Why do others seem more talented than we are?

 Is talent innate? Is it just practice? Or is there something else.

Incredibly the key to talent is in the way you define talent. Change the definition and you see it in a whole new light.

In Part 1 of this episode on talent, you’ll see how mere definitions change the way you see the world of talent (and how it can get you talented faster than before).

Additional rocket launch audio recordings used in this episode are courtesy of NASA (https://www.nasa.gov/)

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: Our battle with talented people.
Part 2: Is talent a reduction of errors?
Part 3: What has “Austin’s Butterfly” got to do with talent.

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7 miles per second

That’s what it takes for a spacecraft to break out of Earth’s orbit. Breaking free of the gravity of Earth and heading into space is called “Escape Velocity” and is easily one of the biggest challenges of space travel. The spacecraft needs an enormous amount of fuel to break free of Earth’s gravity. And yet, that very fuel adds to the weight of the rocket. The more fuel you have, the more thrust you achieve, but the fuel also adds to the weight of the rocket.

It’s almost a maddening Catch 22 situation that scientists have been trying to solve for ages.

And it also drives us crazy when we look around us and see people who are clearly more talented than us

We had this problem in school. Some kids were brilliant at writing and others that excelled in maths.

As we grew up, we noticed people who sang better, danced better, are better artists, speakers, pick up languages faster than we could ever imagine.

And then we brush it off

We believe we were born with certain skills and it’s best to use them to our fullest capacity. The gravity of our situation holds us back.

That’s not the way scientists look at gravity. For them, gravity is a challenge. Achieving “escape velocity” is simply a matter of breaking through what holds us back.

It’s always about how to go at 7 miles per second in the most efficient manner possible.

What you’re about to read is my battle with talent.

You may already know of some of my skills. Writing, drawing, teaching, painting, cooking—that’s what you might have seen. You may not know that I’m also an excellent babysitter, dance exceedingly well, learn programs at very high speed and know more than six languages.

And the reason I’m stating all of this isn’t to impress you. In fact, it’s the reason why I started studying the science of acquiring talent back around the year 2008. I’d be sitting at the cafe, and someone would come up to me and tell me how I was “talented” at drawing. I’d be on the dance floor, and I’d get a compliment about how well I danced.

Compliments are amazing. They were my Jamba Juice.

They spurred me on to get a lot better. But they also drove me crazy. It almost seemed like people were suggesting I was born with the skill. And so I started on an uphill climb. To prove that innate talent may not exist. In reality, I don’t care whether it exists at all. But it wasn’t easy to say it out aloud because the very concept of acquiring talent seems improbable. “Not everyone can be Michael Phelps,” they tell me. Not everyone can be Albert Einstein.

The funny thing is I love pushback

I love it that people kept putting objections in my way because somehow I had to prove beyond any doubt that talent could be acquired. What made the challenge even more interesting was the concept of 10,000 hours. I was determined to prove that you have didn’t need anything remotely close to 10,000 hours to acquire a very high level of skill.

But you don’t have to believe me—well, not right away.

All I’m asking you to do is listen to three definitions of talent. And then I’ll have made that little dent in your universe. Or at least that’s the theory. So let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of talent and see why mere definitions can make you see the world the way I see it.

It might even make you a better dancer.
Are you ready? Let’s go, then.

Definition No.1: A reduction of errors.

No matter where you look, you find people who have talents in one area or another—except one.

Not one person has innate talent when it comes to riding a bicycle.

Definition No.1: A reduction of errors.When you see parents trying to teach kids to ride, they run wildly behind the kid, shouting out instructions that fall on deaf ears. After all the kid is trying desperately to pedal, steer and not go kaboom into the tree. So no one teaches you to ride a bike, and no one (at least no one I know) was born with the ability to ride a bicycle.

Assuming you can ride a bicycle, that leaves us with only one conclusion

Bike riding has x. no of errors you can make. Errors that involve steering, pedalling, balancing, etc. And slowly but surely, you started eliminating those errors one by one. The more errors you reduced, the less crashed into trees. Eventually, as you ironed out most of the mistakes, you were able to sail away down the road, chattering with your friends.

Talent is a reduction of errors

When you begin to learn a new skill, you make an enormous number of errors. Like a student driver who’s learning to drive a stick-shift, you lurch back and forth, trying to master the skill. Since your brain has no reference point of the errors, it’s unable to cope, and you continue to find the learning extremely tedious. If you were to ask someone how to learn to drive a car or a bicycle for that matter, they tend to answer in a single word: practice.

Yet, practice is not the answer

Even deliberate practice is not the answer. Instead, what’s needed is an understanding of errors. When the brain consciously or sub-consciously knows what errors it’s making, it prompts us to take corrective action.

Take for example the act of dealing with a hot pan. There’s only one kind of error that’s possible with a hot pan. And yet a two-year-old child may not realise that glaring error and head right for the pan. But once we’re aware of the mistake, we take scrupulous care to avoid hot pans. We also avoid stepping in dog poo, potholes, and closed doors.

The trick to learning, or talent, isn’t just in practice or deliberate practice. Instead, it’s about understanding the errors. Once you understand the errors, you are closer to fixing them. Once you’ve reduced or eliminated the errors, you effectively are talented.

An excellent example of error fixing is the website building software called Dreamweaver

If you were to open up Dreamweaver today, you’d find the option of viewing a website in two different modes. You could see the website in HTML on the left-hand pane, while simultaneously seeing the graphical view of your site on the right. Even if you were completely oblivious about HTML code, all you’d need to do is open up a perfectly good looking website in Dreamweaver.

Then head into the HTML pane, and make a single change. You’d immediately see the change reflected on the right-hand side. Immediately your brain would go into “hot pan” mode, recognising the error. You may run into hot pans in the future, but at least you know better because you’ve learned from your mistake.

Many of us believe that talent is either inborn or acquired by practice

Instead, it’s acquired by a reduction of errors. Everything you do today had a huge error rate at one point in your life. Addition, subtraction, spelling and grammar were all riddled with errors. Some people you may know make mistakes such as spelling. They spell “you’re” as “your” or “pique” as “peak.”

When you see these mistakes, you experiencing a situation where the person has not learned to spot and correct the error. You can’t fix a mistake unless you know you’re making one in the first place.

Take for instance my niece, Marsha

When Marsha was just three years old she came to visit us in New Zealand for the first time. At the time, her speech was a bit garbled, like most three-year-olds. Even so, one of the letters that foxed her was the letter “r.”

Wherever “r” was prominent, she’d substitute it with a “y.” So “road” became “yoad,” and “room” became “yoom.” And of course, we only ever “yolled in the gyass” (that’s “rolled in the grass”). If you tried to point out that she was pronouncing “r” as “y,” she would look at you with puzzlement. In her brain “r” sounded like “y.”

Then one day I decided to speak exactly like her.

I didn’t say “road,” I said “yoad.”
I didn’t say “grass,” I said “gyass.”

Marsha didn’t say anything, or if she did, she probably said it in her garbled method. But within two days, she was pronouncing the “r” perfectly. Her brain, it seems, was able to detect the error when the word was said incorrectly. And within days, and without any training, she was able to fix the problem.

This isn’t to say that all learning is made through trial and error

The brain is a pattern-recognition system and will learn efficiently enough by just copying patterns. It’s why we learn to speak a language, then adopt the accent of a parent and then change our accents depending on where we go to school.

A good chunk of learning is purely pattern recognition. What holds us back from learning a skill like dancing, cooking or drawing, isn’t pattern recognition, but knowing what we’re doing wrong.

There’s a video online called “Austin’s Butterfly.”

It shows a group of very young children appraising the work of one of their classmates. Austin, who’s probably in first grade, and has just drawn a butterfly. There’s only one problem. The Tiger Swallowtail butterfly looks amateurish, and the kids know it. At that tender age, they’re not about to let Austin get away with such a terrible piece of art.

Then something quite unusual happens.

The teacher takes over and asks the kids to give feedback

One by one they pipe up with their critiques, so that Austin can take a crack at the second draft. They point to the angles, the wings, making the wings of the butterfly more pointy. They go on, and on, and the illustration improves with every draft.

Six drafts later, the butterfly looks like something you’d find in a science book. The finished butterfly is so stunning that anyone—you, me, anyone—would be proud to call the illustration our own.

What’s at work is simply a reduction of errors

This article isn’t about becoming Michael Phelps or Muhammad Ali. We’re all tempted to diverge into why we’re not winning gold medals by the dozen at the Olympics. And yet, even at that level of super-heroes, there’s only one gold medal winner.

Why is this so? In the Olympic pool, Phelps is often only one-hundredth of a second faster than his rival. That’s hardly an advantage. The only difference is that Phelps is committing fewer errors. And just for the record, Phelps too was beaten by a much shorter, stockier swimmer from Singapore. On that particular day, in that particular race in the Rio Olympic Games, Joseph Schooling made fewer errors.

Talent is merely a reduction of errors.
When you reduce the errors, you get talented.

But that’s only the first definition.

But what of those who seem innately talented?

They do things that we could never hope to do. In the next section, we look at the second definition of talent. Where talent is just pattern-recognition at high speed.

(Additional rocket launch audio recordings used in this episode are courtesy of NASA (https://www.nasa.gov/))

Continue reading or listening here: Part 2:  Three Definitions of Talent—And Why They’ll Help You Understand Yourself Better

Part 2

The listen: http://traffic.libsyn.com/psychotactics/118b_-_Rapid_Talent_How_To_Get_There_and_What_Holds_Us_Back.mp3

To read the article: https://www.psychotactics.com/three-definitions-talent/

Which is the most frustrating part of an article?

Yes, it’s the First Fifty Words. We get so stuck at the starting point when writing an article, that it’s almost impossible to go ahead.

But what if there were not just one, but three ways to create drama in your article? That would be cool, wouldn’t it?

Well, here you go. Not one, but three ways to start your article with drama and get attention.

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In this episode Sean talks about—Three ways to get your readers attention.

Part 1: The power of story
Part 2: Disagreement with your premise
Part 3: How to create intrigue with lists

You can read it online here: 
3 Ways To Create Instant Drama In Your Articles

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In 1974, New York had a problem that didn’t seem to go away.

No matter where you rode the subway in New York, there was graffiti painted both inside and outside the trains. Young men with their spray cans covered the city’s trains with their version of art and soon the subway came to be seen as a symbol of a city on its way to the gutter.

The city put up security fences, razor wire and brought in guard dogs

They even went through one amazingly misguided strategy to paint all the trains white. Sure enough, The Great White Fleet as they called it, was soon covered with a fresh layer of graffiti. The city couldn’t seem to think of any way to solve the graffiti problem.

Then along came David Gunn

In 1984, Gunn was appointed as the president of the New York City (NYC) Transit Authority. Gunn had a track record of cleaning up subways in Boston and Philadelphia. Even so, the city of New York had been battling the graffiti problem for over a decade. What radical idea could Gunn implement that would turn back the clock to better times?

As it turned out Gunn’s solution centered around a single idea

The moment a train was bombed with graffiti, it was to be pulled over and painted. If a train car was being repaired, they’d ensure the car remained graffiti-free.

If they found graffiti on a train overnight, the NYC Transit Authority would sweep in and repaint the train. Even during rush hour if they found a train had been “bombed”, they would pull it back to the yard and clean it up, so that the graffiti was nowhere to be seen.

On May 12, 1989, the city declared victory over the city’s graffiti artists.

Notice what just happened?

You started reading this article to find out how to write the First Fifty Words. But before you knew it, you were transported back to New York, the subway and the graffiti dilemma. And the reason why you got to this point is because of the drama created by the First Fifty Words. When your article, presentation or webinar has a powerful opening, the client gets pulled along happily.

And yet, it’s not always easy to know how to go about creating those First Fifty Words. So today, let’s take a look at three ways to create the drama.

Method 1: The power of story
Method 2: Disagreement with your premise
Method 3: Lists

Method 1: The Power of the Story

In the 1980’s a persistent drought swept through the African Savannah.

Watering holes dried up, food was scarcer than ever. Yet, one animal, the kudu, wasn’t affected as much. This is because the kudu can continue to get its nutrition from the hardy Acacia tree. Most other animals don’t tangle with the Acacia’s thorns, but the kudu navigates its way between the thorns to get at the juicy leaves.

But suddenly dozens of kudu started dropping dead.

When the kudu were examined, there seemed to be no reason for the deaths. They looked perfectly healthy and didn’t appear to be suffering from any malnutrition. However, the number of deaths soon soared into the hundreds, then into the thousands.

Now we may believe that Africa is one vast open area, but in reality a lot of wildlife lives in vast ranches

While it was devastating for the ranchers to see the kudu fall to the ground in heaps, they were also puzzled by the inconsistency of the deaths. On one ranch the kudu continued to thrive. On other ranches, their numbers decreased precipitously. There seemed to be no answer to the question, until they considered the number of kudu on the ranches.

On some ranches there were a lot of kudu

On others there were a lot less. As the drought raged on, the kudu had no other vegetation but Acacia leaves. Once the tree lost all its leaves, it would no longer be able to harness sunlight. In effect, the Acacia trees would die. In an act of self-preservation, the tree started producing more tannin.

Not just more tannin, but lethal amounts of it. Biologist and African herbivore expert, Professor Woutor Van Hoven examined the rumen of the kudu and found the digestive system to be in complete shutdown. Now tannin is a compound can only come from a natural source. It wasn’t hard to point fingers at the Acacia tree.

On the ranches with dense kudu populations the Acacia tree was producing 400% more tannin

The tannin was getting inside the digestive system and killing the kudu. In effect, the Acacia trees were culling the kudu. On the ranches with sparser kudu, the tannin wasn’t anywhere close to these lethal amounts. The plant was clearly going through a stage of self-preservation.

Story, it seems is easily the fastest way to get a client’s attention

And we all know this fact of attention-getting to be true. But we aren’t sure where to find the stories or how to make them work and then how to reconnect them to the article.

Those are three elements in themselves, so let’s start with finding the stories. I tend to find my stories all around me. But if that’s not a good enough answer for you, here are a few links. Go to www.smithsonian.com, or live science.com, history.com, bbcearth or listverse.com.
In effect, what you need to do is to go any of these sites, spend some time reading and then save whatever you need to Evernote.

Of course, as I keep harping on repeatedly, without Evernote, you’re just wasting your time.

I can literally find hundreds of stories in a few minutes, precisely because of Evernote. Finding stories was a bit of a nightmare at first, but I soon realised I could find two or three stories a day that related to history, geology, biology and case studies.

Added to that were my own personal stories, and so the first problem was done and dusted. If I could find three stories a day, I’d have about 21 stories by the following week. And no matter how prolific a writer or speaker I turn out to be, I can’t go through that volume of stories. But how do you know which stories work?

Look for the unfolding ups and downs

The most boring story is one that stays on a single track: either up or down. A good story is like the kudu story. It started out with the drought, went to the fact that kudu didn’t care and neither did the ranchers. Then kudu start dying, yet the next ranch with fewer kudu has no such trouble. The biologist comes in, investigates and we have the killer: the Acacia tree itself.

It was an act of self-preservation. That story has bounce all the way, as do most good stories. You’ll probably have noticed the same bounce for the NY subway story. How the situation went from bad to worse, until David Gunn came in and put an end to the graffiti.

Stories make for a dramatic start

You know how to find the stories and how to store them in Evernote. You can even find the bounce in these stories. What remains is how to connect them to your main content. Notice how I finished the kudu story? The last line was about self-preservation.

So what would the theme of the article be? Sure, self-preservation. But what if the last line was “speedy response”? Well, then the article would head over to “speedy response”. The last line of your story, whatever you happen to choose, is what creates the bridge towards the rest of the article.

The first port of call should always be a story, or analogy

When you go to Amazon.com and read the reviews of The Brain Audit, you’ll find most of the readers seem to agree on one fact. Many of them seem to suggest The Brain Audit is exceedingly easy and refreshing to read. But what makes it refreshing? Or rather what makes content boring? It’s clearly the lack of stories and analogies.

You can’t turn more than two-three pages without running into analogies and stories in The Brain Audit. The Three Month Vacation Podcast has at least three stories or analogies and it could go to as many as six or seven. Articles, webinars, reports—they all have stories and analogies.

To get your article going, you need to start storing stories

You need to start looking for those ups and downs.
And then it’s a matter of reconnecting by inserting the last line into the story, so it reconnects with the article.

But stories are just one way of taking on the First Fifty Words. The second method is to disagree with your headline.

Method 2: Disagreeing with your premise

In 1949, the ad agency DDB had a reasonably big challenge.

They were given the opportunity to sell the Volkswagen Beetle. This wasn’t just another car. It was a post-war German “people’s car”, connected with development plans that went back to Hitler himself. Plus the car was small, slow and considered ugly.

Added to the challenge was the fact that DDB had a paltry advertising budget of just $800,000. So how do you create instant drama when the odds are stacked against you?

You simply disagree with your premise, or in the case of Volkswagen, the prevailing premise

Back in 1949, the war had ended and overblown consumption was the order of the day. American cars were big, bulky and drank tons of fuel. All the advertising pointed to how fast most American cars happened to be. All, except Volkswagen, that is.

One of their earliest ad took almost everyone by surprise. It said: Presenting American’s slowest fastback. And the ads talked about how the cars wouldn’t go over 72 mph (even though the speedometer shows a top speed of 90).

What Volkswagen Beetle advertising did was create intense drama by disagreeing with the status quo.

The very same principle applies to your article writing and gives you the clue as to what you should be doing as well. To snap your audience out of whatever they’re doing, it’s a good idea to disagree with the prevailing situation or idea.

And since you’re the one who wrote the headline, what better way to go than to disagree with your headline?

Let’s take an example.

Let’s say your headline says: How to increase prices (without losing customers)

You’d think the article would continue in the vein of increasing prices, wouldn’t you? But instead, it goes the other way. The first paragraph instructs you to reduce your prices in half. Then down to a quarter of the original price.

And then the text goes on to explain something you’re already quite aware of: that reducing prices is a very bad strategy. However, the technique it uses is what gets your attention. Instead of going in the direction you’d expect, it moves in quite the opposite direction. Disagreement works because of the mild shock, and the consequent curiosity to figure out what’s happening.

But it’s one thing to examine an ad or an existing article. How do you create this disagreement in your own articles?

Let’s start off with a headline: The 3 Keys To A Perfect Ayurvedic Diet. How could you disagree with this headline in your first paragraph? Start off by thinking how you could sabotage the perfect Ayurvedic diet. Got the idea, yet? All you need to do is think up your headline and think of the exact opposite behaviour.

Let’s try another headline, shall we?

How to get your projects done using an unknown system of time management. Now let’s disagree with the headline.
Time management is an erroneous concept, which is why most of us struggle to get anything done. Haven’t you gone through whole days where you’ve had loads of time, but still failed to get anything done? That’s because we don’t really work with time. We work with energy instead.

See what’s happening?

You’re pushing in a headline that seems to talk about one thing but the opening paragraph seems to disagree. But you don’t have to keep the disagreement going.

After you’ve made your point in a paragraph or so, you can go back to the original premise of the article. You’ve completed your mission. You’ve woken up your audience with the disagreement and they’re keen to read more of what you have to say.

So far we’ve looked at stories. We’ve also looked at disagreeing with your premise. But there’s a third way that really helps when you’re feeling blank. And this method is called the “list method”. Let’s find out how we start articles with lists.

Method 3: Lists

Let’s take one type of list:

The Netherlands 70%
USA 30%
UK 30%

Ok, so let’s take another list:

A bucket
A spoon
Two ladles of chocolate ice-cream

Lists get attention and especially when you use it within the First Fifty Words.

And in case you’re wondering, the first list that comprised of the Netherlands, USA and UK, it was a factor of social trust. In the Netherlands, 7 out of 10 people say they trust each other.

In the US and UK, only 3 out of 10 people seem to have social trust. However, we’re not here to debate the issue of social trust. What we’re looking at, is the power of lists when used in the First Fifty Words of your article.

The moment you slide in a list, the reader is intrigued

And rightly so, because a list is a sequence of elements and somehow that sequence needs to end up in a logical place. So if your headline was: “How to get a business up and running in 90 days”, you could start your article with a list.

That list immediately catches the attention of the reader and keeps that attention as you transition over to the main article.

Lists don’t need much preparation

Unlike a story that needs all that bounce and mystery, a list is almost sterile in its approach. You don’t even need any disagreement in a list. If anything, a list seems to take the reader right to where they want to go, just like a recipe.

And that’s why lists are so cool, but there is a downside. Lists are so spartan that they stand out. If you’ve used a list to start up an article recently, you’re probably going to have to wait to use a list again. The very format is so conspicuous that it requires a good deal of time to pass before you can re-use the technique in another article, podcast or presentation.

Nonetheless, they are great starting points and in you’re in a tricky situation, start with a list.

 

Summary

In this very article, we ran into the story of the NY subway, the kudu on the African savanna and the story of the Volkswagen Beetle being introduced to America in 1949. Stories are easily the best tool to get the attention of your readers within the First Fifty Words.

It’s what I use consistently in books from The Brain Audit to Dartboard Pricing. If you find it easy to read the books, yes, it’s because of two elements. The first is the structure of the book, but easily the biggest other factor is the sheer volume of stories and analogies that help you understand the concepts faster and more permanently.

However there’s more than one way to skin a cat

The method we looked at was the factor of disagreement. And the way to go about disagreeing with your headline is to write a headline e.g. How to buy a second hand computer that will last six years—and then go in the opposite direction. Tell the reader a story about computers that failed. Go the opposite way and you do what DDB did with Volkswagen Beetle. And this method sure gets a ton of attention.

Finally we get to the third way: creating lists

This method is the easiest of all. For instance, if I wanted to start this article with a list, I could start with the three points we’ve covered, namely, “The power of the story, disagreeing with your premise and lists”.

And that would get the reader curious enough to want to read more. Then I could continue the article by simply explaining each of the points and fleshing them out in detail.

But where should you start? What’s the ONE thing you can do?

If you’re stuck for time, try the list today. But ideally the best thing you can do for the long run is to fire up your copy of Evernote. Start saving stories.

Go to BBC Earth, History.com, ListVerse.com, Smithsonian.com and start saving stories. There’s nothing more powerful than stories especially when you’re starting up the First Fifty Words.

Next Step: You know how they say "first impressions count?"
Well, they do. Within the first three seconds of reading an article or an email, your client is already making a decision whether to read on. Many of us aren’t restricted to email. We use webinars, video, podcasts and presentations. And all of these media have one thing in common: they all need a great start.

Learning how to really create outstanding openings (whether in articles or any media) is deeply gratifying. And powerful.
More details: http://psychotactics.com/first-50-words

 

 

What links thousand year old organisations with a bike company like Harley Davidson?

What do football teams have in connection with businesses owners that can take time off?

It’s all here in these free set of goodies (yes, 36 audio files) and a PDF. You’ll love how you can implement much of this information right away.

Learn Why Marketing ‘Doesn’t’ Work. And Why You Need Structure In Your Business!
http://www.psychotactics.com/bam

=========================

You will learn in The Brain Alchemy MasterClass:

1) The Spider’s Secret: How to get customers to call you instead of you chasing them.

2) The Three Prong System: This tool will change the way you look at your business forever. Ignore at your risk.

3) How to create a huge demand for your product or service: This secret is over 10,000 years old and works every single time. And most businesses don’t use it.

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

>>Here is the link to get: The Brain Alchemy MasterClass Free (Yes, all 36 audio files and the PDF)

=========================

The difference between you struggling in your business and zooming ahead is understanding the structure of business

Working hard is great, but it’s not the solution to your problems. No matter what business you’re in — a structured marketing system is the best way to exponentially increase your sales.

The Brain Alchemy is about tactics and strategy that will form the very core of your business, no matter whether you’re just starting up, or have been in business ‘forever.’

 

There are over 253 testimonials for The Brain Alchemy MasterClass

When I heard the Brain Alchemy MasterClass my immediate reaction was, “Damn, I spent so much on going to business school and they never taught us any of these.”

I had a big paradigm shift in the way I was thinking about business and marketing. I also understood that no matter how much I think I might be communicating clearly, the receiver might not be listening right – this revelation came about listening to participants speak. And it is true the other way round also.

Biggest learning was the power of giving. This really stuck with me – and also to give in the right possible packaging.

-If you did implement something, what did you implement?

I have been letting the material sink in and I plan to implement few of it. I will keep you posted about it.

I would definitely recommend this course, because Sean is an amazing teacher. He breaks down complex subjects into simple manageable bites and makes sure that we are able to consume the information.

The course is pure gold !

I would like to add that – I am a big fan of Sean and Renuka – mostly because it showed me that the size of the team doesn’t matter as much as how much power they pack.

Thank you for giving The Brain Alchemy away, Sean.

Regards,
Shirisha

Here is the link to get: The Brain Alchemy MasterClass Free (Yes, all 36 audio files and the pdf)

http://www.psychotactics.com/bam

 

 

Envy isn’t something we talk about, or even admit to openly.

And yet it’s the one thing that all of us feel. We feel that others are going places and doing more than us. We even feel we need their spot and somehow that spot belongs to us.

So how do we overcome this intense envy before it kills us? Find out how even the superstars of the world have to deal with envy. Yes, even people who seemingly have unimaginable wealth and success.

In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: Is Envy Good or Bad?
Part 2: How do You Cope With Envy?
Part 3: How To Stay Motivated—And Happy.

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

===============

No one I know is free of envy

We all, at some level, are envious of others and even more so in our field of endeavour.

If you were to look at my inbox every morning, you’ll notice about 60-70 e-mails.
Then as the day progresses, another 60-70 will stream in.
And yet not one of the e-mails is from some one in the same profession as mine.

As you probably know, I’m in the marketing profession

If you want to put a weird tag on me, you could call me an internet marketer. So why don’t I have any marketing-based e-mails in my inbox? It’s not like I don’t want to learn about marketing. It’s not that I don’t want to read what others in my field are up to.

Instead it’s a lot simpler. The e-mails depress me, sometimes.

And I’m using the word, depression, but hey, I’m never depressed. I’m grumbly, upset, maybe even a bit paranoid, but not depressed.

However, I do feel this wave of frustration that takes my day down a few notches. I don’t feel happy and light hearted. And I figured it wasn’t depression after all.

It was envy.

This is my story about how I deal with envy

And I kinda know it’s your story too. I think very few of us are free of this problem of envy. We look around us and we see people doing things that we aren’t doing. We see them earning a lot more, and seemingly with a lot less effort.

And then there are those like me, who come along and talk about taking three months off. And I know that there are others who are working their tails off and there’s this joker who’s talking about the luxury of not just a vacation—but three whole months in a year.

How is it that we can have endless bounty and still feel envy? And how do we deal with such a situation?

Part 1: Is Envy Good or Bad?

On the chilly night of December 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman approached John Lennon outside the Dakota Apartments in New York. Chapman opened fire at Lennon with a .38 calibre pistol. He fired five shots in quick succession.

The first shot missed Lennon, passing over Lennon’s head and hitting a window of the Dakota building. Two of the next bullets struck Lennon in the left side of his back, and the other two penetrated his left shoulder. By 11 pm that night, John Lennon was dead.

But what was going through Paul McCartney’s mind as he heard the news?

These are Paul’s exact words related to Esquire magazine 35 years later. “When John got shot, aside from the pure horror, the lingering thing was, ‘Well, now John’s a martyr. A JFK’. I started to get frustrated because people started to say, “Well, he was the Beatles”. And me, George and Ringo would go, ‘Er, hand on. It’s only a year ago we were all equal-ish.

Paul McCartney, now Sir Paul McCartney was horrified. And envious.

Back in the 1500s, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, was going through the same pangs of envy

Michelangelo was no ordinary man, no ordinary painter. He was unique as the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive. In fact, two biographies were published during his lifetime.

This is the artist who created the statue of David, the Pietà, the Last Judgement, the statue of Moses and no less than the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In his lifetime he was often called Il Divino (“the divine one”). And yet he was openly envious of another older contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci.

So is this factor of envy normal? And is it any good or bad?

In the August 2015 edition of The New Yorker, Richard Smith, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky gives us an insight into envy. Smith who began studying envy in the nineteen-eighties, writes that the feeling typically arises from a combination of two factors.

The first is relevance: an envied advantage must be meaningful to us personally. A ballerina’s beautiful dance is unlikely to cause envy in a lawyer, unless she once had professional dancing aspirations of her own. The second is similarity: an envied person must be comparable to us.

Even though we’re both writers, I’m unlikely to envy Ernest Hemingway. Aristotle, in describing envy, quotes the saying “potter against potter.” When we admire someone, we do so from a distance. When we envy someone, we picture ourselves in their place.

So is this factor of envy normal? And is it any good or bad?

The closer we get to someone’s capability, the less we seem to admire them. Instead, what might pop up is an intense state of envy. I remember being in school, and there was a friend of mine whose father travelled by Swissair.

Back when I was in school, travelling locally by plane was quite the luxury but a trip overseas was almost out of the question. I remember being upset with the little Swissair booklets my friend brought to school.

It wasn’t even like this kid was taking those flights. He just had a few hand me downs from the flight itself, and yet there was this factor of envy that swept through me every time I saw those booklets.

Envy it seems, is mostly bad for you

Admiration is good. Envy is, for the most part, complex and bad. Plus, it’s painful. Which is why my inbox has almost no e-mails from people who are marketers like me. I do read some e-mails, but just a few. I put in long days and I enjoy my work tremendously, yet it’s hard to watch an e-mail pop in about how someone just achieved some goal that you’ve been aspiring for.

Make no mistake. At Psychotactics. we’ve been very successful over the years, and we’ve lived a life that seems unimaginable. And yet, the admiration slips away over time and I feel the weight of envy.

It’s hard to admit it too

But eventually if you were pumped with a truth serum, you’d admit it too. You, I, we’re all envious about others. Some to a large extent, some to a smaller extent. And no matter how fabulously wealthy or well know we are. No matter how far we’ve come in our lives, we still have to deal with that envy.

Part 2: So how do you deal with envy?

I remember the year 2000.
I’d just arrived in Auckland, New Zealand from India.

I’d never been to New Zealand before

And now I was planning to spend the rest of my life on these islands in the Pacific. If someone showed up at the airport, took me to their home, got me a phone, and rented a house for me—well, that would have been beyond my wildest dreams. And that’s what happened.

In Episode #50 of The Three Month Vacation podcast, I talk about our move to New Zealand. And how fellow-cartoonist, Wayne Logue, who I’d only met online, did all of the above for me, and more.

To have such a start when moving to a new country was beyond my wildest imagination
And yet, let’s up the ante a bit. Let’s say someone else showed up at the airport. That person then said that in fewer than two years, I’d be in marketing, not cartooning. Then that person went on to outline how my life would unfold.

And going forward 15 years, that I’d have a membership site, clients, the ability to go where I wanted, when I wanted. What would I make of such a bizarrely rosy prediction the future? I’d think it was wonderful, wouldn’t I?

To understand just how much I have, I have to use the time machine

I get on board and take myself back to Auckland airport. I go to that point when I first got to New Zealand and that kills all kind of envy on the spot.

No matter how many waves of envy surge at me, I realise that I could never have envisioned the life I have now. And this is true for a lot of us today. Most of us have lost some hair, gone rounder at the edges, and possibly have a slightly rough life. Yet, almost none of us would swap our lives for yesteryear.

We can’t really stop ourselves from getting envious

We look at the neighbours and they have a new car. We look at our friends and they are posting photos of themselves in Tahiti.

And it’s probably worst of all in the professional sphere, because we believe we work harder and better than most of our peers. Which brings in that okinami—a rogue wave—of envy.

Envy can’t be avoided

But the time machine trick works. It really works. Go back to the time when you were younger, and for most of us, it represents a time when life was different. And yet, we like the lives we now lead.

We like the gadgets we use today. Our families have grown around us and there are a thousand memories that would vanish in a flash if we went back in time.

I don’t know about you, but this is my trick for envy

I go back to my time machine. My time machine has one dial and it’s set to the year 2000. Just the thought of going back in time brings back pleasant memories. And yet, today is the world I want to live in. In a flash my envy is gone.

But I still have one more mountain to climb. I may not be envious, but I need to stay motivated—and happy. How do I pull that bunny out of the hat?

Part 3: How to stay motivated—and be happy instead

I don’t know if you’ve ever fed seagulls at the beach
On a sunny day as you head to the beach with your fish and chips, the seagulls are waiting. As you throw out a chip, there’s a mighty scramble, but notice who almost never gets the chip.

Yes, it’s the so-called “leader” of the flock. You know the one I’m talking about. This male (and it’s most certainly a male) spends his time chasing away all the rest of the seagulls.

You throw one chip. You throw another. You throw a third. But the leader never seems to get a chip.

So which of the birds get the chips?

The ones that are focused on the chips, not on each other. And this is really the secret of the how stay motivated. When we look around at each other, we’re too focused on the others, and not the chip.

And the chip for most of us is our work. It’s the one thing that brings us the greatest satisfaction in our lives. Whether we run a restaurant, sell strawberry cream, write books or dance for a living, it’s our work that brings us a deep sense of satisfaction. And yet we make a lot of mistakes along the way.

I’ve  made a lot of strategic mistakes in my life

We were on the internet way back in 1997, and while I did catch on to the e-book phenomenon, I missed out on blogs.

I missed out on YouTube as well, I started the podcast before it was immensely popular and then gave up in 2009, just at the point when it started to take off. And so, as I looked on, others took my spot. Yes, my spot!

The way out of that seagull scrap is to look at your own work

At first your work may not seem a lot different from your competition. However, over time you’ll find your own space, your own plum projects. And you’ll get yourself a group of people that love your work. The envy won’t go away, but you’ll stay focused on your chip. And that will keep you motivated.

And that is the real secret of how to sidestep the envy and be happy instead. The envy won’t ever go away. You’ll always be jostling for space in a scrappy flock of gulls. But you’ll know when you get the chip. And you can fly off with your chip, happy as a gull on a sunny day.

Next Step: The Power of Enough—And Why It’s Critical To Your Sanity

http://www.psychotactics.com/power-enough-critical-sanity/

How do you write intensely curious headlines—even if a deadline is looming.

When writing headlines, you often get stuck.
Can grammar come to the rescue when under pressure?

Find out how grammar class helps you write outstanding headlines in a jiffy.

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: What has grammar got to do with writing headlines.
Part 2: Why you need to break up your headline writing process
Part 3: What’s the one thing you can implement today in your headlines

You can read this online here: https://www.psychotactics.com/headlines-three-ways/

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Every year, 20 billion bottles of wine are produced.

And 80% of those bottles are closed with a single substance. A substance called cork.

The cork, as you’d suspect, comes from bark of the cork tree

The bark has to be harvested, and then you get the cork for those 16 billion bottles. But there’s no hurrying the process of cork production. A tree must be at least 25 years old before the bark can be harvested.

After that, it can be stripped of its bark every nine years. Even so, the first stripping is totally unsuitable for wine and used only for industrial purposes. The second stripping still lacks the quality needed. It may take well over 40 years before the cork is considered good enough to put into a wine bottle.

As you can see, a cork tree can’t be rushed. Good headlines too need a little time. But in today’s world, we need headlines for our newsletters, podcast titles, webinars, and workshops.

But is it really possible to turn out a great headline almost immediately? Or do we have to wait?

What we’ll cover in this article is the concept of headlines in a hurry. We’ll learn three ways to write great headlines and to write them under pressure. But we’ll have fun, and instead of just learning three ways, we’ll go back to grammar class.

Method 1: Headlines with AND
Method 2: Headlines with EVEN
Method 3: Headlines with WITHOUT

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Method 1: Headlines With AND

Remember Windows 3.1?

I sure do. I was a cartoonist still living in Mumbai, India at the time. And that’s when I got my first computer. It was a 386 and top of the line with programs such as Corel Draw and Photoshop. Right before I got the computer I would go through the tedious task of drawing a cartoon, photocopying it several times and then colouring each version. Clients wanted to see the same cartoon rendered in different colours and I’d spend trips back and forth to the photocopy shop.

Let’s say I got to know the photocopy guy quite well.

But it also wasted a lot of my day

Then along came Windows 3.1 and I was able to scan and then colour my cartoons in under half an hour. From paper to the computer was my big leap forward when it came to cartoons. And yet several years later when I moved over from cartoons to copywriting, I struggled a lot with writing headlines. Every time I sat down to write headlines, I’d get the blue screen of death in my brain. Until the day I figured out the incredible power of AND in moving a headline forward.
AND?

When writing a headline, all you have to do is add the conjunction AND and your headline seems to dart forward. Let’s take a few examples, shall we?

How to raise your freelance rates
How to raise your freelance rates (and get a greater number of clients)

How to create magic with your brand stories
How to create magic with your brand stories—and engage new readers every time you publish

How to keep fit over age 55
How to keep fit over age 55 (and still eat everything you want)

What did we notice with those AND headlines?

The first was the sheer simplicity of the headline. We start the headline as if it’s going to be a really short one. e.g. How to raise your freelance rates. Then as an afterthought, we add the AND.

What this tends to do is give your headline more oomph. The first part of the headline, without the AND is good enough, yet the second part allows the headline to move your client forward. Which is why the AND headline has a far greater curiosity factor than the headline without the conjunction.

When writing AND headlines I use the parenthesis or the em dash

The em dash is the long dash, used when you seem to be breaking a thought mid-flow. It seems like you’ve already finished with the thought. For example: How to create magic with your brand stories. Then suddenly the em dash shows up out of nowhere talking about “new readers”. It’s brought in a new thought—a much richer thought. Now your headline reads as: How to create magic with your brand stories—and engage new readers every time you publish.

But you don’t always have to use the em dash

You can just use the parenthesis instead. The parenthesis does something similar to the em dash. It creates a continuation of the thought, and the client feels a greater tug towards the AND type of headline.

Visually too, the headline is more arresting. When you look at the headlines side by side, or even in your inbox, the second headline seems to say a lot more. But because there’s the em dash or the parenthesis, it’s like you’re getting some breathing space as the reader.

If you wondered why you had to sit in boring grammar class, well, now you know. You’re in headline grammar class, and you just found out how to use AND, em dashes and parentheses to good effect. Like Windows 3.1 (bless its soul) which got me from a bit of a struggle to super-fast execution, you too can build a headline in next to no time by using the AND.

But is there a good way of using the AND type of headline successfully?

Sure there is. The best way to use the AND headline well is to write the first part. e.g. How to write irresistible calls to action. Then you walk away. Your headline is already super-yummy. But when you come back, several hours later, your brain will have something to add to the headline.

So your headline will read like this: How to write irresistible calls to action (and increase CTR by 30%). The space between writing the first and second part of the headline isn’t necessary, but it does make for better headlines. Keeping a break between activities helps your brain hum in the background and come up with a far superior idea than if you simply jumped on the first possible idea that comes to your head after using AND.

Ok, first part of grammar class is done.
Let’s go to adverb land; the land of EVEN.

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Method 2: Headlines with EVEN

I’d never heard of the comedian called Michael Jr.

Then one day, I’m lying on the sofa time scrolling through Facebook and this video pops up. In the video, Michael Jr. is talking about how comedy works. And here’s what he says:

This is how it works

First, there’s a setup, and then there’s a punch line. The set up is when a comedian uses his talents and resources to seize any opportunity to ensure that his audience is moving in the same direction. The punchline occurs when he alters that direction in such a way that was not anticipated by the audience.

He’s talking about the adverb

Yup, Michael Jr. doesn’t know it, but he’s just given a quick grammar lesson. And that’s precisely the grammar lesson you can use in your headlines by using the adverb, “EVEN.” When you use EVEN in your headline, you’re doing what Michael Jr. is talking about. You’re taking the audience in a specific direction—and then moving them to the punchline, which isn’t quite anticipated by the audience.

Hah, you’re eager for grammar lesson No.2, aren’t you?

Well here goes:

How to rank high on Bing
How to rank high on Bing (even with low Google rankings)

Why you should raise your freelance rates
Why you should raise your freelance rates (even if you’re not sure you’re worth it)

How to quit your day job
How to quit your day job (even if you’re cash strapped)

How to travel First Class
How to travel First Class (even if You’re dead broke)

See the setup and the punchline?

It’s everywhere, you know, this setup and punchline. When you read The Brain Audit, you have the concept of the problem and the solution. That’s a setup and punchline. When you look at nature, you notice a branch, then a twig.

A snowflake has the same set up and punchline. And of course, when we go to headline land, the adverb EVEN creates a powerful punchline. It brings out that extra bit of information that you’re simply not expecting. And in doing so, it gets and keeps your attention.

Just like the AND, it helps to use the parentheses or the em dash

And just like the AND, there’s no rule (at least that I know of) whether you use the em dash or the parenthesis. Just be sure to use it because it creates that setup and punch line both visually and intellectually.

Visually you can see there’s a separation, but intellectually you see that extra bit showing up. And you weren’t particularly expecting the headline to go in such a weird direction, were you?

So remember: set up, punchline. That’s the power of EVEN.

We’ve covered AND and EVEN.

Should we go to the third grammar lesson? Let’s head to WITHOUT, which happens to masquerade as a preposition adverb and conjunction. Even if you can’t remember where it sits on the grammar hierarchy, WITHOUT does a pretty cool job when you’re tired of using AND and EVEN. Let’s find out how.

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Method 3: Headlines with WITHOUT

To write a headline with WITHOUT, all you have to consider is the opposite. And you can do it with random headlines.

How to raise your prices
How to raise your prices without losing clients
How to raise your prices without increasing the quantity of product
How to raise your prices without considering the competition
How to raise your prices without the accompanying fear factor

When you write a WITHOUT headline, guess what you’re really doing

Yup, you’re bringing up the objection in your head. Notice the second part of the headlines? They brought out the fear of losing clients, of needing to increase the quantity of product, the fear of competition and yes, the fear of fear itself. All of these are obvious objections to your premise or article.

So what’s a grammar headline writer to do?

Why it’s perfectly simple, isn’t it? All you really need to do is write some sort of headline and then think of all the reasons why it’s not a good idea. Or at least why you’d have some objections to that idea.

Let’s take an overly simple headline like:
How to lose weight in two weeks.

What are the objections to losing weight?

– You’re a foodie
– You don’t want to go on a crazy diet
– You don’t care about exercise

And then you slappity-slap on the objections to the first part of the headline. Ready?

How to lose weight in two weeks (without giving up your foodie habits)
How to lose weight in two weeks (without going on a crazy diet)
How to lose weight in two weeks (without needing to exercise endlessly)

And there you have it—WITHOUT comes to the rescue.
Isn’t grammar wonderful?

We should really do a summary, but what would we cover?

We already know the three methods to make our headline stand out. All it takes is just three parts of the grammar universe: AND, EVEN and WITHOUT. AND gets your headline moving boldly forward, EVEN does this little setup and punchline trick and WITHOUT, WITHOUT is all about objections.

See, those Grammar Nazis were right.

You should pay attention your grammar because even if your brain feels like it’s running on Windows 3.1, you’ll still be able to turn out super-curious headlines.

So what’s the ONE thing we can implement today?

Remember the advice you got about writing part of the headline first and then going away? Well, here’s a reminder. You may be so very excited at your proficiency at grammar class that you may forget to take that break. Leaving that task unfinished ensures that your brain brings up (and rejects) many options. Eventually, when you go back to your headline, you’re likely to get a far superior headline than just the first one you think up.

Put space between all activities. This article was written over a period of three days. The outline on one day, part of the article on another and finally the article was completed on the third. And only after these three days, did it go for an edit. A headline may seem almost puny when compared with an article, but letting the brain relax helps you get a far superior output.

And that’s pretty much it.
Grammar lesson over.
School’s out.

Special Bonus: Why Headlines Fail

In under 7 minutes you’ll be able to go through a system that shows you:
• How to write headlines that get results every time
• Why you don’t have to be a copywriter to write headlines
• How to construct headlines, without making a complete mess of things.
Here is the report: Why Headlines Fail 

https://www.psychotactics.com/free/headlines-fail/