Sat, 31 October 2015
There’s a difference between the “four-hour work week” and magic. You can create revenue in a short week. You can’t create magic.Magic is what we all want to create with our work. Most of us love our work. It gives us purpose and satisfaction. And yes, we’d love a “three-month” paid vacation—or just any vacation at all. And that’s the goal. The goal is to work hard, but to also have a great time.
I don’t mow the lawns. I outsource it.I don’t do my accounts. It’s what keeps my accountant in business. I bake my own bread, cook my own food, but at least half of the time it’s all outsourced. In fact, when I think about it, a good chunk of my life is outsourced. I don’t build my own computers, code my own programs, generate my own electricity. I didn’t even bother to weave my own carpet. So yes, you could safely say that outsourcing is a good part of my life. What I don’t outsource is magicIt’s magical to write my own articles. Do my own books. Draw my own cartoons. Answer my own email. When I think about those who keep yearning for a “four-hour” work week, I find it incredibly weird and unsettling. I think of Leonardo da Vinci spending only four hours a week, painting. I think of Michelangelo goofing off on David and just putting in the least amount of time. I think of the wine I drink and how it would taste if the wine maker decided not to put in 50-60 hours a week. I remember the movies that moved me, the food that tantalised my taste buds, the books that have elevated my senses. I think of all the magic the world has seen, felt and experienced over the years and a “four hour” workweek makes zero-sense to me. You can create money in four hoursYou can’t create magic. Money isn’t magic. It may seem that way, when you’re slogging in a job that you have no control over. A life that seems to pull and push you in all directions. At that point, money and magic may seem like one and the same thing. And yet it’s not. Work is magicWork well done, is something we all yearn for. And try as you may, you can’t outsource the important stuff in life. So when some internet marketer comes along and tells you that a four-hour work week is magical, they’re just equating work with money. That somehow you could work for four hours in a week, and make all the money and you’d be happy. I can assure you that you’d be happy for a while, but then you’d seek magic. And magic yup, that takes a lot more time and effort. I wake up at 4 am every day and have done so for many yearsI don’t have to wake up. We’ve done well over the years. We have a business which attracts really phenomenal customers. Some of them have been with us for over 12 years (considering we’re Internet-based, that’s like a hundred years). Our workshops are always full. Our courses often sell out in an hour or so sometimes 20 minutes. We’ve banked enough, own enough, travel three months in a year. Truly speaking, if we were to stop working now, we could go for at least another 20-30 years, living our comfortable lifestyle. So why wake up at 4 am?Why put in 99 cartoons in a book when people are happy to just buy text? Why bother to re-write, re-engineer our courses by 20-30% every year? It’s all extra work, isn’t it? More hours in a day, month and year that seems to slip by increasingly faster. The answer lies in magicYou can outsource some stuff, and you should. But to create the Mona Lisa, David and some fine wine yup, that’s going to take a chunky 50-60 hours a week. Get used to it!..to continue listening to or reading the podcast Right click and save-as to download this episode: Four-Hour Work Week A Waste Of Time? |
Sun, 25 October 2015
When we sit down to write a landing page, we usually have a ton of confusion in our heads. We have so many elements on that landing page. What should we put first? What should we leave out? The sales of our product or service depends on us having incredible focus. So how do we get that focus? The answer lies in the "pebble system". The moment we apply the "pebble system" we are able to prioritise what's important to our client—and to ourselves. The sales page gets crystal clear and we stop going around in circles. So what is this "pebble system" and how do we use it right away? -------------------- Useful Resources Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic Improve your planning (with chaos): http://www.psychotactics.com/chaos Write your home page/about us page: http://www.psychotactics.com/web ---------------------- In this episode Sean talks aboutPart 1: How To Find The Confusion On Your Sales Pages Useful Resources1) How To Avoid Dragging Out A Well Known Story (And Boring The Reader) -------------------------------- The Transcript“This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.” This is the Three Month Vacation, and I’m Sean D’Souza. Every evening at about twilight in New Mexico and Arizona, thousands of bats stream out from caves.One of the most famous of them all, at least among biologists, is the Mexican free-tailed bats, because they’re known for their hunting sprees. Like all animals, bats communicate with each other. But these Mexican free-tailed bats, they not only communicate; they also confuse. Aaron Cochran is a biologist who’s at the Wake Forest University. He was studying the hunting habits of Mexican free-tailed bats in Arizona and also in New Mexico. What he found was that his ultrasonic equipment was picking up two completely different sounds. When the free-tailed be able to was trying to communicate it was one sound, and then, the moment they had competition in the area, they would send out a send that was totally different. What these bats were doing was jamming the signals of other bats. Usually when a bat is hunting, what it does is it sends out a signal. It sends out what is called a feeding buzz. That bounces off the prey, and then they know, “Hey, it’s time for dinner.” What these free-tailed bats were doing was jamming the signals. It reduced their capability of capturing moths from 64% down to just 18%. This confusion, this reduced capability is a lot like what happens on our sales pages. When we are trying to write sales pages, we’re trying to get too much information across. It sounds like there’s one buzz and a second buzz, and now there is confusion and we miss the point. Today what we’re going to do is we’re going to stick to the point and we’re going to use pebbles. We’re going to use pebbles to figure out how we get to exactly what we want to say to the client, and then how we continue to say that over the rest of the sales page. The three things that we’re going to cover are, one, we find the confusion. The second is we use the pebbles. The third is we expand each issue all by itself. Let’s start out with the first one, which is finding the confusion on your sales page. Part 1: How To Find The Confusion On Your Sales PagesAbout two weeks ago I was on Facebook. I learn a lot through Facebook, despite what I say. Yet, I was watching this video by this conductor called Alondra de la Parra. I was so taken by this video that I saw on Facebook that I went to YouTube. On YouTube, there she was directing the Paris Orchestra. One of the songs that really got to me, one of the pieces that really got to me was “Huapango.” I started listening to “Huapango,” and then to another piece, and another piece, and another piece. Before I knew it, I had three albums of Alondra de la Parra. Of course I was driving Renuka crazy because I was playing this music all day long. Now the interesting thing about this music is it’s classic music, and like a lot of classical music, it requires an orchestra. An orchestra is complete confusion if you let it be. That’s what a conductor does. A conductor has to stand up there and somehow know that music in advance, and push and pull so that instead of cacophony we have music, we have this beautiful-sounding orchestra all playing together, but somehow separately at the same time. Your sales page is not difference. It’s got to have all of this information, but it’s got to play something louder than the other. This is why you have to first find the confusion, because when you find the confusion you know exactly what’s driving the sales page crazy. The answer is usually with the clients. When you ask your clients questions about why do you choose our business, they will tend to use a single word or a single phrase. Theygive you a line that you then try to put on your sales page, and of course it’s total confusion. Let me read you a line from the Running Coach. Now we’re talking about head coach Ken Rickerman, and he runs 5speedrunning.com and he teaches people how to run faster and better and with fewer injuries. Of course help go and help speak to a client, and help ask them, “What is it that drives you to come to 5speedrunning.com?” Of course they’ll give their response, and it sounds like this: “I want to move more freely. I want to go longer on the runs, and I want to improve my form.” The question is, does that help? It doesn’t help, because when you look at it, there are three points there. One is move more freely. Second is longer runs. The third is improve form. It sounded like a single sentence, but there are three whole topics in there, and that’s what we have to do. First we have to find the confusion. In that single line, there is enormous amounts of confusion. You can’t write a sales page or you can’t write an email if you’re trying to cover three points at the same time. You have to cover one point, just like this podcast. We’re going to cover three points, but hey, let’s start off with the first point. Let’s go into a lot of detail with the first point. Then we’ll go to the second point, detail the second point. Then we go to the third point. This is how we do stuff, or we should do stuff. Instead, we end up like those Mexican free-tailed bats, and there’s all this confusion because we’re trying to cover all of it together because it seems like one sentence. We take that sentence and we break it down into bullet points. That’s how you sort out any confusion. Take the sentence from your client, whatever that might be, and then break it up into bullet points. Once you break it up into bullet points, you will see very quickly that hey, there are four or five points here, or there are two or three points here, but there is almost never one point. That’s where the confusion lies. First step: make sure that you break up the sentences into bullet points. Part 2: How To Use The Pebble System On Your Sales PageThat takes us to the second step where we start using the pebbles. As you know, we take three months off every year. We work for three months, and then we take a month off. For at least two of those months, we travel internationally. We’ll go to places like The Netherlands, or Japan, or Sardinia. When people ask me, “Which is your favorite city?” that’s not a fair question to ask because every city is completely different. The people are different and the food is different and the experience is different. Even so, you could specifically ask me, “Here are three cities, like three bullet points. Now, can you allocate pebbles to them?” If we took three cities like Amsterdam and Kyoto and Cagliari, then I could allocate pebbles. Because when you rank cities, it’s very difficult. You could say Kyoto is one, Cagliari is two, Amsterdam is three. But that doesn’t give us a sense of weight. What gives us a sense of weight is the pebble system. The pebble system is very simple. If you said, “Now allocate ten pebbles. You’ve got ten pebbles and you have to allocate them to these three different cities,” and then Kyoto would get maybe four or five pebbles. Because Kyoto is old Japan. It’s got temples and shrines and gardens. It’s got lots of ramen, lots of it, great food, great people, and these amazingly sublime gardens where you can sit there for hours and do nothing, just like you would imagine Japan to be, this very quiet, non hustle bustle place. In my ranking, Kyoto would get five pebbles. Now we have just five pebbles among the rest of the cities. Now we have Cagliari and Amsterdam. Amsterdam is amazing. It’s got lots of cheese, and Renuka loved that place more than any other place. But I would give Cagliari three pebbles, and then Amsterdam two pebbles. Now we have a weighted system. We have this concept of Kyoto, five pebbles; Cagliari, three pebbles; and then finally we get to Amsterdam, which is two pebbles. Now, if we have those three bullet points, we’re clear which one is the most important. When look at what Ken had, he had move more freely, longer runs, and improve form. Longer runs got five pebbles. What we’re going to do is we’re going to start off with longer runs. The next thing was improve form; that got three pebbles. Finally, move more freely got two pebbles. Now, what we have with this pebble system is clarity. We know that the most important thing for that runner is for longer runs, so we’re going to deal with longer runs on our sales page. For now, we totally abandon the other two, which is move more freely and improve form, and we focus on the problems that runners have with longer runs: the injuries it causes, all that stuff, but only with longer runs. Then you’re able to get that message across very clearly. You might never have to go to point two and point three. Because, as Ken mentioned, with the longer run you get tired, you get physically exhausted, you lose focus, you get aches and pains, you have oxygen problems, you go out of breath. Then finally, you lose motivation and confidence. There is a lot of stuff to cover with just one topic, as you can see. What we do on the sale page is do the Mexican free-tail dance. We try and put all the points together, when this one point itself could drive half the sales page. Imagine yourself as a client. You get there, you’re having trouble with longer runs, and you see so much information in the form of a sales page about longer runs. That’s when you realize, “My goodness, this guy knows exactly what he’s talking about. This is the stuff that is of interest to me,” instead of all of this confusion and all of these bullet points bouncing back and forth. What we’ve covered so far is we’ve found the confusion. Then we started using the pebbles. Now we’re going to expand the issue. Part 3: How To Expand The Sales MessageYes, we’re on the third and final part of this podcast. Let’s expand the issue, shall we? Let’s go back for a minute to Alondra de la Parra. There she is in front of this orchestra, and there is this accordion. Now this was a different piece altogether, and not “Huapango.” In this accordion we have the analogy that we need to understand how you expand that one point. In the last section we looked at this one concept of longer runs. What we have to ask are three questions. The first is what does the solution look like? When someone goes for a longer run, what does it look like? What does it sound like? What does it feel like? The best thing to do is not to answer this question yourself, especially if you’re writing the sales letter. Because we’re hopeless at writing sales letters. It’s better to call up the client, get a recorder going, and ask them: What does it feel like? What does it look like? They will give you two, three paragraphs. Then you ask that client the second question, which is: When it doesn’t work out? How does it feel? What are things that stop you, slow you down? What they’ll do is come up with that list. I get tired, I lose focus, I lose motivation. What they will do as well is they’ll give you the words that you need to use on that page. If you’ve got that recorder going, you’ll find that the client is giving you the exact words and the exact feeling and the exact emotion that you want from them. The most important thing for you to figure out at this point is that you stay one point. Even when we have gone to just longer runs, we still have five subtopics under that, which is get tired, lose focus, aches and pains, can’t catch breath, and then lose motivation. We have five topics, and you have to be very careful. You have to stick with one thing at a time. Among those five topics, which are the most important? Then you drive that. You address that one topic. Then they answer in a paragraph. That paragraph goes on your sales page. Because they will tell you exactly how they feel, what’s happening in their brain, and what’s really important to them. The client might say that the aches and pains are the most critical of all. That’s where you start. Then maybe they go to the fact that the aches and pains make them lose focus. Then you continue down that path. Let them speak for a while. You just have to transcribe. Maybe you have to tweak a little bit here and there, but most of the time you’re just doing a transcription. This is the beauty of the pebble system. Instead of dealing with all of these things, we go down to one point. From that one point, we get another five points from those five points. We still have some level of ranking. In this case, you can have the ranking, all the pebbles all over again. The client will explain to you how they feel. Then you want to take that and put that on your sales page. What about the other points? The move more freely and the improve form? You can put that in your bullets. You don’t have to put that in your main text. You can put that a lot later. What you’re really trying to do is drive home one problem. That is longer runs and what it means not to run that long. What are the consequences of not running that long? Then you bring up your solution: introducing the long run system. Then you explain your solution. How do you explain your solution? The client told you, remember? We asked them what did the solution look like. In effect, the client is writing your entire sales page. The critical thing is to use the pebble system. Because the pebble system allows you to focus. Otherwise, we have all this confusion, too much information. When someone reads your sales page, they don’t get a single message. We often try to write sales pages ourselves, and it’s a big mistake. Even if you’re a copywriter, it’s a big mistake. The client can come up with terminology that you just cannot dream of, because they live it and they breathe it and they feel it. They have this specific information, the specific term that they want to use. You want to use that on your sales page. The best way to do it is to ask them. First you have to clarify. While I’m talking about clarification, let me reiterate what we’ve covered in this episode. SummaryThe first thing that we looked at was finding the confusion. We saw that it didn’t matter what we’re doing, there were several points that need to be covered. What we’re going to do is isolate them. We isolated them by using pebbles. We then said five pebbles for this place, three for that, two for this. The same thing applies to your website. There are all of these points, but you allocate pebbles. Then you take the one that got the most pebbles. Then you expand on them. That was the third part. When you expand, you ask them, What does the solution look like?” and let them talk, and let them talk, and let them talk. You keep recording. You’re the transcriber. You’re the person asking the questions. Let them talk. Then you ask them what the problem looks like. Then they will give you four or five points. You can ask them more details about those points. Now you have enough content to put on your page. It’s not just content, but emotion-filled content on that one single topic. That is why the pebble system is so powerful, because it helps the client focus, helps you focus, and you’re able to create a much better sales page than just sitting at your computer and churning something out. What’s the one thing that you can do this week?The one thing that you can do is to help yourself find that confusion factor that you’re dealing with every single day. Do this with your grocery list. Just take three items and then allocate those pebbles. This is five, this is three, this is two. Get into the habit of allocating for pretty much everything. Your to-do list looks a lot better when you allocate pebbles, because you know exactly why you’re doing what you’re doing. If you have any questions, I’m at Twitter, Sean D’Souza; Facebook, Sean D’Souza; or sean@psychotactics.com. To get this episode, go to psychotactics.com/64, and you will get the podcast as well as the transcript. There are still a few seats remaining for the storytelling workshop both in Amsterdam and Nashville. To find out more, go to psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop. This is on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th of December; and the 13th, 14th, and 15th of December in Amsterdam. Storytelling is critical. Most people think of storytelling as just telling stories, but no, it’s a branding issue. It gets your message across in a way that is so amazing and so powerful. As you’ve discovered on this podcast, there are all these stories, and that’s why you’re listening to the podcast right to the end. When you read The Brain Audit, when you read Dartboard Pricing, when you read the book on presell, when you go through any of our courses, there are stories. It’s not just about telling stories to sell, but also your books and your podcasts and your webinars, and your pretty much everything. The reason why stuff is so boring is because it doesn’t have stories. This is what the storytelling workshop will do for you. It will show you how to construct those stories for business rather than just telling another story. That’s psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now from Psychotactics and the Three Month Vacation. Bye bye. Do you know—Why Clients Buy And Why They Don’t? In this free except on—The Brain Audit you will find out why customers put off buying your product or service.
Direct download: How_To_Use_The_Pebble_System_To_Create_Extremely_Focused_Sales_Pages.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00pm NZST |
Sun, 18 October 2015
Why do we learn so slowly? Is it because we're not good learners? Is it age? Or is it something quite different? The problem of learning (and teaching) is dependent on the concept of Teacher vs Preacher. When you're a preacher, you give the feeling of a ton of information, but there's no true learning, no true application. A teacher, on the other hand, is completely tied to getting the student to apply the skills. When you're creating info-products, writing books or articles, this what needs to be kept in mind. Are you a teacher or a preacher? And are you following a teacher or preacher? Here are three benchmarks to watch for! -------------------- Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic The Brain Audit: http://www.psychotactics.com/brain -------------------- In this episode Sean talks aboutPart 1: The Responsibility Factor Useful ResourcesAudio and Transcript: How To Incredibly Speed Up Your Skill Acquisition ---------- The Transcript“This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.” This is The Three Month Vacation, I’m Sean D’Souza. If you were to step into India today and go to most Indian households, you would be surprised at what you saw at the doorstep. You would see a Swastika. Yes, the very same Swastika that the Germans used in World War II, the same Swastika that came to be hated by everyone who saw it then, and today. What is a Swastika doing on the doorstep of so many Hindu households? The reality is that the Swastika comes from the Sanskrit word Swastik which means good luck. It has been around for thousands of years. While it’s prominently found in Indian culture even today, it was also found in ancient Greece, it can be seen on the remains of the ancient city of Troy which existed over a thousand years ago. The Druids and the Celts they also use the symbol, the Nordic tribes, the Christians, the Teutonic Knights. The Swastika goes back a long way. In modern history, Coca Cola used it, Calsberg used it on their beer bottles, the boys’ scouts adopted it, and the girls club of America, they called their magazine Swastika. It was used on playing cards, and even by the American Military Units during World War 1. It can be seen on RAF planes as late as 1939. And then, Hitler came along. He took something that was wonderful and incredibly powerful and made it something evil. He took something that was empowering and twisted it in his own way to make it work for him. He changed the meaning of the word. That is the kind of thing that happens very often when we look to learn. When we look around we see that people call themselves teachers, but in reality they are not teachers, they are just preachers. When you get this kind of information in the form of video, and audio, and PDF, you think, well, I am being taught by someone, but in reality, all you’re doing is getting a ton of information. You’re getting a preacher instead of a teacher. While it might sound like just words being twisted or replaced, there is a very big difference between a preacher and a teacher. How do we know what makes a preacher thus as a teacher? That’s what we’re going to cover today. We’re going to look at three things, the first is the responsibility factor. The second is the three benchmark system. The third, the ability for the student to become the teacher. Part 1: The Responsibility FactorLet’s start out with the first one which is the responsibility factor. If you try to learn a language like Spanish, or German, or French, it will take you many, many months to get there. In every classroom, you have the bright students and the not-so-bright students, or at least until Michel Thomas came along. Michel Thomas was a language teacher, and he didn’t believe in bright students, and dull students. He believed that the responsibility lay with the teacher. He made a bold claim, he made a claim that you could learn the fundamentals of grammar in any language within 10 hours, and then he set about proving the fact. The BBC followed him around for several days. If you look up Michel Thomas on You Tube, you will find a three part episode that shows you how he taught these students. Students who were told by their teachers that they were not supposed to learn a language, that they were stupid, that they were dull, that they should never bother to try and learn any language. He sat them down in a classroom. In a week or so, they were already speaking the language. This is the language, the very same language that they were told they should give up, they should never try this anymore. What happened? When we ask what happened, we’re trying to solve the problem of the language. What did he do, how do we learn languages like that? We don’t look at that, we look at what was the core of Michel’s system. The core of Michel’s system was responsibility. He felt that the responsibility of the teaching didn’t lie with the student, it lay with the teacher. When you think about that statement for a few minutes, it changes your whole mindset. It means that the person learning under you is not responsible. You think, well, how is that possible, you can’t control what someone is doing. May be you have online courses like we do and they’re sitting in South Africa, or Australia, or the United States, and you can’t control what they’re doing. Yes you can. This is the difference between a preacher and a teacher. A preacher simply gives you information, you get more CDs, more information, more PDFs, more videos, but whose responsibility is it for you to succeed? The teacher on the other hand changes the way they give you information because they realize that if you don’t get these tiny increments, you will start, and you will go few steps and then you will give up. That’s the difference between a preacher and a teacher. A teacher doesn’t believe in stupid students. A teacher doesn’t believe in dull students. A teacher believes that it is their responsibility to figure out how to get across to that student. Let’s say you have a web design company, and let’s say you’re giving instructions to your clients how to set up their websites. Let’s just say for a second that the client comes back and asks you a whole bunch of questions. Are they dull? The answer is, whose responsibility is it. It’s your responsibility. The reason why that client has not figured out what they should do and how they should go about it, is because you haven’t given them precise instructions, you’ve hurried through the process. Or, you just have the curse of knowledge. You know so much that you don’t realize that you’re going through so many steps. Therefore, you have become a preacher. You’re no longer a teacher, you’re not breaking down things into steps that are foolproof. When we see clients doing silly things, what we say is, well, they’re not smart, or they’re silly, or they’re stupid, but, the responsibility lies with you. If they fail you have failed. That’s the difference between a preacher and a teacher. One of the best examples I have for you is this yes and yes pricing grid on the Psychotactics website. When you go and you buy any product, or any service, or any course on Psychotactics, you will encounter the price grid which is where you click the button to buy now. We have a regular and a premium pricing there. As the teacher, it is my duty to get that message across. How do you create a pricing grid so that you can earn 10% or 15% more when you have the pricing grid on your own website. People make mistakes, if there is one thing that I’ve seen where clients consistently make mistakes is on this pricing grid. We tell them to put ticks, they put crosses, we tell them to put red ticks, they put blue ticks. This is because everyone interprets your information in their own way, and that’s absolutely normal. They want to be creative but their creativity doesn’t end up being beneficial to them, and clients end up buying the regular instead of the premium. What’s my job as a teacher? My job as a teacher is very simple, my job is to make sure that they get it. If they don’t get the pricing grid right, then I have to take responsibility for that. In the book which is Dartboard Pricing, it goes through steps. One step, second step, third step, then it shows the mistakes you can make, and the mistakes other people have made. What it’s doing there, even with the book, even when I cannot be there, I have to make sure that’s it’s my responsibility for you to get your pricing grid right. It’s very easy to say that people don’t understand. “Look, I told them how to do it and they didn’t do it,” but no, it’s your responsibility. That’s the critical element, the difference between a preacher and a teacher. Two and a half years ago I started coaching my niece Marsha. She wanted to get better at her studies and so we started the coaching. I sat her down on the first day and I said to her, “Marsha, if you get everything wrong at school whose fault is it?” She said, “It’s my fault.” I said, “No, no, no, it’s my fault, if your get everything wrong, it’s my fault as a teacher.” She said, “Cool.” That’s the whole point, that’s the difference between a preacher and a teacher. You have to take responsibility. That’s how you know that you’re picking the right teacher because they take responsibility for you. They don’t just dump information, they make sure that you get it right. Part 2: The Three Step BenchmarkThis takes us to the second part of this podcast, and it’s called, the three step benchmark. What is the three step benchmark? When I was 12 years old I used to come home from school and I’d very hungry. School would finish at 4 pm and then it will be a long wait until dinner. Dinner in India is a lot like Mediterranean countries and it’s late, so it’s about 8:30 or so. I’d come home and I’d be ravenous, I want to eat something, and no one would be at home. But there in the pantry on the shelves would be a packet of Ramen Noodles, in this case it was Maggi Noodles. This had a masala flavor which you don’t get in other countries, but you do get in India. What I’d so is I would boil some water and add the noodles, I’d add the taste maker which is the masala flavor, and then five minutes later I’d be eating it. Notice what I did, I only took three steps, boil water, add noodles, add taste maker. This is the difference between a teacher and a preacher. They use these three step benchmark system if they are aware of it or not. The preacher will not do that, a preacher will give you a lot of instructions, they will tell you, you should do 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and you get lost in that whole sequence of things. I know this because this is what I used to do. I would give people instructions, here’s what you need to do, step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4, step 5, not anymore. You need to solve the problem in three steps. If the client cannot get to the other side within three steps like Maggi Noodles, then you have given too many instructions. If they keep coming back to you and asking you something, then you’ve given too many instructions. There is no other way, the responsibility lies with you. We just finished the headlines course for 2015, and there are many ways to write a headline. A lot of people will tell you to just copy headlines but that’s stupid. You should know how to write headlines just like you know how to speak, how to write. There is a structure, and a system, and a format, to write headlines. The problem is also that there are many ways to write those headlines. If you want your student to get their mastery, then you have to follow these three step benchmark. If you give them an instruction and they can’t get there within three steps, then you have made a mistake. Let’s take an example of the headlines, let’s say I needed to get you to write better headlines in the next few minutes. Well, how I’m I going to get this done on a podcast? Here’s how you do it, you’re restricted to just three steps or fewer. What you’re going to do is going to put either “even” or “and.” You’re going to put this in parenthesis or brackets as you call it. Here’s how you do it, you say, how to raise prices “even” when clients are price-conscious, how to raise prices “even” when the competition is offering discounts. The headline with “even” in it, it creates a contrast. It’s a headline going one way and then it starts to go the other way. Now let’s use “and.” How to consistently raise prices “and” still keep 95% of your clients, or, how to tell amazing stories “and” connect the stories to your business articles. What we have here is “and” and “even.” The “and” moves the idea forward, and the “even” takes it a step back, or, it provides contrast. If you’re thinking to yourself, wait, that was such a small step. That’s the whole point, this is how teachers teach. The preachers will give you 7, 8 different steps to do. In the headline course, we spent a week doing this, and people still make mistakes. Bit by bit we outline it. A very small thing can be interpreted in many different ways and a preacher will just dump information on you. A teacher will take a very small element, just three steps. If you can’t get that client to do what you want in three steps, it’s your fault, it’s your responsibility. When you’re looking for a teacher, look for a teacher that has these tiny increments. That helps you get there to the next stage instead of telling you how silly you are, or how dull you are. Part 3: When Does The Student Become The Teacher?This takes us to the third part which is the most scariest benchmark of all, which is when the student becomes the teacher. When I go to seminars, I notice something very interesting. A speaker will stand up and make this presentation, and then they’ll have all these slides, and all of these information, and all of these statistics. Then at the end of that presentation, they get a rousing applause, they get a lot of [inaudible 15:24] they get all of that stuff, but, what is the benchmark of the presentation? The real benchmark of the presentation is that the persons sitting there in the audience should be able to say what you said in their presentation. That sounds bizarre doesn’t it? Of course it is bizarre, but that’s what a teacher does. A teacher makes sure that you don’t go out there with your head full of information. All this shock and awe that you bring to the presentation, that’s not relevant. What’s relevant is what the student can then teach. When that student goes out, can they repeat exactly what you said and often in the sequence that you said it? If you come to a Psychotactics course, or you come to our workshop, or you come to our presentation, one of the most important benchmarks is that you should be able to repeat what I have just taught you. You should be able to tell someone else exactly what you learned, the sequence in which you learned it, and then you have become the teacher. If the person cannot do that, the client there, the person in the audience cannot do that, then there’s something wrong with the way you’re teaching, it’s that simple. If all you have done is given information, then they’re going to cling on to some fact or the other. They’re going to cling on to one fact, or two facts, or three facts, but they don’t have that system in place, because you didn’t put that system in place. That’s the difference between a teacher and a preacher. A teacher will make sure that the student knows how do whatever it is that they are teaching. Their responsibility is to get that student to know what they are teaching. It’s not just information being given out, it is application, and it’s instant application. When there is complication there is no application, when there are too many steps there is no application, and so you start to see the difference between a teacher and a preacher. In fact, let’s summarize because you’ll need to be the teachers. If someone asks you what did you learn on this podcast, well, you’ll need to know the difference between the teacher and the preacher. You’ll need to know how to change your methods, you’ll also need to know how to choose a teacher versus a preacher. SummaryThe first thing that we covered today was the factor that Michel Thomas taught us, and that is the responsibility lies with the teacher, you are responsible. The student is not responsible, you are responsible. It doesn’t matter how you look at it, you are still responsible. When you take on a task you have to make sure that you formulate your teaching in a way that enables the student to learn. That changes the whole perspective of teaching. You can do this very simply by having the three step benchmark in place. If the student cannot get from this point to that point in three steps, then you have given too many steps, you have to reduce those number of steps. That takes us to the third part which is, how do you know that the student is now smart enough and that is because they have become the teacher. You go from this factor of changing your mindset, responsibility, to then boiling down to just three steps. Then finally, you know that they have reached there because now they can teach what you just taught them. That is the difference between a teacher and a preacher. Whether we are in the service business or a product business, we have to make sure that we get this message across. This is not just about training, this is about getting your clients to achieve what they want to achieve. Most of us will blame the client. If you find yourself blaming the client, listen to Michel Thomas’ words yet again, “The responsibility lies with you, it’s your fault, it’s always your fault.” When you say that to your client, they’ll be like Marsha, they will say, “Cool.” This brings us to the end of this podcast. You can find me always on Twitter or Facebook, I’m @seandsouza. You can also email me at sean@psychotactics.com. However, if you are listening to this podcast in sequence, I won’t be available for the next two weeks, I will be in Uluru which is in the middle of Australia. There is this massive rock there, there is nothing else but this massive rock and three hotels, and that’s where we’re going to be, we’re going to be in Alice Springs. It’s going to be really hot there, I hear it’s about 33 °C, which is 91 °F, I wish it were cooler. But hey, I’ve always wanted to go to Australia, this part of Australia specifically. You can only ever go there in the colder months, and now we have slipped past the cold rainy months and we are into October, so we’re going to have to put up with some of the heat. While we are away make sure that you read The Brain Audit because it will show you why customers buy and why they don’t. There is also the Web Component Series which is website secrets and you’ll learn how to create your home page, or About Us page, your download page, very effectively. You can find it at psychotactics.com/web. If you’d like to join us at Five Thousand B.C that’s fivethousandbc.com, that’s the community of mostly introverts, and there is me, the extrovert. You’ll find that Five Thousand B.C is a membership site like no other because I’m there all the time, 17,000 times a day, except for the next two weeks when I will be in Australia. That’s it from Psychotactics and The Three Month Vacation, make sure you send this over to your friends as well so that they can listen to The Three Month Vacation podcast. Bye for now. One of the biggest reasons why we struggle with our learning is because we run into resistance. There are hidden forces causing us all to resist doing what we really should do. This slows us down considerably. Find out how to work with resistance, instead of fighting it all the time. Click here to get the free report on ‘How To Win The Resistance Game’. (http://www.psychotactics.com/free/brain-audit-excerpt/)
Direct download: 63-How_to_Be_A_Teacher_Instead_of_A_Preacher.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00pm NZST |
Sat, 10 October 2015
When you're giving away bonuses, it's easy to believe you don't need to give away your best product or service. The best information always needs to be sold—so you can earn a decent living. And yet, this podcast episode takes an opposite stance. You need to put your best stuff out in front—free. Yes, give away the goodies, no matter whether you're in info-products or content marketing; services or running a workshop. Giving away outstanding content is the magic behind what attracts—and keeps clients. -------------------- Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic In this episode Sean talks aboutPart 1: The Concept of Consumption Useful Resources5000bc: Where smart people come together to help each other honestly -------------------- The Transcript“This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.” What are the three benchmarks that you need to create this magic?Many years ago when I started my cartooning career, I used to get all kinds of jobs. What I really loved was the plum jobs, the jobs where you had this fabulous stuff that you could do and used to get paid really well. I would spend hours and days and weeks doing those kinds of jobs. Then you had the recurring jobs. These were tiny cartooning assignments which didn’t pay very well, so I’d just work very quickly through them because well, they weren’t paying that much anyway. One day, my neighbor, who happened to be an art director of Elle Magazine, he stopped in and said, “Sean, why are you doing such a bad job with these cartoons? Why is it that this work looks so shoddy?” Of course I said, “Well, they don’t pay much.” He said, “I don’t really know how much they pay when I look at your work in the newspaper. I only look at the work and I say, ‘This work is shoddy. This work is sloppy. As a reader, I’m not supposed to know how much you get paid. I only see the end result.'” This is true for us as well. In today’s world, where we’re giving away free stuff, we look at the stuff we’re giving away and we think, “Wait, we need to put in all our efforts into creating great products and great services. But if it’s going to be free, then we need to pull back about it. We can’t put in all the effort into free.” My art director friend would tell you, “I don’t see it that way. It cannot be shoddy. It cannot be sloppy.” That’s what we’re going to cover today. We’re going to cover how you need to make your free product as valuable or even more valuable than your paid product. Part 1: The Concept of ConsumptionThe first thing that we’re going to cover today is the concept of consumption. The second thing is how it needs to have that unhurried look, that unhurried texture, that unhurried feeling. Finally, we need to feel pain, real pain. Let’s cover these three topics. Let’s start off with the first topic, and that is one of consumption. In case you didn’t already know it, Netflix has been monitoring your behavior for a very long time. Netflix is big time into consumption. The reason for that is very simple. The more they get you to come back and watch serials and movies, the more likely you are to renew your subscription month after month, year after year. For ages, the television industry has suggested that the pilot episode is the most critical of them all. If someone watches the pilot episode, they’re going to watch all the rest, or at least that’s how the philosophy went until we ran into Netflix. Netflix started pinpointing the episodes for each show season in which 70% of all users went on to complete the entire series. Here’s what they found. When they looked at Breaking Bad, the hook was not episode number one; it was episode number two. When they looked at the prison comedy, Orange is the New Black, they found that episode number three was the one that made the difference. In some cases, it was episode number eight that made the difference; in some, four; in some, three; in some, five. What they found, however, was that people wanted to get to the end, and that if they got them to binge watch, they would watch all of them one after the other. What does this tell us about our clients? What does this tell us about our reports and our newsletters? It tells us that people are a lot more willing to give us a chance than we think, if we can get them to the end. This is why consumption becomes so critical. When you look at all of those signups, you know those little boxes that say just give me your name and your email address, and let’s do this quickly. Well, that’s not how people really behave. When you do the study, people behave differently. They want to consume stuff. They want to spend more time at your site. They want to read a little more before they commit. When you’re creating a product, maybe it’s just a report, maybe it’s an article, a series of articles, maybe it’s a webinar or a podcast, people will take their time. They will give you more than one chance. It’s not like you need to have a sloppy first time, but it’s not like you have to convince them either. Because they take their time. What you have the ensure is that they get from point A to point C at the very least. You have to get them through the stages. This is what we do with the Headline Report. When you get 2 Psychotactics and you subscribe to the newsletter, you get a headline report. It shows you how to write headlines, just taking three easy steps. But there is no hurry. You go through the introduction. It gives you the philosophy. Then it takes you to step one, and you’re able to create a headline, and then step two, and you’ll be able to create another headline, and step three and the third type of headline. In under ten minutes, you can create headlines just reading the report, but it gets you to the end. When you get to the end, you already have this superpower. You have this ability to write headlines, to figure out which headlines are missing those components. It’s complete. What’s happened there is it has been designed for consumption. It has been designed to make sure that the client gets that superpower, that ability to do something. When you look at a lot of the webinars online or the podcasts, a lot of the stuff is based on information. It is more and more and more information, but not stuff that you can directly apply. This is what we have to work at, because we’re not in the entertainment business like Netflix. Their goal is to make sure that you get to the end of the episode, of the next episode, and then right to the end of the series. They’re totally in the entertainment business, and we are in the information business, but we need to make sure that we’re not just giving information but we’re giving that client a superpower. We’re giving them the ability to write headlines. We’re giving them the ability to do something specific at the end of it. We need to start off with the end in mind. That’s probably what Netflix is doing anyway. They’re going, “What is the end point of this series?” That end point is then creating all of the series back to back so that you get hooked. You need to ask yourself that question as well. When you’re creating a report, when you’re creating an article, when you are doing anything that you’re giving away free, the shoddiness comes from the fact that you were just going to give away information, more information. In reality, if you think about it from a perspective of when they finish this, what superpower will they have, that changes everything doesn’t it? That makes your client more likely to binge read, binge listen, binge watch, whatever it is that you’re going to throw. Then the free becomes more important than the product itself because they haven’t paid for anything and they’ve got this value which they just didn’t expect. Consumption comes in very quickly and consumption becomes more critical than attraction and conversion, which gets bandied about all over the internet. You need to know how to attract. You need to know how to convert. Once you’ve gone through that, the third stage, consumption, that’s the most critical of all. You can start off with your free product or your report, or just about anything, as long as you know what is the end in mind and how will it help the customer get to that end and have the superpower. That brings us to the end of this first section. Let’s go to the second section. Part 2: Why Package Your Free ContentLet’s explore why your free product content needs to look very unhurried, and yet, very unpackaged. On Fridays, something very strange happens at our café. The usual baristas disappear and someone else takes their place. Now it bugs me when baristas get changed on Friday, because you’re starting to settle in, you’re starting to relax a bit, and then your whole routine has changed because of this change in barista. Anyway, this new barista, she’s making the coffee and she places it in front of us. She goes away and the café is reasonably quiet, almost too quiet for a Friday. She comes over and she’s asks for my opinion. She’s says, “How did you find the coffee?” Of course I’m the wrong person to ask for an opinion because I will give it. She’s standing there for about 20 minutes listening to what I have to say, because I’m telling her how I evaluate the coffee. The way I evaluate coffee is I look at the barista themselves and I look at how they’re dressed. Maybe this is just me, but every time I see an untidy-looking barista, I get bad coffee. The first thing I’m looking for is how tidy does the barista look. Then the second thing I’m looking for is how tidy does my cup of coffee look. Is there art on it or is it just coffee in a cup? Before I’ve even tasted the coffee, I have a pretty good idea whether the coffee is going to be good or bad. Then of course there are variables; that can be humidity, the temperature of the milk. There are so many variables in the coffee, but at the very core I’m looking for this unhurried professional cofee that comes out in the midst of a deadline. This is what your client is looking for as well. They’re looking for this report, this article, this information that is unhurried. They know that you’re busy, but they don’t care. They’re the clients. They want this product or this service to look professional long before they open it. Packaging becomes very critical, and packaging needs to look unhurried. It needs to look like someone has spent a little time despite the deadline. You see this a lot in Japan. I have mentioned this before on the podcast, that Japan is probably the best place in the world to buy pretty much anything. You can go to the smallest store and ask for food, and you’ve seen how sushi and sashimi has been packaged. It’s always very cleanly packaged. There’s this design element around it. You can go and buy some sweets. You can go and buy a little pendant. You can buy pretty much anything in Japan and you get packaging. You get this look of unhurriedness. When you have this product, whether it be a webinar or a podcast, you need to feel that packaging. What sets off that packaging? For instance, in this podcast. The story that starts up right at the beginning, that tells you that some amount of research has gone into the whole Netflix story. The fact that there are three points that we’re going to cover, that tells you that’s a very clear outline. This is like the barista. You’ve not really listened to the episode yet, but you get this feeling. You get this feeling that there is a logic and there is work put into this, and it’s unhurried. That is what is critical, because it sets you up for the rest of the binge listening or the binge reading or the binge experiencing. You can tell the difference between a great presenter and a crappy presenter. You can tell the difference between a good writer and a bad writer. There’s always this factor of unhurriedness. We need to get the client to feel this packaging long before they get to the meat of the content. Netflix, their research has shown exactly that: that clients are willing to go the distance before they decide this is really good or this is really crappy. We will walk into cafes and look at the barista, and either stay or walk out. It’s based on this factor of unhurriedness. How do they present themselves? How do they present their coffee? It’s the same thing for your product. You cover your introduction, your structure. That needs to be very clear before I get into the meat of the matter. That’s what you really need to work on. That’s what makes the difference between a free product and a paid product. It needs to look like a paid product. It needs to look like something you paid a lot of money for, and yet you got it free. Now you don’t have to spend months and years working on this free product, but make it tidy. This takes us to the third part, which is the pain that you must feel when you’re giving away your free product. Part 3: Why You Must Feel PainAs you know, I like to cook Indian food. Two dishes that make me very happy are butter chicken and a dal. A dal is a lentil, by the way. If you were to ask me to give away the butter chicken or the dal, I would hesitate. Now I like them both as much, but I like one better than the other. Well, not really, but here’s the thing. I still would hesitate to give away the chicken, the butter chicken. That’s the kind of dilemma that you’re dealing with. You’re dealing with a situation where you’ve got this really good stuff and you’re not really that keen on giving it away. You think maybe it would be a good idea to give away something that is not quite so salable. Because when you look at what you’ve done, you’ve spent a lot of time and effort, and somehow it seems like a shame to just give it away. You’ve got to feel that pain. You really have to feel that pain, because when you feel that pain, that’s when you know that the client is going to feel wow, this is amazing. It’s almost too easy to give away something that is not quite up to that standard. You know the standard. It doesn’t matter where you are in life, you know your standard and you know what’s possible, and you know your best. When you’re giving away your best, you feel that pain. I remember the time I went and met a friend of mine. He is a world-class watercolorist. He had just finished a workshop in Auckland. Of course we met, we had a beer, etc. After that, he gave me one of his sketches. He just pulled it out from his bag and he gave it to me. What did I do with the sketch? I look at it, I said thank you, I took it home. Do you think it was his best sketch, his best watercolor? Of course not. It was just something that he was doing, just a rough sketch. It stayed around the office for a while, and then it went under the bed. Then I don’t even know where it is anymore. Now, even if he were listening to this podcast, he would not know that I’m referring to him, because I know quite a few watercolorists. If you’re a watercolorist and you gave me a painting, there’s a pretty good chance that I don’t know where it is right now because it wasn’t your best. This is the whole point. When you give away stuff, give away the best stuff, or at least part of the best stuff. Now we sell a course called the Pre-Sell Course. This teaches you how we sell our courses, how we sell our workshops, how we sell our products. We sell our products faster than pretty much anyone on the internet. Courses that cost $3,000, in 20 minutes the course is full. No strategic alliances, no ads, no joint ventures, no nothing. How do we do it in 20 minutes? The Pre-Sell Course shows you that. It’s not cheap; it’s almost $400. But we wanted the audience, our members, our subscribers, to understand how powerful this course was. What we did was we sliced it up into about a fifth of the course and gave it away. You know someone wrote back to me and said, “You know, I didn’t buy the rest of the course, but just using that one-fifth, I was able to launch a product very successfully.” Are you thinking what I’m thinking right now? We’re giving away stuff that is so powerful that the client might not even need to come back for some more, but they will come back. That’s what we’ve found consistently. We’ve found that when we give away stuff which is useful, that is consumable, that is powerful, the client comes back. Because that’s what happens in real life when you give away a sample. Something that’s amazingly tasty, it’s not like the diner goes away and just doesn’t come back. We’ve found time and time again, and this isn’t the Pre-Sell Course by the way … There’s a whole section on sampling. It talks about how sampling increases sales by 200, 300, 400%. It’s incredible. I didn’t think that sampling could do that, but it does it. There are statistics to prove it. But if the sample itself is not so powerful, not so outstanding, why is the client going to buy a product or service from you in the future? SummaryThis brings us to the end of this podcast. We covered three things. The first thing was the factor of consumption. You need to get the client from one point the other. Interestingly, as we saw in Netflix, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to speed up the process. You don’t have to get people to sign up right away. They read, you know? They read a little bit. They read the introduction. They look at how it’s constructed. That takes us to the second one, which is your packaging needs to be great and unhurried. It’s like every time we go to the café, we look at the barista and we say, “How are they? Are they neat? How’s the coffee presented? Is it perfect?” That’s how you know you’ve got a great coffee. That’s how you know you’ve got a great product. Finally, you have to feel that pain when you’re giving away your product. If you don’t feel that pain, it’s like giving away the dal instead of the butter chicken. It’s not that the dal is bad; it’s just that the butter chicken, well, you would rather be eating it yourself, right? What is the one thing that you can do today? We’re done with this podcast episode. I store all my podcast ideas in Evernote, so if you’ve got some ideas, some questions you want to ask me, send them to sean@psychotactics.com, or on Twitter @Sean D’Souza, and Facebook at Sean D’Souza. If you’d like to join us at 5000bc.com, then please do so. It’s a place where introverts gather, and we talk and we discuss, and there’s a huge amount of information. I’m there 17,000 times a day answering questions, writing articles in response to your questions. It’s a cool place to be. If you would like to meet us live at a workshop, then there’s a storytelling workshop in Nashville, Tennessee, and in Amsterdam, which is in The Netherlands. You can find out more about this on psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop. Be sure to read The Brain Audit before you arrive, because The Brain Audit is compulsory for any course that you do with Psychotactics. Yes, it’s a barrier, and we’re happy to keep that barrier in place. You will find The Brain Audit a tremendous read. It is really fun to read and to understand how people think. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now. Bye bye. Still Reading? Now that you understand why free products need to be better than paid products or services, do you know how to price your products? Here is a detailed visual “yes-yes” pricing grid, to help you—Dartboard Pricing: Yes and Yes Grid. You’ll see how to construct the pricing grid (it’s easy), and then you can adapt the concept on your own slides, pricing sheets, or website. And yes, increase your prices! (http://www.psychotactics.com/cb)
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Sun, 4 October 2015
Starting up is always rough—and especially when you're a small business that at first has no clients and no credibility. In this episode, 5000bc member, Christopher Cook talks to Sean D'Souza about how to get over the inner chatter. How to get past those starting blocks and whether it's possible to be superhuman. -------------------- Useful Resources How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems?(http://www.5000bc.com/) In this episode Sean talks aboutPart 1: Why Roadblocks Are Universal -------------------- The TranscriptThis is indeed The 3 Month Vacation and I’m Sean D’Souza.
Back in the year 2000, I was still a cartoonist and I was doing both cartooning and marketing at the same time.At that point, I decided that I wanted to be the best in the world at marketing, but that meant that I had to start up. I had to start up all over again. I don’t know much about marketing. I hadn’t read that many marketing books and this whole factor of starting up was hard enough just as a business. I was also new at New Zealand. I just moved in from India and so it was like a double start up. Often people ask me this question, “How did you manage? What was the start up like? Does this internet marketing thing work just for some people and not for others? These are the questions that Christopher C was asking me and this interview is about that. It’s about debt start up, the obstacles. It’s a whole bunch of questions that Christopher C decided, “Let him answer it,” so here I am answering it. Interestingly, as I was going through this whole interview and listening to it, it seemed like almost a compellation of many of the podcasts that I have done before. We’re covering topics like roadblocks and mindset and routine and you probably heard it before. It’s just a different version of it you could say. It’s on Skype, but it’s still live and we started out with roadblocks. Christopher asked me what the roadblocks are, what do I see as roadblocks in day-to-day life. The thing with roadblocks is that most people think that it only happens to them and it’s not true at all. Part 1:Why Roadblocks Are UniversalThe first thing is that roadblocks are universal. They don’t care about you and don’t care about me. Their only real purpose in life is to teach you a lesson. When people don’t learn the lesson the roadblocks pop up again and again and again. When you learn that lesson, they disappear and other roadblocks show up. If you don’t deal with the roadblocks in the first instance, they pile up and they become bigger and bigger and bigger and that’s the part that people don’t get. They think that somehow the roadblock is going to disappear and it doesn’t disappear. It’s there specifically to teach you a lesson. I’ll give you a simple example. We have several websites. Over the years, we’ve made them very popular or they’ve become popular and so they attract hackers. In 2014, 3 of our websites attracted hackers. They didn’t really tear it down, but they created enough havoc so that we had to change our whole system. We had to from Dune to WordPress. We had to move all the stuff across and now we’re in the process of redesigning all 3 websites, which is it might seemed like just a simple project but considering the size of our websites that’s about probably conservatively a year, a year and a halfs’ work and this is working very quickly. We ignore that. We ignore the hackers. They’ve been sniping away and then we’ll just fix it, a little bandage here and there. Then eventually they came in a big way and got us blacklisted on Google and all those kinds of things. That’s when we had to pay attention and this is what I see as roadblocks. I see that everyone has them and if you don’t do something when you have the time to do it, which of course we don’t, then they will come back again. Part 2: Why Talent Is Not InbornThe second question is something that I’ve heard many times before and that is, “You, Sean, have natural talent and skills and I don’t have these skills and I don’t have this talent. If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that I don’t believe in inborn talent.” That’s a completely different topic, but the question was, “You seemed to be superhuman that is Sean, you are superhuman. You get so much stuff done. You draw cartoons. You cook. You write books. You do workshops. You do all of this stuff.” This is not me praising myself. This is just what Christopher brought up. He said that at some level it’s intimidating. At some level it feels like only some people can do it. Is it true that just some people can do it or can anyone do it? That’s when I launched into my answer. They’re exactly right. The reason why I said they’re exactly right is because the person I am today was not the person I was 10 years ago or the person I was 20 years ago. When I look back at what I could do 10 years ago or 12 years ago, it was a lot less than I could do today. I knew a lot less than I know today. I’m not just saying I read more books or did learn some more stuff and went to more seminars. What I’m saying is that even a simple task like writing an article, a simple task like writing an article would take me 2 days, 2 whole days. I don’t know many people that take 2 days to write an article, but it was sure frustration for me. It sounds like marketing, because I sell an article-writing course and it sounds like a good thing. You take 2 days to write an article, now you do it in 45 minutes. It was a reality and the problem was I didn’t know how that article would turn out. The question of me doing any podcast, the question of me doing any webinars, any speeches, anything of that sort it was totally out of the question. The first time I spoke when I got to Oakland I forgot what I had to say. We had to take it in mid-break. When I wrote my first book, it was only 16 pages. We put some cartoons in it and it became 20 pages. When I look at all the cartoons that I did back then, they were pretty amateur and people say, “Yes, but at least you could draw.” Sure I could draw, but I couldn’t write. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t do a lot of things that I can do today. Not only am I good at what I do today, but I can be very quick and very effective so I’m not the same person. When you say someone is superhuman, it means that along the way that person has spent a lot of time and a lot of effort and continues to spend a lot of time and effort to get to that superhuman status. You know this to be true because you look at top performers. You look at the top tennis player in the world, the top swimmer, the top runner. You can say you can go blue in face saying that they have natural abilities, which we will talk about, but look at what they’re doing. They’re still in the track 4 or 5, 6 hours a day. They still have coaches. They still have all kinds of training. Then you look at yourself and you think, “I manage to get half an hour of listening to a podcast last week because I was too busy.” I’m sorry but it’s not going to happen by magic. The way to get to that level where you are superhuman is to be able to do something that superhuman people do. The reason why they got to superhuman and I’m sorry that I’m referring to myself as superhuman; that was not the goal, the point is that I see myself completely differently from 6 months ago or a year ago or 2 years ago or 10 years ago. As much as I like, what I’m doing right now I like the articles that I write. I like the cartoons that I draw. I like the stuff that I do. I know that it will be totally crappy in my own eyes 10 years from now. I know that because I’ve learned so much I will change so much, everything will change. Everything has to change because that’s how it works. At this point in the interview, we shifted into the key elements or keystone. Keystone is the foundation on which a lot of things are built. The question was, what keystone elements do you need to be superhuman? I’m still not comfortable with superhuman but since that’s the term being used in the interview, we continue with the term superhuman. I’ll go and get my kryptonite on the side. I think the first element is that it has to be daily. You have to take an analogy of brushing teeth. You can brush once a week. You can brush once a month. You can brush once a year. It totally depends on you. What sets in is a factor of decay and your reign is exactly the same. It’s not going to turn on lights and keep them on if you decide that you’re not going to learn. It just going to switch them off or it’s going to put them in dimmer setting. You know this because you can learn something and you can forget about it and then you learn it again and then it comes up a little brighter. Unless you keep adding to it, unless you keep polishing and unless you have what is called a daily routine it’s not going to work. There is no way on earth that you can be where you want to be unless you have a daily routine. It might be just 15 minutes. You might just take a walk for 15 minutes and listen to something and you never remember anything. You don’t have to remember anything. You just have to listen. Just listen to it like radio, just like you went for a walk with a friend and you listen and you can’t remember 99 percent of what they said. That 1 percent when you add it up, add 1 to 1 you think they would end up as being 2, but it doesn’t end up as being 2. Eventually, the 1 percent plus 1 percent plus 1 percent becomes exponential and suddenly you jump up 20 percent and then 50 percent and that’s how it works. The first thing is definitely that you have to do something on a daily basis. How long? I can’t say. I spend at least an hour learning every day if not longer and I have a very busy day, busier day than most. The second thing that you have to look at is a teacher. You have to. You can waste so much time trying to work your way through a system that if you don’t find the right teacher then you’re just wasting time. The point is how do you find the right teacher. It’s the same thing as trying to find the right spouse in life or right girlfriend or boyfriend or friend for that matter. You have to reject a lot of people. If you go out there and say, “I’ll go to the first person that’s promising me all these instant happiness and riches and stuff,” that’s what you get. You get no instant anything. The teacher makes a huge difference. The daily stuff makes a huge difference. Part 3: How To Successfully Get Rid of Self-DoubtThe third thing is just that a lot of people have to get rid of the self-doubt. It doesn’t matter who you are and how successful you are. You are going to have self-doubt. There is no one on the planet who doesn’t have self-doubt. The doubt performers they all have self-doubt. What they do is they have to work out a system to get rid of the self-doubts so that when they run their next race, they’re thinking, “I might not win this race,” but they still end up with the gold medal or the silver medal. Maybe they showed up in that race, but the next race and the next race and the next race. I hate to nail anything down to keystone stuff but this is it. If you find the teacher and the teacher will have a system, they will have a group and you do something daily that helps you get rid of the most critical element that stops you, which is self-doubt. This took us at the topic of daily routine, what I do every single day to make sure that my daily routine stays daily. The thing that you have to do is when you create a habit, you’ve got to understand that there is a cue, routine, and reward. These 3 elements have to be in place. Cue is like an alarm clock. You wake up on cue and then there’s a routine. You put on your shoes and you go for a walk and then there’s a reward. The point is that without that reward in place, the cue and the routine are not going to happen. You decide I’m going to listen to podcast every day or I’m going to read every day. What’s the reward? That’s what I would ask first, what is your reward? If you don’t have the reward every single day, there’s a very good chance that’s it’s going to fall by the way. There’s a pretty good chance that your cue will set up, your alarm will set up, you’ll get into your shoes but then you’ll decide it’s raining I’m not going to go. Cue, routine and reward have to be in place but first you have to ask yourself what is the reward. Some people say, “I don’t need the reward. I have to be self-motivated.” No, no, no, that’s not how it works. You first figure out your reward if you want to learn something what happens at the end of that something, if you want to do something what happens to the end of that something. When people do courses, for instance, the first time we did a workshop that’s speaking engagement very early in our career in 2002. I spoke at this event and there were about 30 people in the room and most of them bought this PDF from me. Right after we did that, we went out. We bought a bottle of wine and we celebrated and I still have that bottle with me; the empty bottle obviously. The point that the reward matters, every time when you have the reward in place you know. This is what going through this whole routine. Once you have that in place you then have to seek out what is called group, because an individual is not usually capable of going by themselves. When you have a group, the other persons buzz you on. They say, “Are we going for a run today?” You go, “We’ll go.” Having these elements in place make a difference. This is how I go for a walk every day. When I go for a walk, I have my iPhone with me so I listen to podcast or I learn languages or I do stuff like that. I listen to audio books so for 1-1/2 hour I’m learning. Some days I’ll just speak to my wife. We’ll brainstorm, but at the end of that there’s a cup of coffee. Then I have my cup of coffee and I come back and I’ve learned something and I’ve done something and that’s the reward. You have to determine the reward and that’s my routine. That’s how I go about stuff. At this point in the interview, Christopher brought up something that I’d mentioned when I just started doing watercolors. You may or may not know the story but in 2010, I went out to learn watercolors. I’d gone to several courses and learn anything. I went to this guy Ted and he told me that I should practice every day. He said, “Get watercolor book and just paint every day.” I decided to paint what I did every day, which is just my life. When I started, I mentioned in 5000bc, which is the membership site, and in the forum I said, “I’m starting on this watercolor journey. I’m not very good at it but I will be in 2 years’ time.” That is what Christopher brought up. He said, “That mindset stayed with me the fact that you said you will be good in 2 years’ time.” I’ll give you a better thing than that. I’ll give you an analogy. Imagine for some reason you went blind. It sounds terrible and I wouldn’t want to be blind, but lots of people go blind for whatever reason. What’s going to happen in the next year, for one, you’re going to be able to find your way around the city almost by yourself. That’s the first thing that’s going to happen. The second thing is you’re going to learn a brand new language that you’ve never encountered before, which is braille. Third, you’re going to be able to hear stuff. Because of how your brain functions, you’re going to hear stuff more profoundly than ever before because you can’t see anymore. When you look at the mindset of what happens to a blind person in a year’s time, they have got 3 sets of you can call them skills that they never had before. It is beyond any doubt that if you decided that you’re going to do something and you do it on a regular basis, you will be better in a year’s time. You don’t have to do much. You don’t even have to have a great teacher. You don’t have to have a great system. You can get there, say, record a podcast everyday. You can, say, do a drawing every day. It’s not going to be very fulfilling because what are you going to do. No one sees it. No one looks at it. The point is that after a year you will be better. If you find a good teacher and you find a good system and you do all that other stuff then you will be a professional in year’s time. It’s not an if or a but, but it is a guarantee. You will be professional in a year’s time. That’s how blind people learn to type. That’s how they learn to write. That’s how they learn to read. That’s beyond any doubt. Then we came full circle with the hardship bit. We talked about scarcity, about not having that skill or resources and how to still go forward. A lot of people they believe that they can’t make that they don’t have the skill. They don’t have the resources. Frankly speaking nobody does. A lot of people when they say they don’t have resources they don’t really understand what they’re saying. I didn’t grow up in a very poor family. I grew up in a middle-class family, but even so I didn’t have access to a library. I had to go out there and buy my books. My father had to subscribe [the stuff 19:44]. A lot of the things that people take for granted especially in western countries you can go to the library. You can get any book you want. You have an internet connection. You have all these things. Even if you just look at yourself going back 25 years, you didn’t have an internet connection. You didn’t have so many things like a mobile phone, all these things that you take for granted today. In that sense, you are quite deprived. You may do with what you had and you were very creative. It’s when a person becomes saddled, all those equipment and this excess that they become worse at what they’re supposed to do. Probably the smartest people work with very little information. They work with very little resources and information is one of those very critical resources. One of the things that stop people consistently is this information. They go, “If I have more information about this house then maybe I’ll buy it. If I have more information about how my business is going to go in six months then maybe I’ll do it.” The people who succeed on a consistent basis they don’t have this resource. They have the same resource as you. They have the same amount of information as you and what they do is they do it anyway. They go ahead anyway and then they keep going and they find the group, they find a teacher, they keep going, they keep going, they keep going. What happens over time is you just get very quick at something. As I said, I used to take 2 days to write an article, it takes 45 minutes. I now have one day and another 14 hours of whatever to play with. What you are really doing is you have to understand that to be very good at what you do you have to work with very little information and just keep going. The second thing that I would add just to finish this off is that something that I had to learn which is rest. We’ve take three months off every year, but the point is that even so I wasn’t taking weekends off. Let me clarify what I mean by that. I wasn’t working the whole weekend but I’m going on a Saturday morning and then I’d work for a few hours and then before I knew it, it would be 9:00 or 10:00 and then someday maybe two or three hours. The downtime is critical. You can’t compensate for downtime. If you don’t take a break, if you don’t disconnect your email, if you don’t disconnect your phone, you are going to find that your work is not as good. When people go and they say, “We went on a vacation,” and all they did was see 700 monuments, that’s not a break. When you were on your weekend and you just check email, that’s not a break. Your ability to work when you have to work goes down and you get more and more tired, more exhausted and then eventually there’s nothing left. There’s no energy left. That’s pretty much what I’d say. Summary:That brings us to the end of this podcast. What we’d covered was the whole concept of roadblocks and how we think that someone else is superhuman. They’re not really superhuman. They just started along time ago and what they did was continue. A lot of people stop. They pause. They think that the other people are somehow succeeding because they have some special gene. If that other person has special gene, it is just to persist over and over again until they get it right until they eliminate all the errors and that makes them what other people call them which is superhuman. The second thing that we covered was this concept of keystone habits. We found that you have to have to work on it like your toothbrush. Your toothbrush does a job and it does it very well. If you can think of your learning and your application as a daily routine, then it changes everything. The third thing that we talked about was the future and how you have to have a mindset for the future that you might not be very good at watercolors today, but in two years’ time you will be. You might not be very good at podcasting today, but in 2 years’ time you will be. It doesn’t matter what you undertake if you go about it with dedication and you find the right teacher. Even if you don’t find the right teacher you still in 2 years’ time you will be far down the road than where you are right now. If you stop today, you’ve just wasted 2 years. In 2 years’ time, you will still know nothing and that is the reality for most people. That brings us to the end of this podcast. We still have the storytelling workshop in Nashville, Tennessee on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th of December and then the 13th, 14th and 15th of December is in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. People wander why they have to tell stories and it’s the flipside of the coin. You have logic and you have facts and you have to have stories, because stories they keep the audience alive and they keep things memorable. You can run on facts and logic alone, but who’s going to remember your story? Who’s going to pass it on? Storytelling is incredible. You read The Brain Audit and you’ll find that almost the entire book is one of storytelling. Read The Brain Audit and also join us at 5000bc.com. If you want to go ahead you need a group and that group is in 5000bc, we don’t have these spammers and these loud mouths. We largely have a group on introverts even though I’m an extrovert. Join us at 5000bc.com and if you like to come to the workshop it’s at psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop. That’s me Sean D’Souza saying bye for now and here’s to your talent 2 years from now. How much is enough? And where do you stop?
Direct download: 61_How_To_Get_Over_The_Start_Up_Roadblocks.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00pm NZST |
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