We're all pounded with the whole concept of success. We think that it means more money, more fame, more power. And yet when confronted with defining our own success, we realise there's something we haven't quite defined. In this episode we explore why feeling like a fraud is normal; why seemingly successful people define themselves differently when the spotlight is removed; why space is so critical to creating that identity. / / Identity is what holds us back. Identity is what can take us further. You'll love this episode!

Links:

To get the special "Resistance" PDF (It's cool, so get it)
http://www.psychotactics.com/resistance
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http://www.psychotactics.com/magic

To get The Brain Audit, go to:
http://www.psychotactics.com/brainaudit

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https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/three-month-vacation-podcast/id946996410?mt=2 

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: Why It Is Okay To Feel Like A Fraud
Part 2: How We Define Success And How It Becomes Your Identity
Part 3: The Factor Of Space And Why It Is Critical To Your Life
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.

Useful Resources

How To Increase Your Pricing— Dartboard Pricing
Why Headlines Fail—The Report
Psychotactics Newsletter—Weekly slightly crazy, mostly zany marketing newsletter
Audio and Transcript—Three Obstacles To Happiness (And How To Overcome Them)

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The  Transcript

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This is the Three Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza.

The Cherokee elder stood before his students and he told them of two wolves that live and battle within each one of us. One of these wolves, he explained, is ill-natured. It sees the worst in people and things. It thinks only of itself. It is vengeful, jealous, arrogant. It’s full of ego and false pride. The other wolf sees the best in people and things. It is kind, it is generous, it is peaceful. It is full of integrity and respect for love itself and others.

One of the students asks the chief which one of these wolves wins the battle. The elder replied, “Whichever one you feed. Whichever one you feed, that is your identity.” When I started out in marketing, it was very easy for me to get fed by a lot of stuff around me. When you’re on Facebook, when you’re on the internet, there is a whole lot of junk out there. That junk makes you feel small. It makes you feel insignificant, and you’ve got to build an identity with the situation around you. How do you do it?

In today’s episode we will cover the three elements of what was my journey. Also, it’s going to be your journey. The first element is one of feeling like a fraud. The second one is just one of success. What does it mean? Finally, the third one, which is one of space and why it’s so important.

Part 1: Feeling Like A Fraud

When you look at January of 2001, I didn’t really feel like a fraud, but by December of 2001 I was feeling more and more insecure. What happened between January and December to create all this insecurity? For many years, even as I was a kid, I used to draw. I was extremely shy, and I’ve been drawing my whole life. I became a cartoonist. I became a writer. That’s what shy people do. As I moved into the world of marketing, that completely threw me. I didn’t know that much about marketing. I didn’t know how people think, what they do, how they buy, the prices that they decide on.

But I read this book by Jim Collins, which was called Good to Great. It asked what can you be the best in the world at. I thought I love the cartooning, I love the writing, but I want to do something different. The answer lay, strangely, in marketing. I was not into marketing. I just didn’t understand it. In all the years that I had run the cartooning business, I had done very little organized marketing. It was a good thing, because we moved to New Zealand and the public library was accessible, which was different from India.

I stepped into the library and I picked up ten books. Then I picked up another ten books. Then eventually the librarian realized that I was picking up a lot of books so they gave me an allocation where I could take 30 books at a time. I read those books. The more I read it, the less confident I got, the more I felt like a fraud.

But because I had no choice, I went out there and I spoke with clients. I spoke at small little events. The feeling of being a fraud didn’t go away. It always seemed like someone would tap me on the shoulder and say, “Okay, your time is up. You’ve been talking nonsense for quite a while now and it’s time for me to get in here.”

Six months passed, and a year passed. That tap never came. Then I did a trip to the US and I met with other marketers and I spoke with them. An interesting thing happened. I realized that these guys don’t know that much more than I do. In fact, I know quite a few things that they don’t know. That’s when that fraud label just slipped off and fell into the drain. It never came back again.

It never came back again for me as a marketer but it came back again in different ways. When I write a book, for instance, I just wrote the book on Dartboard Pricing, again, that whole fraud feeling came out. I have made this presentation in Chicago. I made another presentation in Denver. I’ve written so much about pricing. It’s all on the website. It’s on the blog. It’s in our membership site at 5000bc. I’ve explained it at length.

The feeling of being a fraud comes out because you feel what else is there to say. If I write this book, people will have read all of this information. They will think wait a second, he’s just rehashing everything. Then when I send out early copies of the book to clients just so that they can read and send out some testimonials, and they come back and go, “I’m so excited,” and I think what, I already said all this stuff.

It’s different. They haven’t experienced it from the concept of a book, a system, step by step going through the whole logic. Even though I may feel like a fraud when I’m writing the book or putting it out there, that’s just a bit of my own insecurity coming in. They don’t feel that at all. They feel this stuff is really cool.

This feeling keeps coming back. I remember when we were in Washington D.C. and we did a workshop on The Brain Audit. I was very nervous. I didn’t sleep that night simply because when I stood in front of that audience I thought they’ve already read The Brain Audit. These were people who bought the first version of The Brain Audit, version two, version three. Now they’re sitting in the audience and I’m going to say the very same thing. I’m going to tell them exactly what they read about.

I should have paid attention. They bought version one, version two, version three. Obviously every version was bringing them a different angle, a different perspective, and my presentation was going to bring a different perspective. That’s not how I felt. I felt like a fraud. I felt like something is going to go wrong. Someone is going to tap me on the shoulder.

No one did. In fact, when we came out after the first break, everyone was going, “Wow, I didn’t know The Brain Audit was like this. I perceived it to be different.” That’s it. You start out in life feeling a little insecure. You change professions, you feel insecure. You change your system. You write a book. You give a presentation. It doesn’t matter what happens. The moment you change midstream, it’s like being in a strange city and you’re not very confident. You’re completely lost. Your GPS is not working, and your soul needs to be a pilot, as Sting would say.

But Sting isn’t sitting in my chair, is he? I didn’t feel that way, and it comes back. What you’ve got to understand is that part of your identity is always going to be that you’re unsure, and that’s great.

This takes us to the second part of today, which is the whole feeling of success. What is success, and how do you cope with it?

Part 2: The Whole Feeling of Success

When you ask people what is their definition of success, they come up with various definitions. The thing that shows up is a lot of philosophy. People get very philosophical about the fact that success is this and success is that. When you look at the books and you look at the awards, the success parameters become very claustrophobic. In New Zealand we have an award for the Fast 50. On Forbes you have maybe the top 100 companies or the top 100 CEOs. Their success is all benchmarked by how many dollars they have in the bank or how quickly they got to the top.

When you look at so many blogs, what you find is the definition of success becomes one of taking shortcuts, of things like the four-hour work week. Four hours? What kind of genius can you create in four hours in a work week? Sometimes you’ll get the contrast. They will talk about quick meals and then slow cooking. Mostly success is benchmarked by money, by speed, and by shortcuts.

That becomes our identity, because it’s all around us. This is how it’s always been. It’s not just something that showed up yesterday. When we go back 100 years, 200 years, 500 years, 1,000 years, success has always been about money, speed, and shortcuts. And power, let’s not forget about power.

The point is, as human beings this makes us very happy: the money, the speed, the power. All this stuff makes us really happy. Fair enough, because we can’t really do without it. But we can also change things a bit and we can set a different benchmark.

When I started out Psychotactics I didn’t know how to set this benchmark, but I knew that I wanted to be different in some way. Over the years, this difference has morphed. Suddenly our books, the ebooks, are different from everybody else’s ebooks. They’re different because they have less information but more depth of that information. Instead of pummeling you with endless amounts of data and more data, they cluster around a few important elements.

For instance, if you read Dartboard Pricing you would find that when we deal with sequential pricing, only three points are being covered, but those three points are being covered in-depth. When you cover this in-depth, what you have is the power to empower. No, yeah, power to empower. Empowerment is really what happens there. Over time, this has become one of the more important elements of what we would define as success. It’s not the ability to sell more books or courses or workshops, but to be more like a pilot that takes all the passengers across. It’s very easy to start a course or a workshop or have a book and not have everyone consume it. Our goal has been different. Our goal is how do we get them to the endpoint. That becomes a benchmark for success.

On a personal scale, the Three Month Vacation becomes a benchmark for success. How can we run our business so that we can get away, that we can eat the food that we want, travel the way we want, relax, and then come back refreshed so that we can do better work. That has become a benchmark for success.

Now invariably, the money and the shortcuts and the power and all that stuff has got to sneak in, but it doesn’t become the whole reason why we do stuff. When I go to events, I meet with a lot of speakers. They’re all hanging around the corridor. They’re not essentially speaking to anybody else but the other speakers. All of them are saying exactly the same thing. They want to be home with their munchkins and they want to spend time with them at the swimming pool. They want to go to school with them. They want to do all this stuff.

Yet when they present themselves to the world they’re talking about I did three million miles. I made so much money. I spoke at so many events. They present a completely different view to the world, yet when you’re backstage, when they’re in the corridor, they’re talking about being home, about not wanting to friendly, about being sick about getting on another plane.

What they seem to present as success is not really what they feel is success. Going to that school event, going to that pool and jumping in the pool with the kid, that’s success to them. I thought that the Three Month Vacation was kind of normal. I thought that people needed breaks. Maybe not three months, but I thought that they needed breaks.

When I meet with a lot of my friends in marketing and they talk about wow, it’s amazing that you’re able to do this … These are people who are extremely, what we call, successful. That’s when I realized that setting these benchmarks for myself, setting this identity of who I really am, is critical. This is what you’ve got to do as well.

What is really your identity of success, other than the money and the power and the shortcuts, which are fine. It’s just that you’ve got to have that other identity that you know wow, I’ve reached this goal. Maybe that benchmark, that identity is just to get to the beach 300 days in a year and that’s it, and then you know. This is measurable. I can do it and it doesn’t involve that other stuff that other people are portraying.

Our identity is almost restricted to being a fraud at some point right through our career. The second thing is one of success and how we define success, and how the world defines success. The third one, and this is something that a lot of people don’t talk about, is just the factor of space, how space defines who we are as human beings.

Part 3: The Factor of Space

What is this factor of space? I was on my way back home after a walk. I always listen to the podcast on the way back home. I was listening to this writer, Pico Iyer, speaking on the TED stage. He came up with a statement that I had to stop and I had to write it down, because it was so interesting. He was talking about home and movement. He said it’s only by stopping movement that you can see where to go. It’s only by steeping out of your life and your world that you can see what you most deeply care about, and then you can find a home.

To me that has been home, that peace, that pause, that stop for refuelling. That has been the most critical element of my life. It’s what gave me identity. It’s what allows me to come back refreshed and do stuff that I want to do.

This resonates with me at a different level as well. Because, several years ago I listen to philosopher Wayne Dyer. He used to say it’s the silence between the notes that make the music. I heard it a dozen times and I couldn’t really figure out what he was saying. Then one day I rushed out to the car and I was telling my wife, “Do you know what that means? It’s the quiet. It’s the quiet that makes the music, because when there’s just note after note after note, we get cacophony.” She gave me that look that wives often give you, like what took you so long.

Even if you go back in time to one of the greatest masters of our time, Leonardo Da Vinci, he said you have to step away from your work to get perspective. Without space, it’s hard to have an identity that you’re really looking for, that you want to create. It becomes what people call the dream. They’re always searching for it, but to create a real identity instead of a dream, you have to step away and you have to look at yourself from a different space. Then you come back a changed person. You’re not completely changed but somewhere some of those notes have changed. That makes for beautiful music.

The Cherokee elder stood before his students and told them of the two wolves that live and battle within each of us. One of those wolves, he explained, is ill-nature. It sees the worst in people and things. It thinks only of itself. It is vengeful, and jealous, and arrogant, and full of ego and false pride. The other wolf sees the best in people and things. It is kind, it is generous, it is peaceful. It is full of integrity and respect for love itself and others.

One of the students asks the chief which one of these wolves wins the battle. The elder replied, “Whichever one you feed.” You’re going to be fed with this concept of being a fraud. You’re going to be fed with this concept of imaginary success, what the world defines as success, not what you define as success. The wolf that you really need to feed is the one that brings you peace, that brings that space so that you can create your own music.

Summary

That brings us to the end of this podcast, but before we go, let’s see the one thing that you can do today. Personally, I think it’s hard to get over that feeling of being a fraud. It comes back no matter how confident you are. Believe me, I’m a very confident person. Yes, we’ve got to create that space. We have to say let’s not take a three month vacation right now but let’s take a weekend maybe two weeks from now, just a break. No email, no phone, just a break. Definitely no Facebook.

What’s the one thing you can do today?

What you can do today is to define your benchmark, your identity of success. What is it that brings you or will bring you the most happiness? That will make a huge difference. It will make a difference to who you are and where you’re going to go tomorrow. That will determine which wolf you’re going to feed.

I appreciate all of you who’ve been writing in about this podcast. If you want to reach me, I’m on Twitter@SeanD’Souza, on Facebook at Sean D’Souza, and then at sean@psychotactics.com. If you’re listening to this podcast it’s more than likely that you’re a subscriber at psychotactics.com, but if you haven’t gone there already, go topsychotactics.com and subscribe.

Yes, one very important thing: I struggle to get to iTunes and leave a review because every time I’m listening to this I’m away from my computer, but I am on my phone. If you look below your phone, there is a little I button, especially if you’re on an iPhone. If you click on that I button you’ll get more information and there a link to the iTunes site. If you can leave a review, that would be really, really cool.

That’s me, Sean D’Souza, from the Three Month Vacation, saying thanks again and bye for now. Go feed that wolf.

You’re still listening?

People often ask me: Have you ever skipped a vacation? The answer is yes. We did that once. We thought it was more important for us to work and complete some projects and stuff. We did in four months what we normally do in three. That time that we should have been spending away, we were working and getting more and more tired and frustrated.

Then eventually we just got on a plane and went off to Sydney for a week. It was terrible. Not Sydney, just the week. It was like you just did something for the sake of doing it. It wasn’t planned or interesting. Then we came back and we were different but not as different as if it were planned. Yes, we have skipped it. There you have it, a little snippet from the Psychotactics archive. Bye for now.
You can also listen to or read this episode: #45: The Secret To Getting Your Report Read (From Start To Finish)

When your client picks up your report, can you guarantee they'll read it from start to finish? No matter how good the content, there are precise elements that cause a client to completely consume the report. This episode delves into three of the most important elements that makes your report stand out—and more importantly—get read.

In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: What makes a report powerful?
Part 2: What are tiny increments?
Part 3: How to empower your reader
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
 

Useful Resources and Links

Dart Board Pricing: How To Increase Prices (Without Losing Customers)
The Headline Report: Why Headlines Fail
The 70% Principle: Why It Knocks Procrastination Out of the Ball Park

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The  Transcript

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Back in the year 2003  I wrote an article where you just had to take three steps to write a great headline. You could test the headline and you could find out in minutes that it worked for you, and it also got the attention of your customers. I wasn’t prepared for how popular that article would be. As we were looking at the statistics of the Psychotactics site, we saw that the article got picked up over and over again. Then we decided, let’s make this a report. Surprisingly, when I took that same article, which was just about 800 words, and I put it into a PDF and put some graphics and an introduction and some cartoons, it became close to a ten-page book. That is the headline report.

This is the interesting part.

The report was nothing more than an article. Can we all do the same? Can we just write an 800-word article, put it in a report, and make it powerful? Not quite. You have to understand why the report works. We’re going to break up that headline report here today on this podcast. You’ll see for yourself, there are three elements that make it work. Let’s explore those three elements.

What makes the report so powerful?

The key factor is not the elements but the overall concept. The overall concept is one of empowerment. We are so hung up on the concept of information that we forget what we really have to do as teachers. As teachers we have to empower. We know we’ve done our job correctly when the client is able to do exactly what we’re doing, and possibly even better. Frankly, when I was writing the headline report I wasn’t thinking of this. I wasn’t thinking of empowerment. I wasn’t thinking of the elements. But when you deconstruct the report you can see there are three very specific elements that make it that empowerment tool. The first of the elements is tiny increments. The second is the length. The third are the examples in the report. Let’s explore each one systematically. Let’s start off with the first one, which is the tiny increments.

What are tiny increments?

About a month ago I got myself some recording hardware. It has all these buttons and it’s very hard to figure out which button to press and when to press it. Of course you don’t want to look at the manual because that’s really badly written. Maybe you go online like I did and you go to YouTube. There are lots of tutorials on how to use it, but there is all this unboxing and then something else and something else. 35 minutes later, you have no clue what you’re supposed to do. Then I found a video that was only three minutes long. The video only covered turning on the device. Now, it was three minutes long. How much can you learn about turning on a device? It’s a little switch. But it was so cool. I could actually do it. It was a tiny increment.

You don’t have to put in a ton of information for people to be impressed.

You have to empower. At the end of the video, what could I do? I could turn on the device. So I go to the next video. In the next video, they cover a little bit again. This is the concept of tiny increments. When we’re teaching, we don’t understand that the client doesn’t get what we’re saying. Let’s say you’ve come to one of the Psychotactics workshops and we’re doing an experiment. We’re saying we’re going to take steps now. I say, “Okay, let’s take a step.” Then you watch the people in the room. What do they do? Almost everyone will take a step forward, but someone will take a step to the left, or someone will take a step to the right, or someone will take a step back. Now we have all these permutations where people are going off-tangent. If they just take one step, they just make one mistake, you can pull them back and then say, “What I meant was take a step to the left.” Now the whole group can go one step back, one step to the left, and now we’re on target.

When you have something that has a very tiny increment, the customer can only make a very small mistake.

You can spot the mistake and pull them back, or you can show them that mistake in your report and pull them back. When you have this wealth of information, all these buttons to press and all these things to do all at once, suddenly the customer is lost. When they’re lost, they’re intimidated, and intimidation doesn’t create a safe zone, and when you don’t create a safe zone then of course you don’t get empowerment.

The first factor you have to look at when you look at the headline report is this concept of tiny increments.

You only have to take a very tiny step to get from point A to point B. When you’ve taken that step, you can go from point B to point C. This is what struck me when I stepped into an Apple store many years ago. It’s one of the reasons why I bought an Apple even though I’d been using a PC for ages. When I got into the store, I just had to do one thing. That one thing led to the next thing, and that next thing led to the next thing. This is very cool. You see it on the iPad where you just have to press a little button, and that one thing leads to the next thing. This is the concept of tiny increments. You see this in the headline report. It’s what you’ve got to do in your report: just one little step.

Now this takes us to the second one, which is the concept of length.

Length really helps in empowerment. Every time I speak to someone about this podcast, I will say, “The podcast is only about 15 to 20 minutes long.” But what if were to say, “It’s only two to three hours long’? There would be a very clear difference. When you say 15 to 20 minutes long people think, “I could go for a little walk and I could listen to the podcast.” This principle of length is critical, especially when a customer doesn’t know you that well and you have to get your message across without going crazy on them. It has helped me when I was trying to work out that audio hardware. I just had to deal with three minutes, and then after that the next three minutes, and then the next three minutes. Every one of those three-minute capsules, they empowered me. They moved me forward. The headline report does this in a really fascinating way. It moves youforward. Within ten pages, you’re done. Now the question arises: Is that it? Is that all you could write about headlines? No, of course not. You could write 300 pages or 500 pages. There is a wealth of information in the world of headlines. But do you have to put in the report?

The core of empowerment is simply one of length.

When there is not too much of it, someone is able to consume it. Once they’re able to consume it, you have empowered them. You know that because you can get them to teach you what you’ve just taught them and they will do that spectacularly well. We take the first concept, which is tiny increments, and we take the second concept, which is length, and that leaves us with just the third one.

What is the third concept?

The third concept is simply one of examples and case studies. When you listen to this podcast, you got a whole bunch of examples about the recording device and how I had to fiddle with it. You also got the example of how the iPad worked, and of course my visit to the Apple store for the first time in 2008. Those were examples. Why were those examples there? They weren’t just random stuff. For one thing, the example lowers that intimidation factor.

Immediately you’re taken on a little side journey, a little detour.

That helps you to focus on the idea, but it also helps you understand the concept in greater detail. When you look at the headline report you’ll find that there is an example of how the headline is being built stage by stage. If all you had was a concept of how to write a headline without the example it would be so much more dreary and harder to achieve the same result. As a teacher, that’s your goal. Your goal is to empower. Examples empower. Case studies empower. Stories empower. Go down that path and put it in your report. Whether you’re reading The Brain Audit, or Pricing,or any book, you will find that we use this concept. That’s what clients read and go, “Wow, I should delve more into this stuff.” The biggest problem that we have is we know too much. We try to put all that too much into our reports, into our books, into our presentations. Does it empower? It’s easy to give information. A lot of people are giving a lot of information. It’s all stuff coming at you left, right, and center, and you don’t know where to go. Your client doesn’t know where to go either.

Have this little guiding light of empowerment and everything changes.

We started out with a report. We started out with just a little article, but that article had steps, and it went from one step to another to another. When it got into the report stage it was clearer because of the graphics, because of the layout. That’s how you should go about writing your report. Think about empowerment and think about the three things that we’ve covered today. The first thing that we covered today was tiny increments. Remember that even if you say take one step, people can steps in all directions, show you take very tiny steps. The second thing is one of length. A three-hour podcast, a 300-page report, very interesting but no one’s going to read it. You want to keep it simple. You want to keep it within ten or 12 pages. Finally, you want to reduce that intimidation factor. It’s very hard to understand the new concept. Having examples, having stories, having case studies, this really makes it easier for me to figure out what you’re saying.

Which brings us to the end of this podcast. What is the one thing that you can do?

I think the one thing that you should do is to just boil it down to three things. You’ve seen how this podcast just covers three elements. If I wanted to write a book on how to create a great report, I could write 200 pages. But this podcast, it’s a report. It’s just got three points, three simple points, and you’ve been empowered. I think you should do the same. Just jot down three points. I know there are 700 points on the topic. Just focus on three and you’ll have a report that someone actually consumes. Now isn’t that a novel idea?

What have we been doing in the past six weeks or so?

If you’ve been following this podcast, you know that we went off to Washington D.C. to have the information products workshop. It’s just 25-30 people in a room. Everyone gets to know each other. Everyone works with each other. It’s an amazing event. We don’t do the Psychotactics workshops very often, so if you ever get a chance to get to a Psychotactics workshop, you should come. It’s empowerment at its very best. You’ll see it at the workshop. From there we flew to Denver and I presented at the Opera House in Denver and lost my voice, got it back, struggled through the whole episode. My wife gave me an eight on ten. She has given me a -2 in the past, so I think I did a pretty good job. That comes down to practice and getting all your act together.

During the event, some things went wrong for speakers.

The video didn’t show up at the right time, or it didn’t sync with the audio. The way to solve this problem is to do all of the groundwork. I was there a few days in advance, getting over the tiredness factor, making sure that I knew the length of the stage, looking for any light distractions. Because when you’re on a stage a lot of lights hit you, especially on a stage of that size. You need to know where you need to stop before light hits you in the face and you can’t see a thing. You also need to speak to the audio and the video people, because they recommended stuff to me that ensured our whole presentation was absolutely flawless. There’s a lot of background stuff that you have to do, and that marks you out as a professional. I was completely hampered on stage there. I was sniffling and I could barely speak, but that eight on ten, that was because of all the groundwork that went before. As much as I would have liked to get full marks from my wife, at least I was able to struggle to an eight. You know it goes well because when you step out of the auditorium, people come up to you and go, “I’m going to make this fix today. I’m going to make this change today.” You have empowered them.

Once we finished with all of the work and the presentations, we went on to Sardinia.

We had a great time. Sardinia is this big island off Italy. You’ve probably heard of Sicily. If you look to the left, there is Sardinia. The food is absolutely stunning. We go on vacations because of the food. We really don’t care that much about the monuments. The food has to be good. We gorged a lot and we walked a lot of slopes. That’s how we keep our weight in check. Three weeks in Sardinia, a stopover in San Francisco, and now we’re back in New Zealand. I have to admit it’s been hard getting back to work, even though it’s been a week. This nasty cough that started in Washington D.C. followed me through Denver, through Sardinia, through San Francisco. It’s okay now but it’s been a long run. Nonetheless, it was worth doing the info products course in Washington D.C..

If you missed that, then I would strongly suggest that you get the home study.

How much is enough? And where do you stop? It's easy to get all wrapped up in this whole concept of passive income and how smart it seems. Yet, you can work yourself crazy if you're not careful. You can work too much, do too much?but even vacation too much. Understanding the power of enough allows you to have a great business plan and a great vacation plan. Whether you're in online marketing or just have a small business, your strategy should be about "enough".

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Some goodies

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

To get a short, yet beautiful headline report on "Why Headlines Fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com

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Transcript: Power of Enough

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Vacations are like a project. There's a before-vacation and an after-vacation period that needs to be carefully managed. After years of taking vacations?and that too thrice a year, we have to do a lot of planning. So how do we make sure everything works when we're away? How do we make sure we don't get tempted by e-mail and work while on vacation? And how do you manage a smooth re-entry back to work? These super-duper secrets are yours for the taking in this super-duper episode.

Contact Me:
On Twitter: seandsouza
On e-mail at: sean@psychotactics.com
http://www.psychotactics.com (For all notifications and super-duper newsletters).

In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: How to handle the recurring elements of a business—newsletters, podcasts and membership sites
Part 2: Finishing of projects
Part 3: How to handle coming back to work.
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
 

Useful Resources and Links

How To Increase Your Pricing— Dartboard Pricing
Why Headlines Fail—The Report
Psychotactics Newsletter—Weekly slightly crazy, mostly zany marketing newsletter

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The  Transcript

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This is 3-month vacation and I’m Sean D’Souza

Right after Renuka and I got married, we decided that we’re going to go to many places and we did go for a honeymoon because that’s what I was told, you don’t go for your honeymoon, and every time you have a fight, that’s the one thing that comes up. Anyway, we went for a honeymoon and then a year passed and we didn’t go anywhere, and the second year passed, then we did a trip to Australia simply because there was some kind of discount on Qantas, but then the years ticked away and then we moved to New Zealand and we realized that 4 and 5 years had passed and we weren’t going anywhere. That was a real problem because inherently, the reason why I quit my job in India in the first place was because I couldn’t go on vacation whenever I wanted to.

Even when I got to New Zealand, it was a problem because every time I went on holiday, I’d be very hassled about someone else taking my work, that I was not getting paid, and so holidays or vacations became a very important part of our life. What lots of people don’t realize is that a vacation is also a project and you have to plan if you want to make it successful. One of the things that you have to plan is what you do before you leave and what you do when you get back. This episode is dedicated to the vacation.

In this episode, I’m going to cover recurring elements like the newsletter and the podcast and the membership site, and then from there, we’ll go to the next thing, which is how we get closure before we leave, and then how we hit the ground running when we get back. Those are the three things that we’ll cover today.  Let’s start with the first one, which is how we handle recurring responsibilities.

Part 1: Handling Recurring Responsibilities of a Business—Newsletters, Podcast and Membership Sites

At Psychotactics, we are mainly into consulting, training and product, which is really a complete business by itself. Consulting would mean speaking with clients one on one and I definitely don’t speak with clients while I’m away. I don’t make any exceptions to this rule. When I’m on holiday, I’m on holiday.

The second element is one of leverage, which are products, and again, we don’t work when we’re on holiday. We might take a trip that is specifically designed to do some work but while we’re on vacation, there is little work. That just leaves us with the other recurring elements like newspapers and podcasts and membership sites. The newsletter goes out every week twice a week and the Tuesday newsletter, that is about an article about marketing, about business. The Saturday newsletter, that’s the sales biz newsletter. It’s our products, our services, courses. That has to be queued well in advance.

Let’s start out with the Tuesday newsletter, which is the article-based newsletter.

Let’s say we’re going to be away for 4 or 5 weeks. Now what we have to do is we have to make sure that we don’t just cover for 5 weeks but that we cover 8 weeks. The reason for this is very simple. Before you go on any trip, chaos invariably knocks at your door, so what you’ve got to do is make sure that your newsletters are being worked out before you leave, while you’re away and then when you come back, because when we get back, it’s not like I’m keen to sit own and write articles. In fact, when I’m away, I lose all momentum and then when I get back, I’m not really in the mood to write any articles.

What I have to do is in the 12 weeks that we’re back, I have to make sure that somehow, I double the number of articles in some of the weeks.
Even so, I may not finish the requisite number of articles that I require while we’re away. What we do is we run some of the articles from the archives, and they do this on TV shows as well. When the presenter is away, they just pull out old stuff and they run it again, and clients don’t mind. They don’t mind reading the same stuff again and that’s what you’ve got to do. You’ve got to have a mixture of old articles and new articles.

If I can manage to get all that quota completed before we go, well the clients are going to get just new articles, but if I can’t, then we have the old articles as well. With the podcast, we don’t have such a big bank. We’re only up to episode 42 now, but let’s say we go up to episode 200 or maybe 100. At that point in time, it would make sense to recycle some of the older podcasts and this makes sense because articles and newsletters and reports and podcasts, they are not stuff that is like today’s news and it’s still tomorrow. It can be read again the second time and the third time and we can monitor how many people are reading the articles or downloading the podcasts. You get a good feel whether your re-run is actually a good thing or a bad thing and it is usually a good thing.

We also have to prepare what’s going out on Saturday, which is the sales letter.

Sometimes, we will just send out sales letters while we’re away, but often, we will give away stuff, like now, as we’re headed to Italy, we’re giving away the Brain Alchemy Masterclass. This is a complete course of a workshop that was held in Los Angeles. Even so, everything has to be planned and everything has to be within place before we leave and then it just goes out like clockwork.

That’s the first thing. We have to make sure that all the articles and all the sales letters and any kind of promotion or giveaways all need to be in the system for before we go, while we’re away and for at least 2 or 3 weeks after we get back. This is crucial because then, you actually enjoy your vacation instead of just rushing there and rushing back and then going right back to work.

This takes us to the second part of today’s episode, which is finishing of projects.

Part 2: Finishing of Projects

We tend to do courses like article writing or copy writing or headlines. We also do books like web components or pricing and then we do things like training, which is workshops. All of these are considered to be projects and all the projects are complete before we leave, so when we look at products like the pricing book, well all of that was completed 2 weeks ago and that’s done. We finished the article writing course, that’s done. We had a Photoshop course for cartoons and that’s done. Now we’re headed to Washington, DC, where we’re doing the info products course, and that’s done. Once that is done, everything is closed and now we’re going on vacation.

A lot of people take some of their work on vacation and that’s really bad planning. That’s terrible planning. If you’re going to go on vacation and you’re going to take your work with you, that’s not really a vacation. That is just work in a different place. All those stupid ads you see where people take their computer and go to the beach, that’s just fooling yourself. If you really want to have a break and you want to rest your body and you want to rest your mind, you have to switch off. We switch off completely. Everything is closed down. We don’t deal with email. We get someone else to look at the email. We have a separate email address where if there’s an urgent issue, which there never is, but if there is an urgent issue, they can write to us. All projects are completely closed, email is closed and I don’t take any calls on my phone so that’s that.

Also while we’re away, we will meet with clients but only as friends. At first, we didn’t meet with clients at all but over the years, we’ve gotten to know people and so we will meet them in a social setting. One rule is very clear, they’re not going to bring up any work, not even the slightest bit of work. Even in Italy, we’re meeting with a friend of ours. Last time when we went to Hungary, we met with a friend of ours. We went to Portugal, we met with a friend of ours. In Washington, DC, we’ll meet with friends and these friends are also our clients but no discussion about work. That’s very clear.

This brings us to the third part. In the third part, it is about coming back.

Part 3: Coming Back

When we get back home, the last thing you want to do is work. You’re nice and relaxed if you’ve not been checking email and not been looking at any work. You don’t feel like doing anything for a week, 2 weeks, sometimes longer than that. In previous years, we have taken vacations for as long as 6 weeks and that’s probably too long because when you get back, you want to relax for another 3, 4 weeks. You’re so much in that vacation mode that you don’t snap out of it.

We found that 3 weeks away and 1 week travel is a great amount of time to be away. It’s not too much and it’s not too little. Supposing we were going to Sardinia, which we are, then we stop over at, say San Francisco. We spend a couple of days, then we fly to Sardinia. On the way back, we stop over again maybe at San Francisco, and then we come back. We break the journey as well. That takes about a week and then 3 weeks away, so 4 weeks away in all. When we get back, sometimes we hit the ground running and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we’ll take a couple of weeks but we always have a list of what we have to do and when we have to do it before we leave on vacation, so that when we come back, we’re not blank, which you usually are. You come back and you don’t know where anything is on your computer and you don’t know what you are supposed to do, so having that list while you’re in work mode is really cool because you’re completely alert at that point in time.

We keep that list and then we go away, and when we come back, everything starts to flow again until the next vacation. That brings us to today’s summary, so what did we cover today?

Summary

The first thing you have to have all your newsletters, all your podcasts, everything in advance. On this particular trip, I haven’t organized it as well as I should have, and so I’m slogging here doing a ton of podcasts this week but this is not a good situation to be in. This is not a situation I ever want to be in, so when we come back, I’m going to have to organize it a little better. The newsletters were ready but the podcasts were not ready and I’ve had to put in extra time just to make sure that the podcasts are ready. Now they are, this will last all the way to middle of June I expect.

With the membership site, www.5000bc.com, I can’t show up there everyday so what I do is I have vanishing reports. I create these reports in advance. A lot of these reports also come from the articles themselves, so sometimes I will write fresh reports and clients know that and at other times, we take articles related to one topic like pricing or headlines and then we put them together in a book and they become reports and when we’re away, those reports go week after week to the clients.

The second element is one of closure. We don’t take any work with us. We make sure that all the projects, all the workshops, all the courses, everything is done, finished, and we will not check email on vacation. There are people that say they only work 2 hours on holiday. Well that’s their choice but I don’t think you can ever tune out if you check email, if you go back to work. You’re always on alert and you really want to relax. You want to get down to a point where you’re completely relaxed, just like a child.

Finally, we have a list of all the projects that we’re going to do when we get back, because when we get back, we’re completely blank, and having that list enables us to ramp up, if not hit the ground running. What’s the one thing that you can do? The one thing that you can do is to train yourself to add a little bit more to your output, so if you get really good at article writing or you get really good at creating reports, then what’s going to happen is you’re going to put away some stuff and create a bank. When you’re too tired or you have a medical emergency or you want to go on vacation, all of that information is going to come into really good use, and you don’t get so stressed out and everything goes according to plan.

As for the concept of doing your own 3-month vacation, you might think it’s very hard but remember that when we started doing the 3-month vacation, our business was not even 2 years old. We just started at the end of August of 2002, that was Psychotactics, and by 2004, we had decided that we were going to do this. You might not be feeling that brave but you can take 2 or 3 days off and when you do that, you don’t want to check email and you don’t want to have any projects and you don’t want to have any work. That’s when you’re going to get a really good break.

The people who call themselves workaholics, they’re workaholics only because they are permanently connected to their phones, their computers and their work. Once they’re taken away from all of that, they become like kids again. People may call themselves workaholics today, but when they were kids, they didn’t think about their studies while they were away. They enjoyed themselves, and the reason for that is that complete disconnect. You can have that disconnect and you should have that disconnect and that’s the only way you can relax, but for that, you have to prepare. That’s what we do. That’s why we have fun on our vacation.

While I’m away on vacation, I’m not on Facebook and you can’t get me on Twitter and you can’t get me on email, but someone will be checking email so if you have something to say, please email me. I will get to it eventually. About the pricing book, if you’ve already boughtDartboard Pricing, I would recommend that you start reading the first chapter, just the introduction. That’s 3 or 4 pages, and then go to book 3 because book 3 has the sequential strategy. Book 3 is not a very big book but it’s a very powerful book. It shows you exactly how to build your business and how to price in a way that customers want to go to the next step and the next step and the next step. It’s a really cool model so go to book 3.

If you haven’t already bought the pricing book, that’s Dartboard Pricing, go to www.psychotactics.com.ttc, that is Trust the Chef, TTC, and you will be taken directly to that page and you can buy it. The link is at the bottom of this podcast as well if you click on the little I button, which is the information button, you can see those links but you can also go to www.psychotactics.com/43 for all the resources, the transcript and the links to this page.

That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now. Bye bye.

You can also listen to or read this episode: #42: The Crazy, Amazing Trip From FREE to FEE

Is FREE worth it? Or should everything be paid for? How does a person go from free to fee? And how do you stand out in a world where so much is free? There's a simple strategy that needs to be followed and once you do, you'll find client will happily move from free to paid clients. Tah-dah?the strategy follows!

Notes

To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/42
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: The Reason Why Your Free Should Be Non-Crappy
Part 2: How Do You Go From Free to Fee?
Part 3: How Do We Get Over This Fear?
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
 

Useful Resources and Links

Amazing Cartoons for your ebooks, presentations, blog: Cartoon Stock Series
How To Avoid Boring Testimonials : And Get 1000-1500 Word Stories Instead
The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy And Why They Don’t

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The  Transcript

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This is the Three-Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza.

Often in Hollywood movies, you get this concept of the ugly duckling. You’ll see this girl who obviously looks pretty, but they make her look as if she’s got pimples and her hair is not that great. Then, somewhere in the middle of the movie, she magically turns into this beautiful swan. Ugly duckling to white swan. That’s how free-to-fee works.

When you’re giving away information free or even if you intend to give away information free, you’ll feel like an ugly duckling. You’ll feel as if you’re giving away all that hard-earned knowledge that you’ve gained. You’re not going to get much response from it or result from it, and you’re somehow hoping that there’s going to be a middle of the movie when things change and that ugly duckling scenario turns into a white swan. Yet, there is a logic and a strategy that enables you to go from free to paid products or paid services.

As always, we’ll cover three main topics, and then we’ll go to an action plan, so you can implement it. The first element we’ll cover is this concept of why free should be non-crappy. In the second topic, we’ll look at some of the tactics and strategies that you can use to go from free to fee. In the third topic, we’ll cover the fear and how to get over that fear, so that you can successfully jump from free to fee.

Let’s start off with the first one, shall we? The reason why your free should be non-crappy.

Part 1: The Reason Why Your Free Should Be Non-Crappy

Yesterday, I was on Twitter, and I was talking to a guy called “Craig”. Craig, you know who you are. He was telling me how he was binge listening to these podcasts. What is causing Craig to binge listen? Then, as I smiled my way through the morning, I got another email. It was from a guy called “Michael”. Michael said he’s been reading all the articles on our website, and he’s been reading them for hours on end. He said he’s going to come back to read some more.

That’s how it should feel. When you’re giving away information, it should feel like you’re giving away something valuable. Not something crappy. It shouldn’t be something that you found in your drawer that you’ve had since 2003, and you just didn’t get rid of. That’s what a lot of people do. When they give away things free, they give away stuff that is not so valuable, and it goes into the crappy basket. Their logic is, “Let me keep all the good stuff for my book. Let me keep all the good stuff for my consulting program. Let me keep all the good stuff for whatever it is I’m going to earn from, and let me not give away all that valuable stuff.” That’s completely contrary to what I’m saying here.

I’m saying that you should give away at least a bit of the good stuff if not a lot of the good stuff. In today’s world, there is so much information, so much free information that people don’t have any regards for free information anymore. If your stuff doesn’t hit them right between the eyes, there’s probably not going to be a second chance. How do you sort out the good stuff from the crappy stuff?

One of the ways to go about creating really good stuff is to go deeper into a topic. For instance, in podcast number 38, it was about not planning testimonials or rather how to get testimonials before you finish a project. Now, a main topic would just be “How to Get Testimonials” or “How to Get Good Testimonials”, but this topic is very niche in a way. It goes deeper into the topic of testimonials which is “How to Get Testimonials before the Project is Even Complete”. You have to sit down and work out how could this problem be solved.

Your clients might ask a question like this, and then you have to sit down and work out this puzzle like a Rubik’s Cube, or you might want to sit down with a mind map, and then go deeper into the topic. The main topic is always usually an overview topic. It’s usually crappy. This is what you see on the internet a lot. When you go deeper, things change.

For instance, with testimonials, you can write about how to get a great testimonial, but then, how to get a great testimonial, and you add something else to that, so how do you get a great testimonial before the project is over, how do you get a great testimonial using six specific questions, how do you get a great testimonial when you’re just starting out, how do you get a great testimonial when you’re new in the country.

The key is to take that main overview topic, and then add something to it that makes it very specific. Now, your brain is able to focus and go, “Well, how would I solve this problem?” When you solved this problem, it becomes interesting. It becomes non-crappy. It becomes valuable to the customer, and that’s when they go, “Wow. This is being given away?” That’s when you’ve got their attention. Now, you’ve got to move them from free to fee. How do you do that? This takes us to the second part of today’s episode, which is how do you go from free to fee?

Part 2: How Do You Go From Free to Fee?

If there’s only one word you’ll remember, remember this word, “packaging”. Packaging changes everything. We’ll talk about more about free-to-fee, but packaging changes everything. The moment you change the packaging, everything changes. Let’s say you’re listening to the radio, and you’re listening to your favorite music. That music is free, isn’t it? What do you do? You go out and buy a DVD, or you go out and you download some MP3 from iTunes or some other place.

Essentially, you’ve gone from free to fee, and the packaging has changed. The way it has been distributed has changed. Then, you will go to a concert. It’s the same song, isn’t it? You could have listened to it at home or better still, you could have listened to it on the radio, but you went to the concert. Then, at the concert, they sold you some DVDs or some kind of deal, and you bought in to that.

I’m a big fan of Sting, and I can’t even remember where I found his music or when I started listening to it because I was not into rock music at all. In fact, when I was growing up, a lot of the music on Indian radio was country music, believe it or not. Country music from the middle of the United States was streaming on radio in India. Anyway, I didn’t listen to rock music, so I didn’t know who The Police were, and I certainly didn’t know who Sting was, but at some point in time, that free music came over the radio.

I listened to it, and I liked it, and then I bought a tape. Yes, as we did back then, and then a CD, and then a DVD. Often, the same album over, and over, and over again. Then, he showed up live in Oakland for a concert, and I paid for tickets to be on row 9, so I could actually see his face rather than up there in the bleachers. If you ask me, “Would you go to another concert?” Yes. “Would you buy some more albums?” Yes. It’s moved the whole thing from free to fee, and there’s no going back.

I’m probably going to listen to another couple of free songs on the radio, but the moment I know that he’s got another album out, the chances are I’m going to buy it. The customer makes that move because they don’t have that much time to fill around with the free stuff after a while. They want to get great stuff. They want to maximize their time. They want to move ahead, and you want to create that situation where free goes to fee very quickly.

You might think, “Well, that’s Sting, and he’s a rock star, and he’s known really well,” but take for instance just Psychotactics. When I wrote the book “The Brain Audit”, it was just 16 pages. It was not supposed to be a book. It was just the notes that I had given at a seminar. Then, I went around trying to improve my speaking, and so I’d speak at different small events. Really, breakfast events, and we drive … I don’t know, two hours to just speak at this event where three people would show up, but a friend of mine told me, “Why don’t you try and sell this PDF?” and so that’s what I did.

The people that came to the event … It was just a networking event, and it was technically free because they’d already paid their membership fees at the start of the year, but it was free. They came for this speaking thing that I wasn’t being paid for, and then I put on a really good show. What happened as a result of that really good show, they decide they want to buy the book, so it goes very quickly from free to fee.

In most cases, the people that have bought The Brain Audit online have bought it afterreading free articles that were really useful to them. They read free reports that were really useful to them, and then they decided to buy The Brain Audit. Once they bought The Brain Audit, they bought in to a Brain Audit course. They bought in to other courses, and some of our courses are $3,000, $4,000, $5,000. I’m not for a second suggesting that you’re going to go from free to $5,000 overnight, but I am suggesting that if you give really great information, really sub-subtopic information, that’s when you’re going to start attracting people to you.

A yoga class can go from free to fee, but in that yoga class, you’re going to have to go into a subtopic. If you just do what every yoga class is doing, it’s not that interesting. If you start doing webinars, or podcasts, or just write articles and your topics are just at the top level, it’s not that interesting. If it’s interesting, then customers are willing to pay for a change in packaging. Let’s take this podcast for example. It’s absolutely free. Now, there are about 40 podcasts, and you can go through them, and you can find out the ones that you like and stuff like that.

In time, there will be a hundred, 200, 300 podcasts. Now, you’ve got a real problem if you’re searching for one topic. Supposing you’re searching for a topic like pricing or supposing you’re searching for a topic on how to speak better or testimonials. If I would take the 10 podcasts that were only on testimonials, you’d be willing to listen to that because it would save you a lot of time having to go through 200 podcasts, and then find the ones that work and download them. You’d be willing to pay $10 to get just 10 podcasts that are free online simply because it saves you time.

If your sub-subtopic is saving your client time and it is valuable, they’re willing to pay for it. There are two core ways in which you can move a client from free to fee. The first way is to give them something free, and then move them up the chain as it were, so people come to subscribe. Then, they buy The Brain Audit, then they go to 5,000 B.C., and then they buy other courses. That’s one way. The second way is to take the information that you already have and to change the format. If it’s an audio, make it a PDF. If it’s in PDF, make it audio.

Sometimes, it just takes a bit of sorting like I gave you the example with this podcast where all I have to do is go through 200 podcasts and just find the 10 that are really good on pricing or 10 that are really good on headlines, and that becomes valuable. That’s where the customer is going to buy. Even as we decide we want to go from free to fee, we have this fear, and this takes us to the third part, which is how do we get over this fear?

Part 3: How Do We Get Over This Fear?

A few years ago, I started a cartooning course. I didn’t actually want to start a cartooning course, but a member of 5000BC, his name is Joe, and he suggested that I start the cartooning course. I didn’t really want to because I was writing books, and marketing, and stuff. I really didn’t want to go into cartooning, but he told me, “Look, I bought all the books in cartooning. I’ve done all the courses, and I still can’t draw cartoons. I think that you can teach me to draw cartoons.”

I wasn’t that keen, and you can say that keenness just let me down. What I did was I offered the first cartooning course free. I know this sounds bizarre to all of you who have paid a thousand dollars for it, but that’s how it was. Of course, because it was free, it was slightly experimental, but it was still good. About 35 people signed up for that course, and we did the course, and they turned out to be cartoonists, and they gave us testimonials, and we put the testimonials up, and now you know how the cartooning course runs year after year at Psychotactics.

What was a free course with great information turned out to be a paid course. What was the difference? The difference was the testimonials. When you put out information, you’re not really sure if it’s great information or not. Sometimes you think, “Well, this is too basic. Everyone should know that.” As you go from topic to subtopic to sub-subtopic, you will find that the information is great. At that point in time, you can have a free course, but the most important thing is to get these outstanding testimonials. You want to listen to podcast number 38 to begin with, and also to go to Psychotactics and look for the six questions that you need to ask to get great testimonials. It’s also in The Brain Audit, by the way.

Testimonials make a difference. Great testimonials make a difference, and that’s what will, first of all, reassure you that your stuff is not basic, but really great, that is changing lives. Then, you can move from there on from free to fee. Put a price, and then you go from there, increasing the price as you go along. The cartooning course started at nothing … Well, you could pay whatever you wanted, and some people gave me an Amazon voucher, but today, it’s a thousand dollars. That one course with 35 people generates $35,000 every time it’s run. That’s how you can take something from free to fee.

Hollywood often has this ugly duckling to white swan scenario happening, and there is no ugly duckling. That woman has been good-looking and smart the whole time. Your products were good-looking and smart the whole time. They just happened to be free. Some of your products and services could continue to remain free, and the rest of them, you can sell it for a fee.

We’ve covered quite a bit, so let’s just summarize what we’ve learned so far.

Summary

We started off with the concept of free not being crappy. They call it the “ugly duckling”, but it was never the ugly duckling. It was always the white swan. To know if your product is really good, go from topic to subtopic, subtopic to sub-subtopic. It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing training, or consulting, or writing a product, you want to explore those depths of the sub-subtopic, and that’s the way you get the attention and the customer.

The second thing that we covered was how you can go from free to fee by changing the packaging, and we saw how you listen to stuff on the radio, and then you buy the DVD, and then you buy the MP3. Then, you go to the concert, and then you go to another concert, and then the whole sequence starts all over again. The point is that over time, customers don’t want that much free stuff. They want to pay for stuff. They want to get from one point to the other as quickly as possible.

When customers first start, they want to test the waters, and that’s why they go for the free stuff to see that you are good in the first place. Once they have established that you’re good, they don’t really need to read much or do much in terms of free. It’s only the new customers that feel that way. After a while, they’re just buying everything in sight. They’re getting value from it, which is they’re buying everything in sight, not because you put a magic spell on them.

Packaging makes a big difference, but also organization. As I said with the podcast, if I just pull out the stuff that’s relevant to you, you’re going to listen to it. Say for instance, just 10 topics on pricing. Packaging and organization will take something from free to fee. Finally, there’s always this fear that your stuff is too basic, that it’s something that nobody wants to buy. Do a free course. Get the testimonials, and those testimonials will assure you and assure your prospects that you’re doing a great job and that it’s worth paying for.

What’s the one thing that you can do today? It’s got nothing to do with today’s podcast. It’s got everything to do with the testimonials. You want to go out there and find out, “How can I get good testimonials? How can I get great testimonials?” First, you want to listen to podcast number 38, and that’s because it deals with the topic of testimonials.

The second thing you want to do is read The Brain Audit because it shows you how the customer thinks, and it gives you those six questions that you need to ask. Now, you can get those six questions free online anyway, but you will find that The Brain Audit is a really good read to understand the entire strategy. There you go. I’m taking you from free, which is the podcast, to a paid product. You’ll find great value, and then you’ll come back again. It’s that simple.

It’s 5:21am here in Auckland, New Zealand, and I’m not going for a walk today. Now, the point of recording this podcast, we’re leaving for the United States in about 48 hours, and I’ve got podcasts to do and presentations to finish. I know it’s an excuse, but it’s a valid excuse this time. I just do not have the time to go for a walk, but when I get to Italy, when I get to the United States, I’ll more than make up for it.

This is a rare instance. Normally, it’s just part of the routine. It’s part of the routine for a simple reason. When I go for a walk, a lot of things happen. It’s not just the health and the fitness, but it’s also that I get the chance to then listen to the podcast, and then listen to an audiobook, and it fills my brain with information. This is critical. Input is everything. Facebook is nothing, and that’s where we spend a lot of our time. We should spend more time going for a walk, listening to the podcast, listening to audiobooks because once you have that input, you have stories, you have strategies, you have tactics, and you’re able to then take your knowledge to a completely different level.

When I first started out, I was on this site by Jim Collins, and I read the fact that he reads a hundred books a year. I thought, “Well, he’s an author. He’s busy. If he can read a hundred books a year, so can I.” I found that just reading books was not getting me very far because you have limited time to read in a day. I found that just by listening to stuff in the car or walking, even if 90% of it just went one ear and out of the other, it didn’t matter. People make these excuses. They talk about why they can’t remember stuff, that they need to make notes. It’s just listen.

There you go. That was my preach for today.

What’s happening in Psychotactics land? Nothing for the next month or so, but when we get back in June, I’m going to start off with the cartoon stock, and you’re going to be able to get all these cartoons that you can use in your blogs, in your presentations, stuff that you just do not get online. Look for that. You’ll have to stay on the newsletter for that because we’re going to have a limited number. I’m not saying this for scarcity sake. I just do not want the cartoons all over the internet.

The second thing is the article writing course, Version 2. If you haven’t done the live version, you want to get the home study version, and that is Version 2.0. If you’ve already bought this before, yes, I’m giving it to you free. Later in the year, we’re going to have theHeadline course, the Headline Trainer Course and The Brain Audit Trainer Course. There you go. All the events stacked up in a row, waiting to land. This has been brought to you by Psychotactics.com. Get on the newsletter. Yes, it’s free. Bye for now.

You can also listen to or read this episode:  #41: How To Save Two Zillion Hours in Research (Using Cool Techniques with Evernote)