Writing a sales page can be a real drag

You start, stop, start and stop. But is it possible that you’re writing a sales page in an inefficient way?

What if you started writing the landing page from the bottom up? What if that bottom up method got you to create a quicker and far superior sales page for your product or service?
Find out a simple, tested method that works time after time using the bottom up technique of writing sales pages.

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26 Olympic medals

22 of those medals were gold.
You know his name because almost anyone following the Olympics knows his name.

As Michael Phelps stepped up to the starting blocks, the eyes of the world bounced between Phelps and his biggest rival in the race: South African Chad Guy Bertrand Le Clos. Their short and intense rivalry had fired the imagination of the press.

No one was particularly fixated on Singaporean, Joseph Isaac Schooling

Schooling it seems was the underdog. No pushover in the pool, Schooling had won the bronze at the 2015 World Championships. He’d been clocking up wins in the Asian, Commonwealth and South East Asian competitions. But at the finals 100 metre butterfly event, he seemed slightly outgunned.

When you’re dealing with copywriting and a sales page, the spotlight always seems to veer between the headline and the opening paragraphs. Other elements of the sales page seem to have a much shorter, less important stature. Yet it’s these seemingly obscure elements that are the powerhouse of the page.

If you’ve been frustrated with the process of writing a sales page, there’s a quick, more efficient way to the finish line. And it starts not from the top down, but instead from the bottom up. And this is why we’ll look at three factors in this article.

Factor 1: The bullets
Factor 2: The features and benefits
Factor 3: The target profile (even when you don’t have one).

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Factor 1: The Bullets

Last week I bought a new car.

Not just another car, but a kind of car I’d waited for since I was 12 years old. An electric car.

An electric car that was tiny, responsive and had a rich pedigree of car engineering.
I bought myself a BMW i3 and plugged into the socket to charge—yes, just like a toaster.

I’m no car fanatic

I don’t revel in terms like torque.
But a week later if you asked me to describe the car, I’d go into a slight rhapsody. I’d do what most of us would do when asked about a product or service. I’d spit out the bullets.

It’s the greenest car on the market

It’s the most efficient electric car you could buy at this point in time.
It’s not a monstrous hulk. It’s sub-compact.
Did I tell you that you can park it by using gestures? Imagine doing that in a car park.

You could do the same for any product or service

You could describe your house using bullets.
Your computer? Your home town? The cafe you visit? All of them could be described with a series of bullets.

And seasoned copywriters tend to avoid the headline and opening paragraphs of a sales page

They start with bullets instead. They sit down and write 10, 20, 30, even 60 bullets for a single product or service. And that’s what you should do too. When you write bullets, you get into a brainstorming trance of sorts.

Try it.

Try it right now.

Sit down and make a list of a service like a cafe. The way to go about it is to break up the service into sections. So if you’re writing bullet points about a cafe, for instance, you’d have main topics. e.g. the food, the drink, the ambience, location etc. It’s pretty much what you’d expect to see on an AirBNB listing online. Those points, they’re bullets.

When you tackle a product, a similar method applies

Several years ago I wrote a series of books that I was very proud of called ‘Black Belt Presentations’. I realised that people get on webinars all the time and do a terrible job. They also have to make presentations either in person or via audio.

And they tend to be so verbose and unfocused. So this series of books were about three main topics (yes, it’s always a good idea to break up any product into sections). The topics were about “slide design”, “presentation structure” and “crowd control”. And every single one of those books had different elements that when compressed, formed bullets.

For example:
Part 1: Controlling Presentation Design or DIY Slide Design: How to create stylish slides without driving yourself crazy.

Understanding the ‘proximity of elements’ and why it avoids visual chaos
The power of invisible lines and how they help avoid distraction—and increase focus
Why a simple colour palette saves you endless amounts of preparation time
How to avoid ‘unwanted noise’ by choosing uncluttered backgrounds

Why 95% of your slides need just one thought for max impact
The palm test: How to get rid of unwanted and distracting graphics
How to use the power of size to make graphics pop on your slides
Two core methods to instantly increase curiosity on every slide
Why most photos/graphics are flat on slides and how to bring them to life instantly!
How to avoid busting your budget on photos/graphics
Easy ways to stretch your budget without compromising on quality

How masking and transparency make graphics stand out
Why most graphs are confusing—and why to avoid 3-D completely
How to transform graphs into powerful visual data that make audiences sit bolt upright
How to avoid the downsides of animation
The secret of how ‘invisible’ animation helps reduce surprise
Handy presentation resources to help improve your presentation skills

Every product or service has dozens of points that can be covered

If you look at the pencil lying right in front of you, you could cover at least 10 interesting points. In your case, the product or service you’re selling is going to be way more complex. You could easily generate between 30-50 bullets on that product or service alone—provided you break it up into sections first.

I know I’m repeating myself here, but bear with me

I’m looking out of my office and I see a shed. I see the sections: the roof, the exterior, the interior etc. I can’t stress how important it is to break up a product or service into sections before writing the bullets. If you lazily look at the shed, you’ll have very little to write. Break it up into sections and your brain starts to co-operate. Suddenly you have a ton of bullets.

And once you have a mountain of bullets you’re done with Stage 1 of writing your sales letter.
It’s time to move to the second stage: the features and benefits.

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Factor 2: The features and benefits

At one point or another, we’re likely to have been to a buffet.
Spread in front of us is a variety of food all beckoning to us at once.

And so we decide on a temporary strategy where we try just a little of everything.

The bridge from bullets to features and benefits is somewhat like a buffet

About 15-20 minutes later, we realise the futility of such a strategy, because we’re clearly overeating. No matter how little we take of everything, the little bits add up to a lot.
With a little work we can drum up between two-three dozen bullets.

And if we try to turn every single bullet into a feature or benefit, we end up with a sales page that’s an overkill. There’s way too much for the reader—they’re stuffed too quickly. The best strategy when moving between bullets and features is to pick about 7-8 of the most valuable bullets.

But how are you supposed to know which ones to pick?

The act of writing bullets is akin to brainstorming. You have some great points and some that are less interesting. In an ideal situation the best judge of what’s interesting or not is the client. But let’s assume you’re working all by yourself, you’re going to have to trust your own judgement.

Let’s go back the ‘Black Belt Presentations’ series yet again and pull up some bullets

How examples can save your bacon when you’re running out of time
How to get a good chunk of your audience to sign up for more information
Why a break in the middle of your presentation improves conversion

Out of those three bullets which ones got your attention?

The least interesting was the “sign up for information” bullet. The “examples” and “running out of time” ranked higher. But there’s not a shred of doubt that the “break in the middle” and “improving conversion” is the most powerful of all. That’s what you need to pull aside because we’re going to take that bullet and turn it into a feature or benefit.

When writing a feature or benefit, use a simple formula

The formula goes like this: problem + curiosity.

Hence the bullet we chose might read like this: Wondering why the audience claps but you get poor conversions? Speakers thrive on audience applause, yet some speakers get a thunderous applause, plus have a high conversion rate. How do you increase your conversion rate by using a little known “break in the middle” technique? How can you improve your webinar or seminar conversion rate almost overnight?

You could clearly spot the problem and solution couldn’t you?

It’s about speakers that get applause but the sales don’t match the audience response. And then right after the problem we had a set of points/questions that ramped up your curiosity. You may have been a little keen to know what the “break in the middle” technique was all about. You’d have been chomping at the bit to figure out who to improve your webinar or seminar conversion rate.

If you’ve got a slightly expensive product or service, go with 7-8 features and benefits

Features and benefits are usually a paragraph of 3-4 lines long, so don’t stuff too much on the reader’s plate. 4 x 8 = 32 lines to read and that’s more than enough for the prospect to make up his or her mind. If you have a less expensive or simpler product, you may want to reduce the features and benefits to about 4-6.

There’s no right figure and if you choose to run with 7-8 every single time, that’s perfectly fine. The only criteria you have to consider is the problem + curiosity. If you have those elements in place, you’ve managed to write some great features and benefits.

What’s even more vital is you’re not stuck at this point

Remember the times when you tried to approach the sales page from the top down? Remember how long it took you to get started? When you start at the bottom with the bullets and work your way to the features and benefits, you’re moving at a relatively frenetic pace. You could spend the morning writing the bullets, take a lunch break and by 5pm you could be well on your way to finishing the features and benefits.

There’s just one itty-bitty problem

Having a client would make this process simple and reliable. But what if you don’t have a client? What if you can’t do a target profile interview in advance? Let’s find out how we clamber our way to the top of the sales page despite having a terrible disadvantage.

Let’s move to Part 3: Getting the top of the sales page (even without a target profile).

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Factor 3: Getting to the top of the sales page (even without a target profile)

Do you know when the world had a massive recession that lasted over 19 months?
If your mind automatically went back to the Great Depression, you’d be slightly off the mark.

The correct year was 2009

2009 was what the International Monetary Fund called the Great Recession—the worst the world had faced since World War II. So guess what headline was topmost in my mind as I planned to conduct a workshop in Campbell, California? Yes, you probably guessed correctly. I was conducting a website masterclass workshop, the headline was about how your website could beat the recession.

Until a client told me I was hopelessly off the mark and that she wasn’t interested in the recession at all.

When we write a sales page, we often make a fundamental mistake

We don’t talk to or interview a client about our product or service. Instead, we often write what we perceive to be true. Like for instance the headline I wrote about the recession which had zero interest for the client. And it’s a mistake I made many times over before I realised that the best way to write a sales page is to interview a client.

But what if you don’t have a client?

This is the problem that many of us face when we’re just starting up, or even when starting up a new project. And finding a prospect, let alone a client might seem quite impossible. A lot of business owners start to go around in circles at this point. They can’t find the prospect so they can’t write the sales page and without sales, well, you know how the story goes, don’t you? Which is where you the bottom-up structure comes to our rescue yet again.

We started out with the bullets, chose 6-8 features and benefits

From those 6-8 features, 2-3 may turn out to be really powerful. When going through the brainstorming stage and churning out bullets, it’s hard to know which bullets are great and which are not.

But by the time we get to the features and benefits, we seem to pick the ones that resonate more strongly than the rest. And finally, if we were to narrow it down to 2-3, we could eventually get to just one point and make that the biggest problem on the sales page.

When I first wrote the text for the sales page of The Brain Audit, I didn’t have a target profile

It was early 2002, and hardly anyone was selling products, let alone e-books on the Internet. I had just one client, the owner of a sofa store, who though very friendly and helpful, wasn’t going be of much use with the sales page of The Brain Audit. And so I took a stab at the most important point—the most important feature—and made it my headline.

Which is why you see the headline: Have you seen a customer back out of a deal at the very last minute? on the sales page.

I didn’t have anyone in mind when I wrote that headline. But it was the strongest headline out of the list of bullets. And so it went to the top. It formed the basis of a headline. Once the headline was in place, I continued to write the rest of the text.

And no, you don’t have to believe me because the proof of how I got to the whole conveyor belt story is sitting on Archive.org. You can see how the features and benefits have the very same idea and how that concept got transferred to the headline and the opening paragraph.

And you can do the same if you don’t have a target profile or prospect

You can work your way up from the bullets to the features and benefits. You can then pick the one that most resonates and drive home that problem and solution. However, this advice isn’t what I’d recommend. The sales copy for The Brain Audit worked and has stayed reasonably consistent since 2002. Yet, it could have gone horribly wrong.

The text I wrote for the 2009 workshop didn’t do any of this “resonating bit” with anyone

Luckily I had the client who said her biggest problem was that her list was too small. She wanted to know whether I could show her a way to run a business even though she had a tiny list. In the case of The Brain Audit, the bottom up method worked—and it might work for you in a pinch. But my advice is to keep searching for a prospect—for two specific reasons.

Reason 1: If you can’t find a prospect, there’s a good chance your product or service is a non-starter

The biggest reason why a product or service fails isn’t because of the quality of the product or service itself. Often it’s because the writer doesn’t understand the pressing problem. If you have the best product or service in the world but there’s no clear need for it, your product or service is unlikely to succeed. If you are endlessly searching for a prospect, it’s a good chance your product or service is a dud.

Reason 2: While you can guess your way to the headline and first paragraph by using the bottom up method, you’re also missing out on the emotional language of the prospect or client.

When a client speaks, they go back in time to the time when they were deeply frustrated. Their language is laced with deep rivers of emotion. This emotion is what makes your sales page come alive.

The reason why many sales pages are boring is simply because they lack the power of the client’s language. Finding a prospect or client is critical to making sure your sales page (and sales text) gets other clients to respond and buy your product or service.

Something is better than nothing

When you’re not going anywhere in a hurry, the most efficient and speedy way forward is to build your sales page from the bottom up. Start with the bullets, work your way to the features and benefits. Finally pick one of the most powerful points in the features and benefits and use that to start your sales page.

And that’s how you quickly get a sales page up and running.
When the media looked at Schooling, we didn’t think about him being an underdog.
They didn’t think of him at all.
They were focused something completely different.

And that’s the problem we have with writing a sales page. We tend to start with the big dogs: the headline and the opening paragraphs. We don’t ignore the bullets but we don’t realise the value of working your way upwards.

The next time you’re writing your sales letter start from the bottom up.

In the race to the finish, it’s the fastest most efficient way to go.

If you’re keen on reading more detail about bullets and features, there’s a really good book called Client Attractors. 
http://www.psychotactics.com/products/client-attractors/

Most of us have grand plans to succeed

Yet, the moment we start there are a million distractions in our way. Chaos lurches around in our doorway and there seems to be no way out.

At Psychotactics, we had managed to get around most of the chaos but then I was in charge of mentoring my niece. As she moved from Year 6 to Year 7, it seemed like we were hit by an okinami of chaos. What did we do to find our way out? How did we manage to avoid the madness that we had no control over? Find out in this article.

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: Part 1: Non-negotiable items
Part 2: Part 2: Just say no
Part 3: The power of drills

Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.

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How To Get Things Done In The Midst Of Unending Chaos

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“J’ai beaucoup de devoirs aujourd’hui.”

That’s French for “I have lots of homework today”.
And it’s what my niece Marsha informs me almost daily, when I pick her up from school.

Three years ago, my wife Renuka and I started mentoring my niece, Marsha

While school work is never easy to cope with, there was always time to beef up on spellings, learn about clouds, earth’s subduction zones and the wondrous mysteries of solar system.

Then Marsha moved to year seven (what you’d call seventh grade) and we were suddenly swamped with homework. English, social studies, maths, even that little bit of French came rushing at us from out of nowhere. It seems so maddening when every day you’re thrown deep into yet another onslaught of homework.

This is the kind of chaos that hits us as we go through our business lives

We have every intention to learn more, do more and yet we find ourselves in this spin cycle that we don’t understand. At this point, it’s important to pull back and notice that nothing else had changed in our lives.

The Psychotactics newsletter still went out on time; The Three Month Vacation podcast rolled out on schedule. Every post at the membership site at 5000bc, and the Article Writing Course went out just as planned. But in Marsha’s world such order didn’t exist. The homework seemed to pull us away from what we believed to be important.

Somehow, something had to change.

In this series we look at how to achieve the seemingly impossible

To break free from gravity, we have to have a strategy that enables us to forge forward even under trying conditions. The three things that we’re going to look at are seemingly pedestrian, but it’s something we’ve had to use ourselves—for our business and now for Marsha.

They are:
– Non-negotiable items
– Just say no
– Drills

Part 1: Non-negotiable items

I just finished conducting the Article Writing Course

On that course you have 25 participants all headed towards one goal: to be able to write articles that are far superior to what you’d see on the internet. And to do so in under 2 hours. At the end of the course, I ask every one of the participants to relate their experiences as they went through the course. And that’s when you hear the stories you’ve never heard before.

Stories of how one of them almost lost a child—and still finished her homework

Or the story about how one person had been working until 2 am, then sat down to write an article at about 3 am, so that they could meet the deadline for the day. Every one of these stories starts off in an almost identical manner.

In their world, article writing was all about struggle, about frustration and chaos. And then, 12 weeks later, every single one of the participants who’ve made it to the end point can write an outstanding article, complete in almost every respect.

And do so within that two-hour period. Some of them were taking days, one even took four weeks to write an article and yet at the end of the course those very same people were achieving the seemingly impossible in under two hours.

Not surprisingly, you do the same

In the early part of the 20th century, 1912 to be precise, tooth decay was a massive problem. People simply didn’t brush their teeth. They do so now, twice a day. In the USA, the Boy Scout handbook from the mid-1950’s had a section on personal hygiene.

It stated that ideally a boy should bathe twice a week and shampoo his hair once a week. What we’re doing today, all of us is achieving the seemingly impossible. We’re engaged in time-wasting activities; activities that were considered unimportant for almost of all human history. Our modern lives have made it easier to brush and shower, but you know the reason why we do what we do.

We’ve made it non-negotiable

Marsha’s reading, spelling, and solar system learning became terribly negotiable. The homework rushed in, took control of the evening and soon the important elements were swept away. And it’s not a lot different from what happens in our own lives.

We start off wanting to achieve precise goals, but suddenly a client dumps a truckload of work. And we’re off scampering.

The reason why the graduates of the Article Writing Course can write in under two hours is because they drew their line in the sand. They realised their assignments were non-negotiable. And that meant they got their reward in just 12 weeks.

At Psychotactics, we too have to make a few of our activities non-negotiable.

Renuka and I went for a walk as we almost always do every morning

We lead super-busy lives, and it does get a bit cramped when we’re about to go on vacation. That’s because we need to queue all the newsletters for the time we’re away. This applies to our membership site at 5000bc, Psychotactics, and the podcast. But not just for the time we’re away but also for at least a few weeks until we get back.

The vacation adds a dimension of chaos that’s abnormal

Yet we manage it quite well and do so every three months before we go on vacation. We had to take a similar sort of learning and apply it to Marsha as well. We had to make spellings, reading and learning about subduction zones non-negotiable.

Making something non-negotiable implies just one thing

You carve out a piece of time, and you put up a force field. Every other activity goes around that time. The participants on the Article Writing Course didn’t have two or three extra hours each day (they have to do other things on top of just writing).

Their results are a direct determination to make their performance non-negotiable, even through sickness, late nights and disruptive clients.

Life doesn’t give us time on a platter.

The people who believe they will have time in the future are living in la-la land. Life doesn’t care squat for your goals. You have to snatch a chunk of time from your very busy day and then put a force field around it.

You’re reading this article not because I have to write it. You listen to the podcast that takes up almost a whole day of production. It’s not like I have eight days a week, and neither will you. You have to make some things non-negotiable. And you have to do it right now.

And one of the best ways to get anything done is to say no.

Saying no to some things and yes to others is what makes you progress.
So how do we say no? And what do we need to reject? This takes us to part two.

Part 2: Just say no

“Seanny is always tired when we come over for playdates”.

That was a random, but a bone-chilling comment from my niece, Keira. She would have been just six-years-old at a time, and every month or so we have playdates for Keira and Marsha. At one such playdate, Keira made the “Seanny is tired” comment.

Until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me that a six-year-old would notice

After all, Keira and Marsha were always running around and playing. Why would they need me to participate? I simply used that downtime to lie on the sofa and get back my breath. But then come the statement and to this day it ricochets somewhere in my brain. It was at that point I decided to say no.

We all realise there’s nothing new in the concept of “saying no.”

We’ve heard it a million times before. We use it a lot when we’ve had enough. And we say no. However, that’s not the lesson we need to learn. What we really need to understand is that we have to endlessly keep the “no” re-negotiations open.

This year, for instance, we announced we’d announced an info-products course

It was the start of the year, and among the various courses and products, it seemed plausible to have a series of classes where you learn about information products.

Where you learn what it takes to create an outstanding information product right from the start, though the construction and finish. And yet as April set in, and the Article Writing Course putting a fair bit of pressure on me, we decided to pull the plug on the information products course.

We said no.

Historically we’ve said no to very lucrative offers, some of them our own

You’ve already heard how we said no to affiliates; how we’ve barely done any joint ventures (probably three in sixteen years); how we’ve not gone down the path of speaking at dozens of events, travelling all the time; trying to make our book bestsellers, etc.

Like some chef in a tiny little restaurant on the wrong side of the world, we’ve beavered on our own creations, content to say no to everything else.

A similar theme applies when we look at Psychotactics

You’re likely to have heard of the Protégé Program. We started it as an annual program back in 2006. Then in 2007 and 2008 we had it yet again. Each time we took on just 15 clients, but together they earned us close to half a million dollars.

Would you have walked away from such a lucrative option? Most people wouldn’t have, but we decided the program was too intense for the clients. They weren’t implementing the learning as deeply as they should. And so we said no.

But this series you’re reading about, wasn’t about Psychotactics, was it?

Yes, Renuka and I face a lot of decisions and we say no at a fairly regular clip. However, this series was about Marsha’s sudden burst of homework. Like any of you, she was faced with this weird situation. It’s not like she could pick and choose what she could say no to. And so we had to make those decisions for her.

She gets a lot of maths games as part of her assignment

She loves playing those games endlessly and yes we know, her maths improves. But even at the risk of hearing back from the teacher, we let Marsha play the games for a short while; then she has to stop.

Take for example the recent assignment about the solar system.

She had to find 50 facts about the solar system, then write them down on a sheet of paper. If she took just 2 minutes per fact, it would take almost two hours.

We decided to say no

We’d find the facts; we’d give it to her. She’d write it down. We said no to the mundane manner in which the homework was doled out and the time saved can be used to learn something more valuable.

The reason for chaos in business is simply the inability to say no

When Keira made her “Seanny is always tired” statement, I couldn’t continue to let things stand as they were. I had to refuse to work on weekends. I had to take a nap every afternoon.

The volume and range of the work I was taking on required a ton of energy and if I wasn’t rested enough it wasn’t Keira alone who was disappointed. My clients would find inconsistency in my work. And worst of all, I had to look at this tired face in the mirror.

You’re going to have to do this too

You’re going to have to say no to a lot of those newsletters that are full of fluff. Unsubscribe from newsletters that just keep pummelling you with how rich you’ll be, or how you’ll get 10,000 clients overnight.

That’s crap. Life doesn’t work that way, and neither does business. Your business takes years before it can get the momentum it needs. When you start out, you’re not even clear which direction you’re headed in, until several tax returns have ticked by and you start to forge your mission in life.

When Renuka and I go for our walk, we do so to listen to keep fit

We exercise and listen to podcasts and audio books. But on Fridays we talk about the things that go on our stop-doing list. Things we need to say no to, both in Marsha’s world and our own. We sit down and make a list of the core things we want to achieve.

We made the weekends and afternoons non-negotiable to work and dedicated it to rest. We take three months off because we said no to endless work. It’s all about re-negotiating the things we have to do, but constantly battling what we need to drop.

Which is why when Keira comes over for her playdates, I’m no longer sprawled on the sofa

I’m running the girls ragged. I’m not exhausted like I always was. And to really get things done, find a way to use Friday to your advantage. Make Friday your say no day. Work out the things you’ve done and what you need to drop. If you can, find a friend to go on a walk with, if not every day, at least on Friday.

Just say no.

Chaos understands. He’ll be back on Monday, but you’ve won the battle for the weekend at least.

This takes us to our third part: Drills

Part 3: Drills

When we think of talent, we think of something inborn.

We assume that one person may be talented in one area because of genetics.
This assumption, however, right or wonderful, is pointless when you stop and think about how the brain works.

The brain is a pattern-seeking device

If you think of talent as something inborn, then good luck to you. It means that you can never be talented in anything else but what you were born with. I, on the other hand, have this aversion to inborn talent. And it’s one thing to say something; it’s quite another to prove the point.

We started mentoring Marsha because she was struggling with her studies at school

She’s a bright girl, and I’ve known her since she was three, but it was clear that she needed help. But while I love maths, languages, and science, there were two fronts to work on: confidence and knowledge.

So we set about going through drills. Day in and day out we’d learn about clouds. We learned about cumulus, cirrocumulus, roll clouds, cumulonimbus, cap clouds, mammatus, and one of our favorites—clouds that look like space ships, lenticularis, and clouds that look like waves on the ocean: Kelvin-Helmholtz (yup, that’s a weird name for a cloud).

We rolled out drills for everything

Clouds, then countries and capitals. At the age of nine, Marsha knew 150 countries and 150 capitals, but not randomly. She worked her way from Iceland, all across Europe, then across Russia and the Middle East, down to Africa, up to Asia and so on.

Every country in order from left to right. And she’d spit it out so quickly that if you followed her list with a sheet of paper, you’d find it almost impossible to keep up with her.

So how does this apply to getting things done?

Without drills, your brain doesn’t have the chance to learn a lot. Take the upcoming headline course, for example. In a short period of eight weeks, a client has to go from struggling with headlines to be astoundingly good.

But what does astoundingly good mean? It means that the client can write dozens, even hundreds of headlines if needed. Every headline is genuinely curious and not click bait.

But at the same time, every client (without exception) should become an auditor. They should be able to look at any headline, across any industry and be able to fix the erroneous headlines in a minute or two.

This level of ability calls for drills

With Marsha, we had drills for her “times tables”. Renuka would sit down and write over a hundred tables-based questions in a day. In a week, Marsha was going through over 500 questions, in a month over 2000. Do you think her ability to calculate figures in her head improved?

When you look at the cartooning course, the headlines course, the Article Writing Course—they all have drills

If you’ve done the course, you know how the drills are anything but boring. They’re hard work, but they’re not boring. And yet, when you’re called on to execute the exercises, you do so almost flawlessly. One of the biggest reasons why I see people struggling is because they don’t have the ability to run at high speed.

If you’re going to run a business, no one needs to tell you about the importance of drills

The drills take a lot of effort, but they are only necessary for a short time. Marsha and I started learning a few countries a day in December and by Easter, barely three months later, she knew the countries and capitals in sequence.

At Psychotactics, we’ve done well for a simple reason. We keep to the drills and add skills as we go along, and that’s really how you become smarter. But smarts are just the icing on the cake. What drills really do is help you quickly go through your day.

You learn the skill, you implement it

Talent is a reduction of errors. The fewer errors you make, the more talented you become. Instead of battling with headlines all day long, you get an outstanding headline done in a few minutes.

Struggling with writing an article over a four week period? Drills help you reduce those errors to a point where you can write an engaging, complete article in under two hours.

When we look at what we’re good at doing it’s because we learned a drill

To get things done, you can’t believe in magic. You have to run the same sequence over and over until it’s not something you think about any more.

It’s just something you can do with the minimum amount of energy. In 5000bc there’s a Taking Action forum. If you track the actions of those who report back every day, you’ll notice a vast improvement over time.

What they’re doing is reducing errors

They’re following the pattern of the brain.
It’s down to drills. Engaging drills that help you learn and execute faster than you’ve ever done before.

Marsha knows about clouds, geology, science and yes, countries

She may appear smarter than you and in some ways that may be true.
But how did she do it?

You know the answer.

Summary

When I pick up Marsha from school she always has a big grin on her face.

And yes, she’ll tease me by saying: “J’ai beaucoup de devoirs aujourd’hui.”
I know that’s my signal for chaos.

I also know that we can tame that chaos by using the three core elements:

1) We make some things non-negotiable.
2) Say no, no matter how enticing the distractions.
3) Drills. Drills make us amazingly fluent at our skills

Food, drink and sleep. That's my dream for every vacation. And yet this trip to Goa, India was quite the opposite. So what did I learn that almost turned my life around? That's what this podcast is about. And it might just turn your life (and health) around as well. 

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Sometimes life takes you down a diversion. And you end up exactly where you need to be.

This is the story of my trip to Goa, India.
It’s where my grandparents came from.
Where I spent many summers under the mango trees in the sweltering heat.

It’s also the place that has led me back to where I need to be.

So what did I learn? I learned a few things:
1- The importance of digestion (and sleep)
2- The importance of food and types of food
3- Breaks are not enough to avoid extreme stress.

Part 1- The importance of digestion (and the avoidance of sleep)

“When you turn 40,” my dentist said to me, “you should go for an annual medical checkup.” There I was on the dentist’s chair having a bridge fixed and my dentist wasn’t giving me dental advice. Instead, he was telling me to go see my doctor, even though I hadn’t been sick a day for almost 20 years.

And since my negligence with my flossing was causing me a small fortune, I decided to take the dentist’s advice. I went and visited my doctor and did my first ever medical test.

It wasn’t good.

My blood pressure wasn’t high, but it wasn’t normal either.
My cholesterol and blood sugar was creeping up too.
And like clockwork, year after year, those numbers edged upwards. Sometimes, they nudged their way downwards, but the general trend was not looking terribly good.

You know me. I’m the 3-month vacation, take weekends off guy.

I work hard, but I take a lot of breaks to rest, think and just do nothing.
And yet all of that nothingness wasn’t dropping the pressure, cholesterol or blood sugar. And then I did something that made a huge difference to my life and health. I went yet again on vacation and this time to India.

I have a love-hate relationship with India

I grew up in Mumbai, vacationed in Goa and travelled through many parts of India before I finally moved to New Zealand. India seeps within you as you hang around that sub-continent. The food, the culture, the languages, history and science going back thousands of years. This trip was about the monsoon (something that’s worth experiencing), the food and most of all to see my parents (who I hadn’t visited in five years).

Yet within days of landing in Goa, my agenda was hijacked

Oh sure I started out with the food and drink, but we also wanted to get a few massages. And that search for massages got us to an Ayurvedic centre. Now you’ve probably heard of Ayurveda, an ancient system of natural healing from India. Some think it’s 5,000 years old, others believe it to be older, going back a whopping 10,000 years.

But I wasn’t there for any medical checkup—I was just there for the massages…
Yet life takes you down this diversion, and it’s just where you need to be.

It was July, the rain was coming down in torrents and the doctor at the Ayurvedic centre was available. And we found out that my blood pressure and cholesterol was pretty high (conducting the article writing course and working through 12,000 posts helps, I guess). But even as he was telling me about the course of action to take, he brought up one important, yet obscure point.

“The reason why we have a lot of problems with our health isn’t the food we eat,” he started.

Food makes a difference, but the bigger problem is digestion. If we don’t digest the food completely, it sits in our system and it becomes like the inner side of a kitchen pipe. It’s got all this junk that starts to accumulate over the years. And it’s that junk that causes a huge number of problems. So he put me on an Ayurvedic course to get rid of the junk.

It was interesting, this course

Spanning over 11 days, it started mildly. All I had to do for the first three days was avoid oily food. But then it got really weird. For breakfast, all I could have was liquid ghee (mixed with some herbs). I don’t know if you know what ghee is, but it’s high in saturated fat. And if you’re trying to get someone’s cholesterol down, it sure seems like the last thing you want to dole out. And yet, it wasn’t just a sip of ghee. On the first day it was 30ml, then it went progressively to 80, 130 and 180 ml (almost a full glass).

As it turns out, the ghee is supposed to permeate all the parts of your body down to your fingers and toes. And then to cut a long story short, the ghee pulls all the impurities and chucks it into the stomach. And you know what happens next, right?

So did it work?

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a “quick fix”. I detest Lemon diets and detox diets of any kind. I don’t care to believe in quick and easy. But there I was, on vacation, and keen to get the cholesterol and pressure down. And 11 days later, we had our results. The blood test before and after could not have been more dramatic. There was a plunge from abnormal to well within normal range and in the process I’d even lost about 3 kilos (about 6 pounds).

But I’m skeptical about quick fixes

So when I got back to Auckland I did another blood test. And I weighed myself again. By now I was down 5 kilos and the blood test showed something remarkable. My current cholesterol and blood pressure was not only normal, but it was the best it’s ever been in 7 years.

“It’s the digestion” said the doctor who put me through this treatment.

Get the digestion right and you’ll find that a lot of things go perfectly well. And part of the issue of digestion was eating foods that digest well, that we all know. But the second part was giving the food time to digest.

I love my sleep because I sleep so little anyway

And I will take an afternoon nap when I can. Yet, it flies in the face of digestion. The moment you wake up, the body is running like a machine and having any nap causes it to slow down. What doesn’t help is that nap is usually right after eating a meal. Now it’s not like I’ve not taken a nap since I got back to Auckland, but the concept of digestion is clear in my mind.

That was the first learning for this trip.

I never realised how much digestion mattered.
I ignored it as much as I could.
And then it proved that once your body is clear of the junk, it works more efficiently.

But that’s only the first part of this learning experience. The second factor was one of food and types of food.

Part 2- The importance of food and types of food

I’m no vegetarian.

If you look at my Facebook page, I’m updating it almost daily with some sort of food. And when you read The Brain Audit or many other books from Psychotactics, it’s quite clear that Butter Chicken takes a place of prominence. Even so, this trip changed my mindset a bit simply because I wasn’t allowed to eat any meat—or fish for that matter.

My diet for at least seven days was pretty spartan

In India, we have a dish called Khichdi. It’s a combination of spices, cumin, ghee, rice and yellow moong dal. It’s a dish that is very easily absorbed by the body, which is why it’s often recommended to older people and for very young children. The version of khichdi I was allowed to eat was more basic. It consisted of no spices, no ghee and on most days all I ate was yellow moong dal and rice, tossed into a pressure cooker.

So when I got to the other side even the simplest vegetarian dish was amazingly tasty.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of vegetarian food and if you’ve ever had the chance to visit India, you’ll know there are over 150 types of vegetarian food for breakfast alone. Once I was off the spartan diet, I wasn’t that keen on meat any more. It’s not like I haven’t eaten any—it’s just that Im not keen any more, especially since I found so many different recipes.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been sidetracked by a diet

Back in 2011, I was told not to eat spicy or oily food. And yet we were on our way to Vancouver and Washington D.C. to do our workshops. That’s when I discovered another side to Chinese, Ethiopian and other foods. But to go back into my own culture—my Indian culture—and find so much to eat took me totally by surprise.

I don’t know if a vacation will make such a change for you

But I think it just might. A trip like this to India or even to an Ayurvedic centre somewhere could change your mindset a bit. I wake up everyday and enjoy exploring food I can make in just 10-15 minutes. Food that may involve something as simple as rice flour and semolina. Food that’s easier to make and digest. Food that’s still extremely delicious and nutritious. And amazingly good for you.

It’s a change, but the biggest change of all was simply following the diversion.

Part 3- Breaks are not enough to avoid stress

11,645.

That’s how many posts were generated in just three months of the Article Writing Course. And though the course has just 25 clients, there’s a ton of activity and assignments. So to have that many posts is pretty normal for a Psychotactics course. What’s not normal is having to write a whole new set of notes, new assignments and re-recording all the audio.

In short, it was too much—yes, even if you’re a crazy person like me.

And that’s one of the recurring themes from most vacations. Almost always I’ll work myself to a frazzle, then go on vacation. And that’s because I like to do so many things. I like to paint, write, deal with 10,000+ posts on the forum—and most of it fits into my work day. I realised that the additional bit, like having to write the notes and re-recording was just too much.

It seems obvious to you, doesn’t it?

It’s obvious that too much work is too much work. And that all that extra work leads to unwanted stress. Stress that directly leads to health issues. And that while I may take time off on weekends and vacation, there needs to be more paring back. To be hit with such a blatantly obvious idea seems odd.

And yet it’s taken me a long time to figure this one out. For starters, taking weekends off was not obvious but in late 2015 and then in 2016, I got it all under control. This trip underlined why my health was not quite as good as it could be. There’s a direct link between too much stress and cholesterol and pressure.

I get it.
It took a while.
It took many vacations, many weekends.

But now I get it.

I get that we all need to be less frazzled. I get the fact that vegetarian food and fruit is good for me.
And I get the digestion bit.

This vacation was supposed to be about food, drink and sleep.

We didn’t get to eat the food we wanted.
We were told to avoid alcohol during the treatment.
And yes, no sleeping in the day time.

And yet, it’s been one of the best vacations I’ve ever had.

Sometimes life takes you down a diversion.
And it’s exactly where you should be.

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Who's Doug Hitchcock? And in a world full of goal-setting exercises, why does Doug's system stand out? Find out why most goal-setting goes hopelessly off the mark and Doug's plan works almost like magic year after year. Find out not just how to set goals, but how to create a stop-doing list (yes, that's a goal too). And finally, learn why most goals are designed for failure because they lack a simple benchmarking system. Find out how we've made almost impossible dreams come true with this goal-setting system. http://www.psychotactics.com/goal-setting-successfully/ ------------------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why most goal-setting goes hopelessly off the mark Part 2: How to set goals, but how to create a successful stop-doing list Part 3: Learn why most goals are designed for failure because they lack a simple benchmarking system Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer. Useful Resources Chaos Planning: How ‘Irregular’ Folks Get Things Done Learning: How To Retain 90% Of Everything You Learn 5000bc: How to get started on your goal setting ------------------------------- 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. Doug Hitchcock was my first real mentor and he had been bankrupt thrive. When I first moved to Auckland in the year 2000, I didn’t really know anyone. I was starting up a new business, I was starting up a new life. I joined a networking group and within that networking group I asked for a mentor. Well, no one in the networking group was willing to be a mentor, but someone did put me in touch with Doug. The only problem with Doug was he had been bankrupt thrive. Now, when I say he was bankrupt thrice, it doesn’t mean he was still bankrupt. He just pulled himself out of the hole three times in his life and there he was, at about 70 plus, and he was my first mentor. Before he starts to talk to me about anything, he asks me, “Do you do goal setting?” I’m like, “Yeah, I have goals,” and he goes, “No. Do you have goals on paper?” I said, “No.” He says, “We have to start there. We have to start with goals on paper.” That’s how I started doing goal setting, all the way back in the year 2000. Almost immediately, I got all the goal setting wrong. You ask, how can you get goal setting wrong? After all, you’re just putting goals down on a sheet of paper. How can you get something like that wrong? You can’t write the wrong goals, but you can write too many goals. That’s exactly what I did. I sat down with that sheet of paper and I wrote down all my work goals, my personal goals, and I had an enormous list. That’s when Doug came back into the scene, and he said, “Pick three.” I said, “I could pick five.” He goes, “No, no, no. Pick three.” I picked three goals in my work and three goals from my personal life. You know what? By the end of the year, I’d achieved those goals. Ever since, I have been sitting down and working out these goals based on Doug’s method. Doug may have lost his business thrice in a row, but he knew what he was talking about. Most of us just wander through life expecting things to happen. When they happen, we say they happen for a reason, but they don’t happen for a reason. They happen, and we assign a reason to it. In this episode, I’m going to cover three topics. The first is the three part planning. Then we’ll go the other way. We’re create a stop doing list. Finally, we’ll look at benchmarks and see how we’ve done in the year. Let’s start off with the first one, which is the three part planning. Does the San Fernando earthquake ring any bells in your memory? Most people haven’t ever heard of this earthquake, and yet it was one of the deadliest earthquakes in US history. It collapsed entire hospitals, it killed 64 people, it injured over two and a half thousand. When the damage was assessed, it had cost millions of dollars, and yet it could have been the disaster that eclipsed all other US disasters. That’s because the earthquake almost caused the entire Van Norman Reservoir to collapse. The dam held, and yet, if it had collapsed, the resulting rush of water would have taken the lives of more people than the Pearl Harbor Attack, the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, 9/11 and 1900 Galveston Hurricane combined. In barely 12 seconds, the top section of the dam had disintegrated and yet, the surrounding areas were extremely lucky. The reservoir was only half full that day. The aftershocks of the earthquake continued to cause parts of the dam to break apart. A few feet of free board was the only thing that stopped a total collapse. This total collapse is what many of us come close to experiencing as we try to clamber up the ladder of success. We try to do too many things and we don’t seem to go anywhere. In effect, this is like water cascading down a dam. There’s too many things and we have no control over it. What’s going to stop it? The only thing that seems to stop anything is some kind of focus and goal setting is focus. The way we go about our goal setting is the way Doug showed me. The first category of goal setting is what we want to achieve at work. The second set comprises of our personal goals. The third, this is the most critical of all, what we’re going to learn. Should we start off with the first one, which is our work goals? Well, that’s not the way we do it as Psychotactics. The way we work at Psychotactics is we look at our personal goals. Our own lives are far more important than work. What we do is we sit down, and first, we plan vacations. As you know, we take three months off. We’ve been doing this since 2004. We started our business at the end of 2002. Yet by 2004, we had decided we were going to take three months off. The thing is that your vacations also need planning. Our vacations are broken up into big breaks, small breaks, and weekends. Now the big breaks are the month long vacations, and then the small breaks are in between that. We’re go away for a couple of days somewhere, and that’s our small break. I’m saying weekends, because before I wouldn’t take weekends off. I’d be working on the weekend at least for a few hours on Saturday morning and a few hours on Sunday morning, and I don’t do that any more. Now that’s almost written in stone. It’s very hard for me to get to work on weekends. I’ll slide sometimes, but it’s very hard. The most critical thing to do is to work out the long breaks. When are we going to have those, and then the shorter breaks. That comprises that whole vacation concept, but you also have to have other personal goals. Maybe I want to learn how to cook Mexican dishes, or maybe I want to learn how to take better photographs. Now, these are personal projects. They’re not not pseudo work projects. They’re things that, at the end of the year, I go, “Wow, that’s what I’ve achieved. That’s how much I progressed.” That’s how you start off with personal goals. You plan your breaks. You plan what you want to do personally. Once you’re done with that, then you go to your work goals. We have a lot of work goals, we have the article writing workshop coming up, we’ve got the 50 words workshop, which is, how do you start up an article. We’ve got a whole bunch of things, because we’ve got products, we’ve got courses, we’ve got workshops. All of this has to sit nicely between, so that we work for 12 weeks and then we go on a break. We’ve decided that we’re not having any workshops next year. We’ve had a lot of workshops this year, no workshops next year. Now, this leaves us the chance to focus on the courses and the products. Now my brain is like that dam, there’s always water rushing over. I want to do a million projects, but then I have to choose. The article writing course is one of the things that I want to do for sure. I want to do a version 2.0 of it. The cartoon bank, I’ve been putting that off for a long time. That’s definitely something I want to do. Then I’ll pick a third one. Do I stop at three? No, but I make sure that I get these three down. The three that I’m going to do, they go down on paper. Some other projects will come up, a lot of stuff that I might not expect, and yet I’ll get all of this done, but these three, they’ll get done. Those three vacations, they will get done. Then we get to the third part, which is learning. What am I going to learn this next year? Maybe I’ll learn a software, or maybe I’ll learn how to use audio better. The point is, I have to write it down, because once I write it down, then I’m going to figure out where I have to go and what I have to do to make sure that learning happens. This is not just learning like reading some books or doing something minor like that. This is big chunks of learning, so that by the the end of the year, I know I’ve reached that point. When it comes to planning, the first thing that we’re always doing is we’re looking at these three elements, which is work, vacation, and learning. If we have to do other sub projects, we’ll do it, but these nine things get done. Year after year after year. This is what Doug taught me, he gave me this ability to focus. I consider myself to be unfocused, I consider myself to want to do everything and anything. That was the gift of Doug. In the year 2008, we had a program, it was a year long program. You probably heard of it. It was called a Psychotactics Protégé program. We would teach clients how to write articles, how to create info products, public relations. Lots of things along the way in that year. As you’d expect, it was reasonably profitable. 15 students paid $10,000, and so that was $150,000 that we would have in the bank before the year started. In 2009, we pulled the plug on the Protégé system. Why would we do that? We started it in 2006, it was full, in 2007 it was full, in 2008 it was full, in 2009 there was a waiting list. We decided not to go ahead with it. We decided it was going to go on our stop doing list. We were going to walk away from $150,000, just like that. Yes, some clients were unhappy, because they wanted to be on the next Protégé program. They had seen the testimonials, they had seen the results. They knew that it was good enough to sign up for. They knew that $10,000 was a very small investment, for a year long advancement. On our part, we realized that we had to walk away from $150,000 that we were getting on cue, every December. This is what’s called a stop doing list. We’ve used this stop doing list in our own lives. When we left India, and got to Auckland, it wasn’t like we were leaving something desperate. We were leaving something that was really good. I was drawing tattoos all day, going bowling in the afternoon, having long lunches, Renuka’s company was doing really well. They were picking up all expenses, and the only thing we really had to pay for was food but, at that point in time, we decided we had to make a break. We had to stop doing something so that we could do something different. We don’t know whether that different is better, but at that point we have to stop it, so that we can explore what is coming up ahead. There are two things that you put on your stop doing list. One, something that is working exceedingly well. The second thing, something that’s doing really badly. Or something that’s getting in your way. Now, the first one doesn’t make any sense. If something is doing exceedingly well, why would you stop it? Well, the point is that if you continue to do something, then you can’t do something else. You don’t know how good that something is until you stop doing it and then you go on to do something else. Last night, I was reading The New Yorker, and The New Yorker is one of my favorite magazines. There’s James Surowiecki saying exactly the same thing. He’s saying that Time Warner should sell HBO. HBO has now 120 million subscribers globally. It has earned over 2 billion dollars in profits last year. It’s stand alone streaming service has got over a million new subscribers since last spring. What does the article recommend? It recommends that they get rid of it, they sell it, they get the best price for it at this point of time, when they’re doing so well. What if it doubles in its value? That’s the answer we’ll never know, but the article went on. It talked about ESPN and how in 2014 it was worth 50 billion dollars. Disney owned it, they should have sold it, they could have banked the money. They could have focused on something else, but no, they kept it. ESPN is still doing well, it’s still the dominant player, but you can see that it’s not exactly where it was in 2014. The Protégé program was doing really well for us, clients were with us for the whole year. They would then join 5000 BC, we’d get to meet them. It was a lot of fun, and it generated a sizable revenue and we walked away from it. It enabled us to do other stuff that we would not have been able to do. When you say stop doing list, it’s not just the bad stuff that you have to stop doing. Sometimes you have to stop doing the things that are very critical, like next year we’re not doing workshops. Workshops are very critical to our business, but we’re not going to do the workshops. Instead, we’ll do online courses. Instead, we’ll do something else. We’ll create that space for ourselves, even though the workshops are doing really well. The other side of the stop doing list is stuff that’s driving you crazy. You know it’s driving you crazy, but you’re not stopping it. For instance, in September of this year, we started rebuilding the Psychotactic site. Now, there are dozens of pages on the Psychotactic site and I want to fiddle around with every single one of them, and do things that are interesting, different. The problem is that there are other projects, like for instance the storytelling workshop. Of course, vacations that get in the way. The point is that, at some point, you have to say, okay, I really want to do this, but I’m not going to do this. I’m going to put it off until later. This is procrastination, but it is part of a stop doing list. You can’t do everything in the same time. Last year, this time, we had the same dilemma when we were going to do the podcasts. I wanted to write some books for Amazon, and I wanted to do the podcast. Every day, we would go for a walk, and it would run me crazy. I didn’t know where to start, when to start, what to do first. I had to sit down and go, okay, what am I going to stop? I just dumped the Amazon books and started on the podcast. Now we’re on podcast number 70, and it’s not even been 52 weeks. It shows you how that stop doing list can help you focus and get stuff out of the way. Sometimes you have to procrastinate to get that point. Now the stop doing list is not restricted to work alone. You can take it into your personal life as well. For instance, I used to get my hair cut by a hairdresser, and I was dissatisfied for a very long time. You come back in, you grumble, and my wife, Renuka, she said, “Okay, stop grumbling. Go and find another hairdresser.” I ran into Shay, now Shay was cutting my hair so well, it was amazing. I wasn’t the only one who thought that was amazing. Usually, I was on a waiting list at a barber shop. I would get there, and there were two people in front of me, waiting for Shay. While a few of the barbers just stood around, doing absolutely nothing because no one was interested. Then, one day, involuntarily, Shay went onto my stop doing list. Kimmy was around and Shay wasn’t and so Kimmy cut my hair. She was better than Shay. I thought, “Oh my goodness. I should have done this a long time ago.” Then Kimmy got transferred to another branch, and now there’s Francis. You’ve heard about Francis in other podcasts. Now Francis is my top guy. There you go, even in something as mundane as cutting hair, there is a stop doing list. You have to push yourself a bit, and at other times you have to pull back and go, “No, we’re not going to do that.” The stop doing list is for good times, as well as for pressurized times. You have to decide, I’m going to stop doing it, I’m going to move onto the next thing. This takes us to the third part of planning, which is benchmarks. Now what are benchmarks? Often when we set out to do a project, say we’re going to do that website. What we don’t do is we don’t write down all the elements that are involved in doing that website because a website can go on forever, can’t it? It expands exponentially. When you are saying, I am going to write books for Amazon. Well, how many books are you going to write? How many pages are the books going to be? What’s the time frame? Where are you going to get the cartoons from? Who’s going to do all the layout? Having this kind of benchmark in mind makes a big difference. When we plan for something, for instance if I’m planning for the article writing course, which is version 2.0. I’m going to have to sit down and work out what I’m going to have to do. When I’m doing the stock cartoons, I’m going to have to sit down and work out what kind of stock cartoons, how many. It’s perfectly fine to write a top level goal. You should do that, you should say, “Okay, I’m going to do the website,” but then you have to get granular. The granular bit tells you, have I reached my destination. Otherwise, people don’t get to their goals, and that’s why they’re struggling, because there’s no clarity. Usually, you’re going to get the clarity when you have only three things to do, but even so, if you don’t have benchmarks you’ll never know when you’re reaching your goal or if you’re going to reach your goal. That brings us to the end of this episode. Summary What did we cover? We looked at three sets of goal setting, and that is your personal goal setting, your work goal setting, and your learning goal setting. Instead of having 700 of them, you just have three things that you want to achieve in the year. Three major things that you want to achieve in the year. Logically, you start with the work, but don’t handle the work. Just go to the breaks. Organize your breaks first, because you get reinvigorated and you come back and then you can do better work. First, fix the breaks and then go to the work, then go the learning. That takes care of the first set. The second thing that you want to do is you want to make sure that you have a stop doing list. Sometimes, things are working, they’re going your way, and they still have to be dropped. That’s what we did with the Protégé program, that’s what we did with our move to New Zealand, and a lot of good things have become better, because we’ve decided to move along. Sometimes, you’re just confused because you have too many things to do, and procrastinate. Go ahead. I mean, I know this about planning, not procrastination, but procrastination is a form of planning, when you have too much to do. Finally, have the benchmarks. Make your goals a little more detailed so that you know when you’re hitting those benchmarks. Plan it in a little more detail. That’s how you’ll reach your goal. This is what goal setting is about. It’s very simple. People make it more complicated than it needs to be. What’s the one thing that you can do today? Very simple. Work, vacation, and learning. Get your paper out, get your pen, and start writing. Three goals. You can start off with seven, or ten, but whittle it down to three. Oh, and make sure you write it down. When you write it down, things happen. It’s like magic when you write it down. Keep it in your head, it’s not as powerful. Write it down, it happens. If one of your goals is to join 5000 BC this year. That’s 5000 BC, our membership site. You’ll find that it’s quite a nice place to be. It’s a very warm and friendly place. It would be great to see you there. It also gives you the opportunity to be first in line for any of the online courses that we’re having. That might not seem like a big deal until you see how cool the online courses are at Psychotactics. It’s not just another information dump, you actually get the skill. If you set out to be a cartoonist, you become a cartoonist. If you set out to be a writer, you become a writer. It’s not just information that you’re getting, it’s all very practical. Being a member of 5000 BC gives you that little edge to get in there before everybody else. You have to read The Brain Audit, however. You can get that at psychotactics.com/brainaudit or on amazon. Com. If you’ve read The Brain Audit and you would like a special collector’s edition, then email us at Psychoanalytical. We’ll give you instruction on how to get the special collector’s edition. That’s it from me at Psychotactics and the Three Month Vacation. Bye for now. One of the biggest reasons why we struggle with our learning is because we run into resistance. Resistance is often just seen as a form of laziness, but that is not true at all. 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/resistance-game/