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.

Read: ww.psychotactics.com/myth-pricing-overcome/
Tell a friend: http://www.psychotactics.com/tellall

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“Don’t go out in cold without your coat—or you’ll get sick”.

Which one of us haven’t heard our parents insisting on us wearing a coat? Almost every parent on the planet firmly believes that a cold is sure to descend upon you, if you don’t have that coat on. And yet, you don’t get colds because of the temperature outside. You get a cold from viruses—and guess what? Those viruses are more likely be indoors than anywhere else. So yeah, getting that jacket or coat on, is just a myth, but it sure keeps you warm.

In pricing we also have myths that keep us warm

And two myths prevail, causing us to lose out on charging higher prices over time. They force us to put on a coat, when it’s perfectly good to go outside without one. Let’s take a look and find out what these myths are, and how to overcome them.

Myth 1: Ending prices with 7 or 9 (e.g. $97 or $99 instead of $100)
Myth 2: You can feel the “right price” in your gut

Let’s start with Myth 1: Prices ending in 7 (E.g. $97 or $99 instead of $100)

Back in the 70’s or 80’s, a marketer called Ted Nicholas is said to have suggested that prices ending with the number 7, do better than other ending digits. This means that, theoretically speaking, you’d sell more at $9.97 than $9.99. Sure, it’s only two cents, but does it actually sell more product or services? The answer is that price rarely if ever depends on your magic figure.

So we decided to test the pricing on our site at Psychotactics

When we started out, way back in 2002, our prices all hovered around the $7 ending. But then we decided to test if the ending prices made any difference whatsoever. And you know where this is going, right? Yup, we ended prices with 8, or 2, or just any old figure that came to our heads. And we waited with bated breath.

And nothing happened.

The sales didn’t go up, and they didn’t go down

So we started putting any price endings that came to our head. One of our best-selling books (it’s sold over $500,000 worth of copies) sold for $109.22. Our courses and workshops had all sorts of odd price endings and it didn’t make one whit of a difference.

Yet what would you notice if you go to our website today?

If you were to do a systematic sweep, you’d find to your surprise that most of the price endings are 7, 9 or 5. So how on earth did that happen? If the price endings don’t matter at all, how did we end up with such oft-repeated figures? It’s a factor of laziness, really. When creating a price point, it’s easy to just not have to think about the price too much at all. And so we revert back to our 7 and 9, without much thought.

So how do we overcome this first myth?

First, recognise that it’s a myth. That if you’re spending time wondering if you should price your product with a 5, 7 or 9, you can go right ahead. In all pricing experiments online and offline, you’ll find that a mere ending rarely has any bearing on sales. Some sites like Target will hover madly around the 7 or 9, but then slip in an 8 here and there.

On equally large sites such as Expedia, the prices for an airline ticket can be $1331 or $791—or even $798 or $644.

If you head to buy houses, say in Washington DC, you’ll find that houses sell at round figures of 4,500,000 or 2,750,000. If you buy movie tickets, you’ll find routinely that the prices may be $12.50, $14 or some round figure with not a 9 or 7 in sight. In fact, the closer you look around at different products and services, the more you find there’s no logic for a 7 or 9 to exist.

In fact, despite the widespread use of 7 or 9, scientific studies (and these are mostly retail examples) have shown the following:
– At least among US retailers (where the study was done), there is no evidence of their effectiveness.
– While the use of 9 as an ending increased demand, it was only for new items than any items sold in previous years (this suggests a novelty effect).
– That in some situations where there is a “sale” cue, the 9 ending becomes less effective.
– In cases where the retailer wants to create an impression of a sale, they price at the 7 or 9 price ending. When they sell “regular merchandise”, the prices are always rounded prices, so that customers see the products as valuable and not underpriced.

So with all this conflicting information, in which direction do we go?

Most of us in either selling a product, service or training of some kind. Training or services are bought one at a time, and after considerable evaluation of the the consultant or trainer. If you’re having a workshop, no one is jumping up and down simply because you decide to put in a magical number. In fact, we have conducted The Brain Audit workshops over several years, pricing the very same workshop at $USD 1500, $NZ 1500, NZ$1499, $800, $500—and because we do workshops worldwide— € 879 or £835.

And the very same workshop, with the same content and the same speaker sells out because of the content, and not the price.

If it were the price, and especially the “so-called” magical 9 price ending, the lower prices might have triggered quicker sales (since the workshop sells out anyway). And granted it’s not industrial scale testing of the pricing, but that’s how most of us are—we’re selling small programs, workshops, training and services. And the customer has made up their mind whether to go ahead—or not—long before they see the price, let alone the magical 7 or 9 price ending.

So what are you to do?: What’s your action plan

Try it out for yourself by pushing your price up from say, $29 to $32. And all you’ll be is $3 richer, every time you sell that particular product. It may sound like it’s just $3, but it’s a whopping 10% increase—and your customer won’t even notice it. So the sooner you get off the myth of 7 or 9 pricing, the better. And if you’re still fussed about sticking to 9, well, sell it as $32.99. That way you can have your 9 and your increased profit as well.

How do you systematically raise prices without losing customers?
Is it possible to raise prices and still keep customers? And how do you keep those prices going up, up and away—and still keep customers coming back? Click to find out more.

http://www.psychotactics.com/products/trust-the-chef/

It might seem like perseverance is a good thing.

We’ve been told to persist in the face of odds. Yet, there are times when you should stop.

How do you know when to stop? And why bother to persevere when failure is waiting around the corner?

Find out why perseverance can be a real pain, and when it can be a blessing. Enjoy this episode on perseverance and yes, enjoy the music.

In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: The link between failure and perseverance
Part 2: Is there a way to know when to stop?
Part 3: Why perseverance could do with a coach

To read this online:  http://www.psychotactics.com/why-persevere-fails/
To tell a friend: http://www.psychotactics.com/general/podcast-friend/

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Should You Give Up? Or Should You Persist?

When you get to your office and want to print some material, what do you do?

You’re likely to turn on your computer, hit the print button and then voilà, out come a crisp, laser-printed copy of whatever was on your computer screen. Back in 1969, an optical engineer called Gary Starkweather thought the same way.

“One morning I woke up and I thought, why don’t we just print something out directly?” Starkweather said. “But when I flew that past my boss he thought it was the most brain-dead idea he had ever heard. He basically told me to find something else to do. The feeling was that lasers were too expensive. They didn’t work that well. Nobody wants to do this, computers aren’t powerful enough.

And I guess, in my naïveté, I kept thinking, He’s just not right—there’s something about this I really like. It got to be a frustrating situation. He and I came to loggerheads over the thing, about late 1969, early 1970. I was running my experiments in the back room behind a black curtain. I played with them when I could.

He threatened to lay off my people if I didn’t stop. I was having to make a decision: do I abandon this, or do I try and go up the ladder with it?”

A Starkweather kind of decision is the kind of decision we have to make, when facing our lives, but also our business

How do we know whether we should persist or give up? Will we meet with success or failure? And is failure one of the goals? Should we really accept failure as a benchmark that we’re moving ahead? In this series we’re going to take a hard-nosed look at three areas of perseverance.

We’ll examine

1) The link between failure and perseverance
2) Is there a way to know when to stop?
3) Why perseverance could do with a coach

1) Let’s start with the link between failure and perseverance

Imagine you were a company that failed repeatedly.

You create a tablet device that was at best, disappointing.
You try your hand at a peer-to-peer payment system like Paypal, and it fails.
You start up an auction site similar to eBay, and that too needs to be shut down.
You then get into the phone business but lose over $170 million in a single year.

And ten solid years after you’ve run the business, your net profit is barely 2.8%.

Should you give up?

Well, this company chose to soldier on despite the odds

Almost all of us are likely to have used the services of this company at one time or another. We’re not talking about some unknown, nondescript company. We’re talking about Amazon.com, the retailing giant.

The reality is that Amazon’s profit margin is wafer thin and has continued to be that way for an agonisingly long time.

In early 2016, CEO Jeff Bezos announced that his gamble had paid off. He spoke excitedly about Amazon Web Services (AWS) which had reached $10 billion in sales and was now generating 52% of Amazon’s total profit for that quarter. What this meant was that a single arm of Amazon, no, not the retail arm, but the cloud hosting section was the real winner. In short what Bezos was mildly gloating about was the fact that his perseverance had paid off.

A similar perseverance experiment paid off in Cupertino, California

In 1993, Apple Inc. launched the Newton MessagePad. The MessagePad, the first series of personal digital assistant devices, developed by Apple Computer and was a reasonably spectacular failure. Sales of the original MessagePad were weak, with Apple moving a mere 50,000 units in the product’s first four months on the market.

On June 29, 2007, the first iPhone was launched. Despite failing miserably on the NewtonPad front, Apple decided to go ahead with the production of a phone. And so far they’ve sold 821 million phones. The iPhone is now slightly over 68% of the entire Apple revenues while the Mac is just 8.89%

And while it’s easy to see these cases as big companies with deep pockets, history is full of artists, inventors, musicians, athletes—in fact, all kinds of people in all sorts of professions—who never gave up despite the odds. And there’s one crucial reason why we should persevere even when there’s no guarantee of success.

The reason? What fails right away might work on an unrelated project

In April 2105, Lynda.com was sold for $1.5 billion to LinkedIn

When we look at that price tag, we tend to see enormous success. Lynda and her husband, Bruce Heavin came incredibly close to the precipice of failure. Lynda.com wasn’t the online training giant that it is today. Instead, it was an offline training company with week-long workshops. They did well over the years building their business to 35 employees and $3.5 million in revenue.

Then came 9/11 and the dot-com crash

Almost overnight they had to lay off 75% of their staff. According to a report in Fast Company, they had to downsize their home and give up classroom leases.

Which is when they decided to go online.

“Right now with broadband, it’s easy to run online video courses,” Lynda told me when we met for dinner. “Back in the early days, it was hard going. Internet bandwidth was extremely narrow, and it was hard to see how we’d keep the business going.” And yet, the perseverance paid off. But what do we learn from this story?

Lynda and Bruce weren’t looking to have an online training business, at that point in time

The only reason they were forced to move in a bigger way online was because of massive and instant failure. That seeming failure in the offline classroom-based training business led to the creation and growth of Lynda.com. Lynda and Bruce persevered, taking the lessons of their failure into another domain before the business took off.

While these success stories are powerful motivators, perseverance works on unrelated project in day to day life as well

Around 2010, we were having real problems with our membership site at 5000bc.com. We’d moved from a hosted membership site to Joomla! (A content management system), and had some software put in that would make it a lot easier to create “magazines”. The software was meant to enable the site owner could create content that would allow clients to read the content.

The only problem was that the software we were using was super-klutzy.

It would take me about 3 hours or so to write the articles and then over 3 hours just to get them posted. I know it sounds terribly bizarre to all of us spoiled by the ease of WordPress, but back then this software was the option presented to me—and I took it. Week after week, I’d do battle with this frustrating content management system, and there seemed to be no solution on the horizon. In effect, what was supposed to save me time and effort was turning out to be a complete and utter failure.

Failure can teach you to move to an unrelated project

I persisted for a while but was forced to move to an unrelated way of presenting the information. I started posting all the articles in the forum. The forum helped tremendously because clients could ask questions, get clarifications and do things they just couldn’t do before. Instead of a top-down, “here’s the article series”, they got a chance to interact on the forum.

But not everyone likes chatter on the forum, and in a way, the forum experiment became a sort of “failure”, when I considered those clients who were not happy with forums. And so we created reports and called them Vanishing Reports. The Vanishing Reports were a result of seeming failure after failure. And yet with persistence, we got a product that to this day is among the top three most-loved benefits of being a member of 5000bc (the other two are almost instant replies from me, and the first priority to courses and workshops).

Perseverance in the face of failure may often lead to unrelated projects.

The Post-It you use today was never supposed to be invented. Arthur Fry and 3M were supposedly working on a project of super-strong adhesives. And yet, as they met with failure on one front, they inadvertently discovered an adhesive that could be peeled off easily without damaging the paper. And the Post-It was born.

At first, it seems like the original project is a very good idea

Then it’s possible that failure comes along. But failure forces you to be persistent. Which is when you’re more likely to get to a different level—often one that’s far superior to the existing level. This is the core lesson of failure. It’s there to teach us a lesson of how to improve our products and services.

If we persist, we get to a whole new level.
Just like Apple. Or Lynda.com. Or 3M.

It’s doable. You just have to be persistent.

But wait, there are just as many examples of persistence leading to ruin. How do you avoid being so blind-sided by your project that you avoid falling into a black hole of perseverance?

2) The black hole of perseverance: Can we avoid it?

When we first moved to New Zealand, I had a job in a web design company. I fancied myself as a web designer because I knew the program, Dreamweaver, quite well. Plus I had been studying another hot program at the time called Flash. I was hired in July, made redundant by October.

There I was, not even a year in New Zealand, and things weren’t going so well.

To make matters slightly worse, we’d just bought a house and had a $180,000 mortgage (which was a lot back in the year 2000). It’s at this point I realised that there was no way out of the mess but forward. Since I knew few people in New Zealand, I called dozens of ad agencies and walked in with my cartooning portfolio. In most cases, I returned home empty handed. Until one day, an agency gave me an assignment, which turned out to be a full-blown campaign.

So what’s the point of this story?

The point is that around mid-December, New Zealand tends to shut shop. Almost the entire country decides to go en masse on vacation, and it seems that no one seems gets back to work until mid-January, even early February. Which means as a cartoonist you have no work for all those months. It’s a bit of a forced hibernation period, and you need to get used to it.

I refused to accept that I couldn’t get work
I tried to call. No one answered.
I showed up. No one was around.
And so it became a bit of a black hole of frustration.

Perseverance can have its downsides

You can easily keep at something in the hope that things will get better, and you fail to notice that the rules of engagement have changed. To give up would be madness, yet to stay at the task would be just as bad, if not worse.

It’s at this point that you have to learn to change your strategy. It wasn’t that the agencies weren’t hiring cartoonists anymore. They just weren’t around to meet anyone. What I was doing with my dogged behaviour wasn’t perseverance at all.

Strategy is when you lie low and prepare for the moment that is to come

As I kept running into closed doors, I decided to change my strategy. Instead of trying to get work, we decided to cut down on our spending. Instead of going out more often, we kept ourselves tied to a limited budget. And on the work front, I enjoyed the rest period and also spent time doodling, learning Photoshop a lot better.

Gary Starkweather ran into endless trouble at Xerox Parc

He knew he was onto a good thing, but the odds were against him. His boss was threatening to fire him and his entire staff. So he changed his strategy. He heard that Xerox was opening a research centre in Palo Alto, which was pretty much right across the country from where he lived in New York. So he threatened to leave for IBM if he didn’t get a transfer. He moved in January 1971, and the first prototype of the laser printer was up and running.

In many cases, we have the opportunity to move to Plan B

Yet we continue to be like the fly that keeps hitting itself against the closed window pane when the next window is wide open. The reason why we keep digger a deep hole and not getting results is partly because a lack of perseverance is seen as weakness. We somehow need to battle on, or we will fail, or so we think.

The solution has often been right in front of me, and I’ve often kept doggedly ahead getting more frustrated all the time. This is why we need more than just perseverance. We need a friend, or better still, a coach.

3) Why perseverance could do with a coach

When you look back at the period between the 14th and 17th century, you have an incredible flowering of art, architecture, politics, science and literature. Some of the finest work found in museums today are from that period. Two centers stood out in Western art for the enormous number of artist and innovation of their work: The Renaissance in Italy and the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century.

But how did all of this astounding work seem to appear all at once?

The answer lies in the gradual reform of the political structure and the patronage of the time. The cities were also the most urbanized culture of their time. To nail down the magnificence of the Renaissance to one factor would be churlish, and yet there was one element that stood out.

It was the factor of guilds and apprenticeship that came into their own.

In short, artists had coaches. Granted that the apprenticeship was often long and arduous, but it meant that there was a constant sense of guidance. This system of coaching is considered to be one of the primary factors why such amazing results were obtained.

In Holland alone, it has been estimated that about five to ten million works of art were produced during the century of the Golden Age of Dutch art. That’s not counting the work that poured out from Italy. And yet it wasn’t just artists toiling by themselves. They had a coaching system in place.

Perseverance is often seen as a solo skill, but it’s also the reason why we get so exhausted in our efforts

Take for instance the problem that I had with formatting in the forum. All our courses are conducted via the medium of notes, audio but live courses have one more component—a forum. This online forum is where clients do their daily, yes daily, assignments and they’re reviewed by me on a regular basis.

A small group of 25 clients can generate as many as 1,000 posts a week (no, that’s not an exaggeration). Hence, it’s not unusual for a course to produce between 10,000-15,000 posts.

The problem is that posts need formatting

You need to make a title look like a title. And yes, there’s forum formatting but what if you want to do three things all in one second? Let’s take for instance the fact that I want to make the title bold, 18 points and in maroon.

Those are three steps, and when you assume that I’ll be posting on at least a third of those posts, you suddenly have triple the work. Every time you’re moving through bold, 18 points and maroon. But hey, I was going to persevere. I wasn’t going to have shoddy formatting and so I’d go through the three actions.

But a coach or outsider can see things in a different way

One day while I was mumbling about this tedious method, a client told me how I could fix the problem. Using Text Expander, a software I already owned, I could format a title, a sub-head or any text in a matter of seconds. My perseverance wasn’t helping at all. All I needed was a different set of eyes.

What seems like talent is a coach catching unforced errors while they’re occurring

The coach realises you’re like the fly on the window. He or she knows that there’s another window open. And that’s what they do. They gently advise you to move one step back or one step to the left or right. And instead of digging yourself into a hole, you’ve changed your strategy. When I look at clients in 5000bc or in courses such as the cartooning course or Article Writing Course, they’re working very, very hard. But working hard is not enough.

You need someone else.

Back when I was trying to call those ad agencies, and not getting results, I didn’t have a coach.

But I did have a friend, Wayne Logue. And Wayne advised me to wait until February or even March. He informed me that I wasn’t really persevering, but just driving myself crazy. And luckily I listened.

Albert Einstein is reported to have said: We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
To me that sounds like it’s time to get advice, to get a group that I trust or a coach.

And then I can persevere and reach my goals faster and better than ever before.

So let’s summarise. What we learned was:

1) The link between failure and perseverance
2) Is there a way to know when to stop?
3) Why perseverance could do with a coach

Next Step:  Why Inspiration Can Be The Key To Winning The Resistance Game

http://www.psychotactics.com/key-resistance-game/

Where do we draw inspiration from?

When we try to beat resistance, we tend to look at what wehaven’t done and what needs doing. Yet sometimes resistance can bepushed over with a simple concept of inspiration.

Where do we draw that inspiration from? And how do we keep theinspiration constant?

In this episode we look at inspiration, but also at the “lousycarpenter” and “trigger” concept.

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It’s said that a bad carpenter blames his tools

But what’s not said is what makes a good carpenter.

A good carpenter isn’t always the one who has the bestequipment. But a good carpenter makes sure he learns how to usethat equipment fluently. And there’s a reason why you need to spendtime learning how to use the equipment.

It’s called tiredness.

Let’s take my early battles with InDesign, for instance

InDesign is a layout program with which I do all my e-books andreports. I learned InDesign, but not quite well enough. So if I hadto do a simple task like updating the Contents Page, I had tomanually update it every time. If I added more pages to mydocument, I’d have to go back, and re-assign all the pagenumbers.

And even if you haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about, youget this feeling of stupidity coming through. Stupidity and hardwork. And all because I refused to learn how to maximise theprogram’s capability.

But forget maximisation, let’s just talk about fixing theimmediate problem

No matter what you do right now, there’s a better way to do it.And there’s someone out there on the Internet who can help you finda better way. For all you know there are probably ten thousandtutorials and fifty videos on solving your exact problem.

But guess what? You’re doing the same old stuff in the same oldway. And resistance loves you for it.

It loves that you have great tools and lousy habits

Because if you did what I did with InDesign, it would take youthrice as much time to do the same job. Maybe even ten times asmuch. Well, guess what? If it takes you five minutes to do a jobvs. fifty minutes, which job is going to tire you out? No prizesfor guessing, but you’ve just opened the door for exhaustion tocome rushing through.

And it’s not just exhaustion but frustration as well. If you didtwo jobs side by side, and finished a ton of stuff vs. finishingjust one measly contents page, there’s no doubt which one bringsmore satisfaction.

The more dissatisfied and tired you are, the better resistancefeels

It doesn’t have to do any work at all. You’ve been a completenincompoop and done all the work yourself. You are the badcarpenter. You blame your tools when you should be working veryhard to maximise the power of the equipment you have.

And let’s face it, you need better tools as well

If you’re running outdated tools, it doesn’t help. But we’reoften just glitzy-eyed for the best tools without ever puttingaside time to learn them well. But the question does arise: Mosttools are so complex.

How do you get the time to learn them well?

The answer lies in doing continuous sweeps, kinda like aradar

If you try and learn something the first time, you only pick upso much. So you come back again for the second sweep, then thethird, then the fourth and so on. I spent a lot of time (about aweek) first trying to work out how to use InDesign.

Now I know it well, but I still spend a good hour or two everymonth to learn tiny bits of stuff. And it helps me improve myproductivity. Of course, InDesign keeps getting better, so now notonly am I faster, but I’m equipped with superior equipment.

And resistance doesn’t like that one tiny bit

It would prefer to see me swearing.
It would love to see me frustrated with just doing a simplecontents page.
But nope, I won’t let it win. And neither should you.

If you’re a good carpenter you’ll learn how to maximise yourtools

Then you’ll earn more, because you’ll be in demand. And thatwill help you get the fanciest, most sophisticated tools that willput you head and shoulders above everyone else. And mostimportantly it keeps resistance away from your door.

Next: How John Forde (and Sean D’Souza) Got Me To WriteArticles

(http://www.psychotactics.com/john-forde-write-articles/)

P.S. Do you sometimes wonder if planning books are written just forthe ‘organised’ people?

Is resistance a game? It can feel a bit like that when you're almost always on the losing team. But often the reason why we lose to resistance is because we don't realise how the brain works. And this brain stuff was studied by researchers at the University of Cincinnati. What they found was astounding. In just over 10 minutes, our brains start to waver and we lose focus. So how can we make sure we don't give in to resistance? Find out in Part 2 of the Resistance game.

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Imagine you had two loans to pay back

Loan A was $100,000 at 19% interest per annum. Loan B was $200 at 1% interest. Which loan would you pay back first? Loan A or Loan B? If you chose Loan A, then almost every financial consultant on the planet would agree with you.

Except Dave Ramsey

To everyone, but Dave, the logic is clear. Loan A has a much higher rate of interest. Logically you should pay back the higher rate of interest first. But as you’d expect, Dave disagrees.

That’s because Dave understands inertia better than most other financial consultants

So what is inertia? I learned a funny definition in physics class at school. It went like this: A body in the state of rest or motion is inertia.

Hah, that made me laugh. How can you be stuck and moving, and still be in the same state? But apparently that’s how inertia works. And this is Dave’s advice to people who are struggling with debt.

First list all the debts on a piece of paper

All debts need to go down. Student loans, credit card, mortgage, blah, blah. Then you need to rearrange the loans based on the size of the loan. So the smallest loan goes right at the top and the biggest one right at the bottom.

And everything else in between (depending on the size of the loan). And then he instructs you to pay only the minimum payment on every debt–with one exception. After the minimum payments were made, every available dollar needs to be put towards the first debt on the list.

Incredible as it may sound, Dave is telling you to wipe out that tiny, itty-bitty $200 debt with the pathetic interest, instead of taking on the painful big amount/big interest debt.

Logically it makes no sense

But your brain doesn’t always work logically when it comes to inertia. While you’re lounging on the sofa, watching endless and pointless political debates on TV, your logic is telling to get off your butt. It’s telling you that the debates are endless (and did we say, pointless?).

Your logic is also telling you that you should be doing some work or exercise instead of engaging in mindless drivel. So logic doesn’t work. And the same applies to the debt. When Dave’s clients wipe out the first debt it’s not necessarily logical, but it creates a factor of momentum. First the $200 is wiped out. Then the $350. Then the $800. And so on, right up to the ‘monsta’ $100,000.

The motion is what matters

A body in a state of rest or motion is inertia. And going from rest to a state of motion is impossible if you decide to take on the biggest task first.

Logic tells you that you should fix your website right now. Logic tells you that you should write that 300 page book. But Dave would say, “Go brush your teeth first.” That simple act of doing something–anything at all–gets you off your caboose and into another state of inertia: a state of motion.

So if you need to get something done, fool yourself

-Don’t go for a 60 minute walk. Instead put on your shoes and decide to walk for just 7 minutes.

-Don’t try to write a complete article. Just write for 14 minutes. Then stop.

-Avoid trying to clean the entire bathroom. Just attack the sink.

These tiny bits help you get to the bigger bits. Because even as you go for the 7 minute walk, you know very well that you’re not going to turn around in 7 minutes.

You’ll go longer and further. But the goal always needs to be 7 minutes or 14 minutes or the $200 debt. The itty-bitty bits are important, more important in fact, than the bigger goals.

When people say they feel inertia, they mostly refer to a state of laziness

Of not wanting to do anything at all. But as my physics teacher would tell you: “There’s inertia and there’s inertia.” And to get from one stage to another, you need to make the list in descending order of importance. Then attack the list.

And as Dave would say: Start small.

Acknowledgements

Dave Ramsey’s ‘Snowball Debt’ and ‘Switch’ by Chip and Dan Heath. P.S. Yes I know. You’re headed to Google these names, aren’t you? You think you’ll find out more about this book and this method of reducing debt, aren’t you? But you already have the tools.

You have a piece of paper. You have a pencil or pen. And you have the methodology. So don’t muck around. Get to work. You need to change that state of inertia right now.

Next Step: Listen to or read Part 1: Can Resistance be Beaten?

http://www.psychotactics.com/resistance-detests-groups/

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5000bc: How to get answers and move ahead in your business.
http://www.5000bc.com/

Why Do Most Plans Fails? Find Out The Critical Importance of Chaos in Planning.
http://www.psychotactics.com/products/chaos-planning-forget-business-planning-and-goal-setting-start-with-chaos-planning/

The Brain Audit: Why Clients Buy And Why They Don't
http://www.psychotactics.com/products/the-brain-audit-32-marketing-strategy-and-structure/

Resistance seems like an overbearing force in our lives

We want to achieve a lot, but as soon as we get started, resistance kicks in. But did you know there are ways around resistance?

Resistance loves a loner. If you’re working alone, you’re just setting yourself for an encounter with resistance. Resistance loves to play the game of winner. We need to put resistance in second place. Here’s how to go about the task of winning the resistance game.

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Resistance loves a loner

Because loners have limited energy.

They start out on a project, all excited about what’s about to unfold. Then, for some reason or the other, they lose their way. And that’s when resistance gangs up on the loner big time. It’s not much of a fight.

The loner is already exhausted. One tiny tap on the head from resistance, and the loner falls into a heap on the floor. But this miserably one-sided bout could be avoided with the understanding of group work.

In Africa there’s a saying:

If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go with a group. And resistance detests groups. And there are several reasons why a group helps you get a project done with far more efficiency and a lower failure rate.

So how do groups help?

1) Release of Pressure
2) Exponential Learning
3) Support

1) Release of Pressure

The toughest part of a project is dealing with the pressure. And a release of that pressure is needed to give you a breather.  When you rant and rave alone, it’s kinda depressing. When you’re suffering alone, you think it’s something to do with your talent, or your genes, or that you’re a loser (yes, everyone feels super-lousy often enough).

And having someone to just listen to your rant is amazing therapy. You rant, you’ve been heard and now it’s time to get back to work, because you have a ton of mistakes to make, and learning to look forward to.

2) Exponential learning

Mistake making is frowned in our society. We love to get things right the first time. And yet all of us know that it’s impossible to learn without making a ton of mistakes on any project, no matter how familiar we are with the project. The problem is that mistake-making, instructive as it is, is also terribly depressing.

When you’re going round in concentric circles, your exhaustion builds up rapidly. However when you’re in a group, you learn from someone else’s mistakes, thus getting a bit of respite from the exhaustion factor.

When a group shares its learning and mistakes, everyone learns and everyone gets a little samba in their steps because you’re not just learning, but it’s exponential learning. You’re learning from four-five mistakes every day, and guess what? Most of those mistakes aren’t yours.

3) The third factor is just one of support

While resistance can take on a loner, it’s a lot harder to take on a group. If someone falls, there’s usually someone to pick you up. If someone is struggling, there’s someone to help. If someone has questions, there are answers that help you move along.

Working by yourself, you not only miss the ongoing support, but the struggle wears you out. And inevitably you give up.

Now this kind of group support doesn’t necessarily work for all kinds of projects

Sometimes the project is just to clean your desk. You could do with ranting and group support, but it’s an overkill. Besides it probably takes under an hour to get even the messiest desk tidy.

But if this seemingly mundane desk has to go on over a longer period of say, six to eight months, then you definitely need the power of the group.

In fact at Psychotactics, groups form a critical part of the project experience

If we take just the Copywriting Course for instance, the three months of learning and implementation are physically exhausting. If you were to try and replicate the same pace by yourself, you’d give up in a week or less.

But with a group, 75-80% make it to the finish line. When you consider the sheer intensity of the Copywriting Course, you should have the figures the other way around (namely 75% should fail to make it to the end). And yet it’s the group that helps you through.

But how do you work with projects where the group doesn’t have a common goal?

Admittedly it’s harder to pull off a project where everyone is headed in different directions. When the African saying suggested you go a lot further with a group, they were indeed suggesting the group had a common goal.

And if everyone in the group isn’t headed towards the same deadline, or using similar tools etc., then they have nothing in common. Then it’s relatively easier for the group to be counterproductive, as no one is learning from group-mistakes, and everyone has their own agenda.

It’s important for the group to set out a common agenda and at least have some common guidelines. So even if you have ten different writers, writing ten different types of books, they should ‘meet’ online every day and post their learning for the day, as well as a minimum of 800 words.

If they’re a group working on a gardening project, there needs to be the shared learning, the shared support moments, and shared implementation.

But don’t you need the right group for things to work?

Yes, having the right group is important. But how do you choose the right group? Groups need to be chosen primarily on the basis of attitude. Which is why for instance, at Psychotactics, we call our courses the World’s Toughest Courses. This weeds out the excuse-makers and ensures that you get the cream of the attitude crop.

And just as you get a great group, you can also get a lousy group. Then whining, whingeing and depression will be constant, and progress will be impossible. So just having a group isn’t enough.

You need to put in some filters to ensure that at least 75% (or more) of your group will make it to the finish line. And it’s a bit of work putting a group together, but hey it’s a lot less work than starting endless projects only to see them go up in flames.

Resistance likes fires

All this namby-pamby, touchy-feely stuff makes resistance look really bad. If prefers the loner. And most projects are done by loners. And resistance is happy. Now it can wield it’s little finger and push you over.

And resistance laughs and walks away contentedly.