confusion. The second is we use the pebbles. The third is we expand each issue all by itself. Let’s start out with the first one, which is finding the confusion on your sales page.
Part 1: How To Find The Confusion On Your Sales Pages About two weeks ago I was on Facebook. I learn a lot through Facebook, despite what I say. Yet, I was watching this video by this conductor called Alondra de la Parra. I was so taken by this video that I saw on Facebook that I went to YouTube. On YouTube, there she was directing the Paris Orchestra. One of the songs that really got to me, one of the pieces that really got to me was “Huapango.” I started listening to “Huapango,” and then to another piece, and another piece, and another piece. Before I knew it, I had three albums of Alondra de la Parra. Of course I was driving Renuka crazy because I was playing this music all day long.
Now the interesting thing about this music is it’s classic music, and like a lot of classical music, it requires an orchestra. An orchestra is complete confusion if you let it be. That’s what a conductor does. A conductor has to stand up there and somehow know that music in advance, and push and pull so that instead of cacophony we have music, we have this beautiful-sounding orchestra all playing together, but somehow separately at the same time. Your sales page is not difference. It’s got to have all of this information, but it’s got to play something louder than the other. This is why you have to first find the confusion, because when you find the confusion you know exactly what’s driving the sales page crazy.
The answer is usually with the clients. When you ask your clients questions about why do you choose our business, they will tend to use a single word or a single phrase. Theygive you a line that you then try to put on your sales page, and of course it’s total confusion. Let me read you a line from the Running Coach. Now we’re talking about head coach Ken Rickerman, and he runs 5speedrunning.com and he teaches people how to run faster and better and with fewer injuries. Of course help go and help speak to a client, and help ask them, “What is it that drives you to come to 5speedrunning.com?” Of course they’ll give their response, and it sounds like this: “I want to move more freely. I want to go longer on the runs, and I want to improve my form.” The question is, does that help?
It doesn’t help, because when you look at it, there are three points there. One is move more freely. Second is longer runs. The third is improve form. It sounded like a single sentence, but there are three whole topics in there, and that’s what we have to do. First we have to find the confusion. In that single line, there is enormous amounts of confusion. You can’t write a sales page or you can’t write an email if you’re trying to cover three points at the same time. You have to cover one point, just like this podcast. We’re going to cover three points, but hey, let’s start off with the first point. Let’s go into a lot of detail with the first point. Then we’ll go to the second point, detail the second point. Then we go to the third point.
This is how we do stuff, or we should do stuff. Instead, we end up like those Mexican free-tailed bats, and there’s all this confusion because we’re trying to cover all of it together because it seems like one sentence. We take that sentence and we break it down into bullet points. That’s how you sort out any confusion. Take the sentence from your client, whatever that might be, and then break it up into bullet points. Once you break it up into bullet points, you will see very quickly that hey, there are four or five points here, or there are two or three points here, but there is almost never one point. That’s where the confusion lies. First step: make sure that you break up the sentences into bullet points.
Part 2: How To Use The Pebble System On Your Sales Page That takes us to the second step where we start using the pebbles. As you know, we take three months off every year. We work for three months, and then we take a month off. For at least two of those months, we travel internationally. We’ll go to places like The Netherlands, or Japan, or Sardinia. When people ask me, “Which is your favorite city?” that’s not a fair question to ask because every city is completely different. The people are different and the food is different and the experience is different. Even so, you could specifically ask me, “Here are three cities, like three bullet points. Now, can you allocate pebbles to them?” If we took three cities like Amsterdam and Kyoto and Cagliari, then I could allocate pebbles. Because when you rank cities, it’s very difficult. You could say Kyoto is one, Cagliari is two, Amsterdam is three. But that doesn’t give us a sense of weight. What gives us a sense of weight is the pebble system.
The pebble system is very simple. If you said, “Now allocate ten pebbles. You’ve got ten pebbles and you have to allocate them to these three different cities,” and then Kyoto would get maybe four or five pebbles. Because Kyoto is old Japan. It’s got temples and shrines and gardens. It’s got lots of ramen, lots of it, great food, great people, and these amazingly sublime gardens where you can sit there for hours and do nothing, just like you would imagine Japan to be, this very quiet, non hustle bustle place. In my ranking, Kyoto would get five pebbles. Now we have just five pebbles among the rest of the cities. Now we have Cagliari and Amsterdam. Amsterdam is amazing. It’s got lots of cheese, and Renuka loved that place more than any other place. But I would give Cagliari three pebbles, and then Amsterdam two pebbles.
Now we have a weighted system. We have this concept of Kyoto, five pebbles; Cagliari, three pebbles; and then finally we get to Amsterdam, which is two pebbles. Now, if we have those three bullet points, we’re clear which one is the most important. When look at what Ken had, he had move more freely, longer runs, and improve form. Longer runs got five pebbles. What we’re going to do is we’re going to start off with longer runs. The next thing was improve form; that got three pebbles. Finally, move more freely got two pebbles. Now, what we have with this pebble system is clarity. We know that the most important thing for that runner is for longer runs, so we’re going to deal with longer runs on our sales page. For now, we totally abandon the other two, which is move more freely and improve form, and we focus on the problems that runners have with longer runs: the injuries it causes, all that stuff, but only with longer runs. Then you’re able to get that message across very clearly. You might never have to go to point two and point three. Because, as Ken mentioned, with the longer run you get tired, you get physically exhausted, you lose focus, you get aches and pains, you have oxygen problems, you go out of breath. Then finally, you lose motivation and confidence. There is a lot of stuff to cover with just one topic, as you can see.
What we do on the sale page is do the Mexican free-tail dance. We try and put all the points together, when this one point itself could drive half the sales page. Imagine yourself as a client. You get there, you’re having trouble with longer runs, and you see so much information in the form of a sales page about longer runs. That’s when you realize, “My goodness, this guy knows exactly what he’s talking about. This is the stuff that is of interest to me,” instead of all of this confusion and all of these bullet points bouncing back and forth.
What we’ve covered so far is we’ve found the confusion. Then we started using the pebbles. Now we’re going to expand the issue.
Part 3: How To Expand The Sales Message Yes, we’re on the third and final part of this podcast. Let’s expand the issue, shall we? Let’s go back for a minute to Alondra de la Parra. There she is in front of this orchestra, and there is this accordion. Now this was a different piece altogether, and not “Huapango.” In this accordion we have the analogy that we need to understand how you expand that one point. In the last section we looked at this one concept of longer runs. What we have to ask are three questions. The first is what does the solution look like? When someone goes for a longer run, what does it look like? What does it sound like? What does it feel like? The best thing to do is not to answer this question yourself, especially if you’re writing the sales letter. Because we’re hopeless at writing sales letters. It’s better to call up the client, get a recorder going, and ask them: What does it feel like? What does it look like? They will give you two, three paragraphs.
Then you ask that client the second question, which is: When it doesn’t work out? How does it feel? What are things that stop you, slow you down? What they’ll do is come up with that list. I get tired, I lose focus, I lose motivation. What they will do as well is they’ll give you the words that you need to use on that page. If you’ve got that recorder going, you’ll find that the client is giving you the exact words and the exact feeling and the exact emotion that you want from them. The most important thing for you to figure out at this point is that you stay one point. Even when we have gone to just longer runs, we still have five subtopics under that, which is get tired, lose focus, aches and pains, can’t catch breath, and then lose motivation. We have five topics, and you have to be very careful. You have to stick with one thing at a time.
Among those five topics, which are the most important? Then you drive that. You address that one topic. Then they answer in a paragraph. That paragraph goes on your sales page. Because they will tell you exactly how they feel, what’s happening in their brain, and what’s really important to them. The client might say that the aches and pains are the most critical of all. That’s where you start. Then maybe they go to the fact that the aches and pains make them lose focus. Then you continue down that path. Let them speak for a while. You just have to transcribe. Maybe you have to tweak a little bit here and there, but most of the time you’re just doing a transcription.
This is the beauty of the pebble system. Instead of dealing with all of these things, we go down to one point. From that one point, we get another five points from those five points. We still have some level of ranking. In this case, you can have the ranking, all the pebbles all over again. The client will explain to you how they feel. Then you want to take that and put that on your sales page.
What about the other points? The move more freely and the improve form? You can put that in your bullets. You don’t have to put that in your main text. You can put that a lot later. What you’re really trying to do is drive home one problem. That is longer runs and what it means not to run that long. What are the consequences of not running that long? Then you bring up your solution: introducing the long run system. Then you explain your solution. How do you explain your solution? The client told you, remember? We asked them what did the solution look like. In effect, the client is writing your entire sales page. The critical thing is to use the pebble system. Because the pebble system allows you to focus. Otherwise, we have all this confusion, too much information. When someone reads your sales page, they don’t get a single message.
We often try to write sales pages ourselves, and it’s a big mistake. Even if you’re a copywriter, it’s a big mistake. The client can come up with terminology that you just cannot dream of, because they live it and they breathe it and they feel it. They have this specific information, the specific term that they want to use. You want to use that on your sales page. The best way to do it is to ask them. First you have to clarify. While I’m talking about clarification, let me reiterate what we’ve covered in this episode.
Summary The first thing that we looked at was finding the confusion. We saw that it didn’t matter what we’re doing, there were several points that need to be covered. What we’re going to do is isolate them. We isolated them by using pebbles. We then said five pebbles for this place, three for that, two for this. The same thing applies to your website. There are all of these points, but you allocate pebbles. Then you take the one that got the most pebbles. Then you expand on them. That was the third part. When you expand, you ask them, What does the solution look like?” and let them talk, and let them talk, and let them talk. You keep recording. You’re the transcriber. You’re the person asking the questions. Let them talk. Then you ask them what the problem looks like. Then they will give you four or five points. You can ask them more details about those points. Now you have enough content to put on your page. It’s not just content, but emotion-filled content on that one single topic. That is why the pebble system is so powerful, because it helps the client focus, helps you focus, and you’re able to create a much better sales page than just sitting at your computer and churning something out.
What’s the one thing that you can do this week? The one thing that you can do is to help yourself find that confusion factor that you’re dealing with every single day. Do this with your grocery list. Just take three items and then allocate those pebbles. This is five, this is three, this is two. Get into the habit of allocating for pretty much everything. Your to-do list looks a lot better when you allocate pebbles, because you know exactly why you’re doing what you’re doing. If you have any questions, I’m at Twitter, Sean D’Souza; Facebook, Sean D’Souza; or sean@psychotactics.com. To get this episode, go to psychotactics.com/64, and you will get the podcast as well as the transcript.
There are still a few seats remaining for the storytelling workshop both in Amsterdam and Nashville. To find out more, go to psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop. This is on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th of December; and the 13th, 14th, and 15th of December in Amsterdam. Storytelling is critical. Most people think of storytelling as just telling stories, but no, it’s a branding issue. It gets your message across in a way that is so amazing and so powerful. As you’ve discovered on this podcast, there are all these stories, and that’s why you’re listening to the podcast right to the end. When you read The Brain Audit, when you read Dartboard Pricing, when you read the book on presell, when you go through any of our courses, there are stories. It’s not just about telling stories to sell, but also your books and your podcasts and your webinars, and your pretty much everything. The reason why stuff is so boring is because it doesn’t have stories. This is what the storytelling workshop will do for you. It will show you how to construct those stories for business rather than just telling another story. That’s psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now from Psychotactics and the Three Month Vacation. Bye bye.
Do you know—Why Clients Buy And Why They Don’t? In this free except on—The Brain Audit you will find out why customers put off buying your product or service.
Why do we learn so slowly? Is it because we're not good learners? Is it age? Or is it something quite different? The problem of learning (and teaching) is dependent on the concept of Teacher vs Preacher. When you're a preacher, you give the feeling of a ton of information, but there's no true learning, no true application. A teacher, on the other hand, is completely tied to getting the student to apply the skills. When you're creating info-products, writing books or articles, this what needs to be kept in mind. Are you a teacher or a preacher? And are you following a teacher or preacher? Here are three benchmarks to watch for!
Useful Resources
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Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
The Brain Audit: http://www.psychotactics.com/brain
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The Responsibility Factor
Part 2: The Three Step Benchmark To Teaching
Part 3: When Does The Student Become The Teacher?
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Useful Resources Audio and Transcript: How To Incredibly Speed Up Your Skill Acquisition
Free Goodies: Why Clients Buy And Why They Don’t
*Audio and Transcript:* Deconstructing Why Bad Habits Succeed (And Good Habits Fail)
The Transcript “This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.”
This is The Three Month Vacation, I’m Sean D’Souza.
If you were to step into India today and go to most Indian households, you would be surprised at what you saw at the doorstep. You would see a Swastika. Yes, the very same Swastika that the Germans used in World War II, the same Swastika that came to be hated by everyone who saw it then, and today. What is a Swastika doing on the doorstep of so many Hindu households? The reality is that the Swastika comes from the Sanskrit word Swastik which means good luck. It has been around for thousands of years. While it’s prominently found in Indian culture even today, it was also found in ancient Greece, it can be seen on the remains of the ancient city of Troy which existed over a thousand years ago. The Druids and the Celts they also use the symbol, the Nordic tribes, the Christians, the Teutonic Knights. The Swastika goes back a long way.
In modern history, Coca Cola used it, Calsberg used it on their beer bottles, the boys’ scouts adopted it, and the girls club of America, they called their magazine Swastika. It was used on playing cards, and even by the American Military Units during World War 1. It can be seen on RAF planes as late as 1939. And then, Hitler came along. He took something that was wonderful and incredibly powerful and made it something evil. He took something that was empowering and twisted it in his own way to make it work for him. He changed the meaning of the word. That is the kind of thing that happens very often when we look to learn. When we look around we see that people call themselves teachers, but in reality they are not teachers, they are just preachers. When you get this kind of information in the form of video, and audio, and PDF, you think, well, I am being taught by someone, but in reality, all you’re doing is getting a ton of information. You’re getting a preacher instead of a teacher.
While it might sound like just words being twisted or replaced, there is a very big difference between a preacher and a teacher. How do we know what makes a preacher thus as a teacher? That’s what we’re going to cover today. We’re going to look at three things, the first is the responsibility factor. The second is the three benchmark system. The third, the ability for the student to become the teacher.
Part 1: The Responsibility Factor Let’s start out with the first one which is the responsibility factor. If you try to learn a language like Spanish, or German, or French, it will take you many, many months to get there. In every classroom, you have the bright students and the not-so-bright students, or at least until Michel Thomas came along. Michel Thomas was a language teacher, and he didn’t believe in bright students, and dull students. He believed that the responsibility lay with the teacher. He made a bold claim, he made a claim that you could learn the fundamentals of grammar in any language within 10 hours, and then he set about proving the fact. The BBC followed him around for several days. If you look up Michel Thomas on You Tube, you will find a three part episode that shows you how he taught these students. Students who were told by their teachers that they were not supposed to learn a language, that they were stupid, that they were dull, that they should never bother to try and learn any language.
He sat them down in a classroom. In a week or so, they were already speaking the language. This is the language, the very same language that they were told they should give up, they should never try this anymore. What happened? When we ask what happened, we’re trying to solve the problem of the language. What did he do, how do we learn languages like that? We don’t look at that, we look at what was the core of Michel’s system. The core of Michel’s system was responsibility. He felt that the responsibility of the teaching didn’t lie with the student, it lay with the teacher. When you think about that statement for a few minutes, it changes your whole mindset. It means that the person learning under you is not responsible. You think, well, how is that possible, you can’t control what someone is doing. May be you have online courses like we do and they’re sitting in South Africa, or Australia, or the United States, and you can’t control what they’re doing. Yes you can.
This is the difference between a preacher and a teacher. A preacher simply gives you information, you get more CDs, more information, more PDFs, more videos, but whose responsibility is it for you to succeed? The teacher on the other hand changes the way they give you information because they realize that if you don’t get these tiny increments, you will start, and you will go few steps and then you will give up. That’s the difference between a preacher and a teacher. A teacher doesn’t believe in stupid students. A teacher doesn’t believe in dull students. A teacher believes that it is their responsibility to figure out how to get across to that student.
Let’s say you have a web design company, and let’s say you’re giving instructions to your clients how to set up their websites. Let’s just say for a second that the client comes back and asks you a whole bunch of questions. Are they dull? The answer is, whose responsibility is it. It’s your responsibility. The reason why that client has not figured out what they should do and how they should go about it, is because you haven’t given them precise instructions, you’ve hurried through the process. Or, you just have the curse of knowledge. You know so much that you don’t realize that you’re going through so many steps. Therefore, you have become a preacher. You’re no longer a teacher, you’re not breaking down things into steps that are foolproof.
When we see clients doing silly things, what we say is, well, they’re not smart, or they’re silly, or they’re stupid, but, the responsibility lies with you. If they fail you have failed. That’s the difference between a preacher and a teacher. One of the best examples I have for you is this yes and yes pricing grid on the Psychotactics website. When you go and you buy any product, or any service, or any course on Psychotactics, you will encounter the price grid which is where you click the button to buy now. We have a regular and a premium pricing there. As the teacher, it is my duty to get that message across. How do you create a pricing grid so that you can earn 10% or 15% more when you have the pricing grid on your own website. People make mistakes, if there is one thing that I’ve seen where clients consistently make mistakes is on this pricing grid. We tell them to put ticks, they put crosses, we tell them to put red ticks, they put blue ticks. This is because everyone interprets your information in their own way, and that’s absolutely normal. They want to be creative but their creativity doesn’t end up being beneficial to them, and clients end up buying the regular instead of the premium.
What’s my job as a teacher? My job as a teacher is very simple, my job is to make sure that they get it. If they don’t get the pricing grid right, then I have to take responsibility for that. In the book which is Dartboard Pricing, it goes through steps. One step, second step, third step, then it shows the mistakes you can make, and the mistakes other people have made. What it’s doing there, even with the book, even when I cannot be there, I have to make sure that’s it’s my responsibility for you to get your pricing grid right. It’s very easy to say that people don’t understand. “Look, I told them how to do it and they didn’t do it,” but no, it’s your responsibility. That’s the critical element, the difference between a preacher and a teacher.
Two and a half years ago I started coaching my niece Marsha. She wanted to get better at her studies and so we started the coaching. I sat her down on the first day and I said to her, “Marsha, if you get everything wrong at school whose fault is it?” She said, “It’s my fault.” I said, “No, no, no, it’s my fault, if your get everything wrong, it’s my fault as a teacher.” She said, “Cool.” That’s the whole point, that’s the difference between a preacher and a teacher. You have to take responsibility. That’s how you know that you’re picking the right teacher because they take responsibility for you. They don’t just dump information, they make sure that you get it right.
Part 2: The Three Step Benchmark This takes us to the second part of this podcast, and it’s called, the three step benchmark. What is the three step benchmark? When I was 12 years old I used to come home from school and I’d very hungry. School would finish at 4 pm and then it will be a long wait until dinner. Dinner in India is a lot like Mediterranean countries and it’s late, so it’s about 8:30 or so. I’d come home and I’d be ravenous, I want to eat something, and no one would be at home. But there in the pantry on the shelves would be a packet of Ramen Noodles, in this case it was Maggi Noodles. This had a masala flavor which you don’t get in other countries, but you do get in India.
What I’d so is I would boil some water and add the noodles, I’d add the taste maker which is the masala flavor, and then five minutes later I’d be eating it. Notice what I did, I only took three steps, boil water, add noodles, add taste maker. This is the difference between a teacher and a preacher. They use these three step benchmark system if they are aware of it or not. The preacher will not do that, a preacher will give you a lot of instructions, they will tell you, you should do 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and you get lost in that whole sequence of things. I know this because this is what I used to do. I would give people instructions, here’s what you need to do, step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4, step 5, not anymore. You need to solve the problem in three steps. If the client cannot get to the other side within three steps like Maggi Noodles, then you have given too many instructions. If they keep coming back to you and asking you something, then you’ve given too many instructions. There is no other way, the responsibility lies with you.
We just finished the headlines course for 2015, and there are many ways to write a headline. A lot of people will tell you to just copy headlines but that’s stupid. You should know how to write headlines just like you know how to speak, how to write. There is a structure, and a system, and a format, to write headlines. The problem is also that there are many ways to write those headlines. If you want your student to get their mastery, then you have to follow these three step benchmark. If you give them an instruction and they can’t get there within three steps, then you have made a mistake. Let’s take an example of the headlines, let’s say I needed to get you to write better headlines in the next few minutes. Well, how I’m I going to get this done on a podcast?
Here’s how you do it, you’re restricted to just three steps or fewer. What you’re going to do is going to put either “even” or “and.” You’re going to put this in parenthesis or brackets as you call it. Here’s how you do it, you say, how to raise prices “even” when clients are price-conscious, how to raise prices “even” when the competition is offering discounts. The headline with “even” in it, it creates a contrast. It’s a headline going one way and then it starts to go the other way. Now let’s use “and.” How to consistently raise prices “and” still keep 95% of your clients, or, how to tell amazing stories “and” connect the stories to your business articles.
What we have here is “and” and “even.” The “and” moves the idea forward, and the “even” takes it a step back, or, it provides contrast. If you’re thinking to yourself, wait, that was such a small step. That’s the whole point, this is how teachers teach. The preachers will give you 7, 8 different steps to do. In the headline course, we spent a week doing this, and people still make mistakes. Bit by bit we outline it. A very small thing can be interpreted in many different ways and a preacher will just dump information on you. A teacher will take a very small element, just three steps. If you can’t get that client to do what you want in three steps, it’s your fault, it’s your responsibility. When you’re looking for a teacher, look for a teacher that has these tiny increments. That helps you get there to the next stage instead of telling you how silly you are, or how dull you are.
Part 3: When Does The Student Become The Teacher? This takes us to the third part which is the most scariest benchmark of all, which is when the student becomes the teacher. When I go to seminars, I notice something very interesting. A speaker will stand up and make this presentation, and then they’ll have all these slides, and all of these information, and all of these statistics. Then at the end of that presentation, they get a rousing applause, they get a lot of [inaudible 15:24] they get all of that stuff, but, what is the benchmark of the presentation? The real benchmark of the presentation is that the persons sitting there in the audience should be able to say what you said in their presentation. That sounds bizarre doesn’t it? Of course it is bizarre, but that’s what a teacher does. A teacher makes sure that you don’t go out there with your head full of information. All this shock and awe that you bring to the presentation, that’s not relevant. What’s relevant is what the student can then teach. When that student goes out, can they repeat exactly what you said and often in the sequence that you said it?
If you come to a Psychotactics course, or you come to our workshop, or you come to our presentation, one of the most important benchmarks is that you should be able to repeat what I have just taught you. You should be able to tell someone else exactly what you learned, the sequence in which you learned it, and then you have become the teacher. If the person cannot do that, the client there, the person in the audience cannot do that, then there’s something wrong with the way you’re teaching, it’s that simple. If all you have done is given information, then they’re going to cling on to some fact or the other. They’re going to cling on to one fact, or two facts, or three facts, but they don’t have that system in place, because you didn’t put that system in place. That’s the difference between a teacher and a preacher. A teacher will make sure that the student knows how do whatever it is that they are teaching. Their responsibility is to get that student to know what they are teaching. It’s not just information being given out, it is application, and it’s instant application.
When there is complication there is no application, when there are too many steps there is no application, and so you start to see the difference between a teacher and a preacher. In fact, let’s summarize because you’ll need to be the teachers. If someone asks you what did you learn on this podcast, well, you’ll need to know the difference between the teacher and the preacher. You’ll need to know how to change your methods, you’ll also need to know how to choose a teacher versus a preacher.
Summary The first thing that we covered today was the factor that Michel Thomas taught us, and that is the responsibility lies with the teacher, you are responsible. The student is not responsible, you are responsible. It doesn’t matter how you look at it, you are still responsible. When you take on a task you have to make sure that you formulate your teaching in a way that enables the student to learn. That changes the whole perspective of teaching. You can do this very simply by having the three step benchmark in place. If the student cannot get from this point to that point in three steps, then you have given too many steps, you have to reduce those number of steps.
That takes us to the third part which is, how do you know that the student is now smart enough and that is because they have become the teacher. You go from this factor of changing your mindset, responsibility, to then boiling down to just three steps. Then finally, you know that they have reached there because now they can teach what you just taught them. That is the difference between a teacher and a preacher. Whether we are in the service business or a product business, we have to make sure that we get this message across. This is not just about training, this is about getting your clients to achieve what they want to achieve. Most of us will blame the client. If you find yourself blaming the client, listen to Michel Thomas’ words yet again, “The responsibility lies with you, it’s your fault, it’s always your fault.” When you say that to your client, they’ll be like Marsha, they will say, “Cool.”
This brings us to the end of this podcast. You can find me always on Twitter or Facebook, I’m @seandsouza. You can also email me at sean@psychotactics.com. However, if you are listening to this podcast in sequence, I won’t be available for the next two weeks, I will be in Uluru which is in the middle of Australia. There is this massive rock there, there is nothing else but this massive rock and three hotels, and that’s where we’re going to be, we’re going to be in Alice Springs. It’s going to be really hot there, I hear it’s about 33 °C, which is 91 °F, I wish it were cooler. But hey, I’ve always wanted to go to Australia, this part of Australia specifically. You can only ever go there in the colder months, and now we have slipped past the cold rainy months and we are into October, so we’re going to have to put up with some of the heat.
While we are away make sure that you read The Brain Audit because it will show you why customers buy and why they don’t. There is also the Web Component Series which is website secrets and you’ll learn how to create your home page, or About Us page, your download page, very effectively. You can find it at psychotactics.com/web. If you’d like to join us at Five Thousand B.C that’s fivethousandbc.com, that’s the community of mostly introverts, and there is me, the extrovert. You’ll find that Five Thousand B.C is a membership site like no other because I’m there all the time, 17,000 times a day, except for the next two weeks when I will be in Australia. That’s it from Psychotactics and The Three Month Vacation, make sure you send this over to your friends as well so that they can listen to The Three Month Vacation podcast. Bye for now.
One of the biggest reasons why we struggle with our learning is because we run into resistance. There are hidden forces causing us all to resist doing what we really should do. This slows us down considerably. Find out how to work with resistance, instead of fighting it all the time. Click here to get the free report on ‘How To Win The Resistance Game’. (http://www.psychotactics.com/free/brain-audit-excerpt/)
When you're giving away bonuses, it's easy to believe you don't need to give away your best product or service. The best information always needs to be sold—so you can earn a decent living. And yet, this podcast episode takes an opposite stance. You need to put your best stuff out in front—free. Yes, give away the goodies, no matter whether you're in info-products or content marketing; services or running a workshop. Giving away outstanding content is the magic behind what attracts—and keeps clients.
Resources
To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/62
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The Concept of Consumption
Part 2: Why Package Your Free Content
Part 3: Why You Must Feel Pain
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources 5000bc: Where smart people come together to help each other honestly
Goodies: How to design a visual “yes-yes” pricing grid for all your products
The Brain Audit: Why clients buy and why they don’t
The Transcript “This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.”
What are the three benchmarks that you need to create this magic? Many years ago when I started my cartooning career, I used to get all kinds of jobs. What I really loved was the plum jobs, the jobs where you had this fabulous stuff that you could do and used to get paid really well. I would spend hours and days and weeks doing those kinds of jobs. Then you had the recurring jobs. These were tiny cartooning assignments which didn’t pay very well, so I’d just work very quickly through them because well, they weren’t paying that much anyway. One day, my neighbor, who happened to be an art director of Elle Magazine, he stopped in and said, “Sean, why are you doing such a bad job with these cartoons? Why is it that this work looks so shoddy?”
Of course I said, “Well, they don’t pay much.” He said, “I don’t really know how much they pay when I look at your work in the newspaper. I only look at the work and I say, ‘This work is shoddy. This work is sloppy. As a reader, I’m not supposed to know how much you get paid. I only see the end result.'” This is true for us as well. In today’s world, where we’re giving away free stuff, we look at the stuff we’re giving away and we think, “Wait, we need to put in all our efforts into creating great products and great services. But if it’s going to be free, then we need to pull back about it. We can’t put in all the effort into free.” My art director friend would tell you, “I don’t see it that way. It cannot be shoddy. It cannot be sloppy.”
That’s what we’re going to cover today. We’re going to cover how you need to make your free product as valuable or even more valuable than your paid product.
What are the three benchmarks that you need to create this magic?
Part 1: The Concept of Consumption The first thing that we’re going to cover today is the concept of consumption. The second thing is how it needs to have that unhurried look, that unhurried texture, that unhurried feeling. Finally, we need to feel pain, real pain. Let’s cover these three topics. Let’s start off with the first topic, and that is one of consumption.
In case you didn’t already know it, Netflix has been monitoring your behavior for a very long time. Netflix is big time into consumption. The reason for that is very simple. The more they get you to come back and watch serials and movies, the more likely you are to renew your subscription month after month, year after year. For ages, the television industry has suggested that the pilot episode is the most critical of them all. If someone watches the pilot episode, they’re going to watch all the rest, or at least that’s how the philosophy went until we ran into Netflix.
Netflix started pinpointing the episodes for each show season in which 70% of all users went on to complete the entire series. Here’s what they found. When they looked at Breaking Bad, the hook was not episode number one; it was episode number two. When they looked at the prison comedy, Orange is the New Black, they found that episode number three was the one that made the difference.
In some cases, it was episode number eight that made the difference; in some, four; in some, three; in some, five. What they found, however, was that people wanted to get to the end, and that if they got them to binge watch, they would watch all of them one after the other. What does this tell us about our clients? What does this tell us about our reports and our newsletters? It tells us that people are a lot more willing to give us a chance than we think, if we can get them to the end. This is why consumption becomes so critical.
When you look at all of those signups, you know those little boxes that say just give me your name and your email address, and let’s do this quickly. Well, that’s not how people really behave. When you do the study, people behave differently. They want to consume stuff. They want to spend more time at your site. They want to read a little more before they commit. When you’re creating a product, maybe it’s just a report, maybe it’s an article, a series of articles, maybe it’s a webinar or a podcast, people will take their time. They will give you more than one chance. It’s not like you need to have a sloppy first time, but it’s not like you have to convince them either. Because they take their time.
What you have the ensure is that they get from point A to point C at the very least. You have to get them through the stages. This is what we do with the Headline Report. When you get 2 Psychotactics and you subscribe to the newsletter, you get a headline report. It shows you how to write headlines, just taking three easy steps. But there is no hurry. You go through the introduction. It gives you the philosophy. Then it takes you to step one, and you’re able to create a headline, and then step two, and you’ll be able to create another headline, and step three and the third type of headline.
In under ten minutes, you can create headlines just reading the report, but it gets you to the end. When you get to the end, you already have this superpower. You have this ability to write headlines, to figure out which headlines are missing those components. It’s complete. What’s happened there is it has been designed for consumption. It has been designed to make sure that the client gets that superpower, that ability to do something.
When you look at a lot of the webinars online or the podcasts, a lot of the stuff is based on information. It is more and more and more information, but not stuff that you can directly apply. This is what we have to work at, because we’re not in the entertainment business like Netflix. Their goal is to make sure that you get to the end of the episode, of the next episode, and then right to the end of the series. They’re totally in the entertainment business, and we are in the information business, but we need to make sure that we’re not just giving information but we’re giving that client a superpower. We’re giving them the ability to write headlines. We’re giving them the ability to do something specific at the end of it. We need to start off with the end in mind. That’s probably what Netflix is doing anyway. They’re going, “What is the end point of this series?”
That end point is then creating all of the series back to back so that you get hooked. You need to ask yourself that question as well. When you’re creating a report, when you’re creating an article, when you are doing anything that you’re giving away free, the shoddiness comes from the fact that you were just going to give away information, more information. In reality, if you think about it from a perspective of when they finish this, what superpower will they have, that changes everything doesn’t it? That makes your client more likely to binge read, binge listen, binge watch, whatever it is that you’re going to throw. Then the free becomes more important than the product itself because they haven’t paid for anything and they’ve got this value which they just didn’t expect.
Consumption comes in very quickly and consumption becomes more critical than attraction and conversion, which gets bandied about all over the internet. You need to know how to attract. You need to know how to convert. Once you’ve gone through that, the third stage, consumption, that’s the most critical of all. You can start off with your free product or your report, or just about anything, as long as you know what is the end in mind and how will it help the customer get to that end and have the superpower.
That brings us to the end of this first section. Let’s go to the second section.
Part 2: Why Package Your Free Content Let’s explore why your free product content needs to look very unhurried, and yet, very unpackaged. On Fridays, something very strange happens at our café. The usual baristas disappear and someone else takes their place. Now it bugs me when baristas get changed on Friday, because you’re starting to settle in, you’re starting to relax a bit, and then your whole routine has changed because of this change in barista.
Anyway, this new barista, she’s making the coffee and she places it in front of us. She goes away and the café is reasonably quiet, almost too quiet for a Friday. She comes over and she’s asks for my opinion. She’s says, “How did you find the coffee?” Of course I’m the wrong person to ask for an opinion because I will give it. She’s standing there for about 20 minutes listening to what I have to say, because I’m telling her how I evaluate the coffee. The way I evaluate coffee is I look at the barista themselves and I look at how they’re dressed. Maybe this is just me, but every time I see an untidy-looking barista, I get bad coffee.
The first thing I’m looking for is how tidy does the barista look. Then the second thing I’m looking for is how tidy does my cup of coffee look. Is there art on it or is it just coffee in a cup? Before I’ve even tasted the coffee, I have a pretty good idea whether the coffee is going to be good or bad. Then of course there are variables; that can be humidity, the temperature of the milk. There are so many variables in the coffee, but at the very core I’m looking for this unhurried professional cofee that comes out in the midst of a deadline. This is what your client is looking for as well. They’re looking for this report, this article, this information that is unhurried. They know that you’re busy, but they don’t care. They’re the clients. They want this product or this service to look professional long before they open it.
Packaging becomes very critical, and packaging needs to look unhurried. It needs to look like someone has spent a little time despite the deadline. You see this a lot in Japan. I have mentioned this before on the podcast, that Japan is probably the best place in the world to buy pretty much anything. You can go to the smallest store and ask for food, and you’ve seen how sushi and sashimi has been packaged. It’s always very cleanly packaged. There’s this design element around it. You can go and buy some sweets. You can go and buy a little pendant. You can buy pretty much anything in Japan and you get packaging. You get this look of unhurriedness.
When you have this product, whether it be a webinar or a podcast, you need to feel that packaging. What sets off that packaging? For instance, in this podcast. The story that starts up right at the beginning, that tells you that some amount of research has gone into the whole Netflix story. The fact that there are three points that we’re going to cover, that tells you that’s a very clear outline. This is like the barista. You’ve not really listened to the episode yet, but you get this feeling. You get this feeling that there is a logic and there is work put into this, and it’s unhurried.
That is what is critical, because it sets you up for the rest of the binge listening or the binge reading or the binge experiencing. You can tell the difference between a great presenter and a crappy presenter. You can tell the difference between a good writer and a bad writer. There’s always this factor of unhurriedness. We need to get the client to feel this packaging long before they get to the meat of the content.
Netflix, their research has shown exactly that: that clients are willing to go the distance before they decide this is really good or this is really crappy. We will walk into cafes and look at the barista, and either stay or walk out. It’s based on this factor of unhurriedness. How do they present themselves? How do they present their coffee? It’s the same thing for your product. You cover your introduction, your structure. That needs to be very clear before I get into the meat of the matter. That’s what you really need to work on.
That’s what makes the difference between a free product and a paid product. It needs to look like a paid product. It needs to look like something you paid a lot of money for, and yet you got it free. Now you don’t have to spend months and years working on this free product, but make it tidy. This takes us to the third part, which is the pain that you must feel when you’re giving away your free product.
Part 3: Why You Must Feel Pain As you know, I like to cook Indian food. Two dishes that make me very happy are butter chicken and a dal. A dal is a lentil, by the way. If you were to ask me to give away the butter chicken or the dal, I would hesitate. Now I like them both as much, but I like one better than the other. Well, not really, but here’s the thing. I still would hesitate to give away the chicken, the butter chicken. That’s the kind of dilemma that you’re dealing with. You’re dealing with a situation where you’ve got this really good stuff and you’re not really that keen on giving it away.
You think maybe it would be a good idea to give away something that is not quite so salable. Because when you look at what you’ve done, you’ve spent a lot of time and effort, and somehow it seems like a shame to just give it away. You’ve got to feel that pain. You really have to feel that pain, because when you feel that pain, that’s when you know that the client is going to feel wow, this is amazing. It’s almost too easy to give away something that is not quite up to that standard. You know the standard. It doesn’t matter where you are in life, you know your standard and you know what’s possible, and you know your best. When you’re giving away your best, you feel that pain.
I remember the time I went and met a friend of mine. He is a world-class watercolorist. He had just finished a workshop in Auckland. Of course we met, we had a beer, etc. After that, he gave me one of his sketches. He just pulled it out from his bag and he gave it to me. What did I do with the sketch? I look at it, I said thank you, I took it home. Do you think it was his best sketch, his best watercolor? Of course not. It was just something that he was doing, just a rough sketch. It stayed around the office for a while, and then it went under the bed. Then I don’t even know where it is anymore.
Now, even if he were listening to this podcast, he would not know that I’m referring to him, because I know quite a few watercolorists. If you’re a watercolorist and you gave me a painting, there’s a pretty good chance that I don’t know where it is right now because it wasn’t your best. This is the whole point. When you give away stuff, give away the best stuff, or at least part of the best stuff.
Now we sell a course called the Pre-Sell Course. This teaches you how we sell our courses, how we sell our workshops, how we sell our products. We sell our products faster than pretty much anyone on the internet. Courses that cost $3,000, in 20 minutes the course is full. No strategic alliances, no ads, no joint ventures, no nothing. How do we do it in 20 minutes? The Pre-Sell Course shows you that. It’s not cheap; it’s almost $400. But we wanted the audience, our members, our subscribers, to understand how powerful this course was. What we did was we sliced it up into about a fifth of the course and gave it away. You know someone wrote back to me and said, “You know, I didn’t buy the rest of the course, but just using that one-fifth, I was able to launch a product very successfully.”
Are you thinking what I’m thinking right now? We’re giving away stuff that is so powerful that the client might not even need to come back for some more, but they will come back. That’s what we’ve found consistently. We’ve found that when we give away stuff which is useful, that is consumable, that is powerful, the client comes back. Because that’s what happens in real life when you give away a sample.
Something that’s amazingly tasty, it’s not like the diner goes away and just doesn’t come back. We’ve found time and time again, and this isn’t the Pre-Sell Course by the way … There’s a whole section on sampling. It talks about how sampling increases sales by 200, 300, 400%. It’s incredible. I didn’t think that sampling could do that, but it does it. There are statistics to prove it. But if the sample itself is not so powerful, not so outstanding, why is the client going to buy a product or service from you in the future?
Summary This brings us to the end of this podcast. We covered three things. The first thing was the factor of consumption. You need to get the client from one point the other. Interestingly, as we saw in Netflix, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to speed up the process. You don’t have to get people to sign up right away. They read, you know? They read a little bit. They read the introduction. They look at how it’s constructed. That takes us to the second one, which is your packaging needs to be great and unhurried. It’s like every time we go to the café, we look at the barista and we say, “How are they? Are they neat? How’s the coffee presented? Is it perfect?” That’s how you know you’ve got a great coffee. That’s how you know you’ve got a great product.
Finally, you have to feel that pain when you’re giving away your product. If you don’t feel that pain, it’s like giving away the dal instead of the butter chicken. It’s not that the dal is bad; it’s just that the butter chicken, well, you would rather be eating it yourself, right?
What is the one thing that you can do today?
The one thing that you can do today is to look at whatever you’re giving away and see is it built for consumption. Can they go from A to B to C and then have that superpower? If no, then you’re just giving information. We don’t need more information. We’re done with information. Just give me some skill that I can sort out in the next ten minutes, or 15 minutes, or 20 minutes, whatever, but quickly.
We’re done with this podcast episode. I store all my podcast ideas in Evernote, so if you’ve got some ideas, some questions you want to ask me, send them to sean@psychotactics.com, or on Twitter @Sean D’Souza, and Facebook at Sean D’Souza. If you’d like to join us at 5000bc.com, then please do so. It’s a place where introverts gather, and we talk and we discuss, and there’s a huge amount of information. I’m there 17,000 times a day answering questions, writing articles in response to your questions. It’s a cool place to be.
If you would like to meet us live at a workshop, then there’s a storytelling workshop in Nashville, Tennessee, and in Amsterdam, which is in The Netherlands. You can find out more about this on psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop. Be sure to read The Brain Audit before you arrive, because The Brain Audit is compulsory for any course that you do with Psychotactics. Yes, it’s a barrier, and we’re happy to keep that barrier in place. You will find The Brain Audit a tremendous read. It is really fun to read and to understand how people think. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now. Bye bye.
Still Reading? Now that you understand why free products need to be better than paid products or services, do you know how to price your products? Here is a detailed visual “yes-yes” pricing grid, to help you—Dartboard Pricing: Yes and Yes Grid. You’ll see how to construct the pricing grid (it’s easy), and then you can adapt the concept on your own slides, pricing sheets, or website. And yes, increase your prices! (http://www.psychotactics.com/cb)
Starting up is always rough—and especially when you're a small business that at first has no clients and no credibility. In this episode, 5000bc member, Christopher Cook talks to Sean D'Souza about how to get over the inner chatter. How to get past those starting blocks and whether it's possible to be superhuman.
Useful Resources
To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/61
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems?(http://www.5000bc.com/)
Brain Audit: Why Clients Buy (And Why They Don’t)
(http://www.psychotactics.com/products/the-brain-audit-32-marketing-strategy-and-structure/)
Goodies: How To Win The Resistance Game
(http://www.psychotactics.com/free/resistance-game/)
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why Roadblocks Are Universal
Part 2: Why Talent Is Not Inborn
Part 3: How To Successfully Get Rid of Self-Doubt
The Transcript
This is indeed The 3 Month Vacation and I’m Sean D’Souza.
Back in the year 2000, I was still a cartoonist and I was doing both cartooning and marketing at the same time. At that point, I decided that I wanted to be the best in the world at marketing, but that meant that I had to start up. I had to start up all over again. I don’t know much about marketing. I hadn’t read that many marketing books and this whole factor of starting up was hard enough just as a business. I was also new at New Zealand. I just moved in from India and so it was like a double start up.
Often people ask me this question, “How did you manage? What was the start up like? Does this internet marketing thing work just for some people and not for others? These are the questions that Christopher C was asking me and this interview is about that. It’s about debt start up, the obstacles. It’s a whole bunch of questions that Christopher C decided, “Let him answer it,” so here I am answering it.
Interestingly, as I was going through this whole interview and listening to it, it seemed like almost a compellation of many of the podcasts that I have done before. We’re covering topics like roadblocks and mindset and routine and you probably heard it before. It’s just a different version of it you could say. It’s on Skype, but it’s still live and we started out with roadblocks. Christopher asked me what the roadblocks are, what do I see as roadblocks in day-to-day life.
The thing with roadblocks is that most people think that it only happens to them and it’s not true at all.
Part 1:Why Roadblocks Are Universal The first thing is that roadblocks are universal. They don’t care about you and don’t care about me. Their only real purpose in life is to teach you a lesson. When people don’t learn the lesson the roadblocks pop up again and again and again. When you learn that lesson, they disappear and other roadblocks show up. If you don’t deal with the roadblocks in the first instance, they pile up and they become bigger and bigger and bigger and that’s the part that people don’t get. They think that somehow the roadblock is going to disappear and it doesn’t disappear. It’s there specifically to teach you a lesson.
I’ll give you a simple example. We have several websites. Over the years, we’ve made them very popular or they’ve become popular and so they attract hackers. In 2014, 3 of our websites attracted hackers. They didn’t really tear it down, but they created enough havoc so that we had to change our whole system. We had to from Dune to WordPress. We had to move all the stuff across and now we’re in the process of redesigning all 3 websites, which is it might seemed like just a simple project but considering the size of our websites that’s about probably conservatively a year, a year and a halfs’ work and this is working very quickly.
We ignore that. We ignore the hackers. They’ve been sniping away and then we’ll just fix it, a little bandage here and there. Then eventually they came in a big way and got us blacklisted on Google and all those kinds of things. That’s when we had to pay attention and this is what I see as roadblocks. I see that everyone has them and if you don’t do something when you have the time to do it, which of course we don’t, then they will come back again.
Part 2: Why Talent Is Not Inborn The second question is something that I’ve heard many times before and that is, “You, Sean, have natural talent and skills and I don’t have these skills and I don’t have this talent. If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that I don’t believe in inborn talent.” That’s a completely different topic, but the question was, “You seemed to be superhuman that is Sean, you are superhuman. You get so much stuff done. You draw cartoons. You cook. You write books. You do workshops. You do all of this stuff.”
This is not me praising myself. This is just what Christopher brought up. He said that at some level it’s intimidating. At some level it feels like only some people can do it. Is it true that just some people can do it or can anyone do it? That’s when I launched into my answer.
They’re exactly right. The reason why I said they’re exactly right is because the person I am today was not the person I was 10 years ago or the person I was 20 years ago. When I look back at what I could do 10 years ago or 12 years ago, it was a lot less than I could do today. I knew a lot less than I know today. I’m not just saying I read more books or did learn some more stuff and went to more seminars. What I’m saying is that even a simple task like writing an article, a simple task like writing an article would take me 2 days, 2 whole days. I don’t know many people that take 2 days to write an article, but it was sure frustration for me.
It sounds like marketing, because I sell an article-writing course and it sounds like a good thing. You take 2 days to write an article, now you do it in 45 minutes. It was a reality and the problem was I didn’t know how that article would turn out. The question of me doing any podcast, the question of me doing any webinars, any speeches, anything of that sort it was totally out of the question. The first time I spoke when I got to Oakland I forgot what I had to say. We had to take it in mid-break.
When I wrote my first book, it was only 16 pages. We put some cartoons in it and it became 20 pages. When I look at all the cartoons that I did back then, they were pretty amateur and people say, “Yes, but at least you could draw.” Sure I could draw, but I couldn’t write. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t do a lot of things that I can do today. Not only am I good at what I do today, but I can be very quick and very effective so I’m not the same person.
When you say someone is superhuman, it means that along the way that person has spent a lot of time and a lot of effort and continues to spend a lot of time and effort to get to that superhuman status. You know this to be true because you look at top performers. You look at the top tennis player in the world, the top swimmer, the top runner. You can say you can go blue in face saying that they have natural abilities, which we will talk about, but look at what they’re doing. They’re still in the track 4 or 5, 6 hours a day. They still have coaches. They still have all kinds of training.
Then you look at yourself and you think, “I manage to get half an hour of listening to a podcast last week because I was too busy.” I’m sorry but it’s not going to happen by magic. The way to get to that level where you are superhuman is to be able to do something that superhuman people do. The reason why they got to superhuman and I’m sorry that I’m referring to myself as superhuman; that was not the goal, the point is that I see myself completely differently from 6 months ago or a year ago or 2 years ago or 10 years ago.
As much as I like, what I’m doing right now I like the articles that I write. I like the cartoons that I draw. I like the stuff that I do. I know that it will be totally crappy in my own eyes 10 years from now. I know that because I’ve learned so much I will change so much, everything will change. Everything has to change because that’s how it works.
At this point in the interview, we shifted into the key elements or keystone. Keystone is the foundation on which a lot of things are built. The question was, what keystone elements do you need to be superhuman? I’m still not comfortable with superhuman but since that’s the term being used in the interview, we continue with the term superhuman. I’ll go and get my kryptonite on the side.
I think the first element is that it has to be daily. You have to take an analogy of brushing teeth. You can brush once a week. You can brush once a month. You can brush once a year. It totally depends on you. What sets in is a factor of decay and your reign is exactly the same. It’s not going to turn on lights and keep them on if you decide that you’re not going to learn. It just going to switch them off or it’s going to put them in dimmer setting. You know this because you can learn something and you can forget about it and then you learn it again and then it comes up a little brighter.
Unless you keep adding to it, unless you keep polishing and unless you have what is called a daily routine it’s not going to work. There is no way on earth that you can be where you want to be unless you have a daily routine. It might be just 15 minutes. You might just take a walk for 15 minutes and listen to something and you never remember anything. You don’t have to remember anything. You just have to listen. Just listen to it like radio, just like you went for a walk with a friend and you listen and you can’t remember 99 percent of what they said.
That 1 percent when you add it up, add 1 to 1 you think they would end up as being 2, but it doesn’t end up as being 2. Eventually, the 1 percent plus 1 percent plus 1 percent becomes exponential and suddenly you jump up 20 percent and then 50 percent and that’s how it works. The first thing is definitely that you have to do something on a daily basis. How long? I can’t say. I spend at least an hour learning every day if not longer and I have a very busy day, busier day than most.
The second thing that you have to look at is a teacher. You have to. You can waste so much time trying to work your way through a system that if you don’t find the right teacher then you’re just wasting time. The point is how do you find the right teacher. It’s the same thing as trying to find the right spouse in life or right girlfriend or boyfriend or friend for that matter. You have to reject a lot of people. If you go out there and say, “I’ll go to the first person that’s promising me all these instant happiness and riches and stuff,” that’s what you get. You get no instant anything. The teacher makes a huge difference. The daily stuff makes a huge difference.
Part 3: How To Successfully Get Rid of Self-Doubt The third thing is just that a lot of people have to get rid of the self-doubt. It doesn’t matter who you are and how successful you are. You are going to have self-doubt. There is no one on the planet who doesn’t have self-doubt. The doubt performers they all have self-doubt. What they do is they have to work out a system to get rid of the self-doubts so that when they run their next race, they’re thinking, “I might not win this race,” but they still end up with the gold medal or the silver medal. Maybe they showed up in that race, but the next race and the next race and the next race.
I hate to nail anything down to keystone stuff but this is it. If you find the teacher and the teacher will have a system, they will have a group and you do something daily that helps you get rid of the most critical element that stops you, which is self-doubt.
This took us at the topic of daily routine, what I do every single day to make sure that my daily routine stays daily. The thing that you have to do is when you create a habit, you’ve got to understand that there is a cue, routine, and reward. These 3 elements have to be in place. Cue is like an alarm clock. You wake up on cue and then there’s a routine. You put on your shoes and you go for a walk and then there’s a reward.
The point is that without that reward in place, the cue and the routine are not going to happen. You decide I’m going to listen to podcast every day or I’m going to read every day. What’s the reward? That’s what I would ask first, what is your reward? If you don’t have the reward every single day, there’s a very good chance that’s it’s going to fall by the way. There’s a pretty good chance that your cue will set up, your alarm will set up, you’ll get into your shoes but then you’ll decide it’s raining I’m not going to go. Cue, routine and reward have to be in place but first you have to ask yourself what is the reward.
Some people say, “I don’t need the reward. I have to be self-motivated.” No, no, no, that’s not how it works. You first figure out your reward if you want to learn something what happens at the end of that something, if you want to do something what happens to the end of that something. When people do courses, for instance, the first time we did a workshop that’s speaking engagement very early in our career in 2002. I spoke at this event and there were about 30 people in the room and most of them bought this PDF from me. Right after we did that, we went out. We bought a bottle of wine and we celebrated and I still have that bottle with me; the empty bottle obviously.
The point that the reward matters, every time when you have the reward in place you know. This is what going through this whole routine. Once you have that in place you then have to seek out what is called group, because an individual is not usually capable of going by themselves. When you have a group, the other persons buzz you on. They say, “Are we going for a run today?” You go, “We’ll go.” Having these elements in place make a difference. This is how I go for a walk every day. When I go for a walk, I have my iPhone with me so I listen to podcast or I learn languages or I do stuff like that. I listen to audio books so for 1-1/2 hour I’m learning.
Some days I’ll just speak to my wife. We’ll brainstorm, but at the end of that there’s a cup of coffee. Then I have my cup of coffee and I come back and I’ve learned something and I’ve done something and that’s the reward. You have to determine the reward and that’s my routine. That’s how I go about stuff.
At this point in the interview, Christopher brought up something that I’d mentioned when I just started doing watercolors. You may or may not know the story but in 2010, I went out to learn watercolors. I’d gone to several courses and learn anything. I went to this guy Ted and he told me that I should practice every day. He said, “Get watercolor book and just paint every day.” I decided to paint what I did every day, which is just my life.
When I started, I mentioned in 5000bc, which is the membership site, and in the forum I said, “I’m starting on this watercolor journey. I’m not very good at it but I will be in 2 years’ time.” That is what Christopher brought up. He said, “That mindset stayed with me the fact that you said you will be good in 2 years’ time.”
I’ll give you a better thing than that. I’ll give you an analogy. Imagine for some reason you went blind. It sounds terrible and I wouldn’t want to be blind, but lots of people go blind for whatever reason. What’s going to happen in the next year, for one, you’re going to be able to find your way around the city almost by yourself. That’s the first thing that’s going to happen. The second thing is you’re going to learn a brand new language that you’ve never encountered before, which is braille. Third, you’re going to be able to hear stuff. Because of how your brain functions, you’re going to hear stuff more profoundly than ever before because you can’t see anymore.
When you look at the mindset of what happens to a blind person in a year’s time, they have got 3 sets of you can call them skills that they never had before. It is beyond any doubt that if you decided that you’re going to do something and you do it on a regular basis, you will be better in a year’s time. You don’t have to do much. You don’t even have to have a great teacher. You don’t have to have a great system. You can get there, say, record a podcast everyday. You can, say, do a drawing every day. It’s not going to be very fulfilling because what are you going to do. No one sees it. No one looks at it.
The point is that after a year you will be better. If you find a good teacher and you find a good system and you do all that other stuff then you will be a professional in year’s time. It’s not an if or a but, but it is a guarantee. You will be professional in a year’s time. That’s how blind people learn to type. That’s how they learn to write. That’s how they learn to read. That’s beyond any doubt.
Then we came full circle with the hardship bit. We talked about scarcity, about not having that skill or resources and how to still go forward. A lot of people they believe that they can’t make that they don’t have the skill. They don’t have the resources. Frankly speaking nobody does. A lot of people when they say they don’t have resources they don’t really understand what they’re saying.
I didn’t grow up in a very poor family. I grew up in a middle-class family, but even so I didn’t have access to a library. I had to go out there and buy my books. My father had to subscribe [the stuff 19:44]. A lot of the things that people take for granted especially in western countries you can go to the library. You can get any book you want. You have an internet connection. You have all these things. Even if you just look at yourself going back 25 years, you didn’t have an internet connection. You didn’t have so many things like a mobile phone, all these things that you take for granted today.
In that sense, you are quite deprived. You may do with what you had and you were very creative. It’s when a person becomes saddled, all those equipment and this excess that they become worse at what they’re supposed to do. Probably the smartest people work with very little information. They work with very little resources and information is one of those very critical resources. One of the things that stop people consistently is this information. They go, “If I have more information about this house then maybe I’ll buy it. If I have more information about how my business is going to go in six months then maybe I’ll do it.”
The people who succeed on a consistent basis they don’t have this resource. They have the same resource as you. They have the same amount of information as you and what they do is they do it anyway. They go ahead anyway and then they keep going and they find the group, they find a teacher, they keep going, they keep going, they keep going. What happens over time is you just get very quick at something. As I said, I used to take 2 days to write an article, it takes 45 minutes. I now have one day and another 14 hours of whatever to play with. What you are really doing is you have to understand that to be very good at what you do you have to work with very little information and just keep going.
The second thing that I would add just to finish this off is that something that I had to learn which is rest. We’ve take three months off every year, but the point is that even so I wasn’t taking weekends off. Let me clarify what I mean by that. I wasn’t working the whole weekend but I’m going on a Saturday morning and then I’d work for a few hours and then before I knew it, it would be 9:00 or 10:00 and then someday maybe two or three hours.
The downtime is critical. You can’t compensate for downtime. If you don’t take a break, if you don’t disconnect your email, if you don’t disconnect your phone, you are going to find that your work is not as good. When people go and they say, “We went on a vacation,” and all they did was see 700 monuments, that’s not a break. When you were on your weekend and you just check email, that’s not a break. Your ability to work when you have to work goes down and you get more and more tired, more exhausted and then eventually there’s nothing left. There’s no energy left. That’s pretty much what I’d say.
Summary: That brings us to the end of this podcast. What we’d covered was the whole concept of roadblocks and how we think that someone else is superhuman. They’re not really superhuman. They just started along time ago and what they did was continue. A lot of people stop. They pause. They think that the other people are somehow succeeding because they have some special gene. If that other person has special gene, it is just to persist over and over again until they get it right until they eliminate all the errors and that makes them what other people call them which is superhuman.
The second thing that we covered was this concept of keystone habits. We found that you have to have to work on it like your toothbrush. Your toothbrush does a job and it does it very well. If you can think of your learning and your application as a daily routine, then it changes everything.
The third thing that we talked about was the future and how you have to have a mindset for the future that you might not be very good at watercolors today, but in two years’ time you will be. You might not be very good at podcasting today, but in 2 years’ time you will be. It doesn’t matter what you undertake if you go about it with dedication and you find the right teacher. Even if you don’t find the right teacher you still in 2 years’ time you will be far down the road than where you are right now. If you stop today, you’ve just wasted 2 years. In 2 years’ time, you will still know nothing and that is the reality for most people.
That brings us to the end of this podcast. We still have the storytelling workshop in Nashville, Tennessee on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th of December and then the 13th, 14th and 15th of December is in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. People wander why they have to tell stories and it’s the flipside of the coin. You have logic and you have facts and you have to have stories, because stories they keep the audience alive and they keep things memorable. You can run on facts and logic alone, but who’s going to remember your story? Who’s going to pass it on?
Storytelling is incredible. You read The Brain Audit and you’ll find that almost the entire book is one of storytelling. Read The Brain Audit and also join us at 5000bc.com. If you want to go ahead you need a group and that group is in 5000bc, we don’t have these spammers and these loud mouths. We largely have a group on introverts even though I’m an extrovert. Join us at 5000bc.com and if you like to come to the workshop it’s at psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop. That’s me Sean D’Souza saying bye for now and here’s to your talent 2 years from now.
How much is enough? And where do you stop?It’s easy to get all wrapped up in this whole concept of passive income and how smart it seems. Yet, you can work yourself crazy if you’re not careful. You can work too much, do too much? And even vacation too much. Click here to find out more about—The Power of Enough. (http://www.psychotactics.com/power-enough-critical-sanity/)
What is the meaning of life? This utterly vast and philosophical question pops into our lives with amazing frequency. But is it the right question to ask? What if we move the words around a bit and asked another question. Like: What gives your life meaning? Hmm, that changes things a bit doesn't it? And even when we change the words, we may still move towards the specific. So why does the abstract help more?
Find out in this episode.
http://www.psychotactics.com/meaning-of-life/
The Transcript
What gives your life meaning? It was 6:20 AM. I was close to the beach, halfway through my walk, listening to this podcast on Transom.org. There was this reporter who was asking older people how they went through their lives. They were 100 years old. She started out with this question, which was: What is the meaning of life? I’ve grappled with this question before, and it sounds very philosophical, but then somewhere in the middle, the question changed. Those words just interchanged somehow and it became: What gives your life meaning?
I had to stop. I had to stop on the road just to absorb what that meant. Just by that little interplay in the words, suddenly the whole sentence, the whole construct changed. It was amazing to me. As you tend to do, you tend to try to answer the questions. I tried to think of the people in my life and I tried to think of the things that I do. Then I realized I was going about it the wrong way.
In today’s podcast we’re going to cover three elements as always, but the way I’m going to cover it is, I’m going to talk about me me me. I’m going to talk about the three things that give my life meaning and why I approached it the wrong way. But I think it is the way that we need to approach it. Of course you might choose to borrow these, or you might choose to bring up your own three elements, but this is the way I think that you’ve got to approach the question: What gives your life meaning?
Part 1: Space I think the right way to approach it is to go through an abstract sort of thinking. The three things that give my life meaning are space, deadline, and elegance. Let’s start out with the first one, which is the factor of space. About a month ago, it was August in New Zealand. Well, it was August everywhere, but it’s wintertime here in New Zealand. I had this little piece of paper in my pocket. I’d been carrying it in my wallet for well over a year, maybe a year and a half. This piece of paper had been given to me by my doctor. I’d done my annual checkup the year before and I was supposed to get the blood test done. I had been procrastinating for quite a while, as you can tell. That day I decided I’m going to park the car and I’m going to walk to the lab and get the blood test done.
I wasn’t expecting anything. I’d been walking every day. I’d been eating sensibly, I think, drinking sensibly. Yet, the very next night I got some news from my doctor. He said, “Your cholesterol is high.” I went and looked it up, and I found that there was no real linkage to what you eat and cholesterol, but there is a very distinct relationship between stress and everything, not just stress and cholesterol but stress and everything. That is when I started taking the weekends off.
Now we fool ourselves. We say we’re taking the weekend off but we check email and we work for a couple of hours, or do this and do that. Suddenly, the weekend is not really off. I found this to be true for me. I used to get to work, even on the weekend, at 4 AM because I wake up at that time. Before I knew it, it was 9:00, 10:00. I put in five or six hours on the weekend, on Saturday and Sunday. Of course I had my excuses. The podcast takes so much time, and we’re doing this course, and I have to write this book.
When I got this report, I suddenly realised the importance of space. I realised that there is no point in me doing this stuff on a consistent basis and driving myself crazy, and that the weekend was invented to give us space. Now we take three months off, and you know that, but these minor breaks become very major breaks on the weekend. I had to find a practical use for this, because at the same time we have courses going on, like we have the headline course going on. Now our courses are not about just information. They’re about practical usage. Clients will come in five days a week and they’ll do their assignment every single day.
This is a problem for me, because in the US it’s Friday, but here in New Zealand it’s Saturday. That means I have to look at the assignment on a Saturday. That’s what I was doing. I convinced myself it was only going to be a couple hours here or there. I had to then go to all the participants and say, “I’m going to take the weekend off, but my weekend, is it okay if I take it off?” I had to take their permission. No one had a problem. I don’t know I was expecting that they would have a problem, but no one had a problem.
This is the concept of space. I’ve had to use this concept of space over and over and over again. Every time, it drives me crazy when I don’t. For instance, now I’m preparing for the storytelling workshop and I have to write the notes and do the slides. I have to create this space. I have to go away from the office and sit in a space that is quieter and less disturbing, and then work through that. This factor of space had an effect that I didn’t expect.
Whenever you’re in any business, you’re always going to be slightly envious of someone else. If you’re a writer you’re going to be envious of other writers. If you’re a dancer you’re going to be envious of other dancers. It’s just natural human behaviour. Now a lot of people interview on their podcasts. Once we finish what we’re covering, they will talk to me just casually. Occasionally someone will say, “Oh, I’m so excited. We’ve just finished 1.8 downloads,” or, “Oh, we’ve got 5,000 more subscribers.”
This used to drive me not crazy, but you think about it. You think, how come? We’re putting in as much effort into this podcast. How come? The question changed the moment I realized that space was important to me, the moment I realised that weekends were important to me. I started asking myself, are you getting the weekend off? I’d listen to that person saying that they made so much more money or they got so many subscribers. I couldn’t get myself to be envious. This was a change for me. This was a big change for me, because I thought that somehow that would never go away. The space became the benchmark. It was no no no, this is more important to me than the money. It’s more important to me than your subscribers or your downloads. Having that space allows me to think and relax. I have not felt this way, like I’m feeling right now, in a very, very long time. It’s taken me about a month to slow down completely, as in to feel really relaxed. It’s just because of space.
This takes us to the second element, which is in direct contrast to space and quiet. That is deadline.
Part 2: Deadline In 2014, we had one of the most harrowing years of our lives. It wasn’t harrowing personally, but professionally it was a real pain. That was because we had hacker attacks. It first surfaced on psychotactics.com. Now that is a very popular site, and for over a decade it has been in the top 100,000 Alexa ratings. It’s natural that hackers like that site. We put a little Band-Aid on the system and we fixed it, but they came back, and they came back, and they came back. They wouldn’t stop until the entire website had to be completely reorganised and rebuilt from the ground up.
Then after that, they went after 5000bc.com, which is our membership site. They did the same thing. Then they went after the training site, which is training.brainaudit.com. You can just tell how frustrating this is. You’re going about your business as passively as possible, trying to keep your head above water, and these hacker attacks continue to come and disrupt your life and drive you crazy. When I think about it, the hacker attacks were the best thing that happened to us because they gave us a sense of deadline.
When we think of deadline, we only think of writing books or an article or finishing this project, but the hacker attacks were so cool. They forced us to do what we hadn’t been doing for several years. We’d been putting off tidying up the website and making it just resistant to these fun-filled creeps. They came there and they went through the system, and then we had to pull up our socks. We just had to do whatever we had to do. This is the beauty of deadlines.
A lot of people consider me to be a pretty crazy person, as in I’m doing a lot of projects. I don’t see myself that way at all. I see myself as a very lazy person. I see myself as someone who loves to lie on the sofa and get a lot of that space and not a lot of deadline. Yet, without the deadline nothing happens. All the books that you read on Psychotactics, starting withThe Brain Audit, they were written because someone forced me to do it. The cartooning course, I didn’t want to do it. Someone said, “Oh no no, you have to do this. I’ve tried all the cartooning courses. They don’t work for me.”
I’ve written a book on storytelling, but to do the course was something completely different. I’m discovering elements of storytelling that I didn’t know existed, or I’m discovering depths that I didn’t know existed. Of course it’s frustrating to have to build a whole course from nothing, to write notes, to create slides, to get all the event venue, to get everyone to sign up. We could do without it, but putting that deadline in place gives my life a lot of meaning because it enhances what I do and it forces me to do it by a specific point in time.
Take this podcast for example. In October we’re going to Australia to Uluru. For those of you that don’t know, this is Ayer’s Rock, that big red rock in the middle of Australia. This brings up its own set of deadlines, which is I have to write extra newsletters. I have to put in extra vanishing reports for 5000bc, and of course podcasts. I have to do more of these podcasts so that it covers all of October. Then in December we’re going to Morocco. I know, I know, it’s a hard life.
The is that the deadline brings meaning to my life. Without the deadline I wouldn’t achieve as much as I do. Those creeps, those hackers, I wish I could send them chocolate, like howwe send our clients chocolate. Because they made such a difference to my life. They brought in this deadline, this “you have to do this right now.” It’s made our life different and I would say a lot better. The first thing that we talked about was space, and having the space creates so much of quiet in your life, and of course a lot less stress. The second thing is this factor of deadline, which forces you to rush, rush and create that stress. They both coexist together just like music. There is quiet in music and there is this huge flurry of notes. They both have to be that way because that’s what makes music.
This takes us to the third element, which is one of elegance.
Part 3: Elegance Now I thought about it a lot. Why elegance? Why not simplicity? Simplicity is so difficult. Why elegance? In 1990 I was still living in India. A pen panel from the United States came across. She was there for a couple of weeks. She created a deadline of sorts for me. I hadn’t seen a lot of India at that point in time and she wanted to see India, so we booked a trip. We got to the Taj Mahal. Now by this point in time I wasn’t doing very well with this pen panel. When I was in university we were sending each other letters, ten pages, 12 pages, really long letters. It seemed like we would get along fine with each other.
Yet, the moment she landed that wasn’t the case at all. Something about her drove me crazy. Something about me drove her crazy. By the time we had reached Agra, which is where the Taj Mahal is located, we were pretty much going our own ways. She’d set out later, but me, I wake up early in the morning. I decided one day to go to the Taj Mahal as early as possible. There was this huge fog that was in front of the Taj Mahal. I couldn’t see it until I was very close, and it was amazing. It was stunning beyond my understanding. I’ve seen thousands of pictures of it over the years, but nothing came close to standing there right in front of it in that fog.
As I got close to it, what struck me was the elegance. It was just so beautiful. It was simple. There wasn’t anything fancy about it. Sure, it was big, it was really big, bigger than I ever imagined, but elegant. It was so elegant. As we’ve traveled the world, we’ve run into places like Japan. When you buy something in Japan, it’s amazing. It’s like you never want to open it. You can buy the smallest thing in Japan and they put it in this little box and this little wrapping. Then they put this ribbon on it. Everything in Japan is so beautifully packaged that you never feel like opening it. There is this elegance to it. It’s not just thrown at you.
As I started to be more aware of the world around me, it struck me that there are three ways to do pretty much anything. When you look around you, you see stuff that’s really crappy. We don’t want to go there because that’s just crappy and sloppy. That’s just how it is. Then you go to the next stage, which is where it’s simple. When I look at a book on Kindle, it’s simple. There’s just text. It’s been thrown in Microsoft Word. It’s out there, nothing to it. Then you look at something’s that’s elegant and you know that someone has spent some time and effort and simplified it so it looks beautiful and it reads beautiful. The words work together and the pictures work together. Suddenly you have this feeling of the Taj Mahal. It’s beautiful. It’s a monument. There are thousands of monuments in the world, but some stand out for their sheer elegance.
To me, that’s my third principle, that when I create this podcast I somehow have to be dissatisfied with it. I’m happy, but I still want to improve it. That quest for improvement becomes quest for elegance. The best example of elegance is a software program, because when you look at a software program it comes out as slightly crappy. You have version one and it’s not so great. Then version two and it’s a little better. Then it gets bigger and more bloated and it stops being elegant. Now you have to improve things without making it bloated and terrible. You have to bring in elegance.
That is the thing that gives my life meaning: to create information, or to create product, or to create a cartoon, or to do anything that is more elegant. The beauty of elegance is that sometimes it doesn’t get noticed, like when you’re watching a movie and there’s this music that enhances the movie and you don’t notice the music. That is elegance: that feeling of creating something that’s so beautiful that it doesn’t matter that no one notices it, as long as you know.
Summary This brings us to the end of this podcast. I know it was about me, but I think it resonates with you as well. To me, the most important things, the things that give my life meaning, we could summarise them with three words, and that is space, and deadline, and elegance. Your three words might be similar, they might be different, but I think we have to stop asking ourselves what is the meaning of life, because that question is too big. Instead, it’s what gives our life meaning. Then bring it down to this whole abstract feeling. I think that’s the one thing you can do today. I think you can just sit down and write down these three terms on paper and start to think about it. What are three things that give your life meaning? Because even hackers can give your life meaning.
That brings us to the end of this podcast. As you know, we’re doing the storytelling workshop in Nashville, Tennessee and in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. We’ll see you there. You need to find your way to psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop. You would also need to read The Brain Audit. That is at psychotactics.com/brainaudit. If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, then leave a review for us at iTunes. That really helps. The show notes, the transcript, all the goodies, they’re always on the podcast number. This is podcast number 60, so that’s psychotactics.com/60. You can get all of that. It’s 5:32 AM and I have to go for my walk soon. Just on cue, it has started to rain, but I’ll take my umbrella and I’ll head out for the coffee. Thanks for listening. Bye for now.
So how can be solve the eternal problem—The Meaning Of Life? Or A Life of Meaning?
Especially when Chaos hits us everyday. Click here to find out—Why and how to make chaos your friend. http://www.psychotactics.com/chaos-planning
The reason why we find writing to be such a tedious task, is because we don't understand the barriers that get in our way. Instead, we write, edit, write, edit — and drive ourselves crazy. One of the ways to get over the barriers is to use the Captain Kirk and Mr Spock method. What is this method all about? Find out in this episode of the podcast.
Resources
To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/59
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: How to use the Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock method of writing
Part 2: The power of preparation
Part 3: How to decide on your ‘One Word’
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy And Why They Don’t
Article and Audio: Three Unknown Secrets of Riveting Story Telling
Live Workshop: How to create amazing stories—and connect them flawlessly to your articles, newletters, podcasts, etc
The Transcript
Imagine you’re the athlete who’s trying for the Olympic gold in high jump. You look at the newspapers that day and there is the Los Angeles Times and they’re saying that he goes over the bar like a guy being pushed out off a 30-storey window. Then you flip to the next newspaper which is The Guardian and it says, “He is the curiosity of the team.” Then you pick up the magazine Sports Illustrated and it says, “He charges up from slightly to the left of center with a gait that may call to mind a two-legged camel.”
We’re talking about Dick Fosbury here, the guy who first did the Fosbury flop. While all these newspapers and magazines seem to make fun of Dick Fosbury, it’s unlike he had a great opinion of himself either. It’s unlike Dick Fosbury was arguing with their comments because at college someone bet him that he couldn’t get over a leather chair. He couldn’t jump over that leather chair and he said he tried, but not only did he lose his bet but he also broke his hand in the crash landing.
In 1968, when he arrived at the Mexico Olympics he was relatively unknown and yet days later he not only captured the imagination of the Mexican public, but also the rest of the world. He sailed over the bar at 2.24 meters, which is 7 feet and 4 inches. It wasn’t that he sailed over because that wasn’t the world record. It’s that he did it by overcoming the obstacle with his crazy jump which was called the Fosbury flop.
What’s interesting about the Fosbury flop is that no one ever did that kind of flop before. No one ever tried to get over the bar in that manner. It was considered extremely weird, extremely camel-like and yet today it’s extremely weird to see people jumping over the bar as they did back in 1968. Today the Fosbury flop is the way people jump over a bar at the Olympics in any sports stadium. What Fosbury did was he looked at the obstacle and he said, “Let me get over this in another way because there’s no way I’m going to be able to do it the usual way.”
That’s really what this podcast is all about. We’re going to look at writing and why we struggle with writing, why we have these obstacles with writing. If we go about it the way we’ve always done, that doesn’t seem to work for us because you’re going about it the same way that I used to do back in the year 2000 where I would look at the article and then try to write it and then spend a day, spend 2 days writing that article and getting very frustrated and not knowing what was going wrong. We have to look at the obstacle that bar and look at how we can over that bar in a completely different way. That’s what this podcast is going to cover.
We’re going to cover 3 things. The first thing is about editing. The second thing is about preparation and the third is about the one word or the one term. As always, we’ll start with the first, which is editing.
Part One: Editing I love making a rice dish called biryani. It is a dish meant for kings. It has all of these yummy elements. If you’ve ever eaten a biryani, you know exactly what I mean.
Here’s how you go about making a biryani. You have to get all the things together, like spices and the yogurt and other stuff like saffron and ghee, which is a clarified butter. When you get all of those things together, you got some onions. In fact, you got a lot of onions and then you caramelised the onions. When all of that is done you, marinate it. A few hours later it’s time to cook the biryani.
I put it all in a dish, which we call handi. You would call it a saucepan. Before I turn on the flame I have to do one very important thing. I have to seal the handi or the saucepan with dough so that it becomes like a pressure cooker and the meat cooks in it and the rice cooks in it and all the flavours cook within it and it’s all sealed you can’t get in. Did you notice the problem? Sure, you did. It was the dough. It sealed the vessel. There is no way to know whether the rice is cooked or the chicken is still raw. The dough prevents me from editing.
Editing is the first big obstacle to writing. Why? Because the writer and the editor are 2 completely different people. The writer is like Captain Kirk; you watched Star Trek, didn’t you? The writer is like Captain Kirk and Captain Kirk has all these great ideas. He wants to go where no man has ever gone before and he is a bit out there. Then you have Spock and he needs to be logical and that’s how your editor acts every single time. We have these 2 people, 2 completely different people and they’re at log ahead with each other.
What we do when we write is we put both of those people on the same seat. Of course they’re going to fight. Of course they’re going to continuously argue with each other and of course that’s your obstacle, isn’t it? You’re not going to get over that obstacle because you’re treating both of them as the same person when they were completely different. The first thing you’ve got to realise is that it’s not Captain Spock, it’s Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. You’ve got to start with the writing process and then let it marinate and several hours later you have to bring in Mr. Spock. Just like the biryani, you’ve got to let that marination process take its own sweet time.
You probably want to write at one part of the day and then one look at it maybe later in the day or even the next day. This is what I had to do when I first started out. I was not very good at writing. I was not very quick at writing. I would send my article to a friend and a client, whose name is Chris Ellington. Chris would look over it and then fix it and he had a million fixes and then it will come back and then I would send it out again this time to Rochelle. Rochelle would look at all the grammar and fix it and all of this editing process would drive me absolutely crazy plus there was my own creative output as it were.
This is the process. There is the writer and the editor. There is this time in between and what we do is we make a Captain Spock out of it. Of course it doesn’t work and there is no reason why it should work, because editing and writing just do not mix. That’s our first-grade obstacle and we have to learn that we’re going to have to do thing differently, do a bit of a Fosbury flop if we want to get over that bar and write great content.
This takes us to the second one and the second one is all about preparation.
Part 2: Preparation On June 29, 2007, Pixar released a movie about a rat and it was called Ratatouille. It was a story about an inspiring chef called Linguini and her rat called Remy, a rat that loved to cook.
Speaker 1: Animation is a very, very complicated business. There’s hundreds of people involved in the actual production.
Speaker 2: Many things that we take for granted in real life are difficult to do in the computer.
Speaker 3: Pixar is really very good at addressing complex problems. By far, this is the most complicated clothing that we’ve done.
Speaker 4: We went to a special sequence on that with the character with Linguini jumps into the sand to try and save Remy. He comes out dripping wet and we had to try and figure out a way to get that look when claw sticks to the skin and you can see just a little bit of colour coming through it.
Speaker 5: What do we do? We abused one of our poor coworkers. We make him dressed up in a chest outfit. We doused him with water and we filmed him. What does it look like? We’re on the clothing. Can you see it through to his skin? Where do the chips come off from his face? It’s our excuse to abuse coworkers actually not to think about it.
Sean D’Souza: What you just heard in that clip is preparation, preparation and more preparation. The reason why Pixar has to do so much preparation is because they’re not amateurs. They have million dollar budgets and of course they’re wasting a lot of money. They’re also wasting time and they’re wasting energy. When you think about it, that’s exactly what we do when we sit down to write. We don’t create that moment of preparationor really that hour of preparation and that’s how you know the difference between an amateur and a professional.
The amateur just sits down and begins to write. They sit at their computer and they decide, “I’m going to write an article today. I’m going to create a podcast today. I’m going to create a webinar.” The professional on the other hand sits down to plan. I was to listening to a podcast earlier today and there was this interview between Brian Orr and Jeff Brown. Jeff worked in the radio industry for many, many years and now he has his own podcast. He was talking about how people just show up on podcast and they start to ask questions and they don’t prepare and how all the preparation is critical.
If you listen to Ira Glass on This American Life and he’s on videos on YouTube, he talks about the preparation and how finding the stories takes half the week even though they have so many people in their staff. We think, “We’re just business people. We just have to write an article. Let’s sit down and write,” and that’s not how professionals work. You are a professional when you sit down to write and therefore you have to sit down to plan.
What are you going to plan? You’ve got to figure out what topic are you going to cover, what one word are you going to cover, what 3 sub-topics you’re going to cover or at least how you’re going to structure the article, how you’re going to structure this podcast. When I sit down to do this podcast, most of the work is done outside. Admittedly, the music takes a lot of time but the podcast takes only about 45 minutes to record and it takes me an hour and a half to put all the details together, sometimes longer. I’ll go to the cafe. I’ll sit don and I’ll put it all together. You can see a photograph of that. I’ll put it in the show notes.
It takes a lot of preparation to create something that is more than average and that’s what professionals do. This is the obstacle that we run into. It’s not I don’t try to beat the system. I try it. I’ll show up here at 4am and I’ll try to record a podcast and then it’s 4:30 and 4:45 and then 5:30. It’s very, very frustrating and so I’ve given up. I’ve totally given up.
Every time I want to record a podcast I will go to the cafe and sit there and plan. I don’t have the time that’s why I go and that’s why I plan and this is what professionals do. They plan before they execute. They get the ingredients, put the biryani in the fridge, let it marinate and then later they are cooking it. Amateurs? We just go there and we cook it right away as if something magical is going to happen.
We’ve looked at 2 main obstacles and the first one was editing, the fact that we get Captain Spock together instead of having Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. The second thing is this whole factor of preparation and how we want to bypass that process of marination. This takes us to the third part, which is the one word or the one term.
Part 3: One Word This podcast started with the story about Dick Fosbury. You have to ask yourself, “Why did that story exist? What is the point of that story?” the story was about obstacles and overcoming those obstacles, but why did the story matter? The story mattered because of that one word or one term and in this case the one term is a different perspective. Right until that moment in Mexico when Dick Fosbury sailed over the bar like a 2-legged camel, there was only one perspective and that perspective was to jump over it, straddle over it. He went over in a completely different way.
The one term is about different perspective and that’s how we look at the entire article. We didn’t go about how do we construct our article and what is the structure of the article, but we looked at things that stop us. We don’t realise that they’re stopping us and that is editing and preparation and the one word that one word or one term which is different perspective. It allows me to do both the preparation and the editing.
When I’m preparing, I’m thinking of how can I have a different perspective on article writing. Then when I’m done and Mr. Editor has to show up, at point in time I’m going, “Did I do this? Did I actually adhere to the one word or one term?” In a way the one word or one term satisfies the needs of those fresh 2 guys, which is preparation and editing and he does so, so brilliantly.
When you’re siting down to write something, create something ask yourself, “What is the one thing that I want to convey here? What is that endpoint?” Once you know the one word or one term you will be able to communicate in a way that you’ve never communicated before. You’d be able to edit it in a way that you’ve never done before.
Can it be more than one word or one term? One term is a couple of words. Maybe you could stretch it to 3 words. The problem is that you may want to put in 3 words or 4 words or 5 words to describe your article and the further away you go from one word the more complicated it becomes. It’s very, very hard to then edit something or nail it down so find one word. Ask yourself, “What am I going to talk about today? Is it endeavour or is it scarcity or is it premium?” The point is once you get the one word and the one term that becomes a lot simpler and that’s really what we want.
Summary That brings us to the end of this podcast. What did we cover today? We covered 3 things. The first thing was the factor of editing that the editor and the writer they’re 2 different people. They show up at different times of day, probably on different days as well. When you write and you edit on the same day or write and edit, write and edit, write and edit, thank you. You’re just frustrating yourself and driving yourselves completely crazy. Do not edit. Come back another day. Do not become Captain Spock.
The second thing is the preparation. The professionals they don’t sit down to write. They don’t sit down to create. They sit down to plan. You need to go away somewhere. Plan, come back then you start to write. If you have to learn how to write, you can deconstruct say this piece because it’s there. It’s there in the show notes. You can deconstruct how it is created and then recreate it or you can do an article-writing course and learn how structure is built and how articles come together and how podcast come together and how … It’s all based on structure and once you understand the structure it’s just a matter of unfolding it like any language.
The third thing that we covered was one word. The one word comes before you head out to the cafe, before you sit down to plan. It’s what am I going to cover today, what is that one thing that I want my audience to get. Once you know that and you should know that, then it’s very simple or rather a lot simpler to get to the end result. What’s the one thing that you can do today? The one thing that you should do today is just sit now and say, “I’m going to write an article. What is the one word that I’m going to cover?”
If you’re not sure what you should do, I would suggest you go to the show notes and look at some of the links that I put there. Then deconstruct it and see how you can actually work out what one word was I trying to cover. You’ll start to see a pattern and once you get that pattern you will learn how to do it yourself..
Of course there is no substitute for being with a good teacher and I am a good teacher and you know that. I’m going to be there alive in Nashville, Tennessee and then in Amsterdam in The Netherlands and we’re going to do a storytelling workshop. I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m sure you did, this podcast and every podcast is full of stories and that’s what keeps you going. As you’re walking, as you’re driving, suddenly in the middle of all those facts and figures there’s the story unfolding how does that story unfold.
When you read the book The Brain Audit or you read the book on pricing or you read the book on testimonials, when you read those books you don’t always know why you like the book so much. Sure there’s a structure. Sure there’s a system, but more critically there are case studies and examples and analogies and stories and that’s what keeps the progression going ahead. Fact and figures they are very good but they are very tiring. Storytelling becomes very critical. It’s not only critical to get the message across in a meaningful way, but it’s also very helpful to know how to construct stories so that your audience remembers them.
There are lots of storytelling books and there are lots of storytelling workshops, so why is this one going to be different?
This one is different because this is storytelling versus storytelling. When you open a book on storytelling, essentially they’re teaching you how to write short stories or they’re telling how to write a script or a movie. Very rarely are you going to get storytelling that helps you construct stuff from business, for writing articles, for adding to podcast or seminars or just about everything that you do in business.
How do you connect it back to the business? How do you create books? How do you create reports? How do you create witch stories embedded in them so they become irresistible? That’s not what most workshops and books online are going to be able to teach you and that’s why this workshop is so critical.
Come join us in Nashville on the second, third and fourth of December or if you’re in Europe it’s the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth of December. You can find everything at psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop. The prices are going up. We always raise prices and they’re going to go up every 20 days or so. By the time you get to it several months later, which is when the workshop begins, it will be at its highest price. We are still in the early bird stages so go to psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop and we’ll see you there.
If you haven’t read The Brain Audit, you should read The Brain Audit. Why? Because it’s one of the coolest business books you will ever read. It has lots of stories and it’s the barrier to the workshop. You have to rear The Brain Audit before you get there, so either the workshop and The Brain Audit or join us at 5000bc.com.
That’s it for me on a Friday evening, not 4am, so that’s a little different. Bye for now.
Storytelling is “persuasion with class”
Does the brain actually process thoughts in a step-by-step manner? You can use all the “buy now” buttons and countdown clocks, but it just comes across as aggressive. You can use facts, figures, and yes, they all work to persuade, but storytelling does it with finesse. See how stories are used in the excerpt of The Brain Audit to get your attention with finesse.
Storytelling struggles without a catalyst. And yet a catalyst doesn't have to be in your face. It can be quiet, almost introspective. So how do you create powerful catalysts for your stories? And then once you have the catalyst in place, how do you connect the story back to your article, podcast or presentation?
Resources
To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/58
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
In this storytelling episode Sean talks about
Part 1: What is a catalyst and why you need it in your story
Part 2: What is the point of a story
Part 3: How to use storytelling in your presentations, articles and sales letters
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources and Links Live Workshop: How to create well-told stories that create a bond with your audience without sounding unprofessional
Article Writing Article: Why We Struggle To Write Articles: The Myth Of Unique Content
Story Telling Goodies: Coming Soon. Email Renuka for more details. renuka@psychotactics.com
The Transcript
This is The 3 Month Vacation and I’m Sean D’Souza. In 2003, I stopped watching TV. It wasn’t like I didn’t like TV. In fact, I probably liked it too much. I’d spend two, three hours every single day, watching TV. It didn’t seem like two or three hours; it seemed like just might be half an hour. I’d switch it on at six o’clock in the evening, then it would be seven o’clock, then eight o’clock and then nine o’clock. And of course, there was the morning news. In effect, I was spending three or four hours watching completely crazy stuff. At this point, my brother-in-law Ranjit moved to New Zealand. He lived with us for several months before finding his own place. In the month before he left, we had a conversation. It wasn’t a conversation really. It was more like a bet. He said that I watched too much TV, and I said, “No, no, no, you watch too much TV.” We took this bet, and the bet was that the next person that switches on the TV loses. We didn’t say what that person loses, but right after that discussion, not one of us touched that remote control. The TV sat in the corner for a week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks. Ranjit moved out, and it still sat in the corner. We didn’t switch it on.
A few months later, we put the TV in the closet and eventually we just got rid of it. What’s the point of the story? What we’re listening to here is this unfolding of the story, but right at the core of it is a catalyst and that catalyst is causing us to move the story forward because that catalyst has speeded up some action, and that’s taking us towards an endpoint. When we look at the same story without the catalyst, it becomes very boring. Let’s run that same story once again. Let’s say, my brother-in-law, Ranjit wasn’t around and that one day I decided to stop watching TV and so I kept the remote to the side. That was it, 13 years have passed, and I haven’t watched TV. It’s not as interesting, isn’t it? That one little factor that came into play, which is my brother-in-law stepping in, the bet and then both of us being very pigheaded about it and not watching TV that’s what causes all the drama.
You’ve got to have a catalyst in your story, but you also have to get that story to an end point, and that is what we’re going to cover in today’s podcast. We’re going to look at this understanding of the catalyst, which could be an active catalyst or an inactive catalyst. The second thing that we look at is what is this catalyst leading to, why are we doing this whole story thing in the first place? What is the endpoint? The third thing that we’re going to look at is how are you going to use this storytelling in your presentations, in your articles, in your sales letters? We’ll take a look at some of those things.
Part 1:What Is The Catalyst Let’s get started with the first thing, which is understanding the catalyst and how it can be active or inactive. If you look at the rating of all the podcasts, you’ll see a little C symbol on it. That C symbol, it stands for clean. It means that you’ll never get any bad language on this podcast, you’ll never hear any swear words, you’ll never hear anything that you would hear on another podcast. All of this goes back to one moment in time when I was in school. I didn’t use any bad language and then suddenly when I was in the sixth grade, I decided that every third word had to be a swear word. I don’t know how it started. I don’t know why it started, but the moment I’d get on to the playground with my friends at school, I would start to use the swear words. One day, my brother showed up, and he’s standing there and he’s watching me. I’m playing and using all these swear words. Suddenly I realize, “Oh, what is he doing standing there?” He’s got this evil grin on his face, and he goes and he says, “I’m going to tell daddy about this.” That’s the first moment that I realize, “Oh, all these swear words, all the stuff that I’ve been doing, he’s going to report me.” He’s my brother; I couldn’t do anything to him. He still had to get home in one piece.
I go home, but now I’m terrified. I know my brother, he is going to tell his story. He is going to tell my father that I’m using all these swear words. I’m expecting some real trouble. I don’t know what the trouble is going to be, but I know there is going to be trouble. My father says to me, “Sean, I would prefer that you didn’t use bad language anymore.” “That’s it?” That was it. That was pretty much it. Over 30 years have passed since that moment and to this day, I am deeply embarrassed if I have to use bad language even by mistake. What we’re experiencing here is this concept called the catalyst. For the story to reach dramalevel, you need that catalyst. You need something to happen; you need something to speed up those bunch of events, so that you get to the other side, whatever that other side is. When we examine this, we say, “Well, what was the catalyst or who was the catalyst?”
We could say that my brother was the catalyst because if he hadn’t gone on this big tell-tell mission, then I wouldn’t have had the problem. Somehow I think that wasn’t the catalyst. It was the calm. The fact that my father didn’t punish me that struck a chord. That calm, it became the inactive catalyst. When we look at the catalyst, we look at something that’s active and something that’s inactive. To me at least, the active catalyst is someone or something that’s pretty much in your face. When I told you some stories in some other podcasts about how my friend Joan, she got into the space and she asked me about my trip to New Zealand. When we were immigrating to New Zealand, she became the active catalyst. She was that one force that pushed me along the journey or did I tell you the story about my mother-in-law and how we went for a week into Northland, which is just a couple of hours from Auckland. These were the early days of Psychotactics. I took some books with me, some business books and she said, “No, no, no, we’re going on a break, and you’re not going to read anything on that break.”
Here’s what I did, when they went for a walk, I read my business books, sitting in the hotel. When they went to the beach, I continued to read my business books. When I got back to Auckland several days later, I’d finished all those books. I didn’t get any walk and didn’t go to the beach, but I finished reading my books, and that catapulted me into this world of Psychotactics, which is what you know of today. When I’m looking at story-telling, I’m looking at, “Well, is this an active catalyst or is this an inactive catalyst?” To me, an active catalyst is something like the drip drip, drip that water that leak that instant fix that has to happen now. The inactive catalyst is something that is introspective that you have to think about. I would say the mother-in-law story that would be an active catalyst. The story by Joan and how she got us moving to New Zealand that would be an active catalyst. The story about my father and how he was so calm, to me that became an inactive catalyst. It became something that was introspective, something that I had to go back and think about what I was doing.
If you want to segregate them into two bits, you can say, “Well, we’re going to have an active catalyst here, someone that is agitating you to move towards that destination that urgency is in place and then you see the interactive catalyst, where you ponder, and you think about it or you read a book and that book changes your life and that becomes the inactive catalyst.” Whether you choose an interactive or an active catalyst, the point is that when you’re telling a story, those elements need to be in place. When you write your story, you need to know very quickly what is that catalyst, who is that catalyst and how did it change whatever you were doing? All that bad language that I was using with my friends that was my everyday life, nothing was changing, nothing changed in that world until the catalyst came along. The catalyst became calm and then I got to a destination.
Part 2: What Does The Catalyst Lead To? That takes us to our second part, which is what is the point of this story? What is the point of the catalyst? Christopher Vogler has this story telling seminar, and it’s about the hero’s journey and how the hero goes on this massive journey somewhere and then he comes back a changed person. In one of his story telling seminars, he talks about this sheriff. The sheriff decides he wants to retire, so he’s hanging up his guns. He doesn’t want anything to do with all this violence and gun slinging. He just wants to live peacefully, and while he’s going about doing this peaceful routine of his every single day, he notices this pretty woman. He sees her buying some groceries and then another time; he sees her walking down the street and slowly he’s falling in love with this woman. Suddenly, a group of bandits ride into town, and one of the people that they kidnap is the woman.
Suddenly, his whole peaceful routine, it’s finished. Now, he’s got to pick up those guns and get back into this world of violence that he has left behind. Let’s assume the story unfolds as it should. He meets the bad guys. He gets rid of them. He gets the woman back, but what’s the point of the story? When I tell you the story about how Joan got us to New Zealand, there is a point to that story. When I tell you about how I read the book by Jim Collins, which is “Good to Great” and it asked me, “What can you be the best in the world at?” Well, there is a point to that story. When my father said, “Hey, Sean I would prefer you don’t use this filthy language,” there was a point to that story, and that is critical. Most people think that if they just tell the story that’s fine, but it’s not. You have to have a point through the story. As kids, we know that this is the moral of the story, and it’s not necessarily the moral that we’re looking at here. We’re looking at why are you telling me the story?
When we started selling the Brain Audit, which was way back in 2002, I had written this book, this PDF and then I went to this guy who was selling stuff online. His name was Joe Vitale. Joe was very excited with the book. He said, “Hey, this book is really good, I could promote it for you.” He got us to do stuff. He got us to get our credit card system in place. He got us to get the sales page up. All of this had to be done in a week and then we were waiting for him to promote it. A week passed, and he didn’t do anything. A month passed, he didn’t do anything. Suddenly, we noticed that people were buying the Brain Audit. The point of the story is that Joe was not supposed to sell anything for us in the first place. He was supposed to be a kicking angel. What I call a kicking angle and kicking angle is someone that comes in there and kicks you and gets you moving and then moves out of the way. They don’t buy anything from you. They don’t sign up for any of your courses. They just make sure that somehow you get moving. Now, you know the point of the story because if I wrote an article about kicking angels, and I started out with the Joe Vitale story, you know Joe was the kicking angle.
The point of the story is that when someone promises to sign of course or they decide that they want to come to your workshop, or maybe they just decide to promote your book, but do nothing and yet there is a point to that story. There was a catalyst that catalyst was Joe. He came and he created all of this boat rocking and then he disappeared, and that was the point of the story. His disappearance was the whole point of the story, and so you’ve got to have these two elements in your storytelling. You’ve got to know who or what is the catalyst? Is that catalyst just something that you’re thinking about? Is it something that is introspective and inactive or active like Joe, like, “Come on, get your credit cards together, get your stuff together.” Once we know that catalyst and then we need to know well what was the point of the story because that point of the story helps us reconnect to the article, to the sales, to everything else. Without that point of the story, it doesn’t matter. The story is just a story with no real connection.
Part 3: How To Use The Storytelling In Your Presentations, Articles And Sales Letters This takes us to the third part, where we start to look at how do we use this in our communication, whether we’re doing sales letters or articles or presentations or anything at all, how do we use it? On the Psychotactics website, there is a product called Black Belt Presentations. In Black Belt Presentations, I talk about how we manage to sell $20,000 worth of product at a single conference. The story that precedes that conference is even more interesting. That is because I went to Australia, and I spoke at this conference and I hardly sold anything. I watched as other presenters not only sold stuff, but people were stampeding to the back of the room to get their stuff. I wanted to create that stampede, so what I have there is this whole point of the catalyst. I stood there like an idiot, watching as other people succeeded while I failed miserably. The point of the story is very simple; I needed to figure out what they did and how they did it and how I could do the same. That day when we sold $20,000 in a single hour at a conference, it goes all the way back to the point where I failed, and that point of failure was the catalyst. What is the point of the story?
Well, if we were just at a party, and we’re drinking some wine and eating some cheese, it makes for some great entertainment because hey you succeeded, but what are you going to do with it when you get to the sales page? This is where stories are so effective because they help the reader to get into that same mindset that you were in. When this goes on to a sales page, and I tell the story, I can then connect it to the Black Belt series. Then you realize, “Well, if I’m going to make a presentation, if I’m going to fail, then no, I’d rather not fail, I’d rather figure out how to be able to set up my slides, how to work out, how the audience participates, how they react, I need to know all this information and me need to know how to put my presentation together.”
The reason a client is going to buy the Black Belt Presentations, even though it’s not a cheap product is because of the story. The story starts them on that journey. It sends them through the catalyst and eventually there is a point that you do not want to be standing there and watching while others sell and you do nothing. You don’t always have to tell a story to sell a product, but you have to tell a story to get an idea across. Let’s say I was going to tell a story about how kindness is more powerful when dealing with human beings than say brute force or anger or frustration. Then, I could tell you the story of how my father said, “I wish you wouldn’t use that language.” Now, we have a point to the story. The whole point of the story is that you’ve created change, and so this takes you right into writing your article about change, about kindness. You start off with the story about the father and the son, you then move through the catalytic moment and then finally what’s the point of the story. It’s kindness works better and then talk about how kindness works with dolphins and dogs and people and how all the elements that you’re going to cover in your article. The storytelling that’s the whole magnet. That’s the thing that sucks me into reading the rest of the article.
If you do not have the skills to tell a story and you don’t get it through the catalyst and you don’t finally get to the point of the story, well it’s a not wasted exercise, but it’s entertainment, possibly entertainment is good enough. When you’re in business, when you’re writing that article, when you’re writing your sales letter, you need to be able to tell those stories using this catalyst.
Summary Let’s summarize what we have covered today. We covered three things. The first thing is the catalyst and how we can have that active catalyst and the interactive catalyst. The active catalyst is something urgent. The roof has just fallen, you have to fix it. Your friend runs into you while you’re grocery shopping, and she says, “No, no, no, you have to get to New Zealand now.” Then there is the inactive catalyst, something you read, something that’s introspective. The catalyst alone is not that important if there’s no point to it, so there must be a point. It’s like, why is this happening? Why is my brother-in-law stepping into my life and taking a bet with me about the television? It’s changed my life. I stopped spending two, three, four hours. I thought I was spending just a little time in front of the TV, but when I stopped watching TV and when I threw it out and gave it away that’s when I realized, “Oh my God, I was spending so much time in front of this stupid device that taught me nothing.” There was a point to the story, and it wasn’t just entertainment. Now, it could be entertainment, but in business, you’re going to have to connect it to something that you’re selling or something that you’re telling. If it is something you’re telling, like an article, then how does it connect?
We saw that with the Black Belt Presentation, the whole story could then fit in, so that you would decide, “Well, yes I don’t want to be in that situation,” or if I’m talking about my father’s story then I could connect it to kindness and how kindness works very well in changing the perception of other people. There you have it, the catalyst, the point of the catalyst and then how to connect it back to whatever you’re telling or whatever you’re selling. What’s the one thing that you can do today? Well, the one thing that you can do today it start off with the point of the story. Why are you telling the story? What change do you want to occur? When you do that, then you have to go out and seek the story that fits into that point. You can work it from there forward. It’s not easy. We have to learn how to do this, but always there has to be the point. Otherwise, it’s just entertainment.
Talking about entertainment, have you been to a Psychotactics Workshop? Well, there is one showing up in Nashville, Tennessee on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th of December, and then we go to Amsterdam, the Netherlands on the 15th, 16th, and 17th. Psychotactics Workshop is a lot of fun. I know lots of people promised fun, but this is a lot of fun and you learn systematically, just like you’ve been learning on this podcast, there is a system and by the end of it, you are exceedingly good at story telling. That’s the goal. The goal is not to give you information. Information will come to you in notes and like in all workshops, there will be slides and presentation, but most of the time you will be working and having fun in your groups and learning to write stories, which is what the goal is after all.
You go to www.Psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop. You have to read the Brain Audit before you get there. You can get the Brain Audit at Psychotactics or on Amazon, but you have to have the Brain Audit, otherwise you cannot attend the workshop and learn how to tell stories like really good stories, stories that you can use in your articles, in your podcasts, in your presentations, on your website, on your About Us page, pretty much everywhere. Storytelling is a craft. You can learn it and you can become very good at it. You also want to check out the membership at 5000bc.com. That’s where we hang around, where there’s lots of information, but also where I am on a consistent basis, answering questions. That’s 5000bc.com and as always I’m on Twitter and Facebook at Sean D’Souza and Sean@Psychotactics.com. Bye for now.
Do you want to write that article, because you do have something to say? And your audience wants to hear it. So what is stopping you? Find out ‘Why We Struggle To Write Articles (And The Myth Of Unique Content).
No matter where you go, you run into people with the same problem?time. Whether you're a small business owner, or run a big company, it's all about time, and getting things done. A lot of time saving can be done without too much effort on your part?and by simply using software. Software that does very smart stuff is what we all need. Here's the list of three core areas where I use the software.
Useful Resources
To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/57
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
Software and Hardware Mentioned In This Episode: Mac
Default Folder: http://www.stclairsoft.com/DefaultFolderX/
Text Expander: https://smilesoftware.com/TextExpander/index.html
Dragon Naturally Speaking: http://www.nuance.com/dragon/index.htm
Mailbox: http://www.mailboxapp.com
Evernote: http://www.evernote.com
Dropzone: http://www.mailboxapp.com
Plantronics DSP400: Plantronics DSP-400 Digitally-Enhanced USB Foldable Stereo Headset and Software
In this episode Sean lists three core areas where he uses software to save time. Part 1: How to handle repetitive tasks
Part 2: What are the factors of communication
Part 3: How to store all your ideas
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources and Links Read about: The Four Critical Zones Required to Speed Up Your Learning
Episode 3: Unusual Time Management Ideas (Audio and Transcript)
Chaos Planning: Why you should Forget Business Planning and Goal Stting
The Transcript
This is The 3 Month Vacation and I’m Sean D’Souza. It was almost the end of the Second World War when Boeing came out with a plane that was called the B-29. It was the first ever high-altitude bomber. It could fly at over 22,000 feet. It’s one thing to have a plane that can fly at such heights, but you also have to be able to predict what’s going to happen to the plane at that height. These planes they were at a Pacific air base and 2 Air Force meteorologists were given the job to prepare wind forecast so that they could figure out how they could get that plane going in that height. Using the information that they had, they decided that the speed was 168 knots.
However, their commanding officer could not believe the forecast. He thought that they had overestimated the speed of the wind. He thought it was too high. However, on the very next day the B-29 pilots reported wind speeds of 170 knots and that moment in time was when the jet stream was discovered. The question is how do you get to jet stream, because when we look at very successful people what we’re seeing is that they’re flying at these very high altitudes at very high speeds. While our lives might be completely different from these people, what we have in common is the factor of time. They have the same 24 hours as we do and they make use of their time.
Today I’m going to talk about time yet again, but this time I’m going to focus on software. We’re going to look at how software can make your life a lot better and a lot quicker and, of course, you have more time to do the things that you really want to do. In today’s broadcast we’re going to cover 3 elements. One is repetitive tasks; the second is tasks that involve communication; and the third one which is tasks that involve storage in finding things. This is where we come to a fork in the road because many of you might be using a PC and I’m using a Mac and I switched from a PC to Mac in 2008 and I have never looked back.
There is going to be some overlap. You’re going to get some of the software that is available both in PC and Mac, but what you’ve got to understand is the concept. The concept is more about repetitive, about communication and storage software. You’ll find that on a PC. Don’t be too stressed out that this is like a Mac presentation. Let’s start off with the first one, which is the repetitive task that I have to do every day.
Part 1: Repetitive Tasks The first thing that you have to do every single day no matter whether you’re a PC or Mac is to find folder. You save something and you need to find a folder and on the Mac you get something called Default Folder. This is one of the best tools that I have found. What this does is immediately it gives you a little heart option and that makes it a favorite, which means that when you’ve got sudden folders that you use on a regular basis you can assign a little heart to them and then every time you save it you click on the heart, those folders show up and goes to box.
My set up is across computers. It would be this folder and subfolder and I would spend a few seconds maybe 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds trying to get to that folder and what Default Folder does is it takes me there in 1 second. I can also set up Default Folder so that it very quickly gets me to that folder by pressing a shortcut and this is in the preferences. Without getting very technical about it, what you’ve got to do is have a software that can get you to the folder very, very quickly. You can generate thousands of shortcuts all sitting on the desktop.
This saves you 10 seconds here, 5 seconds there, 20 seconds there but more importantly it saves you all that energy of opening up folders and subfolders, which is what we do on a regular basis. That’s the first thing that is very repetitive.
The second thing that we do, which is very repetitive, is answer the same questions over and over again, like for instance your email address. You might be typing it several times a day, maybe your website or a website that you go to. The point is that software like Text Expander will do that for you. You just have a little shortcut, like for instance with me, I just type SX and it types out sean@psychotactics.com.
If I type browser X, it will spit out 3 paragraphs that tell the person who’s just emailed me, “Wait a second. You want this download, you have to go and check on another browser because maybe this browser is not working.” It gives us long message of 2 or 3 paragraphs and it does so in 1 second. Every single day what I have is a whole bunch of messages that come to me that are quite repetitive in nature. When I answer, Text Expander will actually say, “You have been using this on a regular basis. You have been answering this way on a regular basis. Would you like to save this as a snippet?”
For instance, I use the word The Brain Audit several times, because I wrote the book. Text Expander will watch while I’m doing this The Brain Audit, The Brain Audit, The Brain Audit and then it will say, “Do you want to save this as a snippet,” and then I can put in a little shortcut like TBA and then I have The Brain Audit. Not only do I have The Brain Audit, but it’s capitalized like T capitalized and B capitalized and A capitalized. All of this stuff is very repetitive and within The Brain Audit I have terms like target profile or reverse testimonials and I have shortcuts for all this.
Who’s going to remember all those shortcuts? The program does it for you. It reminds you every time you don’t use the shortcut, “You had the shortcut TBA for The Brain Audit. Use it the nest time.” After a while, the program is starting to think for you as well. These are 2 repetitive things that you have to do, open up folders and store things in folders and for that you have Default Folder.
The second thing is just answers that you give clients, stuff that you have to write in email, email addresses, maybe just your address, maybe you just have to type in your address send this to whatever PO Box number, whatever. That can be made very unrepetitive with this software called Text Expander, which then takes us to the second one which is a factor of communication.
Part 2: Factor of Communication When I moved to New Zealand in the year 2000, I moved into a rental place. I didn’t really want to spend a lot of money so I bought myself a little plastic chair, which was about $10 at the store. Every one who was back home; my wife Renuka was still in India, all my friends were in India, I didn’t know anyone in New Zealand. What I was doing is using messenger. Back then I was using the PC, so MSN messenger. I would spend several hours on MSN messenger just chatting.
At some point I got what is called RSI, that’s Repetitive Stress Injury. The RSI got so bad that I couldn’t sleep at night. My shoulders hurt. My forearms hurt. My fingers felt like there was an electric current going through them. I had to go for physiotherapy and then I had to go for acupuncture and it seemed I was so afraid of so much as opening the garage door because I was in so much pain all the time. If you just wrapped me on the knuckles, I would fall down on the floor in pain.
At that point in time, I didn’t have this software. When Renuka got to New Zealand, she was actually doing a lot of typing for me. I wasn’t working. I had to stop working and she started doing typing and the point I was building websites. What is the point of this story? The point of the story is that you don’t need to get RSI to get on to the software. This software is Dragon Naturally Speaking.
If you use Dragon Naturally Speaking several years ago, you’re probably very frustrated with the way it worked. You needed to practice for about half an hour train the system then it would get most of the stuff wrong. It wouldn’t work on browsers. It wouldn’t work on forums. It would do this and it would do that. It is got very good in recent years. You can now train it for as little as 5 to 7 minutes and it will recognize your accent and it will start to work just out of the box. Almost out of the box, 5 to 7 minutes is not a lot of time.
The point is that it’s not very easy to get into that mode where you’re dictating, but think about every single bus in the ’60s and ’70s was already doing this form of dictation. They would say a sentence, putting the punctuation, do all that stuff to their secretaries. It’s not like it’s something that is very hard to do. You just have to get used to it and the way to get used to it is to use a phone.
A lot of phones have this system where you can dictate into the phone and that’s how I started. I started using Siri on my iPhone and I would just respond to emails and after a while I got used to speaking like this, which is I will return your email later, full stop. In fact I got so used to it that one day I had to leave a message on an answer phone and I said, “I will call you back later, full stop.”
You can actually switch very quickly between the way we speak or the way I’m speaking right now and then moving into punctuation. This saves you a lot of time, because you cannot believe how fast you can go through this whole system of dictating answers and that is how I get through a lot of my email every day. I have to be careful that I read whatever I have dictated, because the pronunciation is not always very clear.
The computer will spit out whatever your say, because fort may sound like fourth and that’s what the computer will type. You’ve got to do the editing and you can’t afford to be sloppy. I’ll admit I had been sloppy and then I’ll hit send too quickly, so you have to do that a little bit at least, but it saves you enormous amount of time. This is just communication and this is just 1 software in communication.
The second software that I use with communication and this saves me an enormous amount of time is something that Dropbox gives absolutely free. It’s called Mailbox. What it does is it allows you to postpone your email for later. You can postpone it for a month or you can postpone it for a day or tomorrow or later this evening or whatever. When you think of it the first time you think, “Wait a second. You were just procrastinating.” No, what I’m trying to do at all times is keep my inbox down to zero.
Here’s the reason why I have to do that. I have to do that because every time the inbox is filled with, I don’t know, a dozen, 2-dozen, 3-dozen, 4-dozen emails I have to scan through all those emails and that’s no good. Either I act on the emails or I put them off until later. What I do is supposing I have to get in touch with someone a month later. I will swipe and say, “Get this email back to me after a month,” and then exactly a month later it will show up and then I can act on it, so it acts like a to-do list.
Of course, you’re human and you don’t want to deal with some email and you will procrastinate and that’s fine. Most of the time your goal should be to get that email box down to zero. There is other software like SaneBox and other stuff that you can use. This Mailbox it’s free and it works really well. The goal is to keep your inbox down to zero. You cannot believe how addictive this is. After a while you’re swiping and deleting and responding and finishing off your email so that you don’t have to deal with it and you don’t have to scan through al those read emails and figure out which one do I have to get open into the box and put in that folder and this folder; no, nothing like.
I know you’re skeptical. My wife Renuka she is skeptical off a lot of stuff that I think I wonderful because I think a lot of stuff is wonderful. I showed it to her a few months ago, she wasn’t interested. I showed it to her 2 weeks ago, she wasn’t interested. Then last week for some reason she got interested and now she’s hooked. I can tell you, you will be hooked. Try and get your inbox down to zero by using Mailbox.
With communication, there are these 2 things that helped me get to jet stream and that is Dragon naturally Speaking. It’s amazing and often enough they give it to you at a discount so go and look for the discount. You’ll get a Dragon Naturally Speaking and get yourself a Plantronics. If you’re swayed by Dragon telling you to buy their own microphone, don’t do it. Get yourself a Plantronics 400 and that’s a very good microphone. I’ll list this at the bottom of the podcast. The second thing you want to do is you want to get Mailbox.
What we’ve covered so far is we’ve looked at stuff that’s repetitive in nature and Default Folder will help you there and Text Expander will help you there. We’ve also looked at communication and what I use a lot is Dragon Naturally Speaking and Mailbox and finally we’ll look at storage. Let’s go to the third part which is storage.
Part 3: Storage When you write articles, when you create presentations, when you have to write books, you’re going to put facts and figures and let me tell you this. Facts and figures are really, really boring. They are so boring because they first of all are intimidating the hard to remember. The only thing that your clients really remember are stories, but the problem is that you cannot the stories. You cannot get to the case studies. You cannot get to the examples and so then you spend enormous amounts of time in research.
The worst time to do research is when you’re sitting down to write your article. The worst time to do research is when you’re sitting down to do your presentation. You need to have all of this information in advance and episode 41 covered that. It said, “How to save 2 zillion hours in research using Evernote.” Go back to episode number 41. Listen to that or read the transcript and you will learn how I use Evernote.
The second thing that I use and we have brought Default Folder right back. Default Folder allows you to tag your files. If you’re even slightly interested in finding a file then you want to tag it when you save it. This is very important because let’s say you did a cartoon and the cartoon was about a bear. Then later on you wanted to find something to do with intimidation or fear and you typed in intimidation or fear. What kind of results would you get? Nothing.
What you do when you save a file is you put in some little tags. When you put in those tags and Default Folder does this really well then every time you type in those keywords or something close to those keywords it will bring up that file, which is called bear.psd. You look for intimidation and fear and you got bear and you go, “I could use the bear,” and that’s what I do. When I’m saving files, I’ll give them little tags.
You might not do this because you think it takes time, but it only takes time on the front-end. Once you get started and you really are in a project you need all the energy and all the resources at your disposal and all of this software really comes to help you and that brings us to the end of this episode.
Summary We’ve covered 3 things. The first is repetitive, the second one is communicative, and the third one is the storage. We looked at Default Folder and how it will take you exactly where you need to be. We also looked at Text Expander and how it expands little snippets of text or huge amounts of texts and it does it in a matter of seconds. We then went to communication. We looked at Dragon Naturally Speaking and we looked at Mailbox, which can also be procrastination heaven, but let’s face it. Your inbox is procrastination heaven already. You might as well have an empty inbox.
Finally, we looked at storage and we looked at Evernote and that’s episode number 41. Go and listen to it, read it. Default Folder, if you use tags well you will find things like you can’t imagine. These are the 3 things that will get you into jet stream, but what’s the one thing that you can do today?
The one thing that you can do today is find a Text Expander. I know this for sure that the PC has Text Expander as well. I think one of them is called Breevy that is B, R, E, E, V, Y. I don’t know how well it works. I know Text Expander works really well. Get yourself a Text Expander and stop this typing over and over and over again. You will thank me later. You will send me chocolates. You will send me to Disneyland. You will be really thankful that you use this software. When you finish this podcast, go back to your office and buy a Text Expander, whichever one for the Mac or the PC and there you will enter your own jet stream.
An interesting fact about the jet stream with climate change that jet stream has changed. It’s taking pilots 11 minutes more to get to their destination. Of course, when they spend 11 minutes more in the sky they are causing more climate change so it might take you longer to get to your destination. You don’t want to do that in your office. You want to get to that jet stream and you want to get there as quickly as possible. Get the software and start using it today and then you can send me the tickets later. You can send me the chocolates later.
Before we go, there is a storytelling workshop coming up. It’s in Nashville, Tennessee and it’s on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th of December. We have dates and we’re also in Europe in Amsterdam in the Netherlands and that’s on the 15th, 16th and 17th of December. Story telling is used everywhere, but the beauty of storytelling is its stickiness. When I tell you the story about The Brain Audit, I only have to tell you that story once and then you can tell it 100 times over and never lose the impact and that is the beauty of storytelling,.
Storytelling is used for podcast that’s why you like this podcast because there are so many stories. You read The Brain Audit, there are so many stories and so many case studies and so many examples. It’s not enough to just tell the story. It’s how you craft the story and that’s what we’re going to learn. We’re going to learn how you find the story, how you craft the story and then how you connect the story to your business.
It’s very easy to create … It’s not easy to create story but once you know how to do it, it’s easy. The hard thing is connecting it back to your business in a professional way and we’re going to do this at the storytelling workshop, where learning how to create a driveway moment, where people just want to listen to the end of your story. Go topsychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop and we’ll see you either in Nashville, Tennessee or in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
You have to have read The Brain Audit however, because that’s the condition, that’s the barrier. If you haven’t read The Brain Audit, you should be reading it anyway. It’s at psychotactics.com/brainaudit. Read the stories. Read the examples. See for yourself how facts and figures intimidate and get yourself into the jet stream of storytelling.
That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now and thanks for listening to The 3 Month Vacation. Bye-bye.
Still Reading? In business to save time, we have to learn time crunching software. And to get better at our marketing, we have to understand our customers. One of the ways to get better is to understand how the brain works. Does the brain actually process thoughts in a step-by-step manner? Click here to get a free excerpt on Why Customers Buy (And Why They Don’t). Get ready to enjoy the concise and easy to absorb information.
Storytelling has a lot of guidelines and rules. Yet, some of the critical elements slip under the radar. You don't realise storytelling elements and secrets that are hiding in plain sight. And storytellers can't always explain what they're doing?and so these elements of storytelling get left out. And yet, they're incredibly powerful. Like for instance, the concept of "anticipation" before the "problem". It's nowhere to be found? Unless of course you listen to this episode on how to tell riveting stories. Welcome to Goldilocks land!
Resources
To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/56
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
In this episode Sean talks about how to create stories that are very powerful. Part 1: How the ‘The Wall’ changes the pace of a story
Part 2: The power in using the ’The Reconnect’
Part 3: Why anticipation is so critical in storytelling
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources and Links The Brain Audit: How to introduce your product in a language the customer understands
Read or listen to: How to double your writing speed
Special Bonus: How to design the pricing grid for your product
The Transcript
This is The 3 Month Vacation, and I’m Sean D’Souza. I was about 2 years old when I first had a bout of convulsions. It didn’t start up as convulsions. I was standing there on the balcony, looking out on the road, and then I fell off the stool that I was standing on. As the story goes, I ran to my mother. She noticed that I was having convulsions, and she panicked. Now, panic would be the wrong word to use because what she did next was bundled me in her arms and ran with me to the hospital.
To put you in the frame of mind of what India was when I was growing up, there were no phones or most people didn’t have phones. They didn’t have cars. You probably had a scooter if you were well off. That’s just how things were back then. What she had to do was run a distance of 2 kilometers, maybe 3 kilometers to get to the nearest hospital. When she got to the hospital, they wouldn’t admit me because I had meningitis and the hospital was not in the position to deal with cases of meningitis. Somehow, she managed to get them to admit me.
At that point in time, they asked for the mother. Now, my mother was very young at that point in time and they assumed that she was somehow the sister. They said, “No. No. No. You have to get the mother.” This is very odd in India because people tend to get married very early in India and yet they were insisting that they had to have the mother before they could go ahead with anything. There I was, not doing so well and the hospital authorities wouldn’t go ahead without dealing with the mother. Now, she convinced them but once they admitted me, there was one more problem. The doctor wasn’t so sure that I would survive the meningitis. He told my parents, and by that point, my father was there as well. He said, “I have to tell you this. Your son will either die or he’ll go mad.”
What you just heard was the story of my youth. The question is, why did you keep listening? Why did the story work? What is it that caused you to pay attention and not move away from the story?
In today’s episode, we’re going to cover storytelling elements: How to Avoid Boring Articles? The core of avoiding boring articles is to be able to tell stories, but stories are useful for presentations. They’re useful for books. They’re useful for webinars. They’re useful for pretty much everything. What happens is most of us load up our information with facts and figures, and those are very tiring but stories, they encapsulate everything. We’re going to learn how to create stories that are very powerful.
The 3 things we’re going to cover today are one, the wall; second, the reconnect; and third, the anticipation.
Part 1: The Wall Let’s start off with the first one which is the wall. Every afternoon, every weekday, I go through the same routine. I pick up my niece from school. She’s now 11, that’s Marsha. We speak about stuff in the car. We do multiplication tables. Recently, we’ve been doing storytelling. I usually when I asked her, “Tell me of story about what happened in the weekend.” She goes, “Nothing.” Then I say, “What happened in class?” She goes, “Nothing.” This is the interesting part. You think that there’s nothing happening in your life, but there is a lot happening all the time. Then, we have to zero in onto one little thing and make it interesting, just about anything becomes interesting in the way you dealt it.
I said, “Tell me about your piano class on Saturday.” Her little face brightens up and the smile comes on, and she goes, “I didn’t practice before going to piano class on Saturday. Then when I got to the piano class, I was really afraid because I thought I would the play the piece really badly. But as it appears, I played quite well. In fact, I played it so well that the piano teacher said, ‘I’m going to put you on a more advanced piece.’ Of course, once she gave me the advanced piece, I couldn’t play it. She said, ‘No. No. No. No. No. You’re playing it in the wrong key.’ I should try to play in the right key, but it didn’t worked.”
The piano teacher gave her another chance. Of course, she was not playing the piece well, so they went back to the old piece, which is what she had practice. Marsha was quite happily playing her old piece, but playing it by ear, not reading the notes. Happy as a luck when she looked at the corner of the room and there was her mother. According to Marsha, her mother was glaring at her because Marsha hadn’t improved and she was back to square one. How could the day have been worse for Marsha?
Now, that was a really short story. Why would you hook in to the story? The reason the story works is because there were these little blips along the way, what we call the wall. What is the wall? The wall is … Think of it as like a heart monitor. The heart monitor, when it’s absolutely flat, will go “Beeeep.” There is no sound. Then when the heart is beating, it will “Dub dub, dub dub, dub dub.” There is this little spike that jumps in every now and then, and that creates a wall. That creates that fact that you know that your heart is actually working. This is what happens in storytelling. Most people tell a story in a very boring fashion. The reason why they tell that is because there story would just go from one end to the other without the spikes.
What were the spikes in Marsha’s story? The first spike was the fact that she was afraid she hadn’t practiced. That got your attention. Then she went on to a new problem, which is that she had to go there to the class and then play a new piece. Then when she couldn’t play that new piece, she ran into a whole bunch of problems. She was thrown back to the old piece, which was a good thing, at least, to Marsha’s eyes but bad thing in the mother’s eyes, which is why the mother was glaring at her from the corner of the room. Then as Marsha finished the story, she says, “How could the day get worse?” This is a perfect, little story just told from one end to the other with all of these little blips, these little blips, the other wall. The other wall that you have to climb across so you can get into the alley and there’s a wall there and you have to climb over that wall to get to the other side. This is what creates interest.
The wall can be an obstacle. It can be something funny. It can be something unusual. As long as it changes the pace of the story, it becomes the wall because you now have to get over that wall onto the other side before the story can continue. More stories don’t run that way. For instance, if we look at Marsha’s story, we could say, “We went to piano class. On the way, I almost slipped in a banana peel, but then I recovered because I wasn’t feeling so well. Anyway, I got to the class and I played my piece. Then, I played the second piece.” You can see where the story is going, but at one point in time, when she slipped in the banana peel, you got that spike in your head. Even though you might not have thought about it at the time, there was that spike and you see the spike everywhere.
What’s more important is the spike has been with you right since you heard your first story being read to you as a kid. If you look at something like Red Riding Hood, it’s a very simple story. The girl goes to her grandmother’s house and she’s got this bag of goodies that her mother has packed for the grandmother. What happens along the way? Red Riding Hood runs into the wolf. Before that, there was no problem at all. The forest was not that intimidating. She got flowers along the way. Then, along came the wolf. The wolf creates the spike in the story. Now, this is a wall that she has to get over. She has to solve that problem.
If you look at all the stories that you heard or have told your kids, you will find a consistency in this wall, this obstacle, which means that we have to create stories with these spikes, with these obstacles. Then, we have to climb over these obstacles or rather take the reader or the listener across the obstacle and then to the other side.
Here’s what I do with Marsha. I make her sit down with a sheet of paper. Then I get her to draw a line across. At the starting point, she has, say, maybe she’s going to piano class. The ending point is whatever happens at the end. In between, I get her to draw little dots or little spikes, whatever you want to call them, and she has to put in those obstacles. As soon as she puts in those obstacles, we fill in the rest later. The point is once you identify those obstacles, you are able to turn out far better stories because now what you’ve done is you have created that bounce, you have created an obstacle, you have created a wall, and of course, people have to then go over it.
When I started out this podcast, I started out with a story about meningitis. I didn’t spend time explaining to you how I was looking out of the window. I went straight into the bounce, straight into the wall. I had convulsions. I fell down. I then had to run to my mother. You have been thrown right in the middle of this bounce. Of course, the bounce didn’t stop until we got to the hospital because now you’re thinking, “Okay, things are going to get okay.” Then, we have another wall. They won’t admit me to the hospital. Then, we get over that wall. Now, they were asking for the mother because they don’t believe that my mother was the mother, that they thought that she was the sister. Then, when all of those problems have been resolved, the doctor says the chances are not good. What we have of these bounces all along the way, these walls all along the way, and you have to cross over, get over these walls to create a great story. This is just the first element of storytelling.
Part 2: The Reconnect The second one is the concept called the reconnect. What is the reconnect? Right at the end of the previous section, which is when I was talking about the wall, I went right back to the story of meningitis. Immediately, your brain went from wherever it was right back to that original story. This is what storytellers use very effectively. They use the reconnect. They connect back to something they told you a while ago. It’s very powerful because that creates a bounce of its own. It takes you from where you are to where you used to be. If you’re to watch the movie Star Wars, there is this concept called the force. It’s used the force. Luke used the force. How many times does the word force show up in Star Wars? Apparently, more than 16 times. There you are in the cinema or watching the movie on a DVD or maybe on your computer, but you run into this concept of the force. Every time that reference to the force shows up and you don’t really notice it, but it just shows up, it takes you back to wherever you originally heard it or saw it.
Why is this reconnection so cool? The first thing is that often, it makes you feel very intelligent. The story is set up in a way that you know what is coming. When it does arrive, it makes you feel extremely intelligent. That’s what storytelling is about. It’s about making the reader feel a lot happier or a lot sadder, that they use to feel. You can feel that happiness or sadness as I edge into the meningitis story. You know what is coming next. You know how that story ended. It makes you feel very intelligent. It makes the reader or the listener feel very intelligent.
The second thing it does is it creates bounce. It bounces you back to wherever you were, and that creates that spike. It’s doing a dual job, but it does one more thing. It closes a loop. You can start off a story, and then knot in the story. Noticek what happened with my story. I can close that loop. I told you that the doctor said I would die or go mad. The loop wasn’t closed. What you can do is if you’re reconnecting at some point, you can close that loop. It’s very trendy to keep the loop open, but it drives people crazy.
This morning, I was on my walk and I was listening to an audio book about the brain. This author was talking about how he was at a David Attenborough conference. He was sitting there with someone else. They were having a discussion. Then he went into the discussion. About 20 minutes later, I’m going, “What did David Attenborough had to do with it?” He never closed that loop, and he will never close that loop. It will leave that gap in my brain, and that’s not a good thing. You want to create that disconnect, but then you want to reconnect later, you want to close that loop. That is the power of the reconnect.
Part 3: The Anticipation With that, we go to the third part, where we talk about anticipation and why it’s so critical in storytelling. We were doing our workshop in Campbell, California around the year 2006. One of the participants stood up. She was going to tell her story. She told us that her mother was very, very beautiful. She also told us that her sister was a lot like her mother. She then went on to tell us how her father would take photographs, but photographs of the mother and the sister. Notice how we haven’t completed that story. We haven’t really told you what comes next, but the anticipation is killing because you know what comes next. This is the beauty of anticipation. You create anticipation knowing fully well that you’re not leaving any gaps, but that the client, the listener, your reader is filling in the story, that 10%.
This is what Anil Dharker told me when I was growing up and I was just starting out in my cartooning career. Anil was the editor of a newspaper called Mid-day. I was drawing cartoons for that newspaper. One day, he came up to me and he says, “Sean, you’re giving too much away. You need to get the customer, the reader to anticipate that 10%. You’re giving away 90% of the story, but you are getting them to anticipate the 10% because readers and listeners and clients are very intelligent. What you should do is leave out the bits. Don’t give the entire story.”
Now, when you think about the advice you’re getting here on this podcast, you think, “Wait a second, you just said not to leave out gaps.” Yes, you don’t leave out the gaps. You reconnect, but you don’t tell the entire story upfront either. We’re taking the example, you got the story about the meningitis. You’ve got the story about how I got admitted to hospital. What happened next, you don’t know the rest to that story. That gap hasn’t been closed and yet you’re intelligent enough to figure out that there was an ending and how that ending shows up, that we’ll find out.
The reason why we have anticipation is because it creates suspense, it creates unknowing suspense. When you say the boy got on the bus, he would never get off. What you’re doing is you’re going into the brain of the customer and they can see something bad unfolding. When I told you about that father that never took photographs of one of the daughters, you could see that insecurity building up. You could see that loneliness, that detachment. No one had to explain that you, but you can do this very simply by saying, “I woke up expecting it to be a great day.” Within those few words, you have already created anticipation. The reader knows, the listener knows that it’s not going to be a great day.
How is it going to unfold? These are the lines that you have to put in your speech, in your presentation, in your writing because when you put in these lines, they create that pause, they create that white space, they create that breathing space. It allows the reader to anticipate what’s going to happen next. How is it going to twist and turn? Into Marsha’s story, where she talks about just how she went to piano class, she could say, “I thought it was going to be a very bad day.” Immediately, your mind goes [whizzing 00:19:00] forward to, “Wait, she said bad day but she didn’t sound like it was going to be a bad day. Did it turn out to be a bad day or not?” When she got to the piano class and she was able to play, now you’re relaxing. Then she puts in the other spike, and she goes, “I played that piece really well.” That created another problem for me. You notice what’s happening, the anticipation is setting you up for that spike, the problem that comes next. For us, the anticipation, then the problem. The anticipation, then the problem.
Really this is what you have to do when you’re writing great stories. You have to get the reader in the framework, in that frame of mind so that they know that there is something going to change, something I was about to open the drawer when or I walked down the garden, expecting it to be a completely miserable day. It had been raining all morning. You know, even though you don’t know the story is going to unfold, you know that there is going to be a change. You’re creating anticipation. You’re creating that space for the reader and the listener to fill in the gaps in the head. That makes them again feel very intelligent. It also sets it up for that spike that we talked about in the first section.
Summary What we’ve covered in today’s podcast has been 3 things. The first thing has been the wall. The wall creates those spikes. It creates that drama. It creates all of those blips that cause you to pay attention to the story. The second thing we looked at was the reconnect. How we start of something at the beginning; then somewhere in the middle, we connect; and then, we connect at the end, and there are these connections all over.
If you listen to Episode #54, you can hear all of these connects. Go back to Episode #54 and you can see all these reconnects, walls, and anticipation. Of course, that takes us to anticipation, which is that moment that tells you that something is going to change. It creates the suspense. It’s very, very powerful in storytelling. It’s this breathing space, this quiet just before the storm.
What’s the one thing that you can do today? The one thing that you can do today is go back to Episode #54 and listen to that episode because I listened to it just a few days ago. It has all of the stuff. Most of the podcast have it, but I just listened to Episode #54, so I know it’s there, so go back and listen to it. You will see that the wall, the reconnect and the anticipation is there. You’ll get a much better idea because you’ll be able to know in advance when that’s showing up.
I had mentioned that we were going to do some workshops in Nashville, Tennessee and in Amsterdam, which is in the Netherlands. We are still looking for a venue. If you know some venues, let us know. In the meantime, if you would like to sign up for a storytelling workshop, then just email me at sean@psychotactics.com. We will send you more details. It’s still work in progress. As you know, we still haven’t found venue, which is the first step. If you know something, let us know.
Storytelling is incredibly important. A lot of us leave out storytelling. We give facts and figures. This is why most books and presentation and webinars are so boring. The reason why you find the Brain Audit so interesting is the number of stories and analogies and examples, and then go back and read your copy of the Brain Audit or go to www.psychotactics.com/brainaudit and buy a copy, and you will see how critical it is to have these stories and how it reminds you of what you learned weeks, months, years after you learned it.
In the end, statistics don’t sell. The story, the emotion that’s built in within that story, and a story well told is what sells a product or a service. You go for this year and the years to come must be to tell better stories, not to give more information. That brings us to the end of this episode. If you’re in 5000bc and you’re a member, then, please go in and ask questions about storytelling and I’ll be more than happy to answer your questions. If you haven’t joined 5000bc, then get your copy of the Brain Audit first, read the stories and then join 5000bc.
You know how I started this episode with the doctor saying that I would die or go mad. I didn’t die. That’s me, Sean D’Souza from The 3 Month Vacation saying bye for now. Bye-bye.
Still reading?
When we try to tell stories, we get stuck. When we try to learn a new skill, we get stuck. So, how do you dramatically increase your rate of learning without getting stuck? Find out here—Accelerated Learning: How To Incredibly Speed Up Your Skill Acquisition: Episode 52
When you're writing articles, it's easy to get locked into the mistake of simply starting up the article. That's a mistake—a big mistake. Outlining is what counts most of all, and yet outlines are hated with a vengeance. Is there a way to create outlines so you don't drive yourself crazy? And how do you create outlines for products, workshops etc? Let's find out in this episode on outlining, in The Three Month Vacation.-
Note:
To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/55
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: What is the ‘Concept of Curiosity’?
Part 2: The Three Part Outlining System
Part 3: What is the Extraction Method?
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Useful Resources and Links 5000bc: How to help you layer out distractions, and focus on the things you want.
Read or listen to : How To Get Ideas When Writing Article.
Special Bonus: How to increase your prices using the ‘Yes-Yes System’.
The Transcript
This is The Three Month Vacation, I’m Sean D’Souza. In the Antarctic summer of 1912, a rescue party set out in search of Robert Falcon Scott and his expedition team. Scott and his group of explorers had been missing for over eight months. Now, when the search and rescue team found Scott’s body they were horrified at the irony. All of Scott’s men were dead, but not just lying in the snow a million miles from nowhere. They died just eighteen kilometers from a supply depot. This supply depot would have given them all the food and the heating they needed. This depot could of saved their lives.
Instead, there they were frozen to death in the unrelenting snow. What was even worse was what Scott and his team knew when they died, and that was that they had missed their opportunity to be first at the South Pole. Roald Amundsen got there first. Now, the difference between Scott and Amundsen could be attributed to many things including bad luck, but the core of Amundsen’s team was based on planning. Amundsen’s team had no friends, they just had experts that would know what to do when things went wrong, and of course there were details. Amundsen labored over the team’s clothing, the ambiance of the prefabricated Norwegian cabin, the supply chain depots. He just went over everything in great detail.
In the end, luck played its role, but the better planner won. Amundsen was not only the first one to get to the South Pole, but he also managed to get back safely and to glory. His guide through the entire process was planning the journey. Outlining is about planning. When I was growing up I didn’t have any outlining lessons. I don’t remember going to school and doing any outlining, but I do know that when we do the article writing course we run into a lot of people that have these problems with outlining. Something happened at school that caused a lot of people to absolutely hate outlining.
If this hate is so great we miss the opportunity of doing better work and quicker work, and so we have to get over this hate of outlining, because it’s critical not just for your day to day planning, your weekly planning, but it’s also critical for books and podcasts and webinars, and yes of course for articles. Today I’m going to talk about articles, and how you’re going to use outlining, or three methods that you could use to create an outline, without all of that hate of course. One of the biggest objections to outlining is the fact that we don’t have time, and this is critical. When you don’t have time, that’s when you have to outline, because outlining saves time.
We spend about a third of our time outlining in different ways. Whether it’s a plan for the week or the month, or if it’s a book that I’m writing, or an article, or even this podcast it has been outlined in great detail, and that’s what enables me to go start at 5:00, by 5:45 I’m done. The second element, which you probably haven’t considered is doing the outline on paper. I always leave the office, I always go some other place, maybe to the library, maybe to the café, but you want to do the outlining on paper. This saves you an enormous amount of time. Again, because you don’t have to deal with phone calls, or technology, or Facebook popping up. It’s just you and the paper.
Now that we’ve got these couple of things out of the way, what are the three things that we’re going to cover today? The first thing that we’re going to cover is the concept of curiosity. The second is the three part outline, and the third is extraction.
Part 1: Concept of Curiosity Let’s start off with the first one which is curiosity. Let’s say I throw three words at you, and those three words are organic sourdough bread. Now, what is your reaction? Immediately what you have is a factor of curiosity, so you say, “What is it? How long does the bread last? What’s the best way to keep it? Can I freeze it? What are the types of bread? Do you get white bread, and grain bread, and specialty bread?”
Effectively what you’ve done is stepped into the shoes of a five year old kid, and that five year old doesn’t know stuff about bread, or clouds, or recording software. What they do know is curiosity, and so what they end up doing is asking you a whole bunch of questions which involve how, and why, and when, and where, and all of these questions, and this forms the basis of an article. This forms the basis of a book. This forms the basis of any kind of planning that you’re doing, but of course it’s the most critical when you’re writing an article, because we tend to write articles more often than anything else.
Now there are two ways to do this curiosity based planning or outlining, and you have to go through two stages for this. The first thing you have to do is list a topic. For instance, in The Brain Audit we talk about the concept of target profile. Now, when you have that target profile you have to come up with the subtopics. What you do is you brainstorm. You just sit at the café and you write everything you can think of, not analyzing what you’re writing, just keep going at it. This is how we teach outlining on the article writing course and on the headline course.
For instance, we had Kai on the headline course, and he came up with his topic which is search engine optimization. Then he came up with his subtopics, which is Google, Bing, Black Hat, White Hat, spam, Google Update Keywords, keyword, Intent, Biointent, Long Tail, Short Tail, Competition. What he is doing there is he’s got this topic, and then he’s brainstorming all the subtopics. When you look at it, all those subtopics look like big topics in themselves. You look at something like keywords, and that’s a topic in itself, but then you go down to a deeper level and you say, “Okay, let’s talk about keywords. What is a keyword? Why is it important? How does it work? When does it work? Where does it go wrong,” and effectively you’ve stepped into some five year old’s shoe.
Almost instantly an objection seems to pop up. You think, “Well, someone has written about this before.” Search engines and keywords, this is not new stuff. Do you have to write new stuff? No, you don’t, because the questions that are being asked are being asked by someone, but the answers that you give they are your own answers. They’re written in your own style. They’re written with your own experience in mind. Even if you have very limited experience, still I want to know it from you, that’s why I’m reading your article. When you are sitting down to outline, you need to do this brainstorming. Without really thinking about anything, and that’s what I do.
I’ll just sit there and just write a whole bunch of stuff without analyzing anything, but some days you will notice that I will ask for questions. The reason why I ask for questions is not because I don’t know how to ask how and why and when, it’s just that you get the energy from someone else. If you’re struggling to do this, this brainstorming, just come up with a word, maybe like keywords, and then call a friend. Ask them to pummel you with questions, or take them out to coffee, and ask them to ask you all the questions pertaining to a topic. If they don’t know the topic it’s even better, because that’s when they’re going to ask you the questions that come to their mind.
Which of course takes us back to the organic sourdough bread, and you have this factor of what is it, how long do you keep the bread out, what’s the best way to keep it, can I freeze it? Maybe, just maybe at some point in time that topic of freezing just becomes a topic in itself. Now you have to go down, what is this freezing? How do you make it work for you? How do you unfreeze it, what’s the best thing to do, and it becomes a whole new topic in itself and that’s cool. For this podcast, I got all this information about the bread, because someone asked the question. When you go to this website on bread, they ask all the questions, and they answer all the questions, and of course all of them go into the website and in the brochure.
When you look at outlining at the very core it is stepping into the shoes of a five year old. In asking all the curiosity based questions, and if you can’t do it get someone else to help you. That takes us to the end of the first part, which is curiosity as a method of outlining. Let’s go to the second part, which is the method I use most of all because it’s the most efficient, and it’s called the three part system.
Part 2: The Three Part Outlining System When kids grow up they usually have different sorts of treats. When I was growing up my grandma gave me bread. Bread was my treat.
During my vacations I used to go to my grandmother’s house, and when the bread man came, and the bread man used to come to the house with the bread. The bread was always very hot, and they were these little squares of bread, which in India we called pav. Yep, that’s what she’d give me as a treat and I loved it. That’s just a story about bread, but if you would take that story anywhere and split it up you could create three parts. You could say, “Tell us about your love story of bread. What is the state of bread when you were growing up,” and, “How is it different now?” Of course I’m making this up as I go along, but the point is anything can be split up into three parts.
When we took that topic of freezing bread, we can ask why do you freeze bread, how to freeze bread, and finally how to defrost bread. What we’ve done now is split up the topic into a whole bunch of subtopics. We answer those questions, and this is what I do in every call, on every workshop, on every book. A topic is split up into three topics. This topic of outlining we’ll split up into curiosity, and three part, and extraction. If you look at just about anything else that I do it’s always three parts. I’m only trying to do three parts always, but the three part system of outlining is more sophisticated, and I’ll tell you why in a second.
When we looked at pure curiosity we went what and how and when and where, but when we go through the three part system we say, “Well, freezing bread.” Then we look at what is freezing bread, why is it important, how do we go about it, and so what we have here is a much higher level. Where we take a topic, break it up into three subtopics, and then we go into the curiosity. It becomes a far richer experience simply because of how we’ve approached the outlining. The question that arises when we’re doing this assignment is not that we can’t take a topic and break it up into three parts. We can all do that, the question that arises is, “Well, there are a hundred things to talk about anything.”
For instance, if I’m talking about microphones, you can talk about storage, you can talk about how to buy it how to sell it, how to get the best out of your microphone. The topics are endless, how am I going to pick three? The answer is, you just pick three. I always just pick three. There is no specific logic to the three. You have to just connect part one to part two, part two to part three, and as long as you can make the connection there needs to be nothing else that is common between them. If you took a topic like buying bread, and storing bread, and freezing bread, it looks like there’s a logic, but there is no logic. Those are just three topics.
If you go into a bread website, you can find a hundred topics. It’s just that what we’ve done is said, “Okay, we’re going to take these three topics, and then we’re going to connect them one to the other,” and that’s how you create an outline. What we’ve covered so far are two ways to create an outline. The first is curiosity. Just sit down and write who, what, why, when, et cetera, and you will start to outline something in a way that a five year old does. Then we looked at the three part system, which is we take one topic and then we purposely split it up into three topics. Knowing fully well that there are probably seven or eight or a hundred more things that you could talk about that topic, but the third part is what I often use as well.
Part 3: What is the Extraction Method? Which is called the extraction method. What is the extraction method? They already know that we have a membership site at 5000bc. At 5000bc people, clients will often ask me a question, and I encourage them to ask me a question. Then I answer, but I don’t answer in the form of an article, or I don’t outline anything, I just answer. This is a forum, at least part of 5000bc’s a forum, and I will answer as if I were answering in a forum. Which is just a free flow of information. There is no specific structure to it. Of course, there will be some structure in my mind, but it’s just a free flow information, and then as I’m writing it I realize, “Okay, I’m covering this point and that point and that point,” or at the end of it I could go back and go, “What were the points I really covered in this?”
You will find that when you do this free flow you just answer a question, you will find that you’re covering two or three points in a longish answer. If someone were to ask you, “Which are the best places to visit in your city?” You could answer that question. You could say, “You should go here, and you should go there. You should go there,” and there you go. Once you’ve gone into that one, two, three, you’re now going to go into a lot of detail, and that is because you have to justify what you just said, and so you will talk about those three points in great detail, but you’re doing it in a free flow system. I don’t want to call it a system, because it’s not even a system, it’s just free flow.
This may not sound like outlining but it is, because you come back and you look at the points that you’ve covered, and there will be three things that you’ve covered. Then you have to go backwards into the three part system, and then further back into the curiosity, and take every one of them and expand them. Now, you’ve written all of that stuff, so you’ve covered a lot of that just by answering their question. Maybe you don’t have a forum, but then you do have email. Clients will ask you questions on email, and if you don’t have email you have Facebook. You can ask people to ask you questions on Facebook, and if you don’t have Facebook you can go to another forum, you can go anywhere.
You have to get into this habit of getting this free flow answer out, because there is no pressure when you’re in this free flow mode. Go for it, just answer the question, then pull out the stuff, and now you’ve got another form of outlining. I know all of these three systems of curiosity, of three part, and extraction seem relatively easy, and they are and they will become very easy over time. I use all three of them in different situations. I don’t have a system in place, as in I don’t sit down and go, “I’m going to do a three part. I’m going to do curiosity, I’m going to do extraction.”
It depends on what’s in front of me. If someone has asked a question in email, I will take as much time as I can to just free flow an answer, and then I will extract. Put it into three parts, then go to curiosity, and now we have an article. Now we have probably a booklet, or if there’s enough information, and there always is, it can become a book, or even a course. This is the beauty of outlining. If you use one of these three systems, or all of these three systems whenever you feel like, but what’s the one thing that you can do that gets consistent results? That to me is the three part system. I will take a topic, and I will make three subtopics or six subtopics.
I will pick a subtopic, and then that’s subtopic will be broken up in three parts. Like bread, which is the main topic, and then storing and freezing and cutting, whatever and then I’ll pick freezing. I’ll say, “What three things can I cover in freezing?” If I have to look up information and research that’s fine, but I can cover three things. Then I will expand that, and that’s how I get pretty much everything I do. The reason why you find that Psychotactics runs all these articles, and reports, and websites, and all of this stuff, this whole element of being prolific comes from planning.
It comes from being Roald Amundsen. It comes from making sure that you have all of your stuff ready for this South Pole expedition, and you can’t take anything to chance. You’re definitely not going to go in an article sitting at your computer and trying to work it out, no, no, no. You’re going to work out all the details at the café, on a piece of paper, and especially if you don’t have time, because outlining saves you time every single time. When in doubt use the three part system, because that’s the most efficient of all. That’s your one thing that you have to do today. Take a topic and break it up into three parts and work from there.
Summary While that brings us to the end of this podcast, there are a few announcements. The first is a storytelling workshop that we’re going to have in Nashville, Tennessee, and probably in Amsterdam, which is in the Netherlands. If you’d like to register for this workshop, and yes there are no prices and stuff, but if you want more information email me at sean@psychotactics.com. It’s a really good price, because this is a beta workshop doesn’t mean that it’s going to be crappy. It’s going to be as good as any workshop. For the first time we’re having it, it’s going to be three days, it’s going to be in December, email me for details.
While you’re waiting for the workshop get to 5000bc.com, that’s our membership site. Why is it important to you, because you get questions answered. Most of the stuff on the internet … Well, you don’t know if it’s pertaining to you. You can’t ask back and forth questions. In 5000bc I’m there 5000 times a day, so that’s 5000bc.com. I’m on Twitter, I’m on Facebook at Sean D’Souza, and of course my email sean@psychotactics.com. That’s it for me, and The Three Month Vacation. Bye for now.
Still Reading? One of the biggest reasons why we struggle with our writing is because we run into resistance. There are hidden forces causing us all to resist doing what we really should do. Find out how to work with resistance, instead of fighting it all the time. Click here to get the free report on ‘How To Win The Resistance Game’.
It's easy to pick up bad habits. Knowing what causes bad habits to succeed enables you to make good habits meet with similar success. In this episode we dig deep into the trio of trigger, routine and reward mechanisms. And how every one of them play their role. But then we go deeper into the world of groups and how the groups matter.
If you've struggled to maintain good habits on an ongoing basis, this audio (and transcript) will show you the elements you have to put in place to succeed.
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Useful Resources
To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/54
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Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
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In this episode Sean talks about To create a good habit or a bad habit you have to have three core elements in place.
Part 1: How a good habit start with the cue
Part 2: Why routine is important
Part 3: Why no reward leads to failure
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources and Links 5000bc: How to get helpful and specific feedback for your complex marketing problems?
Episode 14: How to Get Things Done: The Power of The Trigger
Resistance: How To Win The Resistance Game
The Transcript
This is the Three Month Vacation and I’m Sean D’Souza. You’ve probably heard of Batman. Now how does Batman get summoned by the police commissioner, who happens to be Police Commissioner Gordon? Apparently Batman was being summoned by a pager. Every time there was a crime in Gotham City that pager would go off in Batman’s pouch and he would have to respond to a crime.
Now you compare this with the bat signal. The bat signal is a distress signal that appears in various interpretations of the Batman myth. According to Wikipedia it is a specially modified Kleig searchlight with a stylized symbol of a bat attached to the light so that it projects a large bat on the sky or the buildings of Gotham City. No one knows for sure how that pager got thrown away and this elaborate bat signal came into play, but one thing we know for sure: that pager was no match for the elaborate bat signal that came up after one of Batman’s encounters with The Joker. Batman said that he was no longer happy to get this pager and skulk around in the shadows. He wanted this elaborate bat signal that would be projected on the building, that would be projected in the sky. That was his trigger.
Most of us don’t have such an elaborate trigger every time we want to achieve something. Let’s say we want to go for a walk every day or maybe we want to wake up every morning and do yoga. Maybe we want to learn how to draw or write or do something and learn a scale or a language. We seem to fall by the wayside simply because we don’t have the trigger. Is it just the trigger? In episode number 14 I covered this concept of the trigger, but since then I’ve realized that it’s a lot more. In the Power of the Habit by Charles Duhigg he specifically talks about three elements that need to be in place. In this episode we’re going to cover those three elements, and then we’re going to add the fourth missing element that makes the big difference.
To create a good habit or a bad habit you have to have three core elements in place. They are a cue, a routine, and a reward. What makes that cue, routine, and reward more powerful, especially when you’re trying to get a good habit rather than a bad habit? That’s the power of the group. In this episode we’re going to look at what is a cue, what is a routine, what is a reward, and how the group helps tremendously. Let’s start off with the first element, which is a cue.
Part 1: The Cue Let’s go back to 1900. In 1900 one of the biggest problems that America had was that most people didn’t brush their teeth. Not a few people but most people. Now imagine you are someone who manufactures toothpaste and you want to get an entire country, probably the entire world, to use toothpaste. What do you do? If you’re lucky you have someone like Claude Hopkins around. Who was Claude Hopkins? Claude Hopkins was one of the first advertising geniuses of our time. He wrote the book Scientific Advertising. If you haven’t read that book, you should read it.
As the story goes, Mr. Hopkins was approached by an old friend with an amazing new creation. It was a minty, frothy toothpaste named Pepsodent. He somehow had to convince everyone that they needed Pepsodent. He has to create this habit from nothing at all. He has to create a cue. He had to create a trigger. What was that cue or trigger? In the book The Power of Habit Charles Duhigg goes on to talk about how this trigger came about. It seems that Claude Hopkins signed on to run the ads on Pepsodent but he had to go through a pile of dental textbooks. In his autobiography he wrote about how it was terrible, dry reading.
In the middle of one of the books he found a reference to something. That something was mucin plaques on teeth, which Claude Hopkins then called the film. When you wake up every morning you have this kind of film on your teeth. Most of us don’t notice it. Well, we didn’t notice it back in 1900. Now this film is a naturally occurring phenomenon and you don’t really have to worry too much about it, but Claude used it as the trigger, as the bat signal. He started running ads all over the place. He said just run your tongue across your teeth and you will feel a film. That’s what makes your teeth look off-color. That’s what invites decay. Then he pushed that button further. He said millions are using this new method of teeth cleaning. Why would any woman have dingy film on her teeth? Pepsodent removes the film. In that one action with that poster and that ad campaign, Claude Hopkins changed the habit by sending out that signal that when you wake up every day you’re going to have that film on your teeth. You’re going to run your tongue over it and you’re going to feel that. That became the trigger.
This is the starting point for any habit. We do this. We have an alarm clock that tells us we have to wake up and go into our yoga, or in my case I have Tuesdays, which is when I record my podcast. I know that by Tuesday morning I’ve got to get this podcast out 4 in the morning. It’s not enough to have the cue because we all sleep through the alarm. We all let Tuesdays slip into Wednesdays. Before you know it it’s Friday and then you’re all stressed out. To solve that problem you have to have the second element, which is the routine. Let’s look at routine.
Part 2: The Routine When I started out as a cartoonist many years ago I used to do two sets of comic strips. These are daily comic strips. You do them every day five days a week. Now I had to do two sets, which means I had to turn out ten comic strips a week. The thing is that I was young. I was in my 20s so I didn’t have time to think about my actions. I just said yes when the newspaper editor said, “Would you like to put your comic strips in five days a week?” Then when you sit down and think about it, do you really want to do a comic strip every single day? Wouldn’t it be better to just do it once every week or once every 15 days?
Instead, what I found surprised me a great deal. I found that it was easier to do one or even two comic strips in this case and to do it every single day rather than to do one every 15 days. You know this to be true because it’s much easier to go for a walk on a regular basis or do something on a regular basis than to do it once every 15 days. Then when we went front cartooning into marketing, I started up this website called 5000bc.com. Now it’s the membership site of Psychotactics. It started out in 2003 and it’s still going. We still have our members and we still have a great time, but that’s not the point.
The point was when I started out 5000bc I had no ability to write articles at high speed. I was taking two days to write a single article. Then I started 5000bc and I promised the readers that I would put in five articles a week. Now how did I come to this five articles a week? I don’t know. I looked at some other membership sites and they were doing five articles a week so I decided to have five articles a week. So the habit started.
The routine was that somehow I had to have that cue, which is Monday morning or Tuesday morning, and then there was the routine where I had to go one, two, three, four, five. It was the end of the week, and then the next week. What you find with routine is that it’s much easier to do things on a regular basis than it is to do it every now and then. We took these concepts and we started applying them to our courses. In 2006 to 2008 we ran a completely different article writing course than we do today. At that point in time someone would write an article once a week. Then I would look at it and then comment on it. Then they would go away and then they would write another article once a week.
When you think about it, that’s pretty good. To write an article once a week, that’s pretty phenomenal. Around the year 2008 my instructions were misunderstood. I started up the article writing course as always and one of the participants … yes Paul, you know who you are … Paul decided to write an article every day thinking that’s what I meant. The rest of the group, they thought they had to write an article every day. I was sitting there looking at them writing an article every day and thinking should I tell them. I went to my wife Renuka. Should I tell them? I let them keep on writing.
Now this should have been amazing to me because to write an article every single day, how difficult is that? It wasn’t amazing. I’d learned this with the cartoons. I’d learned this with 5000bc. I’d learned this before. I knew that the routine helps you move along at a far greater speed. We see this with our daily brushing as well, which what Pepsodent started all those years ago. We brush our teeth once a day, many of us brush it twice a day, so the routine sits in.
What we’ve covered so far are two things. First is the cue and the second is the routine. This takes us to the third part, which is the reward.
Part 3: The Reward If you started out that yoga routine every morning and then you suddenly find yourself not continuing, there is a reason for it. It’s not because of the cue or the routine. It’s because of the reward. What you have to do to get a habit in place is you have to have the reward in place. All bad habits are created by rewards. You start eating a muffin today at lunch time and then tomorrow at lunch time and the day after at lunch time. Suddenly you know the reward before the cue or the routine. Afternoon doesn’t have to show up. In the morning you’re thinking about that muffin.
For good habits you need so much more energy. You have to have the reward in place. When we go for a walk every day, and I’ve said this before, the reward is coffee, but not just any coffee. Because if the coffee wasn’t so good and in between we started running to these cafes that were not so good, your reward falls apart and then everything else falls apart with it. We had to look for this café that was open at 6:45 in the morning. Not 7:00 but 6:45, because that’s when we reach our destination, have our coffee, and then turn around.
We found this café where the barista was one of the top three in the All Japan Championships. As you can tell, the coffee is consistently good cup after cup after cup. That becomes the reward. That becomes the reason why we wake up when it’s raining, when it’s windy, when you have good weather or bad weather. We’re on the road and we get that reward. This is what you have to set in place whether you’re writing a book or learning a language or doing just about anything. Pepsodent had an in-built reward that no one really talked about.
When you have a great product, then you have great competition. Other toothpaste companies tried to sell their toothpaste just like Pepsodent had and they didn’t meet with a lot of success. This left all of those toothpaste companies totally confused. As far as they were concerned, there was a cue, that was the film, and then there was the routine, and that was waking up in the morning. The reward was clean teeth, wasn’t it? But it wasn’t, because Pepsodent had citric acid. It also had mint oil and it had some other exotic chemicals.
When people brushed their teeth they got this tingling sensation. That tingling sensation was their reward. It took the other competing companies a long time to figure out what this secret ingredient, this reward was really all about. If customers didn’t feel that tingling sensation in their mouths, they would feel like they hadn’t brushed their teeth at all, so there was no reward and the whole exercise fell flat on its face.
This is the reason why Pepsodent’s sales continued to soar and the habit continued to set vs. the other one where it wasn’t so good. That’s the same thing with the coffee. The fact that we know that there is a cue and the routine doesn’t make any difference if at the end of the trip the coffee is not stunningly good. I have the same kind of reward with the podcast. When I finish recording the podcast I have to then put in the music. The music is my reward, because I enjoy the music. I enjoy putting in all those little bits of music and increasing the volume just a little bit and reducing it. That’s my reward. All those cues and all those routines make no difference if there is no music.
If you told me to record this podcast without the music, yes I would do it but I would not have fun. If I don’t have fun, there goes the habit. This is why bad habits are so good, because they have fun, they have reward. Every time there’s that muffin at the end, you don’t need much of a cue or a routine. You can quite easily get to the muffin. When you have a bad habit, it’s very easy because there’s always that reward in place. This is thefundamental flaw with habits: that the reward needs to be in place right at the start. We have to do this in the article writing course or all our courses.
On Friday you get a gold star. You have to do your assignment on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday, and on Friday you get a gold star. Now it’s just a little icon. It’s just a little icon in the forum and you would think people would not be interested with that icon, but they are. That’s the reward. People crave that icon. How do we know that? We know that because you take it away and you see their reaction, and people say, “Hey, where’s my gold star for this week?” The reward can be tested.
If you put a reward in place and you take away that reward, that is your benchmark. That’s how you know that the reward is really good. If you take it away and no one cares, you have to change your reward system. This is whether you are setting a benchmark for yourself or for your clients. You have to start off with the reward, then work out the cue, then the routine. Then we have a habit in place. What we’ve covered so far is the cue, the routine, and the reward, which can be benchmarked. But we found out that there is something else that matters. That is the group.
Without a group it’s far easier to fall off the bandwagon. To give you an example of the group, let me talk about having a bad group. Now how do we define a group? A group is just more than one person. Two people, that’s a group. Four people, that’s also a group. Eight people, that’s also a group. 25 people: is that still a group? Apparently not. This is what we found when we started doing the courses. Now when you look online at many marketers they talk about how a thousand people turned up and 500 people turned up and 200 people turned up. Does that lead to change? Does that lead to a change in the habit? It doesn’t.
The reason why 95 or 98% of those people don’t reach their goal, whatever it is, to write a book or sing a song or do whatever it is, the reason why they don’t is because the group is too large. What we did was we had to break it down so that we had, say, only 25 people. Then the introverts stood up and they said, “No no no, 25 people is like having 500 people.” We asked them, “How many people do you need?” and they said, “How about six?” We found that six or seven people constitutes the right group in terms of the maximum number of people. Two people, that’s just you and someone else, that’s the smallest group possible. You have to have the group if you want to set a habit in place, especially because we’re so hopeless at creating and sustaining these habits all on our own.
The reason the group is so important is because one, you get to know other people, so it becomes a social environment but with just five or six other people, not with 500 people where you can get lost and no one can notice if you’ve dropped off. Even in the group of 25 it’s very easy to drop off and no one would notice. The may need to you have a tiny group, everyone notices. You know that everyone is noticing and so you show up. Once you show up, you become a responsible memorable of that group and you start pushing the group forward, the group starts pushing you forward. Now you have a habit.
Now there are other elements of the group that make it so powerful but at the very core, that element of someone else needing your support, that is what makes the group so powerful. Again, like the coffee, if the group doesn’t know each other or if they are anonymous, it doesn’t work because you have no connection to the group. The may need to you have a connection to the group you have a responsibility to the group. As soon as you have that responsibility, then you know that the other person is waiting for you to go for the walk. It sounds crazy. When you’re looking at a course there are people from South Africa, there are people from the United States, from New Zealand. Why would they be interested in someone else? But they are, and that’s the power of the group. That’s what creates that habit. That’s what sustains the cue, the routine, and the reward.
Summary If you really want to create a habit, you have to start off with the reward, then take away the reward. Does it make any difference to you? That’s when you know that it’s a great reward or not. Then you find a group. Once you have the reward and the group, then you go into setting up the cue and setting up the routine. Then you have cue, routine, reward, and group. That is how you get a habit in place.
It’s 5:46 AM and at exactly three or four minutes from now I’m going to get my cue. It’s going to come through Facebook Messenger. Yes, my wife Renuka, she’ll Facebook me and say, “I’m up. Are you ready?” I have to respond, “I’m ready.” The group forms at that point in time. Then it’s time to hit the road and get our cup of coffee. When you’re working all by yourself it’s very difficult to form a habit, so here’s what I would suggest. At a primary level, join 5000bc.com. That’s our membership site. It’s very reasonable. It’s just $259 a year. Once you join, there are groups there and they will help you move forward. We purposely keep the groups very small. For instance, we’ve taken the info products course and we’ve set up groups. They’re working through the info products course.
The second thing that you want to do is you want to join one of our courses. You missed the headlines course and you’re probably missing the cartooning course, but there will be a course, there will be a workshop. You want to come to these events because you want to see how we implement these things. The reason why clients come back and pay $2,000 and $3,000 for the course is not because of the content alone. A lot of people give great content. It’s not just us. Now our system is different and we have the system of tiny increments, but at the very core we have this core of cue, routine, reward, and group. You’ll want to do one of the courses just to work through the system and see how it works for you and how you can implement it with your clients. That is the magic of Psychotactics.
Start off with 5000bc.com. Go there today and sign up, because there is a waiting list and we take two or three weeks to approve you before you get in. Get there quicker, get on the waiting list, and then you can join 5000bc.com and see how this reward system, how this cue and routine is put into place. Later, much later, you can do a course with us and you can see how that system works as well. It’s not just about courses but the applications are for pretty much everything whether you’re doing video games or just about selling toothpaste for that matter. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now. See you in 5000bc.com. Bye bye.
Once we have good habits, we have to then maintain the good habits—but we run into resistance.
Resistance is often just seen as a form of laziness, but that is not true at all. There are hidden forces causing us all to resist doing what we really should do. This slows us down considerably. Find out how to work with resistance, instead of fighting it all the time. Click here to get the free report on ‘How To Win The Resistance Game’.
Haven't you visited a web site and left shortly after reading an article? Why did the site fail to get you to sign up? Or why didn't you buy a product or service? The answer lies in the content of your articles and the way you structure them. Article writing is about creating a solid "next step", so that clients follow one of three sequences.
What are those sequences? Find out in this podcast on the "next step".
In this episode Sean talks about The 3 successful ways to creating a next step with your articles.Using these steps you will sell more products or consulting or workshops or whatever it is that you want your customer to go ahead or go forward with.
Part 1: The importance of the 'Editorial Next Step'
Part 2: The 'Sales Next Step' and how it causes resistance
Part 3: The 'Embedded Next Step' and how to use it.
This is The Three Month Vacation, and I'm Sean D'Souza.
Christmas for me was the most fun time of the year when I was growing up, and that was because as a kid, there were always presents and gifts. Then as I grew up and entered my 20s, we used to go dancing. In Mumbai around Christmas time, we have this very unusual setting where whole football stadiums are allocated for Christmas dances and New Year dances.
Several months before Christmas rolls along, you have to the buy the tickets to the event, you have to book your table and then it's the night of December 25th, and you have to put on your best suit and your tie and get your partner and go to the dance. The music would start at about 9 o'clock at night and go until 6 in the morning when we'd stagger home after this night of revelry. It was at one such dance when I met my wife, Renuka.
Because we used to go in a group, I didn't really know the names of all the girls that were around and I suddenly didn't know Renuka's name. All I know that she was wearing a red dress and because of the red dress, I called her Santa all night. Well, that caused a problem because I didn't really ask her name and then the dance was over and she went her own way and I went my own way. I happened to have her sister's phone number so I did call up their place and I was about to ask for her when I couldn't remember the name. What do you do on the phone? Do you ask for Santa? I very quickly put the phone down and I let it go. There was no next step.
Having a next step is extremely important when you want to go ahead with anything in life. The same applies to article writing. When you're writing an article, you think, "Well, I'm creating all these credibility," but that's not the end point. The end point is the next step. Where are we going to go from there. Today, we're going to explore 3 ways in which you can create a next step with your articles so that you can create even more credibility and then that finally ends up with either selling more products or consulting or workshops or whatever it is that you want to go ahead or go forward with.
In this episode, we'll look at the 3 methods. The first is the editorial next step, the second is the sales next step, and the third is the embedded next step. Let's start looking at the first one which is the editorial next step.
Part 1: Editorial Next Step What is the editorial next step? In every article, your goal is to get the reader to experience a new world. The reason the reader gets to your article at all is because you're taking them on a journey, and this journey depends on what you're covering in the article. Now you may be showing the reader how to increase prices without losing customers. You may be showing them how to fix a roof on a garden shed. You may be asking them to watch a specific video. In every case, you're setting out to change or at least to nudge the customer into doing something. Now that is your goal right from the start or you wouldn't have written the article in the first place.
Let's say you've written the article and the most obvious thing that you want to do is you want to direct the reader to go forward to the next step. Now this step has no sales edge to it. There's nothing that you are selling, no products or services or workshops. You're just creating a deeper sense of credibility, and the way you do that is just to put a little link at the end of your article. It's the most obvious one but a lot of people don't do this, and that is either read more articles on pricing strategy or read the continuing series on how to create more durable roofs or watch this video and you'll see how the soil erosion is affecting our planet. The point is you are really not trying to sell anything. You were just moving them to the next step.
When you write your article, you have to ask yourself, "Do I have a next step? Are they doing something as a result of reading that article?" When we look at our own website or our own blogs, we'll have an article and then we won't have a next step. When we look at us posting our articles on someone else's blog, what we'll have is some kind of footer information and that is not good enough for people to go to the next step. What you've got to do is create some kind of encouragement. What we found very effective is to have a kind of report.
When you look at a lot of the articles that we'll post on guest blogs, at the end of the article, before that footer information, we're going to have a little report and that creates a next step. That creates the enticement for the reader to continue into that same trip as it were. If the article is about pricing, then the report will be about something that the reader has not considered about pricing and that will be the enticement so that they come to your blog or your website and then sign up for that report and of course they get into your subscriber list.
On your own website as well, you want them to move along so either you give them a report, yes you can do this on your own website, or you can drive them to read about more articles on the same topic or similar topic and that gets them deeper into your website and deeper into your information.
You have to remember that a customer buys long before they pay, and when they're buying into your stuff, they're buying into you and your credibility and your ability to transform their lives. The more time they spend on your podcast, the more time they spend on reading that information; the more they are going to like you, the more they are going to trust you, and the more they are likely to buy from you in the future. When you write your article, the first thing is the editorial next step. What is that editorial next step? Is it going to be a report or is it going to be another series of articles? Whatever it is, you need to have that at the end of every article.
This takes us to the second type of next step which has nothing to do with editorial at all.
Part 2: Sales Next Step This is called the sales next step. The sales next step is simply a call to action to buy something or to do something that is more likely to lead to sales. How would you know if the nudge is leading to sales or to editorial? You have to ask yourself this question, will the customer feel a bit of resistance when they go to that next step? If so, then you're actually selling. It's a sales next step. If the customer has to fill in a form or they have to opt in or they have to jump over some barriers, they have to sign up, pay for something, then it's a sales next step.
The editorial next step, it seems like friendly advice. It's like, "Hey, see this movie," or "You should read this book," or "Go read other articles," or "Watch this YouTube video." The sales next step is different and you know there will be at least some resistance when your reader reads your message or listens to your podcast or watches your webinar. It's more likely that your message will be sales. It will be sign up for this course, sign up for this workshop.
For instance, we have a sales letter for the article writing course. When you read the sales letter, it doesn't read like a sales letter. It actually reads like an article. It talks about how I struggle with my article writing, how I used to take two days to write an article, and how I wished I had a fairy godmother, and what the fairy godmother would do to make my life simpler when it came to article writing. Then at the end of it, there is the link to the article writing course. It seems like editorial and it yet leads to a sales pitch. In advertising, they call this the advertorial; seems like editorial, it is editorial, it helps you a lot, but at the end of it, there is some kind of decision that you have to make that involves resistance.
You want to put this in all of your articles at some level. You could have this as links in between your articles. Let's say I'm talking about the Brain Audit; I could hyperlink that as I was talking about it. Or right at the end, I get them to move to the next phase, that next step. That next step is very important. If a customer spent all their time reading your article, they want to know what to do next and if you just leave them hanging there, then it doesn't really work in their favor or your favor.
We've covered 2 ways that you have to move that agenda forward. The first one is the editorial step and the second one is the sales next step. This takes us to the third one which is the embedded next step.
Part 3: Embedded Next Step The embedded next step is where you have the entire sales pitch within your editorial. Let's say I was talking about pricing and then within that whole pricing model, I talk about a membership site at 5000bc and how it was priced and then I go on to how to increase the prices and what was the effect of that on 5000bc. I bring up 5000bc half a dozen times but all the time, it's editorial; all the time, it's informing you; all the time, it's giving you examples about 5000bc.
What this is doing is embedding 5000bc in your brain and there's nothing subconscious about it. It's pretty straightforward. However, there's no doubt that at the end of it, you're going to be curious about what lies behind this doorway. What lies behind this membership at 5000bc. Even as you're listening to this, even as you're reading this, you will start to think, "Well, I wonder. I should go and explore what 5000bc is all about." This is what an embedded next step is, where you're giving complete examples of something else. Maybe it's a product that you have or a service that you have, but you're breaking it down into editorial. You're giving where you succeeded, where you failed, what happened, what didn't happen, all the time that brand name, that product name is coming into the picture.
Yes, we're talking about articles here but I do this in presentations as well. A podcast is a presentation and if I were to give you a lot of examples from the Brain Audit about how customers buy and why they don't buy that eventually, you're going to be curious about the Brain Audit. Even as we're doing this podcast, you can see how this is working. You're thinking about 5000bc, you're thinking about the Brain Audit. It's part of the editorial and this is called the embedded next step.
Is the embedding sales pitch? It is. Some people may not see the sales pitch in it at all. It may appear to be 100% editorial and really, that's the beauty of the embedded next step. It has no next step involved. It's not asking you to buy anything. There is no link inside anywhere. There's nothing, but part of or the entire article revolves around their product or service. It creates the curiosity and so you take that next step. Should you put a link at the end of it? If you do, it looks like you are pushing me towards that all the time. I avoid it, but it's up to you to decide what you want to do. My advice would be to create it as editorial only, giving all these examples, creating that embedded next step, and then the customer makes their own mind up and goes to the next step.
Summary Lets summarize what we've covered today. The first thing is the editorial next step. The editorial next step is part of the article itself. Often, it's just after the summary. It's towards the end of the article. It's more than likely to be the last few sentences of the article where you're driving the customer to read more, to watch more, and to create greater credibility for you, for the future is an investment in the future.
Second type of next step is the sales next step. Now that has a clear demarcation. It sits away from the editorial and it's clearly a sales-based nudge and anyone looking at it should be able to tell that it's a next which is going to have some resistance involved. You either have to fill in an opt-in form or you have to have some barrier or you're going to have to pay for it in some way, and they should be clear.
Sometimes we can put links within the article that leads to a product or a service, but having it at the end is also a very good strategy and that is the sales next step. You'll see this at the end of all the Psychotactics articles. There is this nudge. This is how customers go and they buy products and services from us.
Finally, you have the embedded next step which is embedded in the article itself. If I were to talk about 5000bc right through the article and explain how it is built and how we went about stuff and how we were pricing it, eventually you get this feeling that you want to go to 5000bc. It's the same thing with any product or service when you break it down and you explain it as a case study. Now what you're doing is creating an embedded next step. People want to part of that experience, they want to know more, and the logical step is for them to go and find out more about it.
When do you use these next steps? You can have the editorial and the sales next step in every other article. However, the embedded next step you need to use with some amount of prudence. You use it every now and then and clients get to know your products and your services in great detail to get the inside view, but you don't want to use this a lot. The other ones, use it freely all the time, there's no problem. This takes us to the one action that we have to do.
One of the things that you can do right away is go and look at 3 of your articles, any 3 articles, and look if there is a next step. Is there an editorial next step, because there should be one. Even if you don't have anything to sell at this stage, you need to have an editorial next step. If you're writing an article about pricing, then lead them to other articles about pricing. If you're writing an article about article writing, lead them to other articles about article writing. That way, you're creating credibility. People are buying long before they pay. You will get your payment at some point in time but you need to create that credibility, you need to get the customer that crossed you today. Having that next step makes a big difference, which also takes us back to our Christmas ...
I couldn't get in touch with Renuka after the Christmas dance because I really didn't know her name and I was too embarrassed to ask for Santa, and so I let it slide. Luckily, 3 months later, all the friends gathered around for a picnic and there she was yet again. This time, I made sure that I asked her name, got her phone number, and yes we worked out the next date and that's a long time ago and we've been pretty much together ever since. I say pretty much together because there is some story there as well, but that'll have to wait for another podcast. Right now, we have to go to our next step, don't we?
A good next step for you would be to send me an email about the questions that you have so that I can answer them on this podcast. I can create new information based on your questions. You can send it to me on Twitter on @seandsouza or on Facebook, again Sean D'Souza or sean@psychotactics.com. If you haven't already done your good deed for the day, then go to iTunes and click on the subscribe button so that you can subscribe to this podcast and of course, you can also leave a review because hey, that's your good deed for the day.
I have been embedding 5000bc and the Brain Audit in this podcast. If you haven't already read the Brain Audit, you should. It will completely change the way you look at how clients think and why they do what they do and why they back away at the very last minute. You can find that at psychotactics.com/brainaudit. That's it for me, Sean D'Souza and Three Month Vacation. Bye for now.
Still listening? Often, you want to organize a next step but sometimes life takes over. Like for instance when we had the InfoProducts workshop in Washington, DC and there were 2 belly dancers in the group and they decided that everyone in the room would like to do some belly dancing. Off we went, half of group formed the instrumentation as it were and half of them did the belly dancing. There was no compulsion, but everyone took part in it, took about 15, 20 minutes and we all had a great time. There you go. You don't always have to have this organization. Sometimes you just go with the flow. That's your little snippet from the Psychotactics archive. Bye for now.
How do you dramatically increase your rate of learning? And why do we get stuck when we're trying to learn a new skill? Strangely the concept of boxes comes into play. We move from beginner to average—and then we spin in that middle box, never moving to expert level. So how do we move to expert level? And how can we do that without instruction? Interestingly, there's an answer. Listen to the episode to find more about not just how to learn, but how to teach as well.
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Understanding the three boxes of learning
Part 2: How construction and deconstruction plays a role in learning
Part 3: How you can start using this accelerated learning system, today.
Right click here and 'save as' to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources and Links Special Bonus: How To Win The Resistance Game
DaVinci Cartooning Course: How to draw cartoons to liven up your website, blog or presentations?
Story Telling: How to craft amazing stories
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The Transcript
This is the Three Month Vacation. I'm Sean D'Souza. It's a relatively unknown fact that the world's best chicken sexers come almost exclusively from Japan. Now chicken sexing is simply about telling the male chick from the female chick. For poultry owners, especially commercial poultry owners, this knowledge of which is a male chick and which is a female check is very important because that enables them to feed the female chicks and basically get rid of the male chicks, which are unproductive.
In the past, the poultry owners had a problem. They had to wait for about five to six weeks before differentiating male from female. When you have a problem there's always a solution, so from that problem you got the Zen Nippon Chick Sexing School. It began courses in training people how to accurately discriminate the sex of a day-old chick, not five or six weeks but day-old chick. People were able to discriminate instantly.
Of course you had all these experts who over time became very good at distinguishing the male from the female. Well, then you came along. What are you going to do? How many months or years are you going to spend trying to learn this skill? As it appears, you can do it extremely quickly. But you can't do it through traditional methods, which is where someone tells you exactly what you have to do. Instead, it's more a factor of the brain taking over.
We see something very similar unfolding in the Psychotactics cartooning course. If you went into a café and asked about 10 or 15 people, "Can you draw cartoons?" there's a very good chance that almost all of them will say no. Yet within just a few weeks of starting the cartooning course you will find that people are drawing cartoons like Snoopy and Sid from Ice Age and all these complex cartoons with relative ease. How does this transformation occur? What's really working? What is causing this factor of accelerated learning? That's what we're covering in the episode. Because accelerated learning enables you to do the very same task at a very high speed. Therefore you can go on more vacations. Yes, I know, everything ties up to the Three Month Vacation. You want to get very good at your skill and be very quick at it. That's what this episode is all about. It's about accelerated learning and how we can get there in a fraction of the time.
To understand this concept of accelerated learning we have to look at three elements. The first is box one, two, and three. How do they play a role and what causes us to get bogged down, and how can you move past that? Then in the second part we'll look at construction and deconstruction, and how that is important. Finally, we'll look at the practical usage of all of this stuff that we're going to look at today. How are we going to actually use this so that we can learn but also teach, because we're all teachers.
Let's start off with the first element, which is understanding box one, two, and three.
Part 1: Understanding Box One, Two, and Three Let me tell you the story about my hairdresser. His name is Francis. Now Francis grew up in Samoa and he was brought up by his grandfather. His grandfather was a fisherman, but he also cut hair. Now Francis was 11 years old when his grandfather got him into their saloon, or what he considered to be a saloon. Francis was not allowed to touch the scissors. He was only allowed to sit there and watch or sweet the floor and watch, but all he was doing was watching and watching and watching. No matter how many times Francis asked, his grandfather said, "You're not ready, Francis. You're not ready."
Francis went through several years of just sweeping the floor and watching. Then one day when he was 15 he came home from school and he walked through the door, and his grandfather says, "Francis, you're ready." Francis turns around, "Ready? You're ready for what?" He says, "You're ready to cut hair." He gives him the scissor, and there is this guy sitting in the barber's chair. Now that happens to be Francis' grandfather's friend, so obviously he was ready for that kind of haircut from this absolute beginner who hadn't touched the scissor, who hadn't cut hair. He was trusting him to do a good job. As Francis tells the story, he had no problem whatsoever.
What's happening here? Why is Francis able to cut hair when he has no experience whatsoever? Why is he not feeling any fear when he's cutting the hair, when he should really be extremely fearful? This is the concept of box one, box two, and box three. Box one is when you are kind of hopeless at a task. We want to do something. We know we should do it, but we're not very good at it. Box two is the middle box. We're kind of good at the task but not that great. Eventually we get to box three. That is when we have this fluency and when we don't have to drain our brain's resources.
The problem is that most of us get stuck at box two, and it's the middle box, but you can effectively call it the muddle box. Because when we go from box one ... say we're learning a language like Spanish, so we go from box one to box two, and then we get stuck. We have phrases like "where you from" and "what's your name," and "I'm a professor" or "I'm a student," whatever. Then we're stuck there and we're spinning there. Why don't we go to box three? Because it's very difficult to go to box three.
That's what the chicken sexers learned. They learned that it was very easy for them to tell the male chicken from the female chicken, but they couldn't tell you how to go about it. Here's what they had to do. They got you to lift the chick and for you to guess. You could guess and you could say, "That's male," and they would say yes or no. Then you would go about putting the chick in the box, and so you'd go forward. Male chicken, female chicken, male chicken. They would say yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. Then suddenly you get it, and no one gave you any instruction.
You can probably imagine the surprise on their faces when they figured out that they didn't have to teach. The students were learning all by themselves. What was really interesting was that these beginners were doing as good a job as the experts. Now granted, chicken sexing is not a very complex job like drawing cartoons or writing a book or flying a plane. Still, to move from box one to box three, how do they do that?
The answer lies in how the brain works. The brain really has two parts: the left brain and the right brain. The left brain is the bully brain. This requires all the steps and methods and logic. This requires all the steps and methods and logic. Then you have to right brain. It doesn't require all of that stuff. It's the creative brain. The creative brain is able to work out the elements that you need to get to that point and then feed it to the left brain, and then work out all the logic. Sometimes that logic never has to happen, which is why those chicken sexers couldn't pass on that skill by telling them do this and do that, and go here and do that.
What the right brain is really doing is it's identifying the errors and eliminating them. When you look at talent, talent is a reduction of errors. These people are getting this skill by reducing the errors, but not knowing what errors they are reducing because the right brain doesn't care. Eventually you're able to get to that skill without having the steps and the logic and the system in place.
There was another part of the secret that needed unfolding, and that was that you needed to learn by example. You know when they were picking up those chicks and going male chick, female chick, male chick, female chick, well you had to go through about 300 examples before you figured it out. But not just 300 examples, but 300 good examples. This is where the expert came into play. The expert was accurate every single time, so they were able to tell you that you were wrong, so you had 300 great examples.
Then you were able to do the task. We see this on the cartooning course as well. What we do is we put people into groups. The groups don't matter as much as the examples. Year after year we get lots of good examples. You curate those examples and you show those groups the examples. What they do is they start to recognize a pattern. They see all these different examples. If you were to tell someone draw a circle, how many ways can you draw a circle? As it appears, many ways some people draw circles with pencils. Some people draw big circles. Some people draw complete designs or a swimming pool with circles. Some people draw characters with circles.
Suddenly the brain is working out a pattern. It's working out how to get from box one to box three, completely eliminating box two. Those 200 to 300 good or great examples of what people need to learn, or rather to eliminate the errors, and that makes them great artists, or great chicken sexers, or great writers, or great speakers. When we look at the Renaissance, we see Michelangelo Buonarroti. We see Leonardo da Vinci. We see Rafael. We see Donatello. We see all of these great artists.
But what's really happening at that point in time? What we are seeing is 200 to 300 great examples, all of them in the same or similar workshops experimenting but also comparing each other's work. There is an explosion of talent. There is this moment in time and history when you have amazing art and amazing architecture, and we can't explain why it happens, but we can. It's going from box one to box three requires those 200 to 300 good examples. That's how you move ahead, especially when a skill cannot be taught.
We see this in the article writing course or the cartooning course, or any of the courses that we've constructed. We've constructed it in this way because we know that if the clients just show up and they do their assignments, and we give them those great examples, they will get very good at that skill. Now granted that cartooning or copywriting or article writing is far more complex than, say, chicken sexing. Still, when you go through those examples and you go through a system, that's when your brain eliminates or reduces the errors, and that's when you get talent. It's not something inborn. It's something that can be acquired. You can go from box one to box three in an accelerated way if you know how to get there with those examples. The key to a Psychotactics course is the quality of the examples. There is another element, and we'll talk about that in the next section, which is construction and deconstruction.
This takes us to the second part, where we're talking about construction and deconstruction, and how it plays a role in learning, but learning in an accelerated format.
Part 2: Construction and Deconstruction I think most of us remember when we learned to ride a bicycle. One thing becomes very clearly apparent, and that is no one can actually teach you how to ride a bicycle. You can have a mother or a father or some kind of guide, and they're teaching you how to ride. They're saying just pedal pedal pedal, balance, go to your left, go to your right. But they're not giving you an instruction.
In effect, the left brain, the bully brain, it can't do anything. It's stuck because it requires this instruction and it requires it in a systemized way, and it's not getting it in a systemized way, and you're crashing to the floor all the time. Then the left brain takes over and it works out the errors and eliminates those errors, and soon you're just riding down the road at top speed with no problem at all.
Most of us are not prepared to fall down and get bruised all the time when we're learning a skill like cartooning or when we're learning writing or storytelling or presentations. What we need now is a factor of construction. This is where a good teacher comes into play. Good teachers are teachers, not preachers. There's a huge difference between a teacher and a preacher. A lot of information that you have in books or courses or workshops, or even presentations, is based on preaching, not teaching. The reason why it's based on preaching is because it's easy. You can take information and stack it up one over the other and you can have a book, you can have a course, you can have anything you want.
Teaching, that requires deconstruction, so the teacher must be able to break it down to a very, very small part that you're able to apply. When you're looking at how you're going to learn very quickly through the method of deconstruction, you have to look for the teacher, because the teacher will have a system, and the carrier will have a group. Within that group there will be examples.
To begin with, the system will have very tiny increments. This is what we do at Psychotactics. We make sure that you go one inch or even one centimeter a day. You move very slowly ahead, because you master that skill and then you move to the next, and then you learn skill A and skill B, and then skill A and B and C, and you have this layering system. Groups make a huge difference as well, because groups or members of the group start to make mistakes. When they make mistakes, those mistakes can be identified, those mistakes can be corrected, and essentially that's what talent is. Talent is a reduction of errors.
You have to know the errors in the first place to fix them, and that's how the group works. A great teacher will have that system, will have those groups, will have those examples. That's how you learn, because they have deconstructed everything down to those tiny increments. You only have to do one little step every single day. You will still make the mistake. When you make that mistake, others learn from it, and of course the teacher can step in and fix the mistake.
You compare this with learning by yourself. First of all, you have this book and it has chapters. Within the chapters there are subchapters, and there's more and more and more information. There's not this factor of tiny increments. When you don't have tiny increments, and you don't have examples, and you don't all of this facility to learn, then learning becomes very difficult. This is why we abandon learning. This is why we need to change the way we look at learning, which involves the teacher, the system, the group, and the examples. Because the examples, those 200 to 300 examples, they're very important. Examples can come in many forms. They can come in stories, in case studies, in how to. But essentially those examples become the critical element that allows the brain to filter out all the rubbish and keep what is important. Suddenly, you become talented.
This brings us to the end of the second part where we look at the system that you could use to learn. One is through construction, which is what the brain does automatically. The second is to find a teacher that is really good at having the system and examples and group. They will teach you through these tiny increments and you get deconstruction. Then you can put the bits together and improve your skill, and become talented very quickly.
Now this takes us to the third part, which is how do we use this?
Part 3: How Do We Use This Accelerated Learning System? How do we use this while learning or teaching? I mentor my niece Marsha every day. Marsha was having a problem with writing stories with drama. Now all of us know that we have to write better. One of the critical elements of stories is drama. How do you create this intensity where people want to listen to you, where they want to read your stuff? She was writing these stories that just didn't have any drama.
How are you going to teach an 11 year old kid how to work with drama? As it appears, it's remarkably simple. what I did was I used the same concept of chicken sexing. I started out with a good story, then a boring story, then a good story and a good story, and a boring story, boring story, good story. You know how this is going to unfold, don't you? Marsha was able to identify which was the boring story and which was the good story. Once I gave her a number of examples, and I continue giving her those examples whenever she's writing, what we have is a situation where she'll go back and she'll write a great story.
Now notice that I haven't specifically given her any method to write great stories, but she's worked it out. Her brain has worked out what is a boring story, what is a good story. Without too much effort, it has gone from box one to box three, and there's very little input except identifying which was good and which was bad. This is now where the second part comes in, which is the construction bits.
Now when you have to system, when say now we're going to concentrate on this little bit, then you can build on that, and that's when that skill goes from just average to brilliant. It goes from box one to box three, and then box 3.1 maybe. We do this on the headline writing course. You are soon able to write hundreds, even thousands of headlines, which incidentally you do on the course. You're able to do it because you can identify the good from the bad, but more importantly, you also have the construction methods, which is what makes a great headline.
Most people, they guess. They expect that they can just copy your headline and change the words. They don't understand what's happening. It's important not to understand, but it's also important to understand. The construction and the deconstruction is very critical. The ability to let your brain figure it out all by itself is very critical, but then to get to 3.1 it really helps to have those methods in place as well, the system that a teacher will bring, the tiny increments, the examples. You have high quality examples and high quantity examples.
That is precisely what happened in the Renaissance. All those great artists, sculptors, engineers, they all came from one age because they had high quality and high quantity. That is the same reason why Francis could pick up that scissor and cut hair when he came home from school. Which of course brings us to the end of this episode, in which we have covered just three things, which is very critical when you're teaching and when you're learning to learn just a little bit, very tiny increments.
Summary We learned about box one, box two, and box three, and how we get stuck in that middle or muddle box, and how it's important to jump from box one to box three. How do we do that? We do that through high quality and high quantity examples. That's when we get to fluency.
The second thing is when you're looking at deconstruction and construction. While it's fine to fall around like we're doing on bicycles, it's not very helpful. What we have to do is find a teacher, a teacher with a system, a group, and of course tons of examples. Because that's where the magic really lies. Finally, when you're learning, you want to find 200, 300 great examples. But when you're teaching you can create the situation where you're creating good, bad, good, bad, good, bad. The client is then just made to identify it, and they become very good at it. Then you can bring in the construction bits. Then you can layer over your system and they move from box one to box three, and possibly 3.1.
What's the one thing that you can do today? It's going to be very hard to find examples, and hundreds of good examples, and high quality examples. What you can do is you can start to accumulate examples so that when you're teaching someone you have those examples in play. Then you stop becoming a preacher and you start becoming a teacher. Because they can learn just on the basis of the examples that you put together. That takes them to a whole new level of accelerated learning.
This brings us to the end of this accelerated learning episode. By the time you listen to this podcast, you've probably missed the headline writing course, so you missed a great opportunity to see how this unfolds. But there is also the DaVinci cartooning course. That's at psychotactics.com/davinci. If you've enjoyed this episode, share it with your friends. They need to learn how to learn better as well. This episode will really help them, so share it with them. If you've already done the sharing, go to iTunes and leave a review, because that really helps. You go to iTunes, leave a review, and there is the subscribe button, the purple subscribe button, hit that purple subscribe button, and yes, you get subscribed to this wonderful Three Month Vacation that comes to you week after week.
Finally, if you haven't already subscribed to the Psychotactics newsletter, then you should do so because you can get a great report on resistance. Go to www.psychotactics.com/resistance, and you'll find out why resistance plays an important role in learning, and how it's not just about laziness. That's psychotactics.com/resistance. That's me, Sean D'Souza, saying bye for now. Bye bye.
Don't forget to listen to this episode: The Early Years-Psychotactics-Moving to New Zealand: Episode 50
How many hours do you work on vacation? You don't. But then what about the e-mails? How do you deal with clients? Are you supposed to just close down your business? This episode shows you how we deal with vacations at Psychotactics. We've been going on our "three-month" vacations since 2004 and have had to work out a few "tricks". And you can use them too—and ensure a splendid vacation, instead of just "work by the beach".
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The Secret to handling email on holiday
Part 2: How to handle social media while on holiday
Part 3: How to deal with clients if there is an emergency
Right click here and save-as to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources About Time management—The Carpe Diem Method of Finding Work (And Vacation) Time
5000bc—How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems?
Bonus Book—How To Win The Resistance Game
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
Products under $50: http://www.psychotactics.com/products/under-50/
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The Transcript
Hi, this is Sean D’Souza from psychotactics.com, and you’re listening to the Three Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn’t some magic trick about working less. Instead, it’s about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time.
This is the Three Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. In February of 2005 I had no intention of checking any email. That was because we were on our vacation in the South Island. Now New Zealand is a set of islands, as you probably know. There’s the North Island where we live, and the South Island. In the South Island, it’s truly breathtaking. It’s got rivers and mountains and glaciers, and there we were at Fox Glacier. Now Fox is an amazing glacier because it’s in close proximity to both the rainforest and the ocean. Now that’s pretty rare with a glacier, but the ice flow on Fox Glacier is also amazing. It changes as much as three meters a day, so it’s a pretty crazy place to be, and there we were walking on the glacier.
When we had done that walk, we came down to check email. I didn’t check email for several days, and there was this little hut right next to the glacier. Yes, there’s email everywhere these days. I switched on the computer expecting nothing much, and there it was: an email telling me that our entire membership site was non-existent.
This is the power of email. It can take a perfectly good day and make it an absolutely rotten one. In today’s episode we’re going to cover this topic of no work on vacation. We’re going to look at email and how to deal with email in vacation mode, and then how you deal with social media, and finally what do you do about clients while you’re on vacation. Let’s start off with the first thing, which is dealing with email.
Part 1: Dealing With Email Imagine you’re having a great day and then you get a phone call. It says a child is in hospital, your child is in hospital. It doesn’t matter how happy you were at that moment. Your mood changes. Immediately you want to take control. Immediately you want to be with that child. Immediately you’re transported right back to that situation that in a way you can’t control, but need to be there. Now email isn’t quite the same situation, but it still has that power. It still has that power to pull you back into that work mode. You’re sitting somewhere having a margarita enjoying the sunset, and then you read email and your mood changes. You’re back in work land.
It can be a good email, a bad email, a frustrating email. It doesn’t matter. You’re no longer where you are and you’re some other place where you shouldn’t be, which is back at work. How do we deal with this at Psychotactics? Remember that incident at Fox Glacier where I read that email? It made me feel terrible. I’d just gone up the glacier. I was in this absolutely stunning mood. Then I had to read that email. The point is that I couldn’t do anything. That website was down. They had erased it down to zero pixels. Then they did a backup of that website, the one that they erased, so we had nothing. Then clients started writing in telling us that the website was down. Then I had to write back to clients. I spent several hours at that little hut responding to email.
How do you deal with such a situation? How do you control this so that you’re not completely dealing with work the whole time that you’re away? Because you need to leave email at home when you go on vacation. Here’s how we do it. For one, we don’t check the primary email. We get someone else to check email while we’re away. Here’s how it works. When that someone else is checking email, they’re getting rid of all the stuff that really takes up a lot of your time, so any spam, any offers, all that just goes in the trash straight away. Now on a day to day basis I probably read it because it’s valuable and I’ve subscribed to it and I want to read it, but while I’m on vacation I don’t need that email. All of that goes trashed right away.
What else is left? There are emails where someone has not got a download or someone needs some kind of help. Usually there are canned messages, so there are messages where they can get their downloads or things that come up on a frequent basis. It’s very rare that you’re going to get new episode all the time. Most of the emails that you’re responding to, they are old matters, and if you have canned messages, and I use Text Expander on my computer, and those canned messages go out and the matter is resolved.
This leaves us with the urgent email, the email that simply cannot be ignored. There are two ways to handle this. The first way is to create an email address like, say, vacation@psychotactics.com. Then you instruct that person to send email there only if it’s absolutely critical, that it cannot be put off in any way. If it’s super critical, than they should have your phone number and they should get in touch with you. Then again, let’s assume you want to keep it just to email. You have the special box with a special email address, and you notice nothing is showing up day after day, because after all, the box is for urgent stuff and there isn’t any urgent stuff.
You don’t give up. You just and you check that email repeatedly several times a day. Then you realize there’s nothing there after all. You wait for the phone call, and the phone call never comes. We have been going on vacation since 2004. We work for three months, then we take a month off. In that month we almost never have to deal with email because all of it is taken care. The stuff that needs to be attend later is put in a box. When we get back, we deal with that. And so you remain email-free.
But email isn’t the only way that people can get in touch with you these days. There’s also this menace called social media. Let’s talk about social media, shall we?
Part 2: Social Media In May 2015, after doing an infoproducts workshop in Washington D.C. and speaking at an event in Denver, we headed off to Sardinia. We moved from the south of Sardinia right up to the north. There was this wonderful hotel called Hotel Cuncheddi, or Cala Cuncheddi. I had 500 megabytes of data, so guess what? I was going to use it. Except there was a small problem. This data was connected to a satellite. You only got 500 megabytes, and if you exceeded those 500 megabytes you had to buy more data. I went outside and I took some pictures of the beach. It’s a glorious beach and beautiful views, and I uploaded three pictures.
Instantly, my 500 megabytes was exhausted. I couldn’t surf the internet anymore. Now if you know anything about the internet and technology, that’s impossible. Anything uploaded to Facebook is probably going to be a few megabytes, maybe four or five megabytes. You can’t use up 500 megabytes in about 30 seconds, but there was a glitch in their system. Because of the glitch, I couldn’t access the internet, I couldn’t check Facebook, I couldn’t go on any kind of social media platforms. And so I didn’t.
I found the beach. I found that I didn’t have to look at my phone, I didn’t have to look at the iPad. I did what my grandfather and my father did. I actually went out and enjoyed myself. Just because you’re not checking email doesn’t mean that you’re not connected. When you get into this whole deal of Facebook or Twitter or any social media stuff, you get involved in something. Maybe someone is going to talk about global warming or gun control, or something about some politician or something, and immediately it yanks you back into this frustrating situation where you’re either for it or against it and your mood is spoiled. You’re not looking at the beach. You’re looking down at your phone. You’re looking down at your iPad.
It might not be work, but it still takes you away from where you should be. It still messages to ruin your mood. It still creates that state change. That’s not usually for the better. I hope that I’m going to take Cala Cuncheddi with me wherever I go, where I can upload three photos and then I’m done and then I can’t access the internet anymore. It is a price to pay because we’re so tied to our phones and our iPads and our mobile devices. Yet it’s so critical that we step away from it, because somehow it pulls us back.
Remember that clients can still contact you. They can send messages to you through Facebook Messenger or through some method like Skype. Immediately you’re yanked back. I know that asking someone to get rid of their internet while they’re on vacation is like asking them to get rid of one of their arms. But I can tell you from experience that it’s good. I say this with a lot of reluctance because I want to hold that phone, I want to take the pictures, I want to upload them, I want to do stuff like that. The moments that I’ve not done it, the days I’ve not done it, they have been truly splendid. So no email, and definitely no social media. That takes us to the third part, which is how are we going to deal with clients? What if there’s an emergency?
Part 3: How Are We Going To Deal With Clients? I remember the year that Renuka and I got married. We told clients that we were going on our honeymoon. It was amazing, because everyone said, “We wish you all the best.” One thing that they made sure was not to contact us in any way. How about making it a honeymoon every single time? How about staying away from clients while you’re on vacation? This is what your parents did. This is what our grandparents did. They went on vacation. No matter how rich they were or poor they were, they just left their work and in the summer they would go to some place like a village or their hometown, and they were completely cut off from work. We live in a different world and we think we should be connected to our clients all the time.
Really this depends on you. It depends on how you set up things. When we have courses we make sure that the courses end a week before we go on vacation, so we can tidy up everything and then we can go on our vacation. In fact, before going on vacation we pack our bags three or four days before we have to get on the flight, and then the vacation starts while we’re still in Auckland. Then we leave.
No one contacts us about the courses. No one contacts about products that they can’t download or can’t get, because someone else is handling that. Only while we’re away someone else is handling that. Then it’s the third thing which is the membership site. I go into 5000bc.com, that’s our membership site, and I go there, I don’t know, 15, 20 times a day. If you ask a question, I respond with just the answer or sometimes I’ll write a series of answers, do an audio or video even just to give you the answer. Our clients, they get used to this level of response, but the moment I’m away they know I’m away.
If I were to pop in, and it’s not like I haven’t tried, they instantly tell me I should leave. That I need to go and enjoy my vacation, because that’s what vacation is all about. What you’re doing is you’re actually setting up the client’s so that they tell you to go away. That’s what our members do. If I try to check email or if I try to get back into the membership site, they tell me to go away. What we’ve done from the very start is inculcated in our clients the fact that our vacation is sacred, so they treat it like that. They treat it like as if we’re going on honeymoon. Every time we try to get back, we get a rap on the knuckles and we’re back in Margarita land.
We’ve made a big deal about the vacation, and I think that’s what you need to do as well. You need to tell clients that while you’re away you can’t be reached. Of course they don’t reach you, but are there any exceptions to this rule? Of course there are exceptions to the rule. The point is that you are checking email. I’m checking email 270 days in a year. When I’m at work, I’m checking email, I’m go to the forums, I’m go to the membership site, I’m going on social media. It’s very hard to just slow down and go okay, I’m not doing this anymore. I’ll try, but it’s nice to get booted out. It’s nice to go and enjoy yourself and have a good time.
Even when I got that email at Fox Glacier it wasn’t like I could do anything. I couldn’t bring the website back up again. In fact, the website was down for 17 days. When we got back, we apologized to our clients. Then we got back to work. We got to building 5000bc. That’s where it is today. Many of those clients, they’re still with us today after all of these years.Vacation time should be sacred, should be a place every go to where you can re-energize and relax and learn stuff about cultures, and then come back and get back to work with full gusto.
Summary That brings us to the end of this podcast. Three things that we covered. The first thing is if you need to have email attack you, then create a separate email address and only the urgent stuff goes there. Even better, just don’t get any email. If there’s something utterly urgent, they’ll then call you. Otherwise, get someone to deal with the email with canned messages. You want to stay off Facebook and Twitter and any kind of social media. You want to put yourself in a situation where you’re just disconnected. Finally, you want to train your clients right at the start. You want to let them know that vacation is a time when I’m going to be away. You will be surprised at how they respect this almost like it’s a honeymoon, every single time you go on vacation.
It’s 5:59 AM and it’s time for that walk and to listen to some audiobooks and podcasts. I hope you’ve been enjoying this podcast. If you have been enjoying it, please go and leave a review on iTunes. If you haven’t already subscribed, it’s that big purple button. All you have to do is go and click it. If you’re on Android you can go to Stitcher and download the Stitcher app, and you can get all the downloads. I’m on Twitter @seandsouza and on Facebook at Sean D’Souza. You can email me at vacation@psychotactics.com. No, just kidding. I’m at work right now. Email me at sean@psychotactics.com.
This episode, for instance, was a response to someone asking how do we deal with work on vacation. The answer is you don’t. We’ve got to cartooning course starting off shortly. I don’t know when you’re going to listen to this podcast, but if you don’t get the cartooning course this year, then it’s all the way into 2016, so the cartooning course, which is thatwww.psychotactics.com/davinci. At the end of the year in November, we’re going to have the first 50 words course. This is a course that shows you how to start a podcast or webinars or write stuff in your articles. The first 50 words it drives us absolutely bonkers, and the first 50 words course shows you that. You’ll never have to struggle with the first 50 words ever again. You’ll become an amazing storyteller. That’s the first 50 words course. You have to be on the Psychotactics newsletter list so that you can get the notification when the course is due. That’s pretty much it for this episode. Thank you for tuning in. Bye for now.
You can also listen to or read this episode: #50:The Early Years-Psychotactics-Moving to New Zealand
How did you get to New Zealand? That's the question I get most of all from clients. And there's a story, a very interesting story behind our move from India to New Zealand. Here it is?and with some cool music too.
How did you get to New Zealand? That's the question I get most of all from clients. And there's a story, a very interesting story behind our move from India to New Zealand. Here it is—and with some cool music too.
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: What I was looking for, when I was 13 years old
Part 2: Getting to New Zealand
Part 3: What were the early years at Psychotactics like?
Right click here and save-as to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources and Links The Power of Chocolate: The Power of Psychotactics Chocolate Marketing
Episode #8: The Power of Enough—And Why It’s Critical To Your Sanity
The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy And Why They Don’t
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The Transcript
Hi. This is Sean D’Souza from Psychotactics.com and you are listening to The Three-Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn’t some magic trick about working less, instead, it’s about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time.
This is The Three-Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. One of the questions that I get most of all is how we got to New Zealand. What caused us to leave India and to get to New Zealand? What were the early days like? These are questions that subscribers at Psychotactics want to know all the time.
This is the 50th episode and so I thought that’s good idea. Let’s puts in the Psychotactics story here so that you can listen to it and enjoy it.
Part 1: What I Was Looking For, When I Was 13 Years Old When I was 13 years old, I had a thought. I wanted to live in a place that was half-city and half-country. Mumbai or Bombay as it was called back then, was very polluted and noisy, not good enough for me, obviously, and I wanted to move to a place that was half-city and half-country except I didn’t know about New Zealand. I’ve never been to New Zealand, probably never even seen any photos of it, but in my mind, I was clear that it had to be half-city and half-country. I say half-city because I love the city. I like people. I like going out and seeing people, and I like the energizer level of the city, but I love the country as well, and I thought if I could find a place that was half-city and half-country, that would be great.
I wasn’t thinking of New Zealand. I wasn’t even thinking of leaving India. I was thinking of moving to a place like Bangalore which is in South India. It’s called the Garden City. As I grew up, Bangalore got more congested and busier, and it became just another city, so we started looking out for other countries. We looked at the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. These are mainly the immigrant countries.
Canada was very cool. I went to the Canadian Embassy and they said, “What’s your profession?” I said, “I’m a cartoonist.” In that documentation that they gave me, there were six different types of cartoonist to choose from, and I thought, “Wow, this is a very sophisticated place,” because when you go to most of these places, you don’t find cartoonist listed as a profession. We didn’t go to Canada. We didn’t fill out any forms. We didn’t do any of that stuff.
We did the same with Australia. We went to the embassy. We got some forms. We didn’t do anything. Then, eventually, a lawyer came from New Zealand. He was an immigration lawyer and he looked for our papers, and he said, “No.” He said we didn’t have enough points to get to New Zealand. He said that we needed to try later, but it didn’t look good, and so, we gave up. We just gave up just like that.
Part 2: Getting to New Zealand Then, I was walking down the street several years later, grocery shopping, and I ran into this friend of mine. Her name is Joan. Joan says to me, “What are you doing here?” I said, “I’m grocery shopping.” She said, “No, no. What are you doing in India? Weren’t you supposed to go to New Zealand?” I said, “Oh, yeah. We were supposed to go, but we did all these paperwork and they said that we couldn’t go.” Then, she said, “You should try now.” She gave me a card and I contacted the immigration lawyer, and that was the start of our merry dance with Indian bureaucracy. I don’t know if you’ve been in a bureaucratic country, but Indian bureaucracy is way up there. You have to go to the police and to the passport department, and you’re going back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth, and spending enormous amounts of time just in this back and forth movement.
Anyway, nine months passed, suddenly, late at night, almost midnight, we got a call wherein we have 12 months to make that trip to New Zealand. That’s when something amazing happened. Everything became lopsided in our favor. I know this sounds crazy to say lopsided in your favor, but it was almost like there was a design to stop us from leaving. Everything that came our way was amazing as long as we stayed in India.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like we had a rough life in India. The Renuka’s company was a Swiss company and it is the largest fragrance company in the world, and they used to pay for everything; for our stay, our car, we had a chauffeur. It was good life, but the moment we decided we wanted to move was as if a force came in, trying to keep us back.
At that point in time, Renuka’s boss, he didn’t know that we were leaving. Almost at the moment we decided we’ll be leaving, he decided to put her in charge of the entire Asian region, which was a big job. When he found out that we were going to New Zealand, he offered to pay the entire airfare. He said, “Go to New Zealand. Have a good vacation. Come back and take your job back,” and we said, “No.” It was the same for me, I had an office. I had staff. I have three-hour lunches. We used to go bowling in the middle of the day. It was a very good life and we had to check up that life and then go into this complete uncertainty of New Zealand.
When we left the country, I had just a handbag full of clothes. Not because we didn’t have clothes, but because I wanted to bring all my computer equipment along, so instead of the usual baggage that people bring with all their staff, I had my huge monitor, and then the CPU which weighed a ton, then a scanner, then a printer, and that was what I brought to New Zealand. Everything else was coming in bags later on, but that was the stuff that came with me on the flight.
When I’m talking about New Zealand, I often say that we didn’t know anyone in New Zealand, but that’s not quite true. We knew one person and that was Wayne Logue. Wayne was someone that I had met on an internet forum. I was part of a cartoon forum called the Wisenheimer, and Wayne, he was part of that, too. I said I’m coming to New Zealand and he said, “Oh, I can help you.” This was the amazing part. It almost seemed like, “Wow, where did Wayne come from?” We didn’t know whether he was just a crazy guy, a serial killer, and I think that it crossed his mind as well because that’s what … We had a conversation one day and that’s what he said.
He didn’t know anything about me. He didn’t know whether I was going to show up, but Wayne actually got my mobile phone, he got my P.O. Box, he got a rental apartment, he did all this stuff not really knowing whether I existed or whether I was just pulling one big April Fool’s Day joke on him. Then, he showed up at the airport and I was able to stay at his place for a week.
He had got this rental apartment. He moved me to the rental apartment. He had a hamper full of goodies for me like Kiwi stuff, red socks. When I say “red socks” I mean red socks because we were doing this whole America’s Cup campaign and those are the red socks that they were selling. There were all these things that were essentially very New Zealand-based in that hamper.
The landlord’s name was Barry. Barry showed up. He said, “Do you need anything?” I wasn’t quite sure I needed anything. Barry shows up later with half-a-full of forks and spoons, and iron and ironing board, and he just leaves it outside the door so that I can get started.
This was New Zealand for me. It was full of friendly, wonderful people that just went out of their way to do stuff. This was a fairy tale start to New Zealand, but it got even better before it got worse.
Within a week, I was calling up people from the phonebook. I called up maybe 200 people. These designers and marketing agencies and advertising agencies, and I had a job. I had a job as a web designer. I’d studied a bit of Flash. I didn’t know much of it, but the company that hired me, they didn’t know any of the Flash stuff, so it was very new, very interesting, until I got the job. By day two, I was sick of the job. I wanted to quit.
I emailed Renuka. Renuka was still back in India at that point in time. She was going to follow in month or so. I said I wanted to quit the job. She said, “No, no, no. Hang in there.” Renuka has always been this person who had a job and I’ve always been this person who never had a job. I always ran my own business freelance. This job, I don’t know what it was, but it just drove me crazy. I had nothing to do. The whole time I was there, I probably built one website, which if you know me, that drove me absolutely crazy. It was like being in prison.
Then, I got made redundant, and that was the second happiest day of the entire year. The first being the day I got to New Zealand, but this was fabulous. There was just one little problem though. We had just bought a house the week before and we had a mortgage for over $200,000, and now, we both didn’t have jobs and we had to pay that mortgage.
Part 3: What Were the Early Years at Psychotactics Like? What were the early years at Psychotactics like? For one, it wasn’t even called Psychotactics. It had this very embarrassing name called Million Bucks. As you probably heard before, I was headed back to India and I had this book called “Good to Great” by Jim Collins, and it asked a question, what can you be the best in the world at? I was a professional cartoonist at that time and I couldn’t answer the question. I thought that Calvin and Hobbes was the best cartoon in the world and I couldn’t beat that, and so i wanted to do something else. I don’t know why. Maybe it was a new county, but I wanted to do something else, and so I just decided to jack up everything I was already doing, and then, throw myself into this crazy crevasse.
One day, I just decided I was going to get into marketing. I don’t know what happened. It was as if I took a billboard and put it up on Main Street, and said “Sean D’Souza is not going to do any cartooning anymore,” because all the work I was getting, book covers and magazine covers, and illustrations, and advertising agencies, stuff to be done, and it all stopped. Just overnight, it just stopped. It was as if I’d made these announcements all over town. It just stopped. Then, I had to go out and find some consulting work to do.
Now, I was part of a networking group, but would you trust a cartoonist to then advise you on your marketing? Plus, there was this terrible name called Millions Bucks. Even so, I remember what Wayne had told me when I got to New Zealand. He was talking about the cartooning stuff and he said, “John found the pavement. Just go and meet people.” That’s what I did. I just founded the pavement. We used to go to all these events to speak where there were two or three people, or people who were half-asleep, and the amount of mistakes that we had to make along the way were phenomenal.
As you know, the Brain Audit itself came about from this very, very bad episode where I stood before an audience of about 20 people and started speaking about the Brain Audit, and then I forgot what I had to say. Then, Renuka had to come and take me aside and we have to have a break for 10 minutes, but from that came the Brain Audit, and from the Brain Audit came our entire business.
Along the way, we had all of these little speaking engagements at this rotary and what they call SWAP here, which was sales people with a passion, I think. We’d go to these events and it was this drill over and over again, and this is what I tell people, “You sit behind your computer and yo expect things to happen, but there is a lot of ground work that’s happening, a lot of ground work, and we had to do all our ground work.”
The years just flew by until one day, I was sitting at this restaurant called “D-72″ with my friend Eugene Moreau. We were talking about this whole badly-named company called Million Bucks. He said, “You send out a newsletter and you call it Psychological Tactics, and you call the newsletter Psychotactics, so why don’t you name your company Psychotactics? I thought that was a good idea, and so, we named it Psychotactics, and that is how Psychotactics came about.
It wasn’t like Million Bucks was totally hopeless. We had millionbucks.co.nz. If you know what a frame-base site was, it was a frame-base site, that means Google couldn’t index it, and yet, we had 1000 subscribers to that website. Now, if you go back to archive.org and search for millionbucks.co.nz and go back in time like the year 2000 or 2001, you will find this terrible-looking site with very small fonts, probably 5 or 6-point. Then, right at the bottom, you had to read all the stuff and then get right to the bottom, and it said, “Subscribe Here.” You literally had to read every word before you subscribe.
Today, I sound very confident, but at that point in time, I wasn’t feeling confident at all. I always felt like a fraud. I always felt like someone was going to tap me on the shoulder. Even when opportunity was thrown in our face, we were reluctant. At one point in time, a guy called Joe Vitale, he decided that he was going to promote our book, the Brain Audit, which was just a PDF. It was just 16 or 20 pages. We didn’t have any credit card facility. New Zealand was way back then anyway. It was like you couldn’t get any facility and we’d been looking for three months, and doing the research and spinning, and spinning, and spinning, which is what a lot of people do, and that’s what we did anyway.
He gave us a week, and in that week, we had to figure out something and we found ClickBank. Sure they charged over 7.5%, but it was wonderful for us. It was fabulous that we could actually take a credit card. We got back to Joe and said, “We are ready.” He said, “Oh, this week, I’m busy.” Then, the next week, he was busy. The next month, he was busy. Several months passed, but in those months, someone found our website and they started buying the Brain Audit, and that’s how we started selling copies of the Brain Audit online. We didn’t change that 20-page book for ages, for probably over a year, and we sold about $50,000 worth of that book before we even made a single change.
By this point, we started speaking at events and getting more confident about selling the book at the events. People will buy the book just on the enthusiasm. Back in 2002, the whole concept of any book was like weird. Some people didn’t even have an email address back then. They would ask for the book on a CD. We kept pushing and we kept going to events, and we kept contacting people on the internet, and we still do that today. After all these years, we’re still doing exactly what we did back then.
When I started out, I always believed that things would get less busy, and yes, they do get less busy if your goals are very limited and you want to earn just as much as you did before. We earn a lot more than we did before, but now, the money has become less a focus. Now, just writing books that nobody else is writing, doing them in a way that nobody else is doing them, all of that takes a lot of time and effort, and that’s why I wake up at 4am everyday. In fact, as I’m doing this recording, it’s now 5:52am, and I enjoy every moment of it.
Auckland is half-city and half-country. It’s an amazing place, and New Zealand, no matter how much you read about it or look at it in the pictures or in the movies, it is absolutely astounding, and you should visit.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this little, mini episode on the Psychotactics history. If you’d want more of this, how we started up our workshops, how we started up our courses, the kind of trouble that we went to, and these personal history stories as it were, write to me and let me know so that I can give you some more stuff.
If you haven’t already subscribed to this Three-month Vacation Podcast, then make sure to go to iTunes and hit the “Subscribe” button. Every subscribe really helps the rating of this podcast. If you’ve already done that, then, make sure that you tell your friends about it. Two or three friends that you tell today make a big difference to this podcast.
That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now. Bye-bye and do write in.
You can also listen to or read this Episode: #49:How To Get Better, Higher-Paying Clients With Testimonials
How do you avoid losers as clients? How do you completely sidestep the clients that don't pay, cause trouble and push you around? Surprisingly, the answer lies in testimonials. There are elements of testimonials that cause clients of a certain kind to get attracted to you. So how do you harness that latent power of testimonials? And how do photos, details and tone come into play? Find out in this podcast.
In this episode Sean talks about The whole concept of testimonials and why we are more like elephants. He covers: Part 1: How photos act as a mirror on your website
Part 2: Why you need to explore the detail in your testimonials
Part 3: What is tone and how does it affect your testimonials
Right click here and 'save as' to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources and Links 5000bc—How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems?
Learn more about Testimonials—The Secret Life of Testimonials
Psychotactics Newsletter—Weekly slightly crazy, mostly zany marketing newsletter
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The Transcript
This is the Three Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. African elephants are one of nature’s most amazing communicators. They rumble, they roar and snort, scream, and they trumpet. Yet most of their communication is never heard by humans because it is on the level of infrasound. Infrasound is an extremely low frequency rumble that falls way below the hearing range of human, and yet humans can feel t sound.
Michael Garstang, a meteorologist at the University of Virginia explains how elephants communicate. Many of the rumbling calls occur at the level of infrasound. This is a very low frequency rumble that’s below the audible hearing range of humans, he said. Humans can hear the upper end as a rumble, although you’re not hearing it in your ears. It’s more like feeling the vibrations in your diaphragm. This feeling, rather than hearing, is what we encounter when we run into the concept of testimonials.
Today we’re going to look at this whole concept of testimonials and why we are more like elephants. We’re communicating through this infrasound, this low level. We can see the testimonials but we’re not exactly paying attention to what’s written there or what’s presented to us. Instead, we’re kind of communicating in a completely different way. What are the way that testimonials communicate that we’re not aware of but we can feel? The three elements that we’re going to look at today are the photo, the detail, and the tone.
Let’s start off with the first one, which is the photo.
Part 1: The Photo If you were to go to a dating site today and start to look at the photos, you would find that something very interesting starts to fall into place. That is you are choosing some people’s photos over other people’s photos. Why do we do this? It’s because we recognize something within the photos, and that something draws us to that person. Now this doesn’t just occur on dating sites. If you go to a marketing site, and let’s say you look at the site where you have all these promises like become a millionaire overnight or get these results very quickly, look at those photos. As you scroll down to photo after photo after photo after photo, you find that you don’t really like many of those people, but you haven’t read any of the testimonials. You’ve scanned them but you haven’t really read the detail in the testimonials, and yet the photo is sending this low frequency message.
This photo is telling you these people aren’t like you. They are different somehow. They’re more greedy or they want quicker results. They don’t want to work for it. Even if you had not a single word of text on that page, you would still feel uncomfortable. Then you could sense someone who wanted that kind of result, who wanted to be that millionaire overnight, who wanted all those quick results. They would find those photos very appealing.
This is what happens with photos. Photos send out this message, which means when you’re putting your photos of your clients on your website, you can’t just take the clients that give the best testimonials. You’ve got to put clients that are very, very reliable, clients that are ethical, clients that you like, clients that you want to work with in future. Those are the photos that you want to put on your website.
Why? Because it’s like a mirror. There is a message that’s coming out from those photos. That’s why on Psychotactics we have photos of people that we like, clients that we’ve worked with, clients that we’ve gone out with, clients that we would love to have all the time. The results have been very clear. People often get on our courses and they say, “How do you get such great people in your courses?” They come to our workshops and they go, “Wow, this is amazing. What kind of filtration system do you have in place?” When you look for that answer, at the very core it is the photographs.
Whenever we put up a photograph of a client that we didn’t like just because we needed a testimonial, we start to get other clients that are similar to that client. If you want to try an experiment and put all the bad clients, all the clients that don’t pay you on time, they give you a lot of trouble, put their photos and you’ll start to see that low frequency rumble going through, that communication going through, and you get more clients just like that. You put in some good clients, clients that you like to work with, and you start to see the clients that you want to work with show up time after time. It’s a simple filtration system, and yet it works amazingly well.
But photos alone will not do the job. Of course they’ll attract clients that you want but they still need some more information. What is that more information all about? The more information is the detail that is in your testimonials. This takes us to the second part where we start to explore the detail in your testimonials.
Part 2: Explore the Detail in Your Testimonials What is this detail all about? Let’s take a look at one of the testimonials at 5000bc.com, which is our membership site. The testimonial reads like this: 5000bc is one of the few sites I’ve been a member of that has so little drama. There are no huge fights, no negativity. Everyone tries their best to be helpful.
Then it goes on to talk about how he’s been a member of several membership sites over the years and how they’ve charged over $100 a month. They were big and crowded and scary. Some had just a handful of members and some were strictly moderated, and some were just overtaken by promotion from the members, and how 5000bc is the only membership site that he’s stuck with year after year after year for over nine years.
As you’re reading that testimonial, what you’re getting is a feeling of safety, of being in the safe zone. That when you’re in 5000bc you don’t feel overcrowded and pushed around and all these promotions coming at you. You suddenly feel that you can ask a lot of questions, that you can get the answers, that the people out there are people like you, because that’s what we’re looking for. That’s what we’re looking for in the photos. That’s also what we’re looking for in the detail.
The testimonials start to reflect what you want to be, where you want to go, how you want to be. A lot of testimonials don’t do this. They don’t explain that experience or they don’t give out that experience. What they do is talk about how great they are. It doesn’t come from a user experience. It comes more from how great that website wants to be rather than how safe you need to be. When a customer comes to your site and starts to read the testimonial, they need to read the experience from the user’s point of view. When they do that, then they feel that mirror effect. They can feel that low rumble coming through and they know this is the place where they would thrive and succeed and move forward.
Whether you’re selling a product or a service, what you’re looking for first are photographs, because photographs form that first mirror. But then the second thing you’re looking for is the user experience. It’s not so much about how great it is but how the user has gone through that feeling of feeling insecure and now you’re feeling great. Or they needed some questions answered, and how the questions were answered. Or how they weren’t expecting to find such a fun group, and then how they ran into an honest, fun-loving group.
All of this becomes the experience. It becomes the mirror. Immediately you feel I need to be part of this place. I need to be part of this experience. As you ask the six questions that I mentioned in The Brain Audit, you start to get this response from your clients. You start to get the response that you’re looking for, which enabled them to give their experience. That is what others get attracted to. Suddenly 5000bc is filled with all these happy, friendly people and you have a great experience.
This is true for your own product and your service as well. When you have your workshops, when you have your training, when you have your courses online, when you sell your products you will find that most of the people, if not all the people, are remarkably similar. Their ethics are similar. Their behavior is similar. You don’t have trouble. Or you can have a lot of trouble if you start to put in photographs and experiences that are not congruent with what you really want to achieve.
This takes us to the third part, which is the tone.
Part 3: The Tone We looked at photos and we looked at detail, but what is tone? This part we cannot control. I don’t know what it is, but when people speak like right now I am speaking to you, what kind of feeling do you get from me? That’s the kind of question that cannot be answered. You feel this at a diaphragm level like the elephants feel … You feel their energy at a diaphragm level. You can’t hear it. You don’t know what it is but you feel there’s something happening. The tone comes from clients as they answer your testimonials. The testimonial tone is not something that you can control, but you need to know that when you appeal to those first two elements where you put the right photo and you ask the right questions and you get the right clients in, you will definitely start to get a tone that is consistent.
The tone you find with most Psychotactics lines is one of warmth and helpfulness, and it’s right through the website. You can look at all the products and all the services, and the membership site, and the workshops, and the courses, and it’s there. It’s warm, it’s friendly, it’s helpful. Where did that tone come from? The tone came from us, and the tone can come from you. We tell people to be kind, be helpful, or be gone.
When that message goes out on a consistent basis like it is right now on this podcast, then the people that are interested in being kind and being helpful, they join our courses, they come to our workshops, they deal with us. The rest of them just go away. They go to other sites where probably they’re promised riches or quick results or whatever. It becomes a filtration process. You wouldn’t think of testimonials doing such a fabulous job, and that’s what they do. When you get those testimonials, you get that warm helpful tone in it as well. You can’t control it, except to send out that message on a regular basis.
Let’s just summarize what we’ve learned today.
Summary We looked at three elements. The first was the photo. We found that the moment we put in photos that don’t appeal to us, rather photos of clients that have given us trouble, we’re going to get clients that are going to give us a lot of trouble in the future. You want to pick photos of clients that you like, clients that have worked with you and are enjoyable to work with and pay on time. You will start to see that mirror effect almost immediately.
The second thing is one of detail. When you ask those six questions that you get in The Brain Audit, you will get that detail. In that detail people will talk about warmth, the friendliness or fun. Someone else reading that information also gets that feeling, that user experience. Finally, it’s a factor of tone, but how do you get that tone? You get that tone by first sending out a message that we’re kind, friendly, helpful, whatever message you want to send out. Then you get that same feedback. It comes through in the testimonial. It’s not something that you can control except to send it out in the first place.
Now, every product or service is not going to have testimonials right at the start. We’ve been in business since 2002 at Psychotactics, and yet when we bring out a new product or a new service we don’t have testimonials for that product or service. You’re always the new kid on the block no matter how long you’ve been around. The trick to getting those testimonials is to ask people that you like. Now you can’t always control this when you’re just starting out, but find people that you like. Don’t go for people that you don’t like. Even if you’re looking through forums or Facebook or Twitter, any place, look for people that you already like because that will have the mirror effect, that will have that elephant-like low intensity rumble that other people get.
Yes, it’s always going to be trouble finding testimonials, but this is how you go about it. Then once you’ve got it up and running, you’re going to get testimonials from people who bought your product, and then you don’t have any trouble anymore. When we first started out, it was very hard for us to get testimonials for The Brain Audit, which was our first book. Then we got over 100 testimonials, and then 200 and 300 and 400. At one point we had 800. Today there are over a thousand testimonials. The same applies for all the other books and the products. It’s just a system that you have to keep following, and you get more and more testimonials.
If you would like to learn more about testimonials you can go to www.psychotactics.com/testimonial. There is a book there, The Secret Life of Testimonials. It shows you a world of testimonials that you didn’t know existed. It’s not a very expensive book but it changes the way you respond to things and the way your clients respond to you. At the end of the day, all of us want is to do our work well, to get great clients that respect us and trust us and work with us, and to be able to take the break and go on our three month vacation.
Really, getting the clients is the critical part. If you go to psychotactics.com/testimonial you can read up and you can decide for yourself whether you want the book. I think you’ll like it a lot, so go there and check it out for yourself. On another front, I’m still working on the stock cartoons. They’re turning out to be a lot of fun. I listen to a lot of music and podcasts, and we’re turning out these very elaborate cartoons that you’re going to love to put in your blog posts, your website, your books, pretty much everywhere.
It’s going to be a lot of fun, so get on the Psychotactics list if you haven’t got there, because when I announce this I promise you there will be a bit of a stampede. These cartoons are absolutely stunning. I might even give quite a few away. Get on the Psychotactics list. Yes, also, psychotactics.com/magic. That’s where you get information about the podcast so that you can keep on top of them, but you also get some bonuses from time to time. Either psychotactics.com where you have to subscribe. If you’re already already subscribed, go towww.psychotactics.com/magic. That’s pretty much it. I’m on Twitter @Sean D’Souza. Send me your questions there, or at sean@psychotactics.com. Yes, also on Facebook at Sean D’Souza. Bye for now.
Still listening? One of the best testimonials that you can ever get is the unasked-for testimonial. We were at this workshop in Washington D.C. when one of our clients stood up. We didn’t ask him to stand up and give a testimonial, but he stood up and he started talking about the cartooning course that he had done with us. Then he went out and he got his books and he showed the cartoons that he had done. He showed it to the entire audience. Then some of the group had also done the cartooning course with him, and one of the terms in the cartooning course is “circly circles,” which of course, circly doesn’t exist as a word, but it’s part of the cartooning course. You learn it and you say it.
Suddenly there was this kind of little rumble going through the room and people were interested in the cartooning course. You can see this at psychotactics.com/davinci, because we were recording at that point in time so it’s on video. You can feel the enthusiasm. You can see what is happening there. You can see the person themselves, the tone. It’s just amazing, that detail. There you go, a little snippet from the Psychotactics archives.
You can also listen to or read this episode: How To Build A Cult-Like Following By Using An Adjective In Your Branding
Is it really easy to build a cult-like following for your brand? Yes, but the core of that branding lies in the "adjective". Yes, that very same grammar lesson you had at school. When you look at the biggest and most well-defined brands in history, you find they are defined by a single word. Let's take Volvo, for example. The word "safety" came to mind, didn't it? That's the power of the adjective. Let's learn more in this episode of the Three-Month Vacation
Details
To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/48
Email me at sean@psychotactics.com
Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: What is the adjective and how one little adjective can define your business?
Part 2: How we get to this adjective and the biggest mistake you can make
Part 3: How do we expand it further so that it becomes your whole DNA
Right click here and save-as to download this episode to your computer.
-------------------- Useful resources and links Free Uniqueness Series: How to find your uniqueness
Uniqueness Stories: Why Uniqueness Stories Are Better Than Slogans
Special Bonus: How To Win The Resistance Game
The Transcript
This is the Three Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. When I was growing up in India, all plywood was sold the same way. You went to a store and you picked some plywood. Then you took it home. There was no branding; it was all very, very generic.
At some point, a company called Kitply, they decided that they didn’t want to be generic anymore. They decided they wanted to charge a premium on this plywood. Now why would you go and pay a premium on plywood when you could just enter the store, get your plywood just like everybody else? Well, Kitply, they wanted to do something different. That is exactly what they did.
The Indian coastline, it’s about 7,000 kilometers; that’s about 4,500 miles. When you have a coastline that is so extensive, it also means that you have a lot of water around you. Water means humidity, and humidity means disaster for plywood, at least the plywood that you were getting in the store at that point in time. After you spent all this money on a carpenter, which is what most people did, they got a carpenter across and they built cupboards and they put the plywood in the cupboards. Then the rains would come. In India, you don’t just get rains; you get rains in June, all of July, all of August, and a bit in September as well.
That plywood would get all the moisture sitting in it. After a while, it would start to warp. Your beautiful cupboard, all your furniture, it would have this warped plywood. It would drive people crazy, but there was nothing that you could do until Kitply came up with a solution. They made their plywood waterproof. But Indians are a skeptical lot, and rightly so. If you’ve got a monsoon that goes on for several months, you want to be sure that the plywood is exceedingly good. So, Kitply not only said that their plywood was waterproof, but that it was boiling waterproof.
Now no one was going to take boiling water and throw it on the plywood, but it made a point. What is the factor that caused Kitply to stand out? Incredibly, we have to go back to a grammar lesson, because what we’re doing here is just looking at the adjective. What we’re going to cover in this podcast are three elements. First is what is the adjective. Second: how to pick it. Third: how to refashion your product around it.
Let’s start off with the first one, which is what is the adjective.
Part 1: What is the Adjective Now, I don’t have to tell you what an adjective is. You did that in grammar class. But here’s the point. When we started out the article writing course it was very difficult for us to position it against other article writing courses, because ours is almost $3,000 and, well, the others are $400 and $500. Some are even free.
What we did was we put one little adjective. We called it The Toughest Writing Course in the World. That changed everything. Because not only did it change us, but it changed the perception of all the customers that were going to buy into that course. They knew that it wasn’t a stroll in the park. They knew that they were to expect a lot of work and effort going into that course. That one little adjective made all the difference.
This is what you need to do for your business as well. You need one little adjective to define your business. What is this business all about? When we look at a brand like Volvo for instance, immediately an adjective comes to mind, doesn’t it? It’s safety. Now Volvo hasn’t really pushed this concept of safety for a long, long time, and yet we remember it. We remember it because of that one adjective, which was safety.
If you go and read any of a dozen books, you’ll find another case study showing up, which is Domino’s Pizza. Now Domino’s Pizza has not advertised its speed for a very long time. That is because every pizza parlor will deliver it very quickly. But it still helped them make it a billion dollar brand all on the basis of one adjective, which was speed. Adjectives play an extremely important roll, and what we’ve got to figure out is how do we create our adjective.
This takes us to the second part, where we’re going to explore how we get to this adjective.
Part 2: How We Get to This Adjective One of the big mistakes that people do when they’re coming up with their adjective is they sit down with their company, their brand, and they try to come up with an adjective for the company. At this point in time, that’s not really what you want to do. You want to come up with an adjective for a product or a service and not for your company, because your company has so much ego, so much of your ego invested in it, that it is difficult to nail down an adjective. You want to start off really simply by working with a product or a service.
When we started out, we didn’t do Psychotactics. We started out with something like the article writing course. What you need to do next is to make sure that you sit down and write about ten adjectives for that product or service, whatever it is. Just write down those ten adjectives, and then you cross out seven. This is not going to be easy, but cross out seven. You’re left with three. Out of those three, you cross out two. This is going to be extremely difficult because you think it’s this and that and that, but you want to cross out two. That leaves you with just one adjective. That defines your product or your service.
Now most people go through this procedure in one of two ways. One is absolute fluke, and the second is this organized system of ten and three and one. When we did the article writing course, we didn’t go through this whole system of ten and three and one because a customer, she suggested that it was the toughest writing course in the world, so we adopted that adjective. It became that pivotal point, that pivotal turning point where the course started to get more customers simply based on that one adjective. They wanted to sign up because it was difficult, not because it was easy.
This gives us a good chance to actually compare one course with the other. We also have a copywriting course. Now the copywriting course doesn’t have an adjective. When you describe the article writing course you say it’s the toughest course in the world. When you describe the copywriting course, you go, “Um, uh, wait. I … ” You’re lost for words. This is what the adjective does. It boils it down to one single world, but it does so much more because everything extends from there. This is what we’re going to do in the third part. We’re going to look at how it becomes the DNA of your product or service, and how you can build out from there, how it creates this whole structure, this whole ecosystem around your product and service.
Let’s go to the third part, which is how do we expand it further so that it becomes your whole DNA.
Part 3: How Do We Expand It Further So That It Becomes Your Whole DNA When we just look at the adjective like safety or speed, it doesn’t mean anything. When we look at safety and we look at how do we make this car really safe, then we get to what Volvo has done over the years. They’ve created seat belts and crumple zones and crash test dummies and a whole range of safety devices for your car. So they are known for their safety, and the kind of people that buy a Volvo are those who are obsessed with safety.
The whole ecosystem grew around that one adjective. When you look at brands around you, you start to notice that it’s not just Volvo and Domino’s and the article writing course, but when you look at the Benjamin. This is the Benjamin Hotel in New York. They are focused on a good night’s sleep. It’s restfulness that’s their adjective. They have all kinds of pillows. They have a sleep concierge. They have cakes and stuff that help you sleep better, and they’ll even give you a guarantee if you don’t get a good night’s sleep, even if someone else is drilling in the building next door. Everything they do is built around that one concept of sleep, that one adjective of restfulness.
When I was growing up in India we had a television. It was called Onida TV. When they launched that TV, the slogan was “Neighbours envy and owner’s pride.” They didn’t talk about the features of the TV, the size of the TV, nothing. It was just this devil the whole time, this sneaky little devil. He showed up on the screen and he did all kinds of antics. At the end of it, it was just about envy. They didn’t talk about anything. That one adjective made Onida one of the largest-selling televisions in India.
We live in New Zealand, as you know. If you think of New Zealand, what do you think of? You think of beauty. You think of purity. That’s what New Zealand is all about. It’s 100% pure. That’s what their advertising and marketing is all about. That’s their adjective. But that’s not what New Zealand had about a hundred years ago. Their slogan was about cure, not pure. You came here for health benefits, not to go around and look at the waterfalls and go over the mountains and do all those fabulous things that you can do in New Zealand.
That adjective can change over time. Funny, no one even noticed, did they? In fact, some adjectives are under the radar. You look at Facebook for instance, and you think what could be the adjective for Facebook. But it’s very obvious, isn’t it? It’s sticky. Everything they do is designed to make you get back to Facebook. Recently they even made you, forced you to get the Messenger app if you wanted to get some of the messages that friends would send to you.
Why did they do that? Because if you didn’t go to Facebook, you’d probably miss out on the messages. If you had the Messenger app, that would pop up on your phone and you’d see it, so it would pull you back to the site. Facebook is all about stickiness. It’s about going there several times a day, being addicted to it, communicating with your friends, doing whatever you have to do, but you have to go back to Facebook. It’s an addiction.
When you think of Amazon, you think wow, that’s a great selection. Maybe that is their adjective. But no, it’s below the radar. Amazon’s entire business is built around speed. They have two-day shipping, one-day shipping. This time I was in the United States and I was in Washington D.C. I had bought this mic that I’m using right now. Well not quite, I had ordered the wrong mic. It got shipped in and then I wanted to return it, so I did. I packed it up and I was waiting for the courier to come in.
By the time the courier came in, the new mic had already been delivered. There’s an adjective in place even though we might not see as part of the slogan. Sometimes you can have an adjective that is defined by the title. For instance, when I wrote Dartboard Pricing, the concept of dartboard itself talks about something that is unusual, that is kind of random. That gives it that adjective. It gives it that curiosity factor, and it attracts you to that product or to that service.
Now, the question does arise: can this adjective last forever? In most cases it can go for a very, very long time. In Domino’s Pizza’s case, it didn’t last forever, but they’re still a billion dollar brand. When you are selling your products or services, it’s critical to have this adjective because this is what we do in normal life. We describe other people. We describe places. We describe movies. We describe products. When you have that adjective in place, it not only helps to create that description, but it becomes the DNA for your product or service.
The reason why you see so many products and services without any game plan is simply because they don’t have this simple grammar lesson in place: the adjective. Once you have the adjective, everything builds around it. That is really what we’ve covered today.
Summary In part one we just looked at the fact that our grammar lesson was very important. We needed to have an adjective. In part two we looked at the fact that we could probably list ten adjectives and then get rid of seven, and then get rid of another two until we had a single adjective. Finally, we looked at all of these products and services like the Benjamin, and Onida, and New Zealand, and Amazon, and Facebook. There are dozens of examples of very successful brands. At the core of them is the DNA. At the core of them is this factor of the adjective and how the whole ecosystem is built around this one adjective.
If you’re wondering what is the adjective for Psychotactics, well, there is an adjective for the brand itself. The adjective for Psychotactics is elegance. When you buy a product or a service from Psychotactics, you experience that elegance. There is an elegance int system which goes with very tiny increments. There’s an elegance in the cartoons. There’s an elegance in the way the text is written. The same thing applies to the podcast. There is the music and the way the whole podcast is recorded. We’re always working towards that elegance. But on a ground level, every product and every service is going to need their own adjective as well.
Yes, your company is going to need some kind of adjective. It’s not critical right now but it’s going to need it over time, and you’re going to have to bring out that adjective in your marketing material. Which we haven’t done, by the way, but we will once the new website is up. Companies need the adjective but every product and every service is going to need the adjective as well.
That brings us to the end of this podcast. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. If you do enjoy it, then share it with your friends. Talk about it on Twitter or Facebook. That will really help. Leave a review on iTunes; it really helps us. What’s happening in Psychotactics land? Well, you can still get the Dartboard Pricing at whatever we launched it at. We’re going to have the sales page up, so if you want to get it quickly, go to psychotactics.com/ttc. You can also join the headline writing course or become a headline trainer. That’s at the end of this month, so you want to be on the Psychotactics mailing list if you want to get these notifications, because the courses fill up pretty quickly.
You can find me at sean@psychotactics.com or Twitter @Sean D’Souza, and at Facebook at Sean D’Souza. Very, very sticky place, but I’m getting out of the sticky zone and I’m going for my walk. That’s me from the Three Month Vacation and psychotactics.com.
Also listen and read: #47: How We Sold $20,000 On Stage (In Under An Hour)
Imagine you got on stage and you had an eager audience ready to buy. Of course there are a few obstacles. The first obstacle is that you have just an hour to convince the audience to buy. The second is you're not the only one selling products?there are others. The third obstacle is that a good chunk of the audience doesn't know you that well and aren't on your list. So three big problems to deal with.
Now you may never have the desire to get on stage, but the issues are similar when you're selling a product or service. You have very little time to convince a prospect. You're battling it out with others selling similar products and services. And you're a bit of a stranger to the audience. / / So how do you overcome these issues, and win?
Notes:
To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/47
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The Art Of Preparation And The Importance Of Pre-Sell
Part 2: The Importance Of The Document Before The Event
Part 3: The Whole Factor of Urgency
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources and Links Black Belt Presentations: When you make a presentation, wouldn’t it be amazing to completely control the room—without turning anyone off?
Special Bonus: How To Win The Resistance Game
Psychotactics Newsletter: Weekly slightly crazy, mostly zany marketing business newsletter
The Transcript
This is the Three Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. I was speaking at a conference in Chicago to about 200 to 300 people. I had just finished my speech and I met this guy in the corridor. He was rushing. I asked him, “Why are you in such a hurry?” He says, “I have to go upstairs and get my credit card.” I said, “Why do you have to get your credit card from upstairs? Why don’t you have it in your pocket?”
This is the story of how we sold $20,000 worth of product at a conference. This is digital product. This is not physical product. This was The Brain Audit and the membership to 5000bc. I was asked this question by Alison Beere from Cape Town, South Africa, and you want to know the answer. You probably think that the answer lay in the speech. There might have been some triggers in the speech. There might have been some information that caused them to act. Sure, there would have been some urgency, but what was it that caused all these people to buy? What caused them to trust me after speaking to them for just over an hour? Why did we manage to sell more than all the other speakers on that day?
These are the questions that we need to answer, and not because you want to go out there and sell 20,000. Of course you want to do it, but you have to understand that sales is not a one-time hit. That’s what it looks like. If I put this on a sales page, that’s exactly what it looks like. It looks like a one-time hit. It looks like I went there, made the speech, and they bought everything.
As we’re about to find out in this podcast, it is a matter of preparation. Whether you’re selling a very small item off your website, a course, or in our case, this $20,000 day that we had, it all involves preparation. What are the steps that you have to get all of these ducks lined up in a row? How do you make things work for you? Let’s find out
But wait, wait, wait. Let’s not go into how we did that just yet. Because we have to go back in time to 2003 when I was in Sydney, and I bombed in a big way. I sold very little, just enough to cover the cost of the airfare. What was the difference between the two events? Why was that guy so eager to get his credit card? Okay, enough teasing. Let’s go into the main section of today’s podcast and let’s cover the three points. What are the three points that we’re going to cover?
The first is the preparation. The second is the document before the event. The third is the very tight deadline. Let’s start off with the first one, which is the preparation.
Part 1: Preparation If you had been a subscriber of Psychotactics you would have run into a statement that almost sounds like hype. That is that we sell out our courses maybe within half an hour, sometimes 20 minutes. Now these aren’t just $20 courses. These are courses that go up to $2,000, $3,000, and yet they fill up in 20 to 30 minutes. We do with this without any joint ventures, without any affiliates, without any publicity, without any advertising. It’s done with a very small group of people, and yet time after time, all the way since 2006, the courses have been consistently filling up. Not that it doesn’t make me nervous every time I launch a course. I still think somehow this time it will be jinxed, but it just keeps going.
What’s really happening? The first thing is the prep work. It’s what I call presell. When I went to this event in Chicago it was completely different from the event in Sydney. When I went to Sydney, I had great slides, I had a great presentation, and I give that presentation. I did exactly the same thing in Chicago. What a big difference. The difference was the preparation. Before we went to the event in Chicago we had done some prep work, some ground work. Before the event, Ken McCarthy, who was hosting the event, he had done some interviews. What did I do in those interviews?
The first thing I made sure was that I was empowering people. When we did the interviews, instead of answering a question, I gave away almost the complete system. When you give away a system, what you do is you empower people. You don’t cover a lot of points. You cover just a few points. I cover three points as you know. There are steps. You do this and you do that and you do the third thing, and you get to an end point.
When we did those interviews, people were listening at the other end. Now frankly, I don’t know what the other interviews were all about. Ken was interviewing a lot of folk, but I made sure that when someone finished my interview they had a task so simple that they could apply it. You see this in the free headline report that we give away, or you see this in the books that we write. You see this empowerment factor, and it’s very critical. Because there are several other speakers and they’re all going to make their pitch. You somehow have to stand out from it.
How do you stand out? You start right at the beginning. You start before the event. A lot of people don’t realize this. They don’t realize that people buy long before they pay. I’ll say that again. People buy long before they pay. What we were doing is getting them into the buying process. We were giving them information that was empowering that they could take right after the call and use it. Immediately, instead of just being another interview, instead of just being another speaker, now we were getting them to buy into our system, into our method, into whatever we were offering them. We hadn’t got on stage yet and people already buying into us.
Then you’d think that was enough. That if you just gave away that information, which is a system, a small system but a system nonetheless, that would be enough. But we gave away further goodies. We gave away information that we could easily sell. Of course people go through it. Not everyone goes through it but enough people go through it. Now we’re working on a second level where people are buying through us.
What is really happening here is when people encounter you for the first time, you’re a stranger. When you go back to 2009, there were already a whole bunch of experts in the marketing field. Now when you look around you, it has increased exponentially, whatever your field is. When you get that opportunity you have to take that opportunity with both hands. You have to create something that’s empowering, create something that’s a system, create something that your audience can immediately use. Then on top of that you give away further goodies. Again, the goodies are empowering. They’re short, they’re powerful, they get the point across and they now create this connection with this audience that didn’t know you at all, and you haven’t even stepped on stage.
Now this podcast is about what we did on stage, but it applies to pretty much anything. We’re going to have some cartoon stock, which means that you can use these cartoons anywhere. How do I go about that? I have to empower you. How do I empower you with cartons? Because I’m not teaching you to draw cartoons. I’m actually selling you the cartoon. I empower you by giving away a cartoon. When I give away a cartoon, now you’ve got something. You don’t know me but now you’ve got something, and something that is extremely good. Now the connection has been made.
You’re not going to buy all of those cartoons, not 100, or 200, or whatever you offer in the end. You get just one, but that one is so good that it empowers you. It’s isolated, it’s small, it gets your attention. That’s the first point: that you have to do the prep work well in advance; four, six, eight weeks in advance. Some people do it a year in advance. You might not have the time. You might have very little patience, but you’ve got to start off with the prep work because people buy long before they pay.
This takes us to the second part, which is the document before the event.
Part 2: The Document Before The Event What is the document before the event? When you go to any event, what you get is a badge. Then you get some kind of bag with lots of goodies in it. Then you take that to your hotel room, and you might look through some of it, but most of it gets tossed in the corner because you’re more focused on the event. You’re more focused on what you have to learn.
What if you get something that is not connected to the bag, not connected to that registration process? Now that’s what we did at that Chicago event. We were speaking on the second day of the event. On day one we got the organizers to announce that everyone who was coming to my presentation would need to read about six or eight pages of stuff. This was just photocopied and given to everyone. Now when you go to an event you obviously want to get the best out of it. You’re not considering that bag and the badges and all the goodies. You’re now focused on those six to eight pages. Again, those six to eight pages were directly linked to what I was going to speak about.
Now this may sound really odd. If you’re going to give away the information that you’re already going to present, won’t they get bored? Won’t your whole presentation fall flat? As it turns out, the answer is no. First, let’s backtrack a little bit. Those six to eight pages, they had information on pricing and how to increase your prices without losing customers. In those six to eight pages, what you’re trying to create is a report. You want to go back to episode number 46 and see how you create a great report. That report was something that hit you between the eyes. It was still about the presentation I was about to make, but it was now getting the customer completely absorbed.
Now they had been through two or three levels. First it was the interview, then the goodies. Then we give them this third thing, which was wow, I never thought of it this way. Now they are primed to listen to you. They read those six to eight pages and some of them are reading it just before they enter the auditorium, but they’re reading it. All of them are reading it. That sets you up nicely for when you get up on stage. The people, the customers, they’re buying before they pay. You are setting up all these little bits of information that are empowering them, so that even if they buy nothing from you, they will buy in the future. Can you take that risk? No, you shouldn’t take that risk.
That takes us to the third part, which is the whole factor of urgency.
Part 3: The Whole Factor of Urgency That’s part three: the tight deadline. I had finished my speech and I had stepped out in the corridor. That’s when I ran into the guy, the guy who was running upstairs to get his credit card. Why had he kept his credit card upstairs? You know the answer. He knew that he would get swayed by some of the speakers. He knew that he would buy something that he didn’t need. Yet, when we gave that presentation, he found it so useful that he decided he was going to buy, so he was running up to his hotel room to get his credit card. He said, “Hang on, I have to get the credit card and I can’t speak to you right now.”
What did I do before that that caused him to get his credit card? I was on the podium and my wife Renuka was at the end of the room. We didn’t have anybody else. It was just the two of us. You have to have someone else at the back of the room. Even one person handling 300 orders, not a problem. I said to the audience, “Here’s the thing. This is a great offer. It’s not a discount. You’re getting this great bonus.” We gave them some really good bonuses.
“When Renuka leaves the room, it’s over. You don’t get any of the bonuses. You don’t get anything that we’ve offered in the room.” Some people think it’s a bluff. Who’s going to turn down money? Yet, when we leave the room, that’s it. That guy was running up to his room to get his credit card so he could stop Renuka before she left the room. Now it does take some time to go through 200 or 300 orders, so she was in that room for at least 20 minutes, but we had prepared everything. There were sheets with details. Back then they had to write out their credit card details on a sheet of paper and sign it and give it in. All of that ground work, all of that prep work was in place. The sheets were on their seats before they sat down. Again, they were going through another step. Eventually what they had to do was just fill in the form, step up to Renuka, give her the sheet, and it was done. Then we left the room.
Then someone came up to me and said, “Are you Sean D’Souza?” I said yes. He had been to another presentation, and he said, “I want to buy what you just sold.” I said, “You don’t even know what I was selling.” He said, “Yes yes, I know, but my friend told me just buy whatever he’s selling.” You know how the deal was. The deal was that once we left the room, the offer didn’t exist. You would think it’s a bluff, and it’s never a bluff. You should always have this. It’s a tight deadline. When this happens, it doesn’t exist anymore. The offer doesn’t exist anymore. That creates an urgency that you will not find otherwise. You see this urgency on Christmas day for instance. People will not buy on the 28th of December. They have to buy everything before Christmas day. There is an urgency.
You have to use the same concept of urgency. Once people leave the room, who knows what happens. Some people run into other people, they change their minds. Yes, there is pressure. You might not like this pressure. As a person selling something you’re always a little unsure of this pressure, but this is how we buy everything. We don’t fix the roof because we want to fix the roof. We fix the roof because there is pressure. It’s leaking. We don’t buy a new phone because we need it desperately. We do it because there is external pressure, maybe social pressure. You may not admit to it, but the pressure exists. This is what Apple does as well. They create that momentum towards that event, and this is what you’ve got to do as well.
It’s not easy. It’s not easy to be a speaker there, to do all these steps and then finally to go through this sales process. Because what I used to do and what I did in Sydney was I didn’t really think through the last bit, which was the sales process. You have to be extremely calm and very enthusiastic when you’re selling your products or services. You get very nervous. You speed through it. You miss points. I had everything on slides so I didn’t miss anything. That is the way you go through the whole process.
Summary To summarize what we’ve just covered, we did three steps. The first was we did all the prep work. I did the interviews. We gave the goodies. We had the sheets on the seats. We had everything in place. That was the first hit, because we know that people buy long before they pay. The second thing was that you need to have one little trigger before the event. We had this six to eight page document that people were reading, and they were reading just before they got into the event as well. Finally, there was a tight deadline. That deadline is sacred. You can’t say I’m going to change my mind. Hey, we’ll take your credit card. No. That’s what we do for all our courses as well, for all our products as well.
I said this in another podcast. Who’s going to know if three or four extra people sign up for a course? Who’s going to ask you? Those three or four extra people would be another $12,000 in the bank, but we say no. There is a tight deadline. You meet the deadline, you get in the course. It’s first come, first serve. At the event, it wasn’t first come, first serve, but it was pretty close. It was 20 minutes. She leaves the room, you’re toast.
This brings us to the end of the podcast and the one thing that you can do today. I think the one thing that you can do today is plan. What are the steps before the event? What are you going to give away before the event? What are the things and the goodies, and what are the little bits that you have to prepare? When people get on stage, when speakers get on stage, there are so many things that they have to do before the event and they never do. They just stand up and speak and they think everything is going to be all right. It’s never all right. You have to do all the little bits in advance. That’s what makes for a great event.
I would say sit down and draw a line from left to right. Then put in all the little bits that you have to do. Because when you get on stage, that is like the middle of whole sequence. Then finally, you have to still sell, which is the end of your sequence. You have to be very careful about that as well. Prepare, prepare, prepare.
Now, there is a book on this at Psychotactics. I wrote a book shortly after I came back because people wanted to know not just about this event and how we sold $20,000 worth of stuff, but also what goes into the slides. How do you control the slides? Because the slides also create this enigma factor. It creates this factor where people say wow, this is so well designed. It’s so well structured. You’ve got to have the structure for the slides.
You also have to have great visual appeal. You have to have control of how the slides look, how the presentation rolls out, and finally how you control the audience. All of this is in the Black Belt Presentation Series. If you’re really interested in how to create a great presentation, then that becomes very critical. These elements that we talked about, these help to create that $20,000 moment, but all of the stuff in the book, that helps you understand all the other elements that you have to do. It’s a lot of work. No one said that this was easy. This podcast is not about easy and outsourcing and all that stuff. It’s about doing the hard work and getting the rewards.
That’s what takes you to a three month vacation. When people say, “I can’t get to a three month vacation,” it’s because they don’t have the time, the money, and the resources. You have to put in the time and the resources, and yes, some money before you can get to that three month vacation. You have to start somewhere and put in the work. That’s how you get the results.
Now for some presell. We are having the headline course and the headline trainer course, and for the first time ever the headline trainer course. I don’t know when you’ll get to this podcast, but if you get to it on time, then get to psychotactics.com and look for headline course or headline trainer course. The courses fill up very quickly. You want to move quickly. I mean really, really quickly.
We’re also going to have the first 50 words course at the end of the year. That’s in November somewhere, so you can prepare yourself for that. This is about writing the first 50 words of, say, a podcast or an article. This is where we slog the most, struggle the most. The entire course is about the first 50 words. We probably have The Brain Audit trainer program around that time as well. That’s more expensive. It’s about $10,000. It’s more detailed. It goes over six months. We’ll go into more detail in the future, but for now it’s just the headline course, the headline trainer course. I’ll also be bringing out those cartoons that I talked about in this podcast. Expect to see some of that soon.
A lot of stuff happening, a lot of stuff happening. If you want to ask me more questions, email me at sean@psychotactics.com, also at Twitter @Sean D’Souza, and yes, on Facebook at Sean D’Souza. Yes, we give away goodies, as you know. If you want to be on the goodies list, you go to psychotactics.com/magic. That’s www.psychotactics.com/magic. You will get those goodies from time to time.
That’s it from Psychotactics and the Three Month Vacation. Still listening? I’m giving you this advice, but recently what we’re in Denver and there were about 400 or 500 people in the audience. How many subscribers did we get? 20. Why did we get 20? We got 20 because we didn’t follow the advice that I’ve just given you. We didn’t do as much prep work. We didn’t have the sheet before the event. Of course there was no tight deadline. We goofed up, too. You can do it too if you don’t take your own advice or don’t listen to this advice. Then failure is always around the corner. That’s a little snippet from the archives at psychotactics.com. Bye for now.
You can also listen to or read this episode: Why Identity Helps You Surge Ahead In Work (And Life): Episode 46
We're all pounded with the whole concept of success. We think that it means more money, more fame, more power. And yet when confronted with defining our own success, we realise there's something we haven't quite defined. In this episode we explore why feeling like a fraud is normal; why seemingly successful people define themselves differently when the spotlight is removed; why space is so critical to creating that identity. / / Identity is what holds us back. Identity is what can take us further. You'll love this episode!
Links:
To get the special "Resistance" PDF (It's cool, so get it)
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http://www.psychotactics.com/brainaudit
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In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why It Is Okay To Feel Like A Fraud
Part 2: How We Define Success And How It Becomes Your Identity
Part 3: The Factor Of Space And Why It Is Critical To Your Life
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Useful Resources How To Increase Your Pricing— Dartboard Pricing
Why Headlines Fail—The Report
Psychotactics Newsletter—Weekly slightly crazy, mostly zany marketing newsletter
Audio and Transcript—Three Obstacles To Happiness (And How To Overcome Them)
The Transcript
This is the Three Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. The Cherokee elder stood before his students and he told them of two wolves that live and battle within each one of us. One of these wolves, he explained, is ill-natured. It sees the worst in people and things. It thinks only of itself. It is vengeful, jealous, arrogant. It’s full of ego and false pride. The other wolf sees the best in people and things. It is kind, it is generous, it is peaceful. It is full of integrity and respect for love itself and others.
One of the students asks the chief which one of these wolves wins the battle. The elder replied, “Whichever one you feed. Whichever one you feed, that is your identity.” When I started out in marketing, it was very easy for me to get fed by a lot of stuff around me. When you’re on Facebook, when you’re on the internet, there is a whole lot of junk out there. That junk makes you feel small. It makes you feel insignificant, and you’ve got to build an identity with the situation around you. How do you do it?
In today’s episode we will cover the three elements of what was my journey. Also, it’s going to be your journey. The first element is one of feeling like a fraud. The second one is just one of success. What does it mean? Finally, the third one, which is one of space and why it’s so important.
Part 1: Feeling Like A Fraud When you look at January of 2001, I didn’t really feel like a fraud, but by December of 2001 I was feeling more and more insecure. What happened between January and December to create all this insecurity? For many years, even as I was a kid, I used to draw. I was extremely shy, and I’ve been drawing my whole life. I became a cartoonist. I became a writer. That’s what shy people do. As I moved into the world of marketing, that completely threw me. I didn’t know that much about marketing. I didn’t know how people think, what they do, how they buy, the prices that they decide on.
But I read this book by Jim Collins, which was called Good to Great. It asked what can you be the best in the world at. I thought I love the cartooning, I love the writing, but I want to do something different. The answer lay, strangely, in marketing. I was not into marketing. I just didn’t understand it. In all the years that I had run the cartooning business, I had done very little organized marketing. It was a good thing, because we moved to New Zealand and the public library was accessible, which was different from India.
I stepped into the library and I picked up ten books. Then I picked up another ten books. Then eventually the librarian realized that I was picking up a lot of books so they gave me an allocation where I could take 30 books at a time. I read those books. The more I read it, the less confident I got, the more I felt like a fraud.
But because I had no choice, I went out there and I spoke with clients. I spoke at small little events. The feeling of being a fraud didn’t go away. It always seemed like someone would tap me on the shoulder and say, “Okay, your time is up. You’ve been talking nonsense for quite a while now and it’s time for me to get in here.”
Six months passed, and a year passed. That tap never came. Then I did a trip to the US and I met with other marketers and I spoke with them. An interesting thing happened. I realized that these guys don’t know that much more than I do. In fact, I know quite a few things that they don’t know. That’s when that fraud label just slipped off and fell into the drain. It never came back again.
It never came back again for me as a marketer but it came back again in different ways. When I write a book, for instance, I just wrote the book on Dartboard Pricing, again, that whole fraud feeling came out. I have made this presentation in Chicago. I made another presentation in Denver. I’ve written so much about pricing. It’s all on the website. It’s on the blog. It’s in our membership site at 5000bc. I’ve explained it at length.
The feeling of being a fraud comes out because you feel what else is there to say. If I write this book, people will have read all of this information. They will think wait a second, he’s just rehashing everything. Then when I send out early copies of the book to clients just so that they can read and send out some testimonials, and they come back and go, “I’m so excited,” and I think what, I already said all this stuff.
It’s different. They haven’t experienced it from the concept of a book, a system, step by step going through the whole logic. Even though I may feel like a fraud when I’m writing the book or putting it out there, that’s just a bit of my own insecurity coming in. They don’t feel that at all. They feel this stuff is really cool.
This feeling keeps coming back. I remember when we were in Washington D.C. and we did a workshop on The Brain Audit. I was very nervous. I didn’t sleep that night simply because when I stood in front of that audience I thought they’ve already read The Brain Audit. These were people who bought the first version of The Brain Audit, version two, version three. Now they’re sitting in the audience and I’m going to say the very same thing. I’m going to tell them exactly what they read about.
I should have paid attention. They bought version one, version two, version three. Obviously every version was bringing them a different angle, a different perspective, and my presentation was going to bring a different perspective. That’s not how I felt. I felt like a fraud. I felt like something is going to go wrong. Someone is going to tap me on the shoulder.
No one did. In fact, when we came out after the first break, everyone was going, “Wow, I didn’t know The Brain Audit was like this. I perceived it to be different.” That’s it. You start out in life feeling a little insecure. You change professions, you feel insecure. You change your system. You write a book. You give a presentation. It doesn’t matter what happens. The moment you change midstream, it’s like being in a strange city and you’re not very confident. You’re completely lost. Your GPS is not working, and your soul needs to be a pilot, as Sting would say.
But Sting isn’t sitting in my chair, is he? I didn’t feel that way, and it comes back. What you’ve got to understand is that part of your identity is always going to be that you’re unsure, and that’s great.
This takes us to the second part of today, which is the whole feeling of success. What is success, and how do you cope with it?
Part 2: The Whole Feeling of Success When you ask people what is their definition of success, they come up with various definitions. The thing that shows up is a lot of philosophy. People get very philosophical about the fact that success is this and success is that. When you look at the books and you look at the awards, the success parameters become very claustrophobic. In New Zealand we have an award for the Fast 50. On Forbes you have maybe the top 100 companies or the top 100 CEOs. Their success is all benchmarked by how many dollars they have in the bank or how quickly they got to the top.
When you look at so many blogs, what you find is the definition of success becomes one of taking shortcuts, of things like the four-hour work week. Four hours? What kind of genius can you create in four hours in a work week? Sometimes you’ll get the contrast. They will talk about quick meals and then slow cooking. Mostly success is benchmarked by money, by speed, and by shortcuts.
That becomes our identity, because it’s all around us. This is how it’s always been. It’s not just something that showed up yesterday. When we go back 100 years, 200 years, 500 years, 1,000 years, success has always been about money, speed, and shortcuts. And power, let’s not forget about power.
The point is, as human beings this makes us very happy: the money, the speed, the power. All this stuff makes us really happy. Fair enough, because we can’t really do without it. But we can also change things a bit and we can set a different benchmark.
When I started out Psychotactics I didn’t know how to set this benchmark, but I knew that I wanted to be different in some way. Over the years, this difference has morphed. Suddenly our books, the ebooks, are different from everybody else’s ebooks. They’re different because they have less information but more depth of that information. Instead of pummeling you with endless amounts of data and more data, they cluster around a few important elements.
For instance, if you read Dartboard Pricing you would find that when we deal with sequential pricing, only three points are being covered, but those three points are being covered in-depth. When you cover this in-depth, what you have is the power to empower. No, yeah, power to empower. Empowerment is really what happens there. Over time, this has become one of the more important elements of what we would define as success. It’s not the ability to sell more books or courses or workshops, but to be more like a pilot that takes all the passengers across. It’s very easy to start a course or a workshop or have a book and not have everyone consume it. Our goal has been different. Our goal is how do we get them to the endpoint. That becomes a benchmark for success.
On a personal scale, the Three Month Vacation becomes a benchmark for success. How can we run our business so that we can get away, that we can eat the food that we want, travel the way we want, relax, and then come back refreshed so that we can do better work. That has become a benchmark for success.
Now invariably, the money and the shortcuts and the power and all that stuff has got to sneak in, but it doesn’t become the whole reason why we do stuff. When I go to events, I meet with a lot of speakers. They’re all hanging around the corridor. They’re not essentially speaking to anybody else but the other speakers. All of them are saying exactly the same thing. They want to be home with their munchkins and they want to spend time with them at the swimming pool. They want to go to school with them. They want to do all this stuff.
Yet when they present themselves to the world they’re talking about I did three million miles. I made so much money. I spoke at so many events. They present a completely different view to the world, yet when you’re backstage, when they’re in the corridor, they’re talking about being home, about not wanting to friendly, about being sick about getting on another plane.
What they seem to present as success is not really what they feel is success. Going to that school event, going to that pool and jumping in the pool with the kid, that’s success to them. I thought that the Three Month Vacation was kind of normal. I thought that people needed breaks. Maybe not three months, but I thought that they needed breaks.
When I meet with a lot of my friends in marketing and they talk about wow, it’s amazing that you’re able to do this … These are people who are extremely, what we call, successful. That’s when I realized that setting these benchmarks for myself, setting this identity of who I really am, is critical. This is what you’ve got to do as well.
What is really your identity of success, other than the money and the power and the shortcuts, which are fine. It’s just that you’ve got to have that other identity that you know wow, I’ve reached this goal. Maybe that benchmark, that identity is just to get to the beach 300 days in a year and that’s it, and then you know. This is measurable. I can do it and it doesn’t involve that other stuff that other people are portraying.
Our identity is almost restricted to being a fraud at some point right through our career. The second thing is one of success and how we define success, and how the world defines success. The third one, and this is something that a lot of people don’t talk about, is just the factor of space, how space defines who we are as human beings.
Part 3: The Factor of Space What is this factor of space? I was on my way back home after a walk. I always listen to the podcast on the way back home. I was listening to this writer, Pico Iyer, speaking on the TED stage. He came up with a statement that I had to stop and I had to write it down, because it was so interesting. He was talking about home and movement. He said it’s only by stopping movement that you can see where to go. It’s only by steeping out of your life and your world that you can see what you most deeply care about, and then you can find a home.
To me that has been home, that peace, that pause, that stop for refuelling. That has been the most critical element of my life. It’s what gave me identity. It’s what allows me to come back refreshed and do stuff that I want to do.
This resonates with me at a different level as well. Because, several years ago I listen to philosopher Wayne Dyer. He used to say it’s the silence between the notes that make the music. I heard it a dozen times and I couldn’t really figure out what he was saying. Then one day I rushed out to the car and I was telling my wife, “Do you know what that means? It’s the quiet. It’s the quiet that makes the music, because when there’s just note after note after note, we get cacophony.” She gave me that look that wives often give you, like what took you so long.
Even if you go back in time to one of the greatest masters of our time, Leonardo Da Vinci, he said you have to step away from your work to get perspective. Without space, it’s hard to have an identity that you’re really looking for, that you want to create. It becomes what people call the dream. They’re always searching for it, but to create a real identity instead of a dream, you have to step away and you have to look at yourself from a different space. Then you come back a changed person. You’re not completely changed but somewhere some of those notes have changed. That makes for beautiful music.
The Cherokee elder stood before his students and told them of the two wolves that live and battle within each of us. One of those wolves, he explained, is ill-nature. It sees the worst in people and things. It thinks only of itself. It is vengeful, and jealous, and arrogant, and full of ego and false pride. The other wolf sees the best in people and things. It is kind, it is generous, it is peaceful. It is full of integrity and respect for love itself and others.
One of the students asks the chief which one of these wolves wins the battle. The elder replied, “Whichever one you feed.” You’re going to be fed with this concept of being a fraud. You’re going to be fed with this concept of imaginary success, what the world defines as success, not what you define as success. The wolf that you really need to feed is the one that brings you peace, that brings that space so that you can create your own music.
Summary That brings us to the end of this podcast, but before we go, let’s see the one thing that you can do today. Personally, I think it’s hard to get over that feeling of being a fraud. It comes back no matter how confident you are. Believe me, I’m a very confident person. Yes, we’ve got to create that space. We have to say let’s not take a three month vacation right now but let’s take a weekend maybe two weeks from now, just a break. No email, no phone, just a break. Definitely no Facebook.
What’s the one thing you can do today?
What you can do today is to define your benchmark, your identity of success. What is it that brings you or will bring you the most happiness? That will make a huge difference. It will make a difference to who you are and where you’re going to go tomorrow. That will determine which wolf you’re going to feed.
I appreciate all of you who’ve been writing in about this podcast. If you want to reach me, I’m on Twitter@SeanD’Souza, on Facebook at Sean D’Souza, and then at sean@psychotactics.com. If you’re listening to this podcast it’s more than likely that you’re a subscriber at psychotactics.com, but if you haven’t gone there already, go topsychotactics.com and subscribe.
Yes, one very important thing: I struggle to get to iTunes and leave a review because every time I’m listening to this I’m away from my computer, but I am on my phone. If you look below your phone, there is a little I button, especially if you’re on an iPhone. If you click on that I button you’ll get more information and there a link to the iTunes site. If you can leave a review, that would be really, really cool.
That’s me, Sean D’Souza, from the Three Month Vacation, saying thanks again and bye for now. Go feed that wolf.
You’re still listening?
People often ask me: Have you ever skipped a vacation? The answer is yes. We did that once. We thought it was more important for us to work and complete some projects and stuff. We did in four months what we normally do in three. That time that we should have been spending away, we were working and getting more and more tired and frustrated.
Then eventually we just got on a plane and went off to Sydney for a week. It was terrible. Not Sydney, just the week. It was like you just did something for the sake of doing it. It wasn’t planned or interesting. Then we came back and we were different but not as different as if it were planned. Yes, we have skipped it. There you have it, a little snippet from the Psychotactics archive. Bye for now.
You can also listen to or read this episode: #45: The Secret To Getting Your Report Read (From Start To Finish)
When your client picks up your report, can you guarantee they'll read it from start to finish? No matter how good the content, there are precise elements that cause a client to completely consume the report. This episode delves into three of the most important elements that makes your report stand out—and more importantly—get read.
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: What makes a report powerful?
Part 2: What are tiny increments?
Part 3: How to empower your reader
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources and Links Dart Board Pricing: How To Increase Prices (Without Losing Customers)
The Headline Report: Why Headlines Fail
The 70% Principle: Why It Knocks Procrastination Out of the Ball Park
The Transcript
Back in the year 2003 I wrote an article where you just had to take three steps to write a great headline. You could test the headline and you could find out in minutes that it worked for you, and it also got the attention of your customers. I wasn’t prepared for how popular that article would be. As we were looking at the statistics of the Psychotactics site, we saw that the article got picked up over and over again. Then we decided, let’s make this a report. Surprisingly, when I took that same article, which was just about 800 words, and I put it into a PDF and put some graphics and an introduction and some cartoons, it became close to a ten-page book. That is the headline report.
This is the interesting part. The report was nothing more than an article. Can we all do the same? Can we just write an 800-word article, put it in a report, and make it powerful? Not quite. You have to understand why the report works. We’re going to break up that headline report here today on this podcast. You’ll see for yourself, there are three elements that make it work. Let’s explore those three elements.
What makes the report so powerful? The key factor is not the elements but the overall concept. The overall concept is one of empowerment. We are so hung up on the concept of information that we forget what we really have to do as teachers. As teachers we have to empower. We know we’ve done our job correctly when the client is able to do exactly what we’re doing, and possibly even better. Frankly, when I was writing the headline report I wasn’t thinking of this. I wasn’t thinking of empowerment. I wasn’t thinking of the elements. But when you deconstruct the report you can see there are three very specific elements that make it that empowerment tool. The first of the elements is tiny increments. The second is the length. The third are the examples in the report. Let’s explore each one systematically. Let’s start off with the first one, which is the tiny increments.
What are tiny increments? About a month ago I got myself some recording hardware. It has all these buttons and it’s very hard to figure out which button to press and when to press it. Of course you don’t want to look at the manual because that’s really badly written. Maybe you go online like I did and you go to YouTube. There are lots of tutorials on how to use it, but there is all this unboxing and then something else and something else. 35 minutes later, you have no clue what you’re supposed to do. Then I found a video that was only three minutes long. The video only covered turning on the device. Now, it was three minutes long. How much can you learn about turning on a device? It’s a little switch. But it was so cool. I could actually do it. It was a tiny increment.
You don’t have to put in a ton of information for people to be impressed. You have to empower. At the end of the video, what could I do? I could turn on the device. So I go to the next video. In the next video, they cover a little bit again. This is the concept of tiny increments. When we’re teaching, we don’t understand that the client doesn’t get what we’re saying. Let’s say you’ve come to one of the Psychotactics workshops and we’re doing an experiment. We’re saying we’re going to take steps now. I say, “Okay, let’s take a step.” Then you watch the people in the room. What do they do? Almost everyone will take a step forward, but someone will take a step to the left, or someone will take a step to the right, or someone will take a step back. Now we have all these permutations where people are going off-tangent. If they just take one step, they just make one mistake, you can pull them back and then say, “What I meant was take a step to the left.” Now the whole group can go one step back, one step to the left, and now we’re on target.
When you have something that has a very tiny increment, the customer can only make a very small mistake. You can spot the mistake and pull them back, or you can show them that mistake in your report and pull them back. When you have this wealth of information, all these buttons to press and all these things to do all at once, suddenly the customer is lost. When they’re lost, they’re intimidated, and intimidation doesn’t create a safe zone, and when you don’t create a safe zone then of course you don’t get empowerment.
The first factor you have to look at when you look at the headline report is this concept of tiny increments. You only have to take a very tiny step to get from point A to point B. When you’ve taken that step, you can go from point B to point C. This is what struck me when I stepped into an Apple store many years ago. It’s one of the reasons why I bought an Apple even though I’d been using a PC for ages. When I got into the store, I just had to do one thing. That one thing led to the next thing, and that next thing led to the next thing. This is very cool. You see it on the iPad where you just have to press a little button, and that one thing leads to the next thing. This is the concept of tiny increments. You see this in the headline report. It’s what you’ve got to do in your report: just one little step.
Now this takes us to the second one, which is the concept of length. Length really helps in empowerment. Every time I speak to someone about this podcast, I will say, “The podcast is only about 15 to 20 minutes long.” But what if were to say, “It’s only two to three hours long’? There would be a very clear difference. When you say 15 to 20 minutes long people think, “I could go for a little walk and I could listen to the podcast.” This principle of length is critical, especially when a customer doesn’t know you that well and you have to get your message across without going crazy on them. It has helped me when I was trying to work out that audio hardware. I just had to deal with three minutes, and then after that the next three minutes, and then the next three minutes. Every one of those three-minute capsules, they empowered me. They moved me forward. The headline report does this in a really fascinating way. It moves youforward. Within ten pages, you’re done. Now the question arises: Is that it? Is that all you could write about headlines? No, of course not. You could write 300 pages or 500 pages. There is a wealth of information in the world of headlines. But do you have to put in the report?
The core of empowerment is simply one of length. When there is not too much of it, someone is able to consume it. Once they’re able to consume it, you have empowered them. You know that because you can get them to teach you what you’ve just taught them and they will do that spectacularly well. We take the first concept, which is tiny increments, and we take the second concept, which is length, and that leaves us with just the third one.
What is the third concept? The third concept is simply one of examples and case studies. When you listen to this podcast, you got a whole bunch of examples about the recording device and how I had to fiddle with it. You also got the example of how the iPad worked, and of course my visit to the Apple store for the first time in 2008. Those were examples. Why were those examples there? They weren’t just random stuff. For one thing, the example lowers that intimidation factor.
Immediately you’re taken on a little side journey, a little detour. That helps you to focus on the idea, but it also helps you understand the concept in greater detail. When you look at the headline report you’ll find that there is an example of how the headline is being built stage by stage. If all you had was a concept of how to write a headline without the example it would be so much more dreary and harder to achieve the same result. As a teacher, that’s your goal. Your goal is to empower. Examples empower. Case studies empower. Stories empower. Go down that path and put it in your report. Whether you’re reading The Brain Audit, or Pricing,or any book, you will find that we use this concept. That’s what clients read and go, “Wow, I should delve more into this stuff.” The biggest problem that we have is we know too much. We try to put all that too much into our reports, into our books, into our presentations. Does it empower? It’s easy to give information. A lot of people are giving a lot of information. It’s all stuff coming at you left, right, and center, and you don’t know where to go. Your client doesn’t know where to go either.
Have this little guiding light of empowerment and everything changes. We started out with a report. We started out with just a little article, but that article had steps, and it went from one step to another to another. When it got into the report stage it was clearer because of the graphics, because of the layout. That’s how you should go about writing your report. Think about empowerment and think about the three things that we’ve covered today. The first thing that we covered today was tiny increments. Remember that even if you say take one step, people can steps in all directions, show you take very tiny steps. The second thing is one of length. A three-hour podcast, a 300-page report, very interesting but no one’s going to read it. You want to keep it simple. You want to keep it within ten or 12 pages. Finally, you want to reduce that intimidation factor. It’s very hard to understand the new concept. Having examples, having stories, having case studies, this really makes it easier for me to figure out what you’re saying.
Which brings us to the end of this podcast. What is the one thing that you can do? I think the one thing that you should do is to just boil it down to three things. You’ve seen how this podcast just covers three elements. If I wanted to write a book on how to create a great report, I could write 200 pages. But this podcast, it’s a report. It’s just got three points, three simple points, and you’ve been empowered. I think you should do the same. Just jot down three points. I know there are 700 points on the topic. Just focus on three and you’ll have a report that someone actually consumes. Now isn’t that a novel idea?
What have we been doing in the past six weeks or so? If you’ve been following this podcast, you know that we went off to Washington D.C. to have the information products workshop. It’s just 25-30 people in a room. Everyone gets to know each other. Everyone works with each other. It’s an amazing event. We don’t do the Psychotactics workshops very often, so if you ever get a chance to get to a Psychotactics workshop, you should come. It’s empowerment at its very best. You’ll see it at the workshop. From there we flew to Denver and I presented at the Opera House in Denver and lost my voice, got it back, struggled through the whole episode. My wife gave me an eight on ten. She has given me a -2 in the past, so I think I did a pretty good job. That comes down to practice and getting all your act together.
During the event, some things went wrong for speakers. The video didn’t show up at the right time, or it didn’t sync with the audio. The way to solve this problem is to do all of the groundwork. I was there a few days in advance, getting over the tiredness factor, making sure that I knew the length of the stage, looking for any light distractions. Because when you’re on a stage a lot of lights hit you, especially on a stage of that size. You need to know where you need to stop before light hits you in the face and you can’t see a thing. You also need to speak to the audio and the video people, because they recommended stuff to me that ensured our whole presentation was absolutely flawless. There’s a lot of background stuff that you have to do, and that marks you out as a professional. I was completely hampered on stage there. I was sniffling and I could barely speak, but that eight on ten, that was because of all the groundwork that went before. As much as I would have liked to get full marks from my wife, at least I was able to struggle to an eight. You know it goes well because when you step out of the auditorium, people come up to you and go, “I’m going to make this fix today. I’m going to make this change today.” You have empowered them.
Once we finished with all of the work and the presentations, we went on to Sardinia. We had a great time. Sardinia is this big island off Italy. You’ve probably heard of Sicily. If you look to the left, there is Sardinia. The food is absolutely stunning. We go on vacations because of the food. We really don’t care that much about the monuments. The food has to be good. We gorged a lot and we walked a lot of slopes. That’s how we keep our weight in check. Three weeks in Sardinia, a stopover in San Francisco, and now we’re back in New Zealand. I have to admit it’s been hard getting back to work, even though it’s been a week. This nasty cough that started in Washington D.C. followed me through Denver, through Sardinia, through San Francisco. It’s okay now but it’s been a long run. Nonetheless, it was worth doing the info products course in Washington D.C..
If you missed that, then I would strongly suggest that you get the home study. It’s not cheap but it helps you construct that book. You go from this report and you can create audio, video or webinars, but not just any old webinar or any audio or book, but stuff that empowers and empowers in a big way. You can find that in the product section of the Psychotactics site. If you’re not looking for something quite that big, you might want to check out Dartboard Pricing, because if nothing else you want to increase your prices without losing customers. You can find that at psychotactics.com/ttc. If on the other hand you want to send me a message, I’m at @SeanD’Souza on Twitter, Sean D’Souza on Facebook, and of course on Psychotactics at sean@psychotactics.com. If you’re wondering how you can deconstruct the headline report, you can go to psychotactics.com and subscribe, and you will get the headline report. If you’ve already subscribed, go to psychotactics.com/psychoheadlines.pdf, and there it is just for you. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now. You can also listen to or read this episode: #8:The Power of Enough—And Why It’s Critical To Your Sanity
How much is enough? And where do you stop? It's easy to get all wrapped up in this whole concept of passive income and how smart it seems. Yet, you can work yourself crazy if you're not careful. You can work too much, do too much?but even vacation too much. Understanding the power of enough allows you to have a great business plan and a great vacation plan. Whether you're in online marketing or just have a small business, your strategy should be about "enough".
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Some goodies
To find more podcast options, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast
To get a short, yet beautiful headline report on "Why Headlines Fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com
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Transcript: Power of Enough
Sean D'Souza: There's a comic strip called Calvin and Hobbes. Obviously, many of you have read it. In one panel, Calvin is ramping up for Christmas and so is Hobbes. Calvin asks Hobbes, he says, "What did you get on your list for Santa for Christmas?" Hobbes says, "I asked him for a tuna sandwich," and Calvin goes ballistic. He's like, "How could you do that?! I asked him for a rocket launcher, a train," and he brings up a list that's a mile long.
Of course, the scene shifts to the day that's Christmas Day and Calvin is stomping around the house shouting, "I'm going to sue Santa!" Obviously, because he's got nothing and there's Hobbes, ever the philosopher and saying, "Well, I got my tuna sandwich." At this point, I turn to people and ask them, "Do you know what your tuna sandwich is?"
Before I get you all hungry for sandwiches, let's talk about the first episode. I don't know if you've listened to the first episode, but it was outsourcing versus magic. You need to go to number one and start listening from number one, not because they're in sequence, but just because the first episode is so important. It's just the philosophy and this is another philosophy piece. It's about the power of enough. What is the power of enough? What is our tuna sandwich?
One of the things that probably drives us crazy is this keeping up with the Joneses. A good example would be just the three month vacation, so let's say you take three months off this year. Then what do you do next year? Do you take four months off? What about the year after next? Six months off? I could go on, but how long would I go on? Six, eight, ten, twelve? What is the limit?
When we run our businesses, one of the quests is just customers. We want more and more and more customers and the reason for more and more customers is not because we love more and more customers, but because it represents money and it represents more money and more money and more money. For me, money is like fuel. It's like putting fuel in a car. It's finite. You have a fuel tank and you fill it up and then as it empties itself out, you make sure that you never run out of the fuel, but you don't go out there and you store up more and more and more and more because there is a price to pay and that price is that the whole thing might just blow up in your face one day.
So we had to work out our own tuna sandwich. At Psychotactics, we had to define what was our enough. For instance, we have a membership site at 5000bc.com and when you go to 5000bc, you'll find that our membership hasn't dramatically increased from the year 2003, 2004. Considering the year that we are in right now, you'd say, "What's happened?", but the point is that we don't have to double or treble the number of members that we have currently. Sure, some members leave and you have to replace those members with other members, but there isn't enough. There is actually a benchmark at 5000bc of how many members we're willing to accept.
The reason is very simple. It's like having kids around the place. I mean, you have x number of kids and you can handle them, you can look after them, but if you have an enormous number, you can't really give them your attention. The same thing applies to our courses. We do an article writing course. We do a cartooning course. We do copyrighting courses. We do a lot of courses online and we always have waiting lists. Now, when you consider that some of the courses are $3,000 or $5,000, it's very easy to sneak in a few and make another 10, 20, $30,000. Who's going to ask you? Who's going to say, "Hey, you've got three or four more." Who's going to say that? No one's going to say that. Still, we have a limit. We have our enough.
If you come to a workshop like any workshop that we have; we don't have them very often because we know what is our enough, but when we do have a workshop, you have a maximum of thirty-five people in the room. Could we get more than thirty-five people in a room? Of course we could, but at thirty-five, we stop because once it goes beyond thirty-five, you stop becoming a teacher and you start becoming a preacher. It just becomes a blah blah session. You can't really help people.
At least when it comes to work, we have our courses, our workshops, our membership sites. It's all based on a factor of enough, of a limit, a fuel tank and we're not going to overfill that tank. You might say that well, it's easy for you because you are already established. You've been in this business for over twelve years. What about me who's just starting out? The point is that our workshops, our courses, our membership site, they had these limits right at the start. It wasn't something we figured out along the way and while we did really well at work stuff, we didn't really figure out our vacation bit.
When we started, we figure nine months of work and three months of vacation seems like a fair deal, but we didn't understand what the concept of the three months vacation was all about. We overdid it. Now, you'd say how can you overdo a vacation? But you can. The first year we took a vacation was in 2004. We had just started out business towards the end of 2002, so within a year of starting up, we just decided that's it. We're going to take a three month vacation and we took three months off and it drove us crazy. We weren't enjoying that time that we were supposed to spend because it seemed endless. It seemed like we had to fill in those days.
Then of course when you come back from the vacation, there's this big void. You've not been working for so long, you don't feel like working anymore or for a very long time, so we had to juggle it a bit. We had to go okay, let's try six weeks and we tried six weeks and six weeks was too long. Then we tried four weeks and that was too long. Three weeks seemed just right, so three weeks plus a week of going back and forth to whichever place, so we never go directly to a place, we'd stop over for a couple of days. On the way back, we'd stop over a couple of days, so we're away one month at a time. We realize what is enough: Three weeks plus a week of travel and that is enough.
But it's really crazy to have a running tally that continues to increase. You're continuing to add holidays or money or whatever to where you're just putting in more and more fuel into that tank. For what reason? While I'm an information junkie - I just love information. I'm learning in design and Photoshop and my camera, which is the X100, that's a Fuji film. At the same point, I'll be tackling lettering and studying some stuff on learning, etc., but even that has that point of enough.
Often when I'm talking about how I go for a walk with my iPhone loaded with audio books and podcasts and stuff and people think well, you must be doing that all the time; you're completely crazy. Yes, of course, a person like that would be completely crazy, but today I was listening to Billy Joel and all of this summer, I will be listening to Andrea Bocelli, so you have to understand what is enough.
This brings us full circle to Calvin and Hobbes. Sometimes, we just slip into the Calvin mode. We overdo stuff. We are built to overdo stuff. We want to be part of the human race where we're always going to just push our comfort zone quite a bit actually, so we always have to get into the Calvin mode and then decide I want to be like Hobbes sometimes. In fact, I want to be like Hobbes a lot. I want a tuna sandwich.
So what's your action plan? It's simple, really. Think about it. How many customers do you want? How many people do you want at your workshop? How much money do you want to make from now to whenever, just a finite amount. Maybe even how much silence do you need? Everything with definition becomes a fuel tank and you fill it and you're happy and you have enough.
Coming up next week, we have the bikini principle. Interesting topic, isn't it? It's appropriate because it's summer here in New Zealand. I know it's freezing in other parts of the world, but it's appropriate here. We're going to find out exactly what is this bikini principle and how does it apply to stuff that's not related to the beach at all?
We learned a very good lesson when we were selling the brain audit about this bikini principle and it has stayed with me. It was one of the most read posts when we first had the consumption blog which no longer exists because there were too many blogs to manage, but it was one of the most read posts ever.
If you've been a subscriber, then you know that you automatically get the downloads on your phone or on your computer if you subscribe to iTunes. You can also get our podcast on Stitcher and hopefully soon on SoundCloud and finally, if you don't have any of the above, then you can get the RSS feed, so go to Psychotactics.com/podcast and you can find the RSS feed there.
Oh and before I go, be sure to leave a review for us because it's really important. It really helps me look at the review, look at E-comments and I feel much happier and you want to keep me happy, don't you? If you have any feedback, you also want to write to me at Sean@psychotactics.com. Anything you'd like to see or listen to anything you don't like, just write to me at Sean@psychotactics.com. I actually implement the feedback. We've come to almost twelve minutes of this podcast, so that's enough so I'll say bye for now. Bye bye.
This episode has been brought to you by the Three Month Vacation which is at Psychotactics.com.
Vacations are like a project. There's a before-vacation and an after-vacation period that needs to be carefully managed. After years of taking vacations?and that too thrice a year, we have to do a lot of planning. So how do we make sure everything works when we're away? How do we make sure we don't get tempted by e-mail and work while on vacation? And how do you manage a smooth re-entry back to work? These super-duper secrets are yours for the taking in this super-duper episode.
Contact Me:
On Twitter: seandsouza
On e-mail at: sean@psychotactics.com
http://www.psychotactics.com (For all notifications and super-duper newsletters).
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: How to handle the recurring elements of a business—newsletters, podcasts and membership sites
Part 2: Finishing of projects
Part 3: How to handle coming back to work.
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources and Links How To Increase Your Pricing— Dartboard Pricing
Why Headlines Fail—The Report
Psychotactics Newsletter—Weekly slightly crazy, mostly zany marketing newsletter
The Transcript
This is 3-month vacation and I’m Sean D’Souza Right after Renuka and I got married, we decided that we’re going to go to many places and we did go for a honeymoon because that’s what I was told, you don’t go for your honeymoon, and every time you have a fight, that’s the one thing that comes up. Anyway, we went for a honeymoon and then a year passed and we didn’t go anywhere, and the second year passed, then we did a trip to Australia simply because there was some kind of discount on Qantas, but then the years ticked away and then we moved to New Zealand and we realized that 4 and 5 years had passed and we weren’t going anywhere. That was a real problem because inherently, the reason why I quit my job in India in the first place was because I couldn’t go on vacation whenever I wanted to.
Even when I got to New Zealand, it was a problem because every time I went on holiday, I’d be very hassled about someone else taking my work, that I was not getting paid, and so holidays or vacations became a very important part of our life. What lots of people don’t realize is that a vacation is also a project and you have to plan if you want to make it successful. One of the things that you have to plan is what you do before you leave and what you do when you get back. This episode is dedicated to the vacation.
In this episode, I’m going to cover recurring elements like the newsletter and the podcast and the membership site, and then from there, we’ll go to the next thing, which is how we get closure before we leave, and then how we hit the ground running when we get back. Those are the three things that we’ll cover today. Let’s start with the first one, which is how we handle recurring responsibilities.
Part 1: Handling Recurring Responsibilities of a Business—Newsletters, Podcast and Membership Sites At Psychotactics, we are mainly into consulting, training and product, which is really a complete business by itself. Consulting would mean speaking with clients one on one and I definitely don’t speak with clients while I’m away. I don’t make any exceptions to this rule. When I’m on holiday, I’m on holiday.
The second element is one of leverage, which are products, and again, we don’t work when we’re on holiday. We might take a trip that is specifically designed to do some work but while we’re on vacation, there is little work. That just leaves us with the other recurring elements like newspapers and podcasts and membership sites. The newsletter goes out every week twice a week and the Tuesday newsletter, that is about an article about marketing, about business. The Saturday newsletter, that’s the sales biz newsletter. It’s our products, our services, courses. That has to be queued well in advance.
Let’s start out with the Tuesday newsletter, which is the article-based newsletter.
Let’s say we’re going to be away for 4 or 5 weeks. Now what we have to do is we have to make sure that we don’t just cover for 5 weeks but that we cover 8 weeks. The reason for this is very simple. Before you go on any trip, chaos invariably knocks at your door, so what you’ve got to do is make sure that your newsletters are being worked out before you leave, while you’re away and then when you come back, because when we get back, it’s not like I’m keen to sit own and write articles. In fact, when I’m away, I lose all momentum and then when I get back, I’m not really in the mood to write any articles.
What I have to do is in the 12 weeks that we’re back, I have to make sure that somehow, I double the number of articles in some of the weeks.
Even so, I may not finish the requisite number of articles that I require while we’re away. What we do is we run some of the articles from the archives, and they do this on TV shows as well. When the presenter is away, they just pull out old stuff and they run it again, and clients don’t mind. They don’t mind reading the same stuff again and that’s what you’ve got to do. You’ve got to have a mixture of old articles and new articles.
If I can manage to get all that quota completed before we go, well the clients are going to get just new articles, but if I can’t, then we have the old articles as well. With the podcast, we don’t have such a big bank. We’re only up to episode 42 now, but let’s say we go up to episode 200 or maybe 100. At that point in time, it would make sense to recycle some of the older podcasts and this makes sense because articles and newsletters and reports and podcasts, they are not stuff that is like today’s news and it’s still tomorrow. It can be read again the second time and the third time and we can monitor how many people are reading the articles or downloading the podcasts. You get a good feel whether your re-run is actually a good thing or a bad thing and it is usually a good thing.
We also have to prepare what’s going out on Saturday, which is the sales letter.
Sometimes, we will just send out sales letters while we’re away, but often, we will give away stuff, like now, as we’re headed to Italy, we’re giving away the Brain Alchemy Masterclass. This is a complete course of a workshop that was held in Los Angeles. Even so, everything has to be planned and everything has to be within place before we leave and then it just goes out like clockwork.
That’s the first thing. We have to make sure that all the articles and all the sales letters and any kind of promotion or giveaways all need to be in the system for before we go, while we’re away and for at least 2 or 3 weeks after we get back. This is crucial because then, you actually enjoy your vacation instead of just rushing there and rushing back and then going right back to work.
This takes us to the second part of today’s episode, which is finishing of projects.
Part 2: Finishing of Projects We tend to do courses like article writing or copy writing or headlines. We also do books like web components or pricing and then we do things like training, which is workshops. All of these are considered to be projects and all the projects are complete before we leave, so when we look at products like the pricing book, well all of that was completed 2 weeks ago and that’s done. We finished the article writing course, that’s done. We had a Photoshop course for cartoons and that’s done. Now we’re headed to Washington, DC, where we’re doing the info products course, and that’s done. Once that is done, everything is closed and now we’re going on vacation.
A lot of people take some of their work on vacation and that’s really bad planning. That’s terrible planning. If you’re going to go on vacation and you’re going to take your work with you, that’s not really a vacation. That is just work in a different place. All those stupid ads you see where people take their computer and go to the beach, that’s just fooling yourself. If you really want to have a break and you want to rest your body and you want to rest your mind, you have to switch off. We switch off completely. Everything is closed down. We don’t deal with email. We get someone else to look at the email. We have a separate email address where if there’s an urgent issue, which there never is, but if there is an urgent issue, they can write to us. All projects are completely closed, email is closed and I don’t take any calls on my phone so that’s that.
Also while we’re away, we will meet with clients but only as friends. At first, we didn’t meet with clients at all but over the years, we’ve gotten to know people and so we will meet them in a social setting. One rule is very clear, they’re not going to bring up any work, not even the slightest bit of work. Even in Italy, we’re meeting with a friend of ours. Last time when we went to Hungary, we met with a friend of ours. We went to Portugal, we met with a friend of ours. In Washington, DC, we’ll meet with friends and these friends are also our clients but no discussion about work. That’s very clear.
This brings us to the third part. In the third part, it is about coming back.
Part 3: Coming Back When we get back home, the last thing you want to do is work. You’re nice and relaxed if you’ve not been checking email and not been looking at any work. You don’t feel like doing anything for a week, 2 weeks, sometimes longer than that. In previous years, we have taken vacations for as long as 6 weeks and that’s probably too long because when you get back, you want to relax for another 3, 4 weeks. You’re so much in that vacation mode that you don’t snap out of it.
We found that 3 weeks away and 1 week travel is a great amount of time to be away. It’s not too much and it’s not too little. Supposing we were going to Sardinia, which we are, then we stop over at, say San Francisco. We spend a couple of days, then we fly to Sardinia. On the way back, we stop over again maybe at San Francisco, and then we come back. We break the journey as well. That takes about a week and then 3 weeks away, so 4 weeks away in all. When we get back, sometimes we hit the ground running and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we’ll take a couple of weeks but we always have a list of what we have to do and when we have to do it before we leave on vacation, so that when we come back, we’re not blank, which you usually are. You come back and you don’t know where anything is on your computer and you don’t know what you are supposed to do, so having that list while you’re in work mode is really cool because you’re completely alert at that point in time.
We keep that list and then we go away, and when we come back, everything starts to flow again until the next vacation. That brings us to today’s summary, so what did we cover today?
Summary The first thing you have to have all your newsletters, all your podcasts, everything in advance. On this particular trip, I haven’t organized it as well as I should have, and so I’m slogging here doing a ton of podcasts this week but this is not a good situation to be in. This is not a situation I ever want to be in, so when we come back, I’m going to have to organize it a little better. The newsletters were ready but the podcasts were not ready and I’ve had to put in extra time just to make sure that the podcasts are ready. Now they are, this will last all the way to middle of June I expect.
With the membership site, www.5000bc.com, I can’t show up there everyday so what I do is I have vanishing reports. I create these reports in advance. A lot of these reports also come from the articles themselves, so sometimes I will write fresh reports and clients know that and at other times, we take articles related to one topic like pricing or headlines and then we put them together in a book and they become reports and when we’re away, those reports go week after week to the clients.
The second element is one of closure. We don’t take any work with us. We make sure that all the projects, all the workshops, all the courses, everything is done, finished, and we will not check email on vacation. There are people that say they only work 2 hours on holiday. Well that’s their choice but I don’t think you can ever tune out if you check email, if you go back to work. You’re always on alert and you really want to relax. You want to get down to a point where you’re completely relaxed, just like a child.
Finally, we have a list of all the projects that we’re going to do when we get back, because when we get back, we’re completely blank, and having that list enables us to ramp up, if not hit the ground running. What’s the one thing that you can do? The one thing that you can do is to train yourself to add a little bit more to your output, so if you get really good at article writing or you get really good at creating reports, then what’s going to happen is you’re going to put away some stuff and create a bank. When you’re too tired or you have a medical emergency or you want to go on vacation, all of that information is going to come into really good use, and you don’t get so stressed out and everything goes according to plan.
As for the concept of doing your own 3-month vacation, you might think it’s very hard but remember that when we started doing the 3-month vacation, our business was not even 2 years old. We just started at the end of August of 2002, that was Psychotactics, and by 2004, we had decided that we were going to do this. You might not be feeling that brave but you can take 2 or 3 days off and when you do that, you don’t want to check email and you don’t want to have any projects and you don’t want to have any work. That’s when you’re going to get a really good break.
The people who call themselves workaholics, they’re workaholics only because they are permanently connected to their phones, their computers and their work. Once they’re taken away from all of that, they become like kids again. People may call themselves workaholics today, but when they were kids, they didn’t think about their studies while they were away. They enjoyed themselves, and the reason for that is that complete disconnect. You can have that disconnect and you should have that disconnect and that’s the only way you can relax, but for that, you have to prepare. That’s what we do. That’s why we have fun on our vacation.
While I’m away on vacation, I’m not on Facebook and you can’t get me on Twitter and you can’t get me on email, but someone will be checking email so if you have something to say, please email me. I will get to it eventually. About the pricing book, if you’ve already boughtDartboard Pricing, I would recommend that you start reading the first chapter, just the introduction. That’s 3 or 4 pages, and then go to book 3 because book 3 has the sequential strategy. Book 3 is not a very big book but it’s a very powerful book. It shows you exactly how to build your business and how to price in a way that customers want to go to the next step and the next step and the next step. It’s a really cool model so go to book 3.
If you haven’t already bought the pricing book, that’s Dartboard Pricing, go to www.psychotactics.com.ttc, that is Trust the Chef, TTC, and you will be taken directly to that page and you can buy it. The link is at the bottom of this podcast as well if you click on the little I button, which is the information button, you can see those links but you can also go to www.psychotactics.com/43 for all the resources, the transcript and the links to this page.
That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now. Bye bye.
You can also listen to or read this episode: #42: The Crazy, Amazing Trip From FREE to FEE
Is FREE worth it? Or should everything be paid for? How does a person go from free to fee? And how do you stand out in a world where so much is free? There's a simple strategy that needs to be followed and once you do, you'll find client will happily move from free to paid clients. Tah-dah?the strategy follows!
Notes
To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/42
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The Reason Why Your Free Should Be Non-Crappy
Part 2: How Do You Go From Free to Fee?
Part 3: How Do We Get Over This Fear?
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
Useful Resources and Links Amazing Cartoons for your ebooks, presentations, blog: Cartoon Stock Series
How To Avoid Boring Testimonials : And Get 1000-1500 Word Stories Instead
The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy And Why They Don’t
The Transcript
This is the Three-Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. Often in Hollywood movies, you get this concept of the ugly duckling. You’ll see this girl who obviously looks pretty, but they make her look as if she’s got pimples and her hair is not that great. Then, somewhere in the middle of the movie, she magically turns into this beautiful swan. Ugly duckling to white swan. That’s how free-to-fee works.
When you’re giving away information free or even if you intend to give away information free, you’ll feel like an ugly duckling. You’ll feel as if you’re giving away all that hard-earned knowledge that you’ve gained. You’re not going to get much response from it or result from it, and you’re somehow hoping that there’s going to be a middle of the movie when things change and that ugly duckling scenario turns into a white swan. Yet, there is a logic and a strategy that enables you to go from free to paid products or paid services.
As always, we’ll cover three main topics, and then we’ll go to an action plan, so you can implement it. The first element we’ll cover is this concept of why free should be non-crappy. In the second topic, we’ll look at some of the tactics and strategies that you can use to go from free to fee. In the third topic, we’ll cover the fear and how to get over that fear, so that you can successfully jump from free to fee.
Let’s start off with the first one, shall we? The reason why your free should be non-crappy.
Part 1: The Reason Why Your Free Should Be Non-Crappy Yesterday, I was on Twitter, and I was talking to a guy called “Craig”. Craig, you know who you are. He was telling me how he was binge listening to these podcasts. What is causing Craig to binge listen? Then, as I smiled my way through the morning, I got another email. It was from a guy called “Michael”. Michael said he’s been reading all the articles on our website, and he’s been reading them for hours on end. He said he’s going to come back to read some more.
That’s how it should feel. When you’re giving away information, it should feel like you’re giving away something valuable. Not something crappy. It shouldn’t be something that you found in your drawer that you’ve had since 2003, and you just didn’t get rid of. That’s what a lot of people do. When they give away things free, they give away stuff that is not so valuable, and it goes into the crappy basket. Their logic is, “Let me keep all the good stuff for my book. Let me keep all the good stuff for my consulting program. Let me keep all the good stuff for whatever it is I’m going to earn from, and let me not give away all that valuable stuff.” That’s completely contrary to what I’m saying here.
I’m saying that you should give away at least a bit of the good stuff if not a lot of the good stuff. In today’s world, there is so much information, so much free information that people don’t have any regards for free information anymore. If your stuff doesn’t hit them right between the eyes, there’s probably not going to be a second chance. How do you sort out the good stuff from the crappy stuff?
One of the ways to go about creating really good stuff is to go deeper into a topic. For instance, in podcast number 38, it was about not planning testimonials or rather how to get testimonials before you finish a project. Now, a main topic would just be “How to Get Testimonials” or “How to Get Good Testimonials”, but this topic is very niche in a way. It goes deeper into the topic of testimonials which is “How to Get Testimonials before the Project is Even Complete”. You have to sit down and work out how could this problem be solved.
Your clients might ask a question like this, and then you have to sit down and work out this puzzle like a Rubik’s Cube, or you might want to sit down with a mind map, and then go deeper into the topic. The main topic is always usually an overview topic. It’s usually crappy. This is what you see on the internet a lot. When you go deeper, things change.
For instance, with testimonials, you can write about how to get a great testimonial, but then, how to get a great testimonial, and you add something else to that, so how do you get a great testimonial before the project is over, how do you get a great testimonial using six specific questions, how do you get a great testimonial when you’re just starting out, how do you get a great testimonial when you’re new in the country.
The key is to take that main overview topic, and then add something to it that makes it very specific. Now, your brain is able to focus and go, “Well, how would I solve this problem?” When you solved this problem, it becomes interesting. It becomes non-crappy. It becomes valuable to the customer, and that’s when they go, “Wow. This is being given away?” That’s when you’ve got their attention. Now, you’ve got to move them from free to fee. How do you do that? This takes us to the second part of today’s episode, which is how do you go from free to fee?
Part 2: How Do You Go From Free to Fee? If there’s only one word you’ll remember, remember this word, “packaging”. Packaging changes everything. We’ll talk about more about free-to-fee, but packaging changes everything. The moment you change the packaging, everything changes. Let’s say you’re listening to the radio, and you’re listening to your favorite music. That music is free, isn’t it? What do you do? You go out and buy a DVD, or you go out and you download some MP3 from iTunes or some other place.
Essentially, you’ve gone from free to fee, and the packaging has changed. The way it has been distributed has changed. Then, you will go to a concert. It’s the same song, isn’t it? You could have listened to it at home or better still, you could have listened to it on the radio, but you went to the concert. Then, at the concert, they sold you some DVDs or some kind of deal, and you bought in to that.
I’m a big fan of Sting, and I can’t even remember where I found his music or when I started listening to it because I was not into rock music at all. In fact, when I was growing up, a lot of the music on Indian radio was country music, believe it or not. Country music from the middle of the United States was streaming on radio in India. Anyway, I didn’t listen to rock music, so I didn’t know who The Police were, and I certainly didn’t know who Sting was, but at some point in time, that free music came over the radio.
I listened to it, and I liked it, and then I bought a tape. Yes, as we did back then, and then a CD, and then a DVD. Often, the same album over, and over, and over again. Then, he showed up live in Oakland for a concert, and I paid for tickets to be on row 9, so I could actually see his face rather than up there in the bleachers. If you ask me, “Would you go to another concert?” Yes. “Would you buy some more albums?” Yes. It’s moved the whole thing from free to fee, and there’s no going back.
I’m probably going to listen to another couple of free songs on the radio, but the moment I know that he’s got another album out, the chances are I’m going to buy it. The customer makes that move because they don’t have that much time to fill around with the free stuff after a while. They want to get great stuff. They want to maximize their time. They want to move ahead, and you want to create that situation where free goes to fee very quickly.
You might think, “Well, that’s Sting, and he’s a rock star, and he’s known really well,” but take for instance just Psychotactics. When I wrote the book “The Brain Audit”, it was just 16 pages. It was not supposed to be a book. It was just the notes that I had given at a seminar. Then, I went around trying to improve my speaking, and so I’d speak at different small events. Really, breakfast events, and we drive … I don’t know, two hours to just speak at this event where three people would show up, but a friend of mine told me, “Why don’t you try and sell this PDF?” and so that’s what I did.
The people that came to the event … It was just a networking event, and it was technically free because they’d already paid their membership fees at the start of the year, but it was free. They came for this speaking thing that I wasn’t being paid for, and then I put on a really good show. What happened as a result of that really good show, they decide they want to buy the book, so it goes very quickly from free to fee.
In most cases, the people that have bought The Brain Audit online have bought it afterreading free articles that were really useful to them. They read free reports that were really useful to them, and then they decided to buy The Brain Audit. Once they bought The Brain Audit, they bought in to a Brain Audit course. They bought in to other courses, and some of our courses are $3,000, $4,000, $5,000. I’m not for a second suggesting that you’re going to go from free to $5,000 overnight, but I am suggesting that if you give really great information, really sub-subtopic information, that’s when you’re going to start attracting people to you.
A yoga class can go from free to fee, but in that yoga class, you’re going to have to go into a subtopic. If you just do what every yoga class is doing, it’s not that interesting. If you start doing webinars, or podcasts, or just write articles and your topics are just at the top level, it’s not that interesting. If it’s interesting, then customers are willing to pay for a change in packaging. Let’s take this podcast for example. It’s absolutely free. Now, there are about 40 podcasts, and you can go through them, and you can find out the ones that you like and stuff like that.
In time, there will be a hundred, 200, 300 podcasts. Now, you’ve got a real problem if you’re searching for one topic. Supposing you’re searching for a topic like pricing or supposing you’re searching for a topic on how to speak better or testimonials. If I would take the 10 podcasts that were only on testimonials, you’d be willing to listen to that because it would save you a lot of time having to go through 200 podcasts, and then find the ones that work and download them. You’d be willing to pay $10 to get just 10 podcasts that are free online simply because it saves you time.
If your sub-subtopic is saving your client time and it is valuable, they’re willing to pay for it. There are two core ways in which you can move a client from free to fee. The first way is to give them something free, and then move them up the chain as it were, so people come to subscribe. Then, they buy The Brain Audit, then they go to 5,000 B.C., and then they buy other courses. That’s one way. The second way is to take the information that you already have and to change the format. If it’s an audio, make it a PDF. If it’s in PDF, make it audio.
Sometimes, it just takes a bit of sorting like I gave you the example with this podcast where all I have to do is go through 200 podcasts and just find the 10 that are really good on pricing or 10 that are really good on headlines, and that becomes valuable. That’s where the customer is going to buy. Even as we decide we want to go from free to fee, we have this fear, and this takes us to the third part, which is how do we get over this fear?
Part 3: How Do We Get Over This Fear? A few years ago, I started a cartooning course. I didn’t actually want to start a cartooning course, but a member of 5000BC, his name is Joe, and he suggested that I start the cartooning course. I didn’t really want to because I was writing books, and marketing, and stuff. I really didn’t want to go into cartooning, but he told me, “Look, I bought all the books in cartooning. I’ve done all the courses, and I still can’t draw cartoons. I think that you can teach me to draw cartoons.”
I wasn’t that keen, and you can say that keenness just let me down. What I did was I offered the first cartooning course free. I know this sounds bizarre to all of you who have paid a thousand dollars for it, but that’s how it was. Of course, because it was free, it was slightly experimental, but it was still good. About 35 people signed up for that course, and we did the course, and they turned out to be cartoonists, and they gave us testimonials, and we put the testimonials up, and now you know how the cartooning course runs year after year at Psychotactics.
What was a free course with great information turned out to be a paid course. What was the difference? The difference was the testimonials. When you put out information, you’re not really sure if it’s great information or not. Sometimes you think, “Well, this is too basic. Everyone should know that.” As you go from topic to subtopic to sub-subtopic, you will find that the information is great. At that point in time, you can have a free course, but the most important thing is to get these outstanding testimonials. You want to listen to podcast number 38 to begin with, and also to go to Psychotactics and look for the six questions that you need to ask to get great testimonials. It’s also in The Brain Audit, by the way.
Testimonials make a difference. Great testimonials make a difference, and that’s what will, first of all, reassure you that your stuff is not basic, but really great, that is changing lives. Then, you can move from there on from free to fee. Put a price, and then you go from there, increasing the price as you go along. The cartooning course started at nothing … Well, you could pay whatever you wanted, and some people gave me an Amazon voucher, but today, it’s a thousand dollars. That one course with 35 people generates $35,000 every time it’s run. That’s how you can take something from free to fee.
Hollywood often has this ugly duckling to white swan scenario happening, and there is no ugly duckling. That woman has been good-looking and smart the whole time. Your products were good-looking and smart the whole time. They just happened to be free. Some of your products and services could continue to remain free, and the rest of them, you can sell it for a fee.
We’ve covered quite a bit, so let’s just summarize what we’ve learned so far.
Summary We started off with the concept of free not being crappy. They call it the “ugly duckling”, but it was never the ugly duckling. It was always the white swan. To know if your product is really good, go from topic to subtopic, subtopic to sub-subtopic. It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing training, or consulting, or writing a product, you want to explore those depths of the sub-subtopic, and that’s the way you get the attention and the customer.
The second thing that we covered was how you can go from free to fee by changing the packaging, and we saw how you listen to stuff on the radio, and then you buy the DVD, and then you buy the MP3. Then, you go to the concert, and then you go to another concert, and then the whole sequence starts all over again. The point is that over time, customers don’t want that much free stuff. They want to pay for stuff. They want to get from one point to the other as quickly as possible.
When customers first start, they want to test the waters, and that’s why they go for the free stuff to see that you are good in the first place. Once they have established that you’re good, they don’t really need to read much or do much in terms of free. It’s only the new customers that feel that way. After a while, they’re just buying everything in sight. They’re getting value from it, which is they’re buying everything in sight, not because you put a magic spell on them.
Packaging makes a big difference, but also organization. As I said with the podcast, if I just pull out the stuff that’s relevant to you, you’re going to listen to it. Say for instance, just 10 topics on pricing. Packaging and organization will take something from free to fee. Finally, there’s always this fear that your stuff is too basic, that it’s something that nobody wants to buy. Do a free course. Get the testimonials, and those testimonials will assure you and assure your prospects that you’re doing a great job and that it’s worth paying for.
What’s the one thing that you can do today? It’s got nothing to do with today’s podcast. It’s got everything to do with the testimonials. You want to go out there and find out, “How can I get good testimonials? How can I get great testimonials?” First, you want to listen to podcast number 38, and that’s because it deals with the topic of testimonials.
The second thing you want to do is read The Brain Audit because it shows you how the customer thinks, and it gives you those six questions that you need to ask. Now, you can get those six questions free online anyway, but you will find that The Brain Audit is a really good read to understand the entire strategy. There you go. I’m taking you from free, which is the podcast, to a paid product. You’ll find great value, and then you’ll come back again. It’s that simple.
It’s 5:21am here in Auckland, New Zealand, and I’m not going for a walk today. Now, the point of recording this podcast, we’re leaving for the United States in about 48 hours, and I’ve got podcasts to do and presentations to finish. I know it’s an excuse, but it’s a valid excuse this time. I just do not have the time to go for a walk, but when I get to Italy, when I get to the United States, I’ll more than make up for it.
This is a rare instance. Normally, it’s just part of the routine. It’s part of the routine for a simple reason. When I go for a walk, a lot of things happen. It’s not just the health and the fitness, but it’s also that I get the chance to then listen to the podcast, and then listen to an audiobook, and it fills my brain with information. This is critical. Input is everything. Facebook is nothing, and that’s where we spend a lot of our time. We should spend more time going for a walk, listening to the podcast, listening to audiobooks because once you have that input, you have stories, you have strategies, you have tactics, and you’re able to then take your knowledge to a completely different level.
When I first started out, I was on this site by Jim Collins, and I read the fact that he reads a hundred books a year. I thought, “Well, he’s an author. He’s busy. If he can read a hundred books a year, so can I.” I found that just reading books was not getting me very far because you have limited time to read in a day. I found that just by listening to stuff in the car or walking, even if 90% of it just went one ear and out of the other, it didn’t matter. People make these excuses. They talk about why they can’t remember stuff, that they need to make notes. It’s just listen.
There you go. That was my preach for today.
What’s happening in Psychotactics land? Nothing for the next month or so, but when we get back in June, I’m going to start off with the cartoon stock, and you’re going to be able to get all these cartoons that you can use in your blogs, in your presentations, stuff that you just do not get online. Look for that. You’ll have to stay on the newsletter for that because we’re going to have a limited number. I’m not saying this for scarcity sake. I just do not want the cartoons all over the internet.
The second thing is the article writing course, Version 2. If you haven’t done the live version, you want to get the home study version, and that is Version 2.0. If you’ve already bought this before, yes, I’m giving it to you free. Later in the year, we’re going to have theHeadline course, the Headline Trainer Course and The Brain Audit Trainer Course. There you go. All the events stacked up in a row, waiting to land. This has been brought to you by Psychotactics.com. Get on the newsletter. Yes, it’s free. Bye for now.
You can also listen to or read this episode: #41: How To Save Two Zillion Hours in Research (Using Cool Techniques with Evernote)
How much time does it take to do research? Yup, those zillions of hours go down the drain and get us exhausted.
And that's because we go about doing research the "wrong way".
Most of us do our research once we sit down to write an artilce, create a webinar or podcast. A zillion hours later, the content is still not ready and the hours have flown away needlessly.
That needn't be the case at all. Almost all research needs to be done in advance and stored away. But how do you find it once it's stored away? That's where the power of "opposite" tagging", default notebook and the phone and iPad come along.
Find out how to reclaim those zillions of hours back—right now!
Useful Resources
To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/41
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
Time Stamps
00:00:20 Finding Money In My Jeans
00:05:31 Table of Contents
00:06:08 Part 1: How To Take Pictures
00:12:12 Part 2: Why Tagging With Opposites Matters
00:15:51 Part 3: Default Notebook
00:19:35 Summary
00:21:14Final Comments + Offers
====
Transcript
This is the 3-Month Vacation and I'm Sean D'Souza. When I was a teenager, nothing was more interesting to me than finding money in my pant pockets. I'd have all these pairs of jeans and obviously I'd use some of them and then not use the others, and just mix them around. Then eventually I'd go back to the same pair of jeans, yes, dirty jeans, we know. You're a teenager, remember? Then I'd find money and I'd announce it to the world. My mother would go, "But, it's your own money."
I just found it really interesting. I found it very exciting to find money that I thought I didn't have. I don't know what it might feel like to win the lottery because I'll never buy a lottery ticket, but this sure felt great. To me it felt like winning the lottery. There was of course, a problem with this method, and that was I couldn't find money when I needed it, and so it was not such an efficient method. Evernote on the other hand, is an amazing tool. If you want to find information, you can find it every single time.
When I first got Evernote, I thought it was a pretty average tool. I didn't understand it. You know how you sit down and you do research every time you're writing an article or you're writing a book or you're creating a podcast or a video? That's the worst time to ever do research. Research should be done in advance. Evernote is a research tool where you collect all your information in advance and then you're able to find it easily. In fact, you don't have to remember anything because Evernote will remember it for you. In this episode we're also going to cover a concept of tagging that you've probably not considered and that will make your entire presentation, your books and other stuff, amazing.
Back in 2010, I was doing a workshop on uniqueness and we were doing the workshop in California, then in Washington D.C. and then in Guildford, which is just outside London. That summer was a brutal summer for me. Remember, summer is December in New Zealand, so all of December, and a good part of January, I was really tired because I had been writing the notes for the workshop. We always send the notes month in advance for all our workshops. We send all the participants the notes a month in advance. Then once I finished the notes I had to start on the slide. When I'm working on slides, I'll put most of the information together and then I'll leave some slides blank for examples and more information that I need to add later.
The time came for us to leave on our trip and off we went to the U.S. We reached Campbell, California. That was our first stop. After the first day, which went really well, I sat down in the evening and I went through my slides for the next day. At that point in time, I found a whole bunch of slides that had blanks in them, as in they had the information but there were no graphics and there were no examples and I just cannot have a presentation without a ton of examples. That really helps the participants understand the concept. It also breaks up this intensity of information.
I've got no examples and it's 8:00 at night. I've been up since 4 in the morning and been running around all day at the workshop. Where am I going to find any examples at this hour? I go to my pant pockets. That's Evernote. I dig into them and there are 108 notes on uniqueness. Now, not all of them are examples, but 108 notes on one topic and I'm ecstatic. I mean, I'm exhausted but I'm ecstatic because at least I can get some of the examples, take screenshots, do what I have to do and I'm ready for the presentation the next day. This is the power of Evernote. It's the power of doing research in advance long before you need it.
What are we going to cover today? The first thing that we're going to cover today is how to take pictures and why they're so critical. The second is tagging. It's not enough to just tag. You have to know how to tag in 2 different ways. The third is the factor of the default notebook and this is very powerful when you're writing a book or creating a series or doing something which is a current kind of project. Let's start off with the first one, which is how to take pictures. You think you know this, right? Well, let's find out.
How do I pick up stories along the way? Well, I use my Smartphone as a weapon and then I use my iPad as a second weapon and my computer, that's the third weapon. They're all used in completely different ways, but still to capture stuff from Evernote or to Evernote. Let's first start with the Smartphone. Let's say I'm at the café, because I'm always at the café. My eyes fall on a newspaper or magazine. Now, there's an interesting story and it catches my imagination, so what I'll do is I'll take a picture of that story, a photograph. It doesn't matter whether I need the story or not. Let's say it's a story about Singapore Airlines or another story about cockroaches.
I'm going to find the story interesting because it has amused me or it has some relevant information or some facts which are really interesting and so I'm going to take a picture. Then I'll just file it under "Interesting Stories." More often than not, I'll be working on a project. For example, a few months ago I was working on the Information Products course and at that point in time, my entire focus was simply on the course, the course, and nothing but the course. Any story I was reading about somehow ended up being on the course. Let's take, for example, Singapore Airlines.
I found that whatever story I read on Singapore Airlines was very interesting. It was about how their air hostesses are trained for as many as 6 months before they go on a regular flight. Now I had no idea why I found that point interesting, but to be trained for 6 months before you get on the flight, that was really interesting. What I also found was that they were sent to schools, they were sent to old age homes and as I read the story, suddenly it seemed to have a lot of depth.
When you're writing you're completely in a state of chaos. Everything's moving around you, this chapter's merging to that chapter, you have no clue what's happening. It's best to just put away these examples and maybe file them under "Info Products," because I was working on Info Products or "Singapore Airlines," and then forget about it. Now I used to do this in the old days when I had a PC. I had a swipe file and I would store all these things and then of course, I couldn't find anything. The beauty of Evernote is that when you take a picture, the picture has text in it.
Somewhere in the text it said Singapore Airlines. Now, I've taken a photograph, but Evernote recognizes text, so if I can just remember one word or a couple of words about the story or about the incident, say I took a picture about cockroaches and there was information about the cockroaches. It just needs to have the word cockroach on the page. I've taken a photograph and Evernote will find it. That's the beauty of it. I can find whatever I want just by recalling one little fact about that entire story. My phone becomes a weapon.
No matte where I go, I'm taking photographs of different stories, different incidents, and yes, I do tag them and I will get to that. The point is even if you don't tag them, but you remember one word in that entire story, you are able to pull it back whenever you want it, on demand. My iPad, I use it differently. Usually I'm reading on the iPad. I don't really surf that much on the iPad. I use it to read books on Kindle and that's the reason why I buy the books on Kindle, so I can read them.
Then I highlight a certain section. Say I was reading The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg and in that Charles talks about Michael Phelps and how he did this swim almost blinded. I thought, "This is a great story." I had no idea where I was going to use it, but I thought, "It's a great story." On the iPad, I can highlight it. They have a highlighter in the software and so I just highlighted it and I take a screenshot. If you don't know how to take a screenshot, look online, but you take a screenshot.
Then, I send that photograph to Evernote. Then later on, 8 months later or 8 years later, I want to pull up a story on Michael Phelps, like I did in the podcast a few weeks ago, and it's there. I don't have to look for it. Evernote will just find it. It will find all the instances of Michael Phelps and there I've got my story. You can be completely disorganized and take picture after picture, as long as you remember the word or the term, you will be able to find it. However, you want to be a little smarter than that and that's when we start to use tagging.
Did I tell you that tagging is super cool? Well, I'm about to tell you how super cool it is. My system, this patented system of tagging, it's better than anything you've ever seen. I'll tell you why. There are 2 ways to tag. Let's find out how. Tagging is just a matter of putting in terms. For instance, say you took a picture of the Himalayas. They're called the Himalayas, by the way, not Himalayas. Let's say you took a picture of the Himalayas and then you decided to tag it as "high" and "mountains," or something like that.
You want to tag it the inverse way as well. You want to tag it as "low," so you use the tag "high" and also "low." Use the tag for say another picture, "fast" and "slow." You use the opposites. Why are these opposites so important? Because when you're telling a story, you don't have to go with the story itself. Supposing there's the story of Michael Phelps and how the water clouded his goggles and how he won the championship. Well that's a story about victory, but you could just as easily to one about defeat. Let's say you've got a presentation and you're going to put in a picture and you want to talk about defeat.
At that point in time, you bring up this story. How's it going to be about defeat? Well, there is a second place, isn't it? Someone lost by 0.001 seconds or something like that. You can show how that person lost simply because someone else was slightly more prepared. Every story has 2 sides. It depends on how you look at it. It's about winning and losing, about high and low, about fast and slow. Everything can be tagged in several ways. In fact, that's what I do for all my cartoons.
You know that I draw cartoons on a regular basis. When I draw the cartoons, I tag them, but I tag them both ways. If you're in a hurry you just tag them "high" and "low" and "fast" and "slow," but if you've got a thesaurus at hand you can put in some more keywords. Now, this is very critical because when you're looking for an example somewhere in the future 3 months from now, 6 years from now, you might type a term like "flexibility." Of course you'd be expecting all the stories that show up to be about people doing yoga, but in fact you will get a story about inflexibility.
Then you can run this contrasty kind of story where a certain company was inflexible and how flexibility is important. This creates magic. This is the beauty of Evernote. When you file a story, you want to use the tagging system because sure it takes 3 more second and you're in a big hurry, but when you use the tags, which are for and against, "high" and "low," then you create magic. This magic is going to help you when you need it at 8:00 p.m. at night when you have to do slides on the next day and you can barely keep your eyes open. That's how effective Evernote is, but you have to use tagging. Two types of tagging.
This takes us to the third part. The third part is called the default notebook. A lot of people don't know about this as well. Here's why the default notebook is really critical. Now, Evernote stores things in folders which they call notebooks. They're just like books and you can put your stuff with tags, but also in that folder. Let's say I'm doing something on pricing. Then I will tag it with whatever tags I want, like "fast" or "slow," or "high" or "low," but then I will also put it in a notebook. Yes, 2 more seconds that you have to take to do this.
Interestingly, you might not be in this mood to put it in a notebook. However, if you're out on a mission, say you're taking pictures of pricing related stuff all along the way. Then what you can do is you can assign a default notebook and you usually do this from your computer. You want to look this up. I'm not going to give you a tutorial right now. It saves you a ton of time because you don't have to allocate the notebook every single time that you're putting in some new information.
At one point in time my notebook was allocated to talent because I wanted to write a book on talent and so every single photograph I took or any note I made, just went by default into the talent notebook. If I search the talent notebook in the future, it will be easy to find it without having to put in any tags or anything of that nature. My default notebook was Talent and supposing I ran into a story about pricing or a story about microfilms or a story about just about anything, then it's just a matter of reassigning that photograph or that story to another notebook.
If you are just working on a single project and then you're taking hundreds of pictures related to that project, then you don't even have to think about it. It just goes into the default notebook and that saves you an enormous amount of time. While we are mostly talking about the phone and the iPad to store most of your information, you can also use the computer. Evernote has some really good browser extensions. You just go to the Evernote site and whatever browser you're using, say you're using Safari or Firefox, it has browser extensions. When you're on a site anywhere you can click on that browser extension and then save that page to Evernote, which is very cool.
Again, you want to go through some of the tagging and maybe put it in a notebook, and that makes it very effective. This is a swipe file online. The beauty of the swipe file is that unlike that money which I would find in my pant pocket every now and then, you can find this every single time. When people say, "Well, I don't have any stories, I can't remember any stories," you shouldn't be looking for stories at the time of writing an article. You shouldn't be looking for stories at the time of writing your presentation. You must not be looking for stories when you're writing your book. They're all there sitting in Evernote, waiting for you when you're ready. Then you just pick from them. That's the beauty of Evernote.
What are the 3 things that we covered today? Let's summarize. The first thing that we covered was how to take pictures. You take pictures with your phone and then you just search for them. Evernote will find the text within the pictures. The second thing is the iPad and when you're reading a book, when you're reading a magazine on your iPad, you want to take a screenshot and then upload that to Evernote. Then later on you just use it. The second thing that we covered was this concept of tagging and how you should tag both ways: "high" and "low," "fast" and "slow," which then gives you contrast because it's very average to say, "This mountain is high," and then put a picture of a mountain. If you have something very low that creates a contrast. That creates drama. That's what you're looking for.
Finally, it's the default notebook. The default notebook allows you to just take picture after picture after picture without having to do any tagging whatsover. It just goes into the default notebook that you've allocated. Very cool. The biggest benefit of Evernote is that it saves time for me and that all of this research that everyone is doing at the time of writing an article, or writing a book, or doing a podcast, is a complete waste of time. You never do research at that stage. You always do the research in advance. That's what Evernote is. It's your research in advance and it's there to be found on demand.
It's 8:30 a.m. on Monday morning and I've been at this podcast recording. This is my second podcast recording for the day. I've been at it since about 3:30 this morning just so that I could have a bank of podcasts because we're going away on vacation. When we go away on vacation, we make sure that we have all the newsletters lined up for the entire month that we've been away and also for a month after we get back. Because once you get back, you're not exactly in the mood to get started right away. It's very easy to just drop the ball. The podcast and the newsletters and anything that needs to go is covered not only for the time that we're away, but when we get back as well.
As usual, you can find all of the transcripts and any other information that you need, any resources, at www.psychotactics.com/41. This is true for any of the podcasts, so you just put the slash, number 39, number 38, and you can go there. You can find me on Twitter, at Sean D'Souza. I'm also on Facebook, Sean D'Souza and Sean@psychotactics.com. If you're a member of 5000bc, we discuss these podcasts and other information and if you're not a member, then you want to become a member of 5000bc. When I get back from Italy, I'm going to bring out the article writing course version 2.0. We've had version 1.0 for the longest time. Version 2.0 is coming out. It's really, really good.
How do I know it's really, really good? Because it's being supervised by the alumni. They're a strict bunch of people and they're going to make sure that I do a good job. We're also going to have the stock cartoons that I talked about, so you have to be on the newsletter list to get that information. That's going to go pretty quickly because we're going to have a limited number. We don't want the stock cartoons to appear all over the Internet. We're also going to do the headline course and headline trainer and then the brain audit trainer. There's going to be a lot of activity from June to December, but for now I'll say bye and thanks for listening. This is Sean from the 3-Month Vacation and psychotactics.com. Bye-bye.
Success is good. Focus is good. Until it's bad. Incredible as it may seem, focus can cause a massive blindspot in our business. So what's the option? Surely it can't be distraction? Actually it's a mix of both that's required. Using the concept of "spinning plates", you can avoid the blind spot of success and the mindlessness of distraction.
Useful Resources
To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/40
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
Time Stamps
00:00:20 Introduction
00:02:20 Part 1: The Rip Van Winkle Effect
00:08:17 Part 2: Chasing Everything In Sight
00:10:03 Part 3: Spinning Plates
00:13:24 Summary
00:14:00 Action Plan: The One Thing
00:14:20 How We Add Plates
00:19:26 End
Sean: This is the Three Month Vacation. I'm Sean D'Souza. Once upon a time in New York's Catskill Mountains lived a man called Rip Van Winkle. You've probably heard of this story. I heard it when I was a kid. I've kind of forgotten what the story was all about. As the story goes, one autumn day he wants to escape from his wife's nagging so he wonders up the mountain with his dog. He hears his name being called out. He sees a man with antiquated Dutch clothing. This man is carrying a keg up the mountain; he wants help. They proceed to a hollow in which Rip discovers the source of the noises. There are a group of bearded men who are playing nine pins. Rip doesn't ask how they know his name but they offer him moonshine, which is a kind of whiskey, illicit whiskey, not legal. He decides to drink and then he falls into a deep sleep.
When he wakes up, it's pretty strange. His musket is rotting; it's rusty. His beard is a foot long. His dog is nowhere in sight. He returns to the village and he finds he recognizes no one. His wife has died. His close friends have fallen in a war; they moved away. This is often what happens in business, especially if you've got a successful business. You get a blind spot. You start focusing on what works for you, and then you work at it and you work at it, and it works even better for you. The longer you work at it, and the more successful you get, the more you have a blind spot to everything else.
Now, almost instantly you're wondering where is this going. Focus is supposed to be good, right? If focus brings success, then what's the problem with having the blind spot? There is a downside, and that's what this episode is all about. It's about understanding that you can have focus and you can have success, but that you can also have a blind spot.
In this episode we're going to explore three elements. First is the concept of the Rip Van Winkle effect. The second is the opposite, which is the danger of not having that focus. The third is the solution. How do we solve this problem of focus and not focusing at the same time? Let's start off with the first, which is understanding the concept of the Rip Va Winkle effect.
If you look around you, you will find that a lot of blogs have shut off their comments. Why have they done this? This is not just little blogs, but big blogs and mega-sized blogs. They've just shut off their comments. Why is this the case? The obvious reaction is maybe they've decided that they're big enough they don't need the comments, but that's not true. Everyone likes to hear back from their customers. Nothing boosts the ego more than having 50, 70, 100, 200 comments on a single post that you made. Remember, when people comment they also send it off to Facebook and Twitter and every other place.
Why turn off that channel? Why turn off the chance for people to experience your blog at a different level? The reason is very simple: that group has moved on. When you look at the most of the blogs today, even the really big ones, they have far fewer comments. It's embarrassing, so they have to turn it off.
Same thing with Facebook. At one point in time you could effectively run a business off Facebook. Slowly but surely, that tide is changing. Suddenly you find that Facebook has all these restrictions in place. Suddenly there are too many people looking at your stuff, but not the people that you want, so the tide keeps changing.
If you made a successful out of blogging or, say, Facebook or any other medium, then it's very simple for you to focus on that medium and not pay that much attention to everything else, so suddenly someone comes around and says, "Hey, podcasting is a big thing." You look at them with skepticism because you tried podcasting four or five years ago and now this stuff, whatever you're doing right now, is still working for you, so you get into that moonshine mode. You fall fast asleep, and that becomes your blind spot.
This is true even for us at Psychotactics. We had a blog going around 2003 before blogs became popular in 2005l; we dropped it. We had podcasts going around 2008-2009 before podcasting became popular; we dropped it. We never really stepped onto YouTube or Facebook or Twitter in a big way, or even a small way. The reason why we did that is because we had a blind spot. We had courses that were filling up super fast. I mean every single course fills up in less than an hour. We've had workshops in New Zealand, in the US, Canada, Netherlands, the UK, and they all fill up almost instantly.
Of course we send out a newsletter weekly. We've done so since 2002 without missing a single week. We're able to sell products for as little as 9.99 all the way up to $400, $500. When you look at that kind of model, you say, "Well, that's good, isn't it? It's great focus," and it is. But the ecosystem is connected. When we first started out in 2002, if we wrote an article and we published it on another site we'd get 200 subscribers. Yes, for a single article. Then we had the blogs come out and we'd get about 50 to 60 subscribers per article. Recently, with all those comments of the blogs turned off, we probably get 2 or 3. We're talking about really big blogs. You would think that the really big blogs would drive traffic towards you. It's not true anymore. They've had to relook their strategy; we've had to relook our strategy. Focus is a great thing, but things can change around you and you've got to be watching for what's happening around you.
This takes us to our second part of today, which is chasing everything that is around you. The opposite of focus is distraction. Most of us are not very good at focus. We are very good at being distracted. Every time someone comes up and says, "Hey, here's a new method," they just put the word new, improved, and we're off like a bullet. It's almost like the diet syndrome: the South Beach Diet, the paleo diet, the Atkins diet, the Zone diet, every single diet. We think that the next diet is going to solve our problem, but it never does.
It's the same thing for business. If you get into doing, say, podcasting, then you have to be prepared to enjoy it. You have to be prepared to love what you're doing so that you can do it for the next five years or ten years. When we do our courses, they're very tough. They're very tough for me. They're very demanding for me. When we do our workshops I'm on my feet for three days. I never sit down. I'm always running around teaching and doing stuff. Even these podcasts, I've already told you before, they take between three to four hours to produce even though they're just 15 minutes or 20 minutes long.
If you want to make a success of anything you're going to have to be willing to be there for the long run, but as we found out, the long run can change over time. It can twist and change, and suddenly blogs are no longer fashionable and Facebook is no longer fashionable. Maybe podcasting will not work out as effectively as it does today. It might still be good. It might not be as effective.
Which is where the third part of today's podcast comes into play, and that is the concept of spinning plates. In the first section we saw the concept of focus on how that focus really helps but also creates a blind spot. Then we saw what happens when you don't have that blind spot and you're chasing everything in sight and not achieving a lot. Where's the happy medium? Where is the happy mix? It's a concept called spinning plates.
Spinning plates is just simply this: it's like someone you've seen at a fair. They put one plate on a stick and then they start to spin it. It goes faster and faster and faster and faster until it reaches a certain speed. Then the person leaves that plate and goes to the next stick, and then starts to spin that plate, and that reaches a certain speed. As the second plate is spinning, the first plate starts to lose some of its momentum and then you have to spin that and then go back to spinning the second one, and then you can put on the third plate.
This is how you're really running your business. If you don't want to have that blind spot, if you don't want to fall asleep by just focusing on a few things, then you've got to use the spinning plates method. We started out with a newsletter and we've done that week after week after week since, as I said, 2002. The second thing was we have courses on a regular basis, every year maybe. An article writing course is held once a year, headlines course is held once a year. During the year there are several courses, and that keeps the customers coming back. Once we settled all these courses and we have the agenda and the syllabus and the system in place, then we were able to add on workshops. Once the workshops were going we were able to add on podcasts.
People often wonder how do you manage to do all these things at once. Doesn't it get you really frazzled? The answer is no. To someone who's not used to spinning plates, it looks like an extremely difficult task, but to someone who's already adept as spinning different plates, it's just a routine thing, as routine as you playing parent and teacher and driver and chef and whatever you do in a day as you spin those plates. It's just a matter of getting that act together.
Once you're able to spin plates you can focus on your current activities and then add new activities as they come along. You don't stay like Rip did, stuck in one place forever and then the whole world changes around you. On the other hand, you don't start chasing every butterfly that crosses your path. The spinning plates is your answer.
Let's summarize what we've learned today. We've already summarized, haven't we? You need to focus but you also need to be distracted. To be able to get the best of both worlds you have to get that focus really strong, get that rolling, and then add the plate. Once you start spinning plates, people will wonder how you're able to manage so much, but there is no secret to it. The people that struggle the most are those that are continuously either too focused or too distracted. You want to be where the spinning plates are.
What's the one thing that you can do today? The one thing that you can do today is to sit down and work out what are things that you are focusing on and what are the thing that are generating the most revenue for you and make you most satisfied. Then you look at what's changing around you. Then you add just one more plate. That's what I did last year. We were not podcasting. As I said, we were podcasting back in 2009 and then we stopped. Then I added the podcasting, and though it takes so much time, and we have courses and we have workshops and we're going to events and we're doing all that stuff, I still have time for my Three Month Vacation. I still have time to spend with my niece, who I mentor. I still have time to go to the movies. I still have time to cook. I still have time to be part of the membership site at 5000 BC, to do a painting every day. I also go for a walk for an hour and a half. I run a website at 5000 BC. Are you getting tired yet?
These are spinning plates. I'm not any different than you, but I've added the spinning plates over time, and that's what you should do, too. Make that list, and then add to that list one by one, and you will be absolutely amazed, gobsmacked at how much you will achieve in the years to come.
If you like the Three Month Vacation Podcast, then ask your friends to join in with you as well. Maybe make a walking group and all of you put on your headphones, go for a walk, and then you can discuss it later. I'm just kidding, but at least go for your walk and make sure that your friends know about the Three Month Vacation Podcast. It's full of stories, it's full of information, and it really helps your business.
If you haven't already left a review, then please do so, because I will be reading your reviews. Many of you have asked me if I'm going to consider doing a course on podcasting. Maybe email if you're interested, but we are going to be doing a course on headlines and how to create great headlines every single time, not by copying headlines but by understanding how they work. That's later in the year. We're also having a Brain Audit trainer. This is very expensive because it's going to be a year-long program. Brain Audit trainer, headline course, and headline trainer - that will be announced in June or July when we get back from Italy. I also will be working on the cartoon stock stuff that I talked about. I'll be drawing some really good cartoons, maybe about 200 of them. If you would like to use them in your books, in your covers, in your blogs, in your presentations, this is an amazing set of cartoons. You're just absolutely going to love it. They're lavish and it's nothing like what you would find on Stock Cartoon. That project is coming up as well.
As you can see, a lot of spinning plates, isn't it? That's how I like it. That's how I thrive. If you would like to get notification for all these events, then you have to get on the Psychotactics newsletter, because that's the only way you'll know. That's at Psychotactics.com. You can find me on Twitter at Sean D'Souza. You can also find me on Facebook at Sean D'Souza. To get the transcript and resources for this podcast, go to www.psychotactics.com/40, and you will get everything there. That's me, the ex-Rip Van Winkle, signing off for now. Bye bye.
What makes one presentation far superior than the next? What makes you want to binge-listen to some podcasts and just reject the others? What makes one book so readable while the other one is boring? It's the concept of info-tainment. Where information is used to get attention, but entertainment is used to keep that attention. Find out more in this episode.
Useful Resources
To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/39
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Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
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Time Stamps
00:00:20 Start /
00:01:57 Table of Contents /
00:03:09 Part 1: Analogies /
00:09:45 Part 2: Case Studies /
00:10:00 Case Study: Shantiniketan /
00:13:19 Part 3: History Lessons /
00:17:14 Case Study: Shantiniketan /
00:17:14 Summary /
00:18:14 Final Notes /
Sean D'Souza: I'm Sean D'Souza. Every morning when I go for my walk I listen to podcasts and I listen to audiobooks. As you know, I also learn a language, but whenever I'm headed out towards the café, it's always podcasts or audiobooks. I started to analyze. I started to think about what is it that I really like to listen to.
Now obviously you get a lot of speakers and a lot of different topics, so you can't just boil it down to one thing, but you can. The one thing that I like to listen to, and I find that a lot of people like to listen to, is something called infotainment. That's information and entertainment. People like to learn stuff, become more intelligent, but they don't want to be bored along the way. It's not just a matter of presenting the information in a good way. You literally have to provide entertainment, so how you provide entertainment. As part of my analysis I started reading a lot of articles and books. I started listening to more audiobooks, and then listened to some presentations as well, and I figured out the difference. The difference is a story well told.
I like to split up stories well told into three categories. The first is the analogy, the second is the case study, and the third are history lessons. How do we use these concepts to make our information more interesting, to make our articles more interesting, and especially to make our presentations more interesting? More importantly, why would analogies, case studies, and history lesson be so important. The reason is very simple. Information is tiring. That's it. Whenever you give someone information, if they already know the information, [inaudible 00:02:06] just revising the information. If you give them new information, some new concept, so new methods, it starts to seem very nice and very interesting, but as you go past five, ten, 15 minutes, the brain is trying to work out not only what you're saying but also how to apply it, so it gets extremely tiring. That's when the brain needs a break. The brain not only needs a break but it could also do with an example. That's where analogies, case studies, and history lessons come into play.
Let's start off with the first one, which is the analogy. In this episode we'll do something slightly different. I'll talk about good analogies and bad analogies, and good case studies and bad case studies, and so on. Let's start off with the good analogy. What is a good analogy? Well, let's start off with what is a bad analogy. I'm sitting there with this photographer and I've been trying to get in touch with him for quite a while, and he's been fobbing me off. Then eventually we sit at this café. It's about an hour and he's going on into this bad analogy after bad analogy after bad analogy. What is this bad analogy?
He's explaining to me how photography should have strong foundations. He talks about a house that's built on sand vs. on rock. The point is, has he given me any new information? Is the analogy any different from something I know before. When he's using that analogy it's very boring. I've already heard the story of the house built on sand vs. rock. Then he goes on to even more analogies. I can't tell you what those analogies are because I was completely bored out of my skull. The whole one hour that I was there, he went into analogy after analogy, and then talked about photography in the middle.
But I was fast asleep. This is what happens. Your customers are going to be fast asleep because your analogies are not interesting. What makes interesting analogies? You can get interesting analogies from day to day life. I just told you an interesting analogy. I told you about boring, but I didn't tell you about boredom in a way that you probably heard before. I told you a story about the photographer and how he was boring me to death.
In The Brain Audit we talk about the seven red bags. You probably heard the story but you might as well hear it again. It's about how seven red bags are put on the flight and then the person gets off at the other end and they're waiting at the conveyor belt or the carousel to pick up their seven red bags. Then one bag comes out, and second red bag comes out, and third red bag comes out. It builds up to the fifth red bag and the sixth red bag, and then the seventh red bag doesn't show up.
The difference between this analogy and that boring house on the sand analogy is the fact that you know 90% of the analogy but you don't know how 10% is going to roll out. You stood there waiting for your bags at the airport. You've done that; I've done that; everyone has done that, mostly. We can relate to that concept, but the story slightly changes. That's the beauty of the analogy. The analogy that is powerful is not an analogy that you know 100% in advance, because that is boring. The analogy is taken from a situation that we're aware of, that we are probably 90% aware of, but that has that little 10% twist. In this case, the red bags have the twist, and the fact that the seventh red bag didn't show up.
When you're building your analogies, you want to build it in this kind of concept that we already know but there is a little shift in the concept, like the time I was trying to explain how I got stuck. Instead of just saying I got stuck at this conference and I couldn't get out, you shift it just a little bit. I had gone to a yoga class, and after the yoga class it was raining, pelting down. I came out and I was trying to get into my car. Actually, it was my wife's car because, well ... it's a long story.
Anyway, I was trying to get into the car and trying to shove that key in, try and get it open because I didn't have an umbrella and it's raining. The door wouldn't open. I'm looking at the car. I parked it right there and it wouldn't open, and I'm going crazy. Some of the people came up from the yoga class, said, "Why don't you try to get in from the boot?" I tried that and almost twisted the key. I couldn't get in. Just as I was trying to get in, from the corner of my eye I saw another car that looked identical to the one I was trying to get in. The car, the identical one, that was my car, or rather, my wife's car.
I was stuck because I was trying to get into the wrong car. That makes an interesting analogy. Personal stories make for better analogies because they have this natural flow of something happening, then something else happening, and then something else happening. You can encapsulate all of the something else in either a couple of paragraphs ... Well, you don't want to do more than a couple of paragraphs when you're writing an article, but if you're doing a podcast, it could go on for two, three minutes and people would still follow along because there is this sequence. This makes an analogy interesting, instead of the house on sand vs. the house on rock.
I want you to notice something even as you're listening to this podcast or probably reading the transcript. The stories are getting you interested. Your brain is trying to wrap around how am I going to do this analogy bit. But even as you're listening, the story is helping you relax a bit and it's also giving you an example of possibly how you could attack this problem.
Analogies are not the only way to go, obviously. You can also have case studies. How do you handle case studies, and what are good case studies, and what are bad case studies? The thing about case studies is they're called case studies because they have a before and after, and usually they have an in between as well, so they make for a great story rollout. In the book that I recently wrote, called Dartboard Pricing, it started out with a few case studies. One of the case studies was about this guy called Iggy Ignatius, and how he started up an Indian village in the middle of Florida and called it ShantiNiketan, which really means a peaceful place. You can see how he went about generating revenue and then how he built ShantiNiketan. Then just as he was about to sell ShantiNiketan, the real estate market just died.
All the stuff that was selling on his side was more expensive than across the road, and he was destroyed. He didn't know what to do. What happens to this case study? You want to know, don't you? Well, as it turned out, he was oversubscribed. All of the people who bought his condominiums, they were excited to be there. They were willing to spend more to have less just so that they could experience the whole lifestyle of ShantiNiketan.
This is a case study. The case study started out with someone with a plan, rolled out that plan, got stuck along the way, and then came out a winner. This is a beautiful case study. When you look at businesses, you look at Apple for instance ... I hate to say Apple again, but Apple did really well in 1984. Then by the year 2000 they were ready to die. Nothing was working for them. Then they rose from those ashes like a Phoenix, and today they're the most valuable company in the world.
This is a case study. You don't have to take Apple, and that's why I said I don't want to bring up Apple, because everyone knows this case study. But there are thousands of case studies online, and the only factor that you have to consider is one of contrast. Supposing Apple was winning, then they were losing, then they were winning. Or they were losing, then they were winning, but then they lost. Eventually, there has to be that contrast. That makes for a great case study.
Now you can go from the company was losing out and then they won, or the company was winning, then they lost. But that in between, that contrast, that little bounce, that makes a huge difference. When you want to create that example, that entertainment, you want to look for that little bounce, or at least create that little bounce. Then you have a great case study.
What we've covered so far is the analogy and the case study. Let's look at history lessons. History lessons sound really boring, don't that they? It's not necessarily boring. History doesn't have to go back thousands of years, anyway. A couple of episodes ago I talked about the Stockdale paradox, about how James Stockdale was at the Hanoi Hilton in Vietnam and how he was tortured. The topic was about anti-fragility, so the Stockdale paradox fit completely into anti-fragility.
You don't have to stick to war games. You can go to the Olympics or you can go to carrot land. Did you know what happened in 1942 with carrots in Great Britain? Should I tell you? Of course I will. In 1942 there was a carrot surplus. There was 10,000 tons of carrots. They were no onions and no potatoes and no meat, and there were lots of shortages, but carrots? There were lots of carrots.
A guy who called himself Dr. Carrot, he reinforced the belief that carrots help you to see in the dark and that the RAF fighter pilots, they also had greater night vision simply because they ate carrots. As you've realized, that story is not true. The reason why the pilots got so good with their accuracy is because of airborne radar. The British government was very keen that the Nazis don't find out about this airborne radar.
What happened to the carrots? The carrot consumption increased dramatically. Even so, people drew the line at carrot flan or carrot jam or carrot fudge or [carolade 13:30]. They were a lot of carrot drinks and carrot food, and carrots were everywhere. You see how that history lesson could be so instructive, so interesting? It doesn't have to be boring.
Yet, you see speaker after speaker stand up on stage and give you this boring information and more information and more stats and more information. You think, why doesn't he eat carrots? The question is where do you get all these stories and case studies and analogies from? They're all around you. As you're reading a book, as I'm reading a book, what I do is I'll take a snapshot on my iPad, or if it's out in a newspaper I'll take a photograph with the phone. Then I'll store it in Evernote. We'll cover this about Evernote and how magnificent it is in another episode, but I'll keep all this and I'll file this as stories.
Then I'll probably put in a little tag as well so that I know what the story's about, but I don't have to. Then later when I'm doing my presentation, or my podcast, or writing an article, there it is. The story is waiting for me and I just have to put it in, and it becomes infotainmnent.
Today you got information. You got the fact that analogies help. You got a good analogy, a bad analogy. You got case studies, good case study, bad case study. Then we went onto this whole carrot thing with a history lesson. What happened was you were entertained the whole way. That makes you more eager to listen to future podcasts or read more articles or come to the next presentation. Boredom is a terrible thing, and information can be extremely boring. It can be as if you're being forced to eat carrot fudge.
On that repetitive carrot note, let's move to the summary. What did we cover today? We covered analogies, we covered case studies, and we covered stories from history. What we found was that it was important to have this little bounce. You can have a before and after, but the in-between bounce, that's really interesting. Most of all, we found that we can't always get these stories at the last minute so we've got to file them away in places like Evernote. As I said, we'll cover that in a future episode.
By the way, that's your action plan as well. You're going to read several stories, case studies. You're going to talk about how something happened to you, and it's going to happen today. It's going to happen tomorrow. It's going to happen the day after. Get Evernote. Start saving the stories. That's what you can do today. I do it every day; so should you.
If you want to get more on storytelling, at Psychotactics we have a series on storytelling. You might want to pick that up. There is also the information products course. Now this is more expensive; it's over $1,000. But the reason you should consider it is because it shows you how to construct an information product like a presentation or a book or a booklet. It's very easy to just stack information together and not realize that there are different elements that help the reader to learn as well as get entertained. The information products, over $1,000, worth your money.
Finally, the Dartboard Pricing book, you want to check that out if you want to increase your prices and not lose customers. Even Starbucks increases prices every two or three years, and they've increased their prices about 13 times in the last 20 years. When was the last time you increased your prices? Read Dartboard Pricing, and yes, increase your prices, and don't lose customers. I'm on Twitter at Sean D'Souza. I'm on Facebook at Sean D'Souza and at email at sean@psychotactics.com. If you don't want to type so much, it's sean@5000bc.com. All of the resources for this episode can be found at psychotactics.com/39. By the time this episode gets to you, I'll be in Sardinia, Italy, eating, drinking, and having a great time. No work. Bye for now.
We ask for testimonials and we get them, but are they any good? Or are they the usual sugary stuff that no one really reads. How do you get testimonials that are "journeys" and weigh in at 800-1000 words? Find out in this episode on "how to plan—and yes—get outstanding testimonials.
Oh, and I'm at sean@psychotactics.com.
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Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
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This is the Three Month Vacation. I'm Sean D'Souza. It's August 13, 2008. The time? It's 9:56 AM. Olympic champion Michael Phelps is standing behind his starting block. He bounces. He bounces lightly on his toes. Then the announcer calls his name and he steps onto the block. Michael always waves his hands thrice; he's done that since he was a kid. He then steps on the block again. He gets his position, and then the gun goes off and he jumps into the pool.
The moment he's in the water he realizes something is wrong. He doesn't know what is wrong but the moisture seems to fill up the goggles. By the second turn, everything's blurry. By the third lap, his goggles are full of water. But Michael is no longer in Beijing; he's back in Michigan. The pool is a familiar practice pool, not Olympic pool. There's no roar of the crowd. It's just Bob Bowman, his coach. Bob has turned off all the lights off in the Michigan pool just so Michael can learn to swim blind, just in case something like this were to happen, something's that's happening right now at the Olympic finals.
Winners always plan, and this is the difference between winners and those that struggle. The ones that struggle don't seem to have a plan in place. For something as minor as a testimonial you might think well, I don't really have to do that much planning. After all, the testimonial is about the client, isn't it? You just ask them the questions or you ask for a testimonial and they give you the testimonial.
That's not true. The greatest testimonial is not some sugary-coated "I like your stuff. Your stuff is so great." The really good testimonial is a journey. It's a journey of how the customer bought your product or service, the trials and tribulations they went through, and finally, how they came out at the end. It's more like a movie than just a little Twitter feed.
As you'd expect, there are three steps to get there, and we will take those itty bitty steps and we'll get there, and then we'll have our action plan, just one thing you can do, as always. What are the three things that you have to do to ensure that your testimonial is really good? This doesn't matter whether you're doing a course or you're a consultant or you have a product like a book or anything other product. You have to go through these three steps. These three steps don't work in every single instance, but in most instances you'll find that it's very, very useful.
What are the three steps? Step number one is to make an appointment. What is an appointment? Let's find out. The second thing is not having examples. Why do examples matter in the first place? The third, and probably the most important, is not having the requisite questions. What are the questions? What questions do we need to ask and how do we get the answers out of the client?
This is what a journey is all about. It's about planning. It's about storyboarding. It's not just about showing up for your testimonial and then hoping that the client will give you a great testimonial. We'll take this journey and we'll figure out how we get this great testimonial. When you finish this journey, go back to episode number 37. At 37 you learn the specific points where you can ask for testimonials and get those testimonials long before your project is completed. Not after the project, but before the project is completed. Now we're on episode number 39, and let's find out the three steps that you have to take to make sure that you get these amazing journey-like testimonials.
What's the first step that you have to take? The first step that you have to take is making the appointment. Most of us make the appointment at the wrong spot. The spot is usually after the job is done. The appointment needs to be made before the job is done. I explained to you in episode number 37 how we do this in our workshops. On day one there are people that give testimonials, on day two there are people that give testimonials, and day three there are people that give testimonials. What we're doing is we're making appointments. Renuka will go ahead of time, meet these people, make sure that they're ready at a specific point in time. They're seated somewhere. We have the equipment ready. It is an appointment.
The same thing applies to your business. Even if you're a consultant, or you're selling a product, you want to make an appointment with a client. You have to be there most of the time. Even if you can't physically be there, you have to make an appointment with the client so that they know this testimonial is coming up. It's not something you just spring on them. They know exactly on this week at this time there's going to be a testimonial. We do this on our courses as well. Before the course ends, as part of the course, clients are asked for their testimonial. They're also asked for their feedback, and we get feedback before testimonials because it helps them get everything out of their system before they give a testimonial. But there is an appointment.
This is the part of the planning that a lot of people miss out on. They just send an email to someone expecting that the someone, that client, is going to respond whenever you feel like it, but the client is not going to respond. They need an appointment. It's best to get a testimonial by video because obviously you can get the video and the audio and the transcript. But even an audio testimonial, get on the phone, speak to the client, record the call, and that's an appointment. If you are live at an event, you've got the video, but even if you've got a course and you've got 20 or 30 or even 100 people in your course, you can allocate a certain section of the course where they come in, they know that that's testimonial time. That's an appointment. It's fixed. Then you get your testimonial. The first thing you got to realize is I've got to make an appointment and I've got to stick to that appointment.
The second part of the planning process is where a lot of stuff goes wrong. You may do everything right. You may fix the appointment, ask the right questions, but you won't get a testimonial like you expected. That's because you haven't recreated that actual moment. You know the point when Michael Phelps jumped into that pool and was kind of blind? He'd already lived that moment. It was something he could call upon on demand. He was just going back to Michigan, not swimming in that pool in Beijing. To get your clients back to Michigan, what you have to understand is that they have to have something, some form that they can see, something they can refer to so they can give you something that looks exactly the same or very similar.
This is not what most of us do. Most of us just show up and ask a bunch of questions. The client needs to see great testimonials in the first instance. When we're doing a course, what we do is we get them to look at examples of two or three testimonial in advance, the testimonials that we've thought are good testimonials. We get them to read it, and they read it because they want to do a good job. They want to give you a good testimonial so they read the earlier testimonial.
Now some of our existing testimonials, in fact, a lot of our existing testimonials, are between 800 hundreds to 1,500 words long. When you look at a template like that, when you look at a situation like that, what are you're going to do? The answer is very simple. You're going to try and match that as far as possible. When you don't give the client the example, they don't what to shoot for, but having read that 1,200 word testimonial, they know what to shoot for. That's why we don't get one-line answers. Because once you get one-line answers to your testimonials, say you ask ten questions and you get ten lines as answers, technically it's not a journey. It's a terrible testimonial. You can't really use it. You have to trash it the moment you get it. There's nothing there. You have to have the journey, and the journey consists of 600, 800, 1,200 words. Clients will write that out.
Now, not all clients will sit down and write it out, so that's where the phone comes in or the video comes in. We speak at three words a second, so how many words do you get in a minute? Yep, that's 180 words, which means that in ten minutes you can get 1,800 words. That's a pretty big testimonial, isn't it? But the client needs to see the testimonial, and when they do, they get a good feel for it and they give you an equally good testimonial.
In a live situation you think, how am I going to do this? What we do is we take a client who has already been through the testimonial process before and we get them to answer the questions. We get the rest of the audience to look at us asking the questions and look at the response that we're getting from the client. Of course they follow through. They follow exactly what the previous client has done, so we get video testimonials that are just as long - five, ten minutes long. Then you have a wealth of information and you have a journey, and you don't have this crappy testimonial that you have to throw out right away.
This takes us to the third part, which is asking the right questions. When many of us ask for a testimonial we usually say something like "Can you give me a testimonial?" Then you wait and you wait, and you wait. You don't exactly get a testimonial because the other person doesn't know what to answer. In The Brain Audit we have six questions. You can find them on the internet, or email if you like. I can send you those six questions.
However, in courses like the article course we have 17 questions, and that is to get a much richer experience out of the clients. Every situation is going to require a different set of questions, and you're going to have to play with those questions a little bit, not too much. You don't want to really get that creative with your questions. What you're really trying to achieve is a journey. You're trying to achieve a situation which is a before, a midway point, and then the final. What has been the result?
We've put together some really cool templates, but The Brain Audit is a very good start. The six questions in The Brain Audit, you get an amazing testimonial from those questions alone. If you've done any of our courses, or if you want the questions, just email me at sean@psychotactics.com, and I will send the questions to you. That's just a thank you for listening to this podcast.
Anyway, to get back, the point is very simple. You have to ask the right questions if you're going to get the right answers. Let's just summarize what we've learned so far. The three things that we covered today were first, we need to make an appointment. We can't just send something to someone and hope that something happens. We want to get the journey. We want to get the story. We want the details. We want the starting, the middle, the end. So an appointment is necessary.
The second is we have to have examples. If a client doesn't see those examples, they don't know what to shoot for, they don't know what length to shoot for, but mostly they are not motivated to give you more detail. They'll give you one-line answers and then you think that was pretty useless.
The third thing is not having the questions. As I said, just the six questions that you get in The Brain Audit, they're amazing. However, if you want more questions then you have to ask me for it. The only point about the additional questions is that a client has to go through a journey for a while with you, because otherwise those questions become too much. The six questions, they're pretty good for most stuff. The 16 or 17 questions that we ask, that's when a client goes through a three-day workshop with us or a three-month course with us. That's when they're ready to answer a lot more questions. It depends where you're going to ask those questions. Don't just throw all the questions at everybody.
Are you still going to get bad testimonials? Are you still going to get one-liners? Of course. Some people will give you a single line. They won't give you a paragraph; they won't give you two paragraphs; they're not going to give you 800-word testimonials. These testimonials are pretty useless. A single-line testimonial; five, six, seven line testimonials: they don't really give you a sense of the journey. The other kind of testimonial that you really don't want is this rambling testimonial where someone goes on and on and on and on and editing the whole process becomes a nightmare. You need to make sure that these kind of testimonials, the very short ones and the rambling ones, they're out of the system. Unfortunately, but it's true. The client needs to understand that those two types of testimonials are completely worthless. It's a waste of their time and your time. Still, you take your chances, and 95% of the time you get great testimonials.
This brings us to the end of this episode, but what's the one thing that you can do today? The one thing that you can do today is to make sure that you get examples. You want to get a great testimonial in the first place. Of course you have to have the questions for this so get those six questions from The Brain Audit. Get on the phone with the client, especially someone who's a good client, and ask them the questions. Get the testimonial, and when you have that example, that's when you can pass it on to the next client and the next client. You can see what's happening here, right? It's self-replicating. A great testimonial is getting another great testimonial is getting another great testimonial. If you get a crappy one, just drop it. Don't put that in. Don't be tempted.
Yes, we've come to the end of episode number 38, but remember, episode number 36 is about your three points, the points where you can get those testimonials. You want to go back to that episode and listen to it several times, and then take action. It's 5:09 PM here in Oakland and it's very hot. It's already autumn but it's pretty hot here. It's not usually the time that I record a testimonial. What am I saying? Not usually the time I record a podcast. It's usually 4:00 in the morning or some other ridiculous time when I wake up. However, this is a busy week. We're headed to the US and we're going to do the info products workshop in Washington D.C.. You probably missed that, and you should get us on the next time, but we do workshops so infrequently that the next time we announce a workshop, or an online course, you should jump for it. Because we do them infrequently.
After that, we get on the flight, go to Denver. We're speaking at the Opera House at the Copyblogger Conference. Finally, we get to Sardinia, Italy, where we eat, drink, and sleep. Some of you have asked me if I check email or I do any work while on vacation. No, that's the whole point about vacations. You're supposed to do nothing, as in N-O-T-H-I-N-G. I am looking forward to that.
You can find this episode on iTunes. You can find it on Stitcher. You can find it on the website at psychotactics.com/38. You can find all the other resources there as well, so go to psychotactics.com/38. iTunes is probably the best if you have an iPhone or any Apple device because it automatically downloads it for you, so you can access it and listen to it later when you're going for a walk. You're walking, right? Not taking the car everywhere, right? You want your heart to be in good condition, right? Go for a walk. Listen to the podcast. I'll speak to you soon. This is the Three Month Vacation and I'm saying bye for now. Bye bye.
You've told yourself you shouldn't be a perfectionist. Yet time and time again we head back to getting things done—perfectly. And in the process we get nothing done. I get into that trap a lot, and the only way out of the trap is to use a combination of three methods: external deadlines, internal deadlines and the "version system". Interestingly, one of the most effective tools you have at your disposal is a timer. Find out how to use these methods—and yes—the timer.
Useful Resources
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/
Time Stamps
00:00:20 Introduction: The Great White: The Ultimate Predator? /
00:05:19 Table of Contents /
00:06:00 Part 1: External Deadlines /
00:11:34 Part 2: Internal Deadlines /
00:14:11 Part 3: Versions /
00:16:49 Summary /
00:18:06 Actiion Plan: The ONE Thing /
00:18:28 Final Wrap Up /
This is the Three Month Vacation and I'm Sean D'Souza. When you think of the greatest killer in the ocean, one thought comes to mind, and that is the great white shark. Until quite recently, the great white shark was considered to be the ultimate predator. They grow up to a length of 15 feet and they weigh about 5,000 pounds, which is about 2,500 kilos. We consider the great white shark to be the ocean's ultimate predator.
But in fact, the ocean's ultimate predator is not a fish at all, it's a dolphin. Well, it belongs to the dolphin family and it's called the orca. Orca are known as killer whales, but that's wrong because they're not whales at all. They belong to the dolphin family. The reason why they're probably called killer whales is because at some point in time they were called whale killers, and somewhere along the line it got inverted and now they're called killer whales. The greatest predator in the ocean, that's it: the orca, the whale killer.
It's called a whale killer because they routinely gang up on whales, especially baby whales. Yes, that's breakfast, lunch and dinner sometimes. But no one had ever seen an orca attack a great white until it happened. Then in October of 1997 there was this whale watching tour. They were out on a routine whale watching mission and they got this call that there was some activity. They rushed to the scene and what they saw had never been seen before. They saw an orca attacking a great white.
There they are, this whale watching tour, off the Farrallon Islands, which is just off San Francisco. There's complete quiet, complete silence in the water for about 15 minutes. No one knows what is happening. They know that the orca and the great white are out there but no one knows what is happening.
Then out bursts the orca with the great white between its teeth. Now a great white, as fearsome as it is, is about half the size of an orca. It's about 15 feet, whereas an orca grows up to be about 32 feet. The weight is different as well: about 5,000 pounds for the great white and 22,000 pound for the orca. Still, they'd never seen an orca attack a great white before.
Why was it so quiet for 15 minutes? What kind of attack would involve quiet? What they found out later was how the orca attacks. Sharks, as it appears, are only fearsome right side up. If you flip them over they go into a state of almost being unconscious. It's called a state of tonic immobility. What this orca did was it attacked the shark and flipped it over. For all those 15 minutes it held it in a state of tonic immobility.
Now a shark that is held in that position, it cannot breathe. After a while it just drowns. That's what the orca knew. Somehow they had figured out that if you held the shark in a state of tonic immobility, they would not move again. They would be stuck forever. This is how it feels like when we're trying to deal with perfection. So many of us call ourselves perfectionists, but we're in this state of tonic immobility. We're struggling to get things done. How do we get out of this state of always wanting to do things perfectly? How do we get out of this state of tonic immobility?
As usual, we're going to cover three things and then you're going to get an action plan. You know something? I think I forgot to give an action plan in the last podcast. That was podcast number 35, I think. Anyway, we'll have that action plan this time around. The three things that we're going to cover are first, the external deadline. The second is the concept of a timer, which is an internal deadline, and finally, the understanding of how versions work.
Let's start off with the first one, which is the external deadline. In October of 2014 I decided that I wanted to write a book on pricing. I put it down and got everyone to look at it and did a plan. Then November came along and then December came long, and then Jan and then Feb. Then around the middle of February we sold it, as in pre-sold it. We did an offer. I didn't do a sales page, just did a trust the chef offer, which by the way, I picked up from restaurants, because I'm always eating.
We did a trust the chef without the sales page. That's when I started writing. Before that I was just playing perfectionist. I was sitting there trying to get the whole system together, doing mind map after mind map, writing notes, talking about all kinds of things but getting the job done.
The moment we had our sale and the moment the first person bought the product, the game was on. I couldn't afford to be a perfectionist anymore. We said we were going to release it on April the 13th. It needed to be ready on April the 13th. Now you might think that a lot of planning went into that date. No, it got plucked out of thin air. We just said it's going to take three or four weeks. Let's go for it. That's how you pick an external deadline. There is no precise something that you need to figure out. There is no alignment of planets before you can work out the exact external deadline.
I've wanted to do a bunch of stock cartoons, not the usual stock cartoons that you get but just lavish cartoons. More so in the pricing book because I've got better over the years, but in every single book that you get from Psychotactics there are 40, 50, maybe even 100 cartons. They're very lavish, and I wanted to do a series of stock cartoons, maybe 100 or 200, that people could use in their marketing, in their books, on their covers.
I first had this idea back in 2010. We were in California and I wanted to do it. I'm being the perfectionist. I've done all the planning. I've done the sales page. I've interviewed the customers. Like a plane that's circling the airport, I go round and round and round and nothing gets done. How do I resolve this perfectionist issue?
When we get back from Sardinia in June, I'll just sell it. We'll have an external deadline. Then the job gets done. It's that simple. I'm saying it's simple but there is never anything in life that's simple. You will run into a bunch of obstacles, late nights, early mornings, all kinds of problems. Eventually you get there. It's almost like the Olympics. When the Olympics is supposed to start on a specific date, it's not like they can push back the date. They just have to start on that day. That's the day of the opening ceremony and everyone has to be there. Everything has to work the best it can possibly work. That is the power of an external deadline.
What we have, however, is a backup system. For instance, when I wrote the pricing book they were three separate books. I get into my perfectionist tendency and I wanted to do even finer cartoons so it took a little more time than I expected. I wanted to do some graphics. I went hunting for some fonts and other stuff. That all took a little time, so on the date what did we do?
We gave two of the books and then four days later the third book. We have this backup system. If you're running the Olympics there's no backup system. You have to be ready on the date. You as a business owner, you always have a backup system. If you can deliver most of the goods on the day, then the external deadline works. This is very important for us because we feel this pressure. All of us feel this pressure. If all your information is not ready, if you're writing a book that is, you can send in an update later. If you missed out some of the slides in your presentation, you can send the information later. If you're in a consulting program, same thing. Everything can be done three-fourths or four-fifths and the remaining can be sent later.
The external deadline really helps us get rid of that perfection, because otherwise we're just going round and round and round and we're constantly stuck. The external deadline is one thing. There are situations where we don't have such a big project and we just have to write an article or maybe we just have to do a cartoon, or maybe we just have to do one little thing. For this we need the power of the internal deadline, or rather, a timer.
In the second part we'll look at the timer, just a plain, ordinary timer. Whenever we've trained people to write articles or draw cartoons or do just about anything, what we see time and time again is they spend an inordinate amount of time just trying to perfect their work. Let's say you're writing a book and you have to write a chapter. Now, even if you're writing the introduction that might take you an hour or two hours. What people do is they start editing and cleaning it up and then it takes three, three and a half hours.
The question is: By adding 30% or 40% more, did it become 40% better? The answer is it never does. It has never been 40% better. Whenever I look at the work of other people, whether they're writing or drawing or dancing or cooking, the extra time doesn't add up. The only way you can solve this problem is to use a timer. You have to figure out how long you're going to take to finish a project. How much time do you have to finish your project? Let's say you've got two hours. Well, set a timer for two hours. Because if you sit down to write something or draw something or cook something, invariably you will take more than two hours. When you take more than two hours you're getting tired all the time and your work is actually getting a lot worse. Spend the two hours, and when the timer goes, it's done.
Now we may think that we're improving it. This happens when you're editing an article or you're improving your cartoon or doing a watercolor. In most instances it actually gets worse. If you've ever tried to overcook something or paint a watercolor, it gets worse every single time. It seems to get better. You try to make it better, but the overwork doesn't really help. You're getting more and more exhausted. At the point that you're trying to fix it, you're at your weakest. You're exhausted. You're just unable to do whatever you think you're doing. Having the timer just allows you to rest, to go away from it. Then if you want to come back to it later, that's fine, but don't overwork it. Get the timer in place before you start a project. That's it.
With that ding, we go to the next part, which is treating everything as a version. Now there is an external deadline, there is an internal deadline, but what about a version? Most people when they're doing big projects, they have to follow this method where they do version one, which is a draft. Then we do a second draft. Then we do a third draft. All the time you're getting rid of the perfectionist system. You're still working towards that external deadline but you're treating it as a draft.
We're now on episode number 37 of this podcast, and if you go back to, say, number 3 or number 6, or number 10 for that matter, you will find that there is a huge difference. There is a huge difference in delivery and confidence and style and everything. How can that happen in just 36 episodes? If you go back all the way back into, say, 2010, which is when I first attempted podcasts and gave up, it's terrible. Even though there is so much content out there, I don't need to put that out anymore.
The point is that we're always improving. If you just treat your stuff as if it were a version, then it really helps with big projects because then it becomes a draft, and the second draft, and the third draft. Then finally, on your external deadline, it's ready. For smaller projects your work is going to be better tomorrow. No matter what you do today, no matter how much you work at it today, it's going to be better tomorrow and the day after and the day after. It's much better than just sitting there and hoping that it will get better, that it will get perfect. Do the job. Call it version 1. Then move along and then fix it later.
Now a lot of people say, "Well, but I am a perfectionist." The truth is that all of us are perfectionists. Every single one of us are perfectionists, but we could not live in a perfectionist world. Think of going through school. Did you always score 100%? Think of your driving lesson. Would you be able to drive a car if they expected 100% from you? Think of all the things that happen in today's world and you'll notice one thing consistently: there is no such thing as perfectionism. It's a complete myth. It is in your head, and the only way to get it out of your head is to have these three things. Let's just summarize what these three things are.
The first things is an external deadline. You cannot get out of an external deadline. You can push it like we have, just a little bit, but you cannot get out of it. That's really good. It's pressure-building but it's really good. The second thing is the factor of an internal deadline. No one can control you except that timer and that little ding sound that shows up. Finally, it's the version. No matter what you do today, it's going to be crappy tomorrow, so you might as well get used to it, and you will get better tomorrow if you continue going.
This podcast sounds good. I think it sounds really good, but it's going to be better next time, and it's going to be better in episode number 40, and 45, and 50. Your project, your artwork, all of your stuff, it can be the best in the world but it doesn't matter. From the depths of the water comes an orca and poof, it gets you. The moment it gets you, you go into tonic immobility. That's what perfection is. It's tonic immobility. You're stuck. You can't move ahead. So use one thing. What's the one thing that you can do today? Drafts are a good thing and external deadlines, well, you might get down to that, but a timer: all of us have a timer. All of us have a clock, a phone, something on the computer that will go ding. Use the ding to your advantage.
That brings us to the end of this episode. Now if you want to go through these steps, one of the books that really helps people is outlining. This is especially when you're writing books or writing articles. We have a book on outlining. Another book that really helps is the factor of storytelling. How do you build that story? Look up outlining and storytelling on the Psychotactics site. About this podcast, if you want all the links and all the information, the transcripts, it's all at psychotactics.com/37. You can find this for any episode except for 18. 18 is the great mystery. We cannot put in psychotactics.com/18. Anyone wants to help us on that, you're welcome to try. Finally, if you want to contact me I'm at psychotactics.com, sean@psychotactics.com, or twitter Sean D'Souza, and then also on Facebook at Sean D'Souza. If you haven't told your friends about the Three Month Vacation podcast, do so today. That's me, Sean D'Souza, saying bye for now. Bye bye.
Most of us wait until a job is completed to ask for testimonials. Admittedly that's a good time, but it's also much harder to get a testimonial from a client at that stage. Then we have to get all needy when asking for the testimonial. There are three points when you can get testimonials, and get them long before the client has finished with your product or service? Where are these points located? And can all of us get testimonials at these points? Find out in this episode?and get to the points sooner than later.
What I'm listening to on audio books
Anti-Fragile by Nassim Taleb
The Brain's Way of Healing by Norman Doidge
Useful Resources
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Twitter: seandsouza / Facebook: seandsouza
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic /
Time Stamps
00:00:20 Start /
00:02:41 Table of Contents /
00:03:18 Bear Point No.1: Getting Agreement In Advance /
00:05:45 Bear Point No.2: In Progress Testimonial /
00:09:58 Bear Point No.3: Tail End of Project /
00:12:09 Summary /
00:15:36 Links, Resources and Goodies
Sean D'Souza: This is the Three Month Vacation and I'm Sean D'Souza. As spring arrives in British Columbia and Alaska, something amazing happens. The grizzly bear comes out of its hibernation. All through the winter it has been high up in the mountains where there's lots of snow, and it's relatively easy to hibernate in the snow. Now it's time to feed, but there's no food up here so it has to make its way down to the coast. It's all about timing. It's all about planning. It has to get there just in time for the salmon run.
It might seem to us that the bear just shows up, but usually a mother bear will have some cubs with her as she makes her way down the mountain, so it's not just a matter of showing up but also making sure that the cubs make it, because the cub mortality rate is very high. Over half of the cubs die every year. The bear has to wake up from its hibernation, makes its way down the mountain, make sure the cubs are all fine, or at least as fine as they could be, and then get in position for the salmon run which will happen at a speak time, provided the rains come.
All of this requires an enormous amount of time and anticipation, and we have to do exactly the same thing. We have to act like bears when we want to get our testimonials, because if we don't anticipate and we don't plan, then nothing happens. It's all about timing. It's all about being there at the right time, at the right moment. Or is it?
Most of us think that testimonials are only available for us once the project is complete. It doesn't have to be like that. The project can be very incomplete before you starting to get testimonials. Let's just explore these elements of where you can get testimonials. The first point of getting a testimonials, or getting an agreement for a testimonial, is before the project even begins. The second point is the in-progress testimonial. Finally, you can get a testimonial right on the tail end of the project. In all three instances, the project hasn't been completed and you're getting a testimonial, or at least an agreement to a testimonial. Let's explore all three of them one by one.
In one of my first jobs as a consultant I didn't have any testimonials, so I had to get the testimonial in advance, or at least get the agreement for the testimonial. Here's what I did. When we sat down to work out the project, we worked out the scope of the project, and then at the tail end of the discussion I turned to the person and said, "If this project works out exactly as you planned, as we planned, can I get a really good testimonial?" Of course the client is anticipating the fact that the job will be done really well, and so they will give you a really good testimonial.
Just by asking this little question at the starting point, it makes a huge difference to how you get the testimonial at the end. When someone has already agreed to something, there is more of a likelihood of them giving a testimonial. When they have not agreed to something, and at the end you in and say, "Can I have a testimonial?" the chances are diminished. The first instance is always to look at where can I get an agreement. At first it seems like this is only consulting-based, but it works just as well if you're doing a workshop, just as well if you're writing a book.
Say for instance you're writing a book and you have these graphs. The client or the prospect client can look at those graphs and agree to a testimonial in advance. Same things applies to the workshop. What you're really doing is setting the whole benchmark. You're getting the client ready and prepared. Not every client is ready when you just finished the project, but if you've put it in right at the start as part of the agreement, the chances are much higher. You're like that bear sitting there not on some river any place on the planet, but specifically in British Columbia. You're waiting for the salmon, so you're setting it up in advance. You're setting up your position in advance. This is a very critical step, especially when you're starting out and you don't have much of a reputation.
This takes us to the second point, which is the in-progress testimonial. Often when I'm writing a book or creating a course, I don't have testimonials for the product in advance. Now, I still have to write the sales letter. I still have to send out some kind of testimonials. What do you do? You have the in-progress testimonial. In this case, the customer doesn't look at the complete picture but looks at the part of the picture.
Let's take an example of the book that I just wrote, which is on Dartboard Pricing. It consists of three different sections. Say I finished the section on sequential pricing, which shows you how prices go up and they go down. The customer doesn't really need to read the entire book. They could just read about sequential pricing, and then they could give you a testimonial that went into a lot of detail about sequential pricing.
Now surprisingly, this kind of testimonial is often better than a testimonial that just talks about the entire project. This is the kind of testimonial that focuses on one aspect, and it gets the prospective reader or the prospective client to then get excited or interested in that one aspect. Instead of the entire project, now you're starting to get interested in just how does this sequential pricing work. How does it relate to [kuh-rah-day 06:39]? Why do prices go up and come down, and do we do that for all our products, all our services, all of our training? How do you use all the three different aspects of sequential pricing simultaneously? What is a doorway? Even right now as I'm speaking to you, you're getting interested because what we're covering are elements of that section of sequential pricing.
It's often easier for a customer to tackle a small section and talk about why that section works than the complete experience. By the time you're finished with the complete experience it almost becomes abstract in a way. There's so much stuff to consider, so much stuff to implement. When you deal with a smaller sequence, you're able to explain that in greater detail.
This is the in-progress kind of testimonial that you can get. A customer doesn't need to go through a whole year of your consulting practice. They don't have to go through your entire book and they don't have to go through the entire course. In fact, when you come to a Psychotactics workshop you will see that on day one there are some people who are giving a testimonial, on day two another batch, and on day three a third batch.
Now, not only is this smart in terms of planning, because you can't do all of them back to back. It's too tiring for you in the first instance. More importantly, you can get the customers to talk about that specific moment, that specific section, that specific segment. You can do this for a book or a workshop or consulting. This is the second type of testimonial, which is the in-progress testimonial. Notice we haven't reached the end of the course. We haven't reached the end of the book. We haven't reached the end of the consulting program, and yet, you're getting testimonials that are better in some respects than the testimonials you get right at the end. As we're progressing through this testimonial bit, right at the start we could get the testimonial or at least an agreement to a testimonial. Then the in-progress testimonial. This is very powerful, so pay attention to it and use it.
This takes us to the third part of today's episode, which is how to get a testimonial right at the end of a project, not after the project, but right at the end. How do you get a testimonial right at the end of the project? In every Psychotactics course I have an entire week where the customers will give feedback, and this is brutal feedback, believe me. They also give a testimonial. They're finished with their feedback. They've got it out of their system and now they move to giving the testimonial. This is part of the assignment. We're not done.
Now the mistake that you can make, and I've made this mistake, is to treat it as part of the whole system. Supposing this is a 12-week course and you say in week number 12 you're going to give your feedback and testimonial. Obviously that won't go down too well. If it's a 12-week course, people expect 12 weeks of instructions and then the 13th week to be one of testimonial or whatever you want them to do.
We did this in our eBooks as well. We put in a little email link in the last chapter and people write to us from the chapter. The pricing book has been out barely a few days and customers have already started writing in. Even as I'm doing this podcast, it's like how do I put this testimonial thing as part of the agreement. How do I put it in-progress and then how do I put it at the end of the book instead of sending an email after?
Now be aware that we send the email anyway. If your customers are part of a list and you have them on the list, then you should send them an auto-responder that asks them specifically for their testimonial. In effect, we have four spots where we can ask them for the testimonial, but what are the three main spots that we covered today? Let's just summarize.
The first instance where you can bring up the testimonial is at the starting point when you're sitting down with the client, when they're buying into your consulting or your training, and you can ask them whether they would give a testimonial at the end. This agreement makes a big difference. The second point is the in-progress testimonial, which I think is the most powerful of all, because it focuses on a specific bit. Finally, we have the testimonial you get at the end, not after, but at the end, where you tag on a little assignment that the customer can do or should do as part of their whole exercise. Most customers agree to this. There's no problem getting this. It's the waiting after the project that's a problem.
Yes, you can send an email or you can request for a testimonial after the project is over, but that's the harder testimonial to get. That's the kind of testimonial that most of us try for. You're like this bear sitting there waiting for the salmon after the season is over. Well, good luck to you but it's much harder to do that. You want to be there getting those salmon, those testimonials, as they leap up through that salmon run, not after.
Now let's say you have a product and you already have a few testimonials. Should you go through this exercise every time with all your customers? The answer is yes. There are two reasons why. The first is, a customer is explaining their mindset in the testimonial, so if the testimonial is done right, you will get an insight into your product, a completely different insight from all of those other customers. This is very powerful for you. It's very enabling but it also shows you what customers are looking for and what they're not looking for, because then you can go and fix it. All of our products, all of our services, they're all versions, at least at Psychotactics. When you go to the next workshop, when you go to do the next course, when you read the next version of the book, it's always better, and it's because of these testimonials. It's because of the feedback that we get.
That's the first thing, that it enables you to look into the customer's mind from a completely different perspective. The second thing is that when a customer goes through a good experience they actually want to say thank you, and they want to say thank you in a meaningful way. The testimonial is a meaningful way. It is their way of saying thank you for all the trouble you've taken. The testimonial is a way of saying thank you. It also ratifies that they have made a good decision by investing in you. You definitely want to have that testimonial in even if you've got a million other testimonials.
This brings us to the end of this episode. What's coming up next? We're looking at the mistakes that you make in not planning to get these testimonials. Yes, we are the bear that's waiting there at the river, but things can go wrong. What are those things that can go wrong? We'll explore that in the next podcast. Now you can get all the links and resources at Psychotactics as well. This is podcast number 36 so you go to psychotactics.com/36. The second thing is, if you want to learn more about testimonials, there is a cool book. It's called The Secret Life of Testimonials. When I started writing this book I thought I'd write about 25 pages, because I'd already covered it in The Brain Audit. There's already a chapter in The Brain Audit about testimonials. That's about 25 pages, so I thought maybe I'll add another 20 pages or so.
As I started writing, the book ballooned to over a hundred pages. You'd never think that testimonials had so much depth, but there are questions and the problems you run into. It's really cool to get into this secret life of testimonials. As you're listening to this podcast, if you scroll down a bit you'll find the information section, and there is the link for the testimonial book. Have a look at that. There's also the Dartboard Pricing. If you haven't already got it, it's really good. Two of these books: testimonials and pricing. You know you need them. Go for it.
It's almost time to go for my walk. I go up the hill, down the hill, all the way to the beach, past the beach, then to the café, and then all the way back. What am I going to listen to today? I've got some podcasts lined up and some audiobooks, and of course my languages. What I do is I listen to podcasts because they provide me with stories, they provide me with tactics. The audiobooks, they are more about strategy. The languages? I just speak better Italian. If you want to find out more about what I'm listening to or reading, it's all down in this information section, so as I said, scroll down a bit and it's all there, all the links. Enjoy yourself. If you want to get straight to the site, it's www.psychotactics.com/36. If you'd like to get in touch with me, I'm at Twitter, so that's Sean D'Souza, and on Facebook, Sean D'Souza, and at sean@psychotactics.com. This is the Three Month Vacation, and I'm saying by for now. Arrivederci.
It's easy to just want praise, but that's not how nature works. Nature roots out the fragile and keep only that which is anti-fragile. So is anti-fragility just a factor of "resilience"? No it isn't. There's a big difference between being resilient and anti-fragile. And the key to anti-fragility is to be like a "hydra". Find out more about how you can root out the namby-pamby factor and become anti-fragile.
Useful Resources
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc
Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver
For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/
Time Stamps
00:00:20 Introduction: Anti-Fragile /
00:00:33 The Trip To New Zealand /
00:02:26 The Stockdale Paradox: Good To Great /
00:05:43 Table of Contents /
00:06:15 Part 1: Chaos / 00:09:33 Part 2: Twice as Strong /
00:13:37 Part 3: Brutal Feedback / 00:20:06 Summary /
00:21:03 The One Thing You Can Do /
00:21:41 What's Happening Next? / 00:23:10
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Sean: This is the Three Month Vacation and I'm Sean D'Souza. In the year 2000 we had moved to New Zealand from India. When we moved to New Zealand we didn't really know anyone here. We'd never been to New Zealand. We just chose to come here, and then in 2001 we decided we were going to stay here, so we had to get on a flight and go back and sell our apartment and sell all the stuff that we had there and just close up everything in India.
While I was on the flight I had a book with me. It was called Good to Great. It's a book by Jim Collins. I'm not sure why I picked it up. Maybe it was the title. As I was reading that book on the flight, something happened to me that changed my mindset. What was my mindset at that point in time? It was a complete jumble of facts. We'd got to New Zealand. We'd bought a house within three months of getting here. I'd got a job; I last at the job for six months and then I was made redundant.
The question is were we feeling fragile. That's what we're going to cover today. We're going to talk about this concept of anti-fragility. Anti-fragility is just not being fragile, it is the opposite of fragile. I used to drink rum and Coke back then, and while I'm at 35,000 feet I'm drinking my rum and Coke and chomping my peanuts, and reading about the Stockdale paradox.
This is about a guy called James Stockdale. He was in prison in the Vietnam War and he was the highest ranking officer at the infamous Hanoi Hilton, which was a prisoner of war camp. From 1965 to 1973 he was tortured over 20 times. On page 85 of the book there is this conversation between the author, Jim Collins, and Stockdale. Jim Collins is asking Stockdale who didn't make it out of the prison camp. Stockdale says, "Oh, that's easy. The optimists didn't make it."
That causes Jim Collins to be completely confused. He says, "I don't understand. Why the optimists?" Stockdale says, "The optimists always thought that things would get better, so they would say we'd be out by Christmas, and then Christmas would come and Christmas would go. Then they'd say we'd be out by Easter, and then Easter would come and Easter would go. Then they would say we'll be out by Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving would come and suddenly it would be Christmas again. Eventually they died of a broken heart."
Optimism, it seems, can be very fragile. In his book, Nassim Taleb talks about this concept of anti-fragility. The book, by the way, is called Antifragile. Fragile is something like glass. It drops to the floor and it breaks into a thousand pieces. Then you have something which is resilient and that is a piece of metal. That doesn't break, but nothing changes it. As soon as something hits it, it falls to the floor, nothing changes it. It remains exactly the same.
Then there is something in between. That in between thing, that is anti-fragile. That's someone like James Stockdale where you get battered and hit and punished and pushed around. Everything comes at you, good times, bad times, and you change but you become stronger. I always thought that being resilient was powerful, but resilient, as Nassim Taleb describes it, is being like that block of steel. Nothing happens to it. It doesn't change, and you want to change. You want to improve. You want to get better.
What makes anti-fragility so important? We'll cover three topics as we always do, and then we'll have a clear action plan, just one thing that you can do. In today's episode we're going to talk about chaos and how it becomes part of our life. The second thing that we're going to talk about, how anti-fragility makes us twice as strong, and third, how all of this prepares us for the unknown.
Let's start out with the first one, which is battling chaos. Whenever you run into people you're always finding that they're struggling. They're always talking about how difficult things are. What they're really doing is they're battling chaos. When you're fragile, every single thing that comes your way causes you to fall and break into a thousand pieces. Then you have to stick yourself together again, and that's very difficult.
On the other hand, you have people who are like steel objects and nothing changes them. You want to be somewhere in the middle. You want to understand that chaos is your best friend, that every single day of your life, it doesn't matter where you live or what you do, there is going to be an element of chaos. The people who are antifragile make a friend out of chaos. They go, "Okay, what I'm going to do is I'm going to run into chaos and it's going to take up an hour, two hours, three hours of my day, so I'm going to make an appointment with chaos. I'm going to keep three hours separate."
The people who are fragile, they don't understand this. They think somehow that they will get through the day without that factor of chaos hitting them. Then when chaos hits them they don't know how to react so they fall to pieces.
One of the main factors that you have to understand when you battle chaos is that it exists. It exists every single day, every single week, every single month of your life. Chaos is going to exist. If you don't plan for it, if you don't make an appointment with chaos, then nothing happens, or rather, the worst happens. You get hit by chaos. You're not prepared for it, and you fall to pieces.
The people who are antifragile, they accept chaos for what it is. Let me give you an example. Let's say we're getting on a flight, say a week from now. When do we pack our bags? The fragile people, they're packing their bags until the very last minute. Then chaos hits you. If you're antifragile you're prepared for that chaos. You're prepared for something to go wrong so you've decided that the flight is going to leave four or five days earlier. You've got all your stuff, all your bags packed five days earlier as if you're going to go to the airport right now. Then if chaos hits you you don't care because you're prepared for it. The core of fragility comes from this factor of chaos, this factor of pretending that Christmas will come and Easter will come and Thanksgiving will come and things will be better. But things are what they are. Chaos is what it is and you just have to make friends with chaos, make an appointment. That's your first step towards anti-fragility.
This takes us to the second step, which is how it makes you twice as strong. When we go back to the book Antifragile by Nassim Taleb, he talks about this ancient Greek mythological creature. It's called a hydra. The hydra is a serpent-like creature, and you have to battle this creature. Of course you go there with your sword and then you try to chop off its head but it's got many heads. You think I'll just cut off the heads. You chop off one head and two heads grow in its place. Then you cut off the other head and two more heads grow in its place.
Suddenly you see this is a crazy battle. You cannot win this battle. When we put ourselves back in that Vietnam War and we see Stockdale's captors and they're trying to get him to do stuff or not do stuff ... At one point in time they wanted to present him as a well treated prisoner so he took a razor and he disfigured himself so that he could not be represented as a well treated prisoner.
Exchanged secret intelligence information in letters to his wife. He knew that if they found out, and when they found out, there would be more torture. This is the point of people who are antifragile. They understand this concept of becoming twice as strong. It's not just about falling to pieces. It's you get at me and I will become twice as strong. I will be the hydra.
Getting to New Zealand was an adventure. It was an amazing adventure. It was something that couldn't be foreseen, because as I said, we'd never been here before. Yet all of these things hit us together: the loss of a job, the mortgage, everything altogether. Those who are fragile, they want this certainty. They want this map in advance. We're going to do this on this day and this person's going to show up on that day and this is how your life is going to unfold. They may not admit it but that's exactly what they want. They want things mapped out for them. That's why when things hit them they get rattled and fall apart.
Nassim Taleb talks about the whole economic crisis and why everything falls apart. It is because everything is being shielded. The banks are too big to fail. The economy will fall apart if we get rid of these people. That's the problem. When we make things fragile, when we make our kids fragile, when we make ourselves fragile, when we expect that everything will go according to today's schedule, then we can't be the hydra. We can't grow two heads every time someone cuts off one head. That's the critical part. Anti-fragility enables you to become twice as strong.
There is a third part to anti-fragility, and that is to prepare yourself for the unknown. I know that I'm saying that this is the third part, but when you think of the first part and you think of the second part, which is the chaos and twice as strong, you're going to be prepared for the unknown. The reason why you're prepared for the unknown is because you're not expecting life to unfold just as you wrote it down. You have this saying: planning is priceless but plans are useless. You go through with the plan and you plan for chaos, and chaos will show up.
Let me give you an example. One of the courses that we conduct at Psychotactics is called the article-writing course. We're in the last stages of the article-writing course. There are a few things that I get the participants to do before they finish the course. The first thing that I get them to do is to give me feedback. Feedback may sound like testimonials but feedback is not a testimonial. Feedback is that screeching sound you hear when two mics come into the range of each other. That's feedback. They have to tell me everything that is wrong with the course, everything that is wrong with my teaching, everything that is wrong with anything to do with what they've just gone through.
I want you to be the trainer in this case and I want you to step back and think of the chaos that's going to hit you. You are actually asking people to tell you what is wrong. What are they going to do? They do, they tell you what is wrong. So far we have got 25 recommendations in the last 24 hours, 25 new things, new structures that we have to put in place. This is for a course that has been running since 2006. You know what happened the last time we had this course? They probably made 25 recommendations as well, and the time before that they made 25 recommendations as well.
Chaos has to be my friend, right? I have to make an appointment with chaos. There is this course that people absolutely love, this course that people are willing to sign up six months, eight months in advice, that when we release it it fills up in less than an hour yet, 25 recommendations, 25 fixes, 25 structural jigsaws to put together? That's what you have to do. You have to be antifragile. You have to put yourself out on there. Of course you will get recommendations.
Now when you are the student making the recommendation, you are simply giving your feedback. You're being as constructive as possible, but for you, the teacher, the trainer, the book author, it's like someone attacking your baby and saying there are 25 things wrong with your baby, and wait a second, we're not done yet. There are still more to come. If you don't make chaos your best friend, you don't make an appointment with this chaos and these 25 changes that you have to make, then chaos will come along. Clients will leave. They'll be upset. They won't tell you anything. If you confront chaos, then you become antifragile. You don't become that piece of steel and you don't become that piece of glass. You become the in between, the hydra. You step into the battle and the sword is coming straight for your head, and you better be prepared for it.
When that sword comes and chops off your head, it makes you twice as strong. All of those 25 amendments and the structural changes and all that stuff, it's going to take a month, maybe two months of extremely hard work on top of everything else that has to be done on a daily basis. That's going to make us twice as strong. Then next year when we do the course, again it's the same thing all over again. There are going to be 25 amendments or changes or recommendations.
How do we know this to be true? Because look at your phone, look at your software. The moment a new phone comes along, everyone is all excited and then you find all the glitches with that phone, all the things that could be better. All these glitches go back into that system, and the company that decides we're going to fix it, we're going to make a bigger screen, we're going to make a sharper screen, we're going to do this and do that, they're the ones that are expecting the chaos. They're the one that know that the feedback, brutal as it is, is going to make them twice as strong, that the next version is going to be a better version.
It's this concept of antifragile that makes them ready for the unknown, because we don't what's around the corner. Whether you are manufacturing phones, doing a course, writing a book, you don't know what's around the corner. Being prepared for it in this way by being antifragile is what makes a difference.
The biggest problem with people who are fragile is they don't see themselves as fragile. They see other people as fragile but they don't see themselves as fragile. How do you become antifragile? The only way to become antifragile is to ask for brutal feedback. I know that some of you listening to this podcast say it's feet forward or something else, but eventually it's feedback. It's terrible. It feels miserable. It's not like I went through the last 48 hours feeling like I was the king of the world. You feel like you put in so much work and it almost seems like why do I do this to myself.
Stockdale would have that answer for you, because for Stockdale it was the end game that mattered, how you became twice as strong with all the beatings and all the imprisonment and all of the stuff that affected you, you became stronger. That change, that brutal change, it makes you stronger, not weaker. The weak, they seek plans and lack of chaos, and certainty. That's not how life pans out, and that's when you get brittle and you fall apart.
Let's just summarize what we've covered today. We talked about the three factors. The first one was battling chaos, the whole concept of making an appointment with chaos and then expecting that it's going to show up. That's what makes you antifragile in the first instance. When you go out there and you expose yourself and ask for feedback, brutal feedback ... I don't like any other word but brutal feedback because it feels brutal. That makes you twice as strong. What it does on a third level is it prepares you for the unknown. That unknown is coming whether you like it or not. Clients are going to leave whether you like it or not. When you know about it, when they give you their feedback, you can take corrective action and you can make it better. That's really what anti-fragility, in my world at least, is all about.
What's the one thing that you can do? Ask for brutal feedback. Don't sugarcoat it. You are going to get brutal feedback. When you get brutal feedback, you expect that you're going to feel miserable for the next two, three days, a week, however long it takes you to recover. When you recover, you come back like that hydra: stronger than ever before.
That brings us to the end of this episode, a longer episode, almost 20 minutes and still edging forward. What's happening next? In about ten days we're headed to the US. We're doing the workshop on information products, on how to structure your information products. If you haven't already got the workshop, you might want to get the home study version. It's not as great as the workshop. The workshop if a lot of fun. There's Elmo; there are soft toys; there's food; there's stuff that you don't find at other workshops. If you haven't got to this workshop you will get to another Psychotactics workshop in the future.
We then head over to Denver. I'm speaking at the Denver Opera House on pricing, talking about pricing. The book on pricing, the prices have gone up, as you'll expect but it's still at a reasonable price. Go to psychotactics.com. You will find the search bar on the right hand side and you won't find a sales page on the pricing book, but if you type in "trust the chef" you will be taken to the page, and yes, there is not a lot there but the book is really good. That's trust the chef. Find it in the search bar at psychotactics.com. If you want to get in touch, sean@psychotactics.com or I'm at Twitter @Sean D'Souza and on Facebook at Sean D'Souza as well. This has been brought to you by the Three Month Vacation, and we're headed for one of those months shortly, and psychotactics.com. If you're not already a subscriber, here's your cue. Bye for now.
When we're writing a book, creating a workshop or giving a presentation, we go hurtling down the path of HOW-TO. Except it seems that HOW-To is only part of the picture. We're missing out on a crucial element, which is why our clients get confused. Learn how to use the HOW-NOT-To in your online and offline marketing and training.
Useful Resources
Dartboard Pricing Excerpt: http://www.psychotactics.com/prx
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc
Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver
For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/
Time Stamps
/ / 00:00:20 Introduction
/ 00:03:34 Table of Contents
/ 00:04:01 Part 1: How To
/ 00:06:41 Part 2: Why HOW NOT to Works
/ 00:08:03 Part 3: Bringing in HOW NOT to.
/ 00:14:09 Summary / 00:18:27
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Sean D'Souza: This is the Three Month Vacation and I'm Sean D'Souza. Today I was at the café as usual. As I'm paying the bill, the guy, he knows I'm writing the book on pricing and he says, "Well, why is it taking you so long." I said, "Well, it's because I'm not just writing how to, but I'm writing how not to." He lifts his eyebrows like people often do when they don't really want to ask you a question but the question is on their mind, so I feel compelled to answer the question.
That's what we're going to cover in today's episode. We're going to see how how to is more an intellectual thing and how not to is more instructional, and why both of them combined make such a potent weapon when you're teaching something, and also when you're learning it.
I don't know if you've ever heard of the water test. Now the water test is a test that you do to figure out if the frying pan is at the right temperature. Often when we're cooking, what we'll do is we'll take a frying pan and we'll put some oil on it. Then the oil will start to heat up and then we'll put some chicken in it. The chicken or the fish, it sticks to the pan. Now that only happens because the pan is not at the right temperature or the oil is not at the right temperature.
I was watching this video online and they were showing me how to figure out the right temperature. What you have to do is you take a little water and you drop it on the pan. If it goes vsshhhhhh, then the pan is not hot enough. Of course you go through many of these, until at one point it's magic. The water droplet just rolls in the pan as if it were a blob of mercury. At that precise moment you put the oil in the pan and then immediately after that the chicken or the fish, and it doesn't stick.
Here's what I did. I took the pan, I followed the instructions, and no matter how many times I tried to get that water test to work, and it just wouldn't work for me. I'm pretty persistent. I went at it quite a while and the pan was in danger of getting burnt, but I still wasn't having any success with it. This doesn't make any sense, because when you think about it, I had the instructions. I should have been able to get it right but I wasn't getting it right.
In this episode we'll cover three things as always. The first thing is the importance of how not to vs. just how to. The second is why how not to works. The third is when to bring it in. What's the right time to bring it in? Let's start off with the first topic, which is how not to. What is it and why is it so important?
Let's go back to my frying pan. There I was with the frying pan trying to get the water test to work, but it wouldn't work. The reason why it wasn't working was because in the video they had a stainless steel frying pan and I had a non-stick. Now you might think that makes perfect sense. You're such an idiot. You should have seen it was a stainless steel one. They would have even mentioned take a stainless steel frying pan.
But when you're encountering something it's like learning a new language. You're just struggling at so many levels that it's easy to have this blind spot, to have many blind spots in fact. You're so focused on trying to get it right, not to goof up, that eventually you do goof up. That's because how to is an intellectual process. It might seem like how to are the steps. You're doing one step, the second step, the third step.
But if you've ever sat in an audience when a presenter is talking about, say, search engine optimization, or they're talking about pricing, or they're talking about something that you're not that familiar with, you get it. I remember the time I was at this water color class in Spain. The artist was showing us how to get these reflections of light on a rainy day. When he showed us he went through the steps. This is step one. This is step two. This is step three. I got it.
Then I went to my easel and I got the paint out, and then it all falls apart. Of course the reason why it falls apart is not because of the how to, the how to is already in place, but the how not to. That is the beauty of learning. Most of us are so focused on giving our clients how to. Whether we're consultants or we're teachers or we're training or writing books, we're so focused on giving them the how to that we don't realize that they go off-track on the how not to.
This takes us to the second part, which is why does the how not to work so well. Don't get me wrong, the how to works exceedingly well, but it works at an intellectual level. If you really want the client to practically use whatever you've showed them, then you've got to get to a how not to level.
Essentially what you're doing is you're highlighting the mistakes that people will make. Let's say you're drawing a cartoon and you place a character on one side of the page and another character on the other side of the page. What happens at that point in time? There is nothing wrong with the cartoon. You've drawn a great cartoon, because if you go and speak to 20 people they will say, "Wow, that looks really good," but from a composition point of view, that is terrible.
As a consultant you need to be able to tell your clients what to do and where they can go wrong. As a writer, you've got to do the same thing. You've got to tell them what to do, how to do something, and where it can go wrong. We have this responsibility with our clients to show them how things go wrong, and of course, the how to, which is how to get it right.
Which of course takes us to our third part, which is where do we bring in this factor of how not to. When a client starts reading an article or reading a book, or doing anything with you, they essentially want to hear how to do something. They don't want to know how not to do something. It just drives them crazy to have to listen to all the mistakes.
Once they figure out what steps they have to take, then at that point in time it's a very good idea to bring in the how not to. One of the really good ways of bringing in a how not to is to have an example. The example could be a story; it could be a case study; it could be something from history. Now the moment you bring in an example, two things happen.
The first is the attention spikes. The how to has been driving them crazy. Well, it's been driving their brain crazy, because the more you get in terms of information, the more your brain gets tired. The how not to takes the opposite stance, and the fact that you're using an example or a case study makes it even better. It makes it better because now you're taking the opposite stance. When you take an opposite stance you create contrast. When you create contrast you create attention.
The how to has its role. It creates attention, but as you go through the how to, the brain gets more and more tired because it has to juggle with all these facts. Then you get to the how not to, and again, you've got the audience's attention, but now you're doing it with a story. Shall we go to some stories and examples? We should, shouldn't we? Here is example number one.
I recently wrote a book on pricing. It's called Dartboard Pricing, and it shows you how to set your prices, how to do sequential pricing, how to increase your prices without losing customers. There right in the middle of the book is a table, and the table only has four elements. Now how much can you get wrong with four elements? Well, as it turns out, quite a lot. Over the years this table, called the yes and yes table, has helped people increase their prices by 10%, 15%. But they still get it wrong.
How do they get it wrong? I go through several pages of showing them the how not to, showing them all the tables that went wrong, and people just love this. They love to see how someone else got it wrong. They look at those case studies, the attention goes up, but the lesson goes home. Now they know how to because of the how not to.
You might think that this applies just to business but it applies to everything in life. For instance, I mentor my niece Marsha. We have to do spellings. Now sometimes Marsha will go off-tangent and no matter how much I try to get the spelling across she will still spell it incorrectly. What do you do? You go to the how not to stage. You show her how not to spell the word.
What I do is I make her spell the word as she's spelling it and say that's the wrong way to spell it. Then I give her the right way to spell it, at which point in time I tell her now spell it wrong. You know what happens to the brain? It's not able to cope with spelling something wrong. She has two options. She can spell it right or spell it wrong, but now that she knows how it's spelled wrong, her brain switches back to spelling it right. I tell her spell it wrong; she spells it right. I say spell it wrong; she spells it right. Wrong, still right.
This is the power of how not to. When you expose the concept of how not to, you get to people at a very practical level. When you give them how to, you go to them at an intellectual level. Both of them are needed. The intellectual stimulates, gets tiring. Go to how not to and then you can implement it.
At this point in time we run into an even bigger problem. When you have a how to, the steps are usually limited. If you have to put something together, you have maybe step number one to step number 17, but when we consider the realm of how not to, we're looking at an enormous number of things that people could do wrong. What are you supposed to do? The how not to exposes how much you're confusing your audience. The best advice I can give you on this is to get them step by step, to bring out the step, to take them through the how to, to take them through the how not to, and then move to the next step. You're tackling one thing at a time, and that's the way the audience really gets it.
The second thing that you have to consider is the medium. Now in a presentation, probably an hour-long presentation, you have more time to go into the how to and how not to. In a book you definitely have more time. You have more space. In an audio or a video you don't have that much space. You probably didn't realize it, but I just ran two how not to's by you. In audio or video you need to keep the how not to's short, a couple of them and then move along. In a book, in a presentation, you have a little more space, a little more leeway.
With that, we finish how to and how not to. Let's summarize. What are the three things that we covered? The first thing that we covered was the how to. We started off with the concept of how to and how not to, and that how to is an intellectual process and how not to is very powerful because it allows you to implement things. The second thing that we covered was how not to. How does it work? We saw how it gets the attention of the customer. It gets the attention of the reader simply because it shows you what you shouldn't be doing but it also is very useful for you as a creator of audio or video or a book or a consulting, because it spikes that attention just after all of those how to's have tired the person out. Now you've got this situation where you are creating attention yet again.
You do this with a case study. You do this with a story. You do this with an example. I gave you the example of the yes and yes in the pricing book and how people get it wrong, and also how I work with my niece Marsha, with her spellings. If you've got kids around, you should try this. Finally, we talked about where to use it. Usually the how not to comes right at the end. Just when all that attention is going down the gurgler, that's when you want to pick it up with the how not to.
What's the one thing that you could do today? You want to start documenting the mistakes. You want to start documenting where people go off-tangent. Let's say I'm doing a course right now on article writing. What I do is I document where they go off-course. Then that becomes part of the documentation. The next time I give some kind of instruction on what to do this week, I also put in the how not to. That makes a huge difference. If you're writing an article, write the how to. Write a bit of how not to. You're writing a book? How to, how not to. Presentation? How to, how not to. Work out the how not to's. That's all you really have to do.
It's almost time for me to go for my coffee and to the beach, so that brings us to the end of this episode. Now I've been going on and on about the pricing book and Dartboard Pricing. Pricing affects us all. There's not a single one of us that really knows what is happening with pricing, so how do you get better prices? This book has some fascinating examples and pretty much a lot of how to, but one of the things that is very powerful in the book is book number three, which tackles sequential pricing, where instead of your prices going up all the time, they actually go up and then they go down.
Why would you want your prices to go down, and how do you create this strategy? That's what sequential pricing is all about. If you want excerpt of the book you can get it at psychotactics.com/prx. If you still want the book, it might still be on Trust The Chef. If you are lucky and you get to it before we raise the prices, get it. Go to psychotactics.com. Search for Trust The Chef and get your copy of Dartboard Pricing.
About iTunes, if you haven't already left a review on iTunes, please do so. We're off to the United States in a couple weeks. We're headed to the Copyblogger Conference. I'm also doing my own workshop on information products, and then we're going to Sardinia, Italy for the rest of the time. We won't be back until mid-June. No work, just play, which is why this podcast is called the Three Month Vacation. Our three months of work are up and now it's time to take a break. This podcast has been brought to you by the Three Month Vacation and psychotactics.com. If you haven't already subscribed, go and press that subscribe button. All the links and the resources are below this podcast, so if you scroll down you'll see all the information right down, and there are links out there. That's it for me from Auckland, New Zealand. Bye for now.
When you have a product or course online it seems it's easy for competitors to copy it. Yet, being in online marketing isn't the only place things can be copied. The fashion industry, for one has people that can copy. Competitors can copy whatever they feel like, because there's no law that prevents them from doing so. So whether you have an offline business or online, you'll want to stay ahead of the competition. But how do you do so?
Useful Resources
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc
Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver
For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/
Time Stamps
00:00:20 Introduction
00:02:35 Table of Contents
00:02:50 Method 1: Updates
00:07:04 Method 2: Branding
00:11:20 Method 3: Personality
00:16:11 Summary
00:19:43 Final Announcements
Ever since I was a kid, I always liked to draw. I'd sit in the corner and I'd draw. I wouldn't speak much to people, but I'd draw. As you can imagine, I got very, very good at drawing, but I wouldn't sign my work. I wouldn't put my name on the work, and my mother would always tell me, "Sean, you have to sign your work. People will copy it. They'll copy it and they'll claim it as their work." Now when I was 10, I didn't see the irony of it, that the reason that I could draw in the first place was because I was copying stuff. As human beings, that's what we do. We learn to copy; we learn to trace. The more we can copy and the more we can trace, the better we become at any skill.
The problem arises when we grow up and we start to write books and we start to do other things like paintings and then other people start to copy us. Suddenly, when you look out there in the marketplace, there seem to be people there ripping you off and you don't know how to stop it, but there is a way to stop it. The wrong way to stop it is to go after them. The wrong way to stop it is to get so upset, so angry that you want to destroy that competitor. This takes up all your energy. All that frustration comes to the fore and it's completely useless because the other person will continue to copy. How do we stop them? We stop them with our own ingenuity.
There are 3 ways that you can actually slow down your competition. How do you slow them down? You can never stop them. You slow them down with updates, with branding, and finally with personality. It doesn't take a lot of effort to do this, so how do we go about it? Let's start off with the first one, which is updates. Yesterday, while I was on my walk I was listening to a TED talk, and this TED talk was by Johanna Blakley. She was talking about the fashion industry and how in the fashion industry it is routine to just copy other people's stuff. You don't even have to think about it; you just copy it.
She talked about a shoe designer, and this shoe designer's name is Stu Weitzman. He was very frustrated because he would design these amazing shoes and people would go out there and copy it, and there were no laws to stop them from copying it. Johanna goes on; she went on to describe how Stu upped his game. What he started to do was create these Bowden-Wedged shoes. It was very difficult to copy them because they were made of titanium, and if you didn't' make them of titanium, they would crack. What he did was create an update that was almost too difficult to copy.
You're probably not making shoes. You probably have a consulting service. Maybe you have a book or a product, you sell information and there your competitors are copying you. How do we deal with this? Let me tell you the issues that we have at Psychotactics. You can have copying where someone just copies your stuff, kind of similar, and then there are other issues like where they rip off your stuff. If you look at several courses that we have, we have the article writing course, the copywriting course, the uniqueness course.
We've been going since 2002. I guess we're reasonably popular on the Internet because if you look at some of the sites where they pirate stuff, where they resell other people's stuff, well, that's exactly what's happening to us. There are these pirates that take our stuff just like they do with Microsoft Word and Photoshop and then they resell it and they make money off it. We can get angry; we can start chasing them down. There are websites that do just this, and it's a complete waste of time.
The way to beat this system is to create updates. When we do an article writing course, we change about 20% of the course. If you did an article writing course live with us, not through some pirate, you would find that it has changed 20% since last time. It has got more efficient, it has got better. If you bought the course off some pirate, you're probably struggling 20% or 40% or 60% more. Yes, you're getting the information probably cheaper, but the problem is that the updates are so powerful that it is very, very difficult for them to keep up. Now they may buy the original product, but as long as we keep updating it, as long as we keep refining it, it becomes extremely difficult to copy.
If you look at our book The Brain Audit, it started out at Brain Audit Version 1 and then went to Version 2 and Version 3 and Version 3.2, and it has stayed there. Now what if your book just stays there? What you've got are updates. What we've done is we've had updates on target profile and we've had updates on uniqueness. The book is changing about 10 to 20%, but internally. If you're on our list and if you bought it from us, that's where you get all the information from, but if you don't, you don't. This is how you stay ahead of both your competitors and your pirates. You keep updating. Change 15%, change 20%, and they'll never, ever catch up.
Now this takes us to the second part, which is the concept of branding. Now branding might just seem like this big multilevel exercise that you have to do that costs a lot of money, and you don't have to do anything like that. At the very core, branding is naming something in a way that makes it difficult to copy. For instance, in The Brain Audit we have something called reverse testimonials. Now you've heard of testimonials, but you've probably not heard of reverse testimonials. That is branding. When a person reads that and they go out there and they learn about reverse testimonials, immediately they think of you. Branding makes it extremely difficult to copy.
I'm writing a book right now. I could have called it Pricing; I did start to call it Pricing. It's very difficult to hang onto a brand name like Pricing, so I changed it. The concept was about pricing being this crazy thing, so we called it Dartboard Pricing. Now immediately, it gets your curiosity as a customer, but it also brands it. It brands it in a way that makes it extremely difficult to copy. When you think of branding, you probably just think of the name of the product or the service and you know it's top level. What you can do is you can also create branding at many sublevels. Dartboard Pricing, that's the top level; that's the name of the book. Within Dartboard Pricing there are already other terms; there are other forms of branding.
For instance, we have a method called a Yes-and-Yes system. Now the Yes-and-Yes system is a way to increase your prices and not lose customers. It shows you a systematic way of going about this whole pricing exercise. What's interesting is the brand name. Once I have the Yes-and-Yes system, whenever someone else sees it, it becomes difficult for them to copy it. What they can do is refer back to you. When you look at, say, someone like Jim Collins and he wrote his book Good to Great, and in that he talked about the Hedgehog Principle, but he doesn't just talk about the Hedgehog Principle. He also talks about Level 5 leadership.
As you keep reading that book, you run into other concepts like the Flywheel and the Doom Loop. This is what you've got to do. You've got to have this top level, which is probably the name of your product or your service. Then within that, you've got to have multilevel branding, names that you come up with that only make sense to you and to your customers, but they follow a pattern, they follow a system, and then it becomes very, very difficult. If you have generic names like, okay, we're going to deal with target audience, well, that's great, but it doesn't become yours, it doesn't become your own. Then it becomes very, very easy to copy.
How do you come up with these names? As you are creating your product or your service, you are describing it. You're probably describing it in words or you're describing it as someone else or they're describing it back to you. You want to pay attention, because sometimes they will use a word, they will use a term, or you will use a word or a term, and that's when it comes about. When I write a book or I create a system or a seminar or a workshop, that's what I'm looking for. I'm always looking for that moment when I can create a term that no one else can copy. I'm not doing that consciously, but just by having that term, it sticks in someone's head and it also makes it very difficult to copy.
This takes us to the third element, which is personality. Now all of us have a personality. Some of us are very quiet and some of us are louder and some of us are bubblier. Developing this personality makes it very, very difficult to copy. If you listen to the podcast that I did back in 2009, I was a different person. I was more loud, I would say. I was more energetic. I was trying to get my point across like this, but now I don't. This is the kind of personality that people tune into. When you're writing your book, you have a certain style that develops over time, and when you're speaking on a podcast, there is a certain style that develops over time. Your job is, ironically, to copy.
How do you develop this style, this personality? Most people think that the personality is inbuilt. Your personality is inbuilt. When you grow up as a kid, you have a certain personality and that is inbuilt. Your style, your drawing style, your writing style, your creation style, that comes from copying. To develop that style, you have to copy many people. Let's say you want to become a great watercolorist. You could copy 1 watercolorist, and after awhile what happens is you become a replica of that person. You start doing the houses the same way, the people the same way, the colors the same way, and when people look at your stuff, that's what they say. That's what they said about me.
When I started out, I started copying a cartoonist called Mario Miranda. Mario was a very, very, very good cartoonist back in India, and his work is still outstanding. I was copying his stuff so much as I was growing up that when I drew a bunch of cartoons and we put them on coffee mugs … These coffee mugs were sold; there were hundreds of thousands being sold. People used to call them the Mario mugs. Now, obviously, Mario was infuriated and so was I because that's not the way I wanted to represent my stuff.
You have to understand that today my work is completely different from Mario's work. The reason for that is I went on to look at other styles and copied those styles. Then over time, you just get your own style, and that style doesn't stay still; it changes. Just like in this podcast, the style that I had I 2009 is totally different from this year. It's the same thing with drawing and writing and everything else. When someone tries to copy you, you don't need to be infuriated because that's exactly what you've been doing.
If you are any good at what you do today, it's because you have been copying, but not copying from one person but from many people. This goes on and on and on until you stop doing whatever it is you're doing. To become great, you have to get influenced by other people, and invariably, that leads to copying. Whether you like it or not, your brain is taking snapshots. Ironically, that is personality. Ironically, that is what people call your drawing personality, your writing personality, your speaking personality. It comes from copying all of these people.
The funny thing is it also becomes a uniqueness; it becomes you completely different from everybody else. If you constantly dive into this pool of influence, of influences of different people and different style and different cultures and different everything, then you become extremely unique, extremely different from everybody else. I know I use the word irony, but the irony just sits there, that you have to become great by copying, and it's copying that infuriates us the most.
Let's summarize what we've just covered, 3 things that we covered. The first thing was the update. When you have updates in your system, it becomes very, very difficult for someone else to copy you. As I said, with the article writing course, with the uniqueness course, with all our courses, with all our workshops, things change. You want to do this because it excites you. Imagine giving the same course over and over again. Imagine having the same book that you wrote 10 years ago and you haven't made any updates. This is a challenge for you; this is interesting for you. Making those updates keeps you ahead of the competition, but it also keeps you ahead of those pirates. If someone were to go out there and buy your stuff from a pirate, they would be worse off. That's what you need to know. That would make you very happy, wouldn't it?
The second element is one of branding. When you start to give terms to anything … You'll find this right through the Psychotactics system where we have the Bikini Principle, the Yes-and-Yes system, the target profile, all of these things that are not common out there. Now that you're aware of that, you can create your own. When you have a book on pricing, well, you can't call it Dartboard Pricing anymore, can you? Which takes us to the third factor, which is the personality, and this is the personality of writing, of drawing, of creating stuff. While we are born with our own personality and that personality develops, all of it is about copying, but not copying 1 person because otherwise we become a replica. It's about copying several people. When you copy several people, you develop a style, and the irony sits on you and you think, "Goodness, what a trip."
How is all of this relevant to the Three Month Vacation? It's relevant because you want to get better prices. You want customers to come to you, and the way to do that is to stand out from the competition. If you were just me-too in your branding, in your personality, and you have no updates, you become exactly like the competition. You become someone who doesn't really change anything. When you do that, it becomes more difficult to get better customers and better-paying customers. As a result, you have to work longer and harder and there's no vacation in sight. This is very critical to creating that uniqueness factor so that people can't copy.
What is the one thing that you can do today? The one thing can be to look at your branding. For instance, we have a course like the article writing course, it's very generic, it's boring. I should go back and I should look at it and say, "How can I make this like the pricing book? Instead of just calling it Pricing, how do I call it Dartboard Pricing?" You and I, we both have to go back and we have to look at our existing product or existing services and say, "How can we brand this in a way that is interesting?" Not just at the top level, but at all other levels as well. When you do that, automatically it's going to stand out. That's what we both have to do.
This brings us to the end of this episode. It's 4:35 a.m. here in Auckland City, quiet. Right after recording this episode, I'm going to be sitting down to complete my book on pricing. That's due out on the 13th of April, so if you get it by then, you get it at a better price and then the prices go up. They always go up at Psychotactics, so get your copy. Go to psychotactics.com and search for Trust the Chef. When you get that Trust the Chef, that's the Trust the Chef offer. Go and get it today.
In a few weeks from now, we're headed to Washington, D.C., to the Information Product Workshop. If you're joining us there, you're going to have a blast. Then we're going to Denver to speak at the Copyblogger Conference, and then it's one of those months of vacation. We'll be back and then we're going to be doing the headline course and the brain audit trainer, where you actually learn to become very, very good at reading your customers' minds. More about that later.
To get all the details on this podcast, just go to psychotactics.com/33. That's the episode; this is episode number 33. You can get all the episodes except episode 18. For some reason, we can't do 18, so you can never find psychotactics.com/18, but you can find all the rest of them from 1 to right now, which is 33.
That's me, Sean D'Souza, saying bye for now. Bye-bye.
Most of us make a fundamental mistake when dealing with the first few paragraphs. We put too many problems in, right away. And it's a mistake. A big mistake! It's like an air traffic controller letting three planes land on the same runway. So how do we avoid this problem? And is the problem over once the "plane" lands? Or is there more to worry about?
Useful Resources
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc
Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver
For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/
Sean D'Souza:Imagine you are an air traffic controller and you've got three planes circling the airport. Are you going to land all three at once?
Hi. This is Sean D'Souza from the Three Month Vacation. Today, we're going to be talking about how you need to dwell on a single problem instead of several problems when you're writing a sales page. Now why would a sales page be critical to you and how would it be connected to a three-month vacation? It doesn't matter who you are. At some point in time, you're going to have to follow the three-prong system. If you haven't done so, listen to episode number two, where I outline the three-prong system. It is a system that has run for pretty much thousands of years, and it's based on three core concepts, which is creating products, services, and training.
Today, we're trying to sell either a workshop, which is training, or a service or a product and you're trying to write a sales page. You know that once you write that sales page and once you sell that product, service, or training, it generates income and clients, and then you get to go on your three-month vacation. Even as you're sitting there, you're trying to land three planes, and that's a mistake. I don't have to tell you it's a mistake. You already know it's a mistake. You know it's a mistake when you're trying to land three planes, but the moment you get onto the sales page, all hell breaks loose. How do we prevent this from happening? How do we land a single plane at a time? If you follow this podcast, you know that we have three topics that we cover and then an action plan. What are those three topics that we're going to cover today?
The first thing we're going to do is we're going to look at the problem and how these problems seem to circle the airport and how we have to land them one at a time. The second thing is once they land, what are we going to do with them? The third thing is when do we give them a break? When do we get to the solution? Let's look at these three and see how we can get this sales page to really work for us so that we can start to sell our products, services, and our training.
The moment you sit down to write a sales page, you have to focus on the biggest problems that you're solving. It doesn't matter whether you have a product or service, you are solving a bunch of problems and this is where you run into a dilemma. Any product or service that you're selling is going to solve several problems, and you're going to feel like you have to stack them all together. When you go to some sales pages, what you find is you won't find a single problem that they're dealing with. You will find that they put in problem number one, problem number two, problem number three, problem number four, problem number five. Then they ask you, "Are you having any of these problems?" That sounds like five planes circling the airport and you're trying to land every single one of them. What should you do?
What you should do is do what any air traffic controller would do; you land a single plane. For us to take this analogy home, we have to treat that plane as a priority, as if there were an emergency. Even if there were a dozen planes circling the airport, one plane has an emergency; it has to land right now. As an air traffic controller, you have to bring that plane down, and this is what you do. You find the biggest problem. How do you know it's the biggest problem?
When you give your customer a list of the problems that you're solving, the customer will usually come back and say, "Okay. Out of these three problems, out of those five problems, this one, this is the biggest problem." You know it's their biggest problem and you know you're solving their biggest problem because if you said, "I'm not going to have this anymore. I'm not going to solve this problem anymore," they don't want your product or service.
To illustrate this, let's take an example. Let's say you are selling a car to a mother, and she has four kids. Now she wants to buy the car because of fuel efficiency; she want to buy it because of style; she wants to buy it because of space. The car is solving three different problems, and if you were to take away one of them, say you take away space, say you said, "Let's get a smaller car. You'll still get style and fuel efficiency," and she says, "No. I need this because I need to take my kids to soccer practice, and I need to take them for music classes and stuff like that. I need to take all four of them."
That's when you know you're solving the biggest problem, and that is one of space. Of course, she would like the style. Of course, she would like the fuel efficiency, but the space, that's the overriding problem. That is the first plane that you've got to land. Instead of dealing with all three problems or all the five problems, you actually drive home just one problem. Once you've done that, you've finished your first part. This takes us to the second part, which is you have to get the plane to the gate. This is very important. Most people think once you land the plane, there is nothing to do, but you know, there have been plane crashes after the plane has landed. That takes us to the second part.
What do you do once that plane is landed? Here we are in the second part. Your plane has landed and it is taxiing towards the gate. What's happening at this point in time? At this point in time, you haven't gone away from that problem. Now, what you're doing is you're driving home the consequences. You're driving home the reason why they have to go ahead and what would fall apart if they didn't go ahead with that one problem. We're still on that one plane. The plane has landed. Now, in the second part what we're doing is we are making sure that the consequences are driven home.
If we took that example of the woman buying the car, well, we would first bring up the problem of space. Then we would drive home the consequences of not having that space and how other cars seem to compensate on that space and how it becomes uncomfortable in the car. You're still talking about space and space and space and space, because you're getting that plane to the gate. You're doing this with the consequences of not making that decision, and because that is the one thing that is most crucial to the customer, that is the one thing that they are listening to.
They want to know that you understand their problem and that you understand the consequences and you are giving them more depth. Those consequences that you're talking about, it's bringing more depth to them and they understand, "Yes, this is exactly what I want." What about those two other planes in the sky, the ones on style and fuel efficiency? You want to let them fly for awhile. Let them circle the airport. We're dealing with this one plane. We've landed it; we make sure that we get to the gate with the problem and with the consequences.
At this point in time, we are itching to get across our solution, which is presenting the workshop, presenting the car, presenting the whatever you're selling, and you have to hang on. Those planes up in the sky, they're going to crash if you leave them alone, so you land the second plane, which is the second problem, and then you drive home the second set of consequences. Let them get to the gate, land the third plane, and at this point in time, you're ready to bring out the solution. This is when you get all those customers off the plane. You know how they rush off the plane? Your customer, reading your sales page, this is how they feel. They want to get off that plane right now.
As air traffic controllers, what we've done is we made sure that we get one plane down, one problem, then we drive home the consequences, and then we've got them to the gate. All of them have got to the gate at the same time, the three problems and the three consequences, and then we can let them all off together. Now this is not what happens at regular airports, but bear with me. The analogy breaks a bit here, but what you want to do is you want to drive home all of those three problems and then, and only then, get the customers off the plane. This is where you announce it. You say, "Announcing the Article Writing Workshop," and you give them your solution.
The analogy falls apart a bit towards the end, but to understand it, it's very simple. You have to make sure that you land one problem at a time, drive home the consequences; land the second problem, drive home the consequences; land the third problem, drive home the consequences. Then, and only then, do you bring your solution.
Now do you have to have three problems before you bring home your solution? No, you don't. You could have just one problem. It could be just one plane circling the airport. You bring out that problem and then you drive home the consequences for the next three of four paragraphs, or you could have a couple of planes and you land the first one, drive home the consequences; land the second one, drive home the consequences. Get them all to the gate, then unload the whole lot together. Then get the solution. Really, that's the summary. The mistake that most people make is they're always trying to get too many things across, and it's like giving someone five instructions at the same time. You give them one instruction and they follow it.
A very good example of just this one plane landing is on the article writing course. If you go onto psychotactics.com and search for the article writing course, you'll see that it's just about how to stop knocking on clients' doors and how to get them to call you instead. It goes about just talking about the consequences of knocking on clients' doors, how it's so hard to get business every time you have to knock on them and how clients tend to put off the purchase and how articles then help you sneak in the side door. It takes awhile before that plane gets to the gate, and that's really what you want to do. You want to drive home those consequences. You want to get to the next problem, drive home those consequences.
On this article writing course page, you will see that the next problem comes up as well, which is, "Hey, the competition can write articles, too, can't they?" That's the second problem, and then the consequences are driven home. Then the third one, which is, "But my articles are boring." Then we're talking about how you can be entertaining with your articles. We have three big problems before we say, "Announcing the article writing course."
You already have the summary, but let me give you some steps here. What are you going to do? You really want to look at all the problems that you're solving. Now you can do this yourself sitting at your desk and banging your head against the computer, or you can go to a client, take them to lunch and ask them the problems that they're facing and they will give you a whole list of them. Then in step two, you get them to rank it. They'll tell you which is their biggest problem, second biggest problem, third problem. You've got three planes; that's enough. I'll tell you what to do with the rest later.
Now, you've got those three planes. Now, you have to get the consequences of the client not acting on those three problems. Ask the client. Ask them, "What would be the consequence of not dealing with this issue?" They will tell you, and you just record it. Don't even write it down; record it and transcribe it. You now have a situation where you've got the problems, the whole list of problems. You've got a ranking, and the client has given you the consequences of them not acting on it. You really don't have to do any copywriting. Then you ask the client what their solution would be like, what would it look like? They will tell you, and then you get that down as well.
What are you going to do with the rest of the problems? Supposing they came up with a list of seventeen problems. Put them in the bullets. Put them in your features and benefits. You don't have to have them all up there at the start of the page. Up there, you just have to deal with those two or three flights that are landing.
Now, your sales page is focused. Now, your sales page is actually doing what it should be doing. This is why some sales pages work better than others. This is why some people sell more products and services than other people. This is why they go on vacations. Landing five planes or three planes or two planes, even, is a disaster. Land one plane at a time, drive home the consequence, get them to the gate, and then you've done a really good landing. It's funny that it's called a landing page, isn't it? I didn't think about it until right now.
That brings us to the end of this episode, and this is Episode number thirty-two, so you know what that means, right? You can just go to psychotactics.com/32 and you'll find the transcript, you'll find other resources. Whatever you want out there, you can download it from there as well. You can also download it on iTunes or you can go to Stitcher if you're on android and you can listen to this. For members of www.5000bc.com, you can log in and we'll be having an interactive session where you can bring in your first problem, second problem, third problem, and we'll do an audit there. Bring it to 5000bc and let's solve this problem within 5000bc itself.
If you're not part of 5000bc, you should get on the waiting list and pay your ten dollars. Yes, it's ten dollars to be on the waiting list. Then while you're waiting, you can read the Brain Audit, and it explains a lot of these concepts. The Brain Audit is available on the site at psychotactics.com/brain audit. If you have any feedback, really bad feedback, like not good stuff, or really good stuff, then write to me at sean@psychotactics.com. You can also write in for requests. If you have some question that you want to be answered, well, I can do this on the podcast. In fact, the last episode number thirty-one, that was a question that was sent in from Australia and we dealt with that in a reasonably long episode. It was twenty-three minutes, I think. There you go. Send in your questions as well, and I'll do my best to answer it.
Hasta luego from the Three Month Vacation and psychotactics.com. Bye-bye.
Whether you conduct online courses or workshops, there's something we fail to consider. It's called the Safe Zone. If we just want to play Internet guru, we don't care if the clients can actually implement the information or not. But if we're keen to be real teachers, it's the ONLY thing we care about. Find out how the safe zone helps clients to consume and apply your material. And that's what makes them come back for more. In a world filled with "experts", you're creating a true learning experience.
Useful Resources
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc
Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver
For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/
This episode is available at: http://www.psychotactics.com/31
Time Stamps
00:00:20 Introduction: Getting Attention with the Problem
00:01:36 Previous "Attention" Episode / 00:02:30 Table of Contents
00:02:53 Part 1: Underestanding Solutions
00:05:29 Part 2: Creating the Problem
00:10:47 Part 3: Sticking to the Problem
00:14:07 Summary
00:16:07 Action Plan: The ONE thing
00:17:13 Brain Audit Kit + Info-products Workshop + iTunes Review
Transcript
Sean D'Souza:In 2010, I decided to go for a walk at 6am, except it was Paris, and my wife was fast asleep. I decided, well, I could go and explore Paris a little bit, and so I did. It was a nice place. It is a nice place. It's full of people and markets and it was great. I walked for a couple of hours, and then I turned around and I found I was lost. I had taken some kind of road somewhere and I couldn't find my way back no matter what I tried. There I was in one of the most well-documented cities on the plant and I was feeling extremely unsafe. There were all these people around me and they were speaking a different language, and I didn't even know how to get back to where I was supposed to be.
This is a lot how students and participants feel when they're doing a course with you. Whether it's an online course or if it's a workshop, it's the same kind of feeling. They get this feeling of being unsafe, and your job as a teacher is to put them in the safe zone. In today's episode we're going to explore the safe zone. What is the safe zone? Why is it so important? How do you take the steps to get people into the safe zone? As usual, we're going to look at three things. The first thing is isolation. The second is mistakes, how do you make them make mistakes. The third is the group size. These three elements are critical to get people into a safe zone.
First, what is a safe zone? When you're doing a live course, you'll notice something, that people from the same company, they seem to sit with each other; or people that know each other, they seem to sit with each other. The reason for this is that they feel unsafe. Now they're there for a course; they should not feel unsafe. No one is coming to bite them, but that's how they react. On an online course, you can't see this activity, and so it's very difficult to realize how incredibly unsafe people feel when they're on the Internet. What you've got to do is you have to create that safety.
Safety is when people feel comfortable. They feel comfortable with their group. They feel comfortable with the pace of the stuff they're learning. They don't feel that intimidation. Mostly, they feel comfortable with you. You'll know they're comfortable with you when they start questioning your behavior. You're the teacher. You're the person training them, but they start questioning the system. They start questioning the way you've approached something. That's when you know that they're in the safe zone, because that's what happens at home, right? When you're at home, people don't just take your word for stuff. They'll ask you, "Why do you want me to do this? That's when they feel they're in the safe zone, when they can come back to you.
For you to create this safe zone is very critical simply because it enhances learning. Instead of it just being top-down, which is you, you're the boss, you're the teacher, it's now back and forth. When a student or participant realizes that there is flexibility in the system and there is safety in the system, they really relax, and that's when they learn. We all learn when we are completely relaxed, not when we're uptight.
Let's explore those three things. Let's start off with the first one, that is, isolation. What is isolation? When I teach the article-writing course, which I call the toughest writing course in the world, I have a responsibility as a teacher, and that is not to say that three people finish the course or five people finish the course. I have to take everyone across this minefield. What is in this minefield? You have headlines, connectors, disconnectors, storytelling. You have so many elements, and it's very easy to just throw it all together and say, "Okay, let's write."
What we have to do is we have to isolate. We have to take step-by-step. Often, just for the first fifty words, we'll take a week, two weeks, and this gets the fluency, the practice, and mostly it's about the isolation. Instead of looking at the entire article, which has so many elements, we focus on one tiny little bit and then we pull out that bit and then break it up into smaller bits. When you do that, what you get is this feeling of isolation.
The reason why isolation is so critical is because your instructions are always going to be misunderstood. For instance, when we do the cartooning course, we ask people to draw circles. Now how many ways can you draw circles? A lot of ways, apparently, because people will draw circles with crayons or colored pencils or large circles and small circles. Some people will do circles with some kind of design with it and some of them will be spartan. The point is that when you give an instruction, it can be interpreted in many ways. The moment you have multiple interpretations, you have creativity, but when you have creativity, you also have confusion.
I'll give you an example. Let's say I asked you to take a step. Now, obviously, you think I'm going to ask you to take a step forward, right? What if I meant you to take a step to the left or what if I meant you to take a step to the right or to the back? There are all these permutations, and the only way to reduce these permutations, to reduce their confusion and to create a safe zone is to have this factor of isolation.
A good example of this would be when I was learning badminton and I had this coach. If you looked at someone smashing the shuttlecock across, you'd look like one fluid motion, but, in fact, there were about five different steps. What he made me do was to work on the first step, then the second, then the third, then the fourth, and then the fifth, but not in one go. This was in five different sessions. This is what isolation is all about.
What happens is you get very, very good at executing and becoming very fluent at that one step. Clients get an enormous amount of confidence. Instead of you just rushing through a course or rushing through a workshop, you're isolating the steps. They master those steps, and then you move to the next one. If this sounds very Eastern, almost like karate or making sushi, then it's exactly that. Instead of this rush, rush, rush, get to the end, finish line, you're slowing things down. That creates a safe zone, because when the client shows up, they know they're not going to be intimidated; they're going to be taken through one little step. If they make the wrong step, you can gently nudge them in the right direction.
The goal for every teacher is to get their students to the finish line. When you do isolation, you get the students to the finish line in a state of fluency, and there's a big difference between someone at the finish line and someone who is fluent at the finish line. What you've got to do, really, is you have to sit down and look at the sections that you're teaching. Maybe you're teaching web design and maybe you're teaching about the home page. The home page might seem like a single page, but it has seven different components. I'm must making this up, of course. What you're going to do is sit down and work out how each component works and break it up into tiny little bits. Then the client takes one little step at a time, and they master it; and the next step, and they master it. This is isolation. This is the first step towards creating the safe zone.
Let's look at the second step, which is making mistakes. Ever since you were a little kid, you've been told you should make mistakes. You should learn from your mistakes; you should make your own mistakes. Then you go to school and you make mistakes and you get everything wrong, and the adult says to you, "Why did you make all these mistakes?" We learn very quickly that it's not a good idea to make mistakes.
Talent is a reduction of errors. When someone learns to fly a plane, it's very easy to technically fly the plane, but it's very difficult to pull a plane out of a crisis situation. The way a pilot is trained is through mistakes. They are put on a simulator, and the simulator is doing something crazy like crashing the plane and you have to pull out. The hydraulics have failed; you have to pull out. Something has happened and you have to pull out. You have to learn from the mistake.
How does the client learn from mistakes? Obviously, they don't want to make mistakes in the course. They don't want to get things wrong. What you do is you design a mistake session. On our courses, we design mistake sessions where if you get it wrong, you get it right. I'll say that again. You get it wrong, you get it right. If you get it right, you get it wrong. You can sense the feeling of fun here, can't you? You have to write headlines, but you don't write them correctly; you write them wrong.
What we do is we teach people how to write headlines. We show them why the headline works, how to deconstruct it. Then when they are proficient at it, we get them to break it. We get them to write headlines that are completely wrong. Of course, they have a lot of fun. They also get very frustrated, but the mistake highlights their skill and it creates fluency. When they have that fluency, they feel safe. They also feel safe just to make the mistake.
In a uniqueness course that I did in California and London, we did the same thing. I gave out a sheet in the first five minutes, and I said, "This is something that you have to solve. The only thing you have to know is that none of you are going to get it right." Everyone in the room immediately knew that they were not going to get it right; they were going to get it wrong. Crazy as it sounds, the entire mood of the room lifted. Then I was able to show them how uniqueness mattered and how copywriting, as it were, didn't make as much difference. What you're really doing is you are creating a situation where you're enabling the client to make a mistake.
In the article-writing course, which is another example, we have a situation where I'm teaching them to boil down the article to a single word. Even though I use the word, one word, one word, one word, which is a single word, but you understand that as a teacher and they don't understand what happens when they go and they boil it down to a couple of words or two or three words or a term. What you've got to do is you've got to help them make that mistake.
In the instructions, I say, "You can use one word or two words or a term, but I recommend that you use one word." Invariably, about fifty to seventy percent of the group will do exactly that; they will use one word, but a few will use two words or three words. That's when you highlight the mistake. You say, "Here's where you went wrong and here's why you went wrong and here's why I put you on the wrong path on purpose so that you could learn from the simulator exercise." Of course, you may get a little pushback, and the only reason you'll get that pushback is because they feel they're in a safe zone. They can push back. Then you explain things to them.
Sometimes, this mistake-making exercise, it needs to be highlighted. This is a mistake-making week. You cannot get it wrong unless you do it right. Sometimes, the mistake needs to be slid in quietly. They need to make the mistake by themselves, and then you need to help them fix it and explain why you put them through that exercise. Both of these elements of sliding the mistake or announcing the mistake is what helps people get into that safe zone. They now know they can make a mistake and not be penalized for making that mistake, so they relax. When they relax, they learn, and that's really what learning is all about.
This take us to the third part, which is the group size. Whenever you go to a conference, whenever you go to a workshop, or even when you're doing a course online, one of the greatest achievements of the people who have conducted the conference, who have organized the conference, is that they've got so many people in the room. This is like going into a classroom when you were five and to find two hundred people in that room. It is horribly intimidating. It's great for the organizer. It's great for the person that's having the workshop or the training course online, but it's terrible for everyone else. This is where you've got to understand that groups size matters.
At Psychotactics, when we do workshops we never take more than thirty-five people. When we do course like the article-writing course, we'll never take more than twenty-five people. I thought that was fine. I thought twenty-five people, that's not a lot of people; it's a whole lot better than two hundred people, but I was wrong. You have to get in from a mind that is intimidated by being in a group of twenty-five people. There was this one woman from France, Catherine, and she told me, "I'm not comfortable in such a large group." I'm going, "It's not such a large group." She says, "For me, it is." I had to ask her, "What do you mean by a smaller group?" She said, "Well, about ten people, that's okay-ish for me."
Eventually, what we found was that the group of six to seven people, that is ideal. Whenever we have our workshops, even if we have thirty-five people in the room, they are broken up into groups of six or seven people. The reason why it's six or seven is because if you have just two or three, a couple of people can dominate and they can go beyond their bounds. When you have six or seven, you have this little balance. It's important to note that just because you do this in a workshop, and we've done this in a workshop for many, many years, we didn't necessarily figure out that we had to do this online as well.
When I first started doing the article-writing course, I used to have twenty-five people in the same group. Again, because of the safe zone, someone said, "No, no, no. I want a group of six or seven." The moment I got this feedback, and this was in the middle of the course, I thought, "I don't really want to do this. This is going to increase my workload four hundred percent because now instead of looking at everyone's work at the same time, in the same area, I have to go into four sub-areas and click and unclick and do all those kinds of things."
Because of the safe zone, the client becomes a little adamant, and this is really good. This shows you that there is this feedback. There is this back and forth even as the course is going on, even as the workshop is headed towards day one or day two or day three. What we did was we broke it up into six and seven. The moment I did it, I realized that it works. You've got to create the safe zone, and big groups don't create a safe zone. They create a feeling of anxiety, of being just one among many, many people. We think that it's okay to be in a big group because we won't be noticed, but no learning happens. If you're really a teacher, you want learning to happen; you want fluency to happen; you want mastery to happen. That happens in a small group.
Let's summarize what we've learned today. The first thing that we tackled was this concept of the safe zone and how people get very comfortable in that safe zone and there's feedback back and forth. The three elements of the safe zone were isolation … What you do is you take one section like if you're teaching about web design, just take the home page, break it up into five, six, seven components and see how they gain fluency. Think of yourself less as this modern day guru and more as a teacher that's teaching a skill like karate, or karate, as we know it, where the little bits like in Karate Kid, "wax on, wax off," that was isolation.
The second thing to consider is that clients don't want to make mistakes, and they yet want to get their assignment right, so you create assignments where they make mistakes, where the only way to get the assignment correct is to make a mistake. If you have a photography course, make them take pictures out of focus, ;make them take pictures with the wrong ISO setting, and you will see that they will gain fluency. The third thing is the group size. If you really want to teach people, if you really want them to get fluency, you have to break it down into smaller group sizes. About six or seven people in a group, that's more than enough. Two or three is too small; six or seven is just about right.
This brings us to the one thing that you can do today. If you are like my badminton coach, then you will take that one action and break it up into five small actions and get your clients to work through those actions. The reason why it's so powerful is you can do this yourself. You can see for yourself that you've been speeding through things and you need to take one step at a time. Isolation is where you need to start.
This brings us to the end of this episode. Now to go back to France, how did I get back? I was lost. I did get back. What I did was I found an Internet café and I went in there and I punched in my address onto Google Maps, and it told me how to get back. There I had printed instructions on how to get back to the apartment, and I was back in my safe zone.
If you want to get more of these episodes, you can find them on iTunes; that's for all those on Apple. You can find them on Stitcher if you're on Android. You can also find it on our website if you go to psychotactics.com/podcast. To get the transcript and the download of this particular episode, and this is episode number thirty-one, you go to www.psychotactics.com/31. This is true for every episode, so if you want to find the transcript for any episode, just go www.psychotactics.com/29 or 43 or whatever. We're not up to forty-three yet, but we will be.
It's 5:22am, and I have to head back to writing my book on pricing. I finished the first book, kind of. It's one book out of three books, and it’s not the usual book on pricing, which is all these measurements and all this kind of stuff, but it enables you to increase prices without losing customers. We're doing a trust-the-chef offer at this point in time, so it's at its lowest price, and with Psychotactics, the prices always go up, up and away. They never come down; they're always going up. If you want to get to the pricing book, this is a good time.
If you haven't already done so, leave a review on iTunes or Stitcher. It really helps boost our ratings and gets other people like you to listen to this. Go to iTunes or go to Stitcher and leave a review.
That's me, Sean D'Souza, saying bye for now from Psychotactics and the Three Month Vacation. Bye-bye.
Most of us use benefits or solutions when presenting our products or services?and not the problem. So why bother with the problem? Will it actually improve the conversion on our sales pages? Will it improve our e-mail marketing? Will it get more attention when we're making our presentations? The answer is yes, yes and yes. And you can do it without being negative in any way. So how do you do it? Let's find out in this episode. /
Useful Resources
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc
Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver
For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/
Time Stamps
00:00:20 Introduction: Getting Attention with the Problem
00:01:36 Previous "Attention" Episode
00:02:30 Table of Contents / 00:02:53
Part 1: Underestanding Solutions
00:05:29 Part 2: Creating the Problem
00:10:47 Part 3: Sticking to the Problem
00:14:07 Summary
00:16:07 Action Plan: The ONE thing
00:17:13 Brain Audit Kit + Info-products Workshop + iTunes Review
Sean: Have you ever been in the situation where you've been in the shower, it's nice warm water, and then suddenly it's freezing cold? That's because someone else turned on a tap somewhere else in the same apartment. No? That hasn't happened to you?
How about a computer? Have you had a computer that went vroom, vroom, vroom, ready to start and it started to go slow and slow and then boom? These are problems and problems get attention. The problem is that we don't make use of the problems when we're getting our message across and we certainly don't use it the way it should be.
How should the problem be used and why not use the solution instead? That's today's episode on attention getting. On the last episode of attention getting, we talked about how you can use the two concepts of novelty and consequences, but here's another way, using the problem.
What are we going to cover today? You like the three things, don't you? We'll cover three things, then we'll do the one thing that you can do and then we'll wrap up. Just in case you haven't heard Episode No. 24, well, listen to it again. I had to do it twice. The first time I did it, I was half asleep and then I had to re-edit the whole thing all over again because the first one really put me asleep. Imagine that? The irony. It was about attention getting and the voice was so slow.
If you got that episode or you thought this is really slow, well, there's a new episode. Delete the old one, download the new one again and you'll find that it's much better, much better music, much better tone, and yes, I'm awake in that one. That was Episode No. 24 on how to get attention through novelty and consequences, use the problem.
We're going to cover three things in this episode. The first thing is why solutions are less effective than problems, and second is why problems get your attention. The third is the mistake that most of us make with implementing the problem.
Let's start with the first one which is why solutions don't work as well as problems. To understand solutions, you have to understand your day-to-day life and your day-to-day life is simply a whole bunch of solutions. When you sit on the chair, that's a solution. When you switch on your computer and it works perfectly, that's a solution. When you get in you car and you turn on the ignition, that is a solution.
What is the problem? The problem is the opposite of the solution. Let's take those instances and you know where I'm going with this. You sit on the chair, it breaks. You turn on the car ignition, it won't start. That's where your brain gets activated.
You don't think of your chair, you don't think of your car, you don't think of all the things that work. That's because the brain is focused on the problem. It's not focused on the solution. When we get into marketing and when we get onto our website and we get into networking and we get into our presentations, what we tend to do is we start to lead with the solution and that's a problem.
The reason why we put our audiences to put is because we're leading with the solution. When someone asks us what we do, what we so is we immediately talk about our solution and you notice that immediately those people start to fall asleep. They are very polite.
Let's say you're at a networking meeting, so let's say you're a software developer and let's say you make time-tracking software. Someone asks you what do you do? Well, you spit out your solution. You say we make time-tracking software and this helps you keep track of your time when you're working. That's your solution.
Notice how your brain doesn't get very activated by something like that. Now the reason why we do is because we've been taught to talk about our benefits. We've been taught to bring out the solution but the brain kind of goes to sleep every time someone brings out a solution. When you turn that into a problem, that's when your brain gets activated.
Now, to be very fair, there is nothing wrong with solutions. Problems increase the heart rate, solutions decrease the heart rate. The question is now that we know that solutions aren't as effective as problems, how do we go about creating the problem?
That takes us to the second part of today which is creating the problem because we don't really want to be negative, do we? Here we are in the second part which is how to bring out the problem. Now the biggest objection is what we have to deal with at this point in time and that is we do not want to be negative. We do not want to highlight a problem, and yet to get the customer's attention when we are writing that email, we have to bring up the problem. When we are on the sales pitch, we have to bring up the problem.
What is this problem? How do we get to this problem without being negative? Let's take the example of that time-tracking app that we talked about earlier. Let's say you're still a software developer and you have the solution for a time-tracking app. As we go through the internet and look at different time-tracking apps, we find that the solution pops up everywhere.
One will say log, learn, optimize your life, every second counts. That's a headline, by the way. The second one says the ultimate timer, it's insanely simple, it's built for speed and ease of use. The third one is find your ideal work/life balance, and it goes on to talk about understanding your daily habit so you can focus and be more productive. The fourth one is a time-tracker that makes it easy to record your work hours and to calculate your income, and to build a customer if you're self-employed.
Are you still awake? You shouldn't be because all of these solutions have put you to sleep but then let's go to letsfreckle.com. That's L-E-T-S-F-R-E-C-K-L-E-dot-com. Immediately your brain is locked in because the headline there is my team has gone through four time-tracking apps in the last 2 1/2 years. What is so precise about that headline? It's precise because it's not something that was invented by someone sitting at their computer.
You can be the best copywriter in the world but when a client speaks, they have a totally different voice and this one shows the pain of the team going through time-tracking apps and getting frustrated with it. This is some kind of manager and that is what makes it so powerful, that emotion-built voice of the problem they've been having with time-tracking apps.
We looked at both the problem and the solution. We've seen that the solution is very important because it reduces your heart rate and the problem increases the heart rate. The issue here is that your problem cannot be manufactured at your desk. It needs to come from a customer. It needs to come from a real customer. They bring up an issue that you would not think of.
The best copywriters in the world, they don't sit at their desk and they write. They go out there, they meet the customers, they speak to them on the phone, they take them out to lunch, and then they get the words from the customer. They get the problems from the customer which they then put on a webpage, which they then put on emails. That has more power than you could ever dream of just by sitting at your computer and thinking what I'm going to write today.
When you think of it, at Psychotactics, we have an article writing course and what is the problem with article writing? Usually you think, well, it has something to do with article writing. It is about the fact that you can't write quickly enough or you can't complete an article, things like that. Yet, when you go there, it talks about how to stop knocking on clients' doors and to get them to call you instead.
Now, you might have a fluke and think of that sitting at your desk but most of the time it's the reason why customers are motivated to do something and they need to tell you that. They need to bring out that pain. You need to put that pain in the headline.
Notice it's not negative, not any more negative than, say, the newscasts are telling you that there's a storm or a cyclone or a hurricane headed your way. Not any more negative than someone telling you, hey, your tires are balding and you might skid off the road.
When the problem comes from the customer themselves, you will find it is very powerful and it's not negative, and it brings out this whole emotion that you would struggle to work on if you were just sitting at your desk and trying to figure it out.
With that, we come to the end of the second part. We did the problem and the solution. We found out that the problem is more intense than the solution. We notice the dog poo, not the sidewalk. We notice the rain, not the sunshine as much. This takes us to the third part and the most important part of all, which is sticking to the problem. Just because you have a problem doesn't mean that you're going to stick to it.
What do I mean by sticking to a problem? To go back to that problem of the software developer that has the time-tracking app, well the problem was that the team has gone through four time-tracking apps in the last 2 1/2 years. Now, you want to drive home that problem.
Why has the team gone through that? What have been the frustrations of your team as they have gone through the time-tracking app? What have been the consequences? What happened? This is a story. This is an unfolding story. It's like a movie. It's like drama. It's amazing, it's got power and detail that you don't want to let go of. You don't want to jump into the solution right now. You want to drive home that problem before you get to the solution.
The second thing is you definitely don't want to go into another problem. You want to stick to the problem. You want to drive home the problem. You want to drive home the consequences. Once you're done, then and only then do you move to the second problem, or if you like, to the solution.
What I tend to do is I have a problem in the headline and a very brief solution because you want to increase the heart rate and decrease the heart rate. From that point on, you just stick to that problem. For instance, when you looked at the article writing course, it was how to stop knocking on clients' doors and get them to call you instead.
Now, that was the problem. There's a bit of a solution there. It is learn why articles do a far superior job of attracting clients you want and how the right articles make you the expert in your field. Now that's a very brief solution there and now we stick to the original problem, which is how to stop knocking on clients' doors.
Knocking on clients' doors can be the hardest way to get business, yet we do it all the time. In order to get the clients' attention, we send out sales letters, we make presentations, we do everything we can to get clients. The more we try to sell, the higher the clients' hackles go up. The more we try to convince, persuade, the more the client wants to say no or avoid you.
That's just the first paragraph. Then it goes on to why clients put off the purchase. The first reason why they put off the purchase, the second reason why they put off the purchase, and only then do you get to presenting the article writing course.
Sticking with a single problem is very critical and the reason why it's critical is because the problem, which was in your headline, got the customers' attention. Now when you stick to that singular problem, it gets the customers' attention and keep that customers' attention. That's what you're really doing. You're getting their attention with the headline. You're keeping it with a couple of paragraphs. Then you're moving to a solution.
That brings us to the end of this episode but let's summarize. What are the three things we covered? We started out with the solution. We found out why the solution is very important. It's important simply because it reduces the heart rate. If you just have a problem, it just gets the heart beating so quickly that the customer's not able to focus for very long.
It does attract. The problem does attract but the solution has reason to be there and that reason is that it reduces the heart rate. The problem and the solution both co-exist. The problem comes first, then the solution.
Now, the problem is very critical and the way to get the problem is not to sit at your desk but to go out there and speak to your customers and they will come up with something which is mind-boggling, something that you would not have thought of.
The third thing that we covered was simply that you cannot just have the problem there for one second and then disappear. Most people do that. They put in the headline, they may sneak in a line or two, and then, poof, they're gone off either to the next problem or they've gone to the solution.
You want to make it linger. You want to make it stay there for awhile. People need to know that you know how they feel about this problem. When you drive home the consequences of not dealing with that problem, they can feel those consequences and so it becomes more powerful but it also becomes more natural. This is exactly how life pans out.
We look at a problem, we figure out the consequences, and then we take action. If we see a solution, there's nothing to fix so we go about our lives as it were.
What's the one thing that you can do today? Maybe you're going for a networking meeting. Maybe you have to write a sales page on your website. Maybe you just have to write an email.
The question to ask yourself is this: Do I have a prospect or a client and can I speak with them? Because when you speak with them, they will give you a list of their problems. All you have to do is make them pick which is the biggest problem. When they pick the biggest problem, ask them why it is the biggest problem, how it became the biggest problem, what did they think are the consequences of that problem.
If you just stick to those three questions, you'll get at least a couple of paragraphs if not three or four paragraphs. The best part is you don't have to do any of the writing, just a bit of polishing and you're done. You're ready to go with your problem and your solution.
To get attention, the brain requires a problem, so use a problem, get to the customer and get cracking.
If you would like to learn more about problems and solutions and consequences, then you should get yourself the Brain Audit Kit. You can get this at www.psychotactics.com/brainaudit and I would recommend that you get the Brain Audit Kit. You can get the Brain Audit at $9.99 but what you miss out is on the entire workshop experience so there is an entire workshop in the Brain Audit Kit, and it also has additional audio from all the questions that we've got over the years.
The Brain Audit by itself is a very comprehensive book but the Brain Audit Kit goes several levels deeper. It explores the mistakes that people make. It explores the trouble that they've had so your experience is richer and you don't make the same mistakes.
I'm not suggesting that you don't get the Brain Audit. The Brain Audit by itself is very powerful but if you get the Brain Audit Kit, you will find that you're able to go deeper and get greater benefits in a shorter amount of time. Not at first, you still have to go through the information but you will find that there is enormous depth that you don't want to miss out on.
The Brain Audit, as you know, was one of our first books and since then we've gone on to write many books. The book I'm writing right now is about pricing and how to increase your prices without losing customers but it covers the psychology of pricing, how to increase your prices, and then how to maintain and manage your prices. It's a very comprehensive series.
The key to actually getting this book out is what I'm going to explain in the information workshop so it's the structure. Most people think that it's the content that matters, that if you have it in your head, that's fine, but as writers, as creators, we have a big problem.
That problem is that we spin in our head. We have so much information that we don't know how to put it down on paper. We just stack it up and when you stack it up, the client gets overwhelmed. When they get overwhelmed, you know what happens. Nothing happens. They don't act on it and they don't consume your book or your product or your workshop, and then they don't come back.
The information product workshop in Maryland does just that. We spend three days and not two days or one day because we don't want to hurry through it or we want to make sure that you get it, that you actually work through it. That's on May 5, 6, and 7. You can find out more at www.psychotactics.com/dc.
Finally, if you haven't already left a review on iTunes, please do so today because it's really helpful to us. That's me, Sean D'Souza, saying get attention today and get it with the problem, and bye for now. Arrivederci.
When you're making a presentation, how do you fire up your audience? There are many ways to get that Powerpoint or Keynote presentation going. But one of the most effective ways is to issue a challenge. The audience then waits for you to succeed (or fail). But you can't fail, can you? You're a magician who has practiced the tricks to perfection. This episode is about creating a challenge?then bringing the entire audience alive with the magic trick.
------------------ Useful Resources
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com / Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic / / Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc / Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver / / For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/ / /
00:03:48 Creating the Challenge
00:07:48 Space Between Challenge and Demonstration
00:09:04 Never Let The Heckler Win
00:11:01 Summary
0:12:52 Maryland Workshop on Info-products
Why Creating and Meeting Challenges Fire Up An Audience
When you're sitting in a magic show, you don't doodle.
You don't take out your pen, a sheet of paper and draw weird, funny squiggles.
And that's because a magician creates action. And most of the action is centred around a challenge. And while a presentation is no magic show, there's a way to take your audience from doodle-zone to challenge-zone in a matter of minutes.
So what is the challenge-zone?
The challenge is something almost magical. Something that the audience would find hard to believe. Like for instance, a magician would make an elephant appear in the room. But the audience is skeptical—yet anticipating some action. This is the challenge-zone. In a world that's full of noise, the challenge immediately ramps up attention.
Let's slip into an early example
When I do the presentation for The Brain Audit, I will often start off telling the audience, that at about the 17 minute mark, I will get everyone in the room to think of the same question. To a skeptical audience, that seems impossible. How could any presenter know what every audience member is thinking, let alone making you think of the very same question?
But the question is based on a trigger
And if you've read The Brain Audit (which you should, if you haven't) you learn how to create the trigger. It's composed of the problem, solution and target profile. And when you string these three together, you get a single question, "What do you mean by that?". Once the trigger is sprung, curiosity takes over, and you have the "What do you mean by that?" question at the top of your mind.
And that's just one example—so let's take another
When I do a presentation on "Pricing", the challenge question is similar. I tell everyone that by the time I show them the price-grid, everyone will want to pay 15% more—instead of 15% less. And I'll create this desire for the more expensive option, without changing the core product. This means that if the core product is a workshop on ballroom dancing, the core product will stay the same. And yet, almost everyone in the room will choose the more expensive option.
You see the elephant in the room, don't you?
There's no elephant, but you as a magician are creating the challenge. And the audience loves the fact that there's a challenge coming up. What they love even more is that you're promising to "mess with the minds" of the entire audience. They think the guy next to them may be susceptible, but they're not going to fall for some silly trick. And this is what gives the challenge more power. The more skeptical they are, the more you're able to convert them from skeptics to fanatical fans.
There's just one itty-bitty problem: How do you construct the challenge?
The challenge must contain a method to get from A to B. It can't be just a concept. It must be something they can try for themselves. So for instance, there's this company called ioSafe. They make hard drives. And the beauty of their hard drive is that they can be dunked in water, blasted with a torch, or crushed under a road roller—and still survive. You can see how the challenge works, can't you? The challenge would be for people to try and destroy the drive.
But sure, that's a product and quite a unique product...
What about if you're selling a service or even a concept? The core of any product/service or training should be that you're able to bring results. Yet, instead of picking many points of your service or product, you pick just one. For instance, we teach a course in Photoshop colouring (for cartoonists). And the way the demonstration goes is like this—we get rid of Photoshop—and the computer.
And imagine we're at the cafe, instead
And the audience is asked to pick a letter for the "brush" tool in Photoshop. Of course, you chose B. And then to choose any number (on the keyboard) that represents 60% opacity. You may fumble, but you'll settle on 6. And then you ask them to choose between the left or right square bracket, to increase the size of the brush.
And they choose the right one—they always do. Whammo! You've shown them how to use the three core tool to colour, without so much as going next to a computer.
But it's not enough to create a challenge
You have to make sure there's a space between issuing the challenge and showing them the "elephant in the room". Usually a good way to do this is to issue the challenge right at the start of the presentation. And give them an approximate time when you'll solve the mystery. e.g. In 17 minutes, or at the end of the first section. This keeps them focused not only on what you're saying, but on edge, anticipating the moment when you solve the mystery.
But won't the gap distract them?
Yes, there's a gap between issuing the challenge and solving it, but the audience doesn't get distracted at all. Why? Because you've been clear. You've told them the time at which the problem will be solved. Now they're ready to focus on anything else that you have to say, expecting fully well that you will keep your promise at the right time.
And even if you're an expert, you don't want the audience to take over
Notice how the magician doesn't ask your opinion when he does the magic trick? Well, the same applies to you. In every audience, there are likely to be hecklers. Or super-skeptics. You could put twenty elephants in the room and they'd still find fault with your method. If you ask the audience to raise their hand, or do something that involves audience participation, you're more than likely to run into the heckler.
That's when you've lost control
Now your carefully executed challenge is the mercy of the heckler and his agenda. It's better to meet the challenge, pause for a few seconds and let the awe seep through the crowd. Then, move along. The ones in the audience who've felt the change will come along with you, and the hecklers won't—but at least they won't get a chance to drive you off tangent.
Every product or service has a bit of magic
Every product or service can demonstrate that magic, but you can't fiddle with all the features. You have to pick one feature—the one that creates magic. And every product or service has to have this amazing "something" or it's just another me-too offering. Finding that magic is what causes the audience to gasp in amazement and come along for the rest of the ride.
So let's summarise, shall we?
1) Look of ONE element in your product or service. What is that one?
2) Introduce the challenge right at the start of your presentation.
3) Then DO NOT solve the problem. Let it linger.
4) The lingering should have a fixed point. e.g. 17 minute-mark or end of first section etc.
5) At that point, not earlier, you should reveal the solution.
6) Do not get the audience to participate. You're opening yourself up to hecklers.
7) Losing control is one thing. A heckler can make you lose status. And that's death on stage.
8) Once you've got the audience gobsmacked, linger for a few minutes. Let the moment sink in, then move along.
When you read this piece, it may seem almost impossible to figure out what to do next. Does your product or service really have a magic trick. Yes it does. And you will find it only if you stick to ONE feature or benefit.
That one trick is a pure attention-getter!
It pulls the audience along with you, and sure stops the doodling!
The Three-Month Vacation, that's one of the things that make me really happy. But what else is required to keep that happiness level up? The key lies in identifying the obstacles. When we remove the obstacles, we know how to get to happiness. This may seem like a weird topic to take on, but check it out for yourself. Happiness isn't some weird pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It isn't some Internet marketer promising you endless clients. It's reachable, you know. So check it out.
Useful Resources
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc
Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver
For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/
Time Stamps
00:00:20 Introduction: The Secret of Happiness
00:01:23 The List, the list, the list
00:03:56 Obstacle 1: Inefficiency
00:07:07 Obstacle 2: Greed
00:09:32 Obstacle 3: Self-doubt
00:11:30 Summary
00:12:29 US Workshop + Book on Pricing
Transcript:
When I was 8 years old the highlight of my week was "coconut water".
On Saturdays, I'd go with my father to get all the provisions for the week. There was no drive to the supermarket ten times a week. Instead, once a week, we'd get on the train, then walk into a market filled with fresh vegetables, meat, fish and fruit. And in the middle of this market was a guy who sold coconuts—and coconut water.
Almost nothing brought a smile to my face as much as the thought of drinking coconut water on Saturdays. It was my moment of pure bliss.
And that, just that, is the secret of life
We go around trying to find the purpose of life, when the answer is right in front of us all the time. The purpose of life is to be "happy".
Except I wasn't entirely happy with just the coconut water
After we bought a ton of meat, fish and vegetables and headed back to the train station, we'd eat a potato snack dipped in a mixture of green mint chutney and tamarind sauce. Now that too, was my moment of bliss.
So wait, this happiness story is getting weird, isn't it?
I mean here we are trying to establish happiness, and it seems we're jumping from one point to another. And that's exactly the point! No one thing makes us happy. For me, my current moments of bliss are the walk to the cafe with my wife, the coffee, let's not forget the coffee. There's also the time I spend with my nieces. My painting, my work, the music on my podcast, single malt whisky—and yes, the 3-Month vacations.
And yet, most of us never write down what makes us happy
So do it as an exercise. Get out a sheet of paper. Make the list. It won't necessarily be a very long list. And the funny thing is that it will consist of rather mundane things like gardening, a walk on the beach—I even know someone who is super contented by ironing. Making the list enables us to know what we really want from life, so we can start heading in that direction.
Because frothing, right in front of us are the obstacles. They’re determined to reduce, even eliminate our happiness.
So what are these obstacles?
They are:
-
Inefficiency
-
Greed
-
Self-doubt
Inefficiency? Really?
Yes, really! Though you'd never expect to see inefficiency in a happiness list, it's the No.1 killer of happiness. That's because if you were to look at your list again, you'd find that everything that makes you happy, also takes time.
Time that you're spending being inefficient
Look at the software you're using. How efficient are you at it? Let's take for example the "Three Month Vacation" podcast that I create. Well, the podcast recording itself is just 15-17 minutes. And I can usually do it in one take. But each podcast is matched to music—often as many as eight different pieces of music (you have to listen to it, to believe it). And all this music, and production, and editing—well, it takes 3 hours.
So the question that arises is just this: How do you save 10 minutes?
Just 10 minutes in a three-hour exercise, adds up to 20 a week—about bout 100 a month. Which totals up to 1200 a year. That's 20 hours of happiness deprivation and for what? For inefficiency? That's a stupid, yes stupid, way to go about things isn't it?
But we do it routinely—we stay inefficient
We know that one of the best ways to get clients is to write a book, or a booklet. To create information that draws clients to you, instead of you chasing after them. And we know that the book can't just be "written". It needs structure. But no, no, no, no and no. We just sit down and write the book. And many, many hours later, we're not sure why we're struggling so much with the book. Or why a client is even going to read it. And we're stepping deeper in the doo-doo of inefficiency.
So what are we to do?
Well, we have a list of what makes us happy, right? How about a list of the things we do; the software we use; the books, video, audio we have to create? How about a list—and not a very long list, that enables us to see where we can get more efficient? Instead of slogging for a year over a book, would there be a way to write it using structure? That alone could shave off 10 months of twirling round and round.
If you're using a piece of software, how about learning just two shortcuts a week? Just two a week! See how that brings inefficiency down to its knees, two shortcuts at a time. Yes, inefficiency is a big problem, but greed isn't far behind is it? Let's examine greed, shall we?
So what's the big deal with greed?
I think greed is good. Whenever I'm greedy, I've almost never felt bad. I'm pretty happy when stuffing my face with one more helping of biryani (that's a rich, rice dish) or another heap of maccha ice-cream. So greed itself isn't a problem.
But it sure can get in the way
That's because it takes time to wash off the greed. Too much ice-cream, too much wanting this and that—it all takes time. Because I now have to balance out that greed and atone for it in some way. I have to walk more, exercise more, work more. It doesn't make sense, does it?
Yet we have all the dollar signs in our face
We have marketers that show us how much they earn. This month I earned x. no of dollars. The month after, I earned so much more.
Oh, look a dip in income!
That's not good. Let's work twice as much to obliterate that dip. And so we follow along like idiots expecting that the dollars will show us the way.
And they do. Without the dollars we're just spinning our wheels
But there's a point of enough. Again, this comes down to a definition, perhaps even a list. What's your enough? Do you know? Even though I love my nieces dearly, I do have a point of enough. Coconut water? Even an 8-year old could tell you what was enough. And yes, the dollars. Do we really have to keep doubling them? Are we working for the joy of working, or are we slaves to the smile of our bank managers?
Greed is nice in small bursts, but terrible as a strategy
We pay the price and it becomes a form of inefficiency—and the second barrier to our happiness. Which slides us into the third big hurdle, which is just as surprising. Namely, self-doubt.
Self doubt is a big rocking chair, isn't it?
You know the concept of a rocking chair, don't you? It gives you the feeling of movement, but it goes nowhere. Self-doubt is like that, doing cartwheels in the velodrome of our brain.
But run into a person who's always second-guessing themselves, and you realise that you can't do much about it. And it's terribly inefficient, this self-doubt. It fills your brain with a load of nonsense that keeps you from being happy. And there's nothing much you can do it about it, because the damage isn't new. It's something that has been part of you for a good chunk of your life.
So learn to say thank you!
That's it. The inefficiency comes from the fact that someone won't like your article, your book, your painting, your garden, the muffins you just baked , etc. And if you just assume that you're at the point of "thank you," you've saved yourself a lot of grief. Because if you're saying "thank you," it means you just got complimented on something. Even just the thought of saying thanks is making you smile right now, isn't it?
Now you no longer have to apologise, or back track. The thank you is your way out of the mess, every single time.
The secret of life is in knowing what you want—what you really want
It's the inefficiencies, the greed and the self-doubt that get in our way. Can we save 10 minutes of inefficiency? Can we define our "enough" so we can earn what we want, but then stop? Can we get off the rocking chair by envisioning the "thank you" that is to follow?
Just recognising the barriers and getting out of their way, that's the goal, isn't it?
The secret of being happy isn't as hard as it seems.
Well, it can be.
Right at this moment I can't decide: coconut water or coffee?
It might seem that it's impossible to get ideas for your articles. And it is. You go completely blank. Of course, there's a reason for all this blankness. And just as you can go blank, you have more ideas than you know what to do with. Wow, can this really be possible? Can you really have tons of ideas? Yes, you can. Provided you use all, or at least one of these systems. But hey, find out for yourself.
--------------------
Useful Resources
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc
Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver
For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/
--------------------
Time Stamps
00:00:20 Introduction: Where To Get Ideas
00:02:05 Table of Contents: Input, Brainstorming, Client Questions
00:02:46 Element 1: The Importance of Input
00:07:46 Element 2: Brainstorming
00:10:39 Element 3: How To Get Clients To Pitch In
00:16:00 Summary
00:17:13 Announcements / 00:18:29
Where to get article ideas: An endless source
The moment you see a ray of sun, you know it's something magical.
That single ray has bounced back and forth like a billiards ball and taken well over a 100,000 years to get to earth. But even as you look, there's another ray, and another. In fact, we get so much energy from the sun, that in one day, it provides more energy than the world’s population could consume in 27 years.
If only we could tap into some of that endless energy when coming up with ideas for an article.
Instead we sit there, transfixed at the screen. We think. We trash around in our seats. We drink copious amounts of coffee. And despite sitting in awesome sunlight, we're trapped in some dark corner.
So what are we to do? Where do we go to get an endless source of ideas?
I can't speak for every writer, but I can speak for myself. And I know that dark place very well. There are days, weeks even, when you think you're never ever going to come up with a single idea worth writing or speaking about (yes, I do podcasts as well). Stomping, screaming and coffee doesn't help. So what does?
Three things actually—three brilliant sources of sunshine
- Reading/Listening
- Brainstorming
- Client Questions
Let's start off with the first ray of sunshine: Reading/Listening
You know how you make coffee, right? You have to have ground coffee, water and a source of heat. Well, that's input. Without input, you're staring at an empty mug that isn't going to fill itself. And the same applies to ideas. Those ideas are going to swerve right around you, unless you decide to get some input. Actually, not some—quite a lot of input.
You want to soak yourself in input
And the way to do this is reasonably obvious. You turn on the TV, read Facebook and listen to the crappy stuff on the radio, right? Ha, ha, that was a joke. Instead you have to get your nose in a book—a good book.
A book that's related to your set of topics to begin with. The moment you get stuck in that book, you go through two stages: agreement and disagreement. Yet, even when you agree, you have your own spin on things. But when you disagree, it's like your head is about to burst. You have fire coursing up and down your veins. You're now ready to write.
Except there's a bit of a problem
Unless we're jumping on a bus or train, we rarely have time to read—in the morning. And the morning matters. It's precisely the point in time when your brain has rested and is more likely to remember and process things a lot better than the evening (and for sure, better than the afternoon). So if you don't have that time to sunbathe in the written word, you have to turn to audio.
Audio? Ugh, you say. Audio...
And ugh is right. I'm listening to an audiobook right now, and ugh is probably the most suitable description. With a book, I could simply flip pages if the author gets too technical or boring.
A quick scan and I'm on my way. But audio is linear. You're stuck, not knowing what to fast forward and how much to fast forward. And that's provided you can remember anything at all. Most of us can't.
And you shouldn't
The goal of input is to get ONE idea. O-N-E. That's it. With a single idea you can bound off into article writing land. And yes, even though you may like your quiet time in the car, or when you're walking, you also need time to get in input. Or else you get too much quiet, and there's zero input.
Suddenly you're thrown back into that dark corner, unsure what to write about. So yes, text is great, audio too. But what about our second ray of sunshine? Ah yes, let's mosey along to brainstorming.
So how and where do you use brainstorming?
I'm doing a podcast, possibly a book on the "myth of inborn talent". I could read a ton of books, listen to audio etc. but that may not help me. And clients, well, they wouldn't be of much help either. There's no recourse but to do the brainstorming, all by myself.
So you sit in the cafe and list out the topics, the sub-topics and the sub-sub-topics. And suddenly it's like you've opened up a vein. You have a lot you've been thinking about and you've got a ton of topics to cover.
But what if you don't end up with a bonanza?
Clients and friends can help—with objections. Given a basic framework, they can come up with objections and then you have to spend your time dismantling those objections. For example: Let's say we take on the objection of 'why one person runs faster than another' or 'one person does geometry faster than anyone else in the room'. These are objections and clients and friends are full of these objections.
Yes, you can do your silent brainstorming, but also consider roping in some deeply skeptical friends and clients to bring in your second ray of sunshine. Which of course takes us to our third ray—clients.
Clients? Didn't we already consider clients?
Sure we did. But you nudged them, didn't you? In a lot of situations the clients will ask you questions as you're working with them. I've been doing the Article Writing Course since 2006. Every year the course changes by about 20%. It has more content than ever before. More clarification, even.
But that doesn't stop the flow of questions
They come thick and fast. And it's up to you to see them as a pain or a blessing. I get my shopping trolley and stack up the questions. And then, for good measure, I answer them as fast as I possibly can.
This impresses the heck out of clients, but hey, they're doing me such a great favour, by asking the questions. Without the questions, I have to tax my own brain—and that's a real pain—that brainstorming bit. With clients, I have the questions served up. All I have to do, is answer them in detail.
But isn't all of this stuff turning out to be an overload?
Sure, we're apt to get tired just thinking about it. But let's look at it simply. You need some reading/listening time. Even 30 minutes of dedicated time is good enough. You then can head to the cafe and wring out your brain, if you like. And while you're at it, an e-mail may slide in, or a client may meet you at the cafe. And yes, solve their problem.
Speed is critical, though...
If you wait too long, the outline seems to fall apart and the article turns to mush. So you need to write, and write as quickly as possible. At first, the writing will be a pain (all stuff is a pain when you're just a "beginner"). In time, you'll get an article out in about 45 minutes, maybe an hour, provided you stick to your outlines.
I've been miserable.
I've run out of ideas.
I've found darkness in bright sunlight.
But to get ideas, you need input. Clients, your own brainstorming and most of all, the reading and the audio (ugh as it may be).
Focus on ONE point. Outline it as quickly as possible.
Then write.
We are prone to think that the opposite of success is failure. And it's not. It's decay. The opposite of moving forward, isn't standing still. It's decay. Like a pool of water that gets stagnant, we decay. Our businesses, whether we're in an online business, or offline?it decays. So how do we overcome this decay?
Contact Details and Links
To e-mail me: sean@psychotactics.com
For the crazy newsletter: http://www.psychotactics.com
Finish your book: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc (yes, that's the workshop)
Chaos in your life? http://www.psychotactics.com/chaos
Time Stamps
00:00:20 Introduction
00:01:58 What's The Opposite of Success?
00:02:53 Table of Contents / 00:03:10
Part 1: Learning Decay / 00:06:03
Part 2: Fitness Decay / 00:09:24
Part 3: Achievement Decay / 00:13:46
Summary / 00:15:36 The One Thing You Can Do Today / 00:16:26
Final Announcements + Workshop DC
Transcript:
Sean:Hi. This is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com and you are listening to the three-month vacation podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead, it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time.
What is 15,000 multiplied by 365? Why would you ask yourself such a question? I'm not really sure but I ask myself the question at the start of the year and the answer was mind boggling. It was 5,475,000. That's 5,475,000 steps that you can do in a year if you do 15,000 a day
. It was mind boggling to me for a very simple reason: I could never reach that goal. At least that's what I thought. I could never, ever reach that goal.
Then I thought about my parents. I thought of my grandparents, my great grandparents and all of them would have reached that goal. Every single one of them would have reached that goal every single year.
My parents, my grandparents, my great grandparents, they'd never known what it was to go to a gym. They never knew what it was to diet. They ate pretty much anything they wanted and any amounts of it and then they drank stuff. In the case of my dad I know that he smoked a lot as well and at 75 he was still riding his motorcycle.
So why did I got down this bizarre path of calculating these 5,000,000 steps a year? The reason I went there was because I heard an interview somewhere. This doctor was talking about the opposite of success. In his case, he was talking about obesity and weight issues. He says, "The opposite of it is not standing still. The opposite of it is decay."
That struck me like a thunderbolt. The opposite of success is not not being successful. It's decay. It's almost like you've decided not to brush your teeth anymore and what happens. We're not really talking about standing still, are we? We're talking about decay. We're talking about stuff going really bad.
In today's episode I want to talk about three things. The first is about learning, the second about fitness and the third is about achievements. Let's start off with the first one which is learning.
I'm not a neuroscientist but I know enough about the brain to realize that the brain works on a [dimmer 03:20] setting. When we don't learn something it doesn't exactly forget that something, but it sets it on dimmer.
Last year, my niece Marsha and I we learned 150 countries and 150 capitals in sequence. We would go at high speed going across the continents Europe, Africa, North Asia, South Asia, The Pacific and of course, South, Central and North America.
A year has passed and if you asked us to go through that sequence at high speed, first we couldn't do it but also, we can't always remember the capitals. We know where they are. We haven't forgotten, but our brains are on a dimmer switch.
When you look at most of us, our real learning took place when we were in school and university and we spent many hours a day learning. Then after that we've done very little. We've learned to program here and there. We've studied some course and done some workshop, but that's about it. Technically, we're in a state of decay.
The problem with this lack of learning is that we're not working at our full efficiency. We're working in our full capacity but not our full efficiency because full efficiency means that you could do the same job in one-fifth a day or maybe one-tenth a day, but you're spending all day doing stuff.
Like writing an article for instance. Most of us would spend a half day or a day writing an article. You might spend a month or two writing a book. You could do it in a week. Better still, you could do a better book in a week than most people could do in a month or two.
The decay really takes its toll and it takes its toll in terms of energy because now we're so tired that we can't do much. Of course, because we're working all the time we don't take breaks. I'm not even talking about weekend breaks or month-long breaks. I'm just talking about breaks during the day. Just half an hour here, an hour there, two hours there.
We've entered a state of decay. We no longer have control over our lives. It's almost like being unable to brush our teeth. We're not really standing still. We're moving backwards.
Of course, the same thing applies to our fitness. Several years ago I went to the doctor and he called in my wife and he said, "This guy, his blood sugar is up, his cholesterol is up, his pressure is up. I don't know what you've been feeding him but he's got to change his habits."
I'm a bit of an iconoclast. I didn't actually change my habits. I wasn't that bad, anyway, but I definitely wasn't exercising as much as I should have been and so I started working. We started doing 10,000 steps a day.
I got a Fitbit about two years ago and that caused me to park further away from the store instead of getting the closest spot near the store. It caused me to walk to the store. Often, I just leave my car behind. In fact, the car got so useless I had to sell it. We still have one car but the point is we had a couple of cars but I was using the car so infrequently that we had spider webs on it.
Even so, it was inconsistent. We'd walk a few days then not walk some days. If it is raining we wouldn't walk. That consistency wasn't in place. Then I realized we could do 5,000,000 steps. Actually, you could do 5,475,000.
To do 50,000 steps a day is phenomenal. It is very hard to keep up to that level, but almost all of us could do about 3,000,000 steps a year. 3,000,000 steps a year. 3,000,000 steps a year that most of us aren't doing.
The reason why we aren't doing it is because we're not tracking it. We're not tracking it because we don't have a goal in place. We don't have those 3,000,000 or those 4,000,000 or those 5,000,000 steps.
Track it. Get a pedometer of some kind. It doesn't have to be a Fitbit, but start tracking it. The reason why I chose Fitbit is simply because it sinks up with all my friends and of course, we are competitive and that causes me to do better.
If I'm trying to compete with myself it's very easy to just give up. The Fitbit works for me, it might not work for you. Choose whatever you like. Get those 3,000,000 steps in, get those 5,000,000 steps in because the opposite of that is decay.
How do we know this to be true? Well, in my case, at least, I went back for the next test. The doctor said, "Whatever you're doing, that's great. Whatever you're eating, that's great." But I hadn't changed anything. I just changed the walking.
The opposite of success becomes decay. We have decay in learning, we have decay in fitness and we have decay in our achievements.
Let's talk a bit about achievement, shall we? I was sitting at the barber the other day and I had all these papers and pens in my hand and he was cutting my hair and he says, "What's all this stuff?" I said, "Well, that's my planning." Of course, you can see the amused look on his face, but that's what we had to do.
We went through maybe a year or two years of not planning on a regular basis. We'd make a plan but then we wouldn't look at that plan again. It didn't work for us. We pretended that Fridays didn't exist. Fridays weren't the day that we could meet any clients or do any stuff. We were going to plan on Friday.
Of course, you don't take the whole day to plan, but in the morning we'd go out, we'd sit at the café and we'd plan. It takes an hour sometimes, an hour and a half to plan the month and the year that's about to unfold.
It's bad enough to plan the week, but the month and the year, everything starts to shift and all your priorities start to shift and suddenly it's taking a good hour and a half to just get that plan moving.
Then as you're going through the week you're looking into your plan you'll find that hey, the plan is going off tangent. So even during the week you have to keep looking in the plan and you have to keep shifting your priorities and things that you have to do and the things that you haven't done.
A lot of people get very stressed with that. They go, "Well, I haven't done this." The idea is that you're re-negotiating. Most people think that somehow they have to conquer that to-do list and you never have to conquer the to-do list because you're never going to conquer the to-do list.
A to-do list is like the Himalayan mountain range. You climb to the top of one mountain and what do you see? There are hundreds of other mountains. It's a mountain range. That's your to-do list. All you have to do is re-negotiate it.
When you haven't achieve certain things, well you might see it as a sense of failure. But in reality, it's how life unfolds. There are millions of things to do and they're not going to go away and all you have to do is to keep planning and keep re-negotiating. As someone once said, "Planning is priceless but plans are useless," and in planning too we have decay.
The opposite of planning is just randomness. The more you're planning, the more you're keeping control over things, the less you're allowing decay to set in. The biggest problem with decay is we're not able to see it as it's happening around us.
We moved into this house 10 years ago and it was a beautiful house. The garden looked pretty good and the fence looked pretty good. I never really saw the decay. As we lived in the house I didn't really notice that decay happening. We were tending the [inaudible 13:01], we were pruning the hedges, mowing the lawns, doing what you do.
Then we had someone come in and do a landscape design and redo the garden. I took some photographs. I took some photographs before and after. It was amazing, especially when you look at the photograph several months later.
It's absolutely gobsmacking amazing. It's amazing how much decay had set in in the previous gut; how terrible the tiles looked; how battered the fence looked. I couldn't believe. It.
Our lives are filled with things that we need to learn, the fitness that we need to keep and the achievements that make us who we are.
If we don't have that time to learn and we don't have the money and we don't have the resources to learn, then decay sets in. The same thing happens with our fitness. We may be told by everyone that this is okay and yet we know when we're unfit. We know exactly when we're overweight. We know exactly when we're obese.
We know that we have to make some changes. You set the goal, in our case it's the 5,000,000 mark, and you go for it. Finally, you look at your achievements and all of that planning make such a big difference because the future is now.
We all hope that in the future we will write a book, we will go and visit some place, we will do this and we will do that. That future depends so much on the planning that we do today. The re-negotiation that we do every week and probably every day or two. All of this stops to decay the rot from setting in.
I used to think that the opposite of success was to be unsuccessful. Now that whole paradigm has shifted in my head. The paradigm is that it's decay. It's rot. We are the only people who can stop the rot.
What's the one thing that we can do today? Well, there is the 5,000,000 Club and it's not $5,000,000, it's 5,000,000. Those 5,000,000 enable us do a lot of other stuff as well because I'm able to listen to audio books while walking or a podcast and so I learned and then the achievement comes from there. From that fitness of body comes a fitness of the brain and the fitness of our business and our downtime, our vacation time, our relaxation time.
The first of January has long passed, but we can have our resolution today. Get on the 3,000,000 step mark or the 5,000,000 step mark or the 5,475,000 step mark.
That brings us to the end of this episode. If you like this episode you probably also like episode 14 and that is about getting things done and how the trigger plays a role. There was also a very popular episode, that's episode 17, which is how to slowdown even in the midst of chaos.
If you haven't already done so, when you leave a review on iTunes or if you send us your review, you can also get a free book which is Outwitting Resistance. It's a really cool book and of course, it stops you from this whole rot and decay.
There's also the workshop in Silver Spring. That's outside Washington, D.C. at the Sheraton on the 5th, 6th and 7th of May. This is about information products on how to construct that book. It's not about writing the book. That content you already have in your head.
This is more about what makes the book consumable. You'll learn how to construct a book that customers read from start to finish or a course or a webinar or a report that they go from start to finish just like you're doing on this podcast right now.
What is it that causes people to abandon stuff in the middle and not complete it? That's what we're going to cover in this workshop. It's pretty much one speaker and we're going to cover one topic and we're going to go three days. You're actually going to implement stuff rather than just sit there in the audience and listen. To meet us and to meet Elmo go to psychotactics.com/dc.
That's me, Sean D'Souza, saying bye from psychotactics.com and the three-month vacation. Buh-bye.
Why did we have so many great artists, painters and sculptors in the Renaissance? Why does Brazil produce so many great soccer players? Is slow learning better than fast? Learn more by reading "The Talent Code" by Daniel Coyle. / / For more: http://www.psychotactics.com / / sean@psychotactics.com
If you're struggling to get attention on your website or when you meet a client, it's because you're not using two core factors: novelty and consequences. When you use these two concepts back to back with each other, something magical happens?you get attention!
http://www.psychotactics.com/dc (Finish Your Book Workshop in Washington DC)
http://www.psychotactics.com/denver (Where I'm speaking at the Copyblogger conference).
http://www.psychotactics.com/magic (for magic, of course)
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Sean D'Souza:Hi. This is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com, and you're listening to The Three-Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead, it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time.
On January 15, 2008, Steve Jobs stood in front of an audience and in his hand he had something that seemed quite boring. It was just an envelope, a yellow envelope, a manila envelope but, still, quite boring. Then he proceeded to take out a computer from that envelope, and that's when the audience gasped. What did Steve Jobs do that was so amazing? It's what you should do as a presenter no matter where you stand in front of an audience. It's what you should do when you're presenting something, a product or a service, and that's something that you should work on. It's called attention.
While we all seek attention, we don't seem to get as much of it as we'd expect. The reason why we don't get that attention is simply because we don't understand the elements of attention. Attention has two elements, novelty and consequences. We'll start off with the concept of novelty. What is novelty? Let's take the example of Sara Blakeley. She started this company called SPANX. SPANX is an undergarment that smoothes the contours of a woman's body, making clothes more flattering, making them more comfortable.
Sara was having a problem. She was having trouble making her first sale. That's because when you're presenting something, it's usually in a boardroom and some buyer is looking at your stuff and you're in a list of seventeen buyers or seven hundred buyers. For some reason, Sara decided to change the tactics. She decided to go with novelty. Instead of making the presentation in the boardroom, she decided to take the buyer to the Ladies' Room. There she was at a Neiman Marcus in Dallas and they go to the Ladies' Room.
To really make a point, Sara had worn some form-fitting white pants, and because it was form-fitting and white, well, you can tell it wasn't that flattering for a woman. Then she pulled out her product, which she had called SPANX, and she put it on and the buyer saw the before and after. Right there and then, there was a moment of conversion. There was this flashing bolt of light and suddenly she was able to sell this product that she was having so much trouble selling before. What she found or stumbled on or figured out was this factor of novelty. The whole scenario of the Ladies' Room, the white pants, it being form-fitting, all of that combined to form this moment where it was impossible for the buyer to ignore. That's really what you're doing. You're making it impossible for the buyer to ignore you.
In this episode we look at the methods that you can use to get novelty going. We'll look at the length of the novelty and finally, we'll look at the connection. Once you've done your novelty act, how do you connect? How do you stay relevant? Where do you go from there? Let's start off with the first one, which is the methods that you need to use to get to novelty.
When I make the Brain Audit presentation, I do something very odd. I'll step into the audience and pick up a chair that no one is sitting on. Then I will get the chair to the front of the room and I will say, "I'm going to sit on this chair, stand up." Sit on the chair, stand up. Sit on the chair and stand up. Then I turn to the audience and say, "Did any one of you expect this chair to break? Why didn't the chair break?" What you've seen there is a demonstration of novelty. It's breaking that cycle of whatever people are doing. The method that was used in this system of novelty was to use the demonstration.
You can use stories, analogies, and demonstrations. Those are the most common uses of novelty. Whether you're writing an article, you're doing a presentation, you're in front of a client and you're selling some product or service, one of these three methods, stories, analogies, or demonstrations, are extremely powerful. The reason why they're powerful is more important, and that is because it breaks the pattern. When an audience or a client is expecting something and you've come out from left field, they are forced to pay attention. You are forced to pay attention when someone walks onstage and pulls out a computer from an envelope. You are forced to pay attention when someone starts to pull up a chair and sit on the chair and stand on it.
In another example, when I was speaking in Chicago, there were about two hundred fifty people in the audience. I don't know about you, but it's very hard to get two hundred fifty people to pay attention to you. The topic that I was speaking about was pricing, about how to increase your prices without losing customers. How would you start such a presentation? I started the presentation with a video of New Zealand. That is novelty. It breaks that pattern in a matter of seconds. It doesn't matter what you are thinking or doing or thinking of doing. The pattern is broken. You have to pay attention.
When Tom Dickson wanted to sell his blenders, well, how can you break a pattern with blenders? When an iPhone comes out, it's extremely coveted. To destroy an iPhone is crazy. It almost flies in the face of reason, so that's what he did. He broke the pattern by going the opposite way. What he did was he took that iPhone and put it in a blender and crushed it to pieces. That got everyone's attention. He became a sensation on YouTube. The sales have soared since then. Whenever you look at this factor of how people have got attention, it's by going almost counterintuitive, that everyone expects you to go one way and you're going the other way.
When we go back to the sixties and we look at Bill Bernbach, he started up an advertising agency which is now called BBDO. He had a lot of these things. We had the Volkswagen, which is the Beetle. All of America was thinking big, big cars, big everything, Big Mac. His campaign was completely the opposite. it was think small. They started selling these Bugs, the Beetle Bugs, and they were about thinking small. In the car rental business, Avis and Hertz have been at each other's throats forever. It was such a delight, such an attention-getter when Avis said, "We're number 2. So why go with us?" Immediately, that gets your attention.
What we're looking at here is this attention-getter, which is this disruption in what people are expecting to get and what you give them. It's done through stories, analogies, demonstrations, and just plain counterintuitiveness, but at the very core of it, what gets attention is the novelty. If you're expecting me to say something and I say exactly that, you fall asleep. You have to find something that's going to wake me up. Yes, novelty wakes me up, but what about the length of that novelty? How long should I go before I stop?
When we read a novel, we tend to find a lot of description; the character is being built up. The same thing applies to movies; the character is being built up. When you're communicating, you don't have that build-up time. Let's say you're writing an article, you've got maybe a paragraph, maybe two paragraphs of telling a story or a demonstration or creating some kind of analogy. That's it. Then you have to go and connect. You have to continue. You have to go to the next section. You can't stay in the novelty for too long because the novelty wears itself out.
The same thing applies with presentations. When you're standing there in front of an audience, you don't have half the presentation to get the novelty across. In fact, it would be boring. When you sit on that chair, stand up, sit on the chair, stand up, that's quick. When Sara Blakeley went through the whole routine of changing into SPANX and showing how it made a difference, that was quick. The same thing applied to Blendtec where he spun those iPhones around in the blender. Again, it's quick. It doesn't have to be very quick; it just has to be quick enough. The novelty lasts for a few minutes, and this applies to reading or speaking or anything.
If you're standing in front of a person, making a presentation, you've probably got a few minutes, maybe three or four minutes. If it's an article or a sales page, you probably have less time; you have twenty seconds, thirty seconds. The novelty of a story, demonstration, or analogy doesn't last very long. It's best to get there, not to be too hurried about it, but to tell the story and get out of there. Pretty much like you've heard in the podcast here. There's a story, it shows up, you get the point, and then we move on to something else. That something else is the third part in today's episode, and that is the consequences.
When you look at a story like Little Red Riding Hood, yes, it's a story. It's a novelty, it's very interesting and kids love it. The little girl is headed to her grandma's place and she's taking some goodies for grandma. Then along the way, she meets the wolf and there are consequences, not just for the girl but for the grandma as well. There is a moral to that story, but before we get to any kind of moral, we are looking at two distinct phases. One is the whole novelty of the girl meeting the wolf and then the consequences.
Sometimes the consequences are not so apparent. When Sara Blakeley shows the before and after of SPANX, those consequences are apparent immediately. When Steve Jobs took the MacBook Air out of the envelope, there didn't seem to be many consequences. In the Steve Jobs presentation, the consequences are in the lightness. When you don't have that light MacBook Air, which was billed as the lightest notebook, well, you've got a heavy computer.
These messages are driven through the media and in the presentation. When you went with Avis instead of Hertz, it was to show you that Hertz is number one; they don't care. Number two, we have to care. In many cases the consequences are either stated or implied. When you're making a presentation, when you're speaking to a client, you cannot afford to let it be implied. You cannot afford to let the client figure out what the consequences are. You need to tell them.
When I'm making a presentation on pricing and I show them this video of New Zealand, the next thing I talk about is The Three-Month Vacation and how pricing affects your ability to go on vacation and how you have to work a lot harder and money is not easy to come by. What happens is a very unconnected topic like the video on New Zealand then connects nicely into pricing with consequences. When I do the Brain Audit presentation, sitting down, standing up, sitting down, standing up, what are the consequences there?
Again, the consequences are explained. It's how a chair is built on science and how marketing doesn't work on science, how it falls apart, how we raise thousands of dollars just buying some crazy system that's supposed to be working tomorrow instead of understanding the science behind it and why things work. Then the audience gets it. We've gone from a stage of novelty to a stage of consequences, and that's how you get and you keep that attention. You can do that very, very quickly. It does take some practice. All of the great stories and demonstrations and analogies, all of them have to have this little practice routine before they go live. Once it goes live, you'll see the results for yourself. You'll stand up and people will pay attention. Then you'll drive home the consequences, and they'll want to know how do I buy into whatever it is you're selling?
Yes, that brings us to the end of this episode. Let's do a quick summary. We started out with the methods of getting attention. We saw that the methods are usually a story, an analogy, or a demonstration, but at the very core it has to be almost counterintuitive. It has to be something that the audience or your client is not expecting to hear, and that gets the attention. It snaps the person to attention.
The second thing you want to do is you want to figure out the length. The length needs to be short enough. In an article, that means a paragraph, maybe two paragraphs. When you're meeting a client face-to-face, you'll get three, four minutes. Anything more and you're just pushing the boundaries. Novelty lasts only so long, and then you have to move to the next stage, which are the consequences. That was our last section, which was the consequences. Sure, you can have implied consequences, but it's very dangerous because the client needs to know specifically what are the consequences of not taking that action. You should bring that in your presentation, in your speech, in your article, in your sales letter.
There you go. Novelty and consequences, and you get attention. What one thing can you do today? We covered quite a lot. The important thing that you can do today is to look at whatever you're saying. Whatever you're saying is what you'd call intuitive. It's what you've trained yourself to say. How about going counterintuitive? Let me give you an example. I started writing a series on writer's block this week, and maybe I'll make it into a booklet, maybe a book, but I went counterintuitive. How would we do this intuitively? How would we come up with a title? We'd say, "How to avoid writer's block." Mine was counterintuitive. It said, "How to get writer's block." Notice how it gets your attention? That's what you want to do, that one thing.
This week, try and do one thing that is counterintuitive and you'll see how it just gets the attention of your audience. Then move to the consequences.
Yes, that's the end of this episode. If you haven't already rated this podcast, please do so at iTunes. If you have a list and would like to share this podcast with your list, please do so. I'm telling you because unless you tell, things don't happen. On another front, if you've been struggling to finish your book or your e-book, then there is a workshop and this is at Psychotactics.com/dc. It's three days. It's a lot of fun. More importantly, it helps you understand the structure of how to finish a book.
A book is very frustrating to write, and the reason why it's frustrating is not because of the whole factor of the content. You already have the content in your head. It's how you structure it. When you are able to structure it quickly, put the book together quickly, your client is able to do the same. They're able to read it, to consume it. As a result, they come back for more. They come back for more consulting, for more training, and for more books and products.
That's Psychotactics.com/dc. We'll see you there on May 5th, 6th, and 7th. That's it from The Three-Month Vacation and Psychotactics.com. If you haven't been to Psychotactics, go there today. Bye for now.
We often wonder why the sale gets killed. Why the customer walks away. Sometimes it's because we're doing a lousy presentation. Or we forget the facts. But often, we get everything perfectly right. And then it's time to ask for the deal. And we freeze. We get needy. We hope the neediness helps to get some empathy. And in reality, it kills the deal. Or at least puts us in a weak spot. So where does this neediness show up? And how do barriers help to avoid being needy?
Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc
Speaking at Copyblogger: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver
Contact me: sean@psychotactics.com
Zany newsletter: http://www.psychotactics.com
Time Stamps
00:00:20 Introduction
00:02:25 Table of Contents: Status and Urgency
00:04:27 The Story of 5000bc.com
00:07:58 How Good Should You Be To Put Up Barriers?
00:10:02 Increasing Level of Barriers
00:12:43 Final Announcements
Transcript
Sean D'Souza: Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from psychotactics.com, and you're listening to the Three Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead, it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time.
You've probably heard of Pilates, but maybe not of Joe Pilates. Who was Joe Pilates? He was the guy who started up the Pilates system, except when he got to the United States he wasn't that popular, so he rented a studio right under the studio of some dancers. They would practice, and as you'd expect, as you dance more frequently you get more injuries. Joe's system, of course, would make sure that you were more fit. Now the important part is that he didn't have any clients. Yet, when someone called in and wanted to make an appointment, this is what he'd say: I can't work with you right now. I'm busy and you'd have to wait for a couple of weeks. He was busy. He was busy doing nothing.
That makes no sense, does it? Why not take someone who's willing to pay right now instead of waiting for a couple of weeks when they could change their mind? That's the whole point about neediness. If you are needy that's a deal killer. That's the number one deal killer no matter what you're selling, whether it be a service, a product, a workshop, just about anything. If you are needy, it's going to go down in flames.
Why is neediness so bad? There are two reasons why neediness is terrible, and the first is that it reduces your status. The second is that it derails urgency. Let's talk about status for a second. We don't even have to go very far to look for examples of neediness. Let's say a friend of yours wants to go for ice cream, and they get needy at that point in time. They are trying to convince you to come for ice cream and you're not that keen on going for ice cream. Immediately their status level goes down and your status level goes up. They need you to come along. You don't need to go.
But at the same time, the second factor kicks in, which is urgency. They want to have that ice cream right now, so the more urgent it is, the more they're going to pull you and the less urgency you feel. Yes, you might say, "Fine, we'll go for the ice cream," but notice how your status level has increased. Notice how your urgency has decreased. Whenever we're selling anything, the moment we're needy it doesn't work for us.
We think that the buyer is going to feel a little empathy for us, they're going to feel a little sorry for us, but something else happens. A switch turns in their heads and suddenly they don't feel any urgency. They don't feel the need to buy anything from us. Instead, what happens is the other person, they feel this need to pull out. That is just human nature. The moment we feel that we're in control and the other person is not in control, we don't feel the need to go ahead and follow their agenda. We think our agenda is more important. It's all because of this little switch of turning needy.
In 2003 we started out a website, a membership website, at 5000bc.com. Right at the start we decided that we were going to have only a fixed number of members. The second thing was that you needed to have read The Brain Audit, which is our book, before you joined 5000bc. Now think about it for a moment. It's a brand new website. Hardly anybody knows us. We've just started out in 2002. Psychotactics was brand new. Why would you put barriers in the way? Why would you tell them that they had to read a book before they could join? No matter where you go and what you read they tell you that you should reduce the friction. You should reduce that friction so that people can sign up for your product or service. Here you're getting barriers.
The barriers is very important, because it removes that sense of neediness. It's like okay, we're going to have five people in this workshop. It doesn't matter. We're still going to go ahead and with the workshop. Today our copyrighting course, our article writing course, it fills up in about 30 minutes. Those courses are in excess of $2,500. Almost no one on the internet fills up their courses as quickly as we do. How are these courses billed? The article writing course is billed as the toughest writing course in the world, and yes, you have to read The Brain Audit anyway, and yes, the notes are sent to you three months in advance and you have to go through the notes and listen to the audio. There are all these barriers.
Clients, knowing these barriers, still want to get there. They still want to do the courses and they sign up faster than ever before. By putting the barriers in place we are less needy, but there was a time when we used to be needy, when we used to do all the things that we were told, which is reduce the friction. So we reduced the friction. We had four people on the copyrighting course, nowhere next to full, nowhere next to half full. When you look at our website and you look at the form you have to fill, most forms have just a name and email address. Ours has the name, last name, where are you from, what city, country, where you found us. Why bother with so much stuff? Again, they're barriers. The more needy you are the less likely I am to feel any urgency. We saw that with Pilates as well.
When Joe started up his studio he worked on that concept of increasing his status level. Even though he had no customers he still increased his status level. Secondly, he made sure there was an urgency factory. They could come in only three weeks from now. You know this when you go to a doctor for instance. You go to a dentist and the dentist goes through his list and there are all these blank spaces but he goes, "No, no, no. It's March now and you can come in July." You are desperate to go there in July, especially if the dentist is really good.
You think wait a second, you said, "Provided the dentist is really good," and I'm not that really good. I'm not so good. But think about it, was Joe Pilates that good? When we started out were we that good? Are we still that good? People are always in a state of evolution. No matter where you are on the road you're always able to help your client in some way that is useful for them, but they have to feel this need. They have to feel needy. They have to sign up. It's only when they feel needy, when they feel this urgency, that they feel wow, this was great.
This is because how our brains are wired. We are happier with the chase than the reward. Once we get the reward we're like okay, but there's also a downside to neediness, and that is haughtiness. No one is saying that you need to be haughty or impersonal or rude. Say you go to a gas station and the person there is really rude. Does that make his status higher? Does that increase your urgency? No, it doesn't. We're not saying that neediness needs to be rudeness. The definitely of neediness would be more about putting in a barrier, several barriers if you can. It really depends. The point is that when a client comes in they have a small barrier. They jump over that better. Then they go to the second level and they jump over more barriers. The funny thing is that when they get to a higher level you increase the number of barriers.
When people join Psychotactics they just have to fill in the form, which is five boxes, but they still have to just fill in the form. Then when they join 5000bc they have to go on a waiting list. They have to be sure that they have read The Brain Audit, so the barriers increase. If we have a program like we used to have, the Protégé Program, they had to read The Brain Audit, they had to be on the list, they had to pay $10,000 in advance, they had to submit to an interview, they had to fill in a whole bunch of details and send it back. When it was free they just had a form, but then when they got to the point where they were actually signing up for a year-long program they were doing a lot more.
Not everyone wanted to do a lot more. One of the participants that signed up decided that she was just going to pay the $10,000 and she was not going to buy The Brain Audit. Renuka wrote to her and said, "You've got until Friday. If you don't get The Brain Audit by Friday the money goes back, right into your bank account." I want you to think about it for a second. What would have gone through that client's mind? She thought we were bluffing, so that's what we did. On Friday we returned all her money. She came back with this enormous sense of urgency. "I bought The Brain Audit. I was stuck. I couldn't buy it."
She bought The Brain Audit and she became the protégé, and she paid the $10,000. But if we were needy, we had to deal with her for the rest of the year. She would take advantage of that situation. This is not about domination. This is just human nature. You're dealing with human nature all the time. The more you reduce your status, the more the chances that someone is going to trample all over you. You can be polite. You don't have to be haughty or rude, but you'd never want to be needy.
This brings us to the end of this podcast. We covered how neediness reduces your status level. It brings you to the point of begging in a way. Immediately people change their behavior, their attitude towards you. The second thing that neediness does is it reduces the urgency. The moment you need them, they're not ready to move. But if they need your stuff, they're ready to move. Just by putting in those barriers in place it creates a sense of urgency. It reduces the need to trample all over you.
Let's face it, you have a far superior relationship with your clients. There is respect between both parties. If you're standing on stage and you're asking your audience to please subscribe to your website, well that's being needy. If you're selling something to someone and you're not creating a sense of urgency, you're not putting any barriers, well that's needy. Even on a website your language, your tone, if it doesn't have these barriers in place, it doesn't have this "Wait, we are fussy about our clients. Wait, we are fussy about our systems," then you're being needy.
Sometimes you have to be needy. Sometimes you have to ask for things, and immediately it reduces your status. It works but it's not as effective. It's very slow going. I'm not saying that you never need to be needy. The situation changes. It depends on a day to day situation and what you need, but as far as possible you want to make sure that your not needy.
What's the one thing that you can do today? Put a barrier, find a barrier. What is your next project about? What is the barrier that you can put in. Maybe a small barrier, business still, put in the barrier. The barrier increases your status and definitely increases their urgency factor to sign up for whatever it is you're selling.
That brings us to the end of this podcast. Now one of the ways to reduce neediness is to have uniqueness. When you have a uniqueness factor it means that you're standing out from the rest of the public. You're standing out from everyone else. If you would like to learn more about uniqueness, we have a program. It's not cheap. It's in excess of $800 but it's a really good program. The reason it's good is it shows you not only to get the uniqueness, but how to get to second level uniqueness. Second level uniqueness is so cool, because your competitor can't just step in and rob it away from you, can't take it away from you.
In fact, one of the stories there is about a property manager and how she was charging 6.9% for a commission, versus the others that were charging 8.5%. What was the difference? The one that was charging 6.9% was actually better than the other ones, but she didn't have this factor of uniqueness. Those set of words that you use, they make the difference between your product being just another me too brand, another property manager, versus something that stands out. That's what you can find at the Psychotactics site. If you haven't subscribed to the Psychotactics site, do so. Fill in the form. There are about four or five boxes, but you already knew that, didn't you?
One last announcement. The workshop at D.C., that's starting to fill up reasonably quickly. You know where to find that. It's at www.psychotactics.com/dc. Now it's time to go. Shall we play some mariachi? Possibly. I'll say bye for now. What's the next episode about? It's about attention and how tension is the critical part of attention. Bye bye.
The hardest thing in business?or life is the factor of confidence. Whether you're in online marketing, selling products or services, or run a physical store, the confidence goes up and down. And yet, confidence is what creates sales. Sales, after all, is a transfer of enthusiasm from one person to another. So how can we create this enthusiasm without confidence? And where do we start looking?
http://www.psychotactics.com
http://www.psychotactics.com/dc
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/ 00:00:20 Introduction: Biryani Disaster?
/ 00:02:36 Table of Contents
/ 00:03:14 Part 1: The Root of Confidence
/ 00:08:14 Part 2: Getting Confidence Back
/ 00:12:59 Part 3: Confidence is a Rechargable Battery
/ 00:16:01 Summary
/ 00:18:25 Announcements: Book on Pricing + US Workshop-InfoProducts
=====
Transcript:
There are lots of things that I like doing: dancing, painting, cartooning, but one of the things I like the most is cooking.
Of course I invite people over to dinner. On this evening I'd invited one of my friends and I was making this very special dish. It's a multi-layered rice dish called a biryani. If you say the biryani to most people they get a little afraid because there's so much preparation involved, and you have to get so many things right.
Anyway, I got a few things wrong that day, but only I knew that I'd got those things wrong Andd yet when I went to serve the dish I mentioned that it was not up to standard. Now this friend of mine, he had never had a biryani before. He didn't know what a biryani was supposed to taste like, but what I said, it really affected him. My lack of confidence spilled over and he didn't feel that the biryani was up to standard.
For ages after that, whenever we met he wanted all the other dishes except the biryani What did I do wrong? The answer doesn't lie in the recipe for the biryani or the way the biryani was made that evening. What it lies is in a factor of confidence. Sales is the transfer of enthusiasm from one person to another, and that evening I wasn't transferring any enthusiasm, so I wasn't selling my dish. This is what we do a lot when we're at networking meetings, when we're at presentations, when we're selling a product or a product or a service to a client. We lack that enthusiasm. We don't appear confident, and then the client wants to think about it. They want to ask their mother, brother, sister about it before they decide.
Today we're going to talk about three aspects of confidence We'll start out with the root of confidence. Where does the confidence come from? Is it inbuilt or do we have something that we have to learn? The second is how to deal with this whole set of confidence issues when things don't seem to be going your way. The third and most importantly, to realize how confidence is like a rechargeable battery, how you need to charge it up all the time.
Let's start out with the first, which is the root of confidence Your background, that's the deepest, strongest root that you can have in confidence with anything. As you're growing up you don't realize it, but as you're sitting around reading some comics or watching TV and the adults are going about doing their own things, you get an education. When I was growing up my father ran a secretarial college and he used to train people to be secretaries.
I used to sit around; I used to eat; I used to read some story books, type on the typewriters because he had a lot of them. Essentially I wasn't doing anything, yet a lot was happening. A lot of the information was going into my head and I was getting confident about teaching, about speaking, about meeting people, about doing a lot of things that I didn't realize until it was much later.
Why am I telling you this? I'm telling you this because when you grow up in a different kind of family you have different experiences. If your family was largely job-oriented and it was about safety and not making mistakes and not taking too many risks, then it becomes quite hard for you to do that and you have to learn that confidence. If you grow up in a family where people are cooking, or they're painting, or they're doing some woodwork, what you're doing is you're getting the confidence just by sitting around. You're absorbing all that information but you also get information.
For instance, when I'm sitting with my nieces and there's my palette in front of me and I'm painting some cartoons, they're getting information about what yellow ocher looks like, how the sky is not really blue but it is blue at the top and then blue and yellow ocher in the middle and then yellow ocher towards the horizon. They get all this information so they get confident. When you don't have that confidence then you have to build up that confidence. Because sales is a transfer of enthusiasm for one person to another, all the things that you're selling depends on you being confident about it because you project that energy.
What I used to do is I used to go to networking meetings and I was quite terrified I was in a new country when we moved to New Zealand. I would play "Simply The Best." I had a tape player in my car and I'd play that over and over again. That gave me confidence. That just boosted my energy to the point where I could last the meeting and then go back home.
There are certain areas where you have confidence because you've grown up around that environment, that family, that atmosphere. There are other areas where you don't have the confidence. One of the things that you have to do is artificially boost that confidence somehow. Listen to some music. Listen to someone who is talking about confidence making you more confident. Because the lack of that confidence often leads to people not buying from you.
How does this confidence play out in real life? We don't stand in front of an audience and say we're terrified, but we say little things like, "Oh, I'm sorry but we didn't have a good night last night," or I would say things like, "Oh, that biryani didn't turn out as well as it should. It's missing these spices." Or right after making a presentation and getting an applause we'll say, "Thank you. It was so good, but ... " But? You use the word but. It's these little clues that give away the fact that we are not as confident as we should.
The moment we are confident people get this surge of enthusiasm from us and they're more interested in buying. Now sales is a lot more than just enthusiasm, but we doubt the confidence, it's almost impossible to sell anything. While some of us have our deep roots in confidence because we've grown up with that atmosphere, the moment we're thrown into an unknown space we have to get that enthusiasm building within us and not apologizing. That's how you get to a level of confidence. The moment you apologize it kills everything. Everything you've done just before that, it's dead.
It's like the song from The King and I: "Whenever I feel afraid I hold my head erect and whistle a happy tune so no one will suspect I'm afraid."
This takes us to the second part.
What do you do when things really go wrong? For about 10 years the musicians and rock star Sting was in what he called a writer's block. He wasn't able to produce any music, write any songs, and then he wrote this album called The Last Ship. Then they went to Broadway and they spent four or five years putting together everything.
The musical cost about 15 million dollars to just bring to the stage, and then about $625,000 in running costs; that is per week. Yet, they were losing. People weren't showing up for the play. You put in all of this effort, all of this time, and what happens? At this point in time it's very easy to say, "I'm a failure. I'm not supposed to do this." But it's not true. It's always a stepping stone for another learning.
We've had situations where our confidence has been badly beaten. I can remember the time very early in my career when I went to Australia. It was this kind of pitch fest and I was not used to pitching from the podium. Everyone around me were selling tens of thousands of dollars of product and when I stood there I couldn't manage anything. I think about 10 people bought the product. It completely shattered the confidence.
At that point in time you have to step back and reevaluate and say, "What did I do wrong?" Not "What is wrong with me," but "What did I do wrong?" Because more often than not it's got nothing to do with you. Back in the year 2000 if you published an article on someone else's site, on a big site, you'd probably get 200 subscribers. If you published it in 2010 you'd probably get 50 subscribers. Now you'd probably get 10 subscribers.
The point is that the distraction has increased tremendously You look at some of the bigger sites and you find that the comments have gone down. You find that everyone is having to fight the same battle. Because you're just starting out, because you're struggling you think, "It's me. It's got something to do with me. I'm not writing well. I'm not doing stuff well." That's possible, but it's possible the technique, which is what I found out on stage in Australia. I found out that my technique was wrong, so I had to learn from that technique. I had to build up that confidence, and then when we went to Chicago a few years later I outsold everybody in the room.
Now admittedly I don't do this pitching from the podium anymore, but in the early years I did a lot of it I had to get the confidence because it was very unusual for me. This is what you've got to understand. Most of the time there's nothing wrong with you. You probably don't have enough experience so you don't have enough confidence and you don't have enough technique. Of course if you're buy into hype from people who say that you're going to get hundreds of customers or thousands of customers, or Facebook fans, and you buy into the la dee da, that's your problem. At the very core of it it is about boosting yourself up, getting the technique, and that's how you get confident.
Because you will run into a whole bunch of potholes in your career, and every single time you have to pull yourself out. That's what Sting has done as well. He's gone on tour now with Paul Simon. You pick yourself up, you dust yourself, and you walk on. Because there is no option. When your confidence is battered it's no point staying in the mud. You just pick yourself up and walk on.
This brings us to the last part, which is the factor of how your confidence is like a rechargeable battery. Just yesterday I got an email from my friend Bryan Eisenberg. Bryan said he really liked the podcast. He mentioned how it was getting better and better with every episode. That's a charge. That would keep me going for at least two or three days, but just like there is a charge, there's also a discharge, and there are people around you all the time that don't exactly encourage you. They don't discourage but they don't encourage you. As soon as that happens your confidence starts to go down.
These might be people you love: your husband, your wife, your friend These might be people that are almost always in your favor, but in this one aspect they don't exactly encourage you. Like yesterday I was helping my wife do a handstand and she's been struggling with the handstand for ages. I said to her, "I don't think you're going to get there." In that moment she was quite angry, she was quite upset.
I realize today that I wasn't being helpful. If you look around you, in your house, in your friend circle, in your family, you will find people who are not discouraging you but they're not encouraging you, and you have to find people that will give you that charge. Because every single day that battery goes up and then it comes crashing down, and you have to have that charge.
We get confident because we recover from mistakes, we fix those mistakes. The icing on the cake is simply when someone says, "Wow, you made a great dish. That was a great painting. That was a superb podcast." If we're not getting this from our friends and our family, especially the family, then we have to find our source that will encourage us and get those batteries up and running.
When we do workshops, one of the questions that we ask is why are you attending this workshop. If you dig deep enough the answer is always confidence, always, always confidence. If you dig deep enough you will find that everyone attending your workshop, everyone buying your product, everyone getting anything from you is because they want to gain confidence. They want to get that charge from you. You've got to send out that confidence and you have to be enthusiastic. For that you have to make sure that you're not being discharged.
That brings us to the end of this episode. Let's do a quick summary. We started out today with the root of confidence. When you grow up in a family or in an environment where things are happening, you don't have to be part of it. You just have to be there. Of course it helps if you're given responsibility and taught stuff as you go along, but just being around makes you more confident than the average person.
The second element that we covered was what happens when you make mistakes. All of us make these mistakes. All of us make terrible mistakes, and really the only way to get over the mistake is to get up and make another mistake until you stop making mistakes. There is a technique, and people learn how to speak better, how to present better, how to write better. There is a technique, and what you need to do is buy into a system that promises you a lot of hard work instead of get rich quick or do this really, really quick. Because the quick methods, they lead to destruction. They don't work, and so your confidence goes down even further.
Finally, we looked at confidence as a rechargeable battery. If you find someone like me who's a scrooge who's saying, "You're not going to do that headstand," you're never going to do the headstand at least with me around. You know this one driving. You know when couples go driving? This is what happens. You want to find a source of confidence of inspiration because our confidence is so fleeting.
What's the one thing you can do today? The core of confidence is the ability to do something very quickly, like speaking a language. You get confidence from someone who has a method, a method that is slow, steady, that has tiny increments. The one thing you can do today is avoid anything that is super fast. When you see that red flag, someone promising you super quick clients, super quick this, super quick that, step aside and find something else that will truly build your confidence, truly build your skill, that takes a lot of effort. That's how you move ahead and that's how you get more confident in life.
It may seem like article writing is very hard. And it is. Good writing needs structure, it needs skill and it needs one more thing: input. Without input, nothing happens. So where do we get this input? And why bother with bad input? Finally, what if you don't like audio learning? Can't you just stick to books? Knowing these answers can dramatically change the way you approach article writing. And yes, make you a better writer.
For more, go to http://www.psychotactics.com
For the fun workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc
For the Story Telling Product: http://www.psychotactics.com/story
Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com and you're listening to The Three Month Vacation podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead, it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time.
Imagine you go to the café and you're sitting there and the barista is making this fabulous coffee. The machine is superb, the barista has just won the championship. This is the top of the line barista and then you get your coffee. You take one sip and you think, "Something is wrong with you," because it can't be. It can't be this bad. How come this coffee is so yucky. It's very simple. Bad input. In coffee land, that is bad coffee beans. Either they're over roasted or under roasted, or just inferior coffee beans. Input is what matters and the same thing applies when you're writing an article or a book. The most important thing of all is input.
If you were to ask someone to write a story about their life, they probably could manage it. You would have to narrow it down, of course. You would have to say, "Tell me about when you were 10." You would have to narrow it down further, maybe some episode at school, but eventually, they would come up with some story and the story would have clear ups and downs. It would have a storyline, it would have everything in place. How did they do that? How did they conjure that up from nothing?
Nothing is a silly word to use here, isn't it? They already had something. They had the whole story in their mind. They have the concept in their mind. That becomes input and then it's a matter of structuring it in an article, and you have to know that structure, or structuring it in the form of a book. Then, you have your material. Most of the time, when you sit down to write an article, we don't have enough input. We have knowledge but we don't have enough input.
In this episode, we're going to look at what is input, where do you get it, and why structured and unstructured input is very important. Let's tackle the first burning question, which is: What is input?
The thing with you and me and everyone is that we already have the answers. The problem is we don't have the questions. We don't have that thing that prods us in the side and gets us to answer the question. That is our problem. It doesn't matter if you're a lawyer or in real estate or fitness or any business. You already have the answers. The problem is you're not getting enough questions. People don't ask you enough questions and so to get those questions, you have to go elsewhere. That elsewhere is really other books, other material, and that is input.
To give you an idea of what my day looks like, I start off the day with going for a walk. Usually, I have a few podcast, different types of podcasts and my phone is loaded with audio books as well. I know a lot of people have aversion to audio and obviously, you're listening to a podcast so you don't have this aversion, but a lot of people think that they're not going to listen to audio books or they're not going to listen to podcasts because they're not going to remember anything.
You're not supposed to remember everything. You're supposed to remember just one thing. That one thing is something that the author says and this could be something brand new, something that you've never thought of. That's input. Now, your brain is churning. Now, your brain is moving faster than ever before.
What if it's old material? Old material, when listened to or read a second or a third time, is different from when it was read the first time or listened to the first time because so much has changed. You have learned so much in between and now, that seems like mundane material could be very exciting. Both old material and new material make a big difference. That becomes input. That becomes like the coffee bean. That becomes the great stuff that you can work with. That is your starting point. You want that ignition point and that ignition point comes from input.
Of course, when we think of input, the input could come from a report, it could come from a book, it could come from audio, it could come from video. Why audio?
Because you're always traveling somewhere. You're always going to the supermarket. You're always walking around. You're always doing something that is just dead time. This is when you want to get that input. You want to start making notes, get more input, make more notes, and all the time, your brain is readying for that moment when you're going to write. Book reading, on the other hand, is a dedicated amount of time. You probably sneak in 15 minutes before bed or 15 or 20 minutes in the morning if you're lucky.
This dead time is there all the time for you. When you're waiting in the queue, when you're at the dentist, when you are picking up your kid, when you are driving in your car, there are literally hours in the day just waiting for you to get that input. If you think I'm telling you not to read and just listen to audio, that's not the point. The point is very simple: To be able to have output, you have to have input and to be able to have great input, you have to read great stuff or listen to great stuff and really crappy stuff.
Crappy stuff? Why would you listen to crappy stuff? We know that when you are listening to great stuff, it really inspires you. It makes you feel on top of the world. You feel like you're going to write an article or you're going to write some chapters in your book. You feel that because that's what input does. It sends energy through your system. Why would we deal with crappy stuff? The reason why you're dealing with crappy stuff is because you want to see how badly people give advice because that also sends a charge through you. You get very excited. You get emotionally charged. You want to get rid of this rubbish that people have been spouting.
That then generates another form of input, which is, "This is really bad, I need to fix it now." Crappy stuff could be just average information, but it also could be unstructured information. It might seem like, "Why do I have to listen to this?" Some of the great input comes from bad stuff. You can show people how to avoid that bad stuff, how to avoid that bad structure.
However, there is a downside to input. That is we're all information junkies so we could be reading and we could be listening to endless amounts of stuff. The key is not to remember everything. I've said this before. I want to say it again. You just want to take away one idea. You will almost never get one idea. You will get more than one idea. If it's really crappy, you might get nothing. This is where the strategy of having several podcasts, several audio books, and several books maybe, if you're reading ... That's really why you need to have several of them, because then, if you're getting nothing for half an hour and you think, "This is rubbish," you can switch. You can switch to something else.
I will listen to philosophy and psychology and marketing and all kinds of stuff on a single walk. It all becomes input. Most people think that article writing and content creation is about sitting down and writing. It's not. It doesn't matter that you have all the information in your head already. You still need an ignition point. You still need something to fire you up. You still need something to inspire you, something to get frustrated about. That is how you create great content.
You can make coffee from any coffee bean or you can make coffee from great stuff. Even bad coffee teaches you a good lesson.
That brings us to the end of this episode. What are you going to do? What's the one thing that you're going to do as a result? You definitely want to subscribe to this podcast. If you're on iTunes, you just press the subscribe button and therefore, you will get a lot of the content that is coming out on Three Month Vacation. Episode 5, 6, and 7 is about storytelling and one of the most critical thing in sales, in storytelling, in article writing, in book creation, product creation, is storytelling. You want to go back and listen to 5, 6, and 7. If you haven't heard it, well, here is a nudge again. Go there, subscribe, and that's your one thing that you need to do today.
You want to stack your phone with lots of podcasts, lots of audio books. There is a ton of dead time. People say they have no time. No, they don't have efficiency. This is efficiency. Do it. Today. There is a series on storytelling. If you go to Psychotactics.com and search for storytelling, there is a really good series on storytelling. Yes, you have to pay for it, but it's worth it. It's all input and it will help you write better articles.
There is also the article writing course. If you want home study for that, that's well worth it. We've been doing the article writing course since 2006 and we never promise that one person turned out to be a great article writer. Everyone turns out to be outstanding. That is because the article writing course is built on structure. It's built on a system. When you put those elements together, it's just fabulous. It's just amazing. You take the input, you take the structure, and you get great articles. You get great content and then you don't struggle anymore, which is the goal, isn't it?
Finally, you know about the information products store, so that's on the East Coast of the United States, in Maryland. It's located at the Sheraton Silver Spring. It's the 5th, 6th, and 7th of May. We don't have 300 people come to our event and have 25 speakers. There is just one speaker and you spend 3 days actually working instead of just listening to more blah blah. We'll see you there. Bye for now.
This has been brought to you by Psychotactics.com and The Three Month Vacation.
Is the 10,000 hours principle true? And if it's true, what are your chances of success? And what are the biggest flaw? How do you take the concept of Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 Hours story (He took it from a K.Anders Ericsson study) and reduce the number of hours? Is talent really attainable in fewer hours?
Have you ever watched a 16-year-old go for a driving test? He probably practices for two or three weeks, off and on, and then after that, he drives. Now, imagine they changed the rules of the driving test. Imagine they said that you needed 10,000 hours to drive. How many of us would be on the roads today?
Several years ago, best-selling author Malcom Gladwell wrote a book called “Outliers”. Within that book, there was this concept of 10,000 hours, and the concept was very simple. It said that if you wanted to be exceedingly good at something, you needed to spend at least 10,000 hours. As you can quite quickly calculate, that’s about 10 years of very had work or 5 years of extremely hard work.
The interesting thing about 10,000-hour principle is that two sets of people jump on it, the people that had already put in their 10,000 hours in something and those who hadn’t; but what if you hadn’t?
What if you hadn’t put in those 10,000 hours? Were you doomed to be always untalented? Understanding this concept of the 10,000 hours is very important, especially if you want to take vacations. You have to get very skilled at a lot of things very quickly. If you don’t understand the concept, then you struggle for no reason at all.
In today’s episode of the Three-Month Vacation, we’re going to cover three things. The first is, why is the 10,000 hours true?
The second, what are the biggest flaws in the 10,000 hours?
The third is, how do you go about shortening that process, so that you just do maybe a thousand hours?
If a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing 70% right. You can always come back to do the 20% later. Yes, read it again, and no, the math isn’t wrong.
If you’re going to build a website, a 70% effort is fine. If you’re going to do a presentation a 70% effort is fine. If you’re going to bake a cake, for that matter…do you need all the ingredients? The perfect cake? With all the perfecto ingredients? Or the cake with ’70%’ of the ingredients? Let's find out what the 70% principle is all about shall we?
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LINKS:
To subscribe: http://www.psychotactics.com
To get to that amazing workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc
Storytelling? You want stories? http://www.psychotactics.com/story
To subscribe to this podcast: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
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Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from psychotactics.com and you're listening to the Three Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead, it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time.
I was sitting in the café minding my business when this woman was sitting across from me. She looked up a few times and made eye contact. Then she summoned up courage and moved across and she spoke to me. Apparently she was a writer. She had written three or four books and never got them published, so I asked her why. You probably know her answer. She said, "Well, I'm a perfectionist."
This is the problem. We think that we are perfectionists, but everyone is a perfectionist. Everyone would like to do the best possible job, and yet some people get their job done and others don't. The reason why they do that is because of a simple concept called the 70% principle. This podcast is going to explore what is the 70% principle, how it helps you, and when you should stop.
Let's start off with the first one, which is the 70% principle. What is it? In 2004 we were headed out from Auckland to Los Angeles. It was the first time we were having a Psychotactics workshop internationally. Of course everything had been sold. We'd booked the venue. We'd got people to sign up. We'd printed the notes. We'd done everything. There was only one little hitch. We still hadn't got a visa from the US embassy. It wasn't because we were delaying or procrastinating. It was just that they were giving out visas just a week before departure. You can imagine the situation, can't you?
What if we didn't get the visa? What if something happened and the workshop couldn't go ahead? Life is full of so many what ifs. It becomes much simpler if you take a software developer's philosophy. A software developer's philosophy is very simple. It is get 70% right and come back and fix the rest later. So many of us don't complete our projects because we think that it's not good enough. Then having completed a project we don't sell it because, again, we feel somehow it could be improved. Of course it could be improved, but your 70%, the audience is already waiting for that right now. They're waiting for the information that you have and they don't care about the remaining 30%, not just yet.
We went ahead with our first workshop simply because we thought that's the best we can do, 70%. When I wrote my first book, The Brain Audit, it was only 16 pages. Today it's 180 pages. What's the real size of the book? To me I think it's about 1,500 pages. Well, not as a single book but as different courses and books. The point is that if you wait for that perfect moment, if you wait to get everything down, it never happens.
When you think like a software developer you go, "Okay, this is the maximum I can achieve." You go out there and you put it out there. Then you can come back and fix it. The brain audit started out with version 1 and then went to version 2, and is on version 3.2. Will there be a version 4? I don't know, but the point is very simple. You can always fix it later. We understand the 70% principle but why does it work? It works for a simple reason. That clients are waiting for your stuff right now. Your audience is waiting for your stuff right now. If you don't put it out there they still have to get it. They still have to get the information.
There's a story about Jack Johnson, Jack Johnson the musician. In a Rolling Stone interview Jack Johnson said, "A song like "Bubble Toes," I don't know if I would have written that song if a million people we're going to hear it." He said, "It was like a joke to my wife around the house. Then a couple of friends liked it and then people asked for it at shows, and it became popular." We're going away from the point. The point is the middle that comes in the middle of the song. It goes like this: la da dada da da, da dada da da da da, la da dada da da. Jack had been planning to put in words but when the time came to release the song there were no words, so he ran it as la da dada da da. Today that's the most endearing part of that album. In fact, if you just play the la da dada da people know that's Jack Johnson.
That's really what the 70% principle embodies. It embodies the fact that people are ready for your music as it is. It might be in version 1, it might be in version 2. It doesn't really matter. That whole concept of perfection, that's just a story you've been telling yourself. That's just another way to procrastinate. That's just another way to not put out that book, that song. That's just another way to hold yourself together. Exposing yourself with just 70%, that really works because your audience is ready for it right now.
The main point is that it's never going to be 100%. No one is ever satisfied with their work. When you look at a writer going through a book, by the time the writer goes through that entire book they have changed. They have physically changed. Something in their brain has changed. When they look at the first few pages it's totally different from page 200.
The late night comedy show Saturday Night Live, that runs on the 70% principle. They can rehearse all they want but then on Saturday night they have to go live. That's the best they can do. At this point in time they're in their 40th season just doing 70% of what they can do, and doing it by deadline. This brings us to the third part, which is how do you know that it's done. When do you stop? When is that 70% reached? The answer is very simple.
We know that we've reached our 70% when the time is up. Let's say you have to write an article. You give yourself a couple of hours and at the end of those couple of hours you're done. You're doing a painting, you give yourself 45 minutes and at the end of 45 minutes you're done. Over the years I've wanted to write books on membership and pricing and presentations, and every single book I could have done better. Every single podcast that I've done I could have done better, but there is a deadline. When you have that deadline and it's an unshakable deadline, then the job gets done.
The reason why people call themselves perfectionists is because they never intend to put the book out. They never intend to have the la da dada da da out there. The ones that put it out there, they get the rewards. That's the one thing that you've got to do today. You've got to make sure that you have a deadline. Whatever you're producing, whatever you're creating, whether it's a book or an article or a song, or maybe you're just going to fix a tap or paint a ceiling, the point is you need to have a deadline and on that deadline it's done.
It is absolutely incredible what a deadline can do for us. We would have never gone to that workshop in the United States if we knew in advance that the visa was only going to come at the last minute, but we had tickets. We had a deadline and we had to go. We had to go for the visa, and we got the visa. There's a happy story there. Sometimes you don't get happy stories, but if you take an average of just putting it out there like a software developer, you'll find that you have more happy stories than unhappy stories. That's what the 70% principle is all about. Get 70% done, have a deadline, and then you can always come back and fix it later.
That brings us to the end of this episode. For the last few podcast episodes I've been talking about the information product workshop. The most critical thing today is just how to put together information when there are so many experts out there. The goal isn't to get someone to read your stuff, but how do we get them to read right to the end and then come back for me. Most information isn't that compelling. The reason why it isn't that compelling is because it doesn't have a structure. When you have structure it goes flowing from one section to the other to the other and you get to the end. When you get to the end you want more. It's just like a meal. It's like an amazing ... You go back to the restaurant again and again and again. That's what we're going to cover at the information products workshop. It's at psychotactics.com/dc. All of this action is happening in the first week of May, so go to pscyhotactics.com/dc and find out for yourself. If you can't make it to the workshop, get yourself the home study and you can find this in the home study section at psychotactics as well.
That brings us to the end of this podcast. You want to hang around for one more story? Okay, we'll do one more story. Have you heard of the song "Second Wind" by Billy Joel? If you listen to that song, right at the end there is a flub. There is this mistake. If you just listen to the song you don't pay attention to it and you don't notice it, but of course Billy Joel knew he had made a mistake, and he was in the studio and he wanted to erase it, but that was the whole point of the song: to make a mistake. That was the 70%, so he kept it. Today if you listen to that song you can hear it. Now I'm going to play this piece of music because my wife absolutely loves this. Here we go.
Clients aren't always keen to accept our ideas?no matter how brilliant or workable. And we have the same problem with product or services. The resistance is much too high and we struggle to get things moving. So how do we overcome this resistance from clients? How do we overcome the objections?
/ / 00:00:20 Introduction
/ 00:03:12 Part 1: Creating Expertise On Your Site
/ 00:04:48 Part 2: Pointing Clients To Existing Material
/ 00:06:48 Part 3: The Power of Demonstration
/ 00:11:33 Wrap Up + Information Products Workshop: Washington D.C.
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the story of the white pants of Sara Blakely. Sara’s product was an undergarment. It smoothed out the contours of a woman’s body making your clothes more flattering, more comfortable but Sara was not able to sell the product. Yet as the legend goes she was at the store at Neiman Marcus in Dallas and she was wearing these form fitting white pants. She invited the buyer to join her in the lady’s room. At this very unusual place that Sara proceeded to show how those white pants looked with the undergarments that she was selling which were called Spanx and then she proceeded to show how they looked without it.
Sara didn’t stop there she went on to sell to Bloomingdales to Saks, Bergdorf-Goodman and today that brand is worth over $250 million, but what was Sara really doing there? Was she selling a product or was she doing something different? Sara was actually fighting resistance. Often as we go about our day to day business selling products and services we run into clients who are convinced that they are right and often they’re wrong. We then try to get into this debate, this mini argument as it were and that’s not the way to convince a client.
The way to convince the client is to show them proof. How do we go about this proof? In today’s podcast we’ll cover 3 ways in which you can get a client over to your side of the fence without any of that mini argument or debate. We’ll talk about 1 the proof that you create, 2 the proof that other people create and finally irrefutable proof demonstration. Let’s start off with the first type of proof which is the proof that you create.
Let’s say for instance you are a web designer and you’re completely convinced that responsive sites are very, very important for clients. Responsive sites as you probably know are sites that you view on a mobile or on a tablet and they readjust to fit the width and the height of the mobile or the tablet. There you are in front of the client and the client is old school. They built their site in 2005 or 2007. They’re not that keen to switch over to something that readjust their entire site. What are you going to do?
The first thing that you need to have is you have to have content of your own because clients have objections and usually they don’t have a lot of objections. They’ve had maybe 6, 7 different kinds of objections over the years and what you need to do is you need to put together information. A good form of information is a bunch of articles. You could have a booklet, you could have any kind of information that you’ve written and it’s very important that it comes with your name attached to it because that makes you the expert. As the client is battling a bit not a lot but just a bit with you, you can point out that information on your website or maybe you’ve got a booklet that you can hand out to them.
Now it’s easy to think we’ll I can just tell them. I can just speak to them right on the spot they are sensible people but a conversation doesn’t have the elements of an article or a booklet that has structure and form. You can’t just put together anything on a website. You have to have structure and form and you have to build that argument as it were. When they go and see that structure and form and it’s signed with your name because it’s on your website or your booklet that makes you the expert. That makes a big difference to have the client perceives you because now you’ve anticipated their objection and you’ve answered their question. That’s only 1 way to do it.
The second way you want to think of is external proof. Let’s say the client decides that “Hey it’s your website. You wrote all the information that’s nice but I’m not convinced.” At that point in time you’ll have to have external proof. The external proof could be again booklets, could be books, could be information on other websites and this becomes third party proof. You may say “That’s exactly the same as what I’m saying.” but it’s not. The moment it comes from a third party automatically it gets relevance. If it’s already published in a book it has even more relevance.
Even if you direct them to an authoritative site you will find that it’s relevant enough and what you’re doing now is bringing down that resistance. That’s really all you’re doing. The client has resistance and you’re bringing down their resistance. When we assume being … see the same thing over and over and over again it becomes true for us. Suddenly that client is no longer seeing the fact that you said that they need to have a responsive website could now suddenly google is sending out notices to website owners saying “Hey you need to have a responsive website.”
Suddenly everything is changed but it’s not likely [it’ll 00:05:54] just show up and expect the client to buy into your idea or your product or service. There’s huge amount of resistance and it’s only when you have these couple of things together your own proof and external proof that makes a big difference.
Imagine you're Sara Blakely. Imagine you don’t have any of your proof. You don’t have any external proof .You just have this product that you want to sell and no one has ever seen it before except maybe your friends, maybe your relatives. No one has ever seen it before how do you sell that’s when the power of demonstration comes into play.
That’s the third part which is demonstration, actual physical proof right front of the buyer. Three’s a story about Corning glass. You’ve probably heard it. It’s about how they tried to sell Corning glass many years ago. Now Corning glass was unbreakable at least this kind of glass was unbreakable and all of the salespeople were talking about how the glass was unbreakable. One of the salespeople was doing better than everybody else and so much better that the management called him in and said “What are you doing?”
What he was doing was actually demonstrating that the glass was unbreakable. He’d take the glass, put it in front of the buyer then get a ball-peen hammer and swing the hammer towards the glass. As soon as he did that they would go back in horror because you’re about to smash glass and he bring that hammer down on the glass and it wouldn’t break and that was proof. That was irrefutable proof and that is through demonstration. You’re thinking “I have a website. I don’t have glass and I don’t have hammers.” You can have a before and after and it doesn’t matter which business you’re in. There’s always a before and after.
If you’re selling an article writing course, there is a before and after. If you’re selling a microphone, there is a before and after. If you’re selling Spanx like Sara Blakely well there is a before and after. The before and after is probably the most powerful instant demonstration you can get through anyone and the moment you do that whole resistance comes crashing down. Not the whole thing but most of it. Sometimes all it take is 1 demonstration but sometimes you need all 3 of these back to back.
You’re going to need articles or a book or a booklet that you have written that makes you the expert then you’re going to have some external information that some other expert has talked about that points exactly to what you’re saying. Finally there is going to be a before and after in your business. There’s always got to be a before and after an when you stack all 3 of these back to back, it’s very, very hard for a customer not to be convinced and that is because you’re prepared.
When you’re prepared, you’re full of confidence and the customer can see that confidence. They can feel that confidence. It’s not you just coming up there and refuting some objection. You’re actually prepped. That’s the kind of person you like to buy from, that’s the kind of person I like to buy from.
However there are situation where a customer will still argue with you. You can show them all the proof, you can give them all the information, you can do the demonstration and they still won't buy from you because they want even more proof. At this point in time we tend to back away and say that customer is really stupid. Is it just the customer being difficult or is the proof not as compelling as it should be? You’ve got to check this out with your target profile.
In the Brain Audit which is our book we talk about target profile in great detail and essentially it’s this. You want to go out there and speak to a single person. You don’t want to make up all these things in your head and they will tell you whether you’re communicating or not. You need to have this kind of audit from your customers especially when it comes to your own information. Especially when it comes to your own demonstration, you get rid of all the holds and then you get a story like Sara Blakely’s. It’s perfect.
Everything is engineered including the master stroke of going to the lady’s room and not selling in the boardroom. That’s all engineering and that’s what it takes to reduce the resistance and to get the customer to be convinced to buy from you and only you. As we jog to the end of this podcast, what is the one thing that we can do today? It’s very simple. Find a before and after. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling there will be a before and after syndrome. Your product or your service or even your idea it’s solving a problem so there has to be a before and after. Look for the before and after and start there and that will make a huge difference in convincing clients and reducing that resistance.
If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, where do you listen to it? Can you email me at sean@ psychotactics.com. Tell me, do you listen to it when you’re walking? Do you listen to it when you’re exercising or do you just listen to it in the middle of the day somewhere? Email me at sean@ psychotactics.com and let me know where you’re listening to this podcast.
On another note we’re having an information products workshop in Silver Spring which is just outside Washington DC in the United States. It’s in the first week of May and if you want to come Psychotactics workshop is unlike anything you’ve ever seen. We have a party. We have a great time and you learn a lot. You spend 2/3 of your time outside the room and that’s where you really learn. It’s not this blah, blah, blah that you have inside the room you’ll find out for yourself. If you’ve been through a workshop you know exactly what we’re talking about.
If you haven’t been to a Psychotactics workshop you should come and the reason why should come is it’ll show you how to construct information in a way that is extremely powerful. We have [inaudible 00:12:26] information and people are putting more and more information together and the information products workshop shows you how to put together less not more information and make it more powerful for your clients so that they consume it and come back for more.
How do we do it? We have a system that involves the planets, the sun, the moon and the lunar surface and if that sounds bizarre, it’s a lot of fun. You learn how to put together an information product that is very sound and customers love and they come back for more. Just like you do with a lot of Psychotactics product, you keep coming back to buy more and more. What is it that holds it together? What is that glue? That’s what we’ll cover at the Psychotactics information product workshop.
Information products have made the difference for us in our lives. It was the Brain Audit that started us on this journey and it’s what enables us to take our 3 month vacation. All the products then lead to clients buying and to consulting buying [inaudible 00:13:24] courses and we’ve made friends with many of our clients through the world. We travel with them, we enjoy ourselves and I wish the same for you. If you would like to come to the workshop the link is at www.psychotactics.com/dc. This podcast had been brought to you by psychotactics.com and of course the 3 month vacation. Bye for now.
For most of us life is about work, work and more work. And no matter whether you have a small business, are in the online marketing space or in consulting, you feel rushed and hassled. This podcast is about how to slow down using the three concepts of "meditation, relaxation and vacation".
Sean:Hi. This is Sean D’Souza from Psychotactics.com, and you’re listening to the Three-Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn’t some magic trick about working less. Instead, it’s about how to really enjoy you work and enjoy your vacation time. Did you know that “medication” sounds a lot like “meditation”? Well, I didn’t know that, and I’ve been playing around with it in my head, “Medication, meditation. Medication, medication, meditation.”
When we talk about the three-month vacation, it’s very easy to just think of going away; but as you know, we don’t have to leave the desk to go away. We could just be here. Should we go away, or should we stay? Do we really have to choose? As you know, it’s summer in December here in New Zealand, and there’s a lot of time because we take time-off around December the 20th, and then we don’t get back to work till almost February, and this is pretty much the whole country. Imagine the entire country going on vacation.
As you walk around on the streets of Auckland, well, there are no people around or very few people around. My wife, Renuka and I, we never go away when everyone else is going away because what’s the point? Everything is more expensive, there are bigger crowds, you have to wait a long time in restaurants, so we stay back and we sit on the deck, get some beer. We have a good time, and we read. When I was reading, I ran into this book by author/speaker Pico Iyer. First, just to backtrack, before I ran into the book, I ran into his TEDTalk.
In the TEDTalk, he was talking about how he started to meditate, how he started to relax. In his talk, he gets you to imagine gong to the doctor, and the doctor is saying, “Well, your cholesterol is up. Your blood sugar is up, etcetera, and you’ve got to exercise.” He says, “Most of us will go to the gym. Most of us would go for a walk. Most of us would do stuff like that, but imagine the doctor said, ‘You need to slow down. You need to take time off and meditate.
Take about half an hour, maybe meditate.’” It’s unlikely that any of us would feel the urgency to meditate, would we? I mean, we have so many things to do already. Really, that’s what I’m going to talk about today. Three things, meditation, relaxation, and vacation. All the “tions” together.
Now, of all these three, mediation is probably the only stuff I know of because it seems like you have to sit in one place or stay in one place, and then just be quiet; and so what I’d do is I’d go for a walk, and I’d hum the same song over and over again, almost like a chant. I was happy doing that, and I thought, “Well, that’s meditation;” and it probably is. I don’t know, but I found that with TheEndApp, it was much easier to do this, and that is to just clear your head of all the thoughts. I’m not very ambitious to begin with, and I don’t suggest you get too ambitious because it’s very, very hard to meditate.
If you’ve ever tried meditating, you know exactly what I mean. It is extremely hard. The moment you decide, “Well, I’m going to be very quiet and clear my mind of all the thoughts,” every single thought comes rushing through. It’s like as if you opened the door and started screaming, “Come on, guys. Bring in all the thoughts.” That’s how meditation is. It’s so weird, and yet time and time again, you read about it, and you’re not sure how to go about it. I ran into this website at Calm.com. That’s C-A-L-M-.com. They had a lovely app. It’s free, and they also have a website.
You don’t need to have the app. You can just have your computer on, and they take you through a guided meditation. It’s very hard at first. It’s just this emptying out of your brain. Not sleeping, not dreaming, not doing anything, just completely blank. Just like looking at the clouds, one cloud after another, after another. Just completely blank, and so I’d recommend that you start there. What I started doing was every day, before I go for a walk, I meditate for 10 minutes. I just lie on the floor, and I go for 10 minutes. Then, I go to the café, and my wife started this. She says, “Okay, let’s be quiet for two minutes.” We close our eyes and sit at the café, and you can hear the coffee.
When your mind is that quiet, you can hear everything. It just screams through, and it filters out those thoughts. It’s very cool because in a day that’s completely chaotic, we need to have these moments of meditation, and it’s good for your brain. I mean, this is about business, but it’s also about taking that time off, just those few minutes in a day. That brings us to the end of the first part which is mediation. It takes us to the second part which is relaxation.
When you think of relaxation, you probably think, “Okay. I’m just going to lie on the bed, or I’m just going to lie on the safe, and read a book, and relax.” That’s nice, but what it doesn’t do is it doesn’t take you out of the house. What I found is that as long as you’re in the house, you’re not as relaxed as you could be. What we started doing was taking a day or two away. We don’t go very far. We could go just half an hour away from where we live, but we go away from our home, and this is very important.
Once you go away from home, everything about your home is left behind like the clothes that needed to be folded, the garbage that needs to be taken out, the coffee blender that needs fixing, the … Whatever issues you have, and there are many of these issues. The moment you leave home, those issues stay behind. Suddenly, you start to relax, and you find that this level of relaxation starts the moment you head away from home. What we found is that in about 24 hours, we feel like we’ve been away for a week.
By the time you’re away for a couple of days, it seems like you’ve been away forever, and most of don’t do that. In fact, right after we got married, we didn’t go anywhere. We didn’t go anywhere for a long time, and then we decided that’s what we’re going to do. A lot of these comes from planning. All of your work comes from planning, but even the vacation, the time away, the meditation, the relaxation. Everything comes from planning. It doesn’t just show up like that. We have to sit down at the start of the year and work out when do we have these bouts of relaxation away from home and when we do we have the vacation which is a long way from home and for … Along the previous.
The thing about relaxation is that those 48 hours can change the way you continue to work, the way you work with your clients, the way you deal with issues when you go back, and so having those little spots makes a big difference. Like for instance right now, we have the article writing course, and this is the toughest writing course in the world. It is very demanding for both the students and for me. You can be sure that once four weeks have passed, I’m going to need a couple of days off.
It’s very easy to say, “No, no, no. We don’t have that kind of time.” Just like we do with meditation, “We don’t have that kind of time. We don’t have two days off. We have to do this, and we have to do that.” The moment you allocate that time, it changes everything. The funny thing is that it changes your mindset even if you’re on vacation. This summer, we started out not checking email, not doing all those kinds of things, and you would think, “Well, it will take a few days, and you’ll be fine.” It wasn’t fine.
A week passed, and I was still waking up at 4:30 in the morning. I like to sleep a lot in the afternoons, especially on vacation. I’ll sleep two, three hours even, and I wasn’t able to sleep more than half an hour. I was still wound up, and it’s only when I got to Waipu, which is about a couple of hours from here that I relaxed. Two weeks into a vacation, the moment I stepped away from home, and I think the same thing applies to you as well. What we need to do really is stuff for ourselves because we’re always doing stuff, but it’s not stuff for ourselves, and it’s definitely not this relaxation that we desperately need. This takes us to the third part which is vacation.
Vacation has always been a big part of my life, but planning the vacation was what I learned from my friend Julia. What Julia would do was she’d book the vacation at the start of the year, and then they had to go. Everything was booked. I remember the year that we went to Japan, the year they had the tsunami, and I wasn’t keen on going there even though we were going several months after the tsunami; but it was booked, so we went. We had a really good time. We learned so much about a different culture, ate different foods. Something I might not have done if we hadn’t booked everything in advance.
Here I am, preaching to the choir as it were. We already know that mediation, that relaxation and vacation are good for us. We know that, so why doesn’t it work for everyone? Why don’t we end up feeling on top of the world? Why is it that we feel like we’re more tired than ever before? There are reasons why it doesn’t work, and the first reason and probably the most important reason of all is email. I have a friend, and she goes on vacation, and she say, “Well, I only check email and work for three hours in a day.”
No, no, no, no, no. You can’t do that. Vacation is nothing. It’s like mediation, nothing. It’s like relaxation, nothing. No email. Get someone else to check your email. You’re not that important. That brings us to the second point, of course, which is, “I’m the most important person here. Nothing can happen without me.” I have a very simple philosophy, and that is, “I can spend time at the beach or spend time in hospital,” and I choose to spend time at the beach. Sure, you’re important, but why are you earning all these money? Why are you doing all these stuff? It is to enjoy yourself.
If you’re going to have this self-importance that no one else can do the job you’re supposed to be doing, well, you’re a bit in trouble, and you need that vacation. Of course, the third one is the most obvious of all which is too much activity. You can’t go on vacation and see 300 cathedrals. You just cannot. They’re boring after a while, and they all will start to look the same. We have a vacation philosophy, “We’re called the five-monument people.” That means we look at five monuments or five places we’re interested, and we’re done.
If we go to Istanbul, five things, and we’re done. If we go to Washington D.C., five things, and we’re done. Friends who know us, they will drive us fast on some of these monuments and go, “There you go. One, two, three, four, five. We’re done. Let’s go to eat.” Of course, that is crazy, but you get the point. You don’t want to have too much activity. If you have all of these stuff packed back to back, you never get relaxed. You never get to nothingness. Nothingness is amazing, but only once you start to get a hold of it.
To me, a three-month vacation, not all three months together, one month at a time is part of my work. It helps my work get better. It helps me relax. It makes me want to do better stuff. I think that if there’s one thing that we could do today is to meditate. That’s one thing you can do at your desk. Go to that website, Calm.com, C-A-L-M-.com. Download the app or just listen to it on your computer. I think that will make a big difference. Five minutes, you can start off with five minutes. You can go with 10 minutes, 20 minutes. It’s up to you. It’s a much easier way to meditate.
I think the second thing, and here I am breaking my own rules saying one thing and telling you about two things. The second thing is just book a couple of days somewhere close by, 20 minutes away, 30 minutes away. Just go. Leave home. Leave the garbage. Leave the coffee grinder. Leave all that stuff home. Of course, leave your email for two days. I’m sure someone can manage it, and you will find that while you may not, at least at this point, make a three-month vacation a reality, that’s where you’re headed. You want to start right now. You want to start today, and you want to relax.
That brings us to the end of this podcast. Before we go, where are we headed for our monthly vacation? We’re going to Sardinia, Italy. We’ve been to the mainland before, and I know Italy is a big place. You can never get enough of Italy, but Sardinia seems to be a completely different space altogether. We’re going from one island to another island. We hope the coffee is good. Before that, we have the info-product workshop, and that is in Silver Spring, just outside of Washington, D.C.
It’s about information products. It is how to create powerful information products, whether it’d be a webinar, or a workshop, or a presentation, a book. The reason why it’s so important today is because there’s so much junk out there. This workshop isn’t about showing you how to write or create that presentation. It is the structure of what makes compelling information, how do you put everything together, so that customers go from one end right to the other end, and then come back for more.
That’s why it’s different. It shows you exactly what you need to do to make information structure compelling, so that you can take whatever you know, all of that knowledge, and package it in a way that customers consume from one end to the other because once they do, they come back. This has been brought to you by Psychotactics.com and The Three-Month Vacation. Now, if you haven’t been to iTunes and left us a glowing testimonial, then this is your chance, so please leave that testimonial because I’d really appreciate it. Bye for now. Bye-bye.
Clients can be great?or monsters! And once you have a client who's a monster, it's easy to blame them for all the issues. Often, the problem lies with us. We don't put things in place, in advance, and then get into all sorts of trouble.
To get hidden goodies, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
To also get the coolest headline report on "why headlines fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com
TimeStamps
00:00:20 Start
00:01:35 The Riot Act
00:01:56 Part 1: The Barrier
00:06:57 Part 2: Your Philosophy
00:12:20 Part 3: Firing the Client
00:14:25 Summary
00:16:08 Your Action Plan
00:16:30 Final Comments + Psychotactics Workshop
Transcript
Sean D'Souza:The year was 1998, I think 1999, and I had a massive headache. The reason for my headache was that I wasn’t being paid on time. Just to get paid, I had to follow up several times and then I was lucky if I got the full amount. These are clients that drive you crazy and often the question is, what are you going to do with clients like these? Whose fault is it?
Our natural instinct is to say that it's the clients' fault. Really, is it? I think it's just our fault. Why is it our fault? How do we decide when do we get rid of the client? Shall we get rid of them now? Should we get rid of them 6 months from now?
We're not very sure but The Riot Act puts everything into perspective and it saves you from the trouble that I had. I not only had headaches but I had hypertension and all kinds of things and I was not even 30 years old. If you want to avoid that kind of thing, you will need to know how to use The Riot Act.
There are 3 parts to The Riot Act. The first is the form or the barrier, the second is the philosophy, and the third is the right to fire the client. Let's see how this all pans out.
The first part of The Riot Act is the barrier. Without the barrier, without the form, nothing happens. When I started my career, I started out as a cartoonist and the clients always have the upper hand. I was just a teenager out of university; in fact I was still in university.
At that point in time, the newspapers would tell me what to do and they would decide when they had to pay me and so I would spend a lot of time in this follow-up just trying to get my payments, just trying to get the jobs, just trying to just go crazy doing what I thought should have been easy and pleasurable. You get into this rock you think that there is never going to be another way.
Then one day, I was sitting at the dentist and the dentist gave me a form. Here I was doing a transaction. I was going to pay this guy to drill my teeth. He wasn’t going to do it until the form was filled.
Later, I went to a yoga class that is several years later. They weren’t going to allow me to the yoga class until I filled in this form and agreed to sit in a number of classes. I thought, "Wow, this is really cool."
What's happening here is the expectations are being set right at the start. The barriers are being put in place. I thought, "This is incredibly powerful. I wonder if I could use this in our business."
As you know, Psychotactics is mostly about books. It's about workshops. It's about training. What we had at that point in time was a consulting program. Because I live in New Zealand, this consulting is done by a telephone. Still, I got people to fill in the form. They had to fill in our big form and then get back and then we went ahead with the consulting.
The same applied with the protege program. This was a year-long program. Again, they had to fill in a form. Because it was more detailed, more intensive as it were, they also had to go through a 45-minute interview.
Think about it for a second. You are sitting there and you're about to take money from a client but you're putting them for a barrier. Would they agree to such a barrier? The answer is yes. When you look around you, most of the successful businesses have some contracted place.
At that point in time, we only had a single document, a book called The Brain Audit and so we made that our biggest barrier. If you wanted to go to workshop, you had to read The Brain Audit. If you wanted to join our membership at 5000bc.com, again, you had to read The Brain Audit. You had to buy, you had to read it.
At that point in time, I was still doing one-on-one consulting. What we had to do was put together a barrier and the simplest barrier of all is a form. You get the client to sit down and go through a whole bunch of questions. They answer the questions. They qualify themselves and that becomes the first barrier. That’s it that dawned for the relationship.
You may not want to have a form. You might want to have some other kind of barrier in place. Maybe they have to read through a couple of pages of something. Maybe they have to listen to an audio. It doesn’t matter what it is. Having the barrier in place gets the client to qualify themselves and that is the first step towards getting rid of that headache.
You know what's the sad thing? The sad thing is that we haven't always taken our own advice and sometimes we've let the barrier down. For instance, once we were having the workshop in Washington DC and we said, "It's The Brain Audit workshop. Everyone has read The Brain Audit. They're going to be here and we don’t really need to have any barrier in place," and we let that barrier down.
Someone slipped through the net. She was just disruptive, asking all sorts of crazy questions, not participating in the group sessions properly. She drove us crazy. We had to send her home after a couple of days. This is not something you want to do in the middle of a workshop. The first step in your Riot Act is to make sure that, "Hey, you've got a barrier."
This takes us to the second step which is the philosophy. Do they buy in to your philosophy? Do you know if they're buying in to your philosophy? Because if they don’t buy in to your philosophy, it's getting into relationship where you don’t the other person at all.
Second thought, philosophy. What is so important about the philosophy and how do you get this across? You don’t have to write a book or have something sophisticated about your philosophy. Most of our philosophy is embedded within our documents, whether it's a report or a book or an audio. The philosophy is there. People have to listen to something specific before they join.
This is the trickiest thing to achieve when you're in consulting, because the client is very eager to get ahead with the job and it almost seems like you're slowing them down. Getting them to read even a couple of pages or listen to something is very critical. Maybe you get them to read just a few pages of your website or maybe a single page.
Having that philosophy in place makes a big difference. For instance, ours is a 3-month vacation philosophy, which is that we work for 9 months and then, of course, we go out for 3 months in the year.
This doesn’t fit really well with clients if they don’t know this right at the start. Let's supposing you're a member of 5000bc and you join and you think, "Sean is going to be there right through the year." I'm not and I go on vacation for a whole month at a time and should I go back into 5000bc I get thrown out. I get thrown out by my own members because they go, "You're supposed to be on vacation."
This is a complete fit of philosophy. They understand where you're coming from. You understand what you need to do. Unless you get this message across right at the start, you're going to run into a clash and you're going to lose. The client is going to get upset with you. They're going to recall your money. They're going to give you all kinds of trouble because they feel that they're in the right. You haven't let them know right in the start what your philosophy is all about.
Let's take an example of this yoga class that I visited in South India. Their philosophy is very simple. You had to be part of that yoga class for a week, not for a few days but for a week. You had to be vegetarian for the entire week. You had to spend an hour or so in meditation every day. That was part of their philosophy. If you didn’t agree with that, then you couldn't be part of their group.
When we do our courses, which is training which is different from a service like a yoga class, we do something similar. The philosophy is about tiny increments. It's not about big jumps. It's not about instant success. It's not about get anywhere quickly. It's about very, very tiny increments.
For this to happen, the clients have to show up every day. They have to agree to this philosophy. They have to agree that they're going to be there 5 days a week going forward step by step as we go through the whole minefield of information and getting things implemented.
In a way, a philosophy is your way of life but it's also the rules that you put together. While it's quite easy to put it, you're offering a service or training. It probably is a lot harder when you're selling a product. What do you supposed to do if you're selling shampoo or soap? There is a philosophy.
If you go to this site at EcoStore.co.nz, you will find that the owner put together a philosophy and you can see the philosophy in the website. It's very clear. They do not want anything to do with chemicals so all their soaps, all their products are made without any chemicals whatsoever. They spend thousands or tens of thousands or probably hundreds of thousands of dollars to make sure that it's absolutely pure that it doesn’t remove the oils from your skin that it doesn’t affect you in any way. They don’t say it but I think you could drink some of their soap. That’s their philosophy.
Your philosophy is the core of your business. It is why you started out in the first place. It is everything. If the client doesn’t get a complete dose of this philosophy, they don’t know what do you stand for. You get into this relationship not knowing how it's going to work out. That’s not a good thing. You want to make sure that the client reads or listens to this philosophy and make it short. Don’t punish them.
This takes us to the third part, which is the right to fire the client. You probably don’t think of firing the client very much, do you? The client pays your bills, sends you on vacation. They're there for your benefit and yet you need to fire the client.
When most of us start up in a relationship, we don’t outline the exit plan. In most cases, especially in personal relationships, it's not necessary. In a business relationship, it's very important that you have some exit plan in place.
In the very first meeting, what you need to do with the client is sitting down and tell them that they have the right to fire you. They have the right to fire you if you don’t meet with the obligations, the specifications of the contract. Then you tell them that you in turn had the right to fire them if they don’t meet up with the scheduled payments, if they don’t behave like normal people should.
When we do this, we are very clear about the fact that it's an equal agreement. Nothing is ever equal that’s always the shift-in power balance but even so, you're not making it so unequal that it causes you trouble. It also sets the benchmarks so you know that, "Hey, at this point in time, I have to get paid. If I don’t get paid, we're walking. We're firing you."
If I had these systems in place when I first started out, it would have saved me a lot of grief. In a lot of cases, I didn’t get paid anyway. In other cases, the trouble of trying to recover the money, the hassle of having to deal with clients that suddenly reduced the font size from 17 to 3, it was not worth the trouble. When you set this whole agenda in place, it makes it much easier for the relationship to continue and to be very, very respectful.
If you were just selling a product online or a physical product, yes it cost you money but it's not as damaging as training or consulting. Especially if you're in training or consulting, you want to make sure that you have this Riot Act in place. Let's go over the 3 parts of The Riot Act.
The first part of The Riot Act was simply the barrier. You've got to have some barrier in place. This could be that they have to read a booklet or a book or filling a form or do something.
The second step is simply to have a philosophy. This might be a short document. It might be a single page. The client has to know your philosophy and, of course, you have to know your philosophy and put it down so that they agree with it.
Finally, you have to make sure that right at the start the client knows that they can fire you but you can fire them. This sets a benchmark, were you going to paid at this time, you're going to get this at that time. It sets this whole relationship right at the start and prevents all the hassle that most of us have had at some point with the other.
We've run Psychotactics for almost 13 or 14 years now and we've had only 3 or 4 clients that have been toxic clients the whole time. That’s a very long time to not have clients that are real thing.
The reason for that is very simple. For most of our products, our services and whenever we do consulting, we make sure that we have the system in place. You'll find that work is an absolutely pleasure, which is the way it should be, not being pushed around all the time by someone else, so put The Riot Act in place.
The simplest thing you can do today that’s the one thing that you can do today. What is it? The one thing that you can do today is put a barrier in place. Even if you don’t have your philosophy in place, even if you don’t have the guts to go up to the client and say, "We're going to fire you," have the barrier. Small barrier, big barrier, whatever barrier, have a barrier in place. When the client gets over their barrier, they qualify themselves and that makes the big difference.
With that, we are shuffling towards the end of this podcast. I just want to tell you, if you want more goodies, which are not available in the website, you can go to psychotactics.com/magic.
On another note, we're having a workshop on information products. It's interesting but a lot of the stuff that you see free on the internet has very little value because there's so much free stuff. It is more efficient to get clients through workshops or training, something that they pay for and yet structuring a book or a workshop or a webinar is critical, how you make it so exciting that people want to come back time and time again and then buy more stuff from you.
That’s what we're going to cover in the information products workshop where we show you how to reduce the amount of information and yet get clients to come back. This is nothing sleazy. It's what we really need at this point in time in our history. That’s happening in the first week of May 2015. We'll have more details on the podcast and on the website, so be part of the newsletter at psycotactics.com.
Finally, I'm writing a book on pricing, yes pricing, and how to get better prices without losing customers. That’s it for now. That’s me, Sean D'Souza saying bye from the Three-Month Vacation podcast and psychotactics.com. If you haven't already gone to Psychotactics, go there today. Bye for now.
Whether you run an online or offline business, there's a point where the business will take control of you. And then it doesn't let go. All those marketing strategies and "four-hour workweek" formulas are totally useless. So what works? And why does it work? Here are three core steps that will get you out of the muck and back on dry land. And yes, on the road to the three month vacation.
00:00:00 Introduction: Getting More Control in Business
00:02:22 Element 1: Learning Core Skills
00:06:44 Element 2: Flying Solo is a Problem
00:12:19 Element 3: Input and Output
00:18:02 Summary
00:19:35 Ending Notes
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Sean D'Souza:Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com, and you're listening to the Three Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead, it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time.
If you go to a restaurant, just about any restaurant, and if you go to sit down you would notice that some days the restaurant is absolutely full and on other days it's completely empty. What's really happening here? What you're noticing is the lack of control over the business. It doesn't matter whether you own a restaurant business or a gym or you just have a service, you have to have control over your business. How do you have this control over your business? I didn't have to answer to this several years ago. I'd run a cartooning business since I was in university and I ran a business for about ten or 12 years without any control. I didn't know where the next client would come from. While I did some amount of promotion, sometimes I had enormous amounts of work so I wouldn't get any sleep. At other times a whole month could pass and I'd have nothing to do.
The only way to have complete control over your business is to use the concepts explained in the three prong system. Now if you didn't listen to episode number two then that's where you need to go right now, or just after you listen to this episode. That's because the three prong system has stood the test of time. When you look at all the religions of the world that have lasted 2,000 years they use the three prong system. When you look at businesses that have done really well over the years they too use the three prong system. You want to go back to episode two and listen to it.
The three prong system brings strategy but to your business, but on a day to day business you need to some strategy as well. This episode talks about the strategy that you need on a day to day basis. As usual, we're going to cover three things, and the first thing we're going to cover is the factor of core skills. The second thing we're going to cover is about how to get help or why you should get help, and the third is input is equal to output.
Let's start out with the first, which is learning the core skills. What is this all about? The biggest problem that we have and the reason why we can't earn more or take more time off is because we spend so much time not learning core skills. Let's say you were a golfer and you wanted to get really good on the golfing circuit. What would you do? It's pretty obvious, isn't it? You'd go out there and you'd practice and you'd get a coach, and you'd work that so that you were very good at golfing. Otherwise, you'd just your Sunday golfer, go there, hit some balls, and hope for the best. In a business, hoping for the best is not a good idea. It's not your hobby as it were. This is your passion.
When you're passionate about something you have to be like Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo. When you're passionate about something you have to have that core skill in place. You know it's in place because you can do it exceedingly well and exceedingly quickly. For instance, if you had to write an article, say 800 to 1,000 words, how long would you take to write that? I'll tell you how long it used to take me to write it. I used to take two days. I'm not kidding. I would start on the first day and then write, and then stop and edit and write and stop and edit and write and stop and edit.
By the end of the second day I was not really sure that the article would be any good. I was a cartoonist, not a writer. I spent a lot of time just trying to get into that writer mode, because I knew as a small business owner that's what I needed to do. I needed to write books. I needed to write articles. I needed to get the word out there. Article writing, which wasn't my core skill, had to become my core skill. I had to communicate that way. I got all the material I needed to study. I got a lot of information that I was deconstructing, and then that didn't help me at all. I still had to write the articles.
Luckily for me, at that point in time there wasn't as much content on the internet. A website called marketingprops.com, they wrote to me and they said "Can you send us some articles?" Then every week the publisher would bug me and say "Can you send me some more articles?" Even though I was not keen on writing the articles I had this person nudging me all the time and so I was forced to write the articles.
Today I can write an article in 45 minutes, but not just an article, but a very, very good article. This is what you've got to do. You've got to figure out what are those core skills. Sit down and work out what are the things that I have to get very good at, and then you proceed to get very good at it. Another core skill, to just be updating your website or knowing more about your website. A lot of us have websites, and of course we have web designers and programmers and stuff. That's very important. We have that too, but you also need to know enough to fix your pages, to put in graphics, to do whatever you want to do. Because having to wait on someone for a day or two days, it slows you down. It frustrates you, and you don't get the results.
While it's all very fine to say outsource this and outsource that, you have to also remember that there are certain core skills that you have to learn, and unless you get very good at these core skills you remain an amateur. You continue to be someone for whom the business is just a hobby. I'm saying hobby; I know it's not your hobby but that's how it ends up being. For me, that key component towards my three month vacation, and your key component, is going to be getting control over your core skills. You have to make a list of the few things that you want to do, not run after every shiny objective that comes your way - because there are lots of shiny objectives there on the internet - and develop your core skill.
This takes us to our second topic, which is about getting help. Our business is incredibly small. It's run by just my wife and I. When I started out it was just me. Then my wife Renuka came along and people said "I wish had someone like Renuka. I wish I had help as well." This is what I tell them at that point in time. I said at the point that Renuka joined Psychotactics she was earning $85,000 a year. By quitting her job what we were doing was talking a hit of $85,000. Remember, at that point in time I wasn't really earning a lot. I was probably earning about $1,500 a month in marketing. This is very important because you might think that you can't afford to get any help and it's just impossible to run a business all by yourself. There are far too many things to do, far too many things that you have to juggle if you're going to be running a business by yourself.
Now the first obvious thing to do is to outsource some of the things, and then you start outsourcing more things. At some point in time you just have to have someone on a consistent basis that does consistent jobs so that you don't have to do everything yourself. The biggest problem with a business is just that you lose too much energy. I've spoken about this before. It's not about time, it's about energy. Once you do task one and task two and task three and task four you're getting very, very tired. At the end of the day you may still have some time, but you just don't have the energy.
Think of it as a plane. Now if you ask a pilot, they don't need two engines to friendly that plane. But if one of the engines quit it's not such a good feeling. You can friendly your plane with one engine but it gets very frustrating, and there are times when that one engine fails and then it's more than just frustrating. I know this is hard advice to give. How do I give you this advice? How do I say to you: Go out there and find someone. Go out there and pay for the services. But the problem with trying to do it all yourself, this flying solo business, it just doesn't work in my opinion.
We've run our business now at Psychotactics since 2002. I really thought that it would get easier over the years, and you know what, it might have got easier if we were doing exactly what we were doing in 2002, if we were earning exactly what we were earning in 2002, yes. But given my aspirations, given the things that I want to do, given the books that I want to write ... and these are just passions. This is less about the money that we're going to make. I'm really fascinated with writing about pricing. I'm really fascinated about writing about talent. I'm really interested in doing something about Photoshop.
This is why we started a cartooning course even though it was free. We started out a cartooning course even though I'd been a cartoonist for 15 years. People knew about my cartooning, and it was free. Without that support that Renuka brings it would be impossible. It would be completely impossible for me to do the things that I really want to do. Over the years we've added bits and pieces here and there. We got someone to do our blog, as in post the information to the blog. Then we got someone to put together the reports, so I write all the information, I do the cartoons, but someone puts it together in an InDesign file and I showed them how to do that.
This is what allows me to do what I want to do. It allows Renuka to do what she wants to do. It gives us time. More importantly, it gives us that energy that we so desperately require. That's all I can say. This advice is like a halfhearted, half-baked advice, because I don't know how you're going to do it. I just know that you have to do it. If you want more control of your life you have to get that second engine. Don't go up in the air with a single engine because it's just too much. Yes, I can go on and on about how we take three month vacations but this is the big secret as it were.
The first thing is that you need to have core skills. You need to be able to do stuff that is critical to your business and do it very, very, very quickly. The second thing you definitely need is that second engine. I don't know how you're going to get it but you need it. The third thing that to me is critical is this whole concept of input is equal to output.
The other day I was in an interview and I was being asked how to be a good writer. It's very tempting to keep talking about the techniques and the methods and the secrets, and all the stuff that goes into great writing. I don't believe that to be true. I believe that the writing part is the execution of what goes in in the first place. I believe that input is equal to output, or at least input really helps the output. To me, reading is more important than writing. Or should I put it another way: it's equally important.
Without the reading part of stuff it's probably not going to end up with great writing. People make a mistake with input. They take in too much information, and that doesn't really work to your advantage. That just sends you scattering in every direction. Now don't get me wrong, at the same time that I'm learning how to use my camera I want to learn how to use InDesign and I want to learn how to do character design in cartooning, and lettering, and all kinds of things. Those are hobbies, and there is my work. When it comes to my work I'm doing something completely different.
My input day goes like this. I start out the day and I go for a walk. I make sure that I'm listening to stuff that is interesting to me or important to me. Ideally I don't listen to podcasts. I know it's ironic since you're listening to a podcast, but I don't listen to podcasts because a lot of people ramble on endlessly, so I listen to an audio book. I listen to a course where I know they're not rambling on. Mostly audio books because they're structured, they're edited, and there's less chance of this ramble. I'm not trying to remember. This is the mistake that a lot of people make with audio. They don't treat it like radio, and you should treat audio like radio. You shouldn't really try to remember anything. It's all sitting in your head bit by bit. Listen to one book and another book and a third book. Soon enough, all the thoughts become input; they sit in your head.
Again, I'm not saying that you should not make notes. I'm not saying that you shouldn't make mind maps. I'm not saying you shouldn't do anything you do not want to do. I'm saying that there is so little time in the day that when you're driving, when you're walking, you need input. Then you get back to your office, your place of work, and then it's time for output. Over the years I've found that just by increasing the input and also cross-pollinating the input, so I'll listen to a whole bunch of different things on the way in. Then we get to the café, we discuss what we've learned along the way, and maybe we've not learned a lot, and then we turn round and come back. Then I will probably listen to something lighter or learn a language.
That's it. That's the input equals to output. If you want to become a great writer you have to listen to and read great writing. If you want to become a great artists you have to go to galleries. You have to look at art books. You have to do all that stuff. That's all the input part. The same thing is with business. If you're going to go chasing after some guy that promises you a lot of money, some guy that promises you a lot of customers and you think that's a good idea, well it might be a good idea but often, and especially if you're listening to a podcast like this, you probably not going to fit in. That input is wrong. That input signal becomes erroneous, and therefore you don't get the output. All you get is frustration.
Control your input signals and then you start to get better output signals. The output is important as well. Every time I put out a book I'm not really sure that someone is interested in it. Every time I do a course I'm not sure that someone is interested in it. I do it for myself. I think that it really matters. I think that when you put your passion into it you then need to sustain it. It's the same thing with this podcast. I don't know if you've realized it, and I probably mentioned it before because I've been mentioning it to everyone, but it takes about 20 minutes to record a 20 minute episode, or 15 minutes to do a 15 minute episode. But it takes about two and a half hours to then put the music. The only reason why I continue to do this and will continue to do this is because I'm fascinated with it.
I'm listening to podcasts where they have great music and I'm listening to stuff where they have great content and great interviewers, and that becomes my input. That's why you're getting this output. Let's wrap up today and let's summarize. We started out with control. You have to know the things that are important. Writing is important. Being able to tweak your website, that's important. Your sales letters, what's wrong with it, what's wrong with your email, understanding that whole sales thing. I think these are critical for a business. If you don't have those critical elements at the tip of your fingers then you're struggling.
The second thing is just an energy factor. If you don't have enough energy at the end of the day then it just becomes one mindless, endless loop. You have to get that second engine. How you get that second engine, whether it's by hiring someone or getting someone in your family to help out, that's something you have to figure out and figure out quickly. You can't friendly solo. I can assure you that. It's very, very, very hard.
The third thing is input is equal to output. The quicker you realize that you don't have that much time in the day and you need great input, the quicker you realize that there is no shortcut and all these guys who offer you this quick route to success, you need to get off that input because it's driving you crazy. It's distracting you. Listen to stuff that is important. Read stuff that is important. That is your key to a sensible future. That is your key to the three month vacation.
That brings us to the end of this episode. We're now on episode 15. Wow, that was quick. Anyway, if you haven't already subscribed ... I've said this a million times before and I'm going to say it again. If you haven't subscribed to iTunes, go there, subscribe; and yes, leave a review. Please do leave a review because it really helps us. I read the review everyday. If your reviews not there then I'm looking out for that review.
The second thing you want to do is you want to go to psychotactics.com/magic because even if you are subscribed to iTunes or Stitcher or anywhere else, the magic that's where you're going to get your stuff. There's a form there. Fill it up and we'll occasionally send you some magic from there. Finally, if you're not already part of Psychotactics, then get to Psychotactics. Get there and subscribe to the newsletter. It's really cool stuff. It's stuff like this, except it's written down. That's me, Sean D'Souza, saying bye for now. Bye bye.
Oh, I almost forgot purpose of one thing that you had to do today. Yes, the one thing that you can control today is input. I am sure you can go out there and get someone over time and get control over all the things you do, but input, you can listen to stuff like this or you can get an audio book or start reading. Have that input every single day, 30 minutes of learning every single day. It will make a big difference for your life. Get rid of those idiots that promise you the world. Yep, that's it. I'm done, really done. Bye bye.
Getting things done isn't as easy as it looks. So what gets in our way when we run our small businesses? Do we simply run out of ideas? The Three Month Vacation Podcast examines how to get out of your own way and get your online?or offline business working smoothly. The key to getting things done is the trigger. How do you create and sustain that trigger in your small business?
To get hidden goodies, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
To also get the coolest headline report on "why headlines fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com
Time Stamps:
00:00:20 Getting Things Done:
00:02:08 How Do We Make The Trigger Work?
00:04:03 Table of Contents
00:04:24 How To Activate The Trigger
00:09:29 How The Trigger Builds Momentum
00:14:33 Summary
00:17:47 Final
Transcript:
When I was little my uncle gave me a game. It was called Snoopy Tennis and it was a little console, a video game from Nintendo. All you had to do was play tennis. Lucy from Peanuts and Charlie Brown from Peanuts as well, they would hit the ball towards you and you as Snoopy had to return the service. Lots of people played those games. Millions of kids played those games across the globe, but mine was different, mine was unique. My console had a crack in it. It had fallen at some point in time, so I can see the ball heading towards me and I have to listen for it. It would go beep, beep, beep, and then I had to push down on the red button that would ensure that I hit the ball, got the service back over the net as it were.
What was interesting was that I wasn't looking for the visual anymore. I was listening to the sound and responding. That sound was a trigger. One of the biggest reasons why we can take as much time off as we do is because we have these triggers in place. Without the triggers it's very hard for us to get anything done. That is because as adults we have so many things to do and so many responsibilities that when we try to do something, when we try to finish a book or write an article or do anything at all, we struggle. We struggle because we don't have that trigger in place.
What is that trigger and how can we make it work for ourselves? Let's start with the things that I don't like very much. One of the things that really bug me is having to exercise. As I've mentioned before, I don't care much for exercise, and yet you'll notice that I'm reasonably fit. This is because I end up doing between 80,000 to 100,000 steps a week. You have to ask yourself how does someone who doesn't like exercise doing such a lot of walking. Well, I use a trigger. In fact, two triggers.
The first trigger is just the coffee. that is when I get up in the morning I am not headed for a walk, I am headed for a coffee. I'll wake up, I'll get my iPhone on, put on the audio, and then head towards the café. When I reach the café that's my reward. What's really happening here is that the walk is not something that appeals to me that much. However, the coffee does appeal to me. That sense of reward, that carrot and stick as it were, is what helps me.
That's the trigger.
The second trigger that I have in place is I have a little pedometer called Fitbit. I have other friends who are also high achievers who do 70, 80, 100,000 steps a week. I want to compete against them so that becomes my second trigger. What I'm saying here is that I don't care much for walking. I would rather sit here and do a podcast and do some music and draw some cartoons, and do all kinds of stuff. Yet no matter what the weather, whether it's rainy or windy or hot or cold, I end up going for a walk - and that is because of the trigger. Triggers work both ways. They work for good and evil.
What we are covering in today's episode are three things. The first is how to activate the trigger. The second is how it helps you build and sustain momentum. This is very important. The third thing is what happens when you go offtrack. How do you get back on track? Let's start off with the first one, which is how do you activate the trigger.
Now in a normal day what I have to do is I have to write articles, I have to draw some cartoons, I have to do a whole lot of things. While a trigger might seem like a reward, because I was talking about coffee earlier, well it's not necessarily a reward. It's just that beep beep headed towards you. How do you install that beep? One of the things that I found very useful for me and to get things done is to keep things open. Now I draw a daily diary in my Moleskin diary.
I do a painting every single day, and I've been doing this since 2010.
How do I achieve this? It's a very busy day. It's quite easy to put it off. It takes a lot of time to do it. What I do is I don't keep the diary in my bag. I don't keep the paints in my bag. I don't keep the pencils in my bag. They're all ready on my desk and they're open. Just before I sit down for breakfast, every single day I will say "Well, let me just sit here for five minutes. Let me just do a little wash. Let me just paint a bit." I'm always trying to fool myself there.
The thing is that the diary is already open, the paints are already there, the water's already there. If I were to spend just a few minutes trying to find the paints or the diary or the pencils and the pens, that could distract me enough for me not to do that painting for the day. I've tried this. I've kept it in the bag, and just that little distraction, that tiny distraction can slow you down.
Slowing you down often leads to complete derailment. It's the same thing when I'm trying to do a podcast for instance. At the end of the day I don't have much energy but I do have energy to keep my Garage Band, which is my software, ready and open. When I show up here at 4 in the morning, and that's just me, it's already open. Before I check any email I'm looking at Garage Band staring at me in the face. The moment I see that I know you've got to do this podcast now, and then you can do the other stuff.
This concept of keeping things ready and open seems almost remarkably too simple and yet it is a trigger. It is a trigger that helps you get things done. This is what successful people have known for a very long time. I once read a book by Twyla Tharp, and she talks about getting into a taxi.
Now Twyla is a very famous dancer and choreographer. She needs to practice. When you wake up in the morning you don't feel like practicing. What she does is just get dressed and gets into a taxi. Often she says "When I'm in the taxi that's when I realize I have to practice." The taxi becomes that little trigger. It's like that beep beep beep.
The mistake that we often make is we have our to-do list and we don't realize that the to-do list is not what gets things done. The to-do list is almost t end point. What gets things done is the trigger that leads us to that to-do list, the trigger that gets us on the bike, the trigger that gets us for the walk, the trigger that gets us to pick up that racket and hit the ball back to Lucy and Charlie Brown.
If you want to get things done you have to isolate that trigger. You have to figure out what is the thing that comes in between me and the task. What is that one thing that will start me off and get me to that task? Then you have to put the trigger in place.
to activate the trigger we have to have that isolation point. We have to figure out what is that one thing that comes in between that will help us to get to the trigger. It will be different for different things. We know email is a trigger. We know Facebook is a trigger. These are triggers that are designed to get our attention. That's why they flash on our phones. That's why they show up on our screens.
Because once we have that trigger we are forced to go to the next step. If these distractions help us waste time in the day, well there is a good chance that you can use the trigger to your advantage as well. It works for good; it also works for evil. Harnessing it for our good is probably the better way to go, isn't it?
That brings us to the end of the first part, but the second part is what is really critical, and that is the factor of how the trigger builds momentum. When psychologists look at how to improve your memory what they realized is that something that is not done takes up an enormous amount of energy. What they did was they took two groups of people and they gave them tasks. One group was supposed to finish their tasks and the other was not supposed to finish their task. At the end of the exercise they were supposed to write down the tasks that they had completed.
The groups of people who had completed the tasks didn't have such a good memory, as in they forgot some of the tasks that they had completed. But the groups who had not completed the tasks remembered stuff. What did they remember? They actually remembered the stuff that they had not completed. You see, in the exercise these people were given the tasks and then almost as they were completing the tasks, the tasks were taken away from them. That stuck in their head. Later on when they had to fill in the form they remembered the tasks that they had not completed.
What was happening was those incomplete tasks were taking up an inordinate amount of energy in the brain. They had to remember those tasks even though they were not trying to remember any of them. This is what happens to us all the time. For instance, I came back from the information products course that I had in Vancouver and I had to write a tiny little booklet about something. I can't even remember now. I've completed the task. It was a tiny bonus, and usually that would take me about a day, maybe two days if I was really slow.
But instead it took me a month. Everyday when I went for my walk that's all I could think of: I have to finish this bonus. I have to finish this bonus. I have to finish this bonus. What that was doing was killing my momentum. Because I couldn't complete or wouldn't complete that task it was draining all my energy for all the other tasks, so it was like a game of dominoes. It was one task not being done, that was dropping into the next and the next and the next. When we look at the reverse thing, which is when we have that trigger in place and we get the task done, then the next task moves along and the third moves along, the fourth moves along.
One of the reasons why I go for a walk in the morning is because I complete so many things. I get my exercise. I listen to the audio. I talk to my wife. We also learn a language and we drink coffee. Before 8:00 in the morning a lot of stuff gets done, but then that leads to the second task and the third task and the fourth task. When people say "I'm not getting a lot of stuff done because I don't have enough time in the day," they probably are referring to not time but energy. Time is different from energy. The lack of completing one task leads to a depletion of energy, which then spills onto the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth.
You know it's energy because sometimes you have the time and you spend that time on Facebook, and you spend that time just lying there on the sofa saying "I'm so tired." That is a depletion of energy, not a factor of time. When you get stuff done, when you use triggers to get stuff done, your energy level is so much higher. You know this; I don't have to tell you this. Your energy level is just bouncing and you get more done.
This brings us to the end of the second part. The third part is just as important because often we go offtrack. Supposing you've gone on vacation for instance. The moment you get back you're offtrack, or say there's been some kind of problem or urgency and now you're offtrack. How do you get back on track? I wish there were a magic pill to tell you how to get back on track, but I've struggled with the same issues. I'll stop painting and then before I know it a week has passed or two weeks have passed and I haven't done a painting. I say I paint everyday. Yes I do but only if the book is open.
I have to go back to the same concept, which is what is that trigger. If the book is open then I'm going to get it done. If the program is open I'm going to write t book. That's just how it is. I wish there were a simpler way. I wish there were a magic button but there is no magic button. The magic button is to isolate the trigger. Whatever that trigger is, you have to isolate it.
This brings us to the end of this episode. In this episode what we covered was just the whole factor of activating that trigger. We activate that trigger by isolating it. We saw how the coffee motivates me, but it's not just a reward. It is any sort of trigger. Just keeping the book open makes a difference. Just keeping the program makes a difference. Just getting to the taxi makes a difference.
You might get on a bus or in a car and when you get in that car you switch on, not the radio, but listen to some audio that helps you learn instead. That's your trigger. That trigger helps you get smarter. You go to your networking meeting, you go to your meeting, you go to your office. You know more, you feel better, that sets off the other triggers, the other tasks that get better and better everyday.
This is the key to getting things done. A lot of people think that getting things done has to do with the to-do list, but it doesn't. The to-do list is at the end of the rainbow. Now you saw what was happening there. I had the trigger. That was my trigger to go for a walk. That was my wife calling up and I'm off right now. Even though I might feel like finishing this podcast I'll have to come back to it and complete it, because that was my trigger.
Just before we I go I want you to know that I'm not always like this. I'm not always hyped up, ready to go. There are some days when I'm just lazy, and that's okay to be that way. Not because I'm saying so but because it's okay to just have down time. Just know that when you're working, work out the trigger that gets you to work more efficiently. That is probably the best thing you can do for yourself. That's the one thing that you can do for yourself: find that trigger.
Here we are at the end of this episode. If you're keen on learning more about planning, then I have a book there for you. It's called Chaos Planning. I find that most people plan without taking chaos into consideration. It details how we go about our three month vacation and how we plan stuff, and why is it so important to plan with chaos in mind. Now chaos is your best friend. It may not seem like that but if you make time for him then he does help you out a lot. Look for Chaos Planning.
Now if you're ever wondering how do I get this podcast on a regular basis, we have it on iTunes, we have it on our website, we have it all over the place. There's one central point; that is Psychotactics.com/podcast. It doesn't matter whether you're on iTunes or off iTunes or any other way. You can get all the details on that page, so go to Psychotactics.com/podcast today. And yes, send me questions. If you have any questions I'd be more than happy to take them on, and feedback. Whatever you'd like to improve, whatever you'd like to see, send it to me at sean@psychotactics.com. That's it from the three month vacation land. Bye for now. Bye bye.
When we set about creating a new product or service, we look for a catchphrase. And while a catchphrase or slogan is very useful, it's not a lot of use when it comes to driving home our uniqueness or positioning. So how do we create that USP or uniqueness? The best way to go about this exercise is to avoid the line completely, because really, your clients can't remember it any way. What you need to focus on, is the story. But how do you create this story line? What's the secret link between storytelling and uniqueness?
Time Stamps
00:00:20 Uniqueness and Story: Introduction
00:02:11 Table of Contents
00:02:25 Element 1: How The Story Helps in Uniqueness
00:07:57 Element 2: How To Create The Story-Emperor
00:11:40 Example: Psychotactics Article Writing Course
00:14:39 Example: Golden Moon Tea
00:16:19 Element 3: Why Is the Story More Important Than The Slogan?
00:19:01 Summary
00:20:25 Final Resources + Goodies
Speaker 1:Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com and you're listening to the three month vacation podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less, instead it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time.
When someone tells you their name, do you remember it? Often when we meet someone they introduce themselves, we introduce ourselves, and then later we cannot remember their names. We think we're really bad with names, but as you know, that's not true at all; no one is good with names. The reason why we don't remember names is either because it's not important or we don't have a story. How important is this story when it comes to uniqueness?
What I'll do right now is I'll read out a whole bunch of slogans from airlines and see if you can remember which airline they come from. I bet you won't remember any of them, or very few of them. That's because they don't have a story.
Here it goes. Number one, making the sky the best place on earth. Number two, the proud bird with the golden tail. Number three, world class, world wide. Number four, we really move our tail for you. Number five, something special in the air.
You're getting that blank feeling aren't you? It's like when you meet that person again and you can't remember their names. That's because there is no story to it. The key to remembering someones name is to assign a story to it. That's exactly what you have to do when you're creating your uniqueness. If there is no story, it becomes impersonal and you can't remember it. More importantly, your client can't pass it on to someone else.
In today's episode we'll cover three points, as always, and that is: how does the story help, how to construct that story, and finally, why it's so important because it needs to be passed on to someone else.
Let's start off with how the story helps. One of the worlds best know slogans is simply, "Thirty minutes or it's free", and that came from Dominos Pizza. That sounds like just a line, doesn't it? When you think about it, is it just a line? There is a story behind it.
there is a story of this pizza guy desperately trying to get the pizza ready right after you've put the phone down, and then getting across to you and ringing your doorbell at the 29th minute. Then you hoping, somehow, they'll miss it by a couple of minutes and then you'll get it free.
Notice how easy it is to tell this kind of story to a friend. The reason why this whole slogan seems to work is because the try is unfolding in your brain. You can actually see this story unfolding even with that single line. The line doesn't really matter, what really matters is the story behind the line.
Let's take a product like ioSafe. These are indestructible, or seemly indestructible, hardware - external drives that you use for your computer. They sell for a lot more than the drives that you get anywhere else. What's the story behind it? It's boiled down to this one word, which is indestructible. I don't think they have a great line, but their story is really powerful.
They take the drive to a shooting range and shoot at it, they take a road roller and run it over, they take it and throw it in the swimming pool, they do all kinds of things that would normally destroy the data in the drive. Yet that data is completely secure.
We may not remember the line, and who cares if we remember the line or not, because we're now telling the story to someone else. We're telling them why they should buy this product or service.
Every morning when I go for a walk I usually have an umbrella; it's a red umbrella. It rains a lot when I go for a walk, so I have to take an umbrella. What's different about this umbrella? For one it costs about $100, when the other umbrellas you can get them in the story for about 10 or $15. Why buy and umbrella for $100 when you can get one for $10?
The answer lays in the uniqueness. Because New Zealand is a set of islands and it's pretty narrow, we get storms and winds and often the umbrella just turns inside out. Not the Blunt Umbrella.
To test the Blunt umbrella what they did what run it through wind tunnels. A wind tunnel will probably demolish your $10 umbrella; it will go to pieces. Often you'll find umbrella in garbage cans all over the place. Just thrown always because people are so sick of them. They're twisted, broken, absolutely useless. The Blunt Umbrella has been tested so that it works under crazy wind conditions and doesn't turn inside out.
You may say that's a lot to pay for an umbrella that doesn't turn inside out, but as you look on the street more and more people have a Blunt Umbrella. More and more people feel the need to stay dry in the rain. It's not so weird after all, is it?
I'm pretty sure that you will agree with me that all of theses three products are pretty unique. Let's go back and look at what their slogans are.
We start off with Dominos Pizza, and everyone remembers that it's "thirty minutes or it's free." that I can remember. What is the slogan for ioSafe? It is "Disaster proof software." It's less on the memory scale, but I can still remember it a bit. Finally we go to the Blunt Umbrella. Their slogan is, "The worlds best umbrella."
You see the problem here, don't you? The slogan doesn't matter at all, does it? It's the story behind it that makes all the difference. You remember the story about the Blunt Umbrella, and how those windy conditions and the wind tunnel makes all the difference. You also remember Dominos offer of giving you a free pizza if they're not on time; that's another story. Iosafe dropping their hardware from a height, or throwing it tin a swimming pool, or getting a road roller to go over it.
What you remember is the story. This gives us a clue as to how we should go about creating our uniqueness. The slogan doesn't matter; what matters is the story behind it. Now that we know the story is more important, how do we go about creating that story?
I personally don't think that any of the great stories come from an advertising agency. If they do come from an advertising agency, it's because someone in the advertising agency had the sense to actually look at the product or the service and figure out, "Hey you guys, this is what you're doing really well."
The story can come from you, the business owner, the creator of the product or the service. You do this by playing emperor.
When you look at the story of Dominos, it was back in the '70s, and if you ordered a pizza it could take and hour or more to get a pizza. What they did was they decided that they're going to have a pizza that wasn't the tastiest or the spiciest or the biggest, it was just the fastest pizza delivered to your door. That got peoples attention, but they decided that. They decided that we're going to set up this system that is build around speed.
When you look at ioSafe, which is that indestructible hardware, it's the same thing. External hard drives have existed for a long time, but now we have this hard drive that is just so indestructible. In effect, they're trying to find ways to destroy it.
While nothing is completely indestructible, they come pretty close to showing you what would happen if you had a fire. What happens when you have a fire? For starters you're hardware is toasted, then right after it's toasted the ire brigade comes in, the fire truck comes in and then they pour water all over it. That toasted hardware is now soaked as well.
Do you think any of the data is going to survive that? Yes, it's find to say you can do an online backup, but what about those big files that you wrote to your computer just 30 minutes ago? They're all securely backed up.
What they're demonstrating is how indestructible it is. The way the go about it is to say, "Let's create something like this." Rather than, "I wonder what we can find in our product or service that's unique."
We look at the third example, the Blunt Umbrella, we get the same scenario. The scenario is someone got sick of umbrellas that had to be tossed away every time the wind blew a little harder. They create a great looking umbrella, but predominately an umbrella that could withstand a wind tunnel blast.
This doesn't solve your problem, does it? You're still wondering, how do you play emperor? Imagine this situation, imagine that you are standing on the edge of a cliff and that was your city sprawled before you. At this point in time you're supposed to ask yourself, "If I could change this city, what would I do?" Naturally you would come up with a list of things, maybe the list would be 10 things, or 15 things, or 2o things. What you want to do is you want to whittle that down to 5, and then to 3, and then to finally the one thing that the city desperately needs.
The same thing applies to your product or service. Let's way you're about to create a product or a service, you have to ask yourself, "How would this product be completely different from any other products or service?"
For instance, when we create the article wring course, our article writing course was approximately the same as every other article writing course. It wasn't the same, but from the outside work it was just another article writing course.
we had a lot of trouble filling up those courses. It would take 3, 4, 5 weeks to fill up a course. When you think about it from a business point of view, that's a lot of energy that you have to spend just to fill up a course.
We got lucky, the first thing that happened was one of my instructions was misunderstood. In earlier courses clients would write four or five articles for the duration of the entire course - which meant for about 12 weeks. In this course one of the participants misunderstood the instructions and they thought that they had to write 5 articles a week. They started writing 5 articles a week and then others in the course looked at what he was doing and thought, "That's what I have to do", so they followed along.
Soon enough it became very very hard. Try writing one article a day, five days a week - in this case it was 6 days a week. You will know what I mean. It's very very hard. By the end of the course one of the clients who had done the course said, "This is the toughest course I've ever done. It's almost like having a baby. There's a dog level course, a cat level course, a baby level course."
There was the story in plain sight of us. There was the cat level course when you don't have to do much, just like cats; they take care of themselves. then there's the dog level course, where you have to go out with the dog for a walk; there's more maintenance involved in having a dog. Finally, a baby level course, where you kept up half the night, you don't sleep very much for three months - that's how the Psychotactics article writing course became the toughest course in the world.
That slogan is not as interesting as the story of the dog level, the cat level, and the baby level toughness. That's the part that you remember, that's the part that clients remember, and that's why our courses fill up in probably half an hour or 45 minutes.
you'll say, "wait a second, you didn't come up with whole scenario", and sometimes you don't. In this case the client came up with the scenario. We had a whole bunch of happy misunderstandings and we got a great story from it. Then we ran with that story and it had run ever since.
While my advice is always, play emperor, sometimes it just pays to listen to what the client is saying and how they perceive the product, or the course, or the service to be. Then use it as your story line.
Another good example of this is Golden Moon tea. This is run by Marcus Stout. Marcus is a friend and client of mine. When he started out the tea company it was just like any other tea company, but he decided to play emperor.
A couple of years ago he decided that even in the tea there were so many chemicals. You can get away with a lot with the label "organic"; you're actually allowed to put in a whole bunch of chemicals, even if it's organic. He decided to make his teas chemical free.
This took a lot of work because you can't just say, "Hey, this is chemical free." You have to be there at the farm, figure out stuff, you have to travel a lot. He wanted to create a tea company that he could be assured he could say, "Yup, this tea is chemical free. There's not a trace of chemical in it." Not 3%, not 5%, not nothing, just chemical free.
Do you know how hard it is to find tea that doesn't have some kind of chimerical, genetic modifications, artificial flavors, or toxins within it? That's the tea that we've been drinking all this while.
By playing emperor, Marcus has decided this is how it's going to be. Now you don't care what his slogan is, you don't even remember his slogan, what you remember is the story behind it.
This brings us to the end of the second part of this episode. In the first part of today we covered how does the story help. Then we went on to, how to construct that story and how to ignore the slogan completely if we need to. Now we move to the third part, which is why is this so critical, why is so important that we create a story before we create any kind of slogan, if we create a slogan at all. I think you already know the answer to that question.
The answer is just that it's memorable. You don't remember peoples names and you don't remember slogans of airlines because they're just words strung together. Sure, every now and then you get a slogan that's memorable like, "thirty minutes or it's free", but for the most part, you don't remember it. Yet we spend hours, and days, and weeks, and some people spend thousands, and tens of thousands of dollars coming up with a slogan that no one remembers.
The story really helps because it's helps people to transfer the message across. It helps people to tell people why they buy this product or service over the next product or service. When you're buying a $100 umbrella instead of a $10 umbrella, you need to know why you're doing that. More importantly, you need to justify to someone else who's going to laugh in your face when they see you with such an expensive umbrella.
The story really makes a difference. You feel like owning an ioSafe because you know someday there might be a fire at your place, you know that you're out with that umbrella, you know that you drink tea and you would prefer to have tea that has no chemicals - not just organic, but no chemicals whatsoever.
It's the same story that drives people to buy into the article writing course, even though we sell it 6 months in advance and at a reasonably high price. This story takes a lot of time to create. Once it's in place, you get better customers, you get higher prices.
Of course all of this adds up in the sense that you can now put all that money and time towards your vacation, which is critical. Vacation is not just something you have to do because you can do, it's something that enables you to calm down, to relax, and to just come back fresh so that you can tackle your work with even more gusto. it's not just going eating, drinking, it's also just relaxing your mind and coming back refreshed.
Let's get back to today's topic. The three things that we covered today are: story helps, we figured how the story helps and how it's more powerful than those terrible slogans that you heard at the start. We also very briefly connected with the construction of that story line. Whenever you're coming up with a product or a service, play emperor and create the story line rather than some slogan that no ones going to pay attention to. Finally, we saw the importance of this story line. It enables people to pass it on, to justify what they bought, and get better use out of it as well.
That brings us to the end of this episode. What is the one thing that you can do today? The one thing that you can do today is to play emperor. Make that list; make the list as long as you need to then cut it down to 10, then to 5. Then you'll really struggle because you'll want to talk about everything, but then cut it down to three, and then finally to one thing.
What is that one thing that you really want to do for this product or service. Do this every time you start up a new product and service, because every product or service requires it's own uniqueness. Play emperor, or get a client to play emperor, and you'll be amazed how that very same product or service gets an enormous amount of power and clients are immediately attracted towards it.
Now it's time to close the episode, so if you haven't already done so, go to Pyschotactics.com/magic. That's where you get some magical stuff and some goodies that we won't offer anywhere else. Go there, there's a form, fill out the form - it's a very short form. It's Psychotactics.com/magic. If you've already started the year and you need to do some planning, you're frustrated with goal setting, there is chaos planning which is built around chaos.
Go to Psychotactics.com and there in the product section you'll find a product called chaos planning. It's very unusual, and I think you'll like it.
I'll say bye for now, and thanks for being on the show. Bye bye.
Are you still listening? You remember that thing about not remembering peoples names? You can remember peoples names if you assign a story to them. To try and find some new people to meet today and see if you remember their names - you'll do very well. You'll find that your memory isn't as bad as you though after all.
So you're new. No one knows you from a bar of soap. And everything that needs to be said has already been said before. Whether you're in online marketing, health and fitness, or just about any small business, it's been done. Or has it? Why would customers continue to seek you out even if you're seemingly a nobody. It's because customers don't necessarily seek out just a name. Instead they seek out a voice; a system; and the way you explain that system.
=======
Time Stamps:
00:00:20 Introduction
00:01:31 Table of Contents
00:01:57 Element 1: Your Voice Matters
00:06:39 Element 2: The System That You Follow
00:12:41 Element 3: Your Examples
00:16:40 Summary
00:19:52 Action Plan: The ONE Thing
00:20:42 Final Statements Including Info-Product Workshop in Washington D.C. + Goodies
========
Transcript
Sean: One of the biggest things that we seem to battle with is our own minds. It doesn't matter how good we are or how good we get, there is always this battle in our own minds. We always wonder about the things that we are writing, about the audio that we're creating, of the video that we're creating because there is so much information out there isn't there?
You think, "Well, surely someone has done this before. Surely, someone has covered this before. Surely my work is just going to be irrelevant. No one's going to pay attention. No one will want this." You know something? You would think that this feeling goes away. It never goes away. Here are the three main reasons why you should persist nonetheless.
The three main reasons why you should continue to write, to create audio or video or a presentation is simply because people want to hear you. The three things that they want to hear are, your voice, your system, and the third is your examples. Let's go into a little detail about what these three things signify and why they are so important to your customer.
The first thing that we're going to cover is just the factor of your voice. When I write an article, people know that that article has come from PsychoTactics. When I draw a cartoon, you know that you can recognize my cartoon from everyone else's cartoon.
You know this for a fact because there are thousands or tens of thousands of cartoonists out there, probably even a few million considering the population of the world. Yet, when you see a cartoon from me, you know instantly this is Sean's cartoon or someone that is trying to copy the same style. If that were to apply to cartoons, that also applies to writing, to speaking, to video, to audio.
This audio for instance is constructed in a completely different voice. It's a different way, there is no hype on it. There is no fanciness. But there are clear tiny increments that you can implement, things that help you move forward. You will notice for instance that when I'm speaking, I don't bring up money. Now, there are no how to make six figures, how to make seven figures, even if that is the case, it never comes up. That's because I believe that it's crass, it's low class to talk about money that way. Talking about money and making other people feel miserable or feel uncomfortable because they don't have the same situation, I think it's crass to do that.
I also think that it's silly to have all these gaps. Today I was listening to a podcast and someone said, "OK you can build this product and all you have to do is just get one customer a day. The product costs $497 and you just have to have one customer a day." Wait a second, you don't even have to have one customer a day, you just have to have one customer every other day and you make all of this money and you gave her $191,000-something figure. He just managed to leave out, how are you supposed to have that [half 00:03:45] customer a day?
I think those things are crass. It doesn't come out in my voice. It doesn't come out in my podcast. It doesn't come out in me audio, or my video, or my presentations. For the most part, we will stay within how do you actually move your skill ahead. How do you get these skills? That's my voice. For the most part it stays consistent. I'm not saying that I've never brought it up before. I'm saying for the most part, it stays consistent.
This is what you've got to understand. That for the most part your voice is going to stay consistent and you're going to attract customers and clients that like that voice. It might be a voice that talks about money all the time. Yes, that's great because that attracts that kind of audience. Then yours might be about hard work. We talk about the article writing course, which is the toughest writing course in the world. Clients will write in and say, "You got me at that line." Why would I sign up for anything if it wasn't tough or if it weren't tough, that's right English.
They tell me that this is what they want from life. They want to work hard, they want to create magic, that is the voice that I'm sending out. That's the voice that your clients are responding to, that's the voice that my clients are responding to. Whenever you have that bully brain coming in saying, "oh no, this has been done before. Oh no you shouldn't be writing or speaking or doing whatever it is you're doing", then shut down that bully brain and say, "This is my voice. I have grown up. I have learned things. It is my duty and my privilege to pass it on."
Your voice will come out and your people will listen to you. I know this is sounding very religious or cult-like but I will listen to pretty much any music that Sting brings out because I like his voice. If someone else were to sing the exact song, I don't think it would matter to me as much. That's what you have to understand, that once you've created your voice you're going to have an audience that is willing to listen to you, that's the first thing. Your voice really matters.
Let's move on to the second thing which is the system that you follow. When I first wrote the Brain Audit, it was more about a factor of just writing something down on a piece of paper. Someone wanted the notes, I wrote the notes, it became a book and that became the Brain Audit. Today, that document has become like the Bible for us at PsychoTactics.com, for all our as well. What you've got to understand is just this, that when I wrote that book, I didn't have a system. I was trying to create a system. I was trying to create a system for myself because someone ask that question, I answer the question but now you have to put it together in a way that is consumable, that someone can use. That's what I did. I put it together in the system.
It not only became a system for me, but also for my clients. Maybe I should put it the other way. It not only became a system for my clients but also a system for me. This is true for everything that I do. When I did the info-product scores, it generated a system in my brain. When I wrote any of the products like, the about us page, or the homepage which is about website components, and you'll see this in our product section in PsychoTactics, all of those things I wrote because I wanted to write it because I've been doing things over the years and most of them are nice, they work. In retrospect, it's nice to look back and see how they work. But it's so much better to have that system, to have that checklist.
This is the kind of thing that people are looking for. Whenever they buy into your product or your service, they are looking for that system, not A system or B system or C system, they want your system. They like your voice, they like the way you operate, now, they want your system. If you don't give them that system, in a way, you're doing them a big disservice. You may think, "well, who am I to tell them how to do things?" But this isn't about how to thing, this is about a student in the 3rd grade teaching someone in the 2nd grade. If you know just a little more than the kid in the 3rd grade, you can help that kid.
If you know a little more about fraction, if you know a little more about spellings, you can help that kid in the 2nd grade. That's where you have to come from. The point is that you know your system is slightly different from any other system out there. That's all I'm interested in. I'm not really interested in the other systems. This becomes even more relevant in today's world where there are so many people who are totally hopeless of what they do but they are good at marketing. What they do is they'll do a lot of advertising, they'll do a lot of marketing, they'll do a lot of joint ventures, they'll do all that kind of stuff and people are buying into those products, sometimes the products are just $50, but sometimes they are $15,000.
It doesn't matter whether you spend $15 or $15,000, it's still a waste of your time and money. Those people are searching for someone who has a system. Those people are searching for someone who can put that system together in a cohesive way, and that is you. Put together that system and this is why you need to make sure that you get your information out there and you get it there sooner than later, that even if you get it 70% right, it's enough. You can go and fix it later.
Think of your system as software. Think of all the software you've used over the years. Think of how you've bought version 1, version 1.2, 2, 3, 4 and you don't feel bad about it do you? If you are such a perfectionist, which all of us claim to be, but of course, there is no such thing as perfection. Go back, just go back and fix it. Do version 1 then do version 1.2, 1.3, 1.7, go to 2. That's all we did. We did that with the Brain Audit. We sold version 1, we sold version 2, we sold version 3. The same people that bought version 1, also bought version 2 and they bought version 3 of a book.
It's not software, it's a book. You can do that as well. Believing your system, that's the second point. The first point that we covered was your voice. It needs to be your voice because want to listen to you. The second thing is just the system. Your system is totally different from everybody else's system.
The third thing are your examples and this very, very, critical. What is it about examples that make a difference? You can have a system, you can have a voice but somehow the examples that you use are going to be totally different from somebody else's examples. Maybe you'll give case studies that are totally different. Maybe you talk about stories that are your own personal stories or stories that you know from somewhere else. Maybe you'll use analogies that are different. People learn in different ways. When you give that specific analogy, when you give that specific story, the lights go off in the head and you felt this before haven't you? You feel this.
I was at a workshop once in Spain and there was this guy who is talking about values. Now, values are a system that you use in water colors top make your character stand out. I had read at least 50 books in water colors. I had gone to courses in water colors and I could never understand values. He came up with this system and these examples. The example was about how the values represent coffee and tea and milk and all that kind of stuff.
Of course it doesn't make any senses to you right now but the point was that that was my light bulb moment. That was the moment where I thought, "Wow this is so cool, I have never figured this one out before. I could go another 20 years and never figure this out." I figured it out at that point in time.
I'm sure that Spain helped. I'm sure my mindset helped. I'm sure that a lot of things helped. But the point is that you examples, your analogies, your case studies, they're going to be different. That's what you're going to take away from it. Just like I used the analogy of the Brain Audit. How we did version 1 and version 2 and version 3, you probably heard this whole thing about "Don't be a perfectionist". That story is going to stick in your head. I know it now. Even as I speak, I know that story is going to stick in your head. Every time you slow down, you're going to think of that story.
There you go, three things. Let's go over them quickly, shall we? The first thing that we covered was just your voice, people want to listen to your voice, it's very, very important. Whether that voice is a grumbly voice or a spammy voice or [inaudible 00:14:05] voice or whatever voice, that's the kind of client that is interested in your voice. It doesn't matter whether you consider it good or bad, your audience will be attracted to that. The second thing is just the factor of your system. Your system is going to be different. Even if you move just one peg away from the other peg, from somebody else's system, it's still your system and that's what I want to buy into. The third thing is your examples, your analogies, your case studies, your stories, one little thing in your book, in your audio, in your presentation could trigger off that magic. That's the magic that you want to bring to the table.
This is why you should never give up. This is why you should never consider yourself irrelevant. This is why you should push that bully brain far into the background and say, "you sit in a corner and when you're 35 years or up, you can come and bug me again." That's what you do.
Well, this is me Sean D'Souza. If you like this audio and you like this information, pass it on to a friend, pass it on to someone, so that they can benefit from it as well. Do write in and ask me the questions about info products or marketing or anything specific that you want to ask because you never know, I might run in it in an audio podcast, in fact I will do that. You know where to find me, it's at PsychoTactics.com. Go to PsychoTactics.com and we'll meet you there.
When you're a small business, you have what seems like a terrible choice: tactics or strategy. But do you really have to choose? How do online or offline strategies differ from tactics? Can you get by on marketing tactics alone? There is a difference and this podcast shows you how to not just tell the difference, but profit from it.
To get hidden goodies, go to: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
To also get the coolest headline report on "why headlines fail", go to: http://www.psychotactics.com
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Time Stamps:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:02:44 The Difference Between Strategy And Tactics
00:06:59 Strategy Leads to More Stress
00:08:39 How to Execute Tactics and Strategy
00:12:27 Summary
00:13:33 Action Plan
00:14:51 Final Notes.
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Transcript
Sean D.: Hi this is Sean D'Souza, from Psychotactics.com and you're listening to the three month vacation podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. It's the new year and most of us are already thinking of not making new year resolutions so why do we hate new year resolutions so much? We hate it because it doesn't work and the reason why it doesn't work is because we're not doing it right. Today we're going to talk about strategy versus tactics. Your new year resolution so far has probably been a tactic, not a strategy.
Back in 2008, I decided I wanted to play badminton. I wanted to lose a bit of weight, but I also enjoy sport. You see, I don't really like to do any exercise, I don't like going to the gym, I can barely tolerate walking, I only do it because I'm listening to something and it helps me pass the time, but sport? You ask me to play some soccer, or as I call it, football, or cricket, or badminton, well that's more up my street. I go to play badminton every day at 9 o'clock and then by 12 o'clock I'd be back. Now I wasn't playing all the three hours, I was playing just a couple of hours, but as you can tell, that's quite a decent workout. What happened at the end of a couple of months?
I didn't lose any weight. How could that be the case? How can you run about like a crazy nut, for two hours, five days a week and not lose any weight? The problem was I was reading it as a tactic, not as a strategy. I'd go and play for those hours every day and then I'd get back and I'd eat a little of this and a little of that and pretty much I was consuming as many calories as I was burning and doing it every single day. After several months, I was exactly where I started, but not only did I goof up on the food, I was also goofing up on how I approached the game. After three months, I had so many aches and pains because I wasn't doing stuff right and I gave up the game.
Now I still have my racket with me, I still have my shoes, I still have the badminton shuttle I was playing with when I went from C player to B player which was quite difficult by the way. That is what today's podcast is about. It's about the difference between strategies and tactics. You've probably figured out the difference between strategies and tactics anyway. Tactics are like a new year's resolution. You decide you want to stop smoking, you want to go on a diet, you want to do something and it's that instant moment of deciding that you want to do something and then you move in a different direction.
Tactics might seem like just that one moment and strategy might seem like a longer period of time, but there's more to strategy than just the period of time and that is that there are different elements that feed into that strategy. When you look at something like what we're doing right now in podcasting, when I did podcasting back in 2010, I had what you call a tactic. I recorded a podcast and I put it up and people came there and they listened to it and that was it. However, this time around it's a strategy, so it's not just a podcast, it has different elements involved.
There is the podcast, there is the cartoon that goes with the podcast, there are the transcripts, there are the pages that have to be created for the podcast. There is the music that has to be put in, the music has to be bought obviously, it has to be tailored, it takes a couple of hours to put in all the music and then in this age of distraction, we have to get people to go there, to listen to the podcast, to subscribe, to download, to continue to listen to them on a regular basis. This is something that I plan to be doing for a long time and that's the difference between a strategy and a tactic.
You have to think about all of the elements that are going to make it work, just like in badminton. It didn't just involve me going there and playing for a couple of hours, it also involved what I was going to eat, how I would improve my game so I wasn't struggling all the time and also how to not injure myself, because I'm an expert at doing that. By simply showing up and playing badminton, that was a tactic. By this point, you're probably wondering, do tactics matter or does strategy matter? Which one is more important? That takes us to the second part of the podcast, where we figure out which one is more important.
The thing with tactics, is that it becomes a springboard. A lot of people think once they listen to the whole concept of strategy versus tactic, that tactics are not important. Tactics are very important, but they're important as the springboard, they're the thing that light your fire, that start everything going. Once that is going, you suddenly get into a state of complete chaos. That's what tactics often do, they lead to chaos. You figure out, "I have to do something. I have to maybe do more webinars, or I have to do more workshops or I have to get more clients" and immediately you're out of your comfort zone and you're wondering what should you do, how should I go about it? At that point, we enter into the new year resolution zone.
We decide we're going to do something and we don't have the strategy and the strategy becomes critical. Now that we have our tactic, now that we've decided we're going to go in a certain direct, we've changed paths, now we have to sit down and work out a strategy and one of the best ways to work out a strategy is to educate yourself. Let's say you've decided to write some books on kindle. The first thing that you have to do is to be able to write really well. A tactic would be to just sit down and start writing. Nice, but quite difficult because there's a lot of editing that you end up doing, you end up wasting a lot of time.
A strategy would be, how am I going to make this more fun and less stress and you know you're actually in the middle of a strategy when you end up with a little more stress. You'd have to probably do something like a story telling course or an article writing course or a fiction writing course because that's what you're ending up doing, right? You're physically [inaudible 00:07:38] a book, so you need to know how you're going to sell the book, how you're going to write the book and you're educating yourself. This is what you do with your kids. You wouldn't say, "Okay let's get some books and learn some stuff and then we're done." No, you have a long term strategy. You send them to school for a duration, you teach them stuff on field trips, you educate them all the time and that becomes a long term strategy and the parents that have a better strategy end up with smarter kids and the parents that don't have a strategy end up with kids that are always trouble and struggling all along the way.
There are many definitions for tactics versus strategy and one of the definitions is tactics is the how and strategy is the what. For me, the difference is just that tactics are quick, there's stuff that you have to do right now, and strategy is the long term journey. It's all the stuff that you have to do to get to that destination. Both of them are equally important in their own way, but without the strategy it's unlikely that you're going to get there.
For the third part of this podcast, let's talk about real examples. Let's say you've got situations and they're not working out too well for you, how would you execute tactics and strategy? Many years ago, around 2004, I was at this internet conference and I was selling from the podium, I don't do a lot of that anymore, but that's what I was doing and I noticed that a lot of people were making these offers and there was a stampede to the back of the room. I didn't have a strategy for that day. I just showed up on the podium and I used a couple of tactics and it didn't work at all. In fact it failed miserably, so I had to come back to New Zealand and then work out what did I do wrong? How should I have gone about it?
I created a strategy. In 2008 we went to Chicago and when I spoke from the podium, there were 250 people in that audience and that day we earned 20,000 dollars. If you sat there in the audience, you would have thought, how did he do it? How did he sell more than all the other speakers? If you were just looking at that one piece, that pitch that was done at the end of the speech, you'd have thought that there was some magic in that pitch.
But it wasn't. A lot of the planning had gone into what we had done before the speech, before we even got to that podium, before I even started to say a single word. There was a whole strategy. There was the stuff that we sent in advance, there was the stuff that we gave at the event itself, including a handout that the participants got the previous night. There was the video when the presentation actually started and what the video was supposed to do, there were the breaks in the middle of the speech where I just took a break for five minutes and what I did on that break and this was all part of the strategy.
A tactic would be just to make that pitch, a strategy would be all of the points that were required for that pitch to work. This brings up a very important point and that is anticipation, anticipation of chaos. When we execute a tactic, we're just doing what the situation requires at that point in time. When we go through a strategy, we're anticipating that things will go wrong, and how do we fix it? How do we recover and how do we recover quickly?
Over the years at PsychoTactics, things have gone wrong and have gone badly wrong. Through most of 2013 and part of 2014, we had several hacker attacks on our website. I don't know why, maybe it's because it's quite popular. It's in the top 100,000 in the Alexa rating and maybe that's why, but nonetheless, we didn't have a strategy in place and so we had to put a strategy in place and that involved moving all the websites from one type of system which was [jumla 00:12:08] over to Wordpress and reinforcing everything. As part of our strategy, we now have to redesign the whole look because times have changed.
We also have to look at the text and whether it reflects who we are right now. Our tactic was to make sure we were no longer in the blacklist and that clients were not compromised in any way, but our strategy was longer term, our strategy would take several months, probably over a year to execute and that is the core difference between a strategy and a tactic. To come full circle, I am now walking every day. I don't go for badminton and maybe I will at some point in time, but I walk every day and I walk for an hour, hour and twenty minutes, every single day.
The strategy is very simple, I have all my audio whether it's music or podcasts or languages and then at the end of that walk I get rewarded with a coffee. Then I turn around and come back. A part of that system is also to anticipate when things are wrong. Some days I don't feel like it or I have too much work to do in the morning and so I get my wife [Re-nu-kah 00:13:36] to call me at the office and disconnect the phone and so then I have to go back home and we go for a walk. You may not have a companion, you may not have a situation, you may not have this and that. The point is that you have to work out a strategy that is going to work for you without excuses.
This takes us to our action plan and you really have to do just one thing. You have to figure out what you're going to do in the new year. What are the three things you're going to do this year? What strategies are you going to follow? Is it just going to be another tactic where you go out there and find someone who says, "I can bring you 10,000 new customers," or you can get to the top of Google instantly? That's not the way to go. The way to go is to go step by step, implementing your strategy and that's how you meet with success. That is how you get to your three month vacation. As you can figure out, once you start taking long vacations, even that requires a strategy, or you just come back more tired than ever before.
Get your three points, what are you going to cover this year and then what are the strategies? Start with one, work out the strategy, move to the next and the next. Start executing your strategy and not giving up. With that, we come to the end of this episode. To get more information, go to psychotactics.com/podcast. You want to subscribe to that newsletter because we send it out only twice a month, but you get a notification when we have any goodies and we do have goodies. You also get notifications of the new podcast, just in case you haven't been following it for a while, or something's happened.
Go right now to htttp://www.psychotactics.com/podcast and subscribe to the newsletter just on email. It would also be really nice if you could pass on this podcast to others, others in business or other people in your life. That would be really nice, thank you again for listening and remember this podcast has been brought to you by the three month vacation and Psychotactics.com. Bye, bye.
What's the secret to getting results? Amazingly it's not some online marketing trick or strategy. It's just plain old follow up. But how do you follow up? And how can you have a marketing strategy—especially for your small business? In this episode of the Three Month Vacation from Psychotactics, you learn exactly how to follow up to get results.
To get hidden goodies, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
To also get the coolest headline report on "why headlines fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com
Time Stamps
00:00:00 Introduction-My Story With Compaq
00:03:07 Table of Contents
00:04:09 Topic 1: Education and Sales to Follow Up
00:09:04 Topic 2: How Often Should You Follow Up
00:13:16 Topic 3: How Do Amazon and Apple Follow Up?
00:16:21 Summary
00:17:48 Final Details
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Transcript
Sean D'Souza:I've not always lived in New Zealand. I lived in Mumbai, India for a long time and back then, I used to be a cartoonist. I wasn't so much into marketing or not into marketing at all. Even as I say that, somehow it seems odd and the reason for that is because even without realizing it, I was using the concepts of marketing, so let me tell you this story. Even though I grew up in Mumbai, I mostly drew for newspapers and magazines and places like that.
The pay is terrible there because all of the syndicates like Universal feature syndicate and all these syndicates that send out cartoons, they just mass dump the cartoons into other countries, including India.
It's so cheap that a newspaper or a magazine can just bring dozens of them. If you look at the cartoon pages, they are there every single day, a whole page of cartoons. There I was competing against this absolutely dirt cheap, probably 20 cents a cartoon scenario and of course I couldn't make a living doing that, so I started looking out for companies because companies do presentations and within presentations, you can use cartoons. At one point I picked on this computer company called Compaq.
They showed some initial interest in the cartoons, but then they went quiet. Now as I said, I wasn't doing any marketing back then, but I followed up and then I followed up and then I followed up and then I followed up and followed up. One day, their manager called up and he said, "Can you come over?" He took me to their boardroom and there I was in front of fifteen or twenty people sitting there and he said, "Tell them what you did." I'm completely confused now. It's like, "What did I do?"
He says, "Tell them when you started communicating with me," and so I did and he says, "Tell them how many times you communicated with me," and of course I followed his instruction. I did want the job after all. Then he turned to the entire group which happened to be in sales and marketing and he said, "This is the difference.
This is why he is standing here. This is why he's going to get the job. It not because of his skill, it's not because of pretty much anything I know about him, it's because he followed up and because he was persistent, that's why he's standing here and that is a lesson for you in sales and marketing."
Yes, it was a lesson for me in sales and marketing too because when you're a small business especially, you don't know whether you should follow up. If you're a big business, you can just buy ads and flood them in the marketplace and repeat them ten thousand times and maybe they'll do the job and maybe they won't, but you have those deep pockets, but if you're a small business, what do you do? You follow up, but how do you follow up without becoming a pest?
The first thing we're going to cover today is how do you follow up without becoming a pest. The second thing is how often do you follow up and then we'll look at some real life situations from Amazon and also from our site at Psychotactics and how it has made a difference to our business. When I say a difference, this has been the difference between a client buying nothing and ending up buying twenty or twenty-five thousand dollars worth of product and services over time.
Let's start with the first topic which is what are the tools that you use to follow up? What are the systems that you're going to use to follow up? There are actually two tools that probably encompass everything that you need to do with follow up and that is to educate and the second one is to sell.
Now both of them are incredibly important. You might think that the education is more important than the sales, but it's not. Both of them are very, very important, so when I first started out as a cartoonist and I just moved to New Zealand, I was not only a small business, but a small business with no clients and with no understanding of what people in New Zealand were buying and where to go. In short, it was like just being born in a business. It was brand new.
Of course, you do what most businesses do. You get in touch with clients and this is a consulting business, a business that's not online. You get in touch with them, you go to some meetings and then you get a name of someone and that's what I did. I got some names of some art directors and I started sending them a calendar. Not just a calendar once a year, but a calendar every month. Now it would have been cheaper to send it once a year, but they got a reminder from me every single month and it was a useful calendar. It had space to write down things and yes, it was just photocopied on color paper and it did the job.
That is a kind of educational followup. If you're online, your followup tends to be with articles, with PDFs, with reports, with some sort of giveaway and as we know, this is increasingly getting harder every minute because of the fragmentation of media. It used to be easy before or easier, but it's getting much harder, so you've got to consider that you are going to follow up both offline and online and we do this ourselves. We get clients and then we send them a bar of chocolate. We send them postcards.
Now consider that our business has been online since 2002, so we've got a reputation. We've got clients that love our work and yet, we're still using that age-old system of offline marketing. We're still following up bit by bit. We still keep in touch with clients through email, just sending them a note saying how are you doing, what's happening and yes, it's all taking time. We're all super busy, but the point is that once you have a client, once you have a contact, your job is to keep following up.
Now you can follow up with educational material like articles or reports or podcasts or webinars or anything, but as long as they are on a regular basis. Now what you might not realize is that following up and selling your product is just as important. Notice what you do when you buy a book. Say you buy a book by an author. Say it's James Patterson. What happens next? You want to buy another book by the same author and then a third book by the same author, so in effect, when you don't have a product and you don't follow up with selling a product, you are preventing the client from coming back.
At least a fifth or a fourth of your communication with clients needs to be one of sales. There's education or there's entertainment or whatever you're sending out for the three-fourth, but one-fourth needs to be some kind of offer, some kind of sales, some kind of incentive so that they can then decide I want to buy this product or service. This might not seem very intuitive at the start, but it's what holds the business together. It generates the income and it enables you to then follow up or to get resources who will then follow up for you. With that, we end the first part, which is follow up with both information as well as something that the customer is going to buy.
This of course takes us to the second part which is how often should you follow up? When we send out something and we expect a response, we usually get a blank and that's not because people don't want to buy, it's just that you're selling at the wrong time. What do I mean by wrong time? Well, when you want to sell something, that's not the exact time that people want to buy something, so you've got to prepare them for that moment. If you want the six secrets to following up, well, the first secret is follow up. The second one is follow up. The third one, follow up. Fourth one, follow up. The fifth one, follow up and you know the sixth one, which is to follow up again.
Even if you're not sending out a newsletter, even if you're not doing anything that most people do in terms of marketing, if you're going to spend the time initiating a meeting with someone, then you want to make sure that you follow up at least six times. Take for example this podcast. Now, admittedly, we've been online for ages and you would think well, you just send out an email blast and everyone's going to go to the page and put in the reviews and subscribe and do what you expect and they don't and so I had an online Google Docs document and I put in the list of the people that I was contacting and I was contacting twenty-five people a day, every day, so guess what happens?
You're looking at the number of people that you have communicated with over the past five years or ten years. I looked at my sent box and there were twenty-two thousand emails that had gone out. Now even if two hundred of them responded and did what I was expecting, that would mean two hundred into six interactions which would be twelve hundred interactions.
Luckily for me, some people respond quickly. Some people don't, but you've got to have that system in place because you spent all that time creating the podcast, putting the music together, putting it up, getting all the software; there's an enormous amount of effort that goes into setting up something, creating something and then we get dejected when people don't respond the first time. You can't do that. You have to keep following up repeatedly over and over again.
The point is that if you follow up with some sort of incentive, some sort of information, some sort of curiosity, it becomes less of a painful experience. When it came to my cartoon career, I was sending out those little calendars. When it came to Psychotactics, we used to send out newsletters. We gave away free products. We sold some products. When it came to the podcast, I was just following up with the people I knew, just through email; no incentive, but a certain amount of curiosity of what we were covering in the podcast, but there was a strategy for follow up and that's the message I want to get across to you today.
What was the result of this follow up? After about ten days of following up, we got thirty-five reviews on iTunes. That was enough. That got us into the new and newsworthy section of iTunes, so we debuted at 55 on iTunes, which is good. I mean, you've spend all that time, you're getting a result. The next time when you're feeling nice and dejected that no one is responding to your stuff, remember, all of us have to do the groundwork. All of us have to follow up. If you don't have a follow up strategy in place, it's not going to work.
But what if you were a big company like Amazon.com? Would you then do this followup? If you're on Amazon or you bought anything off Amazon, you know immediately what I'm talking about and that is that they follow up incessantly. They follow up in different ways.
This morning, for instance, I wasn't interested in buying any books; however, I had bought a book in the past and they sent me an email saying which other books would you recommend to readers who've read this book? Well, that was a different question. I mean, it wasn't about leaving a testimonial. It wasn't about rating anything, it was about which other book would you like to recommend. They also put a link there about here are some other books that readers recommend and so I got curious. I went to see which books others recommended and of course, I ended up buying two books.
Now, the point isn't that you don't have the power of Amazon and you don't have the data base and you don't have this and you don't have that. You have to remember that you have obstacles and the obstacle becomes the way because there is no other way but to go through the obstacle, around the obstacle or over the obstacle.
Amazon, with all its resources, with all of its money, is still following up. We have a strategy at Psychotactics which involves attraction, conversion and consumption. Attraction is the followups that you have to do before someone buys a product and so you send them all of these newsletters or these reports or the podcasts or webinars or whatever content you're creating or sometimes even paid products that you just give away at that point in time.
Once they buy something; let's say they go and buy The Brain Audit, we then have a post followup, which is a consumption followup which is getting the customer to consume what they bought. While this also takes a lot of time, you have to put in a whole bunch of auto-responders together; the point is that we want customers to consume the products.
We don't want them to just buy it, we want them to use it.
It's when you follow up and when you use technology to follow up and when you just follow up using old grind method, that's when you get clients that stay with you and that is one of the secrets of why we can take so much time off every year. That's why we can take our three month vacation. We don't have to go out there and get new clients all the time. We can just follow up with existing clients and they help us in meeting our goals.
Let's summarize what we learned today. The first point we covered was how do you follow up without being a pest and you do this with education, which is good; not just your average stuff, but really good stuff. You do this with sales as well. You want to sell them a great product. You want to sell them a great service. You want to get that through because the moment they buy something from you, there is greater investment in your system, in your methodology, but how often do you follow up?
Well, you follow up before they buy, six, seven, eight times; at least six times and then after they buy, you follow up as well, helping them to consume the product. It's called consumption. Finally, remember that even the giants like Apple and Amazon with all their budgets, they're constantly following up and while it's easy for us to say we don't have that kind of money or infrastructure, we do have systems and all we have to do is work out a strategy to follow up.
It's not going to happen today or tomorrow, but over time, that strategy gets to be better. If you've received a chocolate from us or if you've received a postcard or you've received an email, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. What's the one thing that you can do today?
When I went to Compaq, I just didn't have any strategy. When I launched this podcast, despite being as busy as you know I am, I had to follow up, over and over again, but I had a strategy and I had an Excel spreadsheet. For those of you who know how much I love Excel, well, I had an Excel spreadsheet, so that's how keen I was on followup and that's how keen you should be on followup. Any followup strategy is going to be better than no followup strategy. It gives you a much clearer idea of what you're going to do in the weeks, months and years to follow, but even so, for the next few months, have some sort of strategy, any strategy will do. It's still better.
That brings us to the end of this episode. If you haven't already subscribed, you know what to do. Go to iTunes, subscribe, give us a rating, help us along. We need the help. This is the tenth episode and we're into double figures and that's me, Sean D'Souza saying bye for now. This has been brought to you by The Three Month Vacation and psychotactics.com. Once you subscribe, make sure you go to Psychotactics and subscribe to the newsletter as well.
Bye bye.
The bikini concept or bikini principle works on a simple idea. That by giving away 90% of the concept, and keeping 10%, the attraction factor is just as strong, if not twice as strong. And yes, what the bikini didn't reveal, was the part the audience most want, and was the part they were willing to pay for. The same applies to your information products, webinars, workshops and yes, presentations.
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Time Stamp
00:00:20 Introduction: Bikini Principle
00:05:33 How The Brain Audit Workshop Helped
00:07:57 What You Can Give Away And What You Can Sell
00:09:20 Summary
00:11:04 Action Plan
Transcript
It's hard to think of a bikini when you are in a classroom and you're giving a speech and then someone asks you a question, but that's exactly what happened and how we came upon what we call the bikini principle. This bikini principle became one of the most read, most ever. The reason why it became so popular is probably because of the bikini, but also because it underlines a concept that's so obvious, and we probably are too scared to admit that it works.
What is this bikini principle?
To understand the bikini principle I have to go back in time. I have to go back all the way the Pittsburgh. Now Pittsburgh is a city in the United States; it's on the east coast. I had been invited to speak at an event. As it happened, we had just started Psychotactics.com a couple of years before that and I had written this book called The Brain Audit. The way I'd go about my speeches is I would cover only three things. I still do that; I still cover only three elements even in this podcast.
The point was that in The Brain Audit the book consists of seven bags or seven elements. When I covered those three elements, of course everyone would be very interested in the elements and then they would ask the inevitable question. The question was: If you've told us about the three red bags, and there are seven red bags in The Brain Audit, what are the remaining red bags about?
I was always un-eager, as it were, to answer this question. I was very reluctant because somehow I felt I was giving away the plot. I was giving away everything and then there would be no reason for the customers to buy anything. I was giving away all the seven red bags now, but if I gave away just three then maybe, just maybe, they would buy the book because that way they would have to find out what the rest of the red bags were.
Now one of the people at this event was quite adamant. He was like "But surely you can tell us what the four red bags are about." Very reluctantly, I did. I put it up on the board and I explained what they were. I told them the seven red bags are the problem, the solution, the target profile, the objections, the risk reversal, the testimonials, and uniqueness. I laid it out for them and I thought that's it. I'm going back; I'm not going to sell anything; I've told them everything I know.
Incredibly, we had the best sales ever. Of course we've gone on to sell a lot more since then but back then we were just starting out. It stunned me how many products we sold on that day. When I got back to New Zealand I wrote about it. I called it the bikini principle. It's not very hard to understand where that idea comes from. The bikini hides just a few parts, but what it reveals is enormous, and yet it's just the few hidden parts that make it so sexy. In effect, revealing a lot more wasn't causing customers to buy less.
Instead, they were buying more. That totally took me by surprise. I just didn't expect it.
Over the years I've realized that the people who end up buying stuff from us are people who get more information about a product or a service - and this is not just on the sales page, but when you look at, say, Amazon.com and you read the first chapter, what that does is it reveals a lot of the stuff in that first chapter or second chapter and then you get locked in.
Earlier this year we sold the pre-sale course and then we took it off the shelves. In that short period we gave away one-fourth of the course. Now I know what you're thinking: One-fourth is not a bikini, but you get the idea. The idea is once you give away a substantial amount of your information, instead of the customer leaving and going elsewhere saying "Oh, I got all the information I need," they come back. This went to a completely different level when I did the first Brain Audit workshop.
Now imagine this. Supposing you have a book and you wrote the book and everyone's read the book. Would they come to a workshop? Well, you're going to say yes, right? That's what we do. We buy a book, then we go to the workshop. But as a creator, as the writer, as the person who's running the business, that's not how we think.
We think that if they've got everything, why would they bother to come to the workshop. There I am in Washington D.C. looking around the room, and guess what? Everyone in the room has already brought The Brain Audit, has not just bought The Brain Audit, but because we have it in version we've sold a version of it, version 1.1, 2, version 3, and then finally it was version 3.2. everyone in the room has not just read The Brain Audit but some of them have read various versions.
It then struck me how powerful this concept of revealing stuff is. It's like an epiphany. It's almost too hard to believe that people would continue to buy from you once they've already read your stuff. Now just for the the record this is not for you to go and give away all your stuff hoping that people will come back and read all of it. There is a limit to how much you can give. That's why it's called the bikini principle.
You can give away a lot of the stuff. Whether you choose to give away 90% or 80% or 70% or 30%, that's totally up to you. The point is that customers come back once they are completely hooked with your information. I would like to say that the more information you give the more hooked they are but that's not entirely true. The more information you give that allows them to make changes in their lives, that empowers them, that's the kind of information that they will come back for. That's the information where you can give away 90%, hold back just 10%, and they will keep coming back.
You don't have to give away everything, and even if you decide to be very generous, remember that customers will come back for other formats. What do I mean by other formats? If you happen to give away something absolutely free, and maybe you give away 90%, 95%, maybe even 100%, and then you change the format or the packaging, then customers will come back for that very same something.
Let's say this podcast, this podcast is absolutely free, and yet if I were to just put all of the pricing podcasts together, all of the storytelling podcasts together, and then sell it as a separate product, customers would buy. They would pay a price for something that was absolutely free simply because of the way it was packaged.
Or let's say I took it and I put it in a PDF or an epub, and you had an epub just of storytelling articles or an epub just of pricing articles. Then customers would be willing to pay for that as well. Just giving away stuff free is not going to ruin you completely. I'm not suggesting that you go around giving stuff free all the time. However, when you change the packaging, when you change the format, when you clob things together that seem to be all over the place, then customers are willing to pay for it.
That is what the bikini principle is all about. You can give away stuff, and a lot of stuff, and customers will still want more. The second thing is that the very customers who buy your product or consume all of your product will then come back for workshops and consulting and training and all kinds of things like that. Finally, when you change the packaging, when you change the format, when you club things together, then customers come back to consume those other formats.
That's why the bikini principle is so powerful and that's why so many people wanted to read it, because that's not our natural instinct. Our natural instinct is we should not give it away. We should not share. We should not be so open, so overexposed. Yet time and again the bikini principle just proves us wrong. It proves that we can indeed create attraction with that bikini principle.
That brings us to the end of this podcast. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes. If you've already done that, well, thank you very much. Also, you want to go back and listen to the podcast on the three-prong system.
That's podcast number two and it helps you understand how you can structure your three-month vacation. Before we go, let's look at an action plan for today's show. What are we going to do? Even if you're just a little bit shy about giving away all your stuff, at least give away some bit of it. Maybe a chapter or a free one hour session, which is a live session, a workshop or a seminar.
You will find that it's very powerful. If you're not in a position to do that, take some of the free stuff that you've given away and convert it into audio or into some other format, and that will get you going because people will want that other format even if they've got free stuff from you in the past. That's your action plan for today, and it's time for me to go now. This podcast has been brought to you by Psychotactics, Psychotactics.com, and The Three Month Vacation.
Bye for now.
How much is enough? And where do you stop? It's easy to get all wrapped up in this whole concept of passive income and how smart it seems. Yet, you can work yourself crazy if you're not careful. You can work too much, do too much?but even vacation too much. Understanding the power of enough allows you to have a great business plan and a great vacation plan. Whether you're in online marketing or just have a small business, your strategy should be about "enough".
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Some goodies
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To get a short, yet beautiful headline report on "Why Headlines Fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com
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Time Stamp
00:00:20 Calvin and Hobbes Story
00:02:04 Keeping Up With The Joneses
00:03:37 Psychotactics: Our Definition of Enough
00:06:53 How Can You Overdo A Vacation?
0:09:25 Summary
00:10:40 Coming Up Next
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Transcript: Power of Enough
Sean D'Souza: There's a comic strip called Calvin and Hobbes. Obviously, many of you have read it. In one panel, Calvin is ramping up for Christmas and so is Hobbes. Calvin asks Hobbes, he says, "What did you get on your list for Santa for Christmas?" Hobbes says, "I asked him for a tuna sandwich," and Calvin goes ballistic. He's like, "How could you do that?! I asked him for a rocket launcher, a train," and he brings up a list that's a mile long.
Of course, the scene shifts to the day that's Christmas Day and Calvin is stomping around the house shouting, "I'm going to sue Santa!" Obviously, because he's got nothing and there's Hobbes, ever the philosopher and saying, "Well, I got my tuna sandwich." At this point, I turn to people and ask them, "Do you know what your tuna sandwich is?"
Before I get you all hungry for sandwiches, let's talk about the first episode. I don't know if you've listened to the first episode, but it was outsourcing versus magic. You need to go to number one and start listening from number one, not because they're in sequence, but just because the first episode is so important. It's just the philosophy and this is another philosophy piece. It's about the power of enough. What is the power of enough? What is our tuna sandwich?
One of the things that probably drives us crazy is this keeping up with the Joneses. A good example would be just the three month vacation, so let's say you take three months off this year. Then what do you do next year? Do you take four months off? What about the year after next? Six months off? I could go on, but how long would I go on? Six, eight, ten, twelve? What is the limit?
When we run our businesses, one of the quests is just customers. We want more and more and more customers and the reason for more and more customers is not because we love more and more customers, but because it represents money and it represents more money and more money and more money. For me, money is like fuel. It's like putting fuel in a car. It's finite. You have a fuel tank and you fill it up and then as it empties itself out, you make sure that you never run out of the fuel, but you don't go out there and you store up more and more and more and more because there is a price to pay and that price is that the whole thing might just blow up in your face one day.
So we had to work out our own tuna sandwich. At Psychotactics, we had to define what was our enough. For instance, we have a membership site at 5000bc.com and when you go to 5000bc, you'll find that our membership hasn't dramatically increased from the year 2003, 2004. Considering the year that we are in right now, you'd say, "What's happened?", but the point is that we don't have to double or treble the number of members that we have currently. Sure, some members leave and you have to replace those members with other members, but there isn't enough. There is actually a benchmark at 5000bc of how many members we're willing to accept.
The reason is very simple. It's like having kids around the place. I mean, you have x number of kids and you can handle them, you can look after them, but if you have an enormous number, you can't really give them your attention. The same thing applies to our courses. We do an article writing course. We do a cartooning course. We do copyrighting courses. We do a lot of courses online and we always have waiting lists. Now, when you consider that some of the courses are $3,000 or $5,000, it's very easy to sneak in a few and make another 10, 20, $30,000. Who's going to ask you? Who's going to say, "Hey, you've got three or four more." Who's going to say that? No one's going to say that. Still, we have a limit. We have our enough.
If you come to a workshop like any workshop that we have; we don't have them very often because we know what is our enough, but when we do have a workshop, you have a maximum of thirty-five people in the room. Could we get more than thirty-five people in a room? Of course we could, but at thirty-five, we stop because once it goes beyond thirty-five, you stop becoming a teacher and you start becoming a preacher. It just becomes a blah blah session. You can't really help people.
At least when it comes to work, we have our courses, our workshops, our membership sites. It's all based on a factor of enough, of a limit, a fuel tank and we're not going to overfill that tank. You might say that well, it's easy for you because you are already established. You've been in this business for over twelve years. What about me who's just starting out? The point is that our workshops, our courses, our membership site, they had these limits right at the start. It wasn't something we figured out along the way and while we did really well at work stuff, we didn't really figure out our vacation bit.
When we started, we figure nine months of work and three months of vacation seems like a fair deal, but we didn't understand what the concept of the three months vacation was all about. We overdid it. Now, you'd say how can you overdo a vacation? But you can. The first year we took a vacation was in 2004. We had just started out business towards the end of 2002, so within a year of starting up, we just decided that's it. We're going to take a three month vacation and we took three months off and it drove us crazy. We weren't enjoying that time that we were supposed to spend because it seemed endless. It seemed like we had to fill in those days.
Then of course when you come back from the vacation, there's this big void. You've not been working for so long, you don't feel like working anymore or for a very long time, so we had to juggle it a bit. We had to go okay, let's try six weeks and we tried six weeks and six weeks was too long. Then we tried four weeks and that was too long. Three weeks seemed just right, so three weeks plus a week of going back and forth to whichever place, so we never go directly to a place, we'd stop over for a couple of days. On the way back, we'd stop over a couple of days, so we're away one month at a time. We realize what is enough: Three weeks plus a week of travel and that is enough.
But it's really crazy to have a running tally that continues to increase. You're continuing to add holidays or money or whatever to where you're just putting in more and more fuel into that tank. For what reason? While I'm an information junkie - I just love information. I'm learning in design and Photoshop and my camera, which is the X100, that's a Fuji film. At the same point, I'll be tackling lettering and studying some stuff on learning, etc., but even that has that point of enough.
Often when I'm talking about how I go for a walk with my iPhone loaded with audio books and podcasts and stuff and people think well, you must be doing that all the time; you're completely crazy. Yes, of course, a person like that would be completely crazy, but today I was listening to Billy Joel and all of this summer, I will be listening to Andrea Bocelli, so you have to understand what is enough.
This brings us full circle to Calvin and Hobbes. Sometimes, we just slip into the Calvin mode. We overdo stuff. We are built to overdo stuff. We want to be part of the human race where we're always going to just push our comfort zone quite a bit actually, so we always have to get into the Calvin mode and then decide I want to be like Hobbes sometimes. In fact, I want to be like Hobbes a lot. I want a tuna sandwich.
So what's your action plan? It's simple, really. Think about it. How many customers do you want? How many people do you want at your workshop? How much money do you want to make from now to whenever, just a finite amount. Maybe even how much silence do you need? Everything with definition becomes a fuel tank and you fill it and you're happy and you have enough.
Coming up next week, we have the bikini principle. Interesting topic, isn't it? It's appropriate because it's summer here in New Zealand. I know it's freezing in other parts of the world, but it's appropriate here. We're going to find out exactly what is this bikini principle and how does it apply to stuff that's not related to the beach at all?
We learned a very good lesson when we were selling the brain audit about this bikini principle and it has stayed with me. It was one of the most read posts when we first had the consumption blog which no longer exists because there were too many blogs to manage, but it was one of the most read posts ever.
If you've been a subscriber, then you know that you automatically get the downloads on your phone or on your computer if you subscribe to iTunes. You can also get our podcast on Stitcher and hopefully soon on SoundCloud and finally, if you don't have any of the above, then you can get the RSS feed, so go to Psychotactics.com/podcast and you can find the RSS feed there.
Oh and before I go, be sure to leave a review for us because it's really important. It really helps me look at the review, look at E-comments and I feel much happier and you want to keep me happy, don't you? If you have any feedback, you also want to write to me at Sean@psychotactics.com. Anything you'd like to see or listen to anything you don't like, just write to me at Sean@psychotactics.com. I actually implement the feedback. We've come to almost twelve minutes of this podcast, so that's enough so I'll say bye for now. Bye bye.
This episode has been brought to you by the Three Month Vacation which is at Psychotactics.com.
Should stories be dramatic? Incredibly, the answer is NO. Drama comes from the 90% principle. And this means that your audience needs to know 90% of your story in advance. And that's one of the elements that make storytelling incredibly powerful.
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Transcript:
Sean D'Souza:Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from psychotactics.com.
Speaker 2:And I'm his evil twin.
Sean D'Souza:And you're listening to the three month vacation podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time.
Some people are considered to be natural born storytellers and that's all of us by the way. When you were five years old, you came back from school and you told a whole bunch of stories and you did it perfectly well. You put in the drama, you put in the suspense, you changed your tone, you did everything powerfully and wonderfully.
Then as you grow up, you get a little more judgmental about your stories and you think that other people are better storytellers than you and it's true. Storytelling is a craft. When you're five years old, everyone listens to you because it's true, but as you grow up, you have to craft it.
We'll take a little trip and find out what's involved in storytelling. Now this is just a little bit of the entire series that I've written on storytelling but it will give you a good gist of what to expect from that book, that series, and because these questions were put to me off-the-cuff, I am probably going to answer things that you probably won't find in those books or that series. It's a win-win situation and I think you should get the series from Psychotactics but for now listen in and let's get on this storytelling rollercoaster, shall we?
In this series, we're going to cover a lot of topics, probably 10 in all but we'll start off with the main topic and that is what makes a good storyteller. There are clear attributes to be found in good storytelling. One of the attributes of a storyteller is they should know when to tell a story and when not to tell a story. You can't always tell a story just about anywhere.
One of the good places to tell story is when you are starting up something. If I started off this thing with a story, you'll say let me tell you about the time we were in London. Immediately that gets your attention. The other place when you need to tell stories is once you have given some information. Stories almost act like an example, like a case study and so they help the listener understand, comprehend what you just said.
A storyteller needs to know this. They need to know that it's not just about telling story after story after story. Instead they need to know where to tell the story, when to tell the story, how long that story needs to be. That's what makes a good storyteller.
This takes us to our second point. What can you do to improve your storytelling? Let's find out. There's an amazing series on Africa and the narrator of that series, which is a BBC series, is David Attenborough. Now David Attenborough talks about the resurrection plant and he talks about how the resurrection plant is out there in the desert and how it starts to roll and roll, and then it could be like that, rolling for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, maybe even 100 years.
Then at some point in time, it runs into a puddle of water and that's when the resurrection plant comes to life. Immediately, in a couple of hours, it starts to grow. It's almost like watching something on video in fast motion. Then the resurrection plant is not done. It has to wait for the second phenomenon which is the rain has to come, and the rain has to then hit the petals. The petals have to drop on the floor and new resurrection plants come up. Within a few days, all of them dry up. They shrivel up and then they become these little balls of resurrection plants that may go for another 50 or 100 years.
What makes that story interesting? What makes that story interesting is simply that it has three elements. The first element being sequence; the second being suspense; and the third being a rollercoaster.
A good storyteller needs to know these three things. If you want to improve your storytelling, you need to understand that there needs to be a sequence. It needs to unfold one step at a time. This happens and that happens, then that happens.
The second thing is that there has to be a factor of suspense, so maybe the resurrection plant gets to the water but at that point in time, nothing is happening. It's growing but the petals don't fall off. How are the petals going to fall off? How is that momentous occasion going to come about? Then the rain comes along. Then you've created this ups-and-downs, this suspense, and that brings us to the third part which is rollercoaster.
Now, what is a rollercoaster? A rollercoaster is just the ups-and-downs. The resurrection plant has no rain, then it has the puddle, that's good, but that's not good enough. It needs the rain to come and drop the petals to the floor and then just when everything's going good again, the sun comes up and dries it. We have that rollercoaster, that up-and-down.
If you want to improve your storytelling, you have to focus on these three elements: the sequence, the suspense and the rollercoaster. Now that we know about sequence, suspense and rollercoaster, we have to also figure out how do stories help in business.
When is storytelling important in business? Well, the problem with business, it's full of data, full of information, full of stuff that puts us to sleep. The moment you start off with something like let me tell you about the time or you give a case study, immediately your attention switches. Immediately the audience's attention switches to you.
If you were to stand up in a crowded room and talk about a case study, immediately it doesn't matter what they are doing. It doesn't matter if they are looking at their phones, whatever they are doing, thinking about whatever they're thinking about, at that point in time the attention goes right to you.
The power of the story is that capacity to hold or snap an audience out of whatever it's supposed to be doing. Today people are so captured or captivated by what they are doing that you need to snap them out very very quickly. That's what a story does really well.
There's a second reason why it's important business. When we understand a concept when we have explained a concept to someone, it's not like they can figure out what's happening. They need a layer. The first time you hear something, you think, well, how does it apply to my business?
When you have that story, when you have that case study, that's when people understand exactly how it applies to their business. The thing is that storytelling is very useful when you're trying to differentiate your product or your service from someone else. To give you an example, we have a product called the Brain Audit. Now the Brain Audit is a marketing book. It shows you why customers why and why they don't.
I bet if you go to Amazon, there are 1,000 or 10,000 books on marketing. When someone arrives there, how are they going to decide that this is the book that they want. They look at the story, and the story talks about the seven red bags, how you put seven red bags on a flight and then you get off at your destination and you're waiting at the conveyor belt, the carousel, you're waiting for the bags, and then there's one red bag, and then the second red bag, and the third red bag, and then an orange bag, and a green bag, and fourth red bag, and the fifth red bag, and the sixth red bag.
When does the customer leave the airport? When they have all the seven red bags, right? What's happening there is the story's explaining why this book is different. What are those seven red bags? Why are they needed?
Stories snap people out of whatever they're doing. It gets their attention. It explains a point. It allows people to absorb stuff. Third, it allows you to differentiate yourself from other products and services, so they're very very useful.
Let's take a little break, a little summary. What we've done so far is we've looked at the attributes of storytelling. We've looked at how you can improve your storytelling and then we looked at how stories help in business. This takes us to the fourth section which is about how less is more in information product. What is it that you're doing wrong and how can you fix it?
Imagine you've invited someone to dinner and you want to impress them, of course, but you go out there and you have 20 dishes and each dish has its own taste and its own style and its own look and its own variation and its own subtle flavor. The guest is completely flabbergasted, very impressed but completely lost because as human beings, we're unable to consume that amount of stuff. We've tried it before. We've gone to a buffet and tried to eat 20 dishes. We eat a little of this, a little of that, and we can't cope with it.
This is how information products are created. Information products are chapter on chapter on chapter on chapter on chapter on chapter on chapter on chapter on chapter, and suddenly you have 20 chapters and 200 pages and each of those chapters have their own concept and subconcept. Suddenly you're floating with information.
With information products, less is more, but how much is less in the first place? Usually you can start off with three main topics. If you have three main topics, you can cover three main things. If you listen to some of these audios in this series, you'll find that, say I'm talking about storytelling. I'll say storytelling consists of sequence, it consists of suspense, and it consists of a rollercoaster.
Now I can spend a lot of time talking about sequence. I can spend a lot of time talking about suspense and a lot of time talking about rollercoaster, and that's when you get the depth. You get that felling of that feel that you've consumed, that you've understood, that you can even recreate ... but 20 dishes? That becomes too much.
This is why we're struggling so much in today's world. We have too much information and there is this rabbit hole of information going deeper and deeper and deeper. Instead, have just three main topics and then dig deep. One inch wide, one mile deep. Just a little bit of information, lots of depth in it. That's when you create expertise.
The next time you're thinking of putting together a document or an audio or a book or anything, think about how much you're inflecting on the customer or the reader. How much you're overfeeding them and then give them some expertise instead.
OK, let's not overdo it here because we have covered three or four points and now we go to the fifth point, which is the best way to start writing a story. Then we'll finish off this segment and then we'll do it in the second part so that you're fresh and you can tackle that second part.
When you start to sell, you know that you have a weapon and that is the power of storytelling. When people know that storytelling really engages the audience, engages their customers, they are keen to use that weapon. How do you use that weapon?
Well, you have to remember that storytelling is not just something that you rattle out. It's not a bedtime story. It is a specific story hinging on one phrase or one word. Let's take the example of the Brain Audit. The Brain Audit is a book and it talks about how you put on seven red bags on a flight and then when you get off at the other end, you have six red bags.
The question is, when do you leave the airport? What we have there is a situation of hesitation. You have seven red bags. You had six red bags. Now there's hesitation. We can now take this concept of hesitation and apply it to selling so now we can say, in the same way when you're trying to sell something, you might remove all the bags off the customer's brain and leave just one red bag missing, and then they don't buy. They hesitate.
They want to ask their uncle, their brother, their sister ... they don't want to make a decision. What's really the key between the story and whatever it is you're selling? That is that key word hesitation. That's what we really have to drill into. We have to figure out what are we really saying because it's only when you know what you're saying that you can bring about this whole story line and create a story for that sales pitch.
Now, you don't have to use hesitation in terms of just the bags at the airport. That's been taken by the Brain Audit. You can use different forms of hesitation and you'll know different situations where companies hesitated, so there will be case studies, or you can talk about personal stories where you hesitated.
The point is once you get to that key word or key phrase, then you build a story, then you link the story to whatever it is you are selling. That's when a story becomes very powerful and not just a bedtime story.
OK, it's time for some summary now. Let's see what we've covered so far. The first thing we did was the attributes of the storyteller and we found out that you can start a story with drama and that would get the attention. Also, once you're going in through a lot of information, you want to bring in the story of that [inaudible 00:16:04] because that enables the listener, the reader to absorb that information, to run that case study, that story in their head. That's the first thing that you need to know when to bring in the story and then how to bring in that story.
The second thing we learned was how to improve storytelling and we found that it was about suspense, sequence and rollercoaster. You'll remember that story of that resurrection plant. That had suspense and sequence and rollercoaster. Go back and listen to that bit because it's really useful. Put these three elements and you make great stories.
The third thing we covered was about storytelling in business. Information is full of data and information, and more information and more information is really boring. Storytelling helps you clarify what you're saying. It also helps you to stand out. We did that with the Brain Audit. With all those marketing books, the Brain Audit stands out because of that story, not because of anything else.
Later on you get to the contents of the book and you find it's great and wonderful, etc. The point is that it starts of with the story. It really helps you stand out. If nothing else, it helps you stand out.
Less is always more, and you can have a topic which is one inch wide and one mile deep. Now, on average, you want to cover three things. This series, this audio has five. They are short. They are manageable. You don't want it to be a rule but you definitely want it to be a guideline.
When you have a ton of stuff, people can't consumer. Always remember go inch wide and one mile deep, and that's really what you want to do. Finally, if you want to write really good stories, you need to distill it down to one phrase or one word, just like the Brain Audit is about hesitation.
Until you get that one word, and it's not as hard as you think. You just want to say too many things. Instead, just stick to one word, one phrase, and then you'll get many scenarios, many case studies, many stories that you can build from that one word.
This brings us to the end of the first part in this storytelling saga. Saga? Is it a saga? It's not a saga. It's just a little bit, just a little bit, and I do hope you enjoy it. If you have been, I would suggest you get the storytelling series. You can get it at psychotactics.com. It's in the Products Section and it's the products under $50, so have a look there. You'll find it quite easily or use the search bar.
That's me, Sean D'Souza, saying bye for now and you know what? If you want to share this with a friend, with several friends, or even send it out in your newsletter, feel free to do so. Yes, tune in for the second part in this series because we're going to have a blast there as well.
Storytelling isn't an art. It's a science. Every kid knows how to tell stories. And it's cute to be a storyteller when you're a kid. But when you put structure to writing and storytelling you take it from science to art. Find out how this works with story.
To find more podcast options, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast
To get a beautiful headline report on "Why Headlines Fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com
Transcript:
Sean D'Souza:Hi. This is Sean D'Souza from psychotactics.com. And you are listening to the three month vacation podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less, instead it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. Most stories start up with once upon a time, well at least the stories that we learned when we were kids.
Well, imagine if Goldilocks and the Three Bears started right in the middle. That's what we're going to cover in this section. We're going to start off with stories that start right in the middle. How to keep stories fresh and engaging?
We're going to look at the 90% principle and we will repeat that several times in this series in different ways, but you'll learn the 90% principle. Then, there's counterflow. What is counterflow? Flow and counterflow, but what does counterflow involve? Finally, the pivotal moment, how to turn the story on a dime?
Let's get into story telling. Let's start off with, how to keep your stories fresh and engaging? If you ask a photographer to take a picture of say a glass. Well most of us will just stand up, take our phones out and take a picture from wherever we are standing. We don’t go close to the glass. We don’t bother to see the angle of the glass, we don’t bother about anything. We just rip out the phone, rip out the camera, take a picture and we are done.
That is not interesting. From a photographers point of view it is well you want me to take a picture of this glass, what kind of lighting, which angle. When you look at the glass there are about a million permutations, the type of light, the type of color, the type of angle. All these things come into play when a photographer is taking a picture of a single glass just an ordinary glass, and this is how you have to approach your content.
When you are talking just about anything you have to understand what I am really going at.
What angle am I going at? Why kind of lighting am I portraying? With story telling you have to know what is it that you are talking about? If you are talking about something that is immutable, insurmountable, well you have things like the Himalayas, and you have these mountains that cannot be moved.
You also have other problems, other things that personal stories that talk about things that you could not move, that wouldn’t budge, so you have case study where maybe a recording company didn’t budge and the Beetles just had to find another way. Once you have got that kind of understanding of well, what I am really saying here. What is that word? What is that phrase?
No you can keep your content fresh and engaging. You can tell the same story, that same glass and look at it at different angles and different light and different ways and you can approach that same story a million different ways and customers never get fed up. However, you also have to understand that we the storytellers get tired of our stories long before customers do.
You look at someone like say Frank Sinatra, and he is saying, say ‘New York, New York’ and every time he went out people were happy to listen to the new songs, but they wanted New York, New York. They wanted him to sing that song or they wanted him to sing ‘My Way.’
They wanted those things that they could attach themselves to understand, and so yes there are million ways to represent a story or a million ways to represent a sales pitch but also remember that people love the way that you have always done it, so don’t just change for the sake of changing.
In summary, there are different ways to approach the story, just know what you’re talking about and secondly once you have that run it. You don’t have to keep changing it. This takes us to the second part which is how do we make the story more dramatic. Where do we start?
When we are growing up we are accustomed to listen to stories that start off with once upon a time and the problem with stories that start off with once upon a time, it takes too much time to get to the main gist of the story. Let’s think of a story like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and you know how that story runs. It starts out with once upon time there was Goldilocks and the Three Bears etc.
You don’t really want to start there. That is fine for a kid. That is fine for someone that is just falling off to sleep. Your audience is not falling off to sleep. You want to wake them up remember. Where does your story start? It starts right in the middle. The drama is right in the middle of the story. Goldilocks is there on the bed. She is looking up and suddenly there are three bears looking at her.
That part is far more dramatic than once upon a time there was Goldilocks and she went into this forest or she went to see these three bears. You got to work out that the story is more powerful at the center and so you write your story or your figure out your story or you figure out your case study and go right to the center and go which is the dramatic part and pull that part out, and put it right at the start.
That is what the movies do. Very rarely will you get a movie that starts to build up slowly. A movie will start smack in the middle and then they will go to the start somewhere along the line and then build up the story right to the middle again. That is what you have to do? You have to go right into the core of the story, pull out the drama, put it right at the middle, and then bring out the beginning. It is middle, beginning, back to middle and end of story.
That’s what makes a good story. That is the mistake that a lot of people make. They don’t start off in the middle. Then in the end or right to the middle by which time the audience was fallen asleep. You don’t want them to fall asleep. This is not a kid story. This is a wake them up story. This is a story that they will remember. We have looked at two ways, the first is start in the middle and the way to keep your stories fresh and engaging. Let’s move to the third thing which is very important. It is called the 90% principle.
Whenever you are telling stories, one of the things that people tend to do is put too much information in the story. Let’s say you telling a story about Jack and then Mary comes in and then Charlotte and then Anita, and now you have got too many elements that the person has to deal with. People often tend to make up stories by putting all of these elements and you don’t want to have that.
You want to have 90% of your story in place, so when a person is listening to your story, they don’t have to make up 90%. It is only 10% of that story that they need to figure out. When we look at a story in the brain audit which is the book, you are talking about putting bags on a flight and then standing at a conveyer belt or the carousel and getting those bags off the flight.
What has happened there is that 90% of the story is in place. You have been on a flight. You know that you have to put them on. You have to take them off and the thing that has changed, the elements that have changed are just the factor of the seven red bags, and that one bag goes missing. When you listen to that story on the brain audit, what we have here is 90% of the information is already in place.
Let’s take another example. Let’s say you were trying to get into a car and you are fiddling with the key and it is not opening and you know it looks like your car and it is still not opening. We have tried to do something like that. We have tried to get into a wrong hotel room or try to get into a wrong car, 90% of that story is in place, 10% has changed and that 10% is what makes it personal, what makes it your own.
This is not the case when you are talking about case studies. Case studies unfold in ways that are completely different from personal stories. The personal stories are get the audience on your side. Case studies are something that someone else did. I would always recommend, ‘A’ that you have personal stories and ‘B’ that 90% of that story is already in the customer’s brain and you are just tweaking 10%. Now that we know what the 90% is all about let’s move to counterflow.
When we write a story or when we recount a story what we tend to think is that the only way to get a story going is go forward. You think of a sequence, but there is also anti-sequence, or what I would call counterflow. There is flow and there is counterflow. It is almost like someone is headed towards success and then there is a barrier and that slows down the story, takes it in a different flow as it were.
When you look at the seven red bag story or when you listen to the seven red bag story it seems like everything is going fine. One red bag is coming off the carousel so you put all these bags in the flight and then one came off and the second came off and the third came off and now there is counterflow. There is the green bag, orange bag and a polka dot bag and then of course there is flow again which is the fourth bag comes out and the fifth bag and then the six bag.
Now there is flow again but then the seventh bag is missing and that’s counterflow again. That keeps the interest. When you are looking at any kind of story, you have to look intricate and go is there is a flow and counterflow. Is it going in favor and then slightly off, disfavor. That is what makes great stories. You don’t want to always have the sequence. You also want to have this flow and counterflow. This takes us to the last one which is the pivotal moment. There is a moment where you can turn the story around. Lets’ find out how.
A lot of writers are worried about writing something that is boring and you have to remember that there is no such thing as boring. Let me explain. Let me give you an example. Let’s say I am giving you the story. I remember the night we were driving home on June 21st. It was dark, rainy. Even slightly foggy and then I saw it. In the middle of the freeway it looked like someone had stopped their car, and so I swerved violently to the right and the next moment to my horror a car zoomed right past me. The car was hurtling down the wrong side of the freeway with no headlights. Moments later we heard the sickening crush of metal behind us.
Did that paragraph get your attention? It did, didn’t it, because it is dramatic. The car was on the wrong side of the freeway. Yes the driver the drunk, and yes he would have hit us head on at about 70-80 miles an hour if I hadn’t swerved. Stories such as this one make for enormous heart pounding drama but what if your story is less dramatic. For example, let’s say you went to the post office today and there is a parcel waiting for you.
Now there are five different scenarios that could pop up just from the post office. You could be waiting for this parcel for a long time and it excites you now and you could be not expecting any parcel and then finding a parcel just brightens up your day. You could be expecting a parcel and get someone else’s parcel which leads to disappointment or you could be expecting a parcel, get the parcel, but it is the start to a series of events that you could not have predicted, or you could be expecting a parcels but the contents are broken, and this leads to some other events.
This is just a parcel stuff and you probably got bored with all the variations but the point is just very simple. The point is that there is no such thing as a boring event. What is boring is the way in which we put it forward, because if you are a Hollywood director you would see drama in everything because any incident leads to another incident which leads to the third, fourth, fifth incident.
Any incident can start off being perfectly good and then turn horribly bad, or any incident could be terrible to begin with and then turn out to be amazingly fabulous. What we are really talking about is a pivotal moment and that pivotal movement is simply a moment which spins in some direction, either it gets better or worse. Any moment can be a pivotal moment.
You have a story from your life and you say well that is really mundane. I woke up today and then something happened. What is that moment? Let’s take a dramatic moment. Let’s say a bully is beating you up at one moment but then what happens next? Do you stumble? Does the bully hit his head on the table and knock himself out [inaudible 00:14:34]. Does someone come to your rescue or do you get beaten up black and blue?
The point is that you could be doing anything like eating a spaghetti, a bowl of spaghetti, and the next moment something changes. One movement you are driving down the road and something changes. One movement you are getting drenched in the downpour and then somethings changes. Every situation can go from good to bad, bad to good and then keep bouncing back.
All you have to decide is what is the pivotal movement what is that movement that the story goes off in a tangent? When you have that movement what you do is you keep the story going ahead. There is no such thing as a boring story. There is a boring way in which to put the story. If you have a pivotal moment? If you have things happening along the way then suddenly things happened.
Well, that sounds crazy doesn’t it, but that’s exactly what happens. What is your pivotal moment? That is what you have got to decide and once you decide that you don’t have the problem of being boring any more.
Speaker 2:Okay, we have had enough, now let’s get to the summary. Can we now get to the summary? Summary, summary, summary, summary.
Sean D'Souza:Okay, let’s get to the summary. We have talked about how to make stories memorable and really we will talk about it again, but the point is that if you don’t have that idea, that one word in your mind, it is very difficulty. That is what really makes it memorable from there you get your case studies, from there you get your personal stories, and from there you get your analogies. That was the first thing.
The second thing was starting in the middle. You want to start a story in the middle. It is nice to start a story at once upon a time but starting in the middle that is where it rocks. The third thing was the 90% principle and the 90% principle is very simple. Your story is not ordinary. It’s a great story. You just have to tweak 10% of it. Make it your own and 90% principle works.
The fourth thing we did was counterflow. The story is going in one direction. Hold it back. Turn it around. Make that whole story jiggle a bit, and that is what causes counterflow, and finally we looked at the pivotal movement. Something is happening and this is similar to counterflow in a way. Something is happening and then something else happens. What is that something else. Turn it around. The point is that there is no such thing as a boring story. There is no such thing as I am only going into the post office and something is happening. Be the story teller. Tell that story.
If you enjoyed this podcast then pass it over to your friends and also let them know that they can get podcast just like this full of solid information at ‘The Three Month Vacation’ on Itunes and you can get yours too. Go to Itunes and look for ‘The Three Month Vacation.’ While you are there please give me a review as well so that this podcast can be seen by other people. Your reviews really matter.
Speaker 2:He wants a five star. He wants a five star. He wants a five star.
Sean D'Souza:It is time to take Snippy for a coffee I guess. Bye for now.
Storytelling is a craft that small business owners need to improve their marketing. Without stories, a marketing strategy is like a boat without a rudder. Fact, figures and data can only go so far. Learn how stories help to create powerful marketing, in a completely non-threatening manner.
Oh, and go to http://www.psychotactics.com—it's really cool.
When you're in marketing, one of the big "marketing strategies" is to appear bigger than you are. Every one in the marketing field or in business is always talking about "six figure" incomes and "how to get thousands of customers". And so you and I get pulled along with this crazy tsunami. We stop being who we truly are, and start behaving like someone else. How can we be true to ourselves? How can we be our crazy selves and still succeed online?
For more of the good, crazy stuff, go to http://www.psychotactics.com
TimeStamps
00:00:20 Marsha's Confusion
00:04:10 How to Find Your True Personality
00:07:22 Why Personality is Important
00:09:08 Copying Someone Else
00:13:21 Summary
00:14:37 Getting Started-Action Plan
It's not easy to save time. We all know that. Yet, time management isn't just a factor of getting a fancy to-do list. Sometimes it involves some pretty odd things that you have to do. At Psychotactics, I didn't always have time. Now my workload has more than doubled, but I have a lot of time. How did that happen?
More at http://www.psychotactics.com
Time Stamps:
00:00:20 Introduction /
00:02:54 | Tip 1: Keep Stuff Open At All Times
00:08:22 | Tip 2: Leave the Office?And Plan Obsessively?And Weekly!
00:13:22 | Tip 3: Spend Two Hours To Save 5 Minutes
00:17:07 | Summary
00:18:40
Transcript
Sean:Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com.
Speaker 2:And I am his evil twin.
Sean:And you're listening to the Three Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead, it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time.
I want to start today with just a little boast. I write several courses every year, like 200 pages and then we do the course where we have sometimes 20 or 30,000 posts on a single course. I'll write articles, I'll do workshops. Not lots them, maybe once a year, but it takes a lot of planning. Then I'll be in 5000bc.com which is our membership site. Yes, there's lots of other work-related activities but I also mentor my niece, which means that I stop work at about 12:00 every afternoon. I'll take a break, often take a nap, and I'll explain that in another show and why it's so important. Then I will work with my niece until 7:30 that evening.
The point is that I was boasting there. The other point is that it's all true. Now granted, I do wake up at 4 AM but I also take three months off every year. Where do I find the time to do all this stuff? There are certain things that I've learned over the years, and when I go back to who I was back in 1990 or in the year 2000 or 2005, I was not the same person. I was always battling for time and always struggling with stuff. I had to figure out what am I going to do. How is this going to change? Why is it that I'm always battling with this factor of time? I realized that some people do things slightly differently. On today's show I'm going to talk about three things that would seem radical in a way. I would ask you to try it, because it works really well.
The first thing that we're going to talk about is just the factor of keeping things ready. We'll find out what this is all about. The second thing we're going to cover in the show is just to leave the office, which sounds really odd. The third thing is to spend about an hour or two hours so that you can save five minutes. As you can see, this is pretty radical stuff, but it will save you enormous amounts of time during the year. Let's get on with the show, shall we?
Back in 2010 I started watercolors. I went to a watercolor course nearby. In fact, it was my third or fourth watercolor course. I had never succeeded in painting and so I decided I'm going to get this done. But it was the guy who was conducting the watercolor course that made a difference to me. His name was Ted and he said "Sean, why don't you get a diary and why don't you just put your stuff in there everyday? Just draw what happened to you." I thought that's a good idea. I thought wow, that's a good idea. I could do that. I could just take something that happened to me that day and put it in the book, in the diary.
Now the good thing was that I already had a whole bunch of Moleskine diaries that I'd put earlier a couple of years ago, never used them. Now I could use them. I started to use them, but soon enough chaos reigned. I would forget the diary somewhere and I would sometimes have to diary and not the pens. Then I realized that the reason why I wasn't getting anything done was I didn't have all my stuff with me open at all times. Now this sounds really odd but if you don't have your stuff open and ready to go, you simply lose momentum. If I we're to go into my bag, even if I had my drawing, and then get it out of the bag and then open the book and get to the right page, and then open the pencil box, and then sharpen the pencils, it's five or seven minutes or eight minutes - if I get everything right.
What I started doing was I started keeping everything open. I started keeping all my watercolors there ready to go. I started keeping all my paints ready to go. As a result I have now done a watercolor almost every single day for four years. That's, wow, 365, but I end up doing a little more so maybe about 1,200, 1,500 watercolors that I wouldn't have done, had never done before. Where do you get this kind of time? Just the fact that you have to open stuff takes up a lot of time. I have Scrivener on my computer and when I do my courses, what I do is I keep Scrivener open all the time. I know this sounds crazy for people who want to close everything and keep it neat, but having to open Scrivener, find the file, put in all that assignments that I've written for the course, all of that takes just five minutes. There's five minutes here and five minutes there and five minutes everywhere. Yes, it adds up to an hour but what's more debilitating is that it actually ends up with a couple of hours, because the energy required to do this mindless exercise is fascinating.
What I tend to do is I keep everything ready. When I go for my walk everyday, and I go for my walk everyday because if I don't go for my walk everyday I'm not just fit but I don't listen to the podcast. I don't listen. I don't educate myself. I don't listen to audiobooks. I don't do a lot of stuff. All the podcasts, all the audiobooks, all of the information that I need for my trip, I'm learning languages - all of that is there on my iPhone. When I'm on the walk it's there. I switch on the iPhone as I leave the house. I speak to my wife a little while and then we start listening at a specific point.
The first point I'm trying to say to you is if you're writing a sales letter or you're writing a article, or you're doing whatever you're doing, you have to keep the stuff ready. You have to keep it ready to go. If it's the previous night or the previous day or on your computer or on your desk, keep it ready to go. That saves an enormous amount of time. That sounds like a really simple tip but it's very powerful. The momentum - that's what you're really battling with. The fact that you have to go and you have to put on your shoes to go for a walk. If your shoes are already halfway out of the door, you might as well just put them on and then when you do that you go for a walk. When you go for a walk you listen to the podcast. When you listen to the podcast you get smarter. When you get smarter you're able to implement stuff.
Really that is what it's about. Preparation makes a huge difference. The people who succeed consistently are people who are prepared long before the opportunity arrives. The people who struggle all the time because they're opening their books while somethings going to happen. They're opening their program while something's happening. The prepared ones, they're already there. That's the first tip: just keep stuff open. Keep it ready to go. Keep it there the previous night or whenever. Keep it ready.
The second thing that has been of enormous use to me in saving time has been to leave the office. Now this sounds totally counterproductive. Why would you leave the office? Office is where your computer is. You get a lot of stuff done. Why would you leave the office? For one, because the office is your execution place. It is not your thought place. It is not your learning place. When you leave the office you will find that all of your great ideas, all of your fabulous money-making schemes, they all happen in the car or when you're going for a walk, or you're doing whatever you're doing. My wife and I, we sometimes go to the café. Not sometimes, we actually go to the café a lot. The trip there and back is the most productive part of our day. At the café we probably read something or draw or plan. I'm getting to that shortly.
The point is that the office is the least productive place.
Speaker 2:To be fair, he doesn't get very good coffee in the office anyway.
Sean:The office is where you execute, not where you think. In fact, if I'm doing presentations I will take a pencil and a paper and go out. I'm really good at doing everything on the computer but I will still go outside and do it all. It's the thinking, it's the planning that makes a big difference. That takes me to this whole concept of planning. We make elaborate plans. We plan monthly, weekly, yearly. Every Friday we have a couple of hours of just planning. We just go to the café and we plan. You think well, I keep planning as well but nothing comes of those plans. You'd be surprised that if you just keep at this exercise of planning on the same day every week you will find that you are moving ahead at a far brisker rate than if you didn't plan at all. You have to do this almost methodically. You have to do this on a regular basis. You have to say Wednesday 3:00 to 4:00, that's all I'm going to do. I'm going to plan. You go "I don't have enough time to do stuff," but planning is what clears your mind. When I did one of the planning sessions I realized that I was just going nuts.
Now Pscyhotactics has been around since 2002. We've got lots of articles. We've got courses. We've got products. We've got all that stuff. Then suddenly it occurred to me that I could do podcasts. Suddenly I wanted to write some books for Kindle. Then I wanted to do this and do that. When I sat down at that planning session I realized that I was stupid, that I could never get all of that stuff done. I had been spinning for a couple of weeks just trying to get stuff done, hoping I could get it, and in the process getting absolutely nothing done.
The plan revealed my weaknesses. That's what I say to people. I say this to clients, I say this to my friends, I say this to everyone. Keep on planning, because planning is priceless and plans are useless. But the person who has the planning, you have to fulfill this goal of yours. If you don't have that goal and that goal is not reviewed on a regular basis ... This is not a to-do list. It's a plan. It's where I'm going. Leave the office. Get all your ideas in the car. Go for a walk. Get fit. Yes, spend time planning. You'll say why is that such a time-saving device? Because it gets rid of all the million things that you plan to do and you couldn't fit in. Now you can do the things that you could do or you want to do.
The planning really clears your mind. It focuses your in the right direction. That is a huge time-saving device. When I leave the office I often try to find a café that doesn't have an internet connection. Sometimes it's a real pain because I really want to check stuff and I want to see stuff, but not having that internet connection is really cool. If you can find a café like that, that would be really good. Leave the office and plan obsessively.
This takes us to the third idea of time management, really. That is that you often have to spend two hours to save five minutes. Now that might sound really crazy but let me give you an example. I have a program called Text Expander. Now Text Expander is a tool where if I just type in a couple of letters it can expand into a whole paragraph. For instance, if you asked me "What is your address?", then I would type addx and it would spill out the entire address, my postal address, my home address. Say you had a problem downloading something from our website. Now a lot of people have issues, especially with Internet Explorer. There's a browser issue. In this case it's not downloading. Often you just change the browser and it downloads the product. There's nothing wrong with the product or the server. It's just a browser issue.
I have to then go to this browser, do this. It's a whole couple of paragraphs, maybe three paragraphs. These are just instructions. All I have to type is “browx", which is what I've set up obviously. The point is it spills out all of the information and now that person gets the information, they're able to download that product. But it took me three seconds. It took me half an hour or 45 minutes or one hour to learn how to use that program effectively. Because a lot of programs are very effective and we learn 1/10 or 1/100 of that program and it can do a lot of stuff. That's what we don't realize. I type a lot in forums when we have our courses, like the article writing course or copywriting course. There is formatting to be done. The top subhead has to be in bold and red and italics. Then you go around formatting all of that and you've gone and done five clicks. I can do it in one second.
The reason is had to spend a couple of hours going through a tutorial learning all the stuff so I could save three or four minutes in a day. But what happens is then those three and four minutes expand everyday. Suddenly you wasted hundreds of hours, hundreds of hours every year. But it's not just a concept of hundreds of hours. It's also wasting a hundred or more hours just getting tired. All of that typing and retyping - and you can say "Okay, I can cut and paste," but you're learning Photoshop, you're learning programs. You need to spend a couple of hours that you don't have right now to save those five minutes. You will realize how much faster you are.
This is true especially for the technology that you have on your computer, that you use three, four times a day. I would really suggest this. In design I use Photoshop, I use a whole bunch of programs. Every time I educate myself on it it has saved me enormous amounts of hours in the day. I hit myself on the wall.
Speaker 2:He doesn't really do that. That would be an amusing sight, wouldn't it?
Sean:I think why didn't I do this earlier? Why didn't I actually spend some more time learning how these programs work? Every time I do it saves me time. That's my recommend to you. Spend two hours and save five minutes.
Let's summarize. The first thing that we did was just to keep stuff ready, keep stuff open, keep it open all the time. It's really cool. Don't keep too many things open. You don't have to have 25 tabs open, but the stuff that you really need, the programs, keep it open. Keep your books open and it saves you an enormous amount of time. I know it's a crazy suggestion. Try it.
The second things is leave the office. The office is just a place where you execute. You waste a lot of time at the office. Go out there, get your plans together. Planning saves enormous amounts of time. It tells you what not to do. Your stop-doing list, it comes out in planning.
Third and very important is to make sure that you learn the technology that you use everyday, whatever programs that you use everyday. Take a tutorial on it. Spend time on it. Don't do all your programs. Just do the ones that are most critical, things like Text Expander or Scrivener or programs like that which you're going to use on a regular basis. You will save enormous amounts of time.
This brings us to the end of the third podcast. We have reached podcast number three. If you haven't got the first two podcasts go to iTunes and download them. Be sure to leave us a review as well. It helps me stay focused and get this job done well. Thanks again for listening, and this is brought to you by Psychotactics.com and the Three Month Vacation. You can't have a vacation if you don't have time, so might as well start saving time now. Bye bye.
You're still listening. Well, if you have any suggestions or any feedback, send it to me at sean@pscyhotactics.com. I will be paying attention to it for sure.
It's not enough to want to have passive income. You may think it's a smart way to go about things, but in fact, it's pretty shallow. You want to create magic, and to create that magic you need the help of the three-prong system. Businesses such as Harley Davidson, football, cricket, and of course, big organisations like religion have the three prong system at their very core. At Psychotactics, we've used the three-prong system the moment we figured it out. It's more than a business plan, it's a long-term understanding of where you business will be for years to come.
You can see more at http://www.psychotactics.com or e-mail me at sean@psychotactics.com.
Chapters:
00:00:20 Introduction to Three-Prong /
00:01:43 The Three-Prong System /
00:04:38 Why Consulting, Training and Leverage are Needed /
00:04:46 Why Consulting, Training and Leverage are Needed /
00:08:45 Our Start at Psychotactics /
00:10:07 Why Bother With Consulting? /
00:11:39 Action Plan /
00:13:32 Final Recommendations / 00:14:51
Transcript
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Sean D'Souza:Hi this is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com.
Speaker 1:I'm his evil twin.
Sean D'Souza:You're listening to the Three-Month Vacation podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time.
Back in 1990 I used to work for an advertising agency and I had a great boss. Every time I ask my boss, "Can I take the day off?" She would give me the day off. Now you would think that was an ideal situation but it wasn't for me. I didn't like to ask for the day off. I got into my own business. But that didn't really solve my problem because I was a cartoonist back then and whenever I went on vacation, I would comeback and I would meet with my clients and they would say something like, "Oh where were you?" I would say, "Oh I just was on vacation." They'd say, "By the way we were looking out for you and we can't find you and so we gave the job to someone else."
That could get me really stressed because now, no longer was I losing out on the jobs but I wasn't enjoying my vacations. I was always worried that I was losing out on money and I have competitors now because my client were going out and finding people while I was on vacation. I had to sit down and think about it, how do I overcome this problem?
Interestingly, organizations that have lasted hundreds of thousands of years have a system that has worked amazingly well. I call it the Three-Prong System. What is Three-Prong System? No matter which business you look at it's built on three prongs or at least it should be built on three prongs. The first prong is consulting. The second prong is training. The third is leverage.
Let's look at consulting. What is consulting? Consulting is just a fancy name for one-on-one. Effectively when you go out there and you speak to a client then what you're doing is you're physically going out there. You have to be there for the transaction to happen. That
Speaker 1:Yes, there is such a thing because you have to go through this meeting after meeting after meeting, [inaudible 00:02:41], it's such a pain.
Sean D'Souza:There are meetings but I also enjoyed it a lot. Consulting could be something like meeting with a client for coffee or for lunch. When you physically have to go across and you have to be there in person. That is one-on-one, that's what you see, lots of [inaudible 00:03:04] people doing, they come to your house, they fix up the plumbing or they do some carpentry. Effectively what they're doing is consulting. They have to be there because if they're not there, they don't get paid. This is the most tedious way to get paid.
That's [inaudible 00:03:23] to the second one which is training. What is training? Training is one-to-many. When you do a workshop for instance, you're one person and there are many people at the same time. Courses, webinars, anything that is live and needs you to be there at a specific time and specific place is what you call training. That is less intensive than consulting because now you are dealing with a whole bunch of people. But it's not as great as leverage.
You already know what leverage means. Leverage is just, you don't have to be there. It's an Elvis business. You've left the building as it were. You're at the beach, you're somewhere else, you are at the café or you're just asleep or on vacation. The point is that when you have books or recorded podcast or products or services that are selling while you're not around, that is a leverage business. It's very easy to come to a conclusion that the leverage business is the best business going. It's not. It's only one of three prongs.
Let's take an example to find out just what this means. When we look at organizations such as religious organizations, we see the best structure of the three-prong system. They have consulting where someone can meet with you one-on-one. They have training which is one -to-many. Then they have leverage, where they sell books and things that you would buy if you are part of that religion.
When we say religion, your mind automatically goes to something like a church or a mosque or a temple, wherever you come from. However, religion can mean anything. Harley Davidson has a bunch of people called hogs, H-O-G-S. They are part of a religion, the Harley Davidson religion. When you look at football, again it has a religion. All of these structures wherever you're part of an organization, part of a system, will have this structure in place and some structures will be better than others.
However, what you need to do is you need to figure out, how am I going to do this and how is it going to help me take more vacations? The answer for me lay in the fact that I had to less consulting. This is what you've got to think about. All of us love to consult. All of us like to work with clients. Many of us like to work with clients. The reason why we like to work with clients is simply because it's one-on-one, it's not having to deal with the big crowd. It really helps if you're an introvert. It also helps if you're an extrovert because you're still getting to meet people.
However, once we step out of the comfort zone, we also increase our income. That leads us to training. Now training is effectively harder because now you have to deal with a group of people. However, what is happening here is pretty obvious. Instead of earning $20 an hour working with one person or $50 an hour working with one person or $150 dollar an hour working with a single person, you are earning a $150 multiplied by 10 or 20 people.
What you're starting to do is earn a much larger fee for the same amount of time and possibly the same amount of effort. When we move on to the last part which is leverage, you are now taking that information that you put in that workshop or in that webinar or in that series. You're putting it together in a format which is an information product. That gives you leverage.
Speaker 1:Sure baby I already know about this, we've seen training and consulting and leverage, what's your point here? What are you trying to say? What should we be doing with this information?
Sean D'Souza:Yes, that's the whole point. We have to sit down and work out something very important. That is, how much of my business is consulting-based? How much of my business is training-based? How much of it is leverage? You want to have the smallest slice of that pie to be consulting. Because consulting takes up the most time and effort and in most cases, brings the least result or the least income or the least impact.
You have far more impact with training and you have even more impact with a book or a workshop or a training that has been recorded and then distributed to a whole group of people. What happens as a result is, someone might read a book and then come in for consulting. Someone might read a book and then come in for training. This is what happens.
When we started out, I didn't really have this system in place but I did have a training situation. I spoke in front of a group of people and someone asked me to put it down as notes. I didn't have a name for the book but I called it, The Brain Audit. Then we started selling the book. As a result of the book, we started getting revenue from leverage which was just the book. It was just a 16-page book at that point in time but we started getting the revenue from the book.
We also started getting people coming back for training. We could have little workshops and that got us started, because we were new in New Zealand. We didn't know anyone. It was this little book that was helping us on our way. Finally, what it did was help us to create a membership site which is 5000 BC. Everyone who read the Brain Audit and only those people were allowed into 5000 BC. It has helped us create consulting, training and leverage and it continues to do so.
The question that arises is, why don't we just dump consulting? Why do we bother with consulting at all? The reason is just that consulting brings up questions. When you deal with at least some people, one-on-one, they bring up questions. That helps you to develop your products and your services a lot better. Training, consulting and leverage. They all community-exist with each and they're all responsible, you can look at them as doorways. If you have only one door that your clients can enter through and leave, then they enter and they leave. But if you have many doorways, then they kind of cross-pollinate. That is really powerful to watch.
But more than anything else it allows you that possibility of breaks after vacation. Because the information, the products, all of that stuff keeps selling while we're not around. While we're on vacation, 5000 BC continues to take over. It's another story how it takes over but it continues to be a form of leverage. While we're on vacation, the books and the products and whatever we've recorded, all of that continues to sell. You're taking a paid vacation.
That is the three-prong system in a nutshell. It's leverage, training and consulting. One-on-one, one-to-many and once recorded and sold forever.
What's your action plan as a result of listening to this three-prong system? The first thing you need to do is just go back, get a piece of paper, draw a circle and then divide that circle into three parts. How are you going to divide it into three parts? You're going to divide it based on how much consulting you do, how much training you do and how much leverage you have. Some of us will have nothing. Some of us are just starting out and that's what I did. You're going to determine how much you want to have. Accordingly, you're going to have to study and put things together so that you get really good at that sector.
Supposing you want to do training then you want to read books on how to do better presentations, how to do better webinars, and all those kinds of things. If you, on the other hand, want to write books, you probably want to do an article-writing course and information product course. That is your forte at this point in time. It's not enough to just listen to people and say, "OK, I'm going to write all these books on kindle and I'm going to make a fortune." What you've got to do is figure out where you want to go. If you're already in the business, you're already quite established, you might find that you are doing training. Whether you're spending 60%-70% of your time outside your house, you don't see your kids, you don't see your family, you don't really get a break.
You want to change that around and start moving in another direction. That's really what the three-prong is so powerful. It's about figuring out if you're doing too much consulting or too much training or too much leverage or if you're not doing anything, how to go about it.
This brings us to the end of the second episode of the Three Month Vacation. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you've already subscribed at iTunes. If you haven't subscribed, do so now. Be sure to leave a review as well. The review really helps us and if you have suggestions, email me at sean@psychotactics.com. You know I'm up at 4AM. You know I will be responding to your email. This production takes a bit of a while to get together all the music and all the stuff that you've been listening to. But there's another part that you may not have realized.
If you're listening on a smartphone, you also have access to chapters, which means you can press forward and it will go to a specific chapter, just like in a book. You can also do this on your computer. Give it a go and you will be able to go back to the audios some other point in time and then access a specific point. All of these little things brought to you psychotactics.com. That's me Sean D'Souza.
Speaker 1:That's me, very, very sleepy evil twin being forced to wake up at 4 o'clock.
Sean D'Souza:By for now and tune in for the next episode where I deal with time management. These are my methods of time management which are slightly offbeat but I'm sure you'll enjoy them. Bye for now.
There's a difference between the "four-hour workweek" and magic. You can create revenue in a short week. You can't create magic. Magic is what we all want to create with our work. Most of us love our work. It gives us purpose and satisfaction. And yes, we'd love a "three-month" paid vacation—or just any vacation at all. And that's the goal. The goal is to work hard, but to also have a great time.
Yup, it's the Psychotactics Website
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Why You Can't Outsource Magic
I don't mow the lawns. I outsource it.
I don't do my accounts. It's what keeps my accountant in business. I bake my own bread, cook my own food, but at least half of the time it's all outsourced. In fact, when I think about it, a good chunk of my life is outsourced.
I don't build my own computers, code my own programs, generate my own electricity. I didn't even bother to weave my own carpet.
So yes, you could safely say that outsourcing is a good part of my life.
What I don't outsource is magic
It's magical to write my own articles. Do my own books. Draw my own cartoons. Answer my own email.
When I think about those who keep yearning for a "four-hour" work week, I find it incredibly weird and unsettling. I think of Leonardo da Vinci spending only four hours a week, painting. I think of Michelangelo goofing off on David and just putting in the least amount of time.
I think of the wine I drink and how it would taste if the wine maker decided not to put in 50-60 hours a week. I remember the movies that moved me, the food that tantalised my taste buds, the books that have elevated my senses. I think of all the magic the world has seen, felt and experienced over the years and a "four hour" workweek makes zero-sense to me.
You can create money in four hours
You can't create magic. Money isn't magic. It may seem that way, when you're slogging in a job that you have no control over. A life that seems to pull and push you in all directions. At that point, money and magic may seem like one and the same thing. And yet it's not.
Work is magic
Work well done, is something we all yearn for. And try as you may, you can't outsource the important stuff in life. So when some internet marketer comes along and tells you that a four-hour work week is magical, they're just equating work with money. That somehow you could work for four hours in a week, and make all the money and you'd be happy.
I can assure you that you'd be happy for a while, but then you'd seek magic.
And magic yup, that takes a lot more time and effort.
I wake up at 4 am every day and have done so for many years
I don't have to wake up. We've done well over the years. We have a business which attracts really phenomenal customers. Some of them have been with us for over 12 years (considering we're Internet-based, that's like a hundred years).
Our workshops are always full. Our courses often sell out in an hour or so sometimes 20 minutes. We've banked enough, own enough, travel three months in a year. Truly speaking, if we were to stop working now, we could go for at least another 20-30 years, living our comfortable lifestyle.
So why wake up at 4 am?
Why put in 99 cartoons in a book when people are happy to just buy text? Why bother to re-write, re-engineer our courses by 20-30% every year? It's all extra work, isn't it? More hours in a day, month and year that seems to slip by increasingly faster.
The answer lies in magic
You can outsource some stuff, and you should. But to create the Mona Lisa, David and some fine wine yup, that's going to take a chunky 50-60 hours a week.
Get used to it!