The Three Month Vacation Podcast (Sean D'Souza)

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.

You’ve heard the line many times before, haven’t you? And at times, it seems like kids learn at a blinding pace.

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What I Learned From Children (And How It Lowered My Stress Levels)

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.

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.

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

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.

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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
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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

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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.”

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)

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/

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)

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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

"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 Energy
Part 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.

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 Great
https://www.psychotactics.com/good-to-great/

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)

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/

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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

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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.

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/

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/

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?

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.

Next recommended podcast:

How to avoid embarrassing time overruns when making presentations?

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

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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

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.

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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. 

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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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So how do you subscribe to this free podcast?

To subscribe to the podcast, please use the links below:

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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

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

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.

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'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!

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.

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.

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

==========

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

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.

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.

====================

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

====================

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/

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/

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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.

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

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

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?

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

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. 

To find more podcast options, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/magic

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 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

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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.

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.

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.

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

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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.

2. 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.

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.

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

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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?

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.

More on Feedback: Listen or Read

Why Clients Shy Away From Giving Feedback Despite Liking Your Products and Services

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.

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.

===============

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?

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 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?

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. 

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 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.

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)

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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 Block
Writer’s Block Series: Why Discussion and Feedback Are A Writer’s Secret Weapon (And How Professionals Use it to Their Advantage)

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.

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.

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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/

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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/

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.

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.

Next Step: Find out—How To Overcome Mental Blocks That Derail Your Progress

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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

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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/

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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 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?

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: Preserving the Core + Stimulating Progress
Part 2: The BHAG
Part 3: Your Action Plan To Greatness
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
Why Happiness Eludes You: 3 Obstacles That We Need To Overcome
Find out: Do We Really Need To Start With Why?

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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.

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

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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

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.

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 in the mundane activities in our everyday life. 

Ready to go on a metaphor trip that's fun? Well, here we go.

Next Step: It's time to find out—Why Storytelling Needs The Thumpity-Thump-Thump-Thump-Thump

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)

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.

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.

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.

Once you finish listening to this episode:

Listen or read:
How to Stop Clients In Their Tracks With Riveting Business Storytelling

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 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/

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.

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/

=====================

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/

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.

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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.

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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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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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/

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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/

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? 

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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

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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.