The Three Month Vacation Podcast

When you're a small business, you have what seems like a terrible choice: tactics or strategy. But do you really have to choose? How do online or offline strategies differ from tactics? Can you get by on marketing tactics alone? There is a difference and this podcast shows you how to not just tell the difference, but profit from it.

To get hidden goodies, go to: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic

To also get the coolest headline report on "why headlines fail", go to: http://www.psychotactics.com

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Time Stamps:

 

00:00:00 Introduction
00:02:44 The Difference Between Strategy And Tactics
00:06:59 Strategy Leads to More Stress
00:08:39 How to Execute Tactics and Strategy
00:12:27 Summary
00:13:33 Action Plan
00:14:51 Final Notes.

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Transcript

 Sean D.: Hi this is Sean D'Souza, from Psychotactics.com and you're listening to the three month vacation podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. It's the new year and most of us are already thinking of not making new year resolutions so why do we hate new year resolutions so much? We hate it because it doesn't work and the reason why it doesn't work is because we're not doing it right. Today we're going to talk about strategy versus tactics. Your new year resolution so far has probably been a tactic, not a strategy.

 Back in 2008, I decided I wanted to play badminton. I wanted to lose a bit of weight, but I also enjoy sport. You see, I don't really like to do any exercise, I don't like going to the gym, I can barely tolerate walking, I only do it because I'm listening to something and it helps me pass the time, but sport? You ask me to play some soccer, or as I call it, football, or cricket, or badminton, well that's more up my street. I go to play badminton every day at 9 o'clock and then by 12 o'clock I'd be back. Now I wasn't playing all the three hours, I was playing just a couple of hours, but as you can tell, that's quite a decent workout. What happened at the end of a couple of months?

 I didn't lose any weight. How could that be the case? How can you run about like a crazy nut, for two hours, five days a week and not lose any weight? The problem was I was reading it as a tactic, not as a strategy. I'd go and play for those hours every day and then I'd get back and I'd eat a little of this and a little of that and pretty much I was consuming as many calories as I was burning and doing it every single day.  After several months, I was exactly where I started, but not only did I goof up on the food, I was also goofing up on how I approached the game. After three months, I had so many aches and pains because I wasn't doing stuff right and I gave up the game.

 Now I still have my racket with me, I still have my shoes, I still have the badminton shuttle I was playing with when I went from C player to B player which was quite difficult by the way. That is what today's podcast is about. It's about the difference between strategies and tactics. You've probably figured out the difference between strategies and tactics anyway. Tactics are like a new year's resolution. You decide you want to stop smoking, you want to go on a diet, you want to do something and it's that instant moment of deciding that you want to do something and then you move in a different direction.

 Tactics might seem like just that one moment and strategy might seem like a longer period of time, but there's more to strategy than just the period of time and that is that there are different elements that feed into that strategy. When you look at something like what we're doing right now in podcasting, when I did podcasting back in 2010, I had what you call a tactic. I recorded a podcast and I put it up and people came there and they listened to it and that was it. However, this time around it's a strategy, so it's not just a podcast, it has different elements involved.

 There is the podcast, there is the cartoon that goes with the podcast, there are the transcripts, there are the pages that have to be created for the podcast. There is the music that has to be put in, the music has to be bought obviously, it has to be tailored, it takes a couple of hours to put in all the music and then in this age of distraction, we have to get people to go there, to listen to the podcast, to subscribe, to download, to continue to listen to them on a regular basis. This is something that I plan to be doing for a long time and that's the difference between a strategy and a tactic.

 You have to think about all of the elements that are going to make it work, just like in badminton. It didn't just involve me going there and playing for a couple of hours, it also involved what I was going to eat, how I would improve my game so I wasn't struggling all the time and also how to not injure myself, because I'm an expert at doing that. By simply showing up and playing badminton, that was a tactic. By this point, you're probably wondering, do tactics matter or does strategy matter? Which one is more important? That takes us to the second part of the podcast, where we figure out which one is more important.

 The thing with tactics, is that it becomes a springboard. A lot of people think once they listen to the whole concept of strategy versus tactic, that tactics are not important. Tactics are very important, but they're important as the springboard, they're the thing that light your fire, that start everything going. Once that is going, you suddenly get into a state of complete chaos. That's what tactics often do, they lead to chaos. You figure out, "I have to do something. I have to maybe do more webinars, or I have to do more workshops or I have to get more clients" and immediately you're out of your comfort zone and you're wondering what should you do, how should I go about it? At that point, we enter into the new year resolution zone.

 We decide we're going to do something and we don't have the strategy and the strategy becomes critical. Now that we have our tactic, now that we've decided we're going to go in a certain direct, we've changed paths, now we have to sit down and work out a strategy and one of the best ways to work out a strategy is to educate yourself. Let's say you've decided to write some books on kindle. The first thing that you have to do is to be able to write really well. A tactic would be to just sit down and start writing. Nice, but quite difficult because there's a lot of editing that you end up doing, you end up wasting a lot of time.

 A strategy would be, how am I going to make this more fun and less stress and you know you're actually in the middle of a strategy when you end up with a little more stress. You'd have to probably do something like a story telling course or an article writing course or a fiction writing course because that's what you're ending up doing, right? You're physically [inaudible 00:07:38] a book, so you need to know how you're going to sell the book, how you're going to write the book and you're educating yourself. This is what you do with your kids. You wouldn't say, "Okay let's get some books and learn some stuff and then we're done." No, you have a long term strategy. You send them to school for a duration, you teach them stuff on field trips, you educate them all the time and that becomes a long term strategy and the parents that have a better strategy end up with smarter kids and the parents that don't have a strategy end up with kids that are always trouble and struggling all along the way.

 There are many definitions for tactics versus strategy and one of the definitions is tactics is the how and strategy is the what. For me, the difference is just that tactics are quick, there's stuff that you have to do right now, and strategy is the long term journey. It's all the stuff that you have to do to get to that destination.  Both of them are equally important in their own way, but without the strategy it's unlikely that you're going to get there.

 For the third part of this podcast, let's talk about real examples. Let's say you've got situations and they're not working out too well for you, how would you execute tactics and strategy? Many years ago, around 2004, I was at this internet conference and I was selling from the podium, I don't do a lot of that anymore, but that's what I was doing and I noticed that a lot of people were making these offers and there was a stampede to the back of the room. I didn't have a strategy for that day. I just showed up on the podium and I used a couple of tactics and it didn't work at all. In fact it failed miserably, so I had to come back to New Zealand and then work out what did I do wrong? How should I have gone about it?

 I created a strategy. In 2008 we went to Chicago and when I spoke from the podium, there were 250 people in that audience and that day we earned 20,000 dollars. If you sat there in the audience, you would have thought, how did he do it? How did he sell more than all the other speakers? If you were just looking at that one piece, that pitch that was done at the end of the speech, you'd have thought that there was some magic in that pitch.

 But it wasn't. A lot of the planning had gone into what we had done before the speech, before we even got to that podium, before I even started to say a single word. There was a whole strategy. There was the stuff that we sent in advance, there was the stuff that we gave at the event itself, including a handout that the participants got the previous night. There was the video when the presentation actually started and what the video was supposed to do, there were the breaks in the middle of the speech where I just took a break for five minutes and what I did on that break and this was all part of the strategy.

 A tactic would be just to make that pitch, a strategy would be all of the points that were required for that pitch to work. This brings up a very important point and that is anticipation, anticipation of chaos. When we execute a tactic, we're just doing what the situation requires at that point in time. When we go through a strategy, we're anticipating that things will go wrong, and how do we fix it? How do we recover and how do we recover quickly?

 Over the years at PsychoTactics, things have gone wrong and have gone badly wrong. Through most of 2013 and part of 2014, we had several hacker attacks on our website. I don't know why, maybe it's because it's quite popular. It's in the top 100,000 in the Alexa rating and maybe that's why, but nonetheless, we didn't have a strategy in place and so we had to put a strategy in place and that involved moving all the websites from one type of system which was [jumla 00:12:08] over to Wordpress and reinforcing everything. As part of our strategy, we now have to redesign the whole look because times have changed.

 We also have to look at the text and whether it reflects who we are right now. Our tactic was to make sure we were no longer in the blacklist and that clients were not compromised in any way, but our strategy was longer term, our strategy would take several months, probably over a year to execute and that is the core difference between a strategy and a tactic. To come full circle, I am now walking every day. I don't go for badminton and maybe I will at some point in time, but I walk every day and I walk for an hour, hour and twenty minutes, every single day.

 The strategy is very simple, I have all my audio whether it's music or podcasts or languages and then at the end of that walk I get rewarded with a coffee. Then I turn around and come back.  A part of that system is also to anticipate when things are wrong. Some days I don't feel like it or I have too much work to do in the morning and so I get my wife [Re-nu-kah 00:13:36] to call me at the office and disconnect the phone and so then I have to go back home and we go for a walk. You may not have a companion, you may not have a situation, you may not have this and that. The point is that you have to work out a strategy that is going to work for you without excuses.

 This takes us to our action plan and you really have to do just one thing. You have to figure out what you're going to do in the new year. What are the three things you're going to do this year? What strategies are you going to follow? Is it just going to be another tactic where you go out there and find someone who says, "I can bring you 10,000 new customers," or you can get to the top of Google instantly? That's not the way to go. The way to go is to go step by step, implementing your strategy and that's how you meet with success. That is how you get to your three month vacation. As you can figure out, once you start taking long vacations, even that requires a strategy, or you just come back more tired than ever before.

 Get your three points, what are you going to cover this year and then what are the strategies? Start with one, work out the strategy, move to the next and the next. Start executing your strategy and not giving up. With that, we come to the end of this episode. To get more information, go to psychotactics.com/podcast. You want to subscribe to that newsletter because we send it out only twice a month, but you get a notification when we have any goodies and we do have goodies. You also get notifications of the new podcast, just in case you haven't been following it for a while, or something's happened.

 Go right now to htttp://www.psychotactics.com/podcast and subscribe to the newsletter just on email. It would also be really nice if you could pass on this podcast to others, others in business or other people in your life. That would be really nice, thank you again for listening and remember this podcast has been brought to you by the three month vacation and Psychotactics.com. Bye, bye.

Direct download: 011_Strategies_vs_Tactics.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:00am NZDT

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.

 

Direct download: 010_6_Secrets_of_FollowUp.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:00pm NZDT

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

 

---------------

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.

 

Direct download: 009_The_Bikini_Principle.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:00pm NZDT

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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Time Stamp

00:00:20 Calvin and Hobbes Story
00:02:04 Keeping Up With The Joneses
00:03:37 Psychotactics: Our Definition of Enough
00:06:53 How Can You Overdo A Vacation?
0:09:25 Summary
00:10:40 Coming Up Next

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Transcript: Power of Enough

Sean D'Souza: There's a comic strip called Calvin and Hobbes. Obviously, many of you have read it. In one panel, Calvin is ramping up for Christmas and so is Hobbes. Calvin asks Hobbes, he says, "What did you get on your list for Santa for Christmas?" Hobbes says, "I asked him for a tuna sandwich," and Calvin goes ballistic. He's like, "How could you do that?! I asked him for a rocket launcher, a train," and he brings up a list that's a mile long.

 

Of course, the scene shifts to the day that's Christmas Day and Calvin is stomping around the house shouting, "I'm going to sue Santa!" Obviously, because he's got nothing and there's Hobbes, ever the philosopher and saying, "Well, I got my tuna sandwich." At this point, I turn to people and ask them, "Do you know what your tuna sandwich is?"

 

Before I get you all hungry for sandwiches, let's talk about the first episode. I don't know if you've listened to the first episode, but it was outsourcing versus magic. You need to go to number one and start listening from number one, not because they're in sequence, but just because the first episode is so important. It's just the philosophy and this is another philosophy piece. It's about the power of enough. What is the power of enough? What is our tuna sandwich?

 

One of the things that probably drives us crazy is this keeping up with the Joneses. A good example would be just the three month vacation, so let's say you take three months off this year. Then what do you do next year? Do you take four months off? What about the year after next? Six months off? I could go on, but how long would I go on? Six, eight, ten, twelve? What is the limit?

 

When we run our businesses, one of the quests is just customers. We want more and more and more customers and the reason for more and more customers is not because we love more and more customers, but because it represents money and it represents more money and more money and more money. For me, money is like fuel. It's like putting fuel in a car. It's finite. You have a fuel tank and you fill it up and then as it empties itself out, you make sure that you never run out of the fuel, but you don't go out there and you store up more and more and more and more because there is a price to pay and that price is that the whole thing might just blow up in your face one day.

 

So we had to work out our own tuna sandwich. At Psychotactics, we had to define what was our enough. For instance, we have a membership site at 5000bc.com and when you go to 5000bc, you'll find that our membership hasn't dramatically increased from the year 2003, 2004. Considering the year that we are in right now, you'd say, "What's happened?", but the point is that we don't have to double or treble the number of members that we have currently. Sure, some members leave and you have to replace those members with other members, but there isn't enough. There is actually a benchmark at 5000bc of how many members we're willing to accept.

 

The reason is very simple. It's like having kids around the place. I mean, you have x number of kids and you can handle them, you can look after them, but if you have an enormous number, you can't really give them your attention. The same thing applies to our courses. We do an article writing course. We do a cartooning course. We do copyrighting courses. We do a lot of courses online and we always have waiting lists. Now, when you consider that some of the courses are $3,000 or $5,000, it's very easy to sneak in a few and make another 10, 20, $30,000. Who's going to ask you? Who's going to say, "Hey, you've got three or four more." Who's going to say that? No one's going to say that. Still, we have a limit. We have our enough.

 

If you come to a workshop like any workshop that we have; we don't have them very often because we know what is our enough, but when we do have a workshop, you have a maximum of thirty-five people in the room. Could we get more than thirty-five people in a room? Of course we could, but at thirty-five, we stop because once it goes beyond thirty-five, you stop becoming a teacher and you start becoming a preacher. It just becomes a blah blah session. You can't really help people.

 

At least when it comes to work, we have our courses, our workshops, our membership sites. It's all based on a factor of enough, of a limit, a fuel tank and we're not going to overfill that tank. You might say that well, it's easy for you because you are already established. You've been in this business for over twelve years. What about me who's just starting out? The point is that our workshops, our courses, our membership site, they had these limits right at the start. It wasn't something we figured out along the way and while we did really well at work stuff, we didn't really figure out our vacation bit.

 

When we started, we figure nine months of work and three months of vacation seems like a fair deal, but we didn't understand what the concept of the three months vacation was all about. We overdid it. Now, you'd say how can you overdo a vacation? But you can. The first year we took a vacation was in 2004. We had just started out business towards the end of 2002, so within a year of starting up, we just decided that's it. We're going to take a three month vacation and we took three months off and it drove us crazy. We weren't enjoying that time that we were supposed to spend because it seemed endless. It seemed like we had to fill in those days.

 

Then of course when you come back from the vacation, there's this big void. You've not been working for so long, you don't feel like working anymore or for a very long time, so we had to juggle it a bit. We had to go okay, let's try six weeks and we tried six weeks and six weeks was too long. Then we tried four weeks and that was too long. Three weeks seemed just right, so three weeks plus a week of going back and forth to whichever place, so we never go directly to a place, we'd stop over for a couple of days. On the way back, we'd stop over a couple of days, so we're away one month at a time. We realize what is enough: Three weeks plus a week of travel and that is enough.

 

But it's really crazy to have a running tally that continues to increase. You're continuing to add holidays or money or whatever to where you're just putting in more and more fuel into that tank. For what reason? While I'm an information junkie - I just love information. I'm learning in design and Photoshop and my camera, which is the X100, that's a Fuji film. At the same point, I'll be tackling lettering and studying some stuff on learning, etc., but even that has that point of enough.

 

Often when I'm talking about how I go for a walk with my iPhone loaded with audio books and podcasts and stuff and people think well, you must be doing that all the time; you're completely crazy. Yes, of course, a person like that would be completely crazy, but today I was listening to Billy Joel and all of this summer, I will be listening to Andrea Bocelli, so you have to understand what is enough.

 

This brings us full circle to Calvin and Hobbes. Sometimes, we just slip into the Calvin mode. We overdo stuff. We are built to overdo stuff. We want to be part of the human race where we're always going to just push our comfort zone quite a bit actually, so we always have to get into the Calvin mode and then decide I want to be like Hobbes sometimes. In fact, I want to be like Hobbes a lot. I want a tuna sandwich.

 

So what's your action plan? It's simple, really. Think about it. How many customers do you want? How many people do you want at your workshop? How much money do you want to make from now to whenever, just a finite amount. Maybe even how much silence do you need? Everything with definition becomes a fuel tank and you fill it and you're happy and you have enough.

 

Coming up next week, we have the bikini principle. Interesting topic, isn't it? It's appropriate because it's summer here in New Zealand. I know it's freezing in other parts of the world, but it's appropriate here. We're going to find out exactly what is this bikini principle and how does it apply to stuff that's not related to the beach at all?

 

We learned a very good lesson when we were selling the brain audit about this bikini principle and it has stayed with me. It was one of the most read posts when we first had the consumption blog which no longer exists because there were too many blogs to manage, but it was one of the most read posts ever.

 

If you've been a subscriber, then you know that you automatically get the downloads on your phone or on your computer if you subscribe to iTunes. You can also get our podcast on Stitcher and hopefully soon on SoundCloud and finally, if you don't have any of the above, then you can get the RSS feed, so go to Psychotactics.com/podcast and you can find the RSS feed there.

 

Oh and before I go, be sure to leave a review for us because it's really important. It really helps me look at the review, look at E-comments and I feel much happier and you want to keep me happy, don't you? If you have any feedback, you also want to write to me at Sean@psychotactics.com. Anything you'd like to see or listen to anything you don't like, just write to me at Sean@psychotactics.com. I actually implement the feedback. We've come to almost twelve minutes of this podcast, so that's enough so I'll say bye for now. Bye bye.

 

This episode has been brought to you by the Three Month Vacation which is at Psychotactics.com.

 

Direct download: 008_The_Power_Of_Enough.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:00pm NZDT

Should stories be dramatic? Incredibly, the answer is NO. Drama comes from the 90% principle. And this means that your audience needs to know 90% of your story in advance. And that's one of the elements that make storytelling incredibly powerful.

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

 

====

Transcript:

Sean D'Souza:Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from psychotactics.com.

Speaker 2:And I'm his evil twin.

Sean D'Souza:And you're listening to the three month vacation podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time.

Some people are considered to be natural born storytellers and that's all of us by the way. When you were five years old, you came back from school and you told a whole bunch of stories and you did it perfectly well. You put in the drama, you put in the suspense, you changed your tone, you did everything powerfully and wonderfully.

Then as you grow up, you get a little more judgmental about your stories and you think that other people are better storytellers than you and it's true. Storytelling is a craft. When you're five years old, everyone listens to you because it's true, but as you grow up, you have to craft it. 

We'll take a little trip and find out what's involved in storytelling. Now this is just a little bit of the entire series that I've written on storytelling but it will give you a good gist of what to expect from that book, that series, and because these questions were put to me off-the-cuff, I am probably going to answer things that you probably won't find in those books or that series. It's a win-win situation and I think you should get the series from Psychotactics but for now listen in and let's get on this storytelling rollercoaster, shall we?

In this series, we're going to cover a lot of topics, probably 10 in all but we'll start off with the main topic and that is what makes a good storyteller. There are clear attributes to be found in good storytelling. One of the attributes of a storyteller is they should know when to tell a story and when not to tell a story. You can't always tell a story just about anywhere. 

One of the good places to tell story is when you are starting up something. If I started off this thing with a story, you'll say let me tell you about the time we were in London. Immediately that gets your attention. The other place when you need to tell stories is once you have given some information. Stories almost act like an example, like a case study and so they help the listener understand, comprehend what you just said.

A storyteller needs to know this. They need to know that it's not just about telling story after story after story. Instead they need to know where to tell the story, when to tell the story, how long that story needs to be. That's what makes a good storyteller.

This takes us to our second point. What can you do to improve your storytelling? Let's find out. There's an amazing series on Africa and the narrator of that series, which is a BBC series, is David Attenborough. Now David Attenborough talks about the resurrection plant and he talks about how the resurrection plant is out there in the desert and how it starts to roll and roll, and then it could be like that, rolling for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, maybe even 100 years.

Then at some point in time, it runs into a puddle of water and that's when the resurrection plant comes to life. Immediately, in a couple of hours, it starts to grow. It's almost like watching something on video in fast motion. Then the resurrection plant is not done. It has to wait for the second phenomenon which is the rain has to come, and the rain has to then hit the petals. The petals have to drop on the floor and new resurrection plants come up. Within a few days, all of them dry up. They shrivel up and then they become these little balls of resurrection plants that may go for another 50 or 100 years.

What makes that story interesting? What makes that story interesting is simply that it has three elements. The first element being sequence; the second being suspense; and the third being a rollercoaster. 

A good storyteller needs to know these three things. If you want to improve your storytelling, you need to understand that there needs to be a sequence. It needs to unfold one step at a time. This happens and that happens, then that happens. 

The second thing is that there has to be a factor of suspense, so maybe the resurrection plant gets to the water but at that point in time, nothing is happening. It's growing but the petals don't fall off. How are the petals going to fall off? How is that momentous occasion going to come about? Then the rain comes along. Then you've created this ups-and-downs, this suspense, and that brings us to the third part which is rollercoaster.

Now, what is a rollercoaster? A rollercoaster is just the ups-and-downs. The resurrection plant has no rain, then it has the puddle, that's good, but that's not good enough. It needs the rain to come and drop the petals to the floor and then just when everything's going good again, the sun comes up and dries it. We have that rollercoaster, that up-and-down.

If you want to improve your storytelling, you have to focus on these three elements: the sequence, the suspense and the rollercoaster. Now that we know about sequence, suspense and rollercoaster, we have to also figure out how do stories help in business.

When is storytelling important in business? Well, the problem with business, it's full of data, full of information, full of stuff that puts us to sleep. The moment you start off with something like let me tell you about the time or you give a case study, immediately your attention switches. Immediately the audience's attention switches to you. 

If you were to stand up in a crowded room and talk about a case study, immediately it doesn't matter what they are doing. It doesn't matter if they are looking at their phones, whatever they are doing, thinking about whatever they're thinking about, at that point in time the attention goes right to you.

The power of the story is that capacity to hold or snap an audience out of whatever it's supposed to be doing. Today people are so captured or captivated by what they are doing that you need to snap them out very very quickly. That's what a story does really well.

There's a second reason why it's important business. When we understand a concept when we have explained a concept to someone, it's not like they can figure out what's happening. They need a layer. The first time you hear something, you think, well, how does it apply to my business?

When you have that story, when you have that case study, that's when people understand exactly how it applies to their business. The thing is that storytelling is very useful when you're trying to differentiate your product or your service from someone else. To give you an example, we have a product called the Brain Audit. Now the Brain Audit is a marketing book. It shows you why customers why and why they don't. 

I bet if you go to Amazon, there are 1,000 or 10,000 books on marketing. When someone arrives there, how are they going to decide that this is the book that they want. They look at the story, and the story talks about the seven red bags, how you put seven red bags on a flight and then you get off at your destination and you're waiting at the conveyor belt, the carousel, you're waiting for the bags, and then there's one red bag, and then the second red bag, and the third red bag, and then an orange bag, and a green bag, and fourth red bag, and the fifth red bag, and the sixth red bag. 

When does the customer leave the airport? When they have all the seven red bags, right? What's happening there is the story's explaining why this book is different. What are those seven red bags? Why are they needed?

Stories snap people out of whatever they're doing. It gets their attention. It explains a point. It allows people to absorb stuff. Third, it allows you to differentiate yourself from other products and services, so they're very very useful.

Let's take a little break, a little summary. What we've done so far is we've looked at the attributes of storytelling. We've looked at how you can improve your storytelling and then we looked at how stories help in business. This takes us to the fourth section which is about how less is more in information product. What is it that you're doing wrong and how can you fix it? 

Imagine you've invited someone to dinner and you want to impress them, of course, but you go out there and you have 20 dishes and each dish has its own taste and its own style and its own look and its own variation and its own subtle flavor. The guest is completely flabbergasted, very impressed but completely lost because as human beings, we're unable to consume that amount of stuff. We've tried it before. We've gone to a buffet and tried to eat 20 dishes. We eat a little of this, a little of that, and we can't cope with it. 

This is how information products are created. Information products are chapter on chapter on chapter on chapter on chapter on chapter on chapter on chapter on chapter, and suddenly you have 20 chapters and 200 pages and each of those chapters have their own concept and subconcept. Suddenly you're floating with information.

With information products, less is more, but how much is less in the first place? Usually you can start off with three main topics. If you have three main topics, you can cover three main things. If you listen to some of these audios in this series, you'll find that, say I'm talking about storytelling. I'll say storytelling consists of sequence, it consists of suspense, and it consists of a rollercoaster.

Now I can spend a lot of time talking about sequence. I can spend a lot of time talking about suspense and a lot of time talking about rollercoaster, and that's when you get the depth. You get that felling of that feel that you've consumed, that you've understood, that you can even recreate ... but 20 dishes? That becomes too much.

This is why we're struggling so much in today's world. We have too much information and there is this rabbit hole of information going deeper and deeper and deeper. Instead, have just three main topics and then dig deep. One inch wide, one mile deep. Just a little bit of information, lots of depth in it. That's when you create expertise. 

The next time you're thinking of putting together a document or an audio or a book or anything, think about how much you're inflecting on the customer or the reader. How much you're overfeeding them and then give them some expertise instead. 

OK, let's not overdo it here because we have covered three or four points and now we go to the fifth point, which is the best way to start writing a story. Then we'll finish off this segment and then we'll do it in the second part so that you're fresh and you can tackle that second part.

When you start to sell, you know that you have a weapon and that is the power of storytelling. When people know that storytelling really engages the audience, engages their customers, they are keen to use that weapon. How do you use that weapon?

Well, you have to remember that storytelling is not just something that you rattle out. It's not a bedtime story. It is a specific story hinging on one phrase or one word. Let's take the example of the Brain Audit. The Brain Audit is a book and it talks about how you put on seven red bags on a flight and then when you get off at the other end, you have six red bags.

The question is, when do you leave the airport? What we have there is a situation of hesitation. You have seven red bags. You had six red bags. Now there's hesitation. We can now take this concept of hesitation and apply it to selling so now we can say, in the same way when you're trying to sell something, you might remove all the bags off the customer's brain and leave just one red bag missing, and then they don't buy. They hesitate. 

They want to ask their uncle, their brother, their sister ... they don't want to make a decision. What's really the key between the story and whatever it is you're selling? That is that key word hesitation. That's what we really have to drill into. We have to figure out what are we really saying because it's only when you know what you're saying that you can bring about this whole story line and create a story for that sales pitch.

Now, you don't have to use hesitation in terms of just the bags at the airport. That's been taken by the Brain Audit. You can use different forms of hesitation and you'll know different situations where companies hesitated, so there will be case studies, or you can talk about personal stories where you hesitated.

The point is once you get to that key word or key phrase, then you build a story, then you link the story to whatever it is you are selling. That's when a story becomes very powerful and not just a bedtime story.

OK, it's time for some summary now. Let's see what we've covered so far. The first thing we did was the attributes of the storyteller and we found out that you can start a story with drama and that would get the attention. Also, once you're going in through a lot of information, you want to bring in the story of that [inaudible 00:16:04] because that enables the listener, the reader to absorb that information, to run that case study, that story in their head. That's the first thing that you need to know when to bring in the story and then how to bring in that story.

The second thing we learned was how to improve storytelling and we found that it was about suspense, sequence and rollercoaster. You'll remember that story of that resurrection plant. That had suspense and sequence and rollercoaster. Go back and listen to that bit because it's really useful. Put these three elements and you make great stories.

The third thing we covered was about storytelling in business. Information is full of data and information, and more information and more information is really boring. Storytelling helps you clarify what you're saying. It also helps you to stand out. We did that with the Brain Audit. With all those marketing books, the Brain Audit stands out because of that story, not because of anything else.

Later on you get to the contents of the book and you find it's great and wonderful, etc. The point is that it starts of with the story. It really helps you stand out. If nothing else, it helps you stand out.

Less is always more, and you can have a topic which is one inch wide and one mile deep. Now, on average, you want to cover three things. This series, this audio has five. They are short. They are manageable. You don't want it to be a rule but you definitely want it to be a guideline.

When you have a ton of stuff, people can't consumer. Always remember go inch wide and one mile deep, and that's really what you want to do. Finally, if you want to write really good stories, you need to distill it down to one phrase or one word, just like the Brain Audit is about hesitation.

Until you get that one word, and it's not as hard as you think. You just want to say too many things. Instead, just stick to one word, one phrase, and then you'll get many scenarios, many case studies, many stories that you can build from that one word. 

This brings us to the end of the first part in this storytelling saga. Saga? Is it a saga? It's not a saga. It's just a little bit, just a little bit, and I do hope you enjoy it. If you have been, I would suggest you get the storytelling series. You can get it at psychotactics.com. It's in the Products Section and it's the products under $50, so have a look there. You'll find it quite easily or use the search bar. 

That's me, Sean D'Souza, saying bye for now and you know what? If you want to share this with a friend, with several friends, or even send it out in your newsletter, feel free to do so. Yes, tune in for the second part in this series because we're going to have a blast there as well.

 

Direct download: 007_StoryTelling_3.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:31am NZDT

Storytelling isn't an art. It's a science. Every kid knows how to tell stories. And it's cute to be a storyteller when you're a kid. But when you put structure to writing and storytelling you take it from science to art. Find out how this works with story.

To find more podcast options, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast
To get a beautiful headline report on "Why Headlines Fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com

 

Transcript:

Sean D'Souza:Hi.  This is Sean D'Souza from psychotactics.com. And you are listening to the three month vacation podcast.  This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less, instead it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time.  Most stories start up with once upon a time, well at least the stories that we learned when we were kids.

Well, imagine if Goldilocks and the Three Bears started right in the middle.  That's what we're going to cover in this section.  We're going to start off with stories that start right in the middle.  How to keep stories fresh and engaging?

 

We're going to look at the 90% principle and we will repeat that several times in this series in different ways, but you'll learn the 90% principle.  Then, there's counterflow.  What is counterflow?  Flow and counterflow, but what does counterflow involve?  Finally, the pivotal moment, how to turn the story on a dime?

 

Let's get into story telling.  Let's start off with, how to keep your stories fresh and engaging?  If you ask a photographer to take a picture of say a glass.  Well most of us will just stand up, take our phones out and take a picture from wherever we are standing.  We don’t go close to the glass.  We don’t bother to see the angle of the glass, we don’t bother about anything.  We just rip out the phone, rip out the camera, take a picture and we are done.

 

That is not interesting.  From a photographers point of view it is well you want me to take a picture of this glass, what kind of lighting, which angle.  When you look at the glass there are about a million permutations, the type of light, the type of color, the type of angle.  All these things come into play when a photographer is taking a picture of a single glass just an ordinary glass, and this is how you have to approach your content.

When you are talking just about anything you have to understand what I am really going at.  

 

What angle am I going at?  Why kind of lighting am I portraying?  With story telling you have to know what is it that you are talking about?  If you are talking about something that is immutable, insurmountable, well you have things like the Himalayas, and you have these mountains that cannot be moved.

 

You also have other problems, other things that personal stories that talk about things that you could not move, that wouldn’t budge, so you have case study where maybe a recording company didn’t budge and the Beetles just had to find another way.  Once you have got that kind of understanding of well, what I am really saying here.  What is that word?  What is that phrase?

 

No you can keep your content fresh and engaging.  You can tell the same story, that same glass and look at it at different angles and different light and different ways and you can approach that same story a million different ways and customers never get fed up.  However, you also have to understand that we the storytellers get tired of our stories long before customers do.

 

You look at someone like say Frank Sinatra, and he is saying, say ‘New York, New York’ and every time he went out people were happy to listen to the new songs, but they wanted New York, New York.  They wanted him to sing that song or they wanted him to sing ‘My Way.’  

 

They wanted those things that they could attach themselves to understand, and so yes there are million ways to represent a story or a million ways to represent a sales pitch but also remember that people love the way that you have always done it, so don’t just change for the sake of changing.

 

In summary, there are different ways to approach the story, just know what you’re talking about and secondly once you have that run it.  You don’t have to keep changing it.  This takes us to the second part which is how do we make the story more dramatic.  Where do we start?

 

When we are growing up we are accustomed to listen to stories that start off with once upon a time and the problem with stories that start off with once upon a time, it takes too much time to get to the main gist of the story.  Let’s think of a story like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and you know how that story runs.  It starts out with once upon time there was Goldilocks and the Three Bears etc.

 

You don’t really want to start there.  That is fine for a kid.  That is fine for someone that is just falling off to sleep.  Your audience is not falling off to sleep.  You want to wake them up remember.  Where does your story start?  It starts right in the middle.  The drama is right in the middle of the story.  Goldilocks is there on the bed.  She is looking up and suddenly there are three bears looking at her.

 

That part is far more dramatic than once upon a time there was Goldilocks and she went into this forest or she went to see these three bears.  You got to work out that the story is more powerful at the center and so you write your story or your figure out your story or you figure out your case study and go right to the center and go which is the dramatic part and pull that part out, and put it right at the start.

 

That is what the movies do.  Very rarely will you get a movie that starts to build up slowly.  A movie will start smack in the middle and then they will go to the start somewhere along the line and then build up the story right to the middle again.  That is what you have to do?  You have to go right into the core of the story, pull out the drama, put it right at the middle, and then bring out the beginning.  It is middle, beginning, back to middle and end of story.

 

That’s what makes a good story.  That is the mistake that a lot of people make.  They don’t start off in the middle.  Then in the end or right to the middle by which time the audience was fallen asleep.  You don’t want them to fall asleep.  This is not a kid story.  This is a wake them up story.  This is a story that they will remember.  We have looked at two ways, the first is start in the middle and the way to keep your stories fresh and engaging.  Let’s move to the third thing which is very important.  It is called the 90% principle.

 

Whenever you are telling stories, one of the things that people tend to do is put too much information in the story.  Let’s say you telling a story about Jack and then Mary comes in and then Charlotte and then Anita, and now you have got too many elements that the person has to deal with.  People often tend to make up stories by putting all of these elements and you don’t want to have that.

 

You want to have 90% of your story in place, so when a person is listening to your story, they don’t have to make up 90%.  It is only 10% of that story that they need to figure out.  When we look at a story in the brain audit which is the book, you are talking about putting bags on a flight and then standing at a conveyer belt or the carousel and getting those bags off the flight.

 

What has happened there is that 90% of the story is in place.  You have been on a flight.  You know that you have to put them on.  You have to take them off and the thing that has changed, the elements that have changed are just the factor of the seven red bags, and that one bag goes missing.  When you listen to that story on the brain audit, what we have here is 90% of the information is already in place.

 

Let’s take another example.  Let’s say you were trying to get into a car and you are fiddling with the key and it is not opening and you know it looks like your car and it is still not opening.  We have tried to do something like that.  We have tried to get into a wrong hotel room or try to get into a wrong car, 90% of that story is in place, 10% has changed and that 10% is what makes it personal, what makes it your own.

 

This is not the case when you are talking about case studies.  Case studies unfold in ways that are completely different from personal stories.  The personal stories are get the audience on your side.  Case studies are something that someone else did.  I would always recommend, ‘A’ that you have personal stories and ‘B’ that 90% of that story is already in the customer’s brain and you are just tweaking 10%.  Now that we know what the 90% is all about let’s move to counterflow.

 

When we write a story or when we recount a story what we tend to think is that the only way to get a story going is go forward.  You think of a sequence, but there is also anti-sequence, or what I would call counterflow.  There is flow and there is counterflow.  It is almost like someone is headed towards success and then there is a barrier and that slows down the story, takes it in a different flow as it were.

 

When you look at the seven red bag story or when you listen to the seven red bag story it seems like everything is going fine.  One red bag is coming off the carousel so you put all these bags in the flight and then one came off and the second came off and the third came off and now there is counterflow.  There is the green bag, orange bag and a polka dot bag and then of course there is flow again which is the fourth bag comes out and the fifth bag and then the six bag.

 

Now there is flow again but then the seventh bag is missing and that’s counterflow again.  That keeps the interest.  When you are looking at any kind of story, you have to look intricate and go is there is a flow and counterflow.  Is it going in favor and then slightly off, disfavor.  That is what makes great stories.  You don’t want to always have the sequence.  You also want to have this flow and counterflow.  This takes us to the last one which is the pivotal moment.  There is a moment where you can turn the story around.  Lets’ find out how.

 

A lot of writers are worried about writing something that is boring and you have to remember that there is no such thing as boring.  Let me explain.  Let me give you an example.  Let’s say I am giving you the story.  I remember the night we were driving home on June 21st.  It was dark, rainy.  Even slightly foggy and then I saw it.  In the middle of the freeway it looked like someone had stopped their car, and so I swerved violently to the right and the next moment to my horror a car zoomed right past me.  The car was hurtling down the wrong side of the freeway with no headlights.  Moments later we heard the sickening crush of metal behind us.

 

Did that paragraph get your attention?  It did, didn’t it, because it is dramatic.  The car was on the wrong side of the freeway.  Yes the driver the drunk, and yes he would have hit us head on at about 70-80 miles an hour if I hadn’t swerved.  Stories such as this one make for enormous heart pounding drama but what if your story is less dramatic.  For example, let’s say you went to the post office today and there is a parcel waiting for you.

 

Now there are five different scenarios that could pop up just from the post office.  You could be waiting for this parcel for a long time and it excites you now and you could be not expecting any parcel and then finding a parcel just brightens up your day.  You could be expecting a parcel and get someone else’s parcel which leads to disappointment or you could be expecting a parcel, get the parcel, but it is the start to a series of events that you could not have predicted, or you could be expecting a parcels but the contents are broken, and this leads to some other events.

 

This is just a parcel stuff and you probably got bored with all the variations but the point is just very simple.  The point is that there is no such thing as a boring event.  What is boring is the way in which we put it forward, because if you are a Hollywood director you would see drama in everything because any incident leads to another incident which leads to the third, fourth, fifth incident.

 

Any incident can start off being perfectly good and then turn horribly bad, or any incident could be terrible to begin with and then turn out to be amazingly fabulous.  What we are really talking about is a pivotal moment and that pivotal movement is simply a moment which spins in some direction, either it gets better or worse.  Any moment can be a pivotal moment.

 

You have a story from your life and you say well that is really mundane.  I woke up today and then something happened.  What is that moment?  Let’s take a dramatic moment.  Let’s say a bully is beating you up at one moment but then what happens next?  Do you stumble?  Does the bully hit his head on the table and knock himself out [inaudible 00:14:34].  Does someone come to your rescue or do you get beaten up black and blue?

The point is that you could be doing anything like eating a spaghetti, a bowl of spaghetti, and the next moment something changes.  One movement you are driving down the road and something changes.  One movement you are getting drenched in the downpour and then somethings changes.  Every situation can go from good to bad, bad to good and then keep bouncing back.

 

All you have to decide is what is the pivotal movement what is that movement that the story goes off in a tangent?  When you have that movement what you do is you keep the story going ahead.  There is no such thing as a boring story.  There is a boring way in which to put the story.  If you have a pivotal moment?  If you have things happening along the way then suddenly things happened.

 

Well, that sounds crazy doesn’t it, but that’s exactly what happens.  What is your pivotal moment?  That is what you have got to decide and once you decide that you don’t have the problem of being boring any more.

 

Speaker 2:Okay, we have had enough, now let’s get to the summary.  Can we now get to the summary?  Summary, summary, summary, summary.

 

Sean D'Souza:Okay, let’s get to the summary.  We have talked about how to make stories memorable and really we will talk about it again, but the point is that if you don’t have that idea, that one word in your mind, it is very difficulty.  That is what really makes it memorable from there you get your case studies, from there you get your personal stories, and from there you get your analogies.  That was the first thing.

 

The second thing was starting in the middle.  You want to start a story in the middle.  It is nice to start a story at once upon a time but starting in the middle that is where it rocks.  The third thing was the 90% principle and the 90% principle is very simple.  Your story is not ordinary.  It’s a great story.  You just have to tweak 10% of it.  Make it your own and 90% principle works.

 

The fourth thing we did was counterflow.  The story is going in one direction.  Hold it back.  Turn it around.  Make that whole story jiggle a bit, and that is what causes counterflow, and finally we looked at the pivotal movement.  Something is happening and this is similar to counterflow in a way.  Something is happening and then something else happens.  What is that something else.  Turn it around.  The point is that there is no such thing as a boring story.  There is no such thing as I am only going into the post office and something is happening.  Be the story teller.  Tell that story.

 

If you enjoyed this podcast then pass it over to your friends and also let them know that they can get podcast just like this full of solid information at ‘The Three Month Vacation’ on Itunes and you can get yours too.  Go to Itunes and look for ‘The Three Month Vacation.’  While you are there please give me a review as well so that this podcast can be seen by other people.  Your reviews really matter.

 

Speaker 2:He wants a five star.  He wants a five star.  He wants a five star.

Sean D'Souza:It is time to take Snippy for a coffee I guess.  Bye for now.

 

Direct download: 006_StoryTelling_2.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:09pm NZDT

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.

 

 

Direct download: 005_StoryTelling_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:38pm NZDT

When you're in marketing, one of the big "marketing strategies" is to appear bigger than you are. Every one in the marketing field or in business is always talking about "six figure" incomes and "how to get thousands of customers". And so you and I get pulled along with this crazy tsunami. We stop being who we truly are, and start behaving like someone else. How can we be true to ourselves? How can we be our crazy selves and still succeed online?

For more of the good, crazy stuff, go to http://www.psychotactics.com

TimeStamps

00:00:20 Marsha's Confusion
00:04:10 How to Find Your True Personality
00:07:22 Why Personality is Important
00:09:08 Copying Someone Else
00:13:21 Summary
00:14:37 Getting Started-Action Plan

Direct download: 004_Creating_A_Personality.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:06pm NZDT

It's not easy to save time. We all know that. Yet, time management isn't just a factor of getting a fancy to-do list. Sometimes it involves some pretty odd things that you have to do. At Psychotactics, I didn't always have time. Now my workload has more than doubled, but I have a lot of time. How did that happen? 

More at http://www.psychotactics.com

Time Stamps:

00:00:20 Introduction /
00:02:54 | Tip 1: Keep Stuff Open At All Times
00:08:22 | Tip 2: Leave the Office?And Plan Obsessively?And Weekly!
00:13:22 | Tip 3: Spend Two Hours To Save 5 Minutes
00:17:07 | Summary
00:18:40

Transcript

Sean:Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com.

Speaker 2:And I am his evil twin. 

Sean:And you're listening to the Three Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead, it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. 

I want to start today with just a little boast. I write several courses every year, like 200 pages and then we do the course where we have sometimes 20 or 30,000 posts on a single course. I'll write articles, I'll do workshops. Not lots them, maybe once a year, but it takes a lot of planning. Then I'll be in 5000bc.com which is our membership site. Yes, there's lots of other work-related activities but I also mentor my niece, which means that I stop work at about 12:00 every afternoon. I'll take a break, often take a nap, and I'll explain that in another show and why it's so important. Then I will work with my niece until 7:30 that evening. 

The point is that I was boasting there. The other point is that it's all true. Now granted, I do wake up at 4 AM but I also take three months off every year. Where do I find the time to do all this stuff? There are certain things that I've learned over the years, and when I go back to who I was back in 1990 or in the year 2000 or 2005, I was not the same person. I was always battling for time and always struggling with stuff. I had to figure out what am I going to do. How is this going to change? Why is it that I'm always battling with this factor of time? I realized that some people do things slightly differently. On today's show I'm going to talk about three things that would seem radical in a way. I would ask you to try it, because it works really well. 

The first thing that we're going to talk about is just the factor of keeping things ready. We'll find out what this is all about. The second thing we're going to cover in the show is just to leave the office, which sounds really odd. The third thing is to spend about an hour or two hours so that you can save five minutes. As you can see, this is pretty radical stuff, but it will save you enormous amounts of time during the year. Let's get on with the show, shall we?

Back in 2010 I started watercolors. I went to a watercolor course nearby. In fact, it was my third or fourth watercolor course. I had never succeeded in painting and so I decided I'm going to get this done. But it was the guy who was conducting the watercolor course that made a difference to me. His name was Ted and he said "Sean, why don't you get a diary and why don't you just put your stuff in there everyday? Just draw what happened to you." I thought that's a good idea. I thought wow, that's a good idea. I could do that. I could just take something that happened to me that day and put it in the book, in the diary.

Now the good thing was that I already had a whole bunch of Moleskine diaries that I'd put earlier a couple of years ago, never used them. Now I could use them. I started to use them, but soon enough chaos reigned. I would forget the diary somewhere and I would sometimes have to diary and not the pens. Then I realized that the reason why I wasn't getting anything done was I didn't have all my stuff with me open at all times. Now this sounds really odd but if you don't have your stuff open and ready to go, you simply lose momentum. If I we're to go into my bag, even if I had my drawing, and then get it out of the bag and then open the book and get to the right page, and then open the pencil box, and then sharpen the pencils, it's five or seven minutes or eight minutes - if I get everything right.

What I started doing was I started keeping everything open. I started keeping all my watercolors there ready to go. I started keeping all my paints ready to go. As a result I have now done a watercolor almost every single day for four years. That's, wow, 365, but I end up doing a little more so maybe about 1,200, 1,500 watercolors that I wouldn't have done, had never done before. Where do you get this kind of time? Just the fact that you have to open stuff takes up a lot of time. I have Scrivener on my computer and when I do my courses, what I do is I keep Scrivener open all the time. I know this sounds crazy for people who want to close everything and keep it neat, but having to open Scrivener, find the file, put in all that assignments that I've written for the course, all of that takes just five minutes. There's five minutes here and five minutes there and five minutes everywhere. Yes, it adds up to an hour but what's more debilitating is that it actually ends up with a couple of hours, because the energy required to do this mindless exercise is fascinating. 

What I tend to do is I keep everything ready. When I go for my walk everyday, and I go for my walk everyday because if I don't go for my walk everyday I'm not just fit but I don't listen to the podcast. I don't listen. I don't educate myself. I don't listen to audiobooks. I don't do a lot of stuff. All the podcasts, all the audiobooks, all of the information that I need for my trip, I'm learning languages - all of that is there on my iPhone. When I'm on the walk it's there. I switch on the iPhone as I leave the house. I speak to my wife a little while and then we start listening at a specific point. 

The first point I'm trying to say to you is if you're writing a sales letter or you're writing a article, or you're doing whatever you're doing, you have to keep the stuff ready. You have to keep it ready to go. If it's the previous night or the previous day or on your computer or on your desk, keep it ready to go. That saves an enormous amount of time. That sounds like a really simple tip but it's very powerful. The momentum - that's what you're really battling with. The fact that you have to go and you have to put on your shoes to go for a walk. If your shoes are already halfway out of the door, you might as well just put them on and then when you do that you go for a walk. When you go for a walk you listen to the podcast. When you listen to the podcast you get smarter. When you get smarter you're able to implement stuff. 

Really that is what it's about. Preparation makes a huge difference. The people who succeed consistently are people who are prepared long before the opportunity arrives. The people who struggle all the time because they're opening their books while somethings going to happen. They're opening their program while something's happening. The prepared ones, they're already there. That's the first tip: just keep stuff open. Keep it ready to go. Keep it there the previous night or whenever. Keep it ready. 

The second thing that has been of enormous use to me in saving time has been to leave the office. Now this sounds totally counterproductive. Why would you leave the office? Office is where your computer is. You get a lot of stuff done. Why would you leave the office? For one, because the office is your execution place. It is not your thought place. It is not your learning place. When you leave the office you will find that all of your great ideas, all of your fabulous money-making schemes, they all happen in the car or when you're going for a walk, or you're doing whatever you're doing. My wife and I, we sometimes go to the café. Not sometimes, we actually go to the café a lot. The trip there and back is the most productive part of our day. At the café we probably read something or draw or plan. I'm getting to that shortly. 

The point is that the office is the least productive place. 

Speaker 2:To be fair, he doesn't get very good coffee in the office anyway. 

Sean:The office is where you execute, not where you think. In fact, if I'm doing presentations I will take a pencil and a paper and go out. I'm really good at doing everything on the computer but I will still go outside and do it all. It's the thinking, it's the planning that makes a big difference. That takes me to this whole concept of planning. We make elaborate plans. We plan monthly, weekly, yearly. Every Friday we have a couple of hours of just planning. We just go to the café and we plan. You think well, I keep planning as well but nothing comes of those plans. You'd be surprised that if you just keep at this exercise of planning on the same day every week you will find that you are moving ahead at a far brisker rate than if you didn't plan at all. You have to do this almost methodically. You have to do this on a regular basis. You have to say Wednesday 3:00 to 4:00, that's all I'm going to do. I'm going to plan. You go "I don't have enough time to do stuff," but planning is what clears your mind. When I did one of the planning sessions I realized that I was just going nuts. 

Now Pscyhotactics has been around since 2002. We've got lots of articles. We've got courses. We've got products. We've got all that stuff. Then suddenly it occurred to me that I could do podcasts. Suddenly I wanted to write some books for Kindle. Then I wanted to do this and do that. When I sat down at that planning session I realized that I was stupid, that I could never get all of that stuff done. I had been spinning for a couple of weeks just trying to get stuff done, hoping I could get it, and in the process getting absolutely nothing done. 

The plan revealed my weaknesses. That's what I say to people. I say this to clients, I say this to my friends, I say this to everyone. Keep on planning, because planning is priceless and plans are useless. But the person who has the planning, you have to fulfill this goal of yours. If you don't have that goal and that goal is not reviewed on a regular basis ... This is not a to-do list. It's a plan. It's where I'm going. Leave the office. Get all your ideas in the car. Go for a walk. Get fit. Yes, spend time planning. You'll say why is that such a time-saving device? Because it gets rid of all the million things that you plan to do and you couldn't fit in. Now you can do the things that you could do or you want to do. 

The planning really clears your mind. It focuses your in the right direction. That is a huge time-saving device. When I leave the office I often try to find a café that doesn't have an internet connection. Sometimes it's a real pain because I really want to check stuff and I want to see stuff, but not having that internet connection is really cool. If you can find a café like that, that would be really good. Leave the office and plan obsessively.

This takes us to the third idea of time management, really. That is that you often have to spend two hours to save five minutes. Now that might sound really crazy but let me give you an example. I have a program called Text Expander. Now Text Expander is a tool where if I just type in a couple of letters it can expand into a whole paragraph. For instance, if you asked me "What is your address?", then I would type addx and it would spill out the entire address, my postal address, my home address. Say you had a problem downloading something from our website. Now a lot of people have issues, especially with Internet Explorer. There's a browser issue. In this case it's not downloading. Often you just change the browser and it downloads the product. There's nothing wrong with the product or the server. It's just a browser issue.

I have to then go to this browser, do this. It's a whole couple of paragraphs, maybe three paragraphs. These are just instructions. All I have to type is “browx", which is what I've set up obviously. The point is it spills out all of the information and now that person gets the information, they're able to download that product. But it took me three seconds. It took me half an hour or 45 minutes or one hour to learn how to use that program effectively. Because a lot of programs are very effective and we learn 1/10 or 1/100 of that program and it can do a lot of stuff. That's what we don't realize. I type a lot in forums when we have our courses, like the article writing course or copywriting course. There is formatting to be done. The top subhead has to be in bold and red and italics. Then you go around formatting all of that and you've gone and done five clicks. I can do it in one second. 

The reason is had to spend a couple of hours going through a tutorial learning all the stuff so I could save three or four minutes in a day. But what happens is then those three and four minutes expand everyday. Suddenly you wasted hundreds of hours, hundreds of hours every year. But it's not just a concept of hundreds of hours. It's also wasting a hundred or more hours just getting tired. All of that typing and retyping - and you can say "Okay, I can cut and paste," but you're learning Photoshop, you're learning programs. You need to spend a couple of hours that you don't have right now to save those five minutes. You will realize how much faster you are. 

This is true especially for the technology that you have on your computer, that you use three, four times a day. I would really suggest this. In design I use Photoshop, I use a whole bunch of programs. Every time I educate myself on it it has saved me enormous amounts of hours in the day. I hit myself on the wall.

Speaker 2:He doesn't really do that. That would be an amusing sight, wouldn't it?

Sean:I think why didn't I do this earlier? Why didn't I actually spend some more time learning how these programs work? Every time I do it saves me time. That's my recommend to you. Spend two hours and save five minutes. 

Let's summarize. The first thing that we did was just to keep stuff ready, keep stuff open, keep it open all the time. It's really cool. Don't keep too many things open. You don't have to have 25 tabs open, but the stuff that you really need, the programs, keep it open. Keep your books open and it saves you an enormous amount of time. I know it's a crazy suggestion. Try it. 

The second things is leave the office. The office is just a place where you execute. You waste a lot of time at the office. Go out there, get your plans together. Planning saves enormous amounts of time. It tells you what not to do. Your stop-doing list, it comes out in planning. 

Third and very important is to make sure that you learn the technology that you use everyday, whatever programs that you use everyday. Take a tutorial on it. Spend time on it. Don't do all your programs. Just do the ones that are most critical, things like Text Expander or Scrivener or programs like that which you're going to use on a regular basis. You will save enormous amounts of time. 

This brings us to the end of the third podcast. We have reached podcast number three. If you haven't got the first two podcasts go to iTunes and download them. Be sure to leave us a review as well. It helps me stay focused and get this job done well. Thanks again for listening, and this is brought to you by Psychotactics.com and the Three Month Vacation. You can't have a vacation if you don't have time, so might as well start saving time now. Bye bye. 

You're still listening. Well, if you have any suggestions or any feedback, send it to me at sean@pscyhotactics.com. I will be paying attention to it for sure. 

 

Direct download: 003_Time_Management_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:19pm NZDT

It's not enough to want to have passive income. You may think it's a smart way to go about things, but in fact, it's pretty shallow. You want to create magic, and to create that magic you need the help of the three-prong system. Businesses such as Harley Davidson, football, cricket, and of course, big organisations like religion have the three prong system at their very core. At Psychotactics, we've used the three-prong system the moment we figured it out. It's more than a business plan, it's a long-term understanding of where you business will be for years to come. 

You can see more at http://www.psychotactics.com or e-mail me at sean@psychotactics.com.

Chapters:
00:00:20 Introduction to Three-Prong /
00:01:43 The Three-Prong System /
00:04:38 Why Consulting, Training and Leverage are Needed /
00:04:46 Why Consulting, Training and Leverage are Needed /
00:08:45 Our Start at Psychotactics /
00:10:07 Why Bother With Consulting? /
00:11:39 Action Plan /
00:13:32 Final Recommendations / 00:14:51

 

Transcript

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Sean D'Souza:Hi this is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com.

Speaker 1:I'm his evil twin.

Sean D'Souza:You're listening to the Three-Month Vacation podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. 

Back in 1990 I used to work for an advertising agency and I had a great boss. Every time I ask my boss, "Can I take the day off?" She would give me the day off. Now you would think that was an ideal situation but it wasn't for me. I didn't like to ask for the day off. I got into my own business. But that didn't really solve my problem because I was a cartoonist back then and whenever I went on vacation, I would comeback and I would meet with my clients and they would say something like, "Oh where were you?" I would say, "Oh I just was on vacation." They'd say, "By the way we were looking out for you and we can't find you and so we gave the job to someone else."

That could get me really stressed because now, no longer was I losing out on the jobs but I wasn't enjoying my vacations. I was always worried that I was losing out on money and I have competitors now because my client were going out and finding people while I was on vacation. I had to sit down and think about it, how do I overcome this problem?

Interestingly, organizations that have lasted hundreds of thousands of years have a system that has worked amazingly well. I call it the Three-Prong System. What is Three-Prong System? No matter which business you look at it's built on three prongs or at least it should be built on three prongs. The first prong is consulting. The second prong is training. The third is leverage.

Let's look at consulting. What is consulting? Consulting is just a fancy name for one-on-one. Effectively when you go out there and you speak to a client then what you're doing is you're physically going out there. You have to be there for the transaction to happen. That

Speaker 1:Yes, there is such a thing because you have to go through this meeting after meeting after meeting, [inaudible 00:02:41], it's such a pain.

Sean D'Souza:There are meetings but I also enjoyed it a lot. Consulting could be something like meeting with a client for coffee or for lunch. When you physically have to go across and you have to be there in person. That is one-on-one, that's what you see, lots of [inaudible 00:03:04] people doing, they come to your house, they fix up the plumbing or they do some carpentry. Effectively what they're doing is consulting. They have to be there because if they're not there, they don't get paid. This is the most tedious way to get paid.

That's [inaudible 00:03:23] to the second one which is training. What is training? Training is one-to-many. When you do a workshop for instance, you're one person and there are many people at the same time. Courses, webinars, anything that is live and needs you to be there at a specific time and specific place is what you call training. That is less intensive than consulting because now you are dealing with a whole bunch of people. But it's not as great as leverage. 

You already know what leverage means. Leverage is just, you don't have to be there. It's an Elvis business. You've left the building as it were. You're at the beach, you're somewhere else, you are at the café or you're just asleep or on vacation. The point is that when you have books or recorded podcast or products or services that are selling while you're not around, that is a leverage business. It's very easy to come to a conclusion that the leverage business is the best business going. It's not. It's only one of three prongs. 

Let's take an example to find out just what this means. When we look at organizations such as religious organizations, we see the best structure of the three-prong system. They have consulting where someone can meet with you one-on-one. They have training which is one -to-many. Then they have leverage, where they sell books and things that you would buy if you are part of that religion.

When we say religion, your mind automatically goes to something like a church or a mosque or a temple, wherever you come from. However, religion can mean anything. Harley Davidson has a bunch of people called hogs, H-O-G-S. They are part of a religion, the Harley Davidson religion. When you look at football, again it has a religion. All of these structures wherever you're part of an organization, part of a system, will have this structure in place and some structures will be better than others. 

However, what you need to do is you need to figure out, how am I going to do this and how is it going to help me take more vacations? The answer for me lay in the fact that I had to less consulting. This is what you've got to think about. All of us love to consult. All of us like to work with clients. Many of us like to work with clients. The reason why we like to work with clients is simply because it's one-on-one, it's not having to deal with the big crowd. It really helps if you're an introvert. It also helps if you're an extrovert because you're still getting to meet people.

However, once we step out of the comfort zone, we also increase our income. That leads us to training. Now training is effectively harder because now you have to deal with a group of people. However, what is happening here is pretty obvious. Instead of earning $20 an hour working with one person or $50 an hour working with one person or $150 dollar an hour working with a single person, you are earning a $150 multiplied by 10 or 20 people.

What you're starting to do is earn a much larger fee for the same amount of time and possibly the same amount of effort. When we move on to the last part which is leverage, you are now taking that information that you put in that workshop or in that webinar or in that series. You're putting it together in a format which is an information product. That gives you leverage.

Speaker 1:Sure baby I already know about this, we've seen training and consulting and leverage, what's your point here? What are you trying to say? What should we be doing with this information?

Sean D'Souza:Yes, that's the whole point. We have to sit down and work out something very important. That is, how much of my business is consulting-based? How much of my business is training-based? How much of it is leverage? You want to have the smallest slice of that pie to be consulting. Because consulting takes up the most time and effort and in most cases, brings the least result or the least income or the least impact.

You have far more impact with training and you have even more impact with a book or a workshop or a training that has been recorded and then distributed to a whole group of people. What happens as a result is, someone might read a book and then come in for consulting. Someone might read a book and then come in for training. This is what happens.

When we started out, I didn't really have this system in place but I did have a training situation. I spoke in front of a group of people and someone asked me to put it down as notes. I didn't have a name for the book but I called it, The Brain Audit. Then we started selling the book. As a result of the book, we started getting revenue from leverage which was just the book. It was just a 16-page book at that point in time but we started getting the revenue from the book. 

We also started getting people coming back for training. We could have little workshops and that got us started, because we were new in New Zealand. We didn't know anyone. It was this little book that was helping us on our way. Finally, what it did was help us to create a membership site which is 5000 BC. Everyone who read the Brain Audit and only those people were allowed into 5000 BC. It has helped us create consulting, training and leverage and it continues to do so. 

The question that arises is, why don't we just dump consulting? Why do we bother with consulting at all? The reason is just that consulting brings up questions. When you deal with at least some people, one-on-one, they bring up questions. That helps you to develop your products and your services a lot better. Training, consulting and leverage. They all community-exist with each and they're all responsible, you can look at them as doorways. If you have only one door that your clients can enter through and leave, then they enter and they leave. But if you have many doorways, then they kind of cross-pollinate. That is really powerful to watch. 

But more than anything else it allows you that possibility of breaks after vacation. Because the information, the products, all of that stuff keeps selling while we're not around. While we're on vacation, 5000 BC continues to take over. It's another story how it takes over but it continues to be a form of leverage. While we're on vacation, the books and the products and whatever we've recorded, all of that continues to sell. You're taking a paid vacation.

That is the three-prong system in a nutshell. It's leverage, training and consulting. One-on-one, one-to-many and once recorded and sold forever. 

What's your action plan as a result of listening to this three-prong system? The first thing you need to do is just go back, get a piece of paper, draw a circle and then divide that circle into three parts. How are you going to divide it into three parts? You're going to divide it based on how much consulting you do, how much training you do and how much leverage you have. Some of us will have nothing. Some of us are just starting out and that's what I did. You're going to determine how much you want to have. Accordingly, you're going to have to study and put things together so that you get really good at that sector.

Supposing you want to do training then you want to read books on how to do better presentations, how to do better webinars, and all those kinds of things. If you, on the other hand, want to write books, you probably want to do an article-writing course and information product course. That is your forte at this point in time. It's not enough to just listen to people and say, "OK, I'm going to write all these books on kindle and I'm going to make a fortune." What you've got to do is figure out where you want to go. If you're already in the business, you're already quite established, you might find that you are doing training. Whether you're spending 60%-70% of your time outside your house, you don't see your kids, you don't see your family, you don't really get a break. 

You want to change that around and start moving in another direction. That's really what the three-prong is so powerful. It's about figuring out if you're doing too much consulting or too much training or too much leverage or if you're not doing anything, how to go about it.

This brings us to the end of the second episode of the Three Month Vacation. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you've already subscribed at iTunes. If you haven't subscribed, do so now. Be sure to leave a review as well. The review really helps us and if you have suggestions, email me at sean@psychotactics.com. You know I'm up at 4AM. You know I will be responding to your email. This production takes a bit of a while to get together all the music and all the stuff that you've been listening to. But there's another part that you may not have realized.

If you're listening on a smartphone, you also have access to chapters, which means you can press forward and it will go to a specific chapter, just like in a book. You can also do this on your computer. Give it a go and you will be able to go back to the audios some other point in time and then access a specific point. All of these little things brought to you psychotactics.com. That's me Sean D'Souza.

Speaker 1:That's me, very, very sleepy evil twin being forced to wake up at 4 o'clock.

 

Sean D'Souza:By for now and tune in for the next episode where I deal with time management. These are my methods of time management which are slightly offbeat but I'm sure you'll enjoy them. Bye for now.

 

Direct download: TMV_002_Three_Prong_System.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:05am NZDT

There's a difference between the "four-hour workweek" and magic. You can create revenue in a short week. You can't create magic. Magic is what we all want to create with our work. Most of us love our work. It gives us purpose and satisfaction. And yes, we'd love a "three-month" paid vacation—or just any vacation at all. And that's the goal. The goal is to work hard, but to also have a great time. 

 

Yup, it's the Psychotactics Website

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Why You Can't Outsource Magic

 

I don't mow the lawns. I outsource it.
I don't do my accounts. It's what keeps my accountant in business. I bake my own bread, cook my own food, but at least half of the time it's all outsourced. In fact, when I think about it, a good chunk of my life is outsourced.

 

I don't build my own computers, code my own programs, generate my own electricity. I didn't even bother to weave my own carpet.

 

So yes, you could safely say that outsourcing is a good part of my life.

 

What I don't outsource is magic
It's magical to write my own articles. Do my own books. Draw my own cartoons. Answer my own email.

 

When I think about those who keep yearning for a "four-hour" work week, I find it incredibly weird and unsettling. I think of Leonardo da Vinci spending only four hours a week, painting. I think of Michelangelo goofing off on David and just putting in the least amount of time.

 

I think of the wine I drink and how it would taste if the wine maker decided not to put in 50-60 hours a week. I remember the movies that moved me, the food that tantalised my taste buds, the books that have elevated my senses. I think of all the magic the world has seen, felt and experienced over the years and a "four hour" workweek makes zero-sense to me.

 

You can create money in four hours
You can't create magic. Money isn't magic. It may seem that way, when you're slogging in a job that you have no control over. A life that seems to pull and push you in all directions. At that point, money and magic may seem like one and the same thing. And yet it's not.

 

Work is magic
Work well done, is something we all yearn for. And try as you may, you can't outsource the important stuff in life. So when some internet marketer comes along and tells you that a four-hour work week is magical, they're just equating work with money. That somehow you could work for four hours in a week, and make all the money and you'd be happy.

 

I can assure you that you'd be happy for a while, but then you'd seek magic.

 

And magic yup, that takes a lot more time and effort.

 

I wake up at 4 am every day and have done so for many years

I don't have to wake up. We've done well over the years. We have a business which attracts really phenomenal customers. Some of them have been with us for over 12 years (considering we're Internet-based, that's like a hundred years).

 

Our workshops are always full. Our courses often sell out in an hour or so sometimes 20 minutes. We've banked enough, own enough, travel three months in a year. Truly speaking, if we were to stop working now, we could go for at least another 20-30 years, living our comfortable lifestyle.

 

So why wake up at 4 am?
Why put in 99 cartoons in a book when people are happy to just buy text? Why bother to re-write, re-engineer our courses by 20-30% every year? It's all extra work, isn't it? More hours in a day, month and year that seems to slip by increasingly faster.

 

The answer lies in magic

You can outsource some stuff, and you should. But to create the Mona Lisa, David and some fine wine yup, that's going to take a chunky 50-60 hours a week.

 

 

Get used to it!

Direct download: 001_Magic_vs_Outsourcing.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00pm NZDT

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