What is the meaning of life? This utterly vast and philosophical question pops into our lives with amazing frequency. But is it the right question to ask? What if we move the words around a bit and asked another question. Like: What gives your life meaning? Hmm, that changes things a bit doesn't it? And even when we change the words, we may still move towards the specific. So why does the abstract help more?

Find out in this episode.
http://www.psychotactics.com/meaning-of-life/

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The  Transcript

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What gives your life meaning?

It was 6:20 AM. I was close to the beach, halfway through my walk, listening to this podcast on Transom.org. There was this reporter who was asking older people how they went through their lives. They were 100 years old. She started out with this question, which was: What is the meaning of life? I’ve grappled with this question before, and it sounds very philosophical, but then somewhere in the middle, the question changed. Those words just interchanged somehow and it became: What gives your life meaning?

I had to stop. I had to stop on the road just to absorb what that meant. Just by that little interplay in the words, suddenly the whole sentence, the whole construct changed. It was amazing to me. As you tend to do, you tend to try to answer the questions. I tried to think of the people in my life and I tried to think of the things that I do. Then I realized I was going about it the wrong way.

In today’s podcast we’re going to cover three elements as always, but the way I’m going to cover it is, I’m going to talk about me me me. I’m going to talk about the three things that give my life meaning and why I approached it the wrong way. But I think it is the way that we need to approach it. Of course you might choose to borrow these, or you might choose to bring up your own three elements, but this is the way I think that you’ve got to approach the question: What gives your life meaning?

Part 1: Space

I think the right way to approach it is to go through an abstract sort of thinking. The three things that give my life meaning are space, deadline, and elegance. Let’s start out with the first one, which is the factor of space. About a month ago, it was August in New Zealand. Well, it was August everywhere, but it’s wintertime here in New Zealand. I had this little piece of paper in my pocket. I’d been carrying it in my wallet for well over a year, maybe a year and a half. This piece of paper had been given to me by my doctor. I’d done my annual checkup the year before and I was supposed to get the blood test done. I had been procrastinating for quite a while, as you can tell. That day I decided I’m going to park the car and I’m going to walk to the lab and get the blood test done.

I wasn’t expecting anything. I’d been walking every day. I’d been eating sensibly, I think, drinking sensibly. Yet, the very next night I got some news from my doctor. He said, “Your cholesterol is high.” I went and looked it up, and I found that there was no real linkage to what you eat and cholesterol, but there is a very distinct relationship between stress and everything, not just stress and cholesterol but stress and everything. That is when I started taking the weekends off.

Now we fool ourselves. We say we’re taking the weekend off but we check email and we work for a couple of hours, or do this and do that. Suddenly, the weekend is not really off. I found this to be true for me. I used to get to work, even on the weekend, at 4 AM because I wake up at that time. Before I knew it, it was 9:00, 10:00. I put in five or six hours on the weekend, on Saturday and Sunday. Of course I had my excuses. The podcast takes so much time, and we’re doing this course, and I have to write this book.

When I got this report, I suddenly realised the importance of space. I realised that there is no point in me doing this stuff on a consistent basis and driving myself crazy, and that the weekend was invented to give us space. Now we take three months off, and you know that, but these minor breaks become very major breaks on the weekend. I had to find a practical use for this, because at the same time we have courses going on, like we have the headline course going on. Now our courses are not about just information. They’re about practical usage. Clients will come in five days a week and they’ll do their assignment every single day.

This is a problem for me, because in the US it’s Friday, but here in New Zealand it’s Saturday. That means I have to look at the assignment on a Saturday. That’s what I was doing. I convinced myself it was only going to be a couple hours here or there. I had to then go to all the participants and say, “I’m going to take the weekend off, but my weekend, is it okay if I take it off?” I had to take their permission. No one had a problem. I don’t know I was expecting that they would have a problem, but no one had a problem.

This is the concept of space. I’ve had to use this concept of space over and over and over again. Every time, it drives me crazy when I don’t. For instance, now I’m preparing for the storytelling workshop and I have to write the notes and do the slides. I have to create this space. I have to go away from the office and sit in a space that is quieter and less disturbing, and then work through that. This factor of space had an effect that I didn’t expect.

Whenever you’re in any business, you’re always going to be slightly envious of someone else. If you’re a writer you’re going to be envious of other writers. If you’re a dancer you’re going to be envious of other dancers. It’s just natural human behaviour. Now a lot of people interview on their podcasts. Once we finish what we’re covering, they will talk to me just casually. Occasionally someone will say, “Oh, I’m so excited. We’ve just finished 1.8 downloads,” or, “Oh, we’ve got 5,000 more subscribers.”

This used to drive me not crazy, but you think about it. You think, how come? We’re putting in as much effort into this podcast. How come? The question changed the moment I realized that space was important to me, the moment I realised that weekends were important to me. I started asking myself, are you getting the weekend off? I’d listen to that person saying that they made so much more money or they got so many subscribers. I couldn’t get myself to be envious. This was a change for me. This was a big change for me, because I thought that somehow that would never go away. The space became the benchmark. It was no no no, this is more important to me than the money. It’s more important to me than your subscribers or your downloads. Having that space allows me to think and relax. I have not felt this way, like I’m feeling right now, in a very, very long time. It’s taken me about a month to slow down completely, as in to feel really relaxed. It’s just because of space.
This takes us to the second element, which is in direct contrast to space and quiet. That is deadline.

Part 2: Deadline

In 2014, we had one of the most harrowing years of our lives. It wasn’t harrowing personally, but professionally it was a real pain. That was because we had hacker attacks. It first surfaced on psychotactics.com. Now that is a very popular site, and for over a decade it has been in the top 100,000 Alexa ratings. It’s natural that hackers like that site. We put a little Band-Aid on the system and we fixed it, but they came back, and they came back, and they came back. They wouldn’t stop until the entire website had to be completely reorganised and rebuilt from the ground up.

Then after that, they went after 5000bc.com, which is our membership site. They did the same thing. Then they went after the training site, which is training.brainaudit.com. You can just tell how frustrating this is. You’re going about your business as passively as possible, trying to keep your head above water, and these hacker attacks continue to come and disrupt your life and drive you crazy. When I think about it, the hacker attacks were the best thing that happened to us because they gave us a sense of deadline.

When we think of deadline, we only think of writing books or an article or finishing this project, but the hacker attacks were so cool. They forced us to do what we hadn’t been doing for several years. We’d been putting off tidying up the website and making it just resistant to these fun-filled creeps. They came there and they went through the system, and then we had to pull up our socks. We just had to do whatever we had to do. This is the beauty of deadlines.

A lot of people consider me to be a pretty crazy person, as in I’m doing a lot of projects. I don’t see myself that way at all. I see myself as a very lazy person. I see myself as someone who loves to lie on the sofa and get a lot of that space and not a lot of deadline. Yet, without the deadline nothing happens. All the books that you read on Psychotactics, starting withThe Brain Audit, they were written because someone forced me to do it. The cartooning course, I didn’t want to do it. Someone said, “Oh no no, you have to do this. I’ve tried all the cartooning courses. They don’t work for me.”

I’ve written a book on storytelling, but to do the course was something completely different. I’m discovering elements of storytelling that I didn’t know existed, or I’m discovering depths that I didn’t know existed. Of course it’s frustrating to have to build a whole course from nothing, to write notes, to create slides, to get all the event venue, to get everyone to sign up. We could do without it, but putting that deadline in place gives my life a lot of meaning because it enhances what I do and it forces me to do it by a specific point in time.

Take this podcast for example. In October we’re going to Australia to Uluru. For those of you that don’t know, this is Ayer’s Rock, that big red rock in the middle of Australia. This brings up its own set of deadlines, which is I have to write extra newsletters. I have to put in extra vanishing reports for 5000bc, and of course podcasts. I have to do more of these podcasts so that it covers all of October. Then in December we’re going to Morocco. I know, I know, it’s a hard life.

The is that the deadline brings meaning to my life. Without the deadline I wouldn’t achieve as much as I do. Those creeps, those hackers, I wish I could send them chocolate, like howwe send our clients chocolate. Because they made such a difference to my life. They brought in this deadline, this “you have to do this right now.” It’s made our life different and I would say a lot better. The first thing that we talked about was space, and having the space creates so much of quiet in your life, and of course a lot less stress. The second thing is this factor of deadline, which forces you to rush, rush and create that stress. They both coexist together just like music. There is quiet in music and there is this huge flurry of notes. They both have to be that way because that’s what makes music.

This takes us to the third element, which is one of elegance.

Part 3: Elegance

Now I thought about it a lot. Why elegance? Why not simplicity? Simplicity is so difficult. Why elegance? In 1990 I was still living in India. A pen panel from the United States came across. She was there for a couple of weeks. She created a deadline of sorts for me. I hadn’t seen a lot of India at that point in time and she wanted to see India, so we booked a trip. We got to the Taj Mahal. Now by this point in time I wasn’t doing very well with this pen panel. When I was in university we were sending each other letters, ten pages, 12 pages, really long letters. It seemed like we would get along fine with each other.

Yet, the moment she landed that wasn’t the case at all. Something about her drove me crazy. Something about me drove her crazy. By the time we had reached Agra, which is where the Taj Mahal is located, we were pretty much going our own ways. She’d set out later, but me, I wake up early in the morning. I decided one day to go to the Taj Mahal as early as possible. There was this huge fog that was in front of the Taj Mahal. I couldn’t see it until I was very close, and it was amazing. It was stunning beyond my understanding. I’ve seen thousands of pictures of it over the years, but nothing came close to standing there right in front of it in that fog.

As I got close to it, what struck me was the elegance. It was just so beautiful. It was simple. There wasn’t anything fancy about it. Sure, it was big, it was really big, bigger than I ever imagined, but elegant. It was so elegant. As we’ve traveled the world, we’ve run into places like Japan. When you buy something in Japan, it’s amazing. It’s like you never want to open it. You can buy the smallest thing in Japan and they put it in this little box and this little wrapping. Then they put this ribbon on it. Everything in Japan is so beautifully packaged that you never feel like opening it. There is this elegance to it. It’s not just thrown at you.

As I started to be more aware of the world around me, it struck me that there are three ways to do pretty much anything. When you look around you, you see stuff that’s really crappy. We don’t want to go there because that’s just crappy and sloppy. That’s just how it is. Then you go to the next stage, which is where it’s simple. When I look at a book on Kindle, it’s simple. There’s just text. It’s been thrown in Microsoft Word. It’s out there, nothing to it. Then you look at something’s that’s elegant and you know that someone has spent some time and effort and simplified it so it looks beautiful and it reads beautiful. The words work together and the pictures work together. Suddenly you have this feeling of the Taj Mahal. It’s beautiful. It’s a monument. There are thousands of monuments in the world, but some stand out for their sheer elegance.

To me, that’s my third principle, that when I create this podcast I somehow have to be dissatisfied with it. I’m happy, but I still want to improve it. That quest for improvement becomes quest for elegance. The best example of elegance is a software program, because when you look at a software program it comes out as slightly crappy. You have version one and it’s not so great. Then version two and it’s a little better. Then it gets bigger and more bloated and it stops being elegant. Now you have to improve things without making it bloated and terrible. You have to bring in elegance.

That is the thing that gives my life meaning: to create information, or to create product, or to create a cartoon, or to do anything that is more elegant. The beauty of elegance is that sometimes it doesn’t get noticed, like when you’re watching a movie and there’s this music that enhances the movie and you don’t notice the music. That is elegance: that feeling of creating something that’s so beautiful that it doesn’t matter that no one notices it, as long as you know.

Summary

This brings us to the end of this podcast. I know it was about me, but I think it resonates with you as well. To me, the most important things, the things that give my life meaning, we could summarise them with three words, and that is space, and deadline, and elegance. Your three words might be similar, they might be different, but I think we have to stop asking ourselves what is the meaning of life, because that question is too big. Instead, it’s what gives our life meaning. Then bring it down to this whole abstract feeling. I think that’s the one thing you can do today. I think you can just sit down and write down these three terms on paper and start to think about it. What are three things that give your life meaning? Because even hackers can give your life meaning.

That brings us to the end of this podcast. As you know, we’re doing the storytelling workshop in Nashville, Tennessee and in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. We’ll see you there. You need to find your way to psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop. You would also need to read The Brain Audit. That is at psychotactics.com/brainaudit. If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, then leave a review for us at iTunes. That really helps. The show notes, the transcript, all the goodies, they’re always on the podcast number. This is podcast number 60, so that’s psychotactics.com/60. You can get all of that. It’s 5:32 AM and I have to go for my walk soon. Just on cue, it has started to rain, but I’ll take my umbrella and I’ll head out for the coffee. Thanks for listening. Bye for now.

So how can be solve the eternal problem—The Meaning Of Life? Or A Life of Meaning?
Especially when Chaos hits us everyday. Click here to find out—Why and how to make chaos your friend. http://www.psychotactics.com/chaos-planning

The reason why we find writing to be such a tedious task, is because we don't understand the barriers that get in our way. Instead, we write, edit, write, edit — and drive ourselves crazy. One of the ways to get over the barriers is to use the Captain Kirk and Mr Spock method. What is this method all about? Find out in this episode of the podcast.

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 Resources

To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/59

Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com 

Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza

Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: How to use the Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock method of writing
Part 2: The power of preparation
Part 3: How to decide on your ‘One Word’
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
 

Useful Resources

The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy And Why They Don’t
Article and Audio: Three Unknown Secrets of Riveting Story Telling
Live Workshop: How to create amazing stories—and connect them flawlessly to your articles, newletters, podcasts, etc

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The  Transcript

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Imagine you’re the athlete who’s trying for the Olympic gold in high jump.

You look at the newspapers that day and there is the Los Angeles Times and they’re saying that he goes over the bar like a guy being pushed out off a 30-storey window. Then you flip to the next newspaper which is The Guardian and it says, “He is the curiosity of the team.” Then you pick up the magazine Sports Illustrated and it says, “He charges up from slightly to the left of center with a gait that may call to mind a two-legged camel.”

We’re talking about Dick Fosbury here, the guy who first did the Fosbury flop. While all these newspapers and magazines seem to make fun of Dick Fosbury, it’s unlike he had a great opinion of himself either. It’s unlike Dick Fosbury was arguing with their comments because at college someone bet him that he couldn’t get over a leather chair. He couldn’t jump over that leather chair and he said he tried, but not only did he lose his bet but he also broke his hand in the crash landing.

In  1968, when he arrived at the Mexico Olympics he was relatively unknown and yet days later he not only captured the imagination of the Mexican public, but also the rest of the world. He sailed over the bar at 2.24 meters, which is 7 feet and 4 inches. It wasn’t that he sailed over because that wasn’t the world record. It’s that he did it by overcoming the obstacle with his crazy jump which was called the Fosbury flop.

What’s interesting about the Fosbury flop is that no one ever did that kind of flop before. No one ever tried to get over the bar in that manner. It was considered extremely weird, extremely camel-like and yet today it’s extremely weird to see people jumping over the bar as they did back in 1968. Today the Fosbury flop is the way people jump over a bar at the Olympics in any sports stadium. What Fosbury did was he looked at the obstacle and he said, “Let me get over this in another way because there’s no way I’m going to be able to do it the usual way.”

That’s really what this podcast is all about. We’re going to look at writing and why we struggle with writing, why we have these obstacles with writing. If we go about it the way we’ve always done, that doesn’t seem to work for us because you’re going about it the same way that I used to do back in the year 2000 where I would look at the article and then try to write it and then spend a day, spend 2 days writing that article and getting very frustrated and not knowing what was going wrong. We have to look at the obstacle that bar and look at how we can over that bar in a completely different way. That’s what this podcast is going to cover.

We’re going to cover 3 things. The first thing is about editing. The second thing is about preparation and the third is about the one word or the one term. As always, we’ll start with the first, which is editing.

Part One: Editing

I love making a rice dish called biryani. It is a dish meant for kings. It has all of these yummy elements. If you’ve ever eaten a biryani, you know exactly what I mean.

Here’s how you go about making a biryani. You have to get all the things together, like spices and the yogurt and other stuff like saffron and ghee, which is a clarified butter. When you get all of those things together, you got some onions. In fact, you got a lot of onions and then you caramelised the onions. When all of that is done you, marinate it. A few hours later it’s time to cook the biryani.

I put it all in a dish, which we call handi. You would call it a saucepan. Before I turn on the flame I have to do one very important thing. I have to seal the handi or the saucepan with dough so that it becomes like a pressure cooker and the meat cooks in it and the rice cooks in it and all the flavours cook within it and it’s all sealed you can’t get in. Did you notice the problem? Sure, you did. It was the dough. It sealed the vessel. There is no way to know whether the rice is cooked or the chicken is still raw. The dough prevents me from editing.

Editing is the first big obstacle to writing. Why? Because the writer and the editor are 2 completely different people. The writer is like Captain Kirk; you watched Star Trek, didn’t you? The writer is like Captain Kirk and Captain Kirk has all these great ideas. He wants to go where no man has ever gone before and he is a bit out there. Then you have Spock and he needs to be logical and that’s how your editor acts every single time. We have these 2 people, 2 completely different people and they’re at log ahead with each other.

What we do when we write is we put both of those people on the same seat. Of course they’re going to fight. Of course they’re going to continuously argue with each other and of course that’s your obstacle, isn’t it? You’re not going to get over that obstacle because you’re treating both of them as the same person when they were completely different. The first thing you’ve got to realise is that it’s not Captain Spock, it’s Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. You’ve got to start with the writing process and then let it marinate and several hours later you have to bring in Mr. Spock. Just like the biryani, you’ve got to let that marination process take its own sweet time.

You probably want to write at one part of the day and then one look at it maybe later in the day or even the next day. This is what I had to do when I first started out. I was not very good at writing. I was not very quick at writing. I would send my article to a friend and a client, whose name is Chris Ellington. Chris would look over it and then fix it and he had a million fixes and then it will come back and then I would send it out again this time to Rochelle. Rochelle would look at all the grammar and fix it and all of this editing process would drive me absolutely crazy plus there was my own creative output as it were.

This is the process. There is the writer and the editor. There is this time in between and what we do is we make a Captain Spock out of it. Of course it doesn’t work and there is no reason why it should work, because editing and writing just do not mix. That’s our first-grade obstacle and we have to learn that we’re going to have to do thing differently, do a bit of a Fosbury flop if we want to get over that bar and write great content.

This takes us to the second one and the second one is all about preparation.

Part 2: Preparation

On June 29, 2007, Pixar released a movie about a rat and it was called Ratatouille. It was a story about an inspiring chef called Linguini and her rat called Remy, a rat that loved to cook.

Speaker 1: Animation is a very, very complicated business. There’s hundreds of people involved in the actual production.

Speaker 2: Many things that we take for granted in real life are difficult to do in the computer.

Speaker 3: Pixar is really very good at addressing complex problems. By far, this is the most complicated clothing that we’ve done.

Speaker 4: We went to a special sequence on that with the character with Linguini jumps into the sand to try and save Remy. He comes out dripping wet and we had to try and figure out a way to get that look when claw sticks to the skin and you can see just a little bit of colour coming through it.

Speaker 5: What do we do? We abused one of our poor coworkers. We make him dressed up in a chest outfit. We doused him with water and we filmed him. What does it look like? We’re on the clothing. Can you see it through to his skin? Where do the chips come off from his face? It’s our excuse to abuse coworkers actually not to think about it.

Sean D’Souza: What you just heard in that clip is preparation, preparation and more preparation. The reason why Pixar has to do so much preparation is because they’re not amateurs. They have million dollar budgets and of course they’re wasting a lot of money. They’re also wasting time and they’re wasting energy. When you think about it, that’s exactly what we do when we sit down to write. We don’t create that moment of preparationor really that hour of preparation and that’s how you know the difference between an amateur and a professional.

The amateur just sits down and begins to write. They sit at their computer and they decide, “I’m going to write an article today. I’m going to create a podcast today. I’m going to create a webinar.” The professional on the other hand sits down to plan. I was to listening to a podcast earlier today and there was this interview between Brian Orr and Jeff Brown. Jeff worked in the radio industry for many, many years and now he has his own podcast. He was talking about how people just show up on podcast and they start to ask questions and they don’t prepare and how all the preparation is critical.

If you listen to Ira Glass on This American Life and he’s on videos on YouTube, he talks about the preparation and how finding the stories takes half the week even though they have so many people in their staff. We think, “We’re just business people. We just have to write an article. Let’s sit down and write,” and that’s not how professionals work. You are a professional when you sit down to write and therefore you have to sit down to plan.

What are you going to plan? You’ve got to figure out what topic are you going to cover, what one word are you going to cover, what 3 sub-topics you’re going to cover or at least how you’re going to structure the article, how you’re going to structure this podcast. When I sit down to do this podcast, most of the work is done outside. Admittedly, the music takes a lot of time but the podcast takes only about 45 minutes to record and it takes me an hour and a half to put all the details together, sometimes longer. I’ll go to the cafe. I’ll sit don and I’ll put it all together. You can see a photograph of that. I’ll put it in the show notes.

It takes a lot of preparation to create something that is more than average and that’s what professionals do. This is the obstacle that we run into. It’s not I don’t try to beat the system. I try it. I’ll show up here at 4am and I’ll try to record a podcast and then it’s 4:30 and 4:45 and then 5:30. It’s very, very frustrating and so I’ve given up. I’ve totally given up.

Every time I want to record a podcast I will go to the cafe and sit there and plan. I don’t have the time that’s why I go and that’s why I plan and this is what professionals do. They plan before they execute. They get the ingredients, put the biryani in the fridge, let it marinate and then later they are cooking it. Amateurs? We just go there and we cook it right away as if something magical is going to happen.

We’ve looked at 2 main obstacles and the first one was editing, the fact that we get Captain Spock together instead of having Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. The second thing is this whole factor of preparation and how we want to bypass that process of marination.  This takes us to the third part, which is the one word or the one term.

Part 3: One Word

This podcast started with the story about Dick Fosbury. You have to ask yourself, “Why did that story exist? What is the point of that story?” the story was about obstacles and overcoming those obstacles, but why did the story matter? The story mattered because of that one word or one term and in this case the one term is a different perspective. Right until that moment in Mexico when Dick Fosbury sailed over the bar like a 2-legged camel, there was only one perspective and that perspective was to jump over it, straddle over it. He went over in a completely different way.

The one term is about different perspective and that’s how we look at the entire article. We didn’t go about how do we construct our article and what is the structure of the article, but we looked at things that stop us. We don’t realise that they’re stopping us and that is editing and preparation and the one word that one word or one term which is different perspective. It allows me to do both the preparation and the editing.

When I’m preparing, I’m thinking of how can I have a different perspective on article writing. Then when I’m done and Mr. Editor has to show up, at point in time I’m going, “Did I do this? Did I actually adhere to the one word or one term?” In a way the one word or one term satisfies the needs of those fresh 2 guys, which is preparation and editing and he does so, so brilliantly.

When you’re siting down to write something, create something ask yourself, “What is the one thing that I want to convey here? What is that endpoint?” Once you know the one word or one term you will be able to communicate in a way that you’ve never communicated before. You’d be able to edit it in a way that you’ve never done before.

Can it be more than one word or one term? One term is a couple of words. Maybe you could stretch it to 3 words. The problem is that you may want to put in 3 words or 4 words or 5 words to describe your article and the further away you go from one word the more complicated it becomes. It’s very, very hard to then edit something or nail it down so find one word. Ask yourself, “What am I going to talk about today? Is it endeavour or is it scarcity or is it premium?” The point is once you get the one word and the one term that becomes a lot simpler and that’s really what we want.

Summary

That brings us to the end of this podcast. What did we cover today? We covered 3 things. The first thing was the factor of editing that the editor and the writer they’re 2 different people. They show up at different times of day, probably on different days as well. When you write and you edit on the same day or write and edit, write and edit, write and edit, thank you. You’re just frustrating yourself and driving yourselves completely crazy. Do not edit. Come back another day. Do not become Captain Spock.

The second thing is the preparation. The professionals they don’t sit down to write. They don’t sit down to create. They sit down to plan. You need to go away somewhere. Plan, come back then you start to write. If you have to learn how to write, you can deconstruct say this piece because it’s there. It’s there in the show notes. You can deconstruct how it is created and then recreate it or you can do an article-writing course and learn how structure is built and how articles come together and how podcast come together and how … It’s all based on structure and once you understand the structure it’s just a matter of unfolding it like any language.

The third thing that we covered was one word. The one word comes before you head out to the cafe, before you sit down to plan. It’s what am I going to cover today, what is that one thing that I want my audience to get. Once you know that and you should know that, then it’s very simple or rather a lot simpler to get to the end result. What’s the one thing that you can do today? The one thing that you should do today is just sit now and say, “I’m going to write an article. What is the one word that I’m going to cover?”

If you’re not sure what you should do, I would suggest you go to the show notes and look at some of the links that I put there. Then deconstruct it and see how you can actually work out what one word was I trying to cover. You’ll start to see a pattern and once you get that pattern you will learn how to do it yourself..

Of course there is no substitute for being with a good teacher and I am a good teacher and you know that. I’m going to be there alive in Nashville, Tennessee and then in Amsterdam in The Netherlands and we’re going to do a storytelling workshop. I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m sure you did, this podcast and every podcast is full of stories and that’s what keeps you going. As you’re walking, as you’re driving, suddenly in the middle of all those facts and figures there’s the story unfolding how does that story unfold.

When you read the book The Brain Audit or you read the book on pricing or you read the book on testimonials, when you read those books you don’t always know why you like the book so much. Sure there’s a structure. Sure there’s a system, but more critically there are case studies and examples and analogies and stories and that’s what keeps the progression going ahead. Fact and figures they are very good but they are very tiring. Storytelling becomes very critical. It’s not only critical to get the message across in a meaningful way, but it’s also very helpful to know how to construct stories so that your audience remembers them.

There are lots of storytelling books and there are lots of storytelling workshops, so why is this one going to be different?

This one is different because this is storytelling versus storytelling. When you open a book on storytelling, essentially they’re teaching you how to write short stories or they’re telling how to write a script or a movie. Very rarely are you going to get storytelling that helps you construct stuff from business, for writing articles, for adding to podcast or seminars or just about everything that you do in business.

How do you connect it back to the business? How do you create books? How do you create reports? How do you create witch stories embedded in them so they become irresistible? That’s not what most workshops and books online are going to be able to teach you and that’s why this workshop is so critical.

Come join us in Nashville on the second, third and fourth of December or if you’re in Europe it’s the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth of December. You can find everything at psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop. The prices are going up. We always raise prices and they’re going to go up every 20 days or so. By the time you get to it several months later, which is when the workshop begins, it will be at its highest price. We are still in the early bird stages so go to psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop and we’ll see you there.

If you haven’t read The Brain Audit, you should read The Brain Audit. Why? Because it’s one of the coolest business books you will ever read. It has lots of stories and it’s the barrier to the workshop. You have to rear The Brain Audit before you get there, so either the workshop and The Brain Audit or join us at 5000bc.com.

That’s it for me on a Friday evening, not 4am, so that’s a little different. Bye for now.

Storytelling is “persuasion with class”
Does the brain actually process thoughts in a step-by-step manner? You can use all the “buy now” buttons and countdown clocks, but it just comes across as aggressive. You can use facts, figures, and yes, they all work to persuade, but storytelling does it with finesse. See how stories are used in the excerpt of The Brain Audit to get your attention with finesse.

Storytelling struggles without a catalyst. And yet a catalyst doesn't have to be in your face. It can be quiet, almost introspective. So how do you create powerful catalysts for your stories? And then once you have the catalyst in place, how do you connect the story back to your article, podcast or presentation?

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Resources

To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/58

Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com 

Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza

Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic

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In this storytelling episode Sean talks about

Part 1: What is a catalyst and why you need it in your story
Part 2: What is the point of a story
Part 3: How to use storytelling in your presentations, articles and sales letters
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.

Useful Resources and Links

Live Workshop: How to create well-told stories that create a bond with your audience without sounding unprofessional
Article Writing Article: Why We Struggle To Write Articles: The Myth Of Unique Content
Story Telling Goodies: Coming Soon. Email Renuka for more details. renuka@psychotactics.com

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The Transcript

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This is The 3 Month Vacation and I’m Sean D’Souza.

In 2003, I stopped watching TV. It wasn’t like I didn’t like TV. In fact, I probably liked it too much. I’d spend two, three hours every single day, watching TV. It didn’t seem like two or three hours; it seemed like just might be half an hour. I’d switch it on at six o’clock in the evening, then it would be seven o’clock, then eight o’clock and then nine o’clock. And of course, there was the morning news. In effect, I was spending three or four hours watching completely crazy stuff. At this point, my brother-in-law Ranjit moved to New Zealand. He lived with us for several months before finding his own place. In the month before he left, we had a conversation. It wasn’t a conversation really. It was more like a bet. He said that I watched too much TV, and I said, “No, no, no, you watch too much TV.” We took this bet, and the bet was that the next person that switches on the TV loses. We didn’t say what that person loses, but right after that discussion, not one of us touched that remote control. The TV sat in the corner for a week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks. Ranjit moved out, and it still sat in the corner. We didn’t switch it on.

A few months later, we put the TV in the closet and eventually we just got rid of it. What’s the point of the story? What we’re listening to here is this unfolding of the story, but right at the core of it is a catalyst and that catalyst is causing us to move the story forward because that catalyst has speeded up some action, and that’s taking us towards an endpoint. When we look at the same story without the catalyst, it becomes very boring. Let’s run that same story once again. Let’s say, my brother-in-law, Ranjit wasn’t around and that one day I decided to stop watching TV and so I kept the remote to the side. That was it, 13 years have passed, and I haven’t watched TV. It’s not as interesting, isn’t it? That one little factor that came into play, which is my brother-in-law stepping in, the bet and then both of us being very pigheaded about it and not watching TV that’s what causes all the drama.

You’ve got to have a catalyst in your story, but you also have to get that story to an end point, and that is what we’re going to cover in today’s podcast. We’re going to look at this understanding of the catalyst, which could be an active catalyst or an inactive catalyst. The second thing that we look at is what is this catalyst leading to, why are we doing this whole story thing in the first place? What is the endpoint? The third thing that we’re going to look at is how are you going to use this storytelling in your presentations, in your articles, in your sales letters? We’ll take a look at some of those things.

Part 1:What Is The Catalyst

Let’s get started with the first thing, which is understanding the catalyst and how it can be active or inactive. If you look at the rating of all the podcasts, you’ll see a little C symbol on it. That C symbol, it stands for clean. It means that you’ll never get any bad language on this podcast, you’ll never hear any swear words, you’ll never hear anything that you would hear on another podcast. All of this goes back to one moment in time when I was in school. I didn’t use any bad language and then suddenly when I was in the sixth grade, I decided that every third word had to be a swear word. I don’t know how it started. I don’t know why it started, but the moment I’d get on to the playground with my friends at school, I would start to use the swear words. One day, my brother showed up, and he’s standing there and he’s watching me. I’m playing and using all these swear words. Suddenly I realize, “Oh, what is he doing standing there?” He’s got this evil grin on his face, and he goes and he says, “I’m going to tell daddy about this.” That’s the first moment that I realize, “Oh, all these swear words, all the stuff that I’ve been doing, he’s going to report me.” He’s my brother; I couldn’t do anything to him. He still had to get home in one piece.

I go home, but now I’m terrified. I know my brother, he is going to tell his story. He is going to tell my father that I’m using all these swear words. I’m expecting some real trouble. I don’t know what the trouble is going to be, but I know there is going to be trouble. My father says to me, “Sean, I would prefer that you didn’t use bad language anymore.” “That’s it?” That was it. That was pretty much it. Over 30 years have passed since that moment and to this day, I am deeply embarrassed if I have to use bad language even by mistake. What we’re experiencing here is this concept called the catalyst. For the story to reach dramalevel, you need that catalyst. You need something to happen; you need something to speed up those bunch of events, so that you get to the other side, whatever that other side is. When we examine this, we say, “Well, what was the catalyst or who was the catalyst?”

We could say that my brother was the catalyst because if he hadn’t gone on this big tell-tell mission, then I wouldn’t have had the problem. Somehow I think that wasn’t the catalyst. It was the calm. The fact that my father didn’t punish me that struck a chord. That calm, it became the inactive catalyst. When we look at the catalyst, we look at something that’s active and something that’s inactive. To me at least, the active catalyst is someone or something that’s pretty much in your face. When I told you some stories in some other podcasts about how my friend Joan, she got into the space and she asked me about my trip to New Zealand. When we were immigrating to New Zealand, she became the active catalyst. She was that one force that pushed me along the journey or did I tell you the story about my mother-in-law and how we went for a week into Northland, which is just a couple of hours from Auckland. These were the early days of Psychotactics. I took some books with me, some business books and she said, “No, no, no, we’re going on a break, and you’re not going to read anything on that break.”

Here’s what I did, when they went for a walk, I read my business books, sitting in the hotel. When they went to the beach, I continued to read my business books. When I got back to Auckland several days later, I’d finished all those books. I didn’t get any walk and didn’t go to the beach, but I finished reading my books, and that catapulted me into this world of Psychotactics, which is what you know of today. When I’m looking at story-telling, I’m looking at, “Well, is this an active catalyst or is this an inactive catalyst?” To me, an active catalyst is something like the drip drip, drip that water that leak that instant fix that has to happen now. The inactive catalyst is something that is introspective that you have to think about. I would say the mother-in-law story that would be an active catalyst. The story by Joan and how she got us moving to New Zealand that would be an active catalyst. The story about my father and how he was so calm, to me that became an inactive catalyst. It became something that was introspective, something that I had to go back and think about what I was doing.

If you want to segregate them into two bits, you can say, “Well, we’re going to have an active catalyst here, someone that is agitating you to move towards that destination that urgency is in place and then you see the interactive catalyst, where you ponder, and you think about it or you read a book and that book changes your life and that becomes the inactive catalyst.” Whether you choose an interactive or an active catalyst, the point is that when you’re telling a story, those elements need to be in place. When you write your story, you need to know very quickly what is that catalyst, who is that catalyst and how did it change whatever you were doing? All that bad language that I was using with my friends that was my everyday life, nothing was changing, nothing changed in that world until the catalyst came along. The catalyst became calm and then I got to a destination.

Part 2: What Does The Catalyst Lead To?

That takes us to our second part, which is what is the point of this story? What is the point of the catalyst? Christopher Vogler has this story telling seminar, and it’s about the hero’s journey and how the hero goes on this massive journey somewhere and then he comes back a changed person. In one of his story telling seminars, he talks about this sheriff. The sheriff decides he wants to retire, so he’s hanging up his guns. He doesn’t want anything to do with all this violence and gun slinging. He just wants to live peacefully, and while he’s going about doing this peaceful routine of his every single day, he notices this pretty woman. He sees her buying some groceries and then another time; he sees her walking down the street and slowly he’s falling in love with this woman. Suddenly, a group of bandits ride into town, and one of the people that they kidnap is the woman.

Suddenly, his whole peaceful routine, it’s finished. Now, he’s got to pick up those guns and get back into this world of violence that he has left behind. Let’s assume the story unfolds as it should. He meets the bad guys. He gets rid of them. He gets the woman back, but what’s the point of the story? When I tell you the story about how Joan got us to New Zealand, there is a point to that story. When I tell you about how I read the book by Jim Collins, which is “Good to Great” and it asked me, “What can you be the best in the world at?” Well, there is a point to that story. When my father said, “Hey, Sean I would prefer you don’t use this filthy language,” there was a point to that story, and that is critical. Most people think that if they just tell the story that’s fine, but it’s not. You have to have a point through the story. As kids, we know that this is the moral of the story, and it’s not necessarily the moral that we’re looking at here. We’re looking at why are you telling me the story?

When we started selling the Brain Audit, which was way back in 2002, I had written this book, this PDF and then I went to this guy who was selling stuff online. His name was Joe Vitale. Joe was very excited with the book. He said, “Hey, this book is really good, I could promote it for you.” He got us to do stuff. He got us to get our credit card system in place. He got us to get the sales page up. All of this had to be done in a week and then we were waiting for him to promote it. A week passed, and he didn’t do anything. A month passed, he didn’t do anything. Suddenly, we noticed that people were buying the Brain Audit. The point of the story is that Joe was not supposed to sell anything for us in the first place. He was supposed to be a kicking angel. What I call a kicking angle and kicking angle is someone that comes in there and kicks you and gets you moving and then moves out of the way. They don’t buy anything from you. They don’t sign up for any of your courses. They just make sure that somehow you get moving. Now, you know the point of the story because if I wrote an article about kicking angels, and I started out with the Joe Vitale story, you know Joe was the kicking angle.

The point of the story is that when someone promises to sign of course or they decide that they want to come to your workshop, or maybe they just decide to promote your book, but do nothing and yet there is a point to that story. There was a catalyst that catalyst was Joe. He came and he created all of this boat rocking and then he disappeared, and that was the point of the story. His disappearance was the whole point of the story, and so you’ve got to have these two elements in your storytelling. You’ve got to know who or what is the catalyst? Is that catalyst just something that you’re thinking about? Is it something that is introspective and inactive or active like Joe, like, “Come on, get your credit cards together, get your stuff together.” Once we know that catalyst and then we need to know well what was the point of the story because that point of the story helps us reconnect to the article, to the sales, to everything else. Without that point of the story, it doesn’t matter. The story is just a story with no real connection.

Part 3: How To Use The Storytelling In Your Presentations, Articles And Sales Letters

This takes us to the third part, where we start to look at how do we use this in our communication, whether we’re doing sales letters or articles or presentations or anything at all, how do we use it? On the Psychotactics website, there is a product called Black Belt Presentations. In Black Belt Presentations, I talk about how we manage to sell $20,000 worth of product at a single conference. The story that precedes that conference is even more interesting. That is because I went to Australia, and I spoke at this conference and I hardly sold anything. I watched as other presenters not only sold stuff, but people were stampeding to the back of the room to get their stuff. I wanted to create that stampede, so what I have there is this whole point of the catalyst. I stood there like an idiot, watching as other people succeeded while I failed miserably. The point of the story is very simple; I needed to figure out what they did and how they did it and how I could do the same. That day when we sold $20,000 in a single hour at a conference, it goes all the way back to the point where I failed, and that point of failure was the catalyst. What is the point of the story?

Well, if we were just at a party, and we’re drinking some wine and eating some cheese, it makes for some great entertainment because hey you succeeded, but what are you going to do with it when you get to the sales page? This is where stories are so effective because they help the reader to get into that same mindset that you were in. When this goes on to a sales page, and I tell the story, I can then connect it to the Black Belt series. Then you realize, “Well, if I’m going to make a presentation, if I’m going to fail, then no, I’d rather not fail, I’d rather figure out how to be able to set up my slides, how to work out, how the audience participates, how they react, I need to know all this information and me need to know how to put my presentation together.”

The reason a client is going to buy the Black Belt Presentations, even though it’s not a cheap product is because of the story. The story starts them on that journey. It sends them through the catalyst and eventually there is a point that you do not want to be standing there and watching while others sell and you do nothing. You don’t always have to tell a story to sell a product, but you have to tell a story to get an idea across. Let’s say I was going to tell a story about how kindness is more powerful when dealing with human beings than say brute force or anger or frustration. Then, I could tell you the story of how my father said, “I wish you wouldn’t use that language.” Now, we have a point to the story. The whole point of the story is that you’ve created change, and so this takes you right into writing your article about change, about kindness. You start off with the story about the father and the son, you then move through the catalytic moment and then finally what’s the point of the story. It’s kindness works better and then talk about how kindness works with dolphins and dogs and people and how all the elements that you’re going to cover in your article. The storytelling that’s the whole magnet. That’s the thing that sucks me into reading the rest of the article.

If you do not have the skills to tell a story and you don’t get it through the catalyst and you don’t finally get to the point of the story, well it’s a not wasted exercise, but it’s entertainment, possibly entertainment is good enough. When you’re in business, when you’re writing that article, when you’re writing your sales letter, you need to be able to tell those stories using this catalyst.

Summary

Let’s summarize what we have covered today. We covered three things. The first thing is the catalyst and how we can have that active catalyst and the interactive catalyst. The active catalyst is something urgent. The roof has just fallen, you have to fix it. Your friend runs into you while you’re grocery shopping, and she says, “No, no, no, you have to get to New Zealand now.” Then there is the inactive catalyst, something you read, something that’s introspective. The catalyst alone is not that important if there’s no point to it, so there must be a point. It’s like, why is this happening? Why is my brother-in-law stepping into my life and taking a bet with me about the television? It’s changed my life. I stopped spending two, three, four hours. I thought I was spending just a little time in front of the TV, but when I stopped watching TV and when I threw it out and gave it away that’s when I realized, “Oh my God, I was spending so much time in front of this stupid device that taught me nothing.” There was a point to the story, and it wasn’t just entertainment. Now, it could be entertainment, but in business, you’re going to have to connect it to something that you’re selling or something that you’re telling. If it is something you’re telling, like an article, then how does it connect?

We saw that with the Black Belt Presentation, the whole story could then fit in, so that you would decide, “Well, yes I don’t want to be in that situation,” or if I’m talking about my father’s story then I could connect it to kindness and how kindness works very well in changing the perception of other people. There you have it, the catalyst, the point of the catalyst and then how to connect it back to whatever you’re telling or whatever you’re selling. What’s the one thing that you can do today? Well, the one thing that you can do today it start off with the point of the story. Why are you telling the story? What change do you want to occur? When you do that, then you have to go out and seek the story that fits into that point. You can work it from there forward. It’s not easy. We have to learn how to do this, but always there has to be the point. Otherwise, it’s just entertainment.

Talking about entertainment, have you been to a Psychotactics Workshop? Well, there is one showing up in Nashville, Tennessee on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th of December, and then we go to Amsterdam, the Netherlands on the 15th, 16th, and 17th. Psychotactics Workshop is a lot of fun. I know lots of people promised fun, but this is a lot of fun and you learn systematically, just like you’ve been learning on this podcast, there is a system and by the end of it, you are exceedingly good at story telling. That’s the goal. The goal is not to give you information. Information will come to you in notes and like in all workshops, there will be slides and presentation, but most of the time you will be working and having fun in your groups and learning to write stories, which is what the goal is after all.

You go to www.Psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop. You have to read the Brain Audit before you get there. You can get the Brain Audit at Psychotactics or on Amazon, but you have to have the Brain Audit, otherwise you cannot attend the workshop and learn how to tell stories like really good stories, stories that you can use in your articles, in your podcasts, in your presentations, on your website, on your About Us page, pretty much everywhere. Storytelling is a craft. You can learn it and you can become very good at it. You also want to check out the membership at 5000bc.com. That’s where we hang around, where there’s lots of information, but also where I am on a consistent basis, answering questions. That’s 5000bc.com and as always I’m on Twitter and Facebook at Sean D’Souza and Sean@Psychotactics.com. Bye for now.

Do you want to write that article, because you do have something to say?  And your audience wants to hear it. So what is stopping you? Find out ‘Why We Struggle To Write Articles (And The Myth Of Unique Content).

No matter where you go, you run into people with the same problem?time. Whether you're a small business owner, or run a big company, it's all about time, and getting things done. A lot of time saving can be done without too much effort on your part?and by simply using software. Software that does very smart stuff is what we all need. Here's the list of three core areas where I use the software.

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Useful Resources

To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/57
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic

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Software and Hardware Mentioned In This Episode: Mac 

Default Folder: http://www.stclairsoft.com/DefaultFolderX/
Text Expander: https://smilesoftware.com/TextExpander/index.html
Dragon Naturally Speaking: http://www.nuance.com/dragon/index.htm
Mailbox: http://www.mailboxapp.com
Evernote: http://www.evernote.com
Dropzone: http://www.mailboxapp.com

Plantronics DSP400: Plantronics DSP-400 Digitally-Enhanced USB Foldable Stereo Headset and Software

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In this episode Sean lists three core areas where he uses software to save time.

Part 1: How to handle repetitive tasks
Part 2: What are the factors of communication
Part 3: How to store all your ideas
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
 

Useful Resources and Links

Read about: The Four Critical Zones Required to Speed Up Your Learning
Episode 3: Unusual Time Management Ideas (Audio and Transcript)
Chaos Planning: Why you should Forget Business Planning and Goal Stting

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The Transcript

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This is The 3 Month Vacation and I’m Sean D’Souza.

It was almost the end of the Second World War when Boeing came out with a plane that was called the B-29. It was the first ever high-altitude bomber. It could fly at over 22,000 feet. It’s one thing to have a plane that can fly at such heights, but you also have to be able to predict what’s going to happen to the plane at that height. These planes they were at a Pacific air base and 2 Air Force meteorologists were given the job to prepare wind forecast so that they could figure out how they could get that plane going in that height. Using the information that they had, they decided that the speed was 168 knots.

However, their commanding officer could not believe the forecast. He thought that they had overestimated the speed of the wind. He thought it was too high. However, on the very next day the B-29 pilots reported wind speeds of 170 knots and that moment in time was when the jet stream was discovered. The question is how do you get to jet stream, because when we look at very successful people what we’re seeing is that they’re flying at these very high altitudes at very high speeds. While our lives might be completely different from these people, what we have in common is the factor of time. They have the same 24 hours as we do and they make use of their time.

Today I’m going to talk about time yet again, but this time I’m going to focus on software. We’re going to look at how software can make your life a lot better and a lot quicker and, of course, you have more time to do the things that you really want to do. In today’s broadcast we’re going to cover 3 elements. One is repetitive tasks; the second is tasks that involve communication; and the third one which is tasks that involve storage in finding things. This is where we come to a fork in the road because many of you might be using a PC and I’m using a Mac and I switched from a PC to Mac in 2008 and I have never looked back.

There is going to be some overlap. You’re going to get some of the software that is available both in PC and Mac, but what you’ve got to understand is the concept. The concept is more about repetitive, about communication and storage software. You’ll find that on a PC. Don’t be too stressed out that this is like a Mac presentation. Let’s start off with the first one, which is the repetitive task that I have to do every day.

Part 1: Repetitive Tasks

The first thing that you have to do every single day no matter whether you’re a PC or Mac is to find folder. You save something and you need to find a folder and on the Mac you get something called Default Folder. This is one of the best tools that I have found. What this does is immediately it gives you a little heart option and that makes it a favorite, which means that when you’ve got sudden folders that you use on a regular basis you can assign a little heart to them and then every time you save it you click on the heart, those folders show up and goes to box.

My set up is across computers. It would be this folder and subfolder and I would spend a few seconds maybe 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds trying to get to that folder and what Default Folder does is it takes me there in 1 second. I can also set up Default Folder so that it very quickly gets me to that folder by pressing a shortcut and this is in the preferences. Without getting very technical about it, what you’ve got to do is have a software that can get you to the folder very, very quickly. You can generate thousands of shortcuts all sitting on the desktop.

This saves you 10 seconds here, 5 seconds there, 20 seconds there but more importantly it saves you all that energy of opening up folders and subfolders, which is what we do on a regular basis. That’s the first thing that is very repetitive.

The second thing that we do, which is very repetitive, is answer the same questions over and over again, like for instance your email address. You might be typing it several times a day, maybe your website or a website that you go to. The point is that software like Text Expander will do that for you. You just have a little shortcut, like for instance with me, I just type SX and it types out sean@psychotactics.com.

If I type browser X, it will spit out 3 paragraphs that tell the person who’s just emailed me, “Wait a second. You want this download, you have to go and check on another browser because maybe this browser is not working.” It gives us long message of 2 or 3 paragraphs and it does so in 1 second. Every single day what I have is a whole bunch of messages that come to me that are quite repetitive in nature. When I answer, Text Expander will actually say, “You have been using this on a regular basis. You have been answering this way on a regular basis. Would you like to save this as a snippet?”

For instance, I use the word The Brain Audit several times, because I wrote the book. Text Expander will watch while I’m doing this The Brain Audit, The Brain Audit, The Brain Audit and then it will say, “Do you want to save this as a snippet,” and then I can put in a little shortcut like TBA and then I have The Brain Audit. Not only do I have The Brain Audit, but it’s capitalized like T capitalized and B capitalized and A capitalized. All of this stuff is very repetitive and within The Brain Audit I have terms like target profile or reverse testimonials and I have shortcuts for all this.

Who’s going to remember all those shortcuts? The program does it for you. It reminds you every time you don’t use the shortcut, “You had the shortcut TBA for The Brain Audit. Use it the nest time.” After a while, the program is starting to think for you as well. These are 2 repetitive things that you have to do, open up folders and store things in folders and for that you have Default Folder.

The second thing is just answers that you give clients, stuff that you have to write in email, email addresses, maybe just your address, maybe you just have to type in your address send this to whatever PO Box number, whatever. That can be made very unrepetitive with this software called Text Expander, which then takes us to the second one which is a factor of communication.

Part 2: Factor of Communication

When I moved to New Zealand in the year 2000, I moved into a rental place. I didn’t really want to spend a lot of money so I bought myself a little plastic chair, which was about $10 at the store. Every one who was back home; my wife Renuka was still in India, all my friends were in India, I didn’t know anyone in New Zealand. What I was doing is using messenger. Back then I was using the PC, so MSN messenger. I would spend several hours on MSN messenger just chatting.

At some point I got what is called RSI, that’s Repetitive Stress Injury. The RSI got so bad that I couldn’t sleep at night. My shoulders hurt. My forearms hurt. My fingers felt like there was an electric current going through them. I had to go for physiotherapy and then I had to go for acupuncture and it seemed I was so afraid of so much as opening the garage door because I was in so much pain all the time. If you just wrapped me on the knuckles, I would fall down on the floor in pain.

At that point in time, I didn’t have this software. When Renuka got to New Zealand, she was actually doing a lot of typing for me. I wasn’t working. I had to stop working and she started doing typing and the point I was building websites. What is the point of this story? The point of the story is that you don’t need to get RSI to get on to the software. This software is Dragon Naturally Speaking.

If you use Dragon Naturally Speaking several years ago, you’re probably very frustrated with the way it worked. You needed to practice for about half an hour train the system then it would get most of the stuff wrong. It wouldn’t work on browsers. It wouldn’t work on forums. It would do this and it would do that. It is got very good in recent years. You can now train it for as little as 5 to 7 minutes and it will recognize your accent and it will start to work just out of the box. Almost out of the box, 5 to 7 minutes is not a lot of time.

The point is that it’s not very easy to get into that mode where you’re dictating, but think about every single bus in the ’60s and ’70s was already doing this form of dictation. They would say a sentence, putting the punctuation, do all that stuff to their secretaries. It’s not like it’s something that is very hard to do. You just have to get used to it and the way to get used to it is to use a phone.

A lot of phones have this system where you can dictate into the phone and that’s how I started. I started using Siri on my iPhone and I would just respond to emails and after a while I got used to speaking like this, which is I will return your email later, full stop. In fact I got so used to it that one day I had to leave a message on an answer phone and I said, “I will call you back later, full stop.”

You can actually switch very quickly between the way we speak or the way I’m speaking right now and then moving into punctuation. This saves you a lot of time, because you cannot believe how fast you can go through this whole system of dictating answers and that is how I get through a lot of my email every day. I have to be careful that I read whatever I have dictated, because the pronunciation is not always very clear.

The computer will spit out whatever your say, because fort may sound like fourth and that’s what the computer will type. You’ve got to do the editing and you can’t afford to be sloppy. I’ll admit I had been sloppy and then I’ll hit send too quickly, so you have to do that a little bit at least, but it saves you enormous amount of time. This is just communication and this is just 1 software in communication.

The second software that I use with communication and this saves me an enormous amount of time is something that Dropbox gives absolutely free. It’s called Mailbox. What it does is it allows you to postpone your email for later. You can postpone it for a month or you can postpone it for a day or tomorrow or later this evening or whatever. When you think of it the first time you think, “Wait a second. You were just procrastinating.” No, what I’m trying to do at all times is keep my inbox down to zero.

Here’s the reason why I have to do that. I have to do that because every time the inbox is filled with, I don’t know, a dozen, 2-dozen, 3-dozen, 4-dozen emails I have to scan through all those emails and that’s no good. Either I act on the emails or I put them off until later. What I do is supposing I have to get in touch with someone a month later. I will swipe and say, “Get this email back to me after a month,” and then exactly a month later it will show up and then I can act on it, so it acts like a to-do list.

Of course, you’re human and you don’t want to deal with some email and you will procrastinate and that’s fine. Most of the time your goal should be to get that email box down to zero. There is other software like SaneBox and other stuff that you can use. This Mailbox it’s free and it works really well. The goal is to keep your inbox down to zero. You cannot believe how addictive this is. After a while you’re swiping and deleting and responding and finishing off your email so that you don’t have to deal with it and you don’t have to scan through al those read emails and figure out which one do I have to get open into the box and put in that folder and this folder; no, nothing like.

I know you’re skeptical. My wife Renuka she is skeptical off a lot of stuff that I think I wonderful because I think a lot of stuff is wonderful. I showed it to her a few months ago, she wasn’t interested. I showed it to her 2 weeks ago, she wasn’t interested. Then last week for some reason she got interested and now she’s hooked. I can tell you, you will be hooked. Try and get your inbox down to zero by using Mailbox.

With communication, there are these 2 things that helped me get to jet stream and that is Dragon naturally Speaking. It’s amazing and often enough they give it to you at a discount so go and look for the discount. You’ll get a Dragon Naturally Speaking and get yourself a Plantronics. If you’re swayed by Dragon telling you to buy their own microphone, don’t do it. Get yourself a Plantronics 400 and that’s a very good microphone. I’ll list this at the bottom of the podcast. The second thing you want to do is you want to get Mailbox.

What we’ve covered so far is we’ve looked at stuff that’s repetitive in nature and Default Folder will help you there and Text Expander will help you there. We’ve also looked at communication and what I use a lot is Dragon Naturally Speaking and Mailbox and finally we’ll look at storage. Let’s go to the third part which is storage.

Part 3: Storage

When you write articles, when you create presentations, when you have to write books, you’re going to put facts and figures and let me tell you this. Facts and figures are really, really boring. They are so boring because they first of all are intimidating the hard to remember. The only thing that your clients really remember are stories, but the problem is that you cannot the stories. You cannot get to the case studies. You cannot get to the examples and so then you spend enormous amounts of time in research.

The worst time to do research is when you’re sitting down to write your article. The worst time to do research is when you’re sitting down to do your presentation. You need to have all of this information in advance and episode 41 covered that. It said, “How to save 2 zillion hours in research using Evernote.” Go back to episode number 41. Listen to that or read the transcript and you will learn how I use Evernote.

The second thing that I use and we have brought Default Folder right back. Default Folder allows you to tag your files. If you’re even slightly interested in finding a file then you want to tag it when you save it. This is very important because let’s say you did a cartoon and the cartoon was about a bear. Then later on you wanted to find something to do with intimidation or fear and you typed in intimidation or fear. What kind of results would you get? Nothing.

What you do when you save a file is you put in some little tags. When you put in those tags and Default Folder does this really well then every time you type in those keywords or something close to those keywords it will bring up that file, which is called bear.psd. You look for intimidation and fear and you got bear and you go, “I could use the bear,” and that’s what I do. When I’m saving files, I’ll give them little tags.

You might not do this because you think it takes time, but it only takes time on the front-end. Once you get started and you really are in a project you need all the energy and all the resources at your disposal and all of this software really comes to help you and that brings us to the end of this episode.

Summary

We’ve covered 3 things. The first is repetitive, the second one is communicative, and the third one is the storage. We looked at Default Folder and how it will take you exactly where you need to be. We also looked at Text Expander and how it expands little snippets of text or huge amounts of texts and it does it in a matter of seconds. We then went to communication. We looked at Dragon Naturally Speaking and we looked at Mailbox, which can also be procrastination heaven, but let’s face it. Your inbox is procrastination heaven already. You might as well have an empty inbox.

Finally, we looked at storage and we looked at Evernote and that’s episode number 41. Go and listen to it, read it. Default Folder, if you use tags well you will find things like you can’t imagine. These are the 3 things that will get you into jet stream, but what’s the one thing that you can do today?

The one thing that you can do today is find a Text Expander. I know this for sure that the PC has Text Expander as well. I think one of them is called Breevy that is B, R, E, E, V, Y. I don’t know how well it works. I know Text Expander works really well. Get yourself a Text Expander and stop this typing over and over and over again. You will thank me later. You will send me chocolates. You will send me to Disneyland. You will be really thankful that you use this software. When you finish this podcast, go back to your office and buy a Text Expander, whichever one for the Mac or the PC and there you will enter your own jet stream.

An interesting fact about the jet stream with climate change that jet stream has changed. It’s taking pilots 11 minutes more to get to their destination. Of course, when they spend 11 minutes more in the sky they are causing more climate change so it might take you longer to get to your destination. You don’t want to do that in your office. You want to get to that jet stream and you want to get there as quickly as possible. Get the software and start using it today and then you can send me the tickets later. You can send me the chocolates later.

Before we go, there is a storytelling workshop coming up. It’s in Nashville, Tennessee and it’s on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th of December. We have dates and we’re also in Europe in Amsterdam in the Netherlands and that’s on the 15th, 16th and 17th of December. Story telling is used everywhere, but the beauty of storytelling is its stickiness. When I tell you the story about The Brain Audit, I only have to tell you that story once and then you can tell it 100 times over and never lose the impact and that is the beauty of storytelling,.

Storytelling is used for podcast that’s why you like this podcast because there are so many stories. You read The Brain Audit, there are so many stories and so many case studies and so many examples. It’s not enough to just tell the story. It’s how you craft the story and that’s what we’re going to learn. We’re going to learn how you find the story, how you craft the story and then how you connect the story to your business.

It’s very easy to create … It’s not easy to create story but once you know how to do it, it’s easy. The hard thing is connecting it back to your business in a professional way and we’re going to do this at the storytelling workshop, where learning how to create a driveway moment, where people just want to listen to the end of your story. Go topsychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop and we’ll see you either in Nashville, Tennessee or in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

You have to have read The Brain Audit however, because that’s the condition, that’s the barrier. If you haven’t read The Brain Audit, you should be reading it anyway. It’s at psychotactics.com/brainaudit. Read the stories. Read the examples. See for yourself how facts and figures intimidate and get yourself into the jet stream of storytelling.

That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now and thanks for listening to The 3 Month Vacation. Bye-bye.

Still Reading?  In business to save time, we have to learn time crunching software. And to get better at our marketing, we have to understand our customers. One of the ways to get better is to understand how the brain works. Does the brain actually process thoughts in a step-by-step manner? Click here to get a free excerpt on Why Customers Buy (And Why They Don’t). Get ready to enjoy the concise and easy to absorb information.