Mon, 25 May 2015
How much time does it take to do research? Yup, those zillions of hours go down the drain and get us exhausted. And that's because we go about doing research the "wrong way". Most of us do our research once we sit down to write an artilce, create a webinar or podcast. A zillion hours later, the content is still not ready and the hours have flown away needlessly. That needn't be the case at all. Almost all research needs to be done in advance and stored away. But how do you find it once it's stored away? That's where the power of "opposite" tagging", default notebook and the phone and iPad come along. Find out how to reclaim those zillions of hours back—right now! -------------------- Useful Resources To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/41 Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic -------------------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Finding Money In My Jeans 00:06:08 Part 1: How To Take Pictures 00:19:35 Summary ==== Transcript This is the 3-Month Vacation and I'm Sean D'Souza. When I was a teenager, nothing was more interesting to me than finding money in my pant pockets. I'd have all these pairs of jeans and obviously I'd use some of them and then not use the others, and just mix them around. Then eventually I'd go back to the same pair of jeans, yes, dirty jeans, we know. You're a teenager, remember? Then I'd find money and I'd announce it to the world. My mother would go, "But, it's your own money." I just found it really interesting. I found it very exciting to find money that I thought I didn't have. I don't know what it might feel like to win the lottery because I'll never buy a lottery ticket, but this sure felt great. To me it felt like winning the lottery. There was of course, a problem with this method, and that was I couldn't find money when I needed it, and so it was not such an efficient method. Evernote on the other hand, is an amazing tool. If you want to find information, you can find it every single time. When I first got Evernote, I thought it was a pretty average tool. I didn't understand it. You know how you sit down and you do research every time you're writing an article or you're writing a book or you're creating a podcast or a video? That's the worst time to ever do research. Research should be done in advance. Evernote is a research tool where you collect all your information in advance and then you're able to find it easily. In fact, you don't have to remember anything because Evernote will remember it for you. In this episode we're also going to cover a concept of tagging that you've probably not considered and that will make your entire presentation, your books and other stuff, amazing. Back in 2010, I was doing a workshop on uniqueness and we were doing the workshop in California, then in Washington D.C. and then in Guildford, which is just outside London. That summer was a brutal summer for me. Remember, summer is December in New Zealand, so all of December, and a good part of January, I was really tired because I had been writing the notes for the workshop. We always send the notes month in advance for all our workshops. We send all the participants the notes a month in advance. Then once I finished the notes I had to start on the slide. When I'm working on slides, I'll put most of the information together and then I'll leave some slides blank for examples and more information that I need to add later. The time came for us to leave on our trip and off we went to the U.S. We reached Campbell, California. That was our first stop. After the first day, which went really well, I sat down in the evening and I went through my slides for the next day. At that point in time, I found a whole bunch of slides that had blanks in them, as in they had the information but there were no graphics and there were no examples and I just cannot have a presentation without a ton of examples. That really helps the participants understand the concept. It also breaks up this intensity of information. I've got no examples and it's 8:00 at night. I've been up since 4 in the morning and been running around all day at the workshop. Where am I going to find any examples at this hour? I go to my pant pockets. That's Evernote. I dig into them and there are 108 notes on uniqueness. Now, not all of them are examples, but 108 notes on one topic and I'm ecstatic. I mean, I'm exhausted but I'm ecstatic because at least I can get some of the examples, take screenshots, do what I have to do and I'm ready for the presentation the next day. This is the power of Evernote. It's the power of doing research in advance long before you need it. What are we going to cover today? The first thing that we're going to cover today is how to take pictures and why they're so critical. The second is tagging. It's not enough to just tag. You have to know how to tag in 2 different ways. The third is the factor of the default notebook and this is very powerful when you're writing a book or creating a series or doing something which is a current kind of project. Let's start off with the first one, which is how to take pictures. You think you know this, right? Well, let's find out. How do I pick up stories along the way? Well, I use my Smartphone as a weapon and then I use my iPad as a second weapon and my computer, that's the third weapon. They're all used in completely different ways, but still to capture stuff from Evernote or to Evernote. Let's first start with the Smartphone. Let's say I'm at the café, because I'm always at the café. My eyes fall on a newspaper or magazine. Now, there's an interesting story and it catches my imagination, so what I'll do is I'll take a picture of that story, a photograph. It doesn't matter whether I need the story or not. Let's say it's a story about Singapore Airlines or another story about cockroaches. I'm going to find the story interesting because it has amused me or it has some relevant information or some facts which are really interesting and so I'm going to take a picture. Then I'll just file it under "Interesting Stories." More often than not, I'll be working on a project. For example, a few months ago I was working on the Information Products course and at that point in time, my entire focus was simply on the course, the course, and nothing but the course. Any story I was reading about somehow ended up being on the course. Let's take, for example, Singapore Airlines. I found that whatever story I read on Singapore Airlines was very interesting. It was about how their air hostesses are trained for as many as 6 months before they go on a regular flight. Now I had no idea why I found that point interesting, but to be trained for 6 months before you get on the flight, that was really interesting. What I also found was that they were sent to schools, they were sent to old age homes and as I read the story, suddenly it seemed to have a lot of depth. When you're writing you're completely in a state of chaos. Everything's moving around you, this chapter's merging to that chapter, you have no clue what's happening. It's best to just put away these examples and maybe file them under "Info Products," because I was working on Info Products or "Singapore Airlines," and then forget about it. Now I used to do this in the old days when I had a PC. I had a swipe file and I would store all these things and then of course, I couldn't find anything. The beauty of Evernote is that when you take a picture, the picture has text in it. Somewhere in the text it said Singapore Airlines. Now, I've taken a photograph, but Evernote recognizes text, so if I can just remember one word or a couple of words about the story or about the incident, say I took a picture about cockroaches and there was information about the cockroaches. It just needs to have the word cockroach on the page. I've taken a photograph and Evernote will find it. That's the beauty of it. I can find whatever I want just by recalling one little fact about that entire story. My phone becomes a weapon. No matte where I go, I'm taking photographs of different stories, different incidents, and yes, I do tag them and I will get to that. The point is even if you don't tag them, but you remember one word in that entire story, you are able to pull it back whenever you want it, on demand. My iPad, I use it differently. Usually I'm reading on the iPad. I don't really surf that much on the iPad. I use it to read books on Kindle and that's the reason why I buy the books on Kindle, so I can read them. Then I highlight a certain section. Say I was reading The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg and in that Charles talks about Michael Phelps and how he did this swim almost blinded. I thought, "This is a great story." I had no idea where I was going to use it, but I thought, "It's a great story." On the iPad, I can highlight it. They have a highlighter in the software and so I just highlighted it and I take a screenshot. If you don't know how to take a screenshot, look online, but you take a screenshot. Then, I send that photograph to Evernote. Then later on, 8 months later or 8 years later, I want to pull up a story on Michael Phelps, like I did in the podcast a few weeks ago, and it's there. I don't have to look for it. Evernote will just find it. It will find all the instances of Michael Phelps and there I've got my story. You can be completely disorganized and take picture after picture, as long as you remember the word or the term, you will be able to find it. However, you want to be a little smarter than that and that's when we start to use tagging. Did I tell you that tagging is super cool? Well, I'm about to tell you how super cool it is. My system, this patented system of tagging, it's better than anything you've ever seen. I'll tell you why. There are 2 ways to tag. Let's find out how. Tagging is just a matter of putting in terms. For instance, say you took a picture of the Himalayas. They're called the Himalayas, by the way, not Himalayas. Let's say you took a picture of the Himalayas and then you decided to tag it as "high" and "mountains," or something like that. You want to tag it the inverse way as well. You want to tag it as "low," so you use the tag "high" and also "low." Use the tag for say another picture, "fast" and "slow." You use the opposites. Why are these opposites so important? Because when you're telling a story, you don't have to go with the story itself. Supposing there's the story of Michael Phelps and how the water clouded his goggles and how he won the championship. Well that's a story about victory, but you could just as easily to one about defeat. Let's say you've got a presentation and you're going to put in a picture and you want to talk about defeat. At that point in time, you bring up this story. How's it going to be about defeat? Well, there is a second place, isn't it? Someone lost by 0.001 seconds or something like that. You can show how that person lost simply because someone else was slightly more prepared. Every story has 2 sides. It depends on how you look at it. It's about winning and losing, about high and low, about fast and slow. Everything can be tagged in several ways. In fact, that's what I do for all my cartoons. You know that I draw cartoons on a regular basis. When I draw the cartoons, I tag them, but I tag them both ways. If you're in a hurry you just tag them "high" and "low" and "fast" and "slow," but if you've got a thesaurus at hand you can put in some more keywords. Now, this is very critical because when you're looking for an example somewhere in the future 3 months from now, 6 years from now, you might type a term like "flexibility." Of course you'd be expecting all the stories that show up to be about people doing yoga, but in fact you will get a story about inflexibility. Then you can run this contrasty kind of story where a certain company was inflexible and how flexibility is important. This creates magic. This is the beauty of Evernote. When you file a story, you want to use the tagging system because sure it takes 3 more second and you're in a big hurry, but when you use the tags, which are for and against, "high" and "low," then you create magic. This magic is going to help you when you need it at 8:00 p.m. at night when you have to do slides on the next day and you can barely keep your eyes open. That's how effective Evernote is, but you have to use tagging. Two types of tagging. This takes us to the third part. The third part is called the default notebook. A lot of people don't know about this as well. Here's why the default notebook is really critical. Now, Evernote stores things in folders which they call notebooks. They're just like books and you can put your stuff with tags, but also in that folder. Let's say I'm doing something on pricing. Then I will tag it with whatever tags I want, like "fast" or "slow," or "high" or "low," but then I will also put it in a notebook. Yes, 2 more seconds that you have to take to do this. Interestingly, you might not be in this mood to put it in a notebook. However, if you're out on a mission, say you're taking pictures of pricing related stuff all along the way. Then what you can do is you can assign a default notebook and you usually do this from your computer. You want to look this up. I'm not going to give you a tutorial right now. It saves you a ton of time because you don't have to allocate the notebook every single time that you're putting in some new information. At one point in time my notebook was allocated to talent because I wanted to write a book on talent and so every single photograph I took or any note I made, just went by default into the talent notebook. If I search the talent notebook in the future, it will be easy to find it without having to put in any tags or anything of that nature. My default notebook was Talent and supposing I ran into a story about pricing or a story about microfilms or a story about just about anything, then it's just a matter of reassigning that photograph or that story to another notebook. If you are just working on a single project and then you're taking hundreds of pictures related to that project, then you don't even have to think about it. It just goes into the default notebook and that saves you an enormous amount of time. While we are mostly talking about the phone and the iPad to store most of your information, you can also use the computer. Evernote has some really good browser extensions. You just go to the Evernote site and whatever browser you're using, say you're using Safari or Firefox, it has browser extensions. When you're on a site anywhere you can click on that browser extension and then save that page to Evernote, which is very cool. Again, you want to go through some of the tagging and maybe put it in a notebook, and that makes it very effective. This is a swipe file online. The beauty of the swipe file is that unlike that money which I would find in my pant pocket every now and then, you can find this every single time. When people say, "Well, I don't have any stories, I can't remember any stories," you shouldn't be looking for stories at the time of writing an article. You shouldn't be looking for stories at the time of writing your presentation. You must not be looking for stories when you're writing your book. They're all there sitting in Evernote, waiting for you when you're ready. Then you just pick from them. That's the beauty of Evernote. What are the 3 things that we covered today? Let's summarize. The first thing that we covered was how to take pictures. You take pictures with your phone and then you just search for them. Evernote will find the text within the pictures. The second thing is the iPad and when you're reading a book, when you're reading a magazine on your iPad, you want to take a screenshot and then upload that to Evernote. Then later on you just use it. The second thing that we covered was this concept of tagging and how you should tag both ways: "high" and "low," "fast" and "slow," which then gives you contrast because it's very average to say, "This mountain is high," and then put a picture of a mountain. If you have something very low that creates a contrast. That creates drama. That's what you're looking for. Finally, it's the default notebook. The default notebook allows you to just take picture after picture after picture without having to do any tagging whatsover. It just goes into the default notebook that you've allocated. Very cool. The biggest benefit of Evernote is that it saves time for me and that all of this research that everyone is doing at the time of writing an article, or writing a book, or doing a podcast, is a complete waste of time. You never do research at that stage. You always do the research in advance. That's what Evernote is. It's your research in advance and it's there to be found on demand. It's 8:30 a.m. on Monday morning and I've been at this podcast recording. This is my second podcast recording for the day. I've been at it since about 3:30 this morning just so that I could have a bank of podcasts because we're going away on vacation. When we go away on vacation, we make sure that we have all the newsletters lined up for the entire month that we've been away and also for a month after we get back. Because once you get back, you're not exactly in the mood to get started right away. It's very easy to just drop the ball. The podcast and the newsletters and anything that needs to go is covered not only for the time that we're away, but when we get back as well. As usual, you can find all of the transcripts and any other information that you need, any resources, at www.psychotactics.com/41. This is true for any of the podcasts, so you just put the slash, number 39, number 38, and you can go there. You can find me on Twitter, at Sean D'Souza. I'm also on Facebook, Sean D'Souza and Sean@psychotactics.com. If you're a member of 5000bc, we discuss these podcasts and other information and if you're not a member, then you want to become a member of 5000bc. When I get back from Italy, I'm going to bring out the article writing course version 2.0. We've had version 1.0 for the longest time. Version 2.0 is coming out. It's really, really good. How do I know it's really, really good? Because it's being supervised by the alumni. They're a strict bunch of people and they're going to make sure that I do a good job. We're also going to have the stock cartoons that I talked about, so you have to be on the newsletter list to get that information. That's going to go pretty quickly because we're going to have a limited number. We don't want the stock cartoons to appear all over the Internet. We're also going to do the headline course and headline trainer and then the brain audit trainer. There's going to be a lot of activity from June to December, but for now I'll say bye and thanks for listening. This is Sean from the 3-Month Vacation and psychotactics.com. Bye-bye.
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Mon, 18 May 2015
Success is good. Focus is good. Until it's bad. Incredible as it may seem, focus can cause a massive blindspot in our business. So what's the option? Surely it can't be distraction? Actually it's a mix of both that's required. Using the concept of "spinning plates", you can avoid the blind spot of success and the mindlessness of distraction. -------------------- Useful Resources To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/40 Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic -------------------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Introduction 00:02:20 Part 1: The Rip Van Winkle Effect 00:08:17 Part 2: Chasing Everything In Sight 00:10:03 Part 3: Spinning Plates 00:13:24 Summary 00:14:00 Action Plan: The One Thing 00:14:20 How We Add Plates 00:19:26 End ----
Sean: This is the Three Month Vacation. I'm Sean D'Souza. Once upon a time in New York's Catskill Mountains lived a man called Rip Van Winkle. You've probably heard of this story. I heard it when I was a kid. I've kind of forgotten what the story was all about. As the story goes, one autumn day he wants to escape from his wife's nagging so he wonders up the mountain with his dog. He hears his name being called out. He sees a man with antiquated Dutch clothing. This man is carrying a keg up the mountain; he wants help. They proceed to a hollow in which Rip discovers the source of the noises. There are a group of bearded men who are playing nine pins. Rip doesn't ask how they know his name but they offer him moonshine, which is a kind of whiskey, illicit whiskey, not legal. He decides to drink and then he falls into a deep sleep.
When he wakes up, it's pretty strange. His musket is rotting; it's rusty. His beard is a foot long. His dog is nowhere in sight. He returns to the village and he finds he recognizes no one. His wife has died. His close friends have fallen in a war; they moved away. This is often what happens in business, especially if you've got a successful business. You get a blind spot. You start focusing on what works for you, and then you work at it and you work at it, and it works even better for you. The longer you work at it, and the more successful you get, the more you have a blind spot to everything else.
Now, almost instantly you're wondering where is this going. Focus is supposed to be good, right? If focus brings success, then what's the problem with having the blind spot? There is a downside, and that's what this episode is all about. It's about understanding that you can have focus and you can have success, but that you can also have a blind spot.
In this episode we're going to explore three elements. First is the concept of the Rip Van Winkle effect. The second is the opposite, which is the danger of not having that focus. The third is the solution. How do we solve this problem of focus and not focusing at the same time? Let's start off with the first, which is understanding the concept of the Rip Va Winkle effect.
If you look around you, you will find that a lot of blogs have shut off their comments. Why have they done this? This is not just little blogs, but big blogs and mega-sized blogs. They've just shut off their comments. Why is this the case? The obvious reaction is maybe they've decided that they're big enough they don't need the comments, but that's not true. Everyone likes to hear back from their customers. Nothing boosts the ego more than having 50, 70, 100, 200 comments on a single post that you made. Remember, when people comment they also send it off to Facebook and Twitter and every other place.
Why turn off that channel? Why turn off the chance for people to experience your blog at a different level? The reason is very simple: that group has moved on. When you look at the most of the blogs today, even the really big ones, they have far fewer comments. It's embarrassing, so they have to turn it off.
Same thing with Facebook. At one point in time you could effectively run a business off Facebook. Slowly but surely, that tide is changing. Suddenly you find that Facebook has all these restrictions in place. Suddenly there are too many people looking at your stuff, but not the people that you want, so the tide keeps changing.
If you made a successful out of blogging or, say, Facebook or any other medium, then it's very simple for you to focus on that medium and not pay that much attention to everything else, so suddenly someone comes around and says, "Hey, podcasting is a big thing." You look at them with skepticism because you tried podcasting four or five years ago and now this stuff, whatever you're doing right now, is still working for you, so you get into that moonshine mode. You fall fast asleep, and that becomes your blind spot.
This is true even for us at Psychotactics. We had a blog going around 2003 before blogs became popular in 2005l; we dropped it. We had podcasts going around 2008-2009 before podcasting became popular; we dropped it. We never really stepped onto YouTube or Facebook or Twitter in a big way, or even a small way. The reason why we did that is because we had a blind spot. We had courses that were filling up super fast. I mean every single course fills up in less than an hour. We've had workshops in New Zealand, in the US, Canada, Netherlands, the UK, and they all fill up almost instantly.
Of course we send out a newsletter weekly. We've done so since 2002 without missing a single week. We're able to sell products for as little as 9.99 all the way up to $400, $500. When you look at that kind of model, you say, "Well, that's good, isn't it? It's great focus," and it is. But the ecosystem is connected. When we first started out in 2002, if we wrote an article and we published it on another site we'd get 200 subscribers. Yes, for a single article. Then we had the blogs come out and we'd get about 50 to 60 subscribers per article. Recently, with all those comments of the blogs turned off, we probably get 2 or 3. We're talking about really big blogs. You would think that the really big blogs would drive traffic towards you. It's not true anymore. They've had to relook their strategy; we've had to relook our strategy. Focus is a great thing, but things can change around you and you've got to be watching for what's happening around you.
This takes us to our second part of today, which is chasing everything that is around you. The opposite of focus is distraction. Most of us are not very good at focus. We are very good at being distracted. Every time someone comes up and says, "Hey, here's a new method," they just put the word new, improved, and we're off like a bullet. It's almost like the diet syndrome: the South Beach Diet, the paleo diet, the Atkins diet, the Zone diet, every single diet. We think that the next diet is going to solve our problem, but it never does.
It's the same thing for business. If you get into doing, say, podcasting, then you have to be prepared to enjoy it. You have to be prepared to love what you're doing so that you can do it for the next five years or ten years. When we do our courses, they're very tough. They're very tough for me. They're very demanding for me. When we do our workshops I'm on my feet for three days. I never sit down. I'm always running around teaching and doing stuff. Even these podcasts, I've already told you before, they take between three to four hours to produce even though they're just 15 minutes or 20 minutes long.
If you want to make a success of anything you're going to have to be willing to be there for the long run, but as we found out, the long run can change over time. It can twist and change, and suddenly blogs are no longer fashionable and Facebook is no longer fashionable. Maybe podcasting will not work out as effectively as it does today. It might still be good. It might not be as effective.
Which is where the third part of today's podcast comes into play, and that is the concept of spinning plates. In the first section we saw the concept of focus on how that focus really helps but also creates a blind spot. Then we saw what happens when you don't have that blind spot and you're chasing everything in sight and not achieving a lot. Where's the happy medium? Where is the happy mix? It's a concept called spinning plates.
Spinning plates is just simply this: it's like someone you've seen at a fair. They put one plate on a stick and then they start to spin it. It goes faster and faster and faster and faster until it reaches a certain speed. Then the person leaves that plate and goes to the next stick, and then starts to spin that plate, and that reaches a certain speed. As the second plate is spinning, the first plate starts to lose some of its momentum and then you have to spin that and then go back to spinning the second one, and then you can put on the third plate.
This is how you're really running your business. If you don't want to have that blind spot, if you don't want to fall asleep by just focusing on a few things, then you've got to use the spinning plates method. We started out with a newsletter and we've done that week after week after week since, as I said, 2002. The second thing was we have courses on a regular basis, every year maybe. An article writing course is held once a year, headlines course is held once a year. During the year there are several courses, and that keeps the customers coming back. Once we settled all these courses and we have the agenda and the syllabus and the system in place, then we were able to add on workshops. Once the workshops were going we were able to add on podcasts.
People often wonder how do you manage to do all these things at once. Doesn't it get you really frazzled? The answer is no. To someone who's not used to spinning plates, it looks like an extremely difficult task, but to someone who's already adept as spinning different plates, it's just a routine thing, as routine as you playing parent and teacher and driver and chef and whatever you do in a day as you spin those plates. It's just a matter of getting that act together.
Once you're able to spin plates you can focus on your current activities and then add new activities as they come along. You don't stay like Rip did, stuck in one place forever and then the whole world changes around you. On the other hand, you don't start chasing every butterfly that crosses your path. The spinning plates is your answer.
Let's summarize what we've learned today. We've already summarized, haven't we? You need to focus but you also need to be distracted. To be able to get the best of both worlds you have to get that focus really strong, get that rolling, and then add the plate. Once you start spinning plates, people will wonder how you're able to manage so much, but there is no secret to it. The people that struggle the most are those that are continuously either too focused or too distracted. You want to be where the spinning plates are.
What's the one thing that you can do today? The one thing that you can do today is to sit down and work out what are things that you are focusing on and what are the thing that are generating the most revenue for you and make you most satisfied. Then you look at what's changing around you. Then you add just one more plate. That's what I did last year. We were not podcasting. As I said, we were podcasting back in 2009 and then we stopped. Then I added the podcasting, and though it takes so much time, and we have courses and we have workshops and we're going to events and we're doing all that stuff, I still have time for my Three Month Vacation. I still have time to spend with my niece, who I mentor. I still have time to go to the movies. I still have time to cook. I still have time to be part of the membership site at 5000 BC, to do a painting every day. I also go for a walk for an hour and a half. I run a website at 5000 BC. Are you getting tired yet?
These are spinning plates. I'm not any different than you, but I've added the spinning plates over time, and that's what you should do, too. Make that list, and then add to that list one by one, and you will be absolutely amazed, gobsmacked at how much you will achieve in the years to come. If you like the Three Month Vacation Podcast, then ask your friends to join in with you as well. Maybe make a walking group and all of you put on your headphones, go for a walk, and then you can discuss it later. I'm just kidding, but at least go for your walk and make sure that your friends know about the Three Month Vacation Podcast. It's full of stories, it's full of information, and it really helps your business. If you haven't already left a review, then please do so, because I will be reading your reviews. Many of you have asked me if I'm going to consider doing a course on podcasting. Maybe email if you're interested, but we are going to be doing a course on headlines and how to create great headlines every single time, not by copying headlines but by understanding how they work. That's later in the year. We're also having a Brain Audit trainer. This is very expensive because it's going to be a year-long program. Brain Audit trainer, headline course, and headline trainer - that will be announced in June or July when we get back from Italy. I also will be working on the cartoon stock stuff that I talked about. I'll be drawing some really good cartoons, maybe about 200 of them. If you would like to use them in your books, in your covers, in your blogs, in your presentations, this is an amazing set of cartoons. You're just absolutely going to love it. They're lavish and it's nothing like what you would find on Stock Cartoon. That project is coming up as well. As you can see, a lot of spinning plates, isn't it? That's how I like it. That's how I thrive. If you would like to get notification for all these events, then you have to get on the Psychotactics newsletter, because that's the only way you'll know. That's at Psychotactics.com. You can find me on Twitter at Sean D'Souza. You can also find me on Facebook at Sean D'Souza. To get the transcript and resources for this podcast, go to www.psychotactics.com/40, and you will get everything there. That's me, the ex-Rip Van Winkle, signing off for now. Bye bye.
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Mon, 11 May 2015
What makes one presentation far superior than the next? What makes you want to binge-listen to some podcasts and just reject the others? What makes one book so readable while the other one is boring? It's the concept of info-tainment. Where information is used to get attention, but entertainment is used to keep that attention. Find out more in this episode. -------------------- Useful Resources To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/39 Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/ -------------------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Start / --------------------- Sean D'Souza: I'm Sean D'Souza. Every morning when I go for my walk I listen to podcasts and I listen to audiobooks. As you know, I also learn a language, but whenever I'm headed out towards the café, it's always podcasts or audiobooks. I started to analyze. I started to think about what is it that I really like to listen to.
Now obviously you get a lot of speakers and a lot of different topics, so you can't just boil it down to one thing, but you can. The one thing that I like to listen to, and I find that a lot of people like to listen to, is something called infotainment. That's information and entertainment. People like to learn stuff, become more intelligent, but they don't want to be bored along the way. It's not just a matter of presenting the information in a good way. You literally have to provide entertainment, so how you provide entertainment. As part of my analysis I started reading a lot of articles and books. I started listening to more audiobooks, and then listened to some presentations as well, and I figured out the difference. The difference is a story well told. I like to split up stories well told into three categories. The first is the analogy, the second is the case study, and the third are history lessons. How do we use these concepts to make our information more interesting, to make our articles more interesting, and especially to make our presentations more interesting? More importantly, why would analogies, case studies, and history lesson be so important. The reason is very simple. Information is tiring. That's it. Whenever you give someone information, if they already know the information, [inaudible 00:02:06] just revising the information. If you give them new information, some new concept, so new methods, it starts to seem very nice and very interesting, but as you go past five, ten, 15 minutes, the brain is trying to work out not only what you're saying but also how to apply it, so it gets extremely tiring. That's when the brain needs a break. The brain not only needs a break but it could also do with an example. That's where analogies, case studies, and history lessons come into play. Let's start off with the first one, which is the analogy. In this episode we'll do something slightly different. I'll talk about good analogies and bad analogies, and good case studies and bad case studies, and so on. Let's start off with the good analogy. What is a good analogy? Well, let's start off with what is a bad analogy. I'm sitting there with this photographer and I've been trying to get in touch with him for quite a while, and he's been fobbing me off. Then eventually we sit at this café. It's about an hour and he's going on into this bad analogy after bad analogy after bad analogy. What is this bad analogy? He's explaining to me how photography should have strong foundations. He talks about a house that's built on sand vs. on rock. The point is, has he given me any new information? Is the analogy any different from something I know before. When he's using that analogy it's very boring. I've already heard the story of the house built on sand vs. rock. Then he goes on to even more analogies. I can't tell you what those analogies are because I was completely bored out of my skull. The whole one hour that I was there, he went into analogy after analogy, and then talked about photography in the middle. But I was fast asleep. This is what happens. Your customers are going to be fast asleep because your analogies are not interesting. What makes interesting analogies? You can get interesting analogies from day to day life. I just told you an interesting analogy. I told you about boring, but I didn't tell you about boredom in a way that you probably heard before. I told you a story about the photographer and how he was boring me to death. In The Brain Audit we talk about the seven red bags. You probably heard the story but you might as well hear it again. It's about how seven red bags are put on the flight and then the person gets off at the other end and they're waiting at the conveyor belt or the carousel to pick up their seven red bags. Then one bag comes out, and second red bag comes out, and third red bag comes out. It builds up to the fifth red bag and the sixth red bag, and then the seventh red bag doesn't show up. The difference between this analogy and that boring house on the sand analogy is the fact that you know 90% of the analogy but you don't know how 10% is going to roll out. You stood there waiting for your bags at the airport. You've done that; I've done that; everyone has done that, mostly. We can relate to that concept, but the story slightly changes. That's the beauty of the analogy. The analogy that is powerful is not an analogy that you know 100% in advance, because that is boring. The analogy is taken from a situation that we're aware of, that we are probably 90% aware of, but that has that little 10% twist. In this case, the red bags have the twist, and the fact that the seventh red bag didn't show up. When you're building your analogies, you want to build it in this kind of concept that we already know but there is a little shift in the concept, like the time I was trying to explain how I got stuck. Instead of just saying I got stuck at this conference and I couldn't get out, you shift it just a little bit. I had gone to a yoga class, and after the yoga class it was raining, pelting down. I came out and I was trying to get into my car. Actually, it was my wife's car because, well ... it's a long story. Anyway, I was trying to get into the car and trying to shove that key in, try and get it open because I didn't have an umbrella and it's raining. The door wouldn't open. I'm looking at the car. I parked it right there and it wouldn't open, and I'm going crazy. Some of the people came up from the yoga class, said, "Why don't you try to get in from the boot?" I tried that and almost twisted the key. I couldn't get in. Just as I was trying to get in, from the corner of my eye I saw another car that looked identical to the one I was trying to get in. The car, the identical one, that was my car, or rather, my wife's car. I was stuck because I was trying to get into the wrong car. That makes an interesting analogy. Personal stories make for better analogies because they have this natural flow of something happening, then something else happening, and then something else happening. You can encapsulate all of the something else in either a couple of paragraphs ... Well, you don't want to do more than a couple of paragraphs when you're writing an article, but if you're doing a podcast, it could go on for two, three minutes and people would still follow along because there is this sequence. This makes an analogy interesting, instead of the house on sand vs. the house on rock. I want you to notice something even as you're listening to this podcast or probably reading the transcript. The stories are getting you interested. Your brain is trying to wrap around how am I going to do this analogy bit. But even as you're listening, the story is helping you relax a bit and it's also giving you an example of possibly how you could attack this problem. Analogies are not the only way to go, obviously. You can also have case studies. How do you handle case studies, and what are good case studies, and what are bad case studies? The thing about case studies is they're called case studies because they have a before and after, and usually they have an in between as well, so they make for a great story rollout. In the book that I recently wrote, called Dartboard Pricing, it started out with a few case studies. One of the case studies was about this guy called Iggy Ignatius, and how he started up an Indian village in the middle of Florida and called it ShantiNiketan, which really means a peaceful place. You can see how he went about generating revenue and then how he built ShantiNiketan. Then just as he was about to sell ShantiNiketan, the real estate market just died. All the stuff that was selling on his side was more expensive than across the road, and he was destroyed. He didn't know what to do. What happens to this case study? You want to know, don't you? Well, as it turned out, he was oversubscribed. All of the people who bought his condominiums, they were excited to be there. They were willing to spend more to have less just so that they could experience the whole lifestyle of ShantiNiketan. This is a case study. The case study started out with someone with a plan, rolled out that plan, got stuck along the way, and then came out a winner. This is a beautiful case study. When you look at businesses, you look at Apple for instance ... I hate to say Apple again, but Apple did really well in 1984. Then by the year 2000 they were ready to die. Nothing was working for them. Then they rose from those ashes like a Phoenix, and today they're the most valuable company in the world. This is a case study. You don't have to take Apple, and that's why I said I don't want to bring up Apple, because everyone knows this case study. But there are thousands of case studies online, and the only factor that you have to consider is one of contrast. Supposing Apple was winning, then they were losing, then they were winning. Or they were losing, then they were winning, but then they lost. Eventually, there has to be that contrast. That makes for a great case study. Now you can go from the company was losing out and then they won, or the company was winning, then they lost. But that in between, that contrast, that little bounce, that makes a huge difference. When you want to create that example, that entertainment, you want to look for that little bounce, or at least create that little bounce. Then you have a great case study. What we've covered so far is the analogy and the case study. Let's look at history lessons. History lessons sound really boring, don't that they? It's not necessarily boring. History doesn't have to go back thousands of years, anyway. A couple of episodes ago I talked about the Stockdale paradox, about how James Stockdale was at the Hanoi Hilton in Vietnam and how he was tortured. The topic was about anti-fragility, so the Stockdale paradox fit completely into anti-fragility. You don't have to stick to war games. You can go to the Olympics or you can go to carrot land. Did you know what happened in 1942 with carrots in Great Britain? Should I tell you? Of course I will. In 1942 there was a carrot surplus. There was 10,000 tons of carrots. They were no onions and no potatoes and no meat, and there were lots of shortages, but carrots? There were lots of carrots. A guy who called himself Dr. Carrot, he reinforced the belief that carrots help you to see in the dark and that the RAF fighter pilots, they also had greater night vision simply because they ate carrots. As you've realized, that story is not true. The reason why the pilots got so good with their accuracy is because of airborne radar. The British government was very keen that the Nazis don't find out about this airborne radar. What happened to the carrots? The carrot consumption increased dramatically. Even so, people drew the line at carrot flan or carrot jam or carrot fudge or [carolade 13:30]. They were a lot of carrot drinks and carrot food, and carrots were everywhere. You see how that history lesson could be so instructive, so interesting? It doesn't have to be boring. Yet, you see speaker after speaker stand up on stage and give you this boring information and more information and more stats and more information. You think, why doesn't he eat carrots? The question is where do you get all these stories and case studies and analogies from? They're all around you. As you're reading a book, as I'm reading a book, what I do is I'll take a snapshot on my iPad, or if it's out in a newspaper I'll take a photograph with the phone. Then I'll store it in Evernote. We'll cover this about Evernote and how magnificent it is in another episode, but I'll keep all this and I'll file this as stories. Then I'll probably put in a little tag as well so that I know what the story's about, but I don't have to. Then later when I'm doing my presentation, or my podcast, or writing an article, there it is. The story is waiting for me and I just have to put it in, and it becomes infotainmnent. Today you got information. You got the fact that analogies help. You got a good analogy, a bad analogy. You got case studies, good case study, bad case study. Then we went onto this whole carrot thing with a history lesson. What happened was you were entertained the whole way. That makes you more eager to listen to future podcasts or read more articles or come to the next presentation. Boredom is a terrible thing, and information can be extremely boring. It can be as if you're being forced to eat carrot fudge. On that repetitive carrot note, let's move to the summary. What did we cover today? We covered analogies, we covered case studies, and we covered stories from history. What we found was that it was important to have this little bounce. You can have a before and after, but the in-between bounce, that's really interesting. Most of all, we found that we can't always get these stories at the last minute so we've got to file them away in places like Evernote. As I said, we'll cover that in a future episode. By the way, that's your action plan as well. You're going to read several stories, case studies. You're going to talk about how something happened to you, and it's going to happen today. It's going to happen tomorrow. It's going to happen the day after. Get Evernote. Start saving the stories. That's what you can do today. I do it every day; so should you. If you want to get more on storytelling, at Psychotactics we have a series on storytelling. You might want to pick that up. There is also the information products course. Now this is more expensive; it's over $1,000. But the reason you should consider it is because it shows you how to construct an information product like a presentation or a book or a booklet. It's very easy to just stack information together and not realize that there are different elements that help the reader to learn as well as get entertained. The information products, over $1,000, worth your money. Finally, the Dartboard Pricing book, you want to check that out if you want to increase your prices and not lose customers. Even Starbucks increases prices every two or three years, and they've increased their prices about 13 times in the last 20 years. When was the last time you increased your prices? Read Dartboard Pricing, and yes, increase your prices, and don't lose customers. I'm on Twitter at Sean D'Souza. I'm on Facebook at Sean D'Souza and at email at sean@psychotactics.com. If you don't want to type so much, it's sean@5000bc.com. All of the resources for this episode can be found at psychotactics.com/39. By the time this episode gets to you, I'll be in Sardinia, Italy, eating, drinking, and having a great time. No work. Bye for now.
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Mon, 4 May 2015
We ask for testimonials and we get them, but are they any good? Or are they the usual sugary stuff that no one really reads. How do you get testimonials that are "journeys" and weigh in at 800-1000 words? Find out in this episode on "how to plan—and yes—get outstanding testimonials.
Oh, and I'm at sean@psychotactics.com. --------------------
Useful Resources Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/
This is the Three Month Vacation. I'm Sean D'Souza. It's August 13, 2008. The time? It's 9:56 AM. Olympic champion Michael Phelps is standing behind his starting block. He bounces. He bounces lightly on his toes. Then the announcer calls his name and he steps onto the block. Michael always waves his hands thrice; he's done that since he was a kid. He then steps on the block again. He gets his position, and then the gun goes off and he jumps into the pool. The moment he's in the water he realizes something is wrong. He doesn't know what is wrong but the moisture seems to fill up the goggles. By the second turn, everything's blurry. By the third lap, his goggles are full of water. But Michael is no longer in Beijing; he's back in Michigan. The pool is a familiar practice pool, not Olympic pool. There's no roar of the crowd. It's just Bob Bowman, his coach. Bob has turned off all the lights off in the Michigan pool just so Michael can learn to swim blind, just in case something like this were to happen, something's that's happening right now at the Olympic finals. Winners always plan, and this is the difference between winners and those that struggle. The ones that struggle don't seem to have a plan in place. For something as minor as a testimonial you might think well, I don't really have to do that much planning. After all, the testimonial is about the client, isn't it? You just ask them the questions or you ask for a testimonial and they give you the testimonial. That's not true. The greatest testimonial is not some sugary-coated "I like your stuff. Your stuff is so great." The really good testimonial is a journey. It's a journey of how the customer bought your product or service, the trials and tribulations they went through, and finally, how they came out at the end. It's more like a movie than just a little Twitter feed. As you'd expect, there are three steps to get there, and we will take those itty bitty steps and we'll get there, and then we'll have our action plan, just one thing you can do, as always. What are the three things that you have to do to ensure that your testimonial is really good? This doesn't matter whether you're doing a course or you're a consultant or you have a product like a book or anything other product. You have to go through these three steps. These three steps don't work in every single instance, but in most instances you'll find that it's very, very useful. What are the three steps? Step number one is to make an appointment. What is an appointment? Let's find out. The second thing is not having examples. Why do examples matter in the first place? The third, and probably the most important, is not having the requisite questions. What are the questions? What questions do we need to ask and how do we get the answers out of the client? This is what a journey is all about. It's about planning. It's about storyboarding. It's not just about showing up for your testimonial and then hoping that the client will give you a great testimonial. We'll take this journey and we'll figure out how we get this great testimonial. When you finish this journey, go back to episode number 37. At 37 you learn the specific points where you can ask for testimonials and get those testimonials long before your project is completed. Not after the project, but before the project is completed. Now we're on episode number 39, and let's find out the three steps that you have to take to make sure that you get these amazing journey-like testimonials. What's the first step that you have to take? The first step that you have to take is making the appointment. Most of us make the appointment at the wrong spot. The spot is usually after the job is done. The appointment needs to be made before the job is done. I explained to you in episode number 37 how we do this in our workshops. On day one there are people that give testimonials, on day two there are people that give testimonials, and day three there are people that give testimonials. What we're doing is we're making appointments. Renuka will go ahead of time, meet these people, make sure that they're ready at a specific point in time. They're seated somewhere. We have the equipment ready. It is an appointment. The same thing applies to your business. Even if you're a consultant, or you're selling a product, you want to make an appointment with a client. You have to be there most of the time. Even if you can't physically be there, you have to make an appointment with the client so that they know this testimonial is coming up. It's not something you just spring on them. They know exactly on this week at this time there's going to be a testimonial. We do this on our courses as well. Before the course ends, as part of the course, clients are asked for their testimonial. They're also asked for their feedback, and we get feedback before testimonials because it helps them get everything out of their system before they give a testimonial. But there is an appointment. This is the part of the planning that a lot of people miss out on. They just send an email to someone expecting that the someone, that client, is going to respond whenever you feel like it, but the client is not going to respond. They need an appointment. It's best to get a testimonial by video because obviously you can get the video and the audio and the transcript. But even an audio testimonial, get on the phone, speak to the client, record the call, and that's an appointment. If you are live at an event, you've got the video, but even if you've got a course and you've got 20 or 30 or even 100 people in your course, you can allocate a certain section of the course where they come in, they know that that's testimonial time. That's an appointment. It's fixed. Then you get your testimonial. The first thing you got to realize is I've got to make an appointment and I've got to stick to that appointment. The second part of the planning process is where a lot of stuff goes wrong. You may do everything right. You may fix the appointment, ask the right questions, but you won't get a testimonial like you expected. That's because you haven't recreated that actual moment. You know the point when Michael Phelps jumped into that pool and was kind of blind? He'd already lived that moment. It was something he could call upon on demand. He was just going back to Michigan, not swimming in that pool in Beijing. To get your clients back to Michigan, what you have to understand is that they have to have something, some form that they can see, something they can refer to so they can give you something that looks exactly the same or very similar. This is not what most of us do. Most of us just show up and ask a bunch of questions. The client needs to see great testimonials in the first instance. When we're doing a course, what we do is we get them to look at examples of two or three testimonial in advance, the testimonials that we've thought are good testimonials. We get them to read it, and they read it because they want to do a good job. They want to give you a good testimonial so they read the earlier testimonial. Now some of our existing testimonials, in fact, a lot of our existing testimonials, are between 800 hundreds to 1,500 words long. When you look at a template like that, when you look at a situation like that, what are you're going to do? The answer is very simple. You're going to try and match that as far as possible. When you don't give the client the example, they don't what to shoot for, but having read that 1,200 word testimonial, they know what to shoot for. That's why we don't get one-line answers. Because once you get one-line answers to your testimonials, say you ask ten questions and you get ten lines as answers, technically it's not a journey. It's a terrible testimonial. You can't really use it. You have to trash it the moment you get it. There's nothing there. You have to have the journey, and the journey consists of 600, 800, 1,200 words. Clients will write that out. Now, not all clients will sit down and write it out, so that's where the phone comes in or the video comes in. We speak at three words a second, so how many words do you get in a minute? Yep, that's 180 words, which means that in ten minutes you can get 1,800 words. That's a pretty big testimonial, isn't it? But the client needs to see the testimonial, and when they do, they get a good feel for it and they give you an equally good testimonial. In a live situation you think, how am I going to do this? What we do is we take a client who has already been through the testimonial process before and we get them to answer the questions. We get the rest of the audience to look at us asking the questions and look at the response that we're getting from the client. Of course they follow through. They follow exactly what the previous client has done, so we get video testimonials that are just as long - five, ten minutes long. Then you have a wealth of information and you have a journey, and you don't have this crappy testimonial that you have to throw out right away. This takes us to the third part, which is asking the right questions. When many of us ask for a testimonial we usually say something like "Can you give me a testimonial?" Then you wait and you wait, and you wait. You don't exactly get a testimonial because the other person doesn't know what to answer. In The Brain Audit we have six questions. You can find them on the internet, or email if you like. I can send you those six questions. However, in courses like the article course we have 17 questions, and that is to get a much richer experience out of the clients. Every situation is going to require a different set of questions, and you're going to have to play with those questions a little bit, not too much. You don't want to really get that creative with your questions. What you're really trying to achieve is a journey. You're trying to achieve a situation which is a before, a midway point, and then the final. What has been the result? We've put together some really cool templates, but The Brain Audit is a very good start. The six questions in The Brain Audit, you get an amazing testimonial from those questions alone. If you've done any of our courses, or if you want the questions, just email me at sean@psychotactics.com, and I will send the questions to you. That's just a thank you for listening to this podcast. Anyway, to get back, the point is very simple. You have to ask the right questions if you're going to get the right answers. Let's just summarize what we've learned so far. The three things that we covered today were first, we need to make an appointment. We can't just send something to someone and hope that something happens. We want to get the journey. We want to get the story. We want the details. We want the starting, the middle, the end. So an appointment is necessary. The second is we have to have examples. If a client doesn't see those examples, they don't know what to shoot for, they don't know what length to shoot for, but mostly they are not motivated to give you more detail. They'll give you one-line answers and then you think that was pretty useless. The third thing is not having the questions. As I said, just the six questions that you get in The Brain Audit, they're amazing. However, if you want more questions then you have to ask me for it. The only point about the additional questions is that a client has to go through a journey for a while with you, because otherwise those questions become too much. The six questions, they're pretty good for most stuff. The 16 or 17 questions that we ask, that's when a client goes through a three-day workshop with us or a three-month course with us. That's when they're ready to answer a lot more questions. It depends where you're going to ask those questions. Don't just throw all the questions at everybody. Are you still going to get bad testimonials? Are you still going to get one-liners? Of course. Some people will give you a single line. They won't give you a paragraph; they won't give you two paragraphs; they're not going to give you 800-word testimonials. These testimonials are pretty useless. A single-line testimonial; five, six, seven line testimonials: they don't really give you a sense of the journey. The other kind of testimonial that you really don't want is this rambling testimonial where someone goes on and on and on and on and editing the whole process becomes a nightmare. You need to make sure that these kind of testimonials, the very short ones and the rambling ones, they're out of the system. Unfortunately, but it's true. The client needs to understand that those two types of testimonials are completely worthless. It's a waste of their time and your time. Still, you take your chances, and 95% of the time you get great testimonials. This brings us to the end of this episode, but what's the one thing that you can do today? The one thing that you can do today is to make sure that you get examples. You want to get a great testimonial in the first place. Of course you have to have the questions for this so get those six questions from The Brain Audit. Get on the phone with the client, especially someone who's a good client, and ask them the questions. Get the testimonial, and when you have that example, that's when you can pass it on to the next client and the next client. You can see what's happening here, right? It's self-replicating. A great testimonial is getting another great testimonial is getting another great testimonial. If you get a crappy one, just drop it. Don't put that in. Don't be tempted. Yes, we've come to the end of episode number 38, but remember, episode number 36 is about your three points, the points where you can get those testimonials. You want to go back to that episode and listen to it several times, and then take action. It's 5:09 PM here in Oakland and it's very hot. It's already autumn but it's pretty hot here. It's not usually the time that I record a testimonial. What am I saying? Not usually the time I record a podcast. It's usually 4:00 in the morning or some other ridiculous time when I wake up. However, this is a busy week. We're headed to the US and we're going to do the info products workshop in Washington D.C.. You probably missed that, and you should get us on the next time, but we do workshops so infrequently that the next time we announce a workshop, or an online course, you should jump for it. Because we do them infrequently. After that, we get on the flight, go to Denver. We're speaking at the Opera House at the Copyblogger Conference. Finally, we get to Sardinia, Italy, where we eat, drink, and sleep. Some of you have asked me if I check email or I do any work while on vacation. No, that's the whole point about vacations. You're supposed to do nothing, as in N-O-T-H-I-N-G. I am looking forward to that. You can find this episode on iTunes. You can find it on Stitcher. You can find it on the website at psychotactics.com/38. You can find all the other resources there as well, so go to psychotactics.com/38. iTunes is probably the best if you have an iPhone or any Apple device because it automatically downloads it for you, so you can access it and listen to it later when you're going for a walk. You're walking, right? Not taking the car everywhere, right? You want your heart to be in good condition, right? Go for a walk. Listen to the podcast. I'll speak to you soon. This is the Three Month Vacation and I'm saying bye for now. Bye bye.
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The Three Month Vacation Podcast
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