In this episode we look at the relationship between energy management and time management. In the modern age we are expected to be on the go continuously; working while on holiday, being ever available for phone calls and e-mails etc. By the time we get to the end of the working day we often find we have no energy. Is there a way to not only have energy for work but also remain energized during our time outside of work?

Listen in to find out how you can receive a surprise Christmas gift!

Which is the most frustrating part of an article? Yes, it's the First Fifty Words. We get so stuck at the starting point that it's almost impossible to go ahead. But what if there were not just one, but three ways to get your article going? That would be cool, wouldn't it? Well, here you go. Not one, but three ways to start your article instantly.

Many of us believe that smartness comes from learning the skills in our own field. And yet, that's only partially true. We can never be as smart as we want to be, if we only have tunnel vision. So how do we move beyond? And how do we find the time to do all of this learning? Amazingly it all comes from limits. Find out more in this episode.

Even if you have the best idea in the world, analysis-paralysis can stop you in your tracks. You feel frozen, not sure what to do. So you research. Then you do some more research and educate yourself even more. But that doesn't get you very far, does it? Even famous people like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo would get stuck in this mode, just like you. But they still went on to create great art. So how do you create great "art" as well? Find out and beat the analysis-paralysis once and for all.

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.

In 1970, two psychologists did a very interesting experiment called the “The Good Samaritan experiment”.

It was meant to determine whether we're kind other some conditions and oblivious at other times.

What makes us kinder, more generous?

Is there something that's been under our nose all along that we've been missing? Let's find out.

You can read the transcript here: #167:The Incredible Power of Kindness (And Why It Has Nothing To Do With Business)

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A few months ago, my brother in law's house was burgled.

What do you say to someone when their house has been burgled? What do you say when you run into a friend, and you find she's lost her father? We live in a world that's filled with kindness, or else we wouldn't function on a day to day basis.

However, as one writer wrote: We're only one generation away from anarchy. We're all born selfish. Kids hang on to their toys and bawl at the need to control the entire ice-cream stand.

We have to be taught to be kind.

And kindness comes in different forms

It's not just about charity or letting the other driver cut into your lane on the motorway. In today's episode, we go all philosophical, simply because of a book I'd been reading (which I didn't complete, of course). It's a book by Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook.

Sandberg and her husband, David were on vacation to Mexico. David was on the treadmill exercising when he collapsed and died alone. In her book, Option B, she recounts the horror that inhabited her brain at the time of the accident, and for months later.

This episode isn't about business. It's about kindness and its many forms.
Let's find out how we can be adults in a world of “kiddy tantrums”. And how we can be kind as children, in a world of jaded adulthood.

Here are three things we'll cover. I promise it will change the way you look at kindness from now on.

1) Not asking what we should do, but doing something instead
2) Telling someone how they changed your life and being very specific
3) Slowing down, because kindness can be heavily dependent on how much you slow down.

1: Not asking what we should do, but doing something instead.

In 2010, my father in law; Renuka's father, passed away.

I don't remember much about the day. What I do remember was the act of our friend, Cher Reynolds. Somewhere after the funeral, Cher showed up to the house with muffins. “I baked these muffins”, she said. Cher then stayed a while and left. So why did the incident of the muffins stay in my head?

I only realised it when I read Sheryl Sandberg's story.

The difference between Cher and so many people is that Cher left out a question that so many people tend to ask in times of crisis. When there's a disaster, death or sudden misfortune, we feel helpless. And our helplessness shows because we all make a similar sort of statement.

We say: If there's anything we can do to help, please let us know.

On the face of it, such a statement is exceptionally kind. In effect, we're writing a sort of blank cheque. We're saying we'd go completely out of our way to help, no matter what the request.

And yet in its kindness, the statement becomes a bit unkind. It's asking the person who's under enormous stress, to let you know what they need.

The stress is so high that the person is often cut off from reality and can barely function. It's at this point that we misguidedly ask them to “think up a list of what they need”. Author Bruce Feiler writes, “that the offer while well-meaning, shifts the obligation to the aggrieved”.

Cher didn't ask if she could bring muffins

Instead, she took a decision, made the muffins, drove halfway across town and gave the muffins. In the book Option B, Sandberg talks about her colleague Dan Levy. Levy's son was sick and in hospital. That's when a friend texted Levy with a message that went like this: What do you NOT want on a burger?

Levy could see how the friend has not dumped the obligation. “Instead of asking if I wanted food, he made the choice for me but gave me the dignity of feeling in control”. Another friend texted Levy saying she was available for a hug if he needed one. She added that she would be in the hospital lobby for a whole hour, whether he came downstairs or not.

Kindness comes from specific acts, writes Sandberg

“Some things in life can't be fixed. They can only be carried.” My brother-in-law and sister-in-law weren't the same people I'd met just a few days before the incident. They were shocked beyond belief that someone had violated their space.

It's at times like these that we sip from our cup of helplessness and ask that question, “how can we help?” It's at this time that we have to step up and act.

That's just the first act of kindness, however. There's more. Like letting someone know how they changed your life. And be specific about it.

2: Tell someone how they changed your life and be specific

At the end of every Psychotactics course, we do something quite unconventional.

We ask for feedback. What's so unconventional about that, you may ask? This act is unusual, because clients are expected to give about 1000 words of what went wrong, and suggestions on how to fix the course.

Which means that if there are 35 clients on the course, we get a mind-boggling 30,000-35,000 words of feedback. And it was on one of these courses that I got feedback from a client named Gordon.

Here's what Gordon wrote to me, separately in an e-mail.

“Whenever I do an assignment incorrectly, you take a lot of effort to tell me what's wrong. You help me get back on track when I'm struggling. And I really appreciate that a lot. However, when I do an assignment, or part of an assignment well, you simply say, “That was good”.

You get what Gordon is saying, right?

He wants specifics both when he's going off the road, but also praise when he's done something correctly. And then for good measure, he wanted to know exactly which part he got right and why I thought it was so very good. In hindsight this request seems so very obvious, doesn't it? Look how quickly we snarl when the coffee's cold, but never stop to tell the barista when the coffee is perfect, and why we think it's so well done.

Every day we get countless opportunities to get mad—and probably just as many where we can be exceptionally kind

Being specific is the key because just a pat on the back, while helpful, is nowhere as good as telling the person why they earned it. Baristas, waitresses, the chef that you never see at the restaurant, they all count.

Even the guy who is trying to get you to buy something at the doorstep counts. And within our own families, our kids, our friends, they all do little things for us, and we often forget to be specific. We forget to tell them how they changed our day, often our lives.

I've learned a lot from my nieces, Marsha and Keira, for instance.

Keira runs in like a typhoon every Friday, turning off all the switches where devices are not charging. I have to remember to tell her how she's changed my laziness with keeping switches on.

Marsha has told me how she often doesn't force her opinion in a discussion, even when she knows she's right. And I've learned to be less pompous as a result. I think we can all be slightly more kind to the people we run into every day.

No one is saying you need to be a saint, of course. We all need our moments of anger and frustration, but when we turn on our faucet of kindness, let's make sure we turn it all the way up and tell people how they make a difference to our lives.

Which takes us to the final aspect of kindness

Strangely, this has nothing to do with how we choose to act. Instead, it examines what causes us to stop and be kind. It's the odd phenomenon that's now known as the “Princeton Seminary Experiment”. But what was this experiment about? And how does it determine our ability to be kinder people?

3: Slow down, because kindness is mostly dependent on an unusual factor

If a traveller is assaulted on the road, who stops to help?

If you've ever read or heard the story of the Good Samaritan, you'll be familiar with how a traveller is assaulted by thieves and left to die. A priest and a Levite pass the injured traveller but don't stop. The Samaritan stops to help the traveller, bandage his wounds and takes him to an inn, where he proceeds to pay for the care of the traveller.

In the 1970s, Princeton social psychologists John Darley and Dan Batson decided to run a modern-day Samaritan test

The students of the Princeton Theological Seminary were asked to deliver a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan. Once they had reached a reasonable level of preparedness, they were expected to deliver a sermon on that very parable. However, in order to give that sermon, they need to get to a studio, in a building across the campus, where they were told they'd be evaluated by their supervisors.

Bear in mind that all of the students were studying to be ordained priests. And every one of them had already been buried in their preparation of the story of the Good Samaritan. Both these scenarios would suggest that if they ran into a scene where someone needed help, this group of all people, would be more inclined to help than any other group.

However there was a little monkey wrench thrown into the mix

As the student prepared to go across to give his sermon, he was given one of three sets of instructions:

“You’re late. They were expecting you a few minutes ago. You’d better hurry. It shouldn’t take but just a minute.” This was the high-hurry condition.
“The (studio) assistant is ready for you, so please go right over.” This was the intermediate-hurry condition.
“It’ll be a few minutes before they’re ready for you, but you might as well head on over. If you have to wait over there, it shouldn’t be long.” This was the low-hurry condition.

The students—all the students—were then expected to walk by themselves to the studio

In every case, the student would encounter a “victim” in a desert alley, just like the injured traveller in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The victim was a plant, but the seminarians didn't know that. All they could see was a slouched, destitute-looking person who desperately needed assistance. In such a scenario, and bearing in mind how they were influenced by the parable, how many seminarians would stop to help the “victim?”

The research findings were startling

Only 10% of the students in the high-hurry situation stopped to help the victim. 45% of the students in the intermediate-hurry and a whopping 63% of the students in the low-hurry situations stopped to help the victim. The researchers concluded, “A person not in a hurry may stop and offer help to a person in distress. A person in a hurry is likely to keep going.

Ironically, he is likely to keep going even if he is hurrying to speak on the parable of the Good Samaritan, thus inadvertently confirming the point of the parable. Thinking about the Good Samaritan did not increase helping behaviour, but being in a hurry decreased it.”

Time, or the lack of time, that was an overwhelmingly important factor when it came to being kind

To be kind, we all need time and energy. This isn't to suggest that someone with more time will be a kinder person, but when we're in a hurry, we are definitely more aggressive. Tunnel vision comes into play, and we fail to see how we can help others who are in need of our kindness.

It's scary to realise that our lack of time could make us inadvertently selfish

And the anguish that comes from the lack of time isn't new either. Way back in 1911, poet, Henry Davies wrote about how we lead a life of care, and we have no time to stand and stare. Over a century ago, time or the lack of it was still the problem. There's no easy way to solve this problem, of course. We have to hurry up, but there are moments when we can decelerate, so that we have time to be kind.

Kindness isn't something we're necessarily born with. We learn kindness along the way.

To get more kindness in our lives, we need to look at three core aspects.
1) Stop asking what we should do, but doing something instead.
2) Tell someone how they changed our lives, and be specific about how they did it.
3) Slow down, because kindness is mostly dependent when we're not in a hurry.

Epilogue

The motto of 5000bc is “Be kind, be helpful or begone”. Kindness is a lot of work and I'm very grateful for everyone that pitches in. All of those who ask questions are being kind because you're helping others who are reluctant. Those who help out in the critique section or in the Taking Action forum, or in the Technology forum—you're all taking the time to be kind.

The way you welcome a new member, that's an extreme act of kindness, because nothing is better than feeling safe in a new environment. And there are the Cave Guides who voluntarily step in to help new members navigate their way, plus the Cave Elves that step in to make sure all is well while we're away on vacation.

Every one of you makes a big difference.
Thank you for your kindness.
Thanks very much.

Next up: Why Happiness Eludes Us: 3 Obstacles That We Need To Overcome

What causes clients to keep coming back?

Is it information?
Or could it be entertainment?

For too long we've treated teaching and learning as an activity that needs endless slides, pages and work. But what if clients get better results having fun? And what if you had a ton of fun as well?

Let's find out how to speed up client learning with some pretty minor tweaks in your e-books, courses, presentations and webinars.

Click here to read the transcript on the website: 
#166: How To Speed Up Client-Learning With The Incredible Power of Infotainment

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When my mother-in-law, Preta, was in her twenties, she was teaching at Sunday school.

Like most Sunday schools, the kids were there to learn about the Bible. However, my mother-in-law decided to teach the girls how to sew tiny dresses for their dolls.

Within weeks of her starting up, all the girls wanted to be part of her class. Ironically, this made the other Sunday school teachers jealous. They complained to the “higher authorities”, and Preta was called in to explain herself.

“We've heard you're not teaching them about the Bible, and instead only involving them in play”, said the person in charge. “You can come in and test the knowledge of the kids,” retorted my mother-in-law, “and you'll find they know they're well-versed in their Bible studies”.

You can clearly see the wisdom of play in this story, can't you?

You can also see how people in charge resist it a lot, even though it's apparent that we all have a maddening streak of playfulness we can't seem to shake. That when learning something, we want the trainer to bring a sense of joy into our learning. Instead, most education is soulless, incredibly dull and it's not surprising that clients drop out. The problem is that we're pretty sure we're guilty of this callous training and teaching as well.

But what if we were to make fun the core of our system?

What if we postponed designing the information-based section and thought about the fun elements, instead? What if fun wasn't an afterthought but part of the entire structure of learning? How would we do things differently, if this were the case?

In this series, let's look at:
In this series, let's look at:

1) How to create Infotainment
2) Why we need to understand the goal
3) How to place the fun elements in your training

1) How to create Infotainment

If you were in charge of getting a kid to write, would you start with “slimy, oozy eyeballs?”

Here is a story of Jen Jackson from Seattle. She'd started a small English tutoring business aimed at kids that were being homeschooled. One of her students was Michael, Michael clearly despised writing, despite being able to read well. His mother tried “everything”, but her methods weren't working, so she called Jen to help Michael write.

Except for the fact, that Jen didn't make Michael write at all.

The two of them read joke books, challenged each other to tongue twisters and did everything but write. The second meeting involved fun drawing games and drawing a monster. Still, no writing was included. It was only the third session where a Monster Cafe was created, apparently to accommodate Michael's monster.

That's when Michael wrote out a short menu that included slimy, oozy eyeballs. In the sessions to follow, Michael went on to create many menus for different monsters. Today, Michael is not exactly prolific, but he willingly writes short paragraphs and is eager to keep improving.

When we read this story, we can see how entertainment has led to information success, can't we?

Yet, as an educator it somehow feels scary. Even if you embrace the power of entertainment as the doorway to learning, how are you supposed to implement it? If you did what Jen did, wouldn't Michael's parent look at you funnily, wondering if you were just wasting their time and money? What are you supposed to do when you're not dealing with kids, but adults instead—and in serious fields like marketing or finance?

The core of entertainment is to take the pressure off, completely

Let's say you wanted to learn Photoshop. If you've never looked at Photoshop before, that sounds a bit intimidating, doesn't it? So how do you make it fun? You look at the what causes people to freeze. Incredibly, it's the computer and Photoshop itself.

When I'm showing clients how to use Photoshop for the first time, I usually take them to a cafe—without the computer. We sit down and work our way through some core shortcuts. If the client wants to learn to draw, what alternatives would they need? Wait, you're reading this, so you can easily play along.

Let's say you want to get the brush tool. Which letter on your keyboard would you press? Yes, you're right, it's the letter B.

What if you wanted to change the opacity of the brush to 30%? What number would you press? Some clients say 30, but of course, the answer is 3. What about 50%. Yes, it's 5. And 70%?

I'm teasing. Of course, you know the answer. Let's move on to the brush size. If you wanted to increase the brush size and you had to choose between the left and right square bracket, which one would you choose? Most of us correctly select the right square bracket, which means that the left one will reduce the brush size.

Imagine you're sipping a cup of coffee, there's no computer in sight, and you're told to create a theoretical drawing in Photoshop. You have to get to the brush, get the opacity to 90% and then reduce the brush size?

Notice how much fun that whole exercise turned out? The first way of taking the pressure off a person or a group is merely to get them as far as you can from the activity. When you put yourself (and the student or client) in a different setting, the pressure is instantly off and a sense of play sets in.

However, not everyone can waltz their way into a cafe or garden

Some teaching needs to be done at the venue itself. What do you do, then? One of the best and most effective ways to get the pressure off is to get the clients to do something wrong. Let's take an example. Of the many workshops we've had over the years, one of the more intimidating ones is the uniqueness workshop.

The fact that we were going to take three days to get to uniqueness didn't help. How do you take the pressure off? You get the uniqueness wrong, that's what you do. Within minutes of starting the workshop, I gave each client an advertisement for a local business.

They all had the same ad, and they had to figure out the uniqueness of the company in under 10 minutes. However, before they started, I informed them, that all of them, no matter how hard they tried, would get the assignment wrong.

Imagine you're in the room right at this very moment

You can hear the hush, can't you? You have an assignment, but you're going to get it wrong. But that quiet lasts only for a few seconds. Everyone has a big smile on their face as they take on the assignment that they just can't get right. The pressure to get it all correct is gone, and they can have a jolly good time.

They start the assignment, complete their version of it, and then they're all chattering away and having a great time. After which everyone is called upon to give their answers, and a logical explanation follows. They've been entertained as well as informed! Tah, dah, infotainment!

Good teachers know the value of play.

Good workshop trainers will take the pressure off as quickly as they can.

Excellent writers and speakers will use the power of stories to get their audience smiling, long before the main guts of the information comes along. The more pressure you put on a student, client or audience, the more the brain goes into shut down mode. Which is why we have to release the tension.

But more importantly, it's because you need to understand the real goal. But what's the purpose? Ah, that's easy. You want the client to want to go forward of their own accord. You want them to beg you to continue. They must enjoy themselves so much that what you're teaching them must feel like a bowl of warm, chocolate muffins. Understanding the goal is what makes the client—or student come back repeatedly.

Let's find out how we can get this goal going, shall we?

2) Why we need to understand the goal

“‘Better, faster, cheaper.’

That was NASA's mantra around the year 1999. And it was in this very year that the Mars Climate Orbiter was destroyed. On Nov 10, 1999, the Mars Climate Orbiter, a $125 million satellite was supposed to become the the first weather observer orbiting over another world. For the orbiter to do its job, it needed to get into a stable orbit around the red planet.

But something had gone wrong. The software was required to control the Orbiter's thrusters, and it did so, using the system of measurement of “pounds”. However, a separate software was processing data in the metric unit—”newtons”. The two systems of measurement threw the entire mission entirely out of whack, and atmospheric friction likely tore the fragile satellite apart.

From the outside, it might look like a doofus-plan: that sophisticated scientists didn't notice that the software was calculating in two completely different units.

And just like that, the mission—the $125 million mission—was no more.

When training clients, the burnout rate is consistently like the Mars Orbiter

That's because we're using completely different systems of measurement in our teaching methods. The goal isn't necessarily to get the ideas or learning across. Yes, that's the final goal, but not the primary goal. The primary goal of any training system is to get the client back.

Remember the story about Jen Jackson and how she tackled Michael's writing problem?
Remember how my mother-in-law got her students to get all excited about Sunday school?

When you think about education in an objective sense, you may feel that it's your job to get the information across. But knowledge is tiring. It's frustrating. It's the wrong system of measurement. And it's most often what causes the client to burn up before the mission so much as gets underway. Instead, think of how you can get the client back using fun and a factor of entertainment.

Entertainment doesn't just mean you're rolling out tacos and a Mariachi band
But then again, who says learning has to be all work, work and more work?

In the headlines course, for example, we start off with an assignment that goes like this:

Day 1: Introduce yourself
Day 2: Watch three videos—and these videos are from the movie, Karate Kid
Day 3: List five topics and many sub-topics

And what does their list look like?
Ice Cream
•   Cup
•   Cone
•   Scoops
•   Buckets
•   Sprinkles
•   Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup
•   Brown Cow
•   Whipped cream

By Day 5, clients are clearly having fun

Mermaids, dinosaurs, deep sea aliens (yes, deep sea aliens exist, you know)—they all make a list. And everyone is having a blast. They're getting to know the members of their tiny group; they're coming up with all of these crazy topics and sub-topics. And it's a lot like what happens at our place every Friday.

On Fridays, for the past four years, we've taken our niece Marsha to the food market

The assignments could involve walking to the veggie section, weighing an object and writing down the weight. Or we might have to skip—no walking, just skipping—to the dairy section to find out how pricing works, and how Swedish rounding of prices works. In short, Marsha (and I) have been running, jumping and skipping through our learning exercise.

She's learned about frozen, dried and fresh foods. She's learn about weights and measures, about addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Then when we get home, we do spellings in the garden or walking around the car (yes, I get sneaky steps on my Fitbit when I do that activity).

However, let's make this really boring. Let's hunch over a desk or dining table and you get the idea why most kids detest having to study. There's zero entertainment and a lot of screaming and do this, do that, involved, instead.

So what would Marsha want to do the following week?

And the week after? Doesn't take much imagination, does it? If our goal is to educate, to train, to impart knowledge, you and I are sure going about it the wrong way. A workshop doesn't need your audience to reverentially worship you as you show them slide after slide. At Psychotactics workshops, clients go for walks and do their assignments.

They sit by the pool. We have games, we have soft toys like Jordan the otter, and of course, Elmo comes along wherever we go. At one workshop, two our clients, Jessica and Alia, who happened to be belly dancers, taught one part of the group to dance, and the other to clap along and create the mood.

Would you want to go to another dull, reverential note-taking-workshop or come to a Psychotactics workshop, instead?

If it sounds like too much fun, and no work, that's not the case at all

Every course online, every workshop, every book you write needs to be result-oriented. If the client buys your product or service to get a result, a result needs to be the finale. But why does it have to be boring? The only reasons why any learning is boring is because the trainer doesn't realise that fun is possible, or they take the easy route and do what they've already done a million times before.

To create a fun-based situation takes a lot of work on your part. It's not as if to suggest that a serious training session isn't a lot of work. It's just that you need to do so much more planning when fun is involved. Entertainment is great for the learner or the audience, but it's a hard grind for you to put into place.

However, the results of information + entertainment are incredibly predictable

Clients come back repeatedly. If you were to attend a Psychotactics workshop, you'd find close to 50% of the audience are back for a second, third, fourth helping. Clients travel long distances just to be at the workshop. And they sign up even before we have time to put up a sales page. For instance, if you take the Singapore Landing Page workshop, ¼ of the seats are already gone.

With the Brussels workshop, ¾ of the seats were taken before we completed the sales page. A similar trend plays out when we're conducting courses online.

There's the Article Writing Course—yes, the live course online—in July 2018

The seats would go on sale by early March. And before you know it, and often within 24 hours, that course is filled to the brim. If you look at a presentation, there are compelling videos, loads of cartoons, a touch of animation—all designed to give the audience respite, even though the presentation may be under 40 minutes long.

And if you've read a book from Psychotactics, you know that once again there are cartoons, a recipe in the middle of the book and an epilogue at the end of the book telling you the process of how the book was made.

What's the goal of education?

To come back, that's what the goal should be, shouldn't it? Imagine you as a kid wanting to race to school every day, because, hey, school was so much fun. Imagine desperately wanting to continue a video series on a topic like Photoshop, because the presenter is so amusing. Now make no mistake. It's not about pure entertainment.

You're there for the information as well, but why on Earth does the process of imparting information have to be so boring?

“Better, faster, cheaper”

That was the mantra, the chant that caused the Mars Polar Lander to fry just 23 days after the Mars Climate Orbiter. According to an article in Wired Magazine, vibrations in that craft’s legs may have convinced the craft’s on-board computer it had already landed when it was still 100 feet in the air.“The specific reasons [for that failure] were different, but the underlying parts, this overly ambitious appetite, were the same.”

“NASA made some “big-time” changes after that,” said NASA engineer Richard Cook, who was project manager for Mars exploration projects.

They got rid of several other missions, including one that involved bringing rocks back to Earth. NASA, it seems, reevaluated what they were doing, based on strategies and concepts that had stood the test of time.

When teaching, what stands the test of time better than entertainment?

Would you rather go back to a place that is boring, or one that is a fun-learning experience?
Which one are you most eager to go back to, time and time again?

Well, since we're on the same page, let's go to the third part. Now that we're pretty sure that fun is part of learning, let's move to the third part and find out just where we can put fun parts in the learning.

3) How to place fun elements in your training

Rob Walling has an unusual video in the middle of his presentation that takes the audience by surprise.

In May 2017, I spoke at the Double Your Freelancing conference in Sweden. Rob was one of the speakers, and his topic was about the topic of “how to launch a startup.” Rob's a pretty easy-going speaker, with well-thought-out slides and a gentle progression. Until midway, when the entire presentation seems to stop for an intermission of sorts.

Walling decides to show the audience a video of how his son solves a problem progressively. It's a home video, nothing flashy, yet the audience laughs as they watch the story unfold.

How did the video show up in Rob's presentation?

It's the same question that could be asked when you attend a Psychotactics and go off scampering for a scavenger hunt. Right in the middle of the workshop, there's a peculiar assignment. The pre-assigned groups are given 30 minutes to go out and find a whole bunch of items, return and then upload the pictures to the blog.

The next day each group makes a presentation; the best entry is chosen by popular vote, and there's a tiny little prize ceremony.

You noticed the fun element in both the examples, didn't you?

The question is: how did they get there? And the answer becomes pretty apparent even as the question is being asked. Someone has to put it there, because yes, it may show up quite by chance. However, in most cases, the creator of the product or service has to be proactive enough to put in the fun elements.

Your product or service needs this break as well Why should it be?

When I went to school, we had a short break of 15 minutes, then a lunch break of an hour. We'd race out of the class at break time, so we could get onto the playground. Was the play connected in any way to our biology or physics class?

Of course not, but the fact that someone decided to have the short and long break enabled us to study and play on every given day.

Your product or service needs this break as well

The way to go about creating the entertainment factor is to sit down with the book you're about to write. If you could make it fun, more interesting, what would you do? If you're about to conduct a course online, what do the assignments look like? Is there any space for play?

What about your workshops or seminars? Are the participants like prisoners listening to you drone on forever? Or is there some factor of entertainment and play?

If you remember picking up a copy of the Reader's Digest, you have this example with “The Lighter Side of” and “Laughter the Best Medicine” in the middle of some pretty serious articles. Someone sat down and said: “Ooh, all of this stuff is intense. We need to lighten up”.

Not everyone appreciates the entertainment, of course

A scavenger hunt may not go down well with 100% of the participants. Cartoons in a marketing book sound a bit crazy, doesn't it? A door that creaks open on a website (it's going to be on our new website) may seem outlandish. And there are always going to be naysayers.

However, by and large, those are the people who wanted to stay in and do their homework while we ran out during school breaks. If they're unhappy with the entertainment factor, don't go around chaining the rest of your group to ol' grumps. Instead, design the event, the book, the product or service with a bunch of fun elements.

Look through other books or situations to find inspiration

Esquire Magazine may have a joke section—just one joke told by a supermodel. Could you be that supermodel in your book? If you've got a video course, why do you have to be Ms.Serious or Mr.Let's-Get-To-The-End? Have a couple of videos that tell a joke, or show something funny around your neighbourhood.

Maybe take a leaf from Rob Walling's book and put in a video about your kid's crazy jokes. The fun part doesn't always have to be disconnected. It can connect quite easily as well.

In The Brain Audit, there are sections where there's a whole page of cartoons, and they connect quite precisely. There's also a total disconnect with a butter chicken recipe.

Do what you please: connect or disconnect at will.

• Crossword puzzles
• Recipes
• Funny home videos
• Cartoons
• Stories
• Case studies

These are just some ways to entertain your audience while educating them

As this article demonstrates, entertainment isn't just a nice-to-have. Instead, it's a necessity. Sometimes it is the reason why people show up. Sometimes it's the reason why they stay and continue.

And sometimes the entertainment may be right at the end, like when David Attenborough and his crew put in the “how we made this documentary” as an epilogue of their film.

When you see an idea you like, make sure you borrow it and use it well. We've used ideas from video and used it our books. We've been to a Sting concert and used some of the concepts in our podcasts. You can get ideas from everywhere if you look out for them—and more importantly—implement them.

My mother-in-law's Sunday school story didn't end well.

She managed to get the kids interested, but jealousy worked against her. She was told to stop the fun bits and focus only on the serious religious teaching, instead. You, on the other hand, aren't going to be pulled up if you add entertainment to your work.

However, you have to plan in advance. The entertainment isn't likely to just work its way into your syllabus. Sit down, create the entertainment. Start small and build from there.

Work is fun.

But play is just as educational, if not more so.

Next Up: The Secret of How To Get Clients To Keep Coming Back Repeatedly

 

Procrastination is bad, right? Well, not quite. If you break up a project, you're likely to find most projects have five distinct sections. To get to the end of the project, you're going to need a form of managed procrastination. But how do you go about this form of procrastination? And why is it seemingly better to keep you focused? Let's find out in this episode, shall we?

Read the transcript online: #165: How to use procrastination to your advantage

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Imagine you're sitting down late at night to get ready for your presentation the next day. And you find your slide deck is empty.

That's precisely what happened to me when I was conducting a workshop in California many years ago.

Usually, I'm very thorough, making sure everything is in order at least four-five days before we board the flight. This time, however, I'd somehow put off what I needed to do, confident I'd have enough time when I got to the U.S.

When preparing for workshops, I go through my slides anywhere between 10-15 times, and complete full run-throughs at least thrice, on the day before. So how come the slide deck was empty? Our workshops usually span three days or more, and the slides for Day One were just as they needed to be. But who looks for Day Two slides on Day One? Not me, at least.

Which brings us right to the evening of the first day, when I sat down to prepare myself for Day Two. That's when I realised many of the slides had incomplete information.

Procrastination doesn't have a good rap.

And rightly so. Just because we've pushed something out into the future, doesn't mean it's gone away. In fact, there's a good chance that unfinished task is a mega-energy drainer.

If I have to go for a medical checkup, and I can see that white slip in front of me, it bugs me. If you need to finish writing that chapter in your book, you spend enormous amounts of energy just pushing that task out on a future to-do list. However, there are times when procrastination can be good for you.

In this series, we'll cover three points:

1) How Deadline-Based-Procrastination Helps Formulate Better Thoughts
2) How Procrastination Can Help Manage the Email Deluge
3) Why Procrastination Can Be Good For Energy Levels (And When It’s Bad)

1) How Deadline-Based-Procrastination Helps Formulate Better Thoughts

In 1966, there was a study on the Ju/’hoansi bushmen that wander around the borderlands between Namibia and Botswana. 
It found that the bushmen only worked seventeen hours a week, on average, to find their food. An additional nineteen hours were spent on domestic chores and activities. In all, their 36-hour week might seem pretty excessive when you consider that most working people aim for a 40 hour week.

However, our week is a lot longer

Even back in 1966, a comparable week in the United States was roughly double. 40 hours were spent at work, and about thirty-six, on average, on domestic labour. Today, adults employed full time in the U.S. report working an average of between 47-50 hours per week. That's more than a whole working day as compared with 1966.

All of this extra work only means one thing

The working brain of the Ju/’hoansi and the busy business owner in Beijing, is similar. But the demands on energy, distractions and travel have made procrastination an imposing part of our lives. Even if you were to go back just to my father's time. He ran a business, a secretarial college and while he put in a long workday from 8 am to 8 pm, he didn't have Facebook or a mobile phone.

Once he got on his train at night, he'd be eating roasted peanuts and nodding off as he made his way back home. In comparison, we have to battle all sorts of crazy stuff, just to get through the day. It's inevitable that as our energy depletes, our procrastination levels skyrocket.

Even so, procrastination can be a great ally when it comes to formulating thoughts

Take this article for instance. I write most of my articles within 5000bc, right in the forum, on forum software. Which means every member of 5000bc can see the progress of the article. This article, for example, started on 19th September. It was just an announcement of the article.

By the 20th, I'd only managed the three topics I was going to cover. As the 21st makes its way to another sunset, four paragraphs are in place. And then there's a “to be continued” added to the unfinished piece. If you look at this form of article writing, you can either consider it to be procrastination or progress.

I think it's procrastination and it's good when you're trying to maximise your creativity

Creative work, according to Hungarian psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, there are five steps to getting to a sort of finish point. They are:

Preparation
Incubation
Insight
Evaluation
Elaboration

 

When you and I look at that list, there are five whole levels of procrastination

Tiny tasks would blur those five elements together in a matter of seconds. However, the moment you have to write an article, compose some music, or even put that plant you bought last week, it all requires five chunky steps. Trying to rush a project of some complexity through those stages, is likely to be counterproductive.

Even so, every stage of the procrastination process needs to be long enough, but not so long that you completely forget about it. The bigger the project, the more likely you're to push it to the back burner and then it just lies in a corner, unfinished.

Properly managed procrastination seems paradoxical

Procrastination by its very nature is putting off something for the future because you don't want to deal with it right now. Managed procrastination, however, is where you do a tiny bit, then put off the rest for just a little while. In some cases, you may start on the task in the morning, and continue your task a lot later in the day.

For other tasks, it might be a lot better to hit the pause button until the next day. While you're seemingly stuck on the pause button, your brain will come up with different angles to solve the problem. If you're writing an article, you'll have different examples, possibly even a different way of expressing yourself.

The more significant the task, the more the complexity

Writing an article might be no big deal for one person, but for you, it might mean a lot of sweat, tears and a bit of beer too. Even so, professionals tend to have some system that will take them through preparation, incubation, and insight. The job gets done as a first draft, then you come back to evaluation and for some elaboration.

The more we find ourselves working through these steps, the greater the procrastination. However, it's a managed form instead of simply putting things off, like we usually do.

Distraction has a bad name and rightly so

We're off on a tangent when we should be working on our project. Unlike the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen, we have too much to cope with all at once. When you accept distraction as part of your day to day life, procrastination becomes even more vital. You realise that once you're done with a pre-designated chunk of work, you're going to reward yourself with some distraction, so your brain doesn't slip into a downward spiral.

Hours later, or even a few days later, you're fresh, filled with a range of ideas and examples (that you no doubt jotted down) and the very same project has a raw new energy. The distraction, unfortunate as it may seem, is not quite so ugly if you plan for it in advance.

In previous versions of the Article Writing Course, I'd get clients to write an article every day

Then around 2016, someone mentioned that she was taking 3-4 hours to finish the article every night. I was appalled at the idea, because in my mind, clients should be taking between 60-90 minutes at best, to write an article.

If you spend 3-4 hours, you merely get exhausted, and the material isn't 300%, and often a lot worse than if you're not so exhausted. Hence I went about re-engineering the Article Writing Course. On Monday, the clients only write topics. On Tuesday they outline the topics.

As the week winds its way to Wednesday, they chip away at the article using the system of procrastination. Instead of writing five articles a week, they may end up with just two. However, those articles are of a higher quality, and the student isn't dreading the following week as much. Make no mistake; learning a new skill or working on a project with twists and turns, is never going to be easy.

However, slaving your way through it is a silly strategy. Going through several stages makes more much more productive, more valuable content and finished projects.

And if procrastination worked for projects alone, it would be wonderful. However, there's another excellent application for managed procrastination. I use it for my e-mail. How? Let's find out.

2) How to use procrastination to deal with the deluge of e-mail.

On Sunday nights, I sit down to go through my e-mail.
That way when I wake up on Monday, I expect my inbox to be empty or at least sparse.

Hah, I should be so lucky.

No matter how much you and I deal with e-mail, there's always more coming through. And easily the biggest problem with e-mail is that it drains you. If you're doubtful about this, start up a new e-mail account and look at the vast blankness of that account. Not a single e-mail sits in your inbox in that new account. And if you sneak back later, maybe 20 minutes later, there's still nothing to be seen.

Now if only you could make your current inbox so neat and tidy, eh?

Well, you can. And it's all a matter of managed procrastination. Email software has gotten very smart over the years and some of it is free, while some of it requires a subscription of some sort. What most modern e-mail software allows you to do is to push e-mail away until it's needed. Maybe someone is requesting an article that I won't tackle until next week.

Normally I'd just let it sit in my inbox, because it needs to be done. Or I may put it in a folder that I won't ever see again.   But at this point, and because of e-mail software, I can push it away. In other words, procrastination comes to the rescue.

On any given day, I'll deal with the urgent e-mails right away.

Everything else gets pushed for later. Either later today, which is about 3 hours after reading it, or for the evening, weekend, next week, next month, or at a specific date and time. Like Friday, 29 Sep at 3:13 pm, for example. No matter how important you are as a person, most of your e-mail can be allocated to another time zone, when you're more likely to be able to tackle what needs to be done.

For instance, some emails that require more effort, I'll either deal with right now, or push until later. It's hard to say which ones you should keep and which ones you should push away. How you defer your e-mails depends on your work load and your mood.

But one thing is clear

If you've ever had an inbox with zero e-mails or just a couple of e-mails, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You feel like a burden has been lifted off your shoulders. You feel free. You feel excited—ok, ok, I'll stop. And yet, all this procrastination, managed as it is, may seem like you're just fooling yourself. We all put reminders and alarms and when we're supposed to do the task, we swipe away that reminder.

Won't the e-mail that comes back be just an excuse to swipe it away for somewhere in the future?

I once had a few e-mails that kept coming back

At first I'd send them off for a week, as they were not urgent. But I soon found myself pushing them away for a month. They showed up in the inbox in January, February, then again in March. April, May—which is when I decided I was never going to act on them and simply archived them to pull up, should I ever need them again. If you're never going to read that e-mail now or later, you may as well get rid of it or archive it (because you never know).

E-mail is a fact of life

We don't expect to get less. We're always going to get more. And it sucks our energy to keep scanning e-mails in our box, often opening some we've already read. Much better to clear up that box so that the e-mails appear later, or as when needed in the future. To get this job done, I used Boomerang for Gmail (which is a paid service and costs about $5 a month).

On the Mac, you also have Spark, which does an excellent job and strangely is free. I know nothing about the PC because I walked away from PCs back in 2008, though Boomerang works with Outlook and should be PC-friendly.

All e-mail isn't the same

Some need to be dealt with right away. Some can do with managed procrastination. Use the procrastination and you'll be more relaxed and you'll have that new e-mail account feeling yet again.

Which takes us to the third part—and probably the biggest reason why procrastination helps.

3) Why Procrastination Can Be Good For Energy Levels

If you head to Uluru, also known as Ayer's Rock, your first experience as you leave the airport, is an invasion of bush flies. Within seconds they're swarming all over your face and in some misguided effort, you try to get rid of them. Do what you will, but they keep coming and you have the sense of losing the battle.

Work can seem a bit like bush flies, at times

You try swatting it away, but it comes back with gusto. And as you take on the day, your energy keeps edging downward. That's how our brains function; first at reasonably high efficiency, and then we seem to get slower, even making more mistakes. Procrastination, managed procrastination makes for a great energy reboot.

Which is why I'll work for a couple of hours in the morning, then go for a walk. Then I'll work for another couple of hours and then go cook lunch. All of these breaks may well seem like “wasted time” but it's “time well wasted”.

But even within that “work time”, I'll mix up activities

For instance, I may start writing an article, but then move to answering e-mail, and then to writing detailed answers to questions asked by 5000bc members. Every activity is different and disconnected. The article writing might create the highest demand on my brain, which is when I have to procrastinate after a while. Trying to take on the article on the very same day might be totally counter-productive, so I'll go build the website or go to 5000bc, instead. The activities will vary between high energy and low, all day long.

However, in between there's a clear sense of adding chunks of procrastination.

Going from one end to the other is seen as focus

Most of us revere the concept of focus, but focus doesn't mean that you have to start and finish everything at one go. A lot of activities both work-related and non-work related could all do with the break up of the activity. For instance, when I'm talking a complex dish, I'll make sure I do it in phases. That phase by phase method is really nothing but a form of managed procrastination, and a good use of high energy vs. low energy tasks.

Procrastination is often seen as a form of laziness

And for some of us, that's just what it can turn out to be. We are either so drained by the activity that lies in front of us that we choose to avoid it, causing a further drain on energy. We know it's still on our to-do list and that drives us crazy, even though it's hard to admit it to ourselves.

However, managed procrastination is a whole different kettle of fish. When used well, it can keep your energy high so that at 5 pm every evening you're still raring to go, instead of feeling washed out and unable to do much.

Use procrastination to your advantage.
Use it to formulate better thoughts and better examples.
Use it in your e-mail to keep that inbox clean as a whistle.
And finally keep your energy high right through the day by mixing high and low energy tasks, thus using a slightly sophisticated version of procrastination.

Next Up: Can Resistance be Beaten?

We want to achieve a lot, but as soon as we get started, resistance kicks in. But did you know there are ways around resistance? Resistance loves to play the game of winner. We need to put resistance in second place. Here's how to go about the task of winning the resistance game.

Some days you just feel fed up of your work. You know you shouldn't. You love what you do, but you can't shake the feeling. You almost have to drag yourself to work and you don't know how to turn the day around.

That day can quickly turn into a second day. Before you know it, the week is a puddle of frustration. But there's a way out of this mess and it's incredibly simple. You can turn your day around in 30 minutes. Let's find out how.

You can read the transcript on the website: #164: How To Transform A Miserable Day Into A Happy One, In Under 30 Minutes

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How to turn a miserable day around in 30 minutes: Episode 166

 

 

How do you get clients to return?

One of the most underrated tactics is often right under your nose. Yet most people having events don't realise the mistake they're making and have to work a lot harder to get clients to come back.

In this episode we look at what every business should do: not just get a client but get the client to come back repeatedly.

Read online: How to Get Clients To Return To An Offline Event

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If you head down to the South Island of New Zealand, you'll run into a little French town called Akaroa.

The story goes all the way back to 1838 when the commander of the French whaling ship Cachalot what can only be called a slightly questionable purchase of the land around the area. Then, the French colonists left France to sail to New Zealand to establish a French colony.

The French did get to Akaroa but found a treaty had been signed between the Māori and the British. The whole of New Zealand was officially a British colony. As the story goes, the French were just a wee bit late.

The French seemingly missed out on yet another colony, and we can feel the impact of being late when it comes to testimonial-gathering as well.

But why testimonials?

Because testimonials are the lifeblood of any organisation, product or service.

The more testimonials you have in place, the more the prospective client can experience your product or service, long before they pay for it. Which is why books have testimonials on their dust jackets, and websites have testimonials on every single product or service.

But back to the concept of lateness

If you wait long enough, the client is unlikely to give you a testimonial, simply because they've gotten too busy. It's also harder for the client to gush as much once they've moved on.

2) How and when to get testimonials

Getting a testimonial for an event is almost as important as the event itself. For one, when a client gives a testimonial, they're ratifying they made the right decision to attend the event. However, it gives you, the person holding the event, a chance to make sure you never have to struggle to fill in seats in future.

Which is why you should get testimonials during the breaks

If you don't have breaks in your event, there's no way to stop the juggernaut from rolling on. At Psychotactics we have workshops, and for information-based events, it's critical to have many breaks or clients simply get more tired.

If you're having an event like a cooking class or a watercolour class, something that's not usually break-oriented, it's easy to forget that every event could do with a break of some sort. People need to get to the toilet; they need just to step outside or reduce the intensity of what's happening.

Most trainers or people hosting events fail to pay attention to the concept of breaks, merely because they think it will stop the flow of the event. What you'll quickly realise is that people regroup speedily and focus better after a short break. It gives you some downtime as the organiser, and it leaves some room should something go wrong during the event.

If you simply go from one end to the other, you're not really planning for any chaos, and as we know, that's a hazardous strategy. Chaos can erupt from nowhere, and it's best to prepare for it in advance, by having at least one, if not several breaks.

It's in this break that you're going to be able to get your testimonial

Usually a client will be having a great time and will come and tell you so. It will quickly be evident as to who's having the most fun, and you can usually go up to them and ask if you can shoot a quick video.

Be prepared to know in advance where you can shoot the video, ideally some places that are slightly quieter and away from the scene of action. I tend to use another room or another area close enough, but far away from the group.

Ideally get 2-3 people to give testimonials, and in about 10 minutes, you can get about three quick testimonials that can be used in a video, audio, or when transcribed, in text format.

Be sure to use the six-questions found in The Brain Audit

The Brain Audit gives you typical questions to ask a client, and when you use the format of the six-questions, you get a client experience instead of yet another sugar-coated testimonial. It also gives you a clear pathway to follow when asking the testimonial. You rarely have time as you have to get back to the event itself.

Even so, you may well run out of time, and it's good to schedule testimonials for the breaks, but also for a short time after the event. Despite all your best intentions, sometimes it's not possible to get the testimonials, or all the testimonials during the event.

Even if that's the case, ask people if you can call them on Skype video and get a testimonial. Most people will agree, and that serves as a form of an appointment, and you've more or less got your testimonial in the bag.

Waiting for a testimonial after the event can often be too late

Once people leave, or if they don't make a commitment to speak later, the task of getting a testimonial gets increasingly harder as the days go by. You're eager to recover after your event, and they're keen to go back to their lives.

This means you've lost the one thing that's incredibly important to business: third party proof. Getting a testimonial needs to be almost as important as conducting the event itself.

At Psychotactics we've goofed not once or twice, but often

It's quite tiring getting an event off the ground. You're never quite sure whether clients are quite ready for the testimonial. And notice that break?

That break should give you a breather as well, but you're often using it to get testimonials. However, we've had to learn to structure our testimonial system in a way that we get a bit of a break and get our testimonials too.

There are times when it's all too much to do on the day itself. For instance, we hosted some really popular meetups that were three hours long but went on for six and seven hours.

It was difficult to break away from the fun and chatter to record a testimonial. It does feel a lot like work, and it takes an iron resolve to keep working when everyone is having a great time.

If it's really so hard to break away, simply ask the group to write each of their names on a piece of paper and give it to you. Later, you know who's keen to provide you with the testimonial, and you can call in or video chat and get your testimonial.

Testimonials are how clients decide, so getting them early is critical to your business. But there's one more thing to cover, isn't there? It's about getting the clients back. How do you do that?

Let's find out.

3) How to get clients to come back.

If you were to get a dolphin to do a trick in the pool, would the size of the reward matter?

In the wonderful book, “Don't Shoot the Dog”, author, Karen Pryor talks about how a dolphin would learn and execute a trick. However, the trainer decided to give the dolphin a smaller fish as a reward.

You'd think the dolphin wouldn't bother too much, considering a fish is a fish, is a fish. However, dolphins do care about the specifics too, just like humans. Which is why if you get a client to come to your event once, you're going to have to figure out how to get them to keep coming back.

You've probably heard that getting a new client is the most expensive part of a business, right?

Even if you don't spend any money on advertising or publicity, getting a client to trust you and attend your first event is a huge task. And your mission should be to get the client to come back repeatedly, if possible.

When a client trusts you, they're likely to sign up at higher prices, and without needing you to create a long sales page and endless promotional messages. Which brings us back to the fish, doesn't it? Why do clients tend to come to one event and never return?

There are many reasons why clients may not return, but one of the most significant responsibility lies with you

One of the biggest reasons why clients come to information based events is, ironically, not to get information. We may believe they come to get more knowledge, but YouTube is full of information.

So is Google, Bing and their inbox. The reason they're coming to you is to get less confusion and more skill. Strangely, the information you're imparting can only be less confusing if you just what's required.

When we started out with Psychotactics, we had no idea how to get the client back to an event

We got lucky because we sat down and did some planning in advance. At the very first event, where I presented early concepts found in The Brain Audit, I had an ending section where I talked about follow up sessions.

For $75 a month, clients could be part of a group that learned different concepts just like The Brain Audit. We'd didn't have the money to book a venue, so we asked for help, and people offered their offices since no one was around after 6 pm anyway. But why did clients sign up for the follow-up sessions?

It's because they got their reward, their right-sized fish, the first time they showed up. That presentation, as amateur as it may have been, got them to a result and they were keen to come back.

If you're hosting an event, clients are eager to get a similar sort of reward } If you're teaching them how to do a pose in yoga, please don't spend the evening showing them ten thousand poses. Show them one or two and get them to a result.

If you have a cooking class, don't run around like a headless chicken trying to get five-six dishes going. A single dish, maybe two will do the job. Clients are increasingly going nuts with the level of information that's streaming through their doors.

What they're looking for isn't a bucketload of fish. They just want one—provided it's the right size.

When we did our first event, we didn't expect anyone to sign up for future events

All the same, we put our strategy together and were pleasantly surprised when about ten people signed up and consistently showed up over the year to follow. Some of those clients then attended higher priced workshops and even ended up consulting with us.

All of this information is very important for those of us who've grown up believing that everything can be done online. The internet is a great tool to market our business, but just starting up a blog and hoping people will visit is a strategy that may get you quickly disappointed.

The core of today's world is a factor of overwhelm, but also a sense of loneliness. Which is why an offline workshop or event should deliver not just a factor of skill, but also the chance to meet others on a similar journey.

So what do you do from this point on?

The first thing you need to do is to work out how you can get the client the reward he/she is seeking. If they come to an event that promises they'll learn to make mozzarella, then all of them should be walking out with that mozzarella-making skill.

Once you have them at the event, and possibly get a few testimonials, you need to do them the courtesy of asking them to come back repeatedly. Even if you're hosting an event in a different country, there's a high likelihood that clients will come back to future events.

Over 50% of the attendees at any event, have met with us before or been through our courses or events. We invite them back to another event, and they come along happily because they enjoy the experience.

If you're going to do an event, plan for six, or ten

This is true especially if your audience is local. The key is to prepare, go into the event, give the participants a skill and call them back. That's the way to go about making sure your events are full in future.

Three things to consider:
1) Where you'll get your clients
2) How and when to get testimonials
3) How to get them to come back.

Now go out there and host your event and give your computer a break .

Next Up: Imagine being a hostage at your own workshop!

Imagine not having access to your own venue; having to take permission from someone else just to conduct your event. This is the crazy story of the very first Psychotactics U.S. Workshop. And while it's an entertaining story all by itself, there's a lot to learn as well for any small business owner.
Click here to read more: The Psychotactics Story_The Craziness of The Very First US Workshop

Most of us dream of having an online business

We are led to believe it's fine to just start up a blog and the audience will show up. Reality is a lot different. It takes time for an audience to appear. And when they do appear, it takes time to trust you.

So how do you speed up that process of client acquisition and trust? Welcome to the land of offline events. In this episode we'll see why you should have the event and how to get your clients.

Read the transcript online: Why You Need An Offline Event to Boost Your Chances of Success

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I don't like Microsoft Excel. However, my wife, Renuka does.

She can spend hours, even days tinkering with that “weird” program and come up with some statistics that are plainly astounding. One day as we sat down to lunch, as we do every afternoon, she announced the results of her morning escapade with Excel.

“Guess what percentage of our income is derived from workshops and offline events?”

Before I could answer, she revealed her statistics. The income we earned from offline events was barely 2% of our income. This tiny percentage wasn't terribly surprising to both of us, because we knew that conducting international events was an expensive exercise. Even so, I was a bit ambivalent at the thought of putting in so much work and getting a return of just 2%.

That's when Renuka revealed her ace, “Guess how much of our income comes as a direct result of those events?” she continued. And mercifully I didn't need Excel to answer that question, because I've done the hand-raising ceremony at our live events. What's the hand-raising ceremony, you ask?

At workshops, I will ask how many clients have done one online course with us, and at least 50% of the hands go up. Then I ask them to keep their hands raised if they've done two courses and few hands, if any, go down.

Three courses? The hands still stay up. The courses at Psychotactics are not necessarily cheap. While some start at around $900, the hands-on courses can cost as much as $3300.

If at this point you think that it's the online courses that lead clients to come to the in-person workshop, then it's the other way round.

Clients that meet us in person, tend to sign up for the online courses, and then just for good measure come back and attend an in-person event as well. It makes perfect sense to you, when you think of it in terms of dating, doesn't it? A relationship can be formed online, but to make sure you're not picking the wrong person, you and I, we both have to do the offline thing: we have to meet.

The exciting bit about the meeting is that it doesn't always have to be a big event

At Psychotactics, we've had three-day, four-day, even seven-day in-person workshops. At other times, we've had a presentation for between 20-45 minutes. But there have also been situations where we've just spent a few hours in a meetup, given answers to client's questions and then gone for an extended lunch or dinner.

In every case, the results are similar. Clients that get to know us don't bother to go to the sales page with a fine tooth comb. When we offer a product, workshop or course, they sign up instantly. They have met us offline, they get to know us well, and they trust us. When you see and meet someone one the flesh, you can often make a pretty accurate assessment of whether to go ahead or not.

Which is why despite the meagre 2% income from workshops and events, we continue to run offline events.

But what if you're just starting out?

You may not have any books or products to sell the clients who attend your event. You aren't likely to have an online course or training system.

Is it still worth it? Without a doubt, it's one of the best ways to get started, no matter what you're planning to do for a living. In most cases, a workshop will get you to interact with clients, you'll find out what interests them, and you'll get instant feedback. Plus, if you do your budgeting well, you're likely to make more than just 2%.

When we did our very first workshop back in the early days of Psychotactics, we were rewarded for our audacity.

I was part of a networking group, and I cajoled several of the members to show up and bring their friends along. The fee was $75 for the evening. The cafe owner offered to rent us the place for no cost and even provided the coffees free of charge. That event netted us $1500 because 20 people showed up.

But it didn't stop at that point. It's a well-known fact that the hardest sell is the first one, so I'd prepared myself to sell recurring events just like this one. How did we go about this task? And how do you do something similar?

This series will cover three core factors.

1) Why consider planning an event—offline
2) Where to get clients
3) How to get people to sign up and the next step.

1) Where to get your clients

When I was just about eight or nine years old, I had a job on Sundays.

Not every Sunday, of course, but around the months of late May and most of June was when my father needed my brother and me to pitch in, in the family business. Since my father ran a secretarial college, admissions would start in July, which meant that we had to stand outside churches and hand out a leaflet. After reading those flyers, many young women would then sign up for the year-long batch that started in July.

But why churches? As it turned out, most secretaries at the time were almost exclusively Catholic.

In Mumbai, India, masses are held on Sundays, on the hour from 6 am, and then all the way until 10 am. Which meant that we'd often be giving out hundreds of leaflets to everyone coming out of the church.

Some of whom would either become secretaries or would pass on the leaflet to a friend or relative. In effect, to start up any business, you need to show up and make yourself known in places where your future clients congregate.

If you've been brought up on the goodness of the internet, you might think the best idea in the world is to sit behind a computer, write a blog and the clients will come rushing in. In several cases that method of creating content is valid, but it could take a lot of time, money and energy to get that kind of business model off the ground. Which is why you may as well take a deep breath and go offline. Scary as it may seem, it's time to do an in-person event instead.

Which raises a very pertinent question: Where do you get clients?

The answer is not apparent and for good reason Let's say you wanted to start a cooking class. Let's say you're no champ at making Michelin starred meals, but you're no slouch at cooking either.

Where would you go? Do you randomly post leaflets into your neighbourhood boxes? That's one option, but there would be a lot of waste as it's unlikely that everyone in your neighbourhood is suddenly going to be interested in investing a frying pan and heading to your class.

Instead, go looking for a problem that needs solving.

When you look at the leaflets being distributed outside the church, it seems like a scattergun approach, doesn't it? However, as we already noted, there was a method to the madness. The girls were out of school or college and back in the early seventies, those were among the only jobs available to them.

It enabled them to get more independent and earn a reasonable income. When looking for your audience, you too need to look at the problem you're solving and not focus on just the solution. The problem you're likely to address is: unsure of how to make meals that kids love? The answer is “how to make meals that kids will eat in minutes”.

And where would you find kids? Right, you figured it out, didn't you? At the playground, in schools—even in doctor's waiting rooms fighting those millions of germs they seem to attract.

But what if you're selling a product instead, like a microphone?

Again, we don't necessarily start out with an audience, but tackle the problem, instead. What problem does the microphone solve? The Rode Podcaster, for instance, combines broadcast quality audio with the simplicity of USB connectivity, allowing recording direct to a computer without the need for an additional digital interface.

Suddenly finding kids and their parents for a cooking class seems a lot simpler, doesn't it? However, you're more likely to find a group of podcasters that meet locally. If you look up a site like MeetUp.com, you're more than likely to find all sorts of different groups.

But what if you looked long and hard and not a single podcast group shows up? Well, let's go past the technology problem and see what problem a microphone can solve. It helps a business owner record podcasts, or just have better-sounding screen recordings or screen videos for their business. The business owner can simply plug in the microphone, and they're well on their way to recording without needing to get muddled up with digital interfaces.

Every product or service is going to solve a problem

Sometimes you can find clients in an obvious place.

For example, we were able to find clients at our networking group. However, we also went on to meet with a group of coaches who held their weekly meetings not far from where we lived. We found dentists who needed marketing advice. I know this sounds bizarre, but we also wrote and got paid for articles in an alpaca magazine. We didn't get to do a workshop or in-person event with the alpaca folks, but the example is designed to show you how to look beyond the obvious.

In some cases, your audience is likely to be pretty narrow

Kelly Q lives in Australia, and her audience is a relatively tiny niche of “supply teachers”. Know what happens when your kid's teacher can't make it for the day? They get a temporary teacher, don't they? They're called “supply teachers” or “teachers for the day”.

Kelly writes a book that helps them work out the issues that plague supply teachers, and her business has started to take off. Where did she find her audience? Not offline, but online in teaching groups and Facebook groups. In her case, the Internet has come to the rescue and enabled her to sell her book. Yes, it's not an offline audience, to begin with, but over time every audience whether you find them online or offline can be engaged within a real setting, in a real place, and drinking real coffee.

2) What's the first step to finding an offline audience?

Sit down with a couple of friends or someone who knows your business well and write a list of the problems your company solves. Once you have the problem, or problems worked out, you can find out the audience that needs your solution. If you're still struggling a bit, try going to a site like MeetUp.com.

For Psychotactics, I had no luck with volleyball teams, or with potters, but that got me to think of volleyball coaches who might need marketing advice or pottery companies. With a little bit of brainstorming, you should be able to find several groups or at least ideas for where to get started.

But what's next? How do you go about getting people to sign up for your event?

3) How to get people to sign up to your event

You know the phrase that says, “Think Big”? Well, the way to get people to sign up, is to get rid of the idea of thinking big. And I stumbled upon this “think small” idea quite by mistake. When we started out, I'd always compare myself with more prominent marketers, and somehow extrapolate their numbers to my own. If they had 5000 people at their event, I automatically assumed that 150 people at my to-be-event were entirely feasible. Then I ran into a friend of mine, Kushla Martin, excitedly told me about an event she was attending and that she'd paid $75 for the event.

Two things struck me at once

The first thing I realised was that it wasn't some elaborate event that I was always dreaming about. It was a simple speech that would take an hour, possibly a couple of hours. Kushla was more than happy to go out, get inspired and pay $75 for the advice.

The $75 was the second point that stuck in my head. When you have to make a decision that involves hundreds or thousands of dollars, there's a lot of decision-making, fund-checking to be done. With an $75 event price, it was relatively easy to decide to go. Even though my business was relatively new, I too had been to at least two or three events that ranged in the $50 to $75 range.

But how do you get people to sign up for your event?

You merely announce the event, the venue and put a price on it. Remember that clients aren't coming to your event just to support you, though a few friends might just do that. They're there to learn something so that they can use it in their own lives and business. So ask yourself: what will the clients get as a result of attending your event?

Sachie's Kitchen in Auckland, New Zealand started with a simple goal in mind. Run by Sachie Nomura who's Japanese and her husband, Nick (who is Kiwi-Chinese) their goal was to take the most helpless cook and turn him or her into what they call a “black belt of Japanese cooking” in a single 2 ½ hour session.

A cookbook store called CookTheBooks, also in Auckland, turned their backyard shed into a kitchen of sorts teaching (and serving) Sri Lankan, Moroccan, North African, Spanish and other cuisines. The clients that come to their events know exactly what result they'll get. In Sachie's kitchen it's a masterclass on Japanese cooking.

In CooktheBooks, it's a bit of knowledge of the cuisine, but it's a great fun evening out and hence it attracts office groups and friends along.

Should you consider having free events?

You could, but it's hard to get people to show up to free events. Remember those series of sessions we did back when we first started? Those were paid sessions, and you could safely say that between 80-90% showed up month after month. Several years later, we decided to give back to the community and host free monthly sessions of one hour each.

For over a year, participants turned up, and the room was always packed with 40 people, but it was never the same people. When an event is free, it's easier to stay at home if it's a windy, rainy day. We found the same with our meetups worldwide. When we'd announce a free meet up in a city, people would turn up, but not in force.

The moment we started charging a modest fee of $30 or so, everyone turned up. Free events are harder to market and even harder to sell. It's better to restrict your free goodies to something online or also something you can give away at the event itself. By and large, you'd do well to avoid free events.

What do you do next?

Depending on how you publicise your event, you can put details on sites like Eventbrite or EventFinda. Those are event sites in this part of the Pacific. You'll have some event sites on your side of the world.

f you're meeting with a group of people, for example, a group of volleyball coaches, you can get them to sign up and often pay through a mobile device. Finally, don't forget to print a few leaflets that talk about the results you're going to get the clients. If you just want them to meet and have a great time, make that the focus of your leaflet and marketing. If you want it to be deadly serious, that's fine too. I've been to watercolour classes, photography sessions, dancing lessons and even bought a couple of houses as a result of offline events.

However, once you've got the event going, it's time to think of the next step

You'd think the contents of the event are pretty important, right? And they are, but that's what you have to put together. No one can tell you what agenda you need.

You can pretty much work it out yourself, and even if you're feeling reasonably nervous, no one is going to notice. The first 5-10 minutes of any event are reasonably nerve wracking but once you settle in, the crowd relaxes, and everyone has a decent time. However, while settling in, you may easily forget a crucial next step.

Next Up: How do we get clients to come back?

How do you get clients to return? One of the most underrated tactics is often right under your nose. Let's look at what every business should do—not just get a client but get the client to come back repeatedly.

How do you redefine the term “passion”?

A definition shouldn't be a barrier to your progress, should it? Yet, the moment you hear people talking about passion, you're stuck. And that's because their definition is all wrong. How do you redefine the term “passion”? And what does one-buttock have to do with passion? Let's find out.

You can read this episode online: One Buttock Passion

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In a TED Talk that's been watched over 9 million times, the conductor of the Boston Philamornic, talks about a seven year-old child.

And this is what conductor, Benjamin Zander, says in his speech.

He talks about a seven-year old child and what he sounds like when he's pounding on the piano. Clearly, the sounds that emanate from the piano border on pain. Even so, if that seven-year old practices for a year and yes, takes lessons, he's now eight. And the piano isn't screaming out in terror any more.

Benjamin Zander goes on to talk about how the child sounds when he's nine, then when he's ten. At which, point, Zander suggests that most kids give up. However, if he'd waited for one more year, he would have sounded pretty wonderful.

Zander takes pain to suggest that it's not that the kid became suddenly passionate, engaged or hit puberty. He explains that when the child was younger, he was playing with an impulse on every note. Then as he got better, he was playing with an impulse on every other note. At 10, it was every eight notes. And the 11-year-old had one impulse on the entire phrase.

Zander calls this the “one buttock” moment

When instead of hogging the piano stool with both buttocks, the music takes over and you're taken over by the music itself, so that you're playing on a single buttock. People who try to find their passion are two-buttock players. At the start of their journey they're struggling to hit the right impulses and this is because of the information they get about passion.

-Stop looking for your passion.
-Knowing something well and solving someone's problem is more commonplace than you believe.

-Why the terminology is all wrong—and hence drives us crazy.
-What if you know too much or too little?

Think about passion for a second and what does it sound like to you?

It sounds remarkably like love at first sight, doesn't it? You don't equate passion with spending five years chasing after a girl or a guy to get their attention. Instead, it's quick, it's instant. You have a new type of drink, possibly a wonderful Pisco sour, and you fall head over heels with it.

Now you want to talk about it to everyone. You want Pisco sour for breakfast, lunch and dinner, if possible. It's all about instant, now, magical moments. And that's what passion sounds like to everyone, whenever it's brought up in a conversation.

But passion for your work is almost never like that It's almost always a kind of slight attraction, a lot of frustration, some joy, some more frustration, some more joy. And then bingo, you look backwards and it's no longer two-buttocks on the seat.

Take me for example. Most people consider me to be a really proficient writer. Without fail and for 40 weeks a year, I diligently turn out at least 5000 words a week. That's the bare minimum, by the way. However, I had no passion for 500 word-articles, let alone 5000. In time, I could turn out 500 word articles while conducting two courses, it was that easy. And may I add, fun too. I was one-buttocking my way to writing.

In 2014, I started writing longer pieces that progressively moved into the 5000 word zone.

As we were having coffee this morning, Renuka reminded me how I was getting upset with her all the time. Well, really I was getting upset with myself. I couldn't come up with topics. Writing 5000 word articles would drain me completely. I'd reach out to her to get ideas, and of course it wasn't something that she was interested in, so it wasn't possible to suggest something as quickly as I needed it.

This would cause me to complain, and quite bitterly at times, that she wasn't helping me at all. In reality, I was a one-buttock 500-word writer, but a two-buttock 5000-word writer. Then, later, much later in 2017, something happened. Yes, you know what happened. I was writing and able to look at the back as well and notice that one buttock was off the chair.

Now I have the opposite problem I have so many 5000 word articles, that I barely have time to write them. I have about 5 or 6 of them outlined and ready to go, and by the time I write them, it will be a week or two from today. By which time, another 5 or 6 will be in the queue, if not more. The passion I'm feeling for writing, just wasn't there when I started Psychotactics, then it came along. Then it wasn't there at the 5000 article mark, and now it's suddenly all fun and games again.

Even so, there's nothing instant about passion. The idea of passion is all wrong.

This one-buttock stuff just takes time. This is not a Pisco sour where you swig it down and you hit an instant high. This is slow, often boring, consistently frustrating progress. One more example and I'm out of here.

I recently bought an app because I love cooking. The name of this app is Paprika (yes, like the spice). And I was instantly in love with it. I could use it on day one and I continued to sing its praises. I even did a double spread cartoon about the app in my Moleskine diary. This experience with the Paprika app is diametrically different to the the experience with Evernote. I didn't like Evernote. I found it hard to work with. I made excuses, I deleted it from my computer, from my iPhone and then installed it again.

Then over time, as I learned how amazingly eccentric it was, I started to love it. And today I'm passionate about Evernote. How do I know that to be true? Because if you gave me the option of deleting one app and keeping the other, the Paprika's head would be on a plate in a second. I would never, ever, ever, ever, give up Evernote, if I could help it.

So all this talk about follow your passion is going to take you nowhere because the starting point is more frustration than one-buttock playing. Which leaves us with a nagging question.

Where do you go from here?

The key is to start learning something you think would work for you. Maybe learn how to do some pottery; or make face cream; or how to build running shoes. Perhaps you're already skilled at something and need to get the message out and need to learn about how to give a better presentation or write better. Wherever you are now, it's where all entrepreneurs are at any point in their lives.

They are almost always in transition. There's almost always that point where you get a bit fidgety and want to do something else, or at least the same thing differently. Whatever it is you have an inkling for, the only way to get the passion to keep going until you look back and see your one buttock.

It's an inexact science, but it boils down to a few simple steps

You start, not necessarily knowing where you're going You run into a lot of frustration until things start to ease up a bit. You aren't doing very well, but you still love what you do, and you persist. Eventually, the tide turns in your favour. You get terrific. And clients think you're close to perfect. It's an inexact science that requires a good deal of focus and persistence.

That's when your passion will find you. And that's all I can really say. The journey is long, but it sure is interesting. You may as well start today.

A few questions on passion:

1) I do have a question: How do you find that intersection passion or even exploring a passion and solving someone's problem? Especially when you have too many interests and passions & can solve several problems just like you can. Or you just pick one and stick with it until you find a reason to change the course.

2. How about people who draw a complete blank on their hobbies, interests or often times they are things like playing tennis but at 50, bodies don't cooperate very well, or a mum who wants to learn calligraphy but fears what's the point of that and where will that lead her, or someone who simply draws a blank? I have met several people like this and it fascinates me that I have a complete different problem to what they are struggling with.

Everyone has either a problem where they feel they know nothing.

Or they know too much. The point is the people who feel they know nothing, haven't really thought things through. I know a woman who for years was just a stay-at-home mother. Technically, that doesn't get you very far if you're looking for a job or want to start a business. She had no intention of starting a business, so she got a job. And how do you get a job if you don't have the skill? That's an easy answer, isn't it?

You look at what you want to learn, and you learn it. Then you apply for the job, and if you meet the requisite needs of the employer, voilà, you have the job. We all know how this system works, don't we? Most of us have had to do some kind of job at some point, whether at home or at work, and we get the skills and off we go.

If you know nothing or believe you know nothing, you have to learn something

This very same person never cooked much. For her a sandwich is as interesting as a fancy meal. Even so, she got herself some cookbooks and took to baking. She now bakes all the time and turns out some great pies, muffins and all sorts of goodies that you and I are not supposed to eat. Once again, no experience, no knowledge magically turns to a high level of skill.

Almost everyone can create something, if they're not physically or mentally handicapped. It sounds trite when someone says the word “simple”, but it's really that simple. To get a skill, you have to learn a skill. To get better at the skill, you have to practice the skill. To get good at muffin-making, you have to burn some muffins before you get your Michelin stars. The same analogy applies to business.

You can sit around thinking that you know nothing, can do nothing and end up doing nothing

The result of all this inactivity isn't nothing. It's a few levels below nothing. Feelings of uselessness wash over you with increasing rapidity. Others see you as directionless and lazy, or just confused. Yet, think of yourself as being 15 years old again and wanted to move into a career. You wouldn't be aimless. You'd pick a college. You'd pick a university. You'd do a professional course. You'd learn, and acquire the skill knowing fully well that it was just a matter of time before you had enough ability to do the task.

There is the flip side to ability, of course.

When I was 25, I felt like I was a bit cursed. I adored Photoshop. I wanted to spend all day with it. But I also drew cartoons. Hey, I could use Photoshop to draw cartoons. No clash of interests, there, are there? But what if you can write, draw, dance, cook, and find there are subsets of everything. Because cooking can involve Italian cooking, but also French. It can involve Sri Lankan cooking, Thai, Malaysian, or Indian.

Suddenly the options are too many. And the excuses increase with every subsequent option. Well, you have to “kill some of your babies”. If you're so very talented, so very skilled, you have to sit down and get yourself a nice big red pencil. Then you make a list of what you can do, by crossing out everything that isn't important right this minute.

You pick one and you stay the course, just like you'd do with a marriage. If things go sour, and you've given it your all, it's time for a change.

The problem with passion is that it changes all the time

When I was growing up, I was a shy kid. All those cartoons you see; all that skill you think is inborn isn't a result of some magical gene in my family. If you go back many generations, you'll find zero cartoonists in our family. All of that drawing came from a lot of encouragement and being much too shy to talk to too many people.

I went through a lot of years, all the way into the first couple of years of university, being relatively shy. If there was one thing I was passionate about, it was drawing. It got better over the years, people complimented me about my talent all the time, and more importantly, it was a perfect “chick magnet”.

While other guys were busy trying to get the attention of the girls in university, I'd sit quietly in the corner of the canteen. I'd drink my chai, open my book and start drawing. Before long, a few girls would be oohing and aahing over the drawings. I didn't have to go and find the girls; the cartoons drew them to me. That's how I got over my shyness, and that's how my passion for drawing cartoons burned even brighter.

But by the time I was in university I wanted to be a copywriter

By the time I'd spent a year and a half in copywriting, I wanted to script 30-second commercials. Then, on a whim, I decided to go back to cartoons. The journey to New Zealand back in the year 2000, caused me to want to get into marketing. Could I end up becoming a chef in the next few years, or find myself obsessed with origami?

It's hard to tell, but look at the story of most entrepreneurs or freelancers, and a common thread starts to reveal itself. Passions change over time, and the starting point of passion is almost always marked by lots of enthusiasm—and a lot of frustration.

It's hard to imagine it now, but back in the years 2000 and 2001 it was really a slog trying to get clients I was passionate about jumping into marketing, but no one else was willing to pay me for it—not for a while at least. And sure we had our website up and running. Sure, we wrote articles. You have to do that for yourself, if not for anyone else.

But the slog continued for quite a while. That frustration is the starting point, and it seems to swirl about like a fog for the longest time. Which is when most people give up and try to find something else.

Something easier, or shinier. And this is where I think the concept of the 10,000 hours really shines.

I don't believe you need to do 10,000 hours to gain a talent

You can get good enough to be hired in a fraction of that time. Even so, the 10,000 hoursmeans you're deep into what you think is important to you. It shows persistence, and if you're spending that much time learning, you will also figure out ways to make things work for you. When I started cartooning, I had no clue how to earn an income. I persisted and found areas where I could make my mark and get paid for it.

The same applies to any skill. At first, if you're floundering, you'll be in that position for a while. If you study your profession well; if you keep improving your skills and more importantly, get away from that computer and into the real world, you'll find that your passion will eventually find its way to you.

In the end it's not about whether you have a passion or not. No one starts off wanting to be an engineer at a waste-recycling plant. No kid runs into the room saying, “when I grow up, I want to sell USB cables to the world”. It's something that you find along the way. That passion comes when you play enough on two buttocks and find you're having fun.

And you know it's one buttock time. For now. Tomorrow, or next year, who knows?

Next up: We are told to start up a business doing what we're passionate about.

How do we know what we are passionate about in the first place?
Let's explore the concept of passion and why you should let your passion find you instead.

Most of us are told to start up a business doing what we're passionate about.

There's just one problem. We don't know what we are passionate about in the first place. How are we supposed to find something we know nothing about? Let's explore the concept of passion and how to stop looking for it, and get it to find you, instead.

Read the podcast on the website: Passion:Let it find you

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Imagine a person who can sniff a perfume and instantly identify the brand

That person is my wife, Renuka. She can quickly work her way through as many as 150 fine fragrances. Fine fragrances are perfumes made in the classical style, by companies such as Chanel, Givenchy, Estee Lauder, Calvin Klein, etc. If you asked her if she's passionate about perfumes, her answer is clearly, yes. She worked in the perfumery industry for well over ten years, spending as much as half an hour to an hour each day, just tuning her nose to the subtleties of every perfume.

Would that count as passion? It should, shouldn't it?

All your life, you're told to follow your passion. To dig deep and find that one thing that makes you ecstatic. Somehow, you're supposed to know almost at the point of leaving school, what you're going to be good at, and to go after that passion. And Renuka didn't fit that bill at all. The only reason she took on the job at the fragrance company was because she was sick and tired of travelling and wanted a marketing job that involved little or no travel.

So how much of a newbie was she at the job?

In Mumbai, India, wearing flowers in your hair is a common trait among women. Whole market spaces are designed just to sell flowers. And two of the most popular flowers worn in women's hair are “mogra” and “jasmine”. When put to the test, Renuka couldn't identify their fragrance. It came as a complete surprise to her when she discovered that soap contained perfume. In short, this was a really miserable start to any kind of passion-hunt.

Success feeds passion, more than passion feeds success

Those are the words of Scott Adams, author and creator of the highly successful cartoon strip, “Dilbert”. And he's right, you know. Passion is a slightly ridiculous word because very few of us know what we're going to be passionate about, and especially so early in life.

If you speak to my nieces, who are 8 and 13, they seem to have a range of things they love. One loves dancing and music to the point where she'll stop chattering and start singing along to the music. Another loves animals and is really fond of the idea of the romantic version of being a vet until she has to do all the un-romantic bits as well.

And that's because success feeds passion I remember going to Fotosoft, a computer training school to learn Photoshop.

Photoshop itself was barely five or six years old having first been released in February 1990. However, I was keen to learn Photoshop. I went to the class, learned what I could and then promptly forgot most of it. To say I was passionate about it, was an incredibly silly statement to make.

Not many years later I needed Photoshop almost all the time. Instead of using the archaic system of creating a sketch, taking photocopies by the dozen and colouring each photocopy, I was able to do a single illustration, scan it in, and colour madly on the screen itself. Then along came the Wacom tablet, and I bought the ArtZ II. I was soon head over heels with Photoshop—a passion that has remained strong for almost 21 years.

Most people don't get hit by a passion bolt of lightning

Instead they fumble, stumble and grumble their way into a whole new world. Along the way, they suddenly run into a whole new world, and they start an exploration process. They look to solve either a problem that has loomed large in their own life or they set out to help someone else. Or like Renuka, they get a highly unusual assignment and then go through the process of falling in love with the skill.

Take someone like Michael Phelps, for instance. Surely he was born to be a swimming champion, right? Nonsense. Phelps hated water as a kid. But he had a problem at school. He had trouble concentrating and was constantly fidgety. When his paediatrician diagnosed him with ADHD, he was expected to take the drug, Ritalin.

When Michael Phelps was in the sixth grade, he was fidgety and had trouble paying attention in the classroom. His paediatrician diagnosed him with ADHD and prescribed Ritalin. To burn off all of that excess energy that Phelps seemed to have, he was told to “swim it off.”

Except for the fact that he hated water

“It's wild to kind of think about how far we've come,” he said in an interview with ESPN. “From my mom putting me in the water safety — I hated the water. I didn't want anything to do with it. I learned on my back.” Now with 23 Olympic medals to his name, we'd all be forgiven for believing that he was born with a passion for water.

Even once he more than made his mark in swimming, his so-called passion flickered wildly. In the run-up to the 2012 Olympics, he routinely skipped practice for days on end. He got into intense arguments with his coach, Bob Bowman. Bowman told Dateline that he wished Phelps would have quit right at that point: “I didn't want him to go through this and I thought it was going to end badly,”.

If you pick successful people at random, you're sure to hit those who knew they were going to make it big

Some people, it seems, were either groomed, or got really good at a skill, and they went on to huge success over time. That's more the exception than the rule. Akio Morita, the founder of Sony first started out making rice cookers that were flops.

The inventor of the pacemaker, Wilson Greatbatch, had no interest in getting the heart to function well. Instead, he spent his days as a young man, absorbed in radio technology. Thomas Knoll, one of the Knoll brothers that invented Photoshop, was a doctoral candidate in computer vision, with no desire to create one of the world's most loved photo retouching tool.

So where do you go to find your passion?

When you hear how Renuka got into the perfumery business, it might seem like a lucky break. The reality is that she sold discount debit cards, to begin with, then timeshares with a company called Dalmia Resorts. Her lucky break was like any other lucky breaks. It wasn't lucky at all.

It was just a matter of getting involved with a project for long enough and finding you're hopeless at it at first, but are willing to stick it out for the duration. Most people start out in one field, get into another, and another and the passion grows, and even wanes over time. One thing is clear: you're not going to find your passion anytime soon.

You'll just have to do what almost everyone before you has done

You'll have to start solving a problem for yourself or someone else. Just writing on a blog or creating a website might be baby steps, but it's probably not going to solve the primary goal of business. A business tends to figure out what a client needs and then create the solution for that problem. To address the problems of the clients, you'll often to get moving past the computer screen.

To get a business going, start those cooking classes, make those guitar videos, teach someone how to do the stuff you know. For starters, all you're doing is going down the road to find success. And success is simply being able to do something decently well. So well, that you're almost starting to enjoy it.

I had no idea I'd like marketing I was positive I hated writing.

I didn't speak very well, cook or dance very well. I started out with a passion for drawing, and that I still do to this day, but not as a profession. Instead my passion hovers around marketing, writing, and yes, I love to dance, cook and I'm a really good speaker.

Forget looking your passion

Learn something well. Solve a problem. Your passion will find you, instead.
But don't you need to know something well before you solve someone else's problem?

Does your neighbour know how to mow a lawn better than you? I'd say if you walk across, you will find the answer. Whether they do a better job or not, it barely matters.

At some point, that neighbour is likely to pay you for the job if you offer to mow their lawn. Most businesses don't start solving some amazing problem. Most businesses are remarkably mundane in their approach. You need to get a package across, let's invent a business like FedEx. You want to learn how to get rid of the cracks on your feet, let's make a crate called Heel Balm. You want to go to Mars? Well, that's an amazing problem, but most of the time, you're not trying to rewrite history.

Take for instance the book “5-Minute iPhone Magic”

That's a book, and yes we sell it on our website. How many pages do you think that book contains? It promises a 5-minute makeover, so it can't have many pages, can it? But wait, surely I must be a great photographer to write a book on photography, right? Even as you hear those words, you know it ‘s not true.

I'm an excellent cartoonist. My writing skills are way above average, and photography is something I do on the side. Unlike any of the books you see on Amazon, this book isn't promising you'll learn about any technical stuff. In fact, what makes it so very palatable is that it takes the 50 odd features that exist in the software and gets rid of 47. When you have only three things to learn, you are on your way to taking some wonderful, if not excellent pictures with your iPhone.

The most mundane job will get you started as an entrepreneur

Which is why so many successful people talk about those mundane jobs. They delivered papers, they worked as waiters, they brushed down a dozen horses—jobs like that. And while they were lucky enough to get their mundane job earlier in life, every job, every business has an overwhelming amount of mundane moments.

The reason why most of us don't start is because we think have to be outstanding, or at least superior in some way.

No one is saying you have to be mediocre, but when you start out, by golly, you're going to be average at best. And there's this funny story to tell at this point because it involves photography. A few months ago, my cousin came over to visit from Dubai. For some reason, the discussion about my sister's wedding came up. And since I've been such a keen photographer/videographer, I'd taken pictures and video of their wedding.

It wasn't easy to find the DVD of the recording, but I was persistent. It only took 30 seconds of video for me to realise I was terrible back then. My video flipped aimlessly from side to side. The photos were devoid of composition, story and didn't resemble anything close to what I can achieve now. Would someone hire me back then as well? The answer is yes. Even when I was turning out what I now consider terrible cartoons, abominable logos and probably ugh articles, someone was willing to pay for it, because it solved their problem.

The reality is you'll never know something well enough for yourself

Or to put it another way, what you think is horrifying, is pretty good for someone else. The reason why successful people get that way is because they are either ignorant how bad they were (I was that way for sure) or they expect to get better as time marches on. If you wait to get better, the wait extends interminably. You'll never really get off the ground. And that passion, your passion, will go find someone else more deserving.

Harsh words? Sure, but that's how passion comes into being

Instead passion starts at the bottom of the heap being really crappy. Renuka didn't know about perfumes. Even you probably know that soaps have perfume. Even I, who have zero interest in fragrances, could identify a “mogra” and “jasmine” flower fragrance. Renuka's start wasn't at the intersection of knowing something well and solving someone's problem. There was nothing. Then there was a little bit. Then there was more. Then she was offered a job as a perfumer.

You don't get asked to be a perfumer unless you have knowledge of chemicals

She knew nothing about it. She didn't take the job because life veered off in another direction. But one thing we know for sure. She'd start at crappy, no-knowledge and work her way up. It took her six months to get to a point where she was ready to rock and roll from not knowing anything to being pretty confident. It might take you three months, or nine.

However, if you wait for that intersection; that intersection of knowing something well and solving someone's problem. Well, that's a long wait. A wait that will last forever.

So, stop looking for your passion. Knowing something well and solving someone's problem is more commonplace than you believe.

Next up: Whenever you have a deadline, somehow you're able to stagger towards it and get the job done. But other tasks never seem to move forward. In life we need to complete projects that are urgent, but also projects that are good for the soul. Find out how do we get these projects going and how can we sustain them over the long term? How To Avoid Overwhelm (And Systematically Complete Projects)

How many books do you read in a year?

Most people boast about how they read hundreds of books a year. That's what I used to do as well. Until I found that I wasn't really absorbing any information. So is speed reading a bad idea? Well, not entirely, but you need to know when to use it and why. Find out how speed works for you and more importantly, when it fails.

Read it online: Mental Barriers Myths

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Mental Myth: You need to speed up your learning (and there are systems to go faster)

If you looked at the About Us page on the Psychotactics site, it used to say that I read 100 books a year.

Well, that was true when I started out in business. I didn't have many clients, hence loads of time. It was also the very early days of the Internet. There were still millions of pages online, but blogs barely existed. Youtube was non-existent. Facebook was years away. If you wanted to get those 100 books, you had to physically make your way to the book store or the library. Nothing online was particularly instant or as distracting as it is today.

Even so, I bought a book on speed reading. In fact, it was an entire course. The course was instantly impressive. It showed me how my brain could recall just about anything it viewed even for a brief second.

It got me to open a random page of the dictionary, then flick through the page and later recall a fair bit of what was on the page. It was a long time ago, and I forget the details of the exercise, but I was hooked into believing I could store endless amounts of information in my head. As I found out, it wasn't impossible to store information, but it was quite like a photocopy machine.

Think of a photocopy machine for a few seconds

What is the primary function? It takes photocopies of information. You can run tens of thousands of pages through a photocopy machine, and it just takes images. Your brain, from what I understand, can do something similar. However, it does not mean that your brain can make sense of the information.

It's just information, loads of information piling up on top of more information. The speed reading course was instantly enjoyable and useless to me, even back in those early days. I abandoned it despite paying a small fortune for it and went back to reading two books a week at top speed.

For someone like me, who was just learning marketing and business reading a lot was a great idea

It was a bit like getting to know the streets in a city. It gave me the confidence and feel for the city. And I didn't have a fear of getting lost. And this constant, pounding flow of information is great as long as you don't have to do too much with the information. You watch the news; you read magazines, you listen to podcast interviews. They constitute a mountain range of information, but not information you necessarily need to use, now or in the future.

I found that I was losing out on depth

In my need to keep up with 100 books a year, or even 25 books a year, I was playing a game of chicken. I was headed right towards my goal, refusing to swerve, and in doing so, missing out on the nuances. To bounce back to the analogy of the city streets, I was getting a lot of information, but not enough depth. I didn't need to speed up my learning. I could take things at a reasonable pace and even slow down.

When I slowed down, I noticed something quite interesting

I missed out at least 30-50% of the nuances in the first reading or listening. I remember listening to how trees absorb nutrition, for example, and I loved that podcast episode, so I heard it again. And again. And yet again.

The fourth time around I was still picking up nuances I'd missed on the earlier drive-throughs. It wasn't enough to read and listen at normal speed but to go back and read again, listen again. Which is why the book, The Brain Audit has a note right in the introduction to go back and read the book thrice. And most clients come back to say that they were surprised at how much they learned on the second and third pass.

This isn't to say that speed itself is a problem

Right now I'm learning some nuances of InDesign and ePub. And much of it is “old knowledge”. I've been over the material and could do some other activity while “listening to the video”, let alone looking at it. In cases where I am very familiar with the material, I will wind up the video to at least 1.25x or even 1.5x.

Even in these conditions, it's important not to get cocky. The material may be the same, or remarkably similar, but often the presenter talks about a new way to implement the information. And if I'm just speeding things up, I will almost certainly miss it. And the idea is to make the learning stick.

But doesn't your brain adapt to faster speeds?

I believe it does. If you listen to everything at twice the speed, over time that double speed is more than likely to become the new standard for you. This isn't to say you're going to know twice as much, only that you can absorb twice the amount at once. There's also a definite downside when you enter the real world, and people don't speak at 2x. If you listen to everything at high speed, normal speech will cause you to get distracted because everyone seemingly speaks so slowly. The main point, however, is that speeding up your reading or listening doesn't necessarily make you smarter.

Eventually, what's the point of all the information you've just read?

When you go online, you'll often run into a site like ours. And some person just like me will tell you that they read 100 books a year. That information may have been correct when they had less work. Or when they were needier for that information. It could be true in an age when everyone wasn't being blasted with ten million pieces of information every single minute of the day. We believe in speed. And for the most part, speed kills. Speed doesn't make things better or more profound.

As singer/songwriter, John Mayer writes in one of his songs: 
Twice as much ain't twice as good
And can't sustain, as one-half could. It's wanting more, that's gonna send me to my knees.

It's a myth that you need to go faster

You can slow down, make notes, make mind maps. Even doodle. You can go over a book once, twice and thrice if you choose to do so. Savour what you're learning and learn it in a deeper, more profound way. It sure beats rushing through life at 2x.

Next up: How do you dramatically increase your rate of learning?

And why do we get stuck when we're trying to learn a new skill? Strangely the concept of boxes comes into play.
Find out more: Accelerated Learning: How To Incredibly Speed Up Your Skill Acquisition

Do you have a bad memory?

Well, so does the memory champion of the US Memory Championships. How's that possible you may ask? But that's exactly the point.

We have misconceptions about learning and memory that need to be wiped out and replaced with accurate representations of how our brain works.

In this first episode we look at two of the mental blocks that cause us to stutter, if not fail. And we transform them from failure to success.

Let's find out how.

Read online: Business Mental Myths

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As late as the 1970s, women's brains were considered to be inferior to that of men, and especially so in the game of chess.

Chess is a game that demands a high level of spatial awareness, among other skills, and it was erroneously believed that women could never equal men at the grandmaster level. In fact, not one woman had made it to grandmaster level until Susan Polgár came along.

Susan's father, László Polgár, didn't believe in inborn talent. He wrote a book about genius, and in it emphasised the fact that “Geniuses are made, not born”. To prove the point, he and his wife Klara educated their three daughters at home, and while geography and history lessons were important, chess was considered to be the most valuable of all.

At 4, Susan Polgár won her first chess tournament in the Budapest Girls' Under-11 Championship, with a 10–0 score. In 1982, at the age of 12, she won the World Under 16 (Girls) Championship.

In a series shot by National Geographic, called “My Brilliant Brain”, Susan Polgár talks about her first visit to the premier chess club in Budapest. She was still just a little girl. “The room was filled with smoke and there were elderly men who thought my father was there for a game and brought his daughter along.

But the reality is that my father wanted to see how I would against the members of the club”. The club members thought László Polgár was mad. But they went along with the crazy plan and soon found the “pretty little girl” was beating them hands down.

Susan Polgár continued her meteoric rise

She was the first woman in history to break the gender barrier by qualifying for the 1986 “Men's” World Championship. In January 1991, Polgar became the first woman to earn the Grandmaster title in the conventional way of achieving three GM norms and a rating over 2500.

No longer could men claim that a woman couldn't attain the role of a grandmaster in chess. In time, Susan's sister, Judit also became a grandmaster. The third sister, Sofia earned a norm in a grandmaster-level tournament in 1989 when she was only 14.

The mental myth was shattered once and for all.

In business too, the we have to deal with mental myths that hold us back.

As we weave our way through videos online or articles that rarely have any solid research, these myths take a hold of us and create a factor of intimidation. It feels sometimes, like everyone else is moving ahead while we lag behind. In business, as in life, it's not enough to just get and keep the business going. We have to make sure we don't get bogged down in myths have have no basis in reality.

Three persistent mental myths that prevail are:

Mental Myth 1: Copying is not a good idea. We need to be original.
Mental Myth 2: You Need To Remember What You Learn
Mental Myth 3: You need to speed up your learning (and there are systems to go faster)

Let's find out why these myths need to be banished, once and for all. We will look at the first two myths in this episode.

Mental Myth 1: Copying is not a good idea. We need to be original.

When you look at the Taj Mahal, you don't think of Humayun, do you?

Humayun, who? For over 200 years, the Mughals ruled over parts of what is modern day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. In what is surely one of the greatest empires the world has ever known, they were rulers of between 110-150 million people—a fourth of the world's population at that time. The family tree of the Mughal emperors started with Babur, went down to Humayun, Akbar the Great, Jahangir, but it's Shah Jahan who gets most of the spotlight.

And let's geek out a bit on history a bit here because we're talking about the Taj Mahal, built by Shah Jahan. Emperor Shah Jahan was utterly besotted with his wife, Mumtaz Begum. In an age where marriages were simply ties between one ruling family and the next, Shah Jahan and Mumtaz fell in love with each other.

However, Shah Jahan was so in love with Mumtaz that he showed little interest in exercising his polygamous rights with his two other wives, other than having a child with each. Mumtaz, on the other hand, bore him thirteen children, which, if you're rolling your eyes, was a family size quite common back in those times. Anyway, on 17 June 1631, at the age of 38, Mumtaz Begum died while giving birth to what would have been the fourteenth child.

The Taj Mahal is a memorial to the intense grief that followed

It took 21 years, from 1632-1653 to build the Taj Mahal. And today, if you're around Delhi, you're likely to make a trip to Agra to look at this remarkable monument. The Taj Mahal had more than its share of inspiration from another structure built almost a hundred years earlier—Humayun's tomb. If you look at Humayun's tomb and then look at the Taj Mahal, there's more than a striking resemblance. It almost looks like a copy.

Copying is given a bad name because it's often mashed with plagiarism

Before the advent of computers, the best way for an artist to learn to draw was to copy. If you head to Amsterdam and look at Van Gogh's start, you'll notice he copies a lot. In a museum dedicated to Van Gogh, the curators have taken great pains to show how Van Gogh's early work was an almost identical copy of the Japanese art of the time. As it says on the museum's website: Japanese printmaking was one of Vincent's primary sources of inspiration, and he became an enthusiastic collector.

The prints acted as a catalyst: they taught him a new way of looking at the world

But did his own work change as a result? There was tremendous admiration for all things Japanese in the second half of the nineteenth century. Vincent did not pay much attention to this Japonisme at first. Very few artists in the Netherlands studied Japanese art. In Paris, by contrast, it was all the rage. So it was there that Vincent discovered the impact Oriental art was having in the West when he decided to modernise his own art.”

In a letter to his brother Theo, Vincent Van Gogh says the following: My studio's quite tolerable, mainly because I've pinned a set of Japanese prints on the walls that I find very diverting.

You know, those little female figures in gardens or on the shore, horsemen, flowers, gnarled thorn branches.” He and his brother then proceeded to buy stacks of Japanese woodcuts because they recognised the Japanese art as highly as any Western masterpiece. Van Gogh then went about copying the structure and composition of Japanese art in great detail. In a letter to his brother, he wrote: “All my work is based to some extent on Japanese art.”

Whether you're a writer, singer, golfer or musician—you have to copy

In the Da Vinci cartooning course, we have whole weeks where the participants have to trace—yes, with regular butter paper or tracing paper—just like you did when you were a child. To be able to copy allows you to see what the other person has done. And how you, in turn, can do the same. As a cartoonist, I had whole books of work.

I started out copying Superman, Batman and other superheroes, moving on to comic strips like Hagar the Horrible, and for a good while, even Dennis the Menace. Years later I was copying Mort Drucker and Jack Davis from Mad Magazine. And Ajit Ninan who was a caricaturist for India Today, one of India's largest magazines at the time.

The copying didn't stop there

When I started out in advertising as a cub copywriter, I knew almost nothing about copywriting. I'd leaf through books; advertising books called the “One Show” that were so thick they could be used as doorstops. I learned a ton of how ads were made from those books alone.

When I moved to marketing, I bought endless material from marketer Jay Abraham, learning how he promoted his courses, workshops and home study versions. I'd get his 15-20 page sales letters in the mail, and I'd go through them with a yellow marker, trying to figure out why I was so excited to buy his material.

When you copy, you learn

When you copy from many sources, you start to merge one style into another until you soon have a style of your own. If you keep copying, your fixed style changes. When I look at some of the cartoons I did between 2000-2010, I cringe a lot. I don't like the colours, I don't like the line work, and I want to change it all. Not entirely erase the work, I'm not that daft, but

I've been copying all my life. Which, as we know, is different from plagiarism. Plagiarism is a rip-off. A photocopy of someone else's work is plagiarism. Work that's not yours and is signed by you, that's plagiarism.

Without copying, you quickly plateau

Copying is what pushes you outside your comfort zone a lot. When Van Gogh started to copy Japanese artists, he had to relearn a whole different way of painting and composition. As it says yet again on the Van Gogh website: “Japanese artists often left the middle ground of their compositions empty, while objects in the foreground were sometimes enlarged. They regularly excluded the horizon too, or abruptly cropped the elements of the picture at the edge.”

However, not all copying should be done blindly

It's one thing to copy a style, but quite another thing to blindly copy what others are doing. For instance, when we did our early workshops in Auckland and Los Angeles, catering was included in the cost of the workshop. All the workshops we'd been to, before hosting our own, had always served food. However, we found that just copying someone's else's actions doesn't necessarily work well.

When we'd ask about feedback for the workshop, people would complain about the food. Someone always wanted proteins; some one else wants carbs. And these were in the days before the wave of crazy diets came along. I got good advice from speaker/author, Brian Tracy. “You're not in catering, Sean”, he said to me. And so we gave up serving food at workshops.

In the same manner, it's probably a good idea to find out the strategy behind why people do certain things. It's better to know the story behind the plan, before making some horrible mistake and finding out later.

Despite the downsides, copying is what makes the world go round. The Taj Mahal, Van Gogh's works of art, even Disneyland got a large dose of inspiration from the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. When you're next thinking of creating your website, painting, writing or doing just about any activity, first consider copying. Consider tracing.

Originality is slightly overrated

P.S. Even while this article series was being completed, I found a clear case of plagiarism. The author had taken the six questions from The Brain Audit and palmed it off as his own. What made it weird was the fact that it was on the Intuit site, the company that sells Quickbooks. Through Facebook, they got in touch with me, because someone tagged Intuit. The article was taken down shortly after.

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Mental Myth 2: You Need To Remember What You Learn

In 2006, a journalist called Joshua Foer won the U.S.A Memory Championship. He also set a new US record in the speed cards event by memorising a deck of 52 cards in barely 1 minute and 40 seconds.

However, Joshua Foer doesn't consider himself to have a very good memory at all.

He forgot where he put his car keys, often where he'd parked his car in the first place. He'd routinely leave food in the oven, forget his girlfriend's birthday, their anniversary. Despite the onslaught of advertising he'd miss Valentine's Day, and not remember most of the things that you and I seem to routinely forget. In 2005, he was a journalist who wanted to figure out what made memory champions so successful. In 2006, he was the U.S. Memory Champion.

If there's one statement almost all of us have heard before it's this: I have a really bad memory. At first it's some relative; maybe a grandparent or someone much older that seems to complain about memory, but increasingly, even in your teens and twenties, you'll find yourself—and others making statements such as: I can't seem to remember names at all. I have a really bad memory.

Which seems to make sense, because we find there are those who seemingly have memories like elephants and our memories seem to be like a sieve. Trying to remember what we've learned seems hard, and often impossible. Learning seems to go one way where we build up skills and knowledge.

Forgetting seems to land all that hard earned information into the gutter. Forgetting seems to be the arch enemy of learning. Forgetting seems to be about failure, and it drives us crazy. And yet, forgetting is exactly the opposite.

“The brain is nature's most sophisticated spam filter” says Benedict Carey in his book, “How We Learn”

To be able to remember one thing, we often have to forget the other. In his book, he talks about how we're all amazingly impressed at the sight of a spelling bee, a competition where young kids seem to be able to spell incredulously complex words. As all contests go, there's a winner and there are losers.

Yet how do we make every one of those seemingly smart kids lose? Instead of getting them to spell words, let's say we drag them back on stage and run a different type of memory test.

The questions would go like this:

•Name the last book you read
•What did you have for lunch two days ago?
•Which was the last movie you saw?
•What's your sister's middle name?
•What's the capital of Ouagadougou? (It's Burkina Faso)

“In a hypothetical content, each of those highly concentrated minds would be drawing a lot of blanks”, says Carey. But why is this the case? And how does this related to what you're learning? Most of us automatically assume that we should remember what we learn.

In many cases, we assume that we've understood what we've just read, seen or heard. In almost every instance, it might take three or four tries for a person to get all the facts right, even if they go back over the information.

Take for instance, this article itself. You probably remember that there was a memory championship. But was it a world championship or based in a specific country? Who won it? Do you remember the year? You possibly remember that the winner was male and that he was a journalist, but there are constant gaps in your memory.

Which is why people tend to write notes

However, while notes might be a better-than-nothing option, they're still extremely poor at pulling up details. All information is dependent on your initial knowledge of the subject matter in the first place. Take for instance, the book called “Dartboard Pricing”. The book goes into a lot of detail about why one product or service can be priced higher than a similar product in an identical market. As you're reading through the book, or listening to the audio, there's a feeling that you're getting the idea.

However, the moment clients put up a pricing grid, they get elements of the grid wrong. Logically this shouldn't be the case at all. You have the book in front of you. The information isn't flipping past you at high speed. Even so, clients will get the pricing grid wrong. To really get the information, you have to go back several times and no amount of arrows and boxes, or explanation will help. The brain is designed to pick up some information and drop all the rest.

The best way to retain information is to follow the way the brain works best

And that's to get to the first powerful idea and then turn off the audio. Close the book. Stop watching the video. If you have to, rewind, or go back. But going forward does little good. Your brain isn't necessarily picking up the details as you progress. Even when reading an article, I will get to a point where I run into something profound, different or difficult.

At which point I stop any sort of progress. If it's on my phone, I freeze the idea by taking a screenshot. If it's on audio, I stop listening to the podcast and yes, you need to do the same, if you really want to remember what you've just read. The breakdown allows your brain to stop at that point. When you go back and review the point, it makes even more sense. Then, if you're ready to go ahead, please do.

Does this method mean you'll progress an inch at a time?

No it doesn't mean that at all. It depends on the information you're learning. I'll listen to some podcasts and it's pure storytelling or information that keeps my brain cells entertained. They may apply to my business or not, but at least at the time, I don't find I need to imprint it in my memory. However, if there's something that's important, I will make sure I stop and come back later.

It's a way of highlighting that information and forcing your brain to remember. I do this at workshops and seminars as well. I will continue to sit and participate in a seminar, but I wait for the first big point to hit me. When that's done, I'm “technically” ready to go home. I notice others are scribbling tons of notes, but I know I will remember nothing when I get back. So I keep the idea down to one. If I'm feeling really generous, I may add a second or third, but that's easily the upper limit.

You don't need to remember everything you learn

It's a myth that your memory, or even the memory of the memory champions are any good. The brain is one of the nature's most powerful spam filters. It remembers what's important. And hence it's your job to help your brain. When you find something that's important, dig in your heels. Stop. Then go back and review it later.

That's how you'll improve your memory and your knowledge over time.

Next up: Is speed reading a bad idea?

Well, not entirely, but you need to know when to use it and why. Find out how speed works for you and more importantly, when it fails—Mental Myth: You need to speed up your learning (and there are systems to go faster)

Whenever you have a deadline, somehow you're able to stagger towards it and get the job done. But other tasks never seem to move forward. You fall behind on your reading, your fun projects, even that movie you'd promised yourself. In life we need to complete projects that are urgent, but also projects that are good for the soul.

How do we get these projects going and how can we sustain them over the long term? Let's find out in this episode.

Click here to read it on the website: How To Avoid Overwhelm (And Systematically Complete Projects)

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I remember lying in bed on a Sunday morning and realising I was a hypocrite.

My niece Marsha says she loves reading, which is why we bought her the entire Harry Potter, the Percy Jackson and the Kane Chronicles. She stuttered through the Harry Potter series but made her way to the last book. And as of this moment, she's been stalled on the first book in the Percy Jackson series.

When I ask her if she's been reading, she always nods happily, but she's barely progressed further than 10-15 pages in the last month or two. It bugs me, because I know that reading isn't just about reading. It's about spelling, structure, storytelling and imagination. As you'd expect, I'd nudge Marsha at every chance I got, encouraging her to read, but she still gives me a happy smile and makes little or no progress.

Until that Sunday morning, I didn't think the lesson of the nudge applied to me I'm one of those crazy people. I go for a walk, and sometimes I'll listen to music, or Renuka and I will talk all the way. Even so, I'll get at least between an hour to two hours of audio every week.

I'll read before I go to bed, and sometimes on weekends. I'll even spend Friday morning planning and then get an hour's worth of reading. I'll even watch a TED Talk on while making breakfast every day. Marsha's situation doesn't apply to me, so why did I feel like a hypocrite?

It just so happened that I was browsing through my Kindle collection that Sunday morning As I scrolled through the books, I realised I hadn't read at least 30% of what I'd bought. That among those I'd read, there were several that were half-abandoned.

A good chunk was complete, but how's that different from Marsha?

How's that different from all of us? We start out with good intentions.

We buy stuff; we save stuff onto our computers or devices for future reading and then suddenly it seems to be too overwhelming. We're reading through one book when you get a recommendation to read five others. You're leafing through one article, and a stack of one thousand seem to be trying to be trying to get through the front door.

I don't like the feeling of being a hypocrite, so I devised a system.

And since I like naming systems, I called it “TBM”: the bare minimum. It even sounded nice when written on a piece of paper. Or better still on a car plate. In my crazy mind, I read it as “T BM”. As in the “the bum”. The kind of guy who is lazy and won't do much more than needed to get by. This mindset of doing the bare minimum was my own invention, it seems. And yet it's not. Many years ago I'd read about the financial advisor, Dave Ramsey who talked about his own bare minimum method when paying back loans.

When you have several loans to pay back what advice do financial planners give you? They tell you to pay the biggest loan first. Which means if you have loans of $500, $2000, $200,000, it makes a lot of sense to whittle down the biggest loan, as it also has the largest portion of interest. Ramsey works on a seemingly counter-intuitive method. He gets you to pay the smallest loan first.

Here ‘s How the Debt Snowball Method Works As he explains on his website, it's a bit like a snowball, a debt snowball. The debt snowball method is a debt reduction strategy where you pay off debts in order of smallest to largest, gaining momentum as each balance is paid off. If the task is too big, it's easy to give up. After all, a $100 payment is barely going to tickle a $200,000 loan. But put that $100 towards the $500 loan and you've wiped away a chunky 20%.

TBM—The bare minimum. The idea gelled in my brain on a Sunday morning.

And this series is a bit counterintuitive as well. It's not about achieving any big goals. Instead, it's about chipping away small wins. It's important because we all seem to fall by the wayside when it comes to long term goals. The more personal the goal, the more likely it is to fall into the cracks. Reading a book that you dearly want to read, goes into the must-do-in-future list. And the future comes and goes, and the book is unread.

So what are we and Marsha to do?  The world isn't getting less complicated.

How do we roll this bare minimum plan out and keep at it? Let's find out.

The three things we'll cover are:
– What is the bare minimum, and why it's not a mind trick to do even more.
– How to use triggers to get the bare minimum going
– Why you need to use it exclusively for long-term projects

1) What is the bare minimum? And why it's not a mind trick to do even more

Almost every one of us has seen a progress bar on our computer, haven't we?

It's that little bar that goes from left to right, telling us that a program is opening, or a file is being saved. What many of us might not know, is that the progress bar doesn't quite give us the real situation because let's face it, we're impatient. To counter this impatience, then-student, Brad A. Myers decided that progress bars made computer users less anxious, more efficient and could possibly help them relax at work.

He then got his fellow students, 48 of them, to take a test with and without the progress bars. 86% said they liked the bars. They loved knowing that progress was being made. They were told that the progress bar wasn't an accurate representation of what was happening within the computer, but they didn't care. They still preferred the progress bar, to not having anything at all.

Let's rewind that last line, shall we? Still preferred the progress bar, to not having anything at all. That's what it says, doesn't it? And when we look at the tasks we have before us, we see nothing at all. We haven't started on the job, because we know there's a lot involved. Just the thought of the steps needing to get to the end point seems to overwhelm us immediately.

And we're not talking about learning a complicated program or writing a book. We're referring to something as simple as reading a book. We look at the book, knowing full well we'd like to read it, but absolutely nothing happens. And one book piles up on another, until we have books and e-books that we'd like to read, but can't get started. Or if we get started, a distraction comes along, and we chase down that butterfly-like-distraction right away.

When I first started out in marketing, I didn't have many butterflies to chase

Back in the year 2000, almost all marketing was done offline. You'd get a big package in the mail. Pages, lots of pages, talking about some program that would help you become more successful. But that's all the post box held—one big set of pages.

There was nothing else to see. Unlike today, where you can easily find two dozen courses and programs in your inbox, there was just this one package. You paid a small fortune for the program as they all seemed to start at around $1500 or so, and some were $5000 and even higher. Then you got these three ring binders, your cassette tapes, later CDs and that was that. You didn't see any butterflies and didn't have to invest in any Butterly net.

Today, you and I have a sea of stuff that we can download in minutes, and buy in seconds

And that's only part of the problem. Learning, yes, that's really important, but then so are the other things in your life. They're all piling up, and you can't seem to figure out how to beat that overwhelm. So why not borrow a concept from the credit card companies?

Let's say you have to pay $5000 on your credit card. Logically speaking, you should be getting Mastercard or Visa to deduct the amount directly from your account. But the credit card companies seem like Santa Claus, don't they? They say: Don't worry, just pay $125 on your credit card, and we're good. You and I know there's not a lot of good in paying off the minimum amount, but hey, sometimes we do. And then the insidious debt creeps up.

It may be insidious for paying off credit card bills, but it's perfect for getting things done

Going back to that book that you haven't read, you don't have to do anything but the bare minimum. Let's say the bare minimum is one paragraph. C'mon, you say. One paragraph is a cop out. You're not going to get very far with one paragraph, are you?

Well, there's this story about John Grisham, the famous author. “If I had 30 minutes to an hour, I would sneak up to the old law library, hide behind the law books and write A Time to Kill”, he said in a USA Today interview with Dennis Moore. It took him three whole years of 30-minute segments, but a thousand days later he was done. If Grisham weren't famous and hadn't sold 250 million books, this story might have never been told, but now we know that his entire career was built on 30-minute increments.

And yet, for many of us, 30 minutes seems like a lot My friend, Campbell Such and I had a mini-tussle over meditation.

I happily boast that you need at least 30 minutes of meditation to get any momentum. For the first 20 minutes or so, it seems like you're swatting flies in the vast Australian outback. But as you get to the 30-minute mark, things start to happen. Campbell disagrees. He spends 5-10 minutes every morning, meditating. “That's all I can manage,” he says. And he's right. I disagreed with him at the point we had the discussion. I thought that 10 minutes was barely a warm up and that if a person couldn't do at least 30 minutes, it's better to avoid it altogether.

Which is the flaw with a lot of productivity plans, when you think about it

They seem to suggest you fool your brain. That if you want to go for a walk, you should put on your shoes and then you'll end up going for a 30-minute walk. And the concept of the bare minimum is entirely the opposite. It's pure sloth behaviour. It's not asking you to fool your brain at all. It's saying: do the bare minimum, just like those credit card companies ask of you. Do nothing but the bare minimum. No mind tricks, no additional time, no extra effort. Just the smallest possible thing you can take on, and that's all you should do.

I tried this method for my website In July 2015, I started on the revamp of our website.

I'm super fussy, but I did outsource the website. I got quotes, I got designs, and they were so terrible, I was tearing my hair out in frustration. Anyway, in 2015, I did the website designs in Photoshop and Stresslesweb (they're our coders) put together the site so I could get on with my fussy ways. Two years ticked by. Every chance I got, I thought about the website, but nothing happened.

Then in August 2017, I decided to do the bare minimum. Some days, I'd merely list what I had to do on the website. The next day, I'd do a headline and the first paragraph. Another day, I'd add a cartoon or two. To my surprise, I started getting that silly momentum. I'd want to do more, but most days I resisted like crazy.

It's because I have a lot of other long-term projects as well I paint every day in my Moleskine diary. But that too was falling apart because I felt the burden of painting. So instead of doing another painting, I'd just do the bare minimum. It could involve simply doing a sketch. Maybe later in the day or next day, just doing a wash. It seems almost tedious because you're literally watching paint dry, but I've begun to turn out some amazing art work. I'm painting better than ever before.

And guess what? The web pages are getting done, and I'm going through the book list as well. I read just one or two paragraphs, and then my progress bar is complete.

The bare minimum may not seem like much, but we all need to push psychological boulders

When faced with the task of taking a walk for 30 minutes, writing a book, or doing any long term project, it seems like we're never getting anything done. But think of your progress like the progress bar. You might get just 2% of the task done, and the progress bar in your brain feels like it's 100%.

You follow up the next day, and whammo—another 100% is done. It may make no logical sense, but this isn't about addition or logic. It's about the satisfaction not just of getting something done, but 100% of that something. It's tiny, that something, but you don't care. The goal isn't to take the second step. It's to take the step you need and stop right there. No fancy motivation or momentum—just one step.

My niece Marsha doesn't need to go through the Percy Jackson series

She needs to go through a paragraph or two. That's it. Campbell Such doesn't need 30 minutes of meditation. If 5 minutes is all he has, that's all that he needs to do. The bare minimum, that's all we need, and it's amazing how much slow progress we make.

However, there's still a problem with planning to get all these activities, right? Which is where triggers come into play. Instead of fancy alarms that you merely ignore, how about aligning your bare minimum to a trigger that shows up every day? Let's find out how.

2) How to use triggers to get the bare minimum going

In many Western countries, Christmas brings carols, chaos, and carrots.

Carrots for Dasher, Dancer, Prancer and Vixen, Comet, Cupid and Donner and Blitzen. And Rudolph, of course. They also leave a plate of milk and cookies for Santa. That tradition seemed to have originated in the 1930s when the US was deep in the Great Depression. Parents tried to teach their kids that was important to give to others. And also to show gratitude for the gifts they'd received. But what sets off the milk, cookies and carrots? Why, Christmas Eve, of course. It's the trigger that requires no alarm or reminder.

And that's because alarms and reminders don't work very well anyway

You know how it works, right? You put a reminder on your phone, but as the reminder pops up, you swipe it away. If it's e-mail, you're likely to jump right into reading it, possibly even answering it, but any reminder to do a task gets a look of disdain. The way around this system is to have no alarm at all. Instead, you do something when something else happens.

So for instance, I paint right after breakfast No matter what time I have breakfast, I will sit down for about 5-10 minutes and sketch or paint. Renuka on the other hand sketches every time she drops her mother off for Tai qi. When we go for a walk, we talk until we hit the first traffic lights. Then, it's time to put on the headphones and listen to audio books or podcasts. The same applies on the walk back from the cafe. We walk to a certain point, hit the dentist's clinic, and it's back to headphone time again.

This system of triggers is important because we rarely keep to a fixed plan

No one ever has breakfast at the very same minute, and hence if your breakfast is early or late, it's easy for you to ignore the alarm. When an activity like breakfast is itself the trigger, then you know what comes shortly after. We do take our vacations.

Every 12 weeks we're off for a month, and that means the triggers go out of whack. But since I'm not working on vacation, nothing else matters. I can ignore the painting after breakfast, choosing to do it at noon helped by a bottle of Cabernet, instead. Or not do it at all. However, once I get back, and the triggers go off, it's back to normal.

It's important to point out that you should not start with many items on your to-do list

Right now I have about 4-5 long term projects going. I know the website won't last forever. And in a month or two, I should be able to get the hang of how to use ePub. My painting, however, has been on since 2010 and that will go on for a long, long time. Some long terms projects come and go while others need to be done every day.

To make things a habit, you need to choose just two or three things to do in a day

Five minutes each and you've only spent fifteen minutes of activity. And even the busiest person has fifteen spare minutes in a day. Over time, some things become so much part of your second nature that you don't even think of them as part of your to-do list.

Take brushing your teeth, for example. When was the last time you needed an alarm or trigger for that activity? I now wake up to the sound of the meditation chant. It's part of what happens every day, and so that's not even part of the list anymore.

However, when you're starting out, just set up one trigger and the bare minimum time you can spend on that task. And get going. But there's one last caveat. All of these bare minimums are not for urgent or important tasks. They all need to be used only for long-term projects. Let's find out why that's the case.

3) Why Use The Bare Minimum Only For Long Term Projects

We all know the story of the tortoise and the hare, don't we?

They both set off on race, and the tortoise is slow, taking step by step. As the story goes, the hare falls asleep, and the tortoise wins the race. The story may sound remarkably like a bare minimum tale, and in a way it is. But it's important to note there's a big point of difference as well. A race is not a long term project. It's reasonably finite, in the sense that there's an end point and in many cases, a deadline.

We tend to drop things that have no deadline

There's really no point in learning Spanish, or painting or doing many of the things that you and I do. We do it for our own happiness. You may, therefore, join a dance class or a cartooning course and then find you've given up somewhere along the way. The photographs you planned to put in that photo book—that didn't get done either. We smartly prioritise what's important to us. Things that are revenue-driven, client-driven or have fixed deadlines can't wait, and so they get done. Things that are often essential to the soul, that gets tossed into the corner.

It's sad, isn't it? We feel that sadness.

We feel the pain of taking a course that feeds our soul and then finding we've either abandoned the course or having finished it, don't get the joy of continuation. It's the same with books we haven't read or documentaries we would love to watch.

However, sometimes even the work-related projects, like my beleaguered website, end up in that same to-do pile. Doing just the bare minimum keeps the project going. At all times, however, the bare minimum should be reserved for the long-term project. No one needs to tell you how wrong things can get if you do the bare minimum on something that's governed by a deadline.

But if the project isn't something that has a line in the sand and probably goes on forever, it's best to simply plod along step by step. It's the journey of a thousand miles.

But it's not about taking steps. The bare minimum is about taking just one step.

And then you're done for the day. When you have to take just one step, there's no overwhelm. Yes, the list of things that you need to do can and will pile up. But you're just taking one step. The rest of the world can drive themselves crazy. Like Marsha, you read two paragraphs at a time. Like me, you finally get down to building your website.

You achieve a lot with a single step per day. TBM—The bare minimum. Now do it.

P.S. Ready to start working on your bare minimum taking action plan?
Join a whole lot of introverts in 5000bc and take one step at a time to achieving your goals.

Writing a report for your website can be quite a nightmare

How are you supposed to put 20-30 pages together? And what system should you follow to get great results? That answer is remarkably simple, and plainly effective. And instead of just one way, why don't we look at three ways you can put together a great report! Let's go into report-land, shall we?

Read this episode on the website: Three Ways To Write A Stunning Report Overnight

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Rice.
Curry.
Meat,
Fish.
Papad.
Pickle.
Vegetables.

Many, if not most of the meals we'd have when I was growing up, consisted of a what you'd easily call a well-rounded meal. But as a teenager, I couldn't wait for dinner. I was ravenous by the time I got back from school at 4 pm. I'd head to the pantry, and pick out my favourite noodles: Maggi Masala.

Boil the water, toss in the noodles and the tastemaker and “two minutes” later, I'd be well on my ate to satisfaction-land.

When creating information, it's easy to get lost in a “rice, curry, pickle, papad land”.

However, complexity is the last thing you need, because it slows you down. What you need is something that's quick, yet effective. Something you can put together for your website, or as goodies to attract clients.

In this series, we're going to look at three ways to create a report, seemingly overnight—if you have a small or even disconnected content. And we'll also look at what to do when you don't have any content at all. It might not take “two minutes” but you can put together a report that will create a solid impact.

Let's take a look at the three types of reports you could put together.

Type 1: Report that goes from C to A
Type 2: Diverse, Disconnected Topic Report
Type 3:One Topic, Many Angles Report

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Type 1: Report that goes from C to A

How do you make a delicious rice dish in under five minutes?

Step 1: Take a cup of cooked rice.
Step 2: In a frying pan, pop a teaspoon of mustard seeds and some dry red chillies in oil.
Step 3: Pour the oil, mustard seeds and red chillies over the rice and add 1 ½ cup of natural yoghurt.

Notice where we started?

We didn't start with the cooked rice. Our goal was to make a delicious rice dish in under five minutes. And then we worked our way backwards, didn't we? We didn't go from A to B to C. Instead we started with the goal in mind, then rewound the steps and it wasn't very difficult to get a very tasty result.

When writing a report, it's easy to feel like you have to cover a lot of information

When I started writing marketing articles back in the year 2000, I had no idea what to write about. I'd read a book about positioning, and then borrow some of the ideas and write my own version of positioning. I'd talk to someone about how they needed to brand their product or service and then rush home to work my way through an article.

These were early days. I was struggling just to get 500 words on a page. I wasn't exactly worried about which articles got more attention than others. Even so, it was hard to ignore how some articles got far greater views than others.

One such article was about how to write headlines in three steps.

Another winner seemed to be how to tell if your business card was too busy. Again, three steps.
At which point we had this bizarre idea to turn one of the articles into a report. We did nothing more than put the very same information into a PDF.

We added some graphics, made the report look all pretty and then put it on the website as an incentive to sign up to the newsletters. If you've ever subscribed to the Psychotactics newsletter, you're likely to have seen and read this report. The reason why it works is because it's short, but more importantly it starts with Point C.

It shows you how to build a headline in a few minutes, that's what it does.

With the goal firmly in mind, it walks you through Step A, Step B and then in a matter of 8-10 pages you're at Step C. It's not unlike the method used to make the yoghurt rice, is it? You're not creating a complex document. All you're really doing is getting a client to get to a specific point, no matter how small the point.

We might believe a report needs to be more detailed, certainly more complex to be taken seriously

Instead what you'll quickly realise is that clients want the quick wins. And if the quick win is small, so much the better. If I were to give you a recipe of a biryani (another rice dish), with 30 ingredients, you're not likely to make that dish, are you?

Yet, a 5-minute shot at yoghurt rice couldn't go so terribly wrong, could it? In the worst possible scenario you'd waste five minutes, wouldn't you? Having a simple report that starts at C and works its way backwards in about three steps is what makes it easy to create a ton of reports—if you want to do so—that is.

But why create a ton of reports?

Let's say your site covers different topics, or has different products or services. Let's say you get to the Psychotactics site and land on a page about resistance. Would you be more likely to sign up for a report on resistance or on a topic like consumption? And if you were to land on a page about consumption, would you want more information on consumption or suddenly be fascinated with the topic of resistance?

Having multiple pages with reports embedded in them helps a client land on a page, read an article, and then find a report that's closely matching up with the article itself. Best of all, that report doesn't promise a tonne of information, but instead has three tiny steps to get the client to a result.

If you're wondering if you have to create a report for every page, no you don't. We have topics such as websites, article writing, consumption, uniqueness, etc. And if you have five-seven broad topics, you can create five-seven quick reports on each individual topic.

But back to the headline report

That report itself has been responsible for getting tens of thousands of clients over the years. When I put up a figure, I say it's been downloaded over 55,000 times, but that's being overly conservative. That headline report has been downloaded at least over 100,000 times and possibly a lot more. What's important is that the report didn't take time to put together. And when you look back, it didn't even have much of a strategy.

If you're teaching Photoshop, show your clients how to get from A-C in three steps.

If you're selling blue-tac, show your clients how to use it in three-steps.
Almost any product or service can be quickly reduced to a specific subset, and then you can show the client how to get to that result quickly and consistently.
Try the yoghurt rice.
It takes five minutes.
It takes three steps.
It would make a good report, that's for sure. A one page report, but the moment you tried it, you'd be hooked. You'd want more, wouldn't you? And that's the magic of a C-A report. It's quick to put together and the client loves it.

But that's only one way to create a report.
What if you wanted some variety, instead?

Let's look at the second option where you have a report with content that's diverse and seemingly completely disconnected.

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Type 2: Diverse, Disconnected Topic Report

“Bring a plate”.

Sometimes, when you go to a party in New Zealand, you're told “bring a plate”.

For anyone born in Kiwi land, such an expression isn't very odd. But you have no idea how many immigrants think it's a crockery problem. They somehow think the host must have just a few plates, and bringing a plate along will help ease the dinnerware issue.

“Bring a plate” just means bring some food along, because we're having a potluck party

And if there's anything I detest when it comes to food, it's a potluck party. Barbecue chicken mingles with wontons, and chickpeas with some tomato-ketchup concoction. For me, it's a culinary nightmare. The textures, colours, and especially the tastes are a complete mishmash.

But really, no one cares about me

They're having too much fun with their chickpeas and tomato-concoction. And sometimes being a little stuck up at a party, is similar to being stuck up when creating a report. It's easy to believe that a report has to go from C to A, or has to work with a single topic. In reality, reports just do fine, potluck style.

We tried this in the membership site at 5000bc

One of the perks of 5000bc is something called the Vanishing Reports. At first, I was an absolute stickler about the reports. They all had to have a sequence. They all had to somehow take you from one point to another. Then, I realised that's hardly the way I read anything.

At this very moment, I'm reading about the “butterfly effect”, “the moons of Jupiter,” “creativity” and “confidence”. That sounds very mishy-mashy, doesn't it? Which is why we trialled reports that had a combination of “pricing, conversion, starting up, and a whole bunch of topics that seemingly didn't sit side by side with each other.

And it worked!

Sometimes the report will have super-duper-ultra focus. Like Report No. 59: The Magical Time-Saving Powers of Evernote. Or Report No.6: Three Core Steps To A Viral Campaign. But Report No.60: How To Keep Learning and Growing for Success, or Report No.45: Good Business Habits ,can have a bit of bacon baguettes jostling with the wontons.

This revelation shouldn't have surprised me because that's how I read, and how a lot of people tend to read. A newspaper, for instance, is a bit of a mishmash, isn't it? A magazine, that's definitely all over the place. Blogs, podcasts, videos: they all seem to follow a slightly random pattern without us so much blinking an eye.

What does this mean for you, however?

It means that you may not have ten articles on a single topic. You may run a yoga site, and some articles might be about stretching, some may be about shavasana, some may be about what the client needs to do on a full moon night. They're seemingly disconnected, but it still makes for a splendid report, doesn't it? And better still, you don't even need ten articles.

Just three-four, okay five articles. That's just fine because every article will probably span 2-3 pages and if you slip in the introduction and a bit of an epilogue, you're looking at a decent fifteen to seventeen pages of content.

And despite the mishmash, you can create a strong feeling of cohesion within the report

There are two elements that create a connection. The first point of focus is the title. If you're going to put together a bunch of unconnected pieces of content, the title must somehow tie the content neatly together. Interestingly, you can veer down the non-specific route when creating a title.

E.g. How to create “hidden magic” in your business. Or “Good Business Habits”. As I veer my chair to my left to look at the titles of some books, I see a title like “The Non-designers Design Book” by Robin Williams. Or “Design it Yourself” by Chuck Green. Or “Scientific Advertising” by Claude Hopkins.

All of these books may, on the face of it, look incredibly focused, but one look within the pages and they're a disparate bunch of articles that have a workable title and one other element that is probably more important. In most of the books—and this applies to reports as well—there's a bridge between the chapters.

This second element isn't utterly crucial, but it's nice to have

Notice how this piece of content connected from the first type of report to the second? A bit earlier in this piece, you read about the report that goes from C to A. And then as we got to the end, we could just stop dead, or create a bit of a bridge. The last few lines spoke about how the C to A report is potent, but what if you wanted more variety? And then it suggested that there was a second kind of report—the report that had diverse, disconnected topics.

It's the kind of thing you should be doing: creating a bridge

As you come to the end of your piece in the report, build up the anticipation for the second piece. As the second piece winds to a close, it's time to shine the spotlight on the third, and so on. A simple set of lines at the end of the content create enough of glue to bind seemingly random topics together. We're not talking about mixing auto-repair and gardening in a report on business, but you get the point, don't you?

That isn't to say I like potluck parties. I guess I never will. Yet, as we've seen, it works just fine with reports.

Are we done, yet?

Not quite. There's still one more kind of report. Which as you might have guessed is the most obvious one of all. It's the report that consists of a single topic. It seems pretty self-explanatory, doesn't it? Still, let's take a look at why that kind of report is much-loved and how to go about creating it in a way that is pretty magical.

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Type 3: One Topic, Many Angles Report

On 29th March 1974, farmers in the Xi'an district of China stumbled on a treasure that was to rival the Great Wall of China.

The farmers real goal was to find water for their crops, when they stumbled on a beautifully sculpted head. The more they began to dig, the more they found hundreds, and then thousands of soldiers—terracotta soldiers. This was the army of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of unified China.

Over 8000 terracotta warriors, cavalry, charioteers, foot soldiers and archers, were built to accompany the emperor into the afterlife. These terracotta soldiers were created using moulds and seem to have an early assembly-line construction.

And this is where the story gets really interesting

Most of the hands of the Terracotta Army appear identical. Yet, when you look closer ever single soldier seems to have completely unique facial features. Every one it seems came from similar moulds, but somehow got tweaked just a little bit to create a high level of uniqueness.

When creating reports, a single mould; a single topic can be tweaked in dozens, possibly thousands of ways as well

Which is why a report on a single topic can be so very powerful. The information that seems to emanate from one source suddenly creates a wealth of sub-topics that become very attractive to the reader. What is being suggested here, is that you can you have a single topic and have dozens of sub-topics. Each sub-topic represents an article and several such articles become a fascinating report. To get the one-topic report going, all you have to do is first start with the topic and add a few sub-topics.

Let's take a topic like headlines, for starters.

What kind of sub-topics could we generate?

Testimonial Headlines: How To Get Your Clients To Write Your Headlines
Bottom-Up Headlines: How To Use Headlines As Email Signatures
Keywords And headlines
How To Avoid Potluck Headlines
Why Unclear Topics Lead to Unfocused Headlines
How To Use The Attraction Factor of Knew and New (When Writing Headlines)
How to Write Intensely Powerful Headlines Without Using Keywords

What you're experiencing is the creating of a Terracotta Army

The topic, in this case, headlines, is pretty mundane. Even so, if you leave your computer, and your Internet connection behind and head to the cafe, you're likely to be able to come up with several sub-topics for any given topic. You may not end up writing great headlines right at the start, but you'll have a bunch of topics nonetheless. Let's take an example from Photoshop, for instance. Let's not get lost in the Photoshop universe, however.

If you've done just a bit of homework, you'll quickly figure out that you can just pick one sub-topic in Photoshop. Let's say for instance, that sub-topic is “Selections and Layer Masks in Photoshop”. Ready, let's run through the sub-sub-topics, shall we?

Okay, Selections and Layer Masks, here we come!

Using the Marquee and Lasso tools
Combining selections
Converting a selection into a layer mask
Using the Quick Selection tool
Selecting soft-edged objects using Refine Edge
Touching up a layer mask with the Brush tool

Granted that all of the above topics may seem alien to you at this point, but just talking about Photoshop does bring up an interesting story.

When I first got to New Zealand I had a job as a web designer

Within six months, I was made redundant and needed to get some work as a cartoonist. This took me to several ad agencies, and in these ad agencies you tend to deal with art directors. As they were leafing through my portfolio, I would tell them how I used photoshop to do my illustrations. And how I would use Photoshop without the toolbar and double my speed and productivity.

This little nugget would get them instantly interested and at least a few of them asked whether I could teach them how to speed up their own use of photoshop. It led to jobs where I would charge $60 an hour training them individually.

However, it's not like I was outstanding at Photoshop. For instance, all of the points that we have just covered with layer masks would have been beyond my reach. Even so, I would be able to watch the videos several times, get fluent at the skill, and then in turn be able to teach it.

Any topic quickly cascades into sub-topics

And sub-topics in turn become a bit of an avalanche as you dig just below the surface. What's extremely exciting when you sit down to write a report, is that you don't need the Terracotta Army of Qin Shi Huang. A report can be extremely powerful with just three-four articles.

However, it's still an excellent idea to go into caffeine-land and brainstorm the topics and sub-topics needed. You may use the bare minimum needed for a report, but you can use the others to create more single focus reports in the future.

All of this brainstorming has a wonderful series of side effects

When you sit down to brainstorm the topics and sub-topics, you realise that you know quite a lot and can write about several topics for your report in detail. However, this very same brainstorming session may be a cause for intimidation. When I was called upon to teach those art directors, I knew a bit of Photoshop, but by no means was I well versed in every facet of the program.

For instance, “Selection Layers and Masks” were definitely something that I hadn't learned about.

This exposed my weakness and there are two ways to handle any weakness. You can pretend that you were not born with innate Photoshop skills, or you can simply pick up a book or video and learn the skills. I have no inborn skills, as far as I know, so I just learned and taught and learned an taught.

To this day, a decent chunk of what I do is something that I've learned along the way. If I find any gaps, well that's what learning is all about isn't it? I learn and then I teach and that is the lesson you can use for your report as well.

This learn and teach method is slower, no doubt

However, we are all beginners at some point in time and having information to share is not going to be at our fingertips. In such a scenario, it's a better idea to simply use the “learn and teach” method. It's more tedious, but I can assure you that almost everyone has to go through an almost identical method when they run into new material.

Not knowing enough about a topic is pretty normal, but what's also normal is that a lot of people intimidate themselves and give up. If you're made of sterner stuff, you'll quickly realise that you can put together a report just by learning about the topic, trying it out yourself and then tying it all together in a nice little PDF, or even a video or audio report.

Having a single topic is a great way to focus, if you're creating new material

If you've already created content in the past, it's easier to find as well. For instance, if I needed to write about topics like pricing, planning, productivity, etc, it would be quite an easy task to go digging through the archives and finding three-four articles on just one topic.

And there you have it

You might have to slog a bit if you aren't familiar with the topic or sub-topics, but it's not an earth-shattering task. For instance, I still don't know a lot about layer masks, and that list I got from the Lynda.com site.

If I wanted to move deeper into the world of layer masks, I'd have to have access to the site (which I do) and about 43 minutes of learning. Even if I were to go over the videos thrice over, that would still require fewer than two hours of work. But that scenario only arises if you're a complete newbie.

If you've been creating content for a while, it's really a matter of collation, some tea or coffee-drinking and you've got yourself a report that's pretty single-minded. It's no army but you don't need an army do you? You don't even need a corps or division, no brigade, regiment, battalion or company. Not even a platoon, squad. Just a section—just 3 or 4 little foot soldiers will do the job just fine, don't you agree?

And that brings us to the end of “how to create a report”. Let's review what we've just learned.

Summary

There are three ways to cook up a quick report.
1) Report that goes from C-A
2) Diverse, Disconnected Topic Report
3) One Topic, Many Angles Report

The report that goes from C-A starts at the very end—and yes, three steps are usually enough of a journey for the client. Start with C and work your way back to A because it ensure a result. Anything that you can achieve in three quick steps is a good enough target. Ideally it needs to pertain to something you're selling.

For example, if you're in the business of gardening then your report would consist of three steps to get something done quickly and effectively in the garden. You don't want to name the report: “3 steps to a better blah-blah-blah”. It's better to give it a curious title, instead. E.g. The title of the headline report on the Psychotactics site is “Why Headlines Fail” and then it goes on to give three steps within the report, anyway. The C-A report is powerful because it has an end point.

However, the diverse, disconnected report seeks no such end-point clarity

If anything, it's a bit of a potluck party. You put in various pieces of content that seemingly don't have any sequence or relation to each other, but come under the broad umbrella of a topic. For instance, the podcast series at Psychotactics is called the “Three Month Vacation”. One episode of the podcast can be about pricing, the second about productivity and the third about software. Even though they're quite diverse topics, they're still bound under the topic of “marketing and business”. The concept of potluck that you hear on the podcast can just as easily be a sure-fire method of creating reports.

Finally we looked at one topic and many angles

Or let's call it topics and sub-topics. Or even sub-sub-topics. A bit of a brainstorm session, and time away from the office can do wonders. Even if you're no pro at the topics or sub-topics, you can quickly spot where you're weak. You can then learn and master the topics, and pass on the knowledge in your own style, tone and language to someone else. In case you're wondering, this isn't plagiarism.

Plagiarism is when you simply “photocopy” someone's work and pass it off as your own. This method of learning and teaching is what everyone needs to follow, and it's simply a form of “tracing” or “copying” and then using your own method to get it to your eventual client. It's why yoga teaching aspirants go to yoga training centres, or why we attend workshops and seminars. We learn, so we can teach.

Which brings us right back to the yoghurt rice. Remember the recipe?

Step 1: Take a cup of cooked rice.
Step 2: In a frying pan, pop a teaspoon of mustard seeds and some dry red chillies in oil.
Step 3: Pour the oil, mustard seeds and red chillies over the rice and add 1 ½ cup of natural yoghurt.

Go try it. You'll love it. Oh, and if you like, keep it in the fridge for an hour or so. It's delicious when it's cold.

Bon appétit!

Next Step: With tens of thousands of similar products or services in the market, it seems impossible to make your product stand out.
But is there a way to make your product/service irresistible—and without looking cheesy? Find out how here: The Two Psychological Techniques To Creating An Irresistible Product/Service (And Increased Sales)

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Oh and before I go

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Competition? That's the enemy isn't it?

Why would you sell or worse, give the competition your ideas? It doesn't seem to make sense at all and yet it's a very solid business strategy—and especially for small business.

In this episode, you'll find three solid reasons why competition can change your life for the better.

Right click here and ‘save as' to listen to this episode.

You are read the transcript on the website too:
#155: Why Selling Strategies to Competition Is a Smart Idea

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Approximately every month we take our nieces, Marsha and Keira for dinner, but Keira always does something very curious.

Since the girls were little, my wife Renuka and I have taken them to dinner

After dinner we head to the mall, where they buy themselves an ice-cream. The first thing Keira does when she gets her ice-cream is offer me the first bite. “Not too big a bite”, she'll always say. But yes, I do get the first bite, before she continues to devour the rest of the ice-cream. In doing so, Keira is sharing what's rightfully hers to keep. She doesn't need to have a chunk of her ice-cream bitten off, no matter how small.

Like Keira, our business is our ice-cream

We don't need to share our secrets with someone else, do we? Yet, the smaller your company, the bigger the upside in sharing the secrets and knowledge you've gained over the years. Big companies can thrive on muscle power alone and sell solely to their customers. A smaller business, on the other hand, needs to learn to share; to teach the competition what they already know.

I know, I know, this strategy sounds really odd. However, there are very solid reasons why you should wade right into the unlikely world of “teaching your competitors”.

Let's find out why and cover three main points.

1: Clients Come And Go, Competition Remains Longer
2: You're always ahead of the competition (even when you tell them what you know)
3: Why selling your information to competition makes the market more viable

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Part 1: Clients Come And Go, Competition Remains Longer

Imagine you dominated 90% of your market. Would you be happy?

About 20 years ago, I heard of a lumber company that was hugely successful. So successful, in fact, that the competition was reduced to just 10% of the share of market, while this lumber-company gobbled up the rest. Ideally they should have rested on their laurels.

A 90% stake signifies a healthy bottom line and lots of champagne, but they were restless. Their restlessness arose from their unusual plight. Being a lumber-based company, they could only operate profitably in a certain geographical area. If they tried to sell outside that area, they would run into increased transportation costs and other additional taxes, which made it unprofitable to go outside their boundaries. In short, they were “trapped” and could never expand or grow their business.

What would you do in such a situation?

Marketer, Jay Abraham, came up with a solution. He suggested the lumber company sell their secrets. As you can imagine, such a suggestion meets with instant pushback. The lumber company was the market leader because they had a system to treat the trees.

I don't remember the story very well, but it went a bit like this: If they overdid the treatment, the lumber would be “overcooked”. If they were too cautious, the wood would be “raw” and unfit for any use. Every year, companies lost hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of precious lumber, because they hadn't perfected this system of treating the lumber just right.

And now the company was being asked to sell its secrets

You'd recoil if you were asked to do the same, wouldn't you? Like some crazy grandmother defending her precious recipes, you'd refuse to give away your secrets. What if the competition learned all of the methods and put you out of business? Why should you sell something that has taken you so much pain to acquire? Giving away, or selling your secrets to the competition seems like the most dimwitted thing to do.

Selling to competition may seem foolish, but competition is an exceedingly powerful source of revenue and longevity.

My friend Julia used to own several bed stores. Over the years she learned how to run the stores very effectively. So effective was she that she'd make 200-300% higher profits over other stores. What's interesting about a bed store is that the goods aren't terribly unique. If you look at a brand like Sealy or Sleepyhead, you're likely to find the same beds in practically every bed store.

Yes, her profits were higher than other stores, but there's a limit to how much stock can be held in a store

Unless Julia were to lease a new space, get the franchise rights, hire new staff etc., there seemed to be no way to increase her profits with clients. However, there was a spectacular, if slightly hidden opportunity to sell the secrets to the competition.

Clients come and go. You buy a bed, and you're not exactly rushing out to buy another one tomorrow, are you? So clients buy the product and leave, but what does competition do? They stick around. If Julia were to sell her secrets to the competition, they'd stick around for as long as they were getting results. The “result” might mean greater profits, more time off, less staff turnover, or less chaotic management systems.

Which is what the lumber company did as well

They realised their geographical boundary was going to inhibit their growth, so they started having seminars. At first, the seminars were modestly priced at $5000 per head. Then in barely a year or so, the very same seminars shot up to $25,000 per person. Would you find the price of the seminar prohibitive? Lumber companies lost hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.

Badly treated wood was taken as the “cost of doing business”. Once this lumber company showed them their methods, the other lumber companies were in a position to make a small fortune by not consigning the wood to waste. And it wasn't just the lumber companies in that district, or city, or even country. Lumber companies around the world wanted to pay for that information so that they could reduce waste to the bare minimum. The competition would stick around as long as it was finding the information profitable.

Every bookstore on the planet is an example of this concept of selling to the competition

When confronted with the fact that you may need to sell your secrets, the idea may seem unpalatable, but look at the bookstore in your city. Those videos, the books, the magazines—they're all filled with secrets that are being given away.

Grandma kept her secrets and she's highly revered in her own family, but Grandma's only clients are her immediate family. The clients of the books, videos and magazines are the entire world. And you know as well as I do how the systems start chugging along once you buy a book.

You rarely buy one book and never buy another one again

When a business owner gives you their “secrets” and you get value from the information, you want to go back for more. However, as we've experienced in the past, we rarely restrict ourselves to just books. We buy into a lot more.

The lumber company continued to make steady profits from their sale of lumber to their customers, but it's the competition that needed more information on a regular basis. They were not only able to give information in the form of treating lumber, but on many other topics that the competition needed to succeed as well.

However, the most important bit of all is the longevity of the competition

Customers tend to come and go. Whether you're selling a bed, lumber or consulting, a customer will show up, take what they need and leave. And truly speaking, so will a competitor. However, in many cases the competition will come back to get even more information.

They'll consult with you, buy your courses, attend your workshops, and want to get as much as possible from you. If you're already ahead of the competition, they will keep coming back. No matter whether you have a brick and mortar business or something online, the principle remains exactly the same.

Customers come and go.
Competition stays around a lot longer.

The lumber company was seemingly trapped

Yet, it's that very trap that transformed their business. Instead of dealing solely with clients, they moved to competition and operated in a completely different universe. However, a red flag does pop up, doesn't it?

What if the competition takes your stuff and makes it their own? Is it possible to muscle in, on your market? What if you don't recover from your weapons being used against you? Let's find out in this second section on why you're always ahead of your competition, even when you're teaching them everything you know.

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2: You're always ahead of the competition (even when you tell them what you know)

Let's say you started walking down the road, six months ago

Somewhere along the way you learned a lot about the road, the pit stops, the method of walking, rehydration methods, etc. Now you're teaching your competition who's coming down that same road. If both of you were to keep walking, you'd still be many “months” ahead of the competition. Even though they've bought all the videos, read all your books and followed your plan in extreme detail, they're still going to be many months behind, even with you giving away all the tips that will help them move faster ahead.

However, if you're still feeling a bit paranoid about the competition, there are two factors that will keep you ahead.

The first factor is that time marches on.

Let's say you've figured out how to make social media ads get a great return on investment. By the time you teach your competition everything you know, time is ticking away. Things change all the time. What worked for Facebook yesterday, may be different today.

The same would apply for any business. Every so-called “success case study” is only a record of the past, and whatever you teach is likely to have changed anywhere from a tiny fraction to quite a lot. Even if you're teaching in an area that's not changing everyday—let's say watercolours, for instance—there's still some change in tools or equipment.

Something in your technique, material or sequence will change all the time, often without your knowledge. And the competition can't keep up.

The second point is one of mistakes

We all have been lost at some point or the other—even with a GPS. Why is this so? A map is a map is a map, right? We're not supposed to get lost when we're given precise instructions. However, human error, and often, human creativity comes into play. Even when it seems you're following the map with a great deal of precision, there's always some possibility that it will be interpreted in an incorrect manner. Your competition is going to have to work out those mistakes and fix them.

It's easy to believe that selling information to competition is risky

What if the competition takes your ideas and uses it as their own? The reality is different. No matter how generous and detailed you are with your ideas and systems, you will always be ahead of the competition. When we did the Protégé sessions back in 2006-2008, most of the “customers” were really our competition.

For most of our courses we get clients to fill in a form before, or right after they join. In this questionnaire, many of them revealed the primary reason why they wanted to be part of the course. As you've already guessed, they didn't want to reinvent the wheel. They wanted to use the system that we already had in place.

If you stay stagnant, the competition will catch up

They'll show up, they may overtake you and you're likely to be left in their dust. Yet we know that few of us intend to remain stagnant. As we learn and implement, invent and re-invent, we move ahead always maintaining enough of a lead. Plus, a lot of what we do depends on our strategy.

Staying ahead is a weird concept, because we're not running parallel races with our competition. In reality we're chapping and changing our strategies all the time and any comparison with the competition is odd, at best.

You can't really compare one restaurant with another. You can't throw one author in the same bull ring as another. Comparison itself is a super-weird activity to contemplate. Anyway, if the competition really wanted to copy your work, there are ways and means of doing so.

Instead, selling your work to competition is a much saner idea

It earns you revenue, builds up your authority and no matter how much you give away or sell, there's still an astounding amount of information that remains to be explained. If anything, selling the system is a far superior way to grow a business, as it draws in both customers and competition on a much bigger scale.

But here's one of the biggest reasons why you need to sell to your competition: it is called “expanding the market“. Most of us think of competition as a bad thing, but it's quite the opposite. It makes the market more viable. Let's find out how.

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3: Why selling your information makes the market more viable

In 2014, Tesla Motors did something very revolutionary. They gave away the patents to their electric car.

What are we to make of news like that? Is Tesla just being generous?

Or does it have an ulterior motive? We know electric cars are a tiny fragment of the market. Despite being superior in almost every way to the petrol-driven car, they're still to make big inroads. But as an article on Forbes Magazine pointed out, Tesla's real competition is not another company.

Instead it's the archaic petrol engines that are being manufactured in the millions around the globe, every single day. By giving away the patents, the competition doesn't have to figure things out. More importantly, they don't have to get into yet another patent lawsuit that would slow them down. Even when the other car manufacturers start to work on Tesla's patents, Tesla should be well down the road.

James Part is the co-founder and CEO of Fitbit, a wireless fitness tracker.

When Fitbit entered the market, they had bigger, gruntier competitors like Nike and Jawbone with the potential to crush an upstart like Fitbit. But here's what Park says. “You need some critical mass to legitimize what you're doing.” And Ben Yoskowitz, an angel investor told Inc. Magazine: “If nobody is competing in your space, there's a very good chance the market you're going into is too small.

Any reasonably good idea has 10,000 people working on it right now. You may not even know they exist because they're as small as you.”

But what's all of this got to do with you? After all Fitbit didn't give away or sell its information, did it?

We grow up in an us vs. them environment. Which means that many, if not most of us, believe that competition isn't a good thing. We also believe that too much competition causes a saturation in the marketplace.

Both these beliefs have some truth in them, but it really depends on your point of view. When you teach competition to do something that you already know, you're not only earning an income, but you're doing your own bit to broaden the market.

My friend, and super-graphic designer, John McWade was literally the first one on the planet to use desktop publishing software

McWade ran into some of the earliest Mac computers back in the 80's. He had a job as an art director of a magazine called Reno when he was given a little piece of software by Jeremy Jake. Jake was the chief engineer of a tiny Seattle startup called All This and was writing a software called PageMaker. Today we use the fancy InDesign software for desktop publishing but the heart of Adobe desktop publishing goes all the way back to PageMaker.

But who was using PageMaker?

Literally no one on the planet, except the engineers and John. Which is when John started up Before and After Magazine. And he showed people how to use PageMaker, and to create amazing graphic design. You could safely say that John McWade single handedly expanded the market and created competition.

Today there are tens of thousands of books, videos and courses on InDesign. Selling the secret of how to create great graphic design has given McWade a good life and a huge fan following. In turn, the expansion of the market has been good for almost everyone. However, this advice of expanding the market doesn't just apply when you're starting up. It also applies when you're entering a reasonably mature marketplace.

Which is why no matter where you look, whether it's books, cosmetics, shoes, consulting or training, there's new stuff appearing on the horizon almost endlessly. Which brings us to a very crucial point.

Your competition is going to sell to your competition

If you decide to keep your secrets all to yourself, that's your prerogative. However, your competition isn't exactly going to keep mum. If you have some great knowledge in selling real estate, and you decide not to tell or sell, another real estate agent will write a book, do seminars and give their version, anyway.

If you're outstanding at creating apps, so are a thousand others who will happily put their information out for sale. The market will exist with or without you, so you might as well get your skin in the game because there really is hardly any downside and a ton of benefit, instead.

Selling to your competition may at first seem like a bad idea, but it rarely is.

No one is saying you need to ignore your customers. Your customers are extremely important, but so is the competition. Go out and find the competition. They're good for business.

Next Step: Read or listen to: The Unlikely Bestseller (And Why It Sold 2 Million Copies)

 

Take time off? Doesn't everyone want that?

So how are you supposed to achieve that force of business?

How do you get to downtime? And what about the passion projects you've been putting off for so long?

In this episode we wrestle with the remaining two forces of business and start on a journey that's been put aside for much too long.

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Read the article online: Passion Projects: How They Can Completely Change Your Business

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: Fourth Force of Business—Passion Projects
Part 2: Fifth Force of Business—The Power of Down Time

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The fourth force: Passion Projects

In 2010, I got this dazzling idea to do a series of stock cartoons.

As you probably know, I'm a professional cartoonist, and my fascination for Photoshop has lasted for well over 20 years. It seemed like a very good idea to create a unique set of cartoons that clients could use for their blogs, e-books, webinars or presentations. Then, seven years sneaked up, and now it's 2017. The cartoons aren't done.

Passion projects are what feed your soul

A passion project is something that you really want to complete, not necessarily because of revenue or fame. It's just something that you have to do because no one else will do it. The longer you put it off, the more you feel something chipping away at your soul.

I've wanted to write a book on talent; I've wanted to write about real education online with “Teacher vs. Preacher”, there's a website that I started out in 2015, and it's been on ice ever since. So much of what's important to me, to you just seems to circle the airport and never really lands.

However, at least at first, passion projects don't necessarily feed your tummy

If you were to decide to spend time embarking on a photography project on the side, or writing the novel you've always planned to write, there's almost no guarantee that any of it will bring in revenue or clients. It's possible that you may hit paydirt or hit a wall—at least when it comes to any sort of riches or fame. Even so, now and then it's important to feed your soul.

Take for instance, Marcus Stout from Golden Moon Tea

Back in 2011, Stout decided to trash 4 out of 5 of his best-selling teas. As if that were not enough, his company had to re-create 75 of his tea blends? What was the reason for all of this upheaval? It was a passion project that Stout wanted had wanted to put into place for a long time.

Around 2011, he changed the way he was personally eating and found he wasn't keen on drinking a lot of his own tea. “Most people don't realise it,” he says, “but a lot of tea has chemicals, even if they say it's natural.” Since he was keen on getting rid of all chemicals and every last toxin, he decided to scrap his best-selling tea.

It wasn't easy to take on a passion project of this nature

Stout did his homework. He didn't merely jump into changing the teas without seeing if a market existed. Even so, it was an incredibly difficult decision to make as some of the teas had been superstars all the way back from 1995. Some of his clients ask for those teas even today, and he won't stock them or sell them because they don't meet his standards.

A passion project can be a small undertaking or a complete change in the way you conduct your business

No matter how we look at it, it's a plane that's been circling the airport, and you need to get that plane to land. At Psychotactics, this meant walking away from doing courses in the second half of 2017 and early 2018.

The Article Writing Course and other live courses (that means courses that are conducted by me online) won't show up until mid-2018. In doing so, we walk away from well over $100k-$150k of profit. Will the passion projects replace that income? It's impossible to tell. When we walked away from the Protégé Program back in 2009, we also walked away from $150k a year, with no idea how to replace that income.

Whether you're dealing with smaller revenues or substantial revenues, the fear and the excitement are remarkably similar

However, a passion project needs to be done. It can't be postponed forever. All those dreams of what you and I will do when we retire, can't wait for retirement. They might be pushed onto the back burner for a while, but at some point, we all have to do what is important to us, even if we aren't sure it will have a payback.

Getting to New Zealand was a bit of a passion project for us

When we left India, we didn't know what to expect in New Zealand. We'd never been to Auckland and knew next to no one. We were also leaving a very settled and decently luxurious life back in Mumbai. The people we'd met along the way told us that it rains a lot in Auckland and it's really quiet. That to us was our beacon of light. We love the rain and the quiet, and it became our not-so-little passion project.

Making space for “landing those planes” is necessary.

It may not happen right away, but it needs to happen because it's good for the soul. What we've found as well, is that in the long run it's been reasonably profitable. Every time we've walked away from one thing to put our energy into another, we've found it's helped not just our mind, but our business as well.

A business needs so many things and has so many forces pulling at you in all directions

Learning by doing
Learning by learning
Revenue generation/client retention
Passion projects

There's still one thing that we all desperately need, and it's called downtime. It's such a simple concept that it almost requires no explanation, but let's give it a shot, shall we? Let's examine the fifth force of business and why it's incredibly crucial to your business and sanity.

The fifth force: Downtime

In the early days of the watercolour course, I gave everyone a break for a month.

When they came back, almost every participant was painting a lot better than the month before. Did they practice during the break? Did they access other material? Some did, but it didn't explain how almost everyone was better—even the ones who hadn't picked up a brush at all. The only common element between every one of the participants was a factor of downtime.

Business requires downtime

Without downtime there's a lot of do, do, do and not enough time for the brain to process what's happening. Time away from work is almost as crucial as work time itself. Which is why we plan the year differently from most people I know.

Instead of listing out all the things we need to do and projects we need to complete, we first put in the blocks of downtime. Then we put in the work in between that downtime. It enables us to recharge in a way that's not possible when at work.

Yet most of us don't have the luxury of downtime

When we started mentoring my niece, Marsha, for instance, it was a bit like starting up a new business. There was no time to waste. To get her up to speed, I'd tutor her on the way from the classroom to the car. Then in the car, we'd talk a bit and do spellings and practice multiplication tables.

We worked through the week, and for a couple of hours on the weekend. The school holidays were intensive for her, but also for us, and we often put in 6-8 hour days for five-six weeks on end. When you're right at the starting point, everything is an uphill journey. However, over time, Marsha has zoomed to the top tier of the class. Now she still works as hard as she possibly can, but she also has big chunky breaks during the day, week and in the year.

In business, it's not unusual to have no downtime

The mortgage and bills are starting to grow in untidy piles on your desk, and those payments need to be made. But in time, almost all of us have the ability to take time off. It almost seems like a silly thing to do, to take time off when the business has just started to pick up. And yet, it's what we all need to do. Downtime calms you down, relaxes you, and it helps you come back refreshed.

It's a force of business like the other forces

If anything, like the students on the watercolour course, it helps you come back stronger than ever before. Plan your downtime. Start small. Take a few days off, before embarking on longer breaks. But ignore the breaks at your peril. A tired brain is not quite as good as a rested one. And certainly not as creative.

Which brings us to the end of this journey where we explored five forces that pull us in different directions. It's a tug of war. Get used to it. With a little work and strategy, you'll be on the winning side.

 

Next Step: Have a look at—Why Anti-Fragility Breeds Success (And How Nature Focuses On It)

No one thinks running a small business is easy

But even so, there are forces that pull you in all directions.

These five forces almost seem to tear at us as we go through our daily work. It's not just a question of coping with the forces. We have to somehow make them part of our lives. Let's find out how.

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Read Online: How To Cope With The Five Forces of Business: Part 1

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: What are the five forces of business?
Part 2: Why it is a question of management?
Part 3: What sucks up the most time in business?

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In December 2015, I attended a workshop in Nashville, Tennessee.

The workshop itself was very tedious. There were endless slides, countless examples of TV commercials and no breaks. However, there were these long lunch breaks that spanned almost an hour and a half. With little else to do after lunch, I’d wander around the lobby looking at the signs posted on the walls. The signs were quotes from prominent American politicians.

One of them was attributed to US President, John F. Kennedy.
It simply said:“If not us, who. If not now, when?”

No one seems to know if John F. Kennedy said it or not. And yet, for me at that moment, the quote was relevant. I’d wanted to get certain things done. I’d wanted to write some specific books on talent; books on teaching etc. And this sign seemed to slap me in the face. If it wasn’t for me, who would do it? If not now, when would it get done?

And yet here we are all these months later, and the battle rages on

Many other projects got done, but some remain almost permanently on the to-do list. How could I, I wondered, make things happen? It was time to take stock. I soon realised that business—at least my business—had five permanently competing forces. To achieve what I wanted, I couldn’t only focus on one and leave the others sulking in the corner.

This wasn’t a question of focus, it was a question of management

For me to feel a profound sense of achievement with every passing year, I knew I had to deal not with just one or two, but with all five forces of business. So what are these five forces of business? The first two involve learning.

The third includes revenue and client retention. The fourth was critical, but often neglected “passion projects” and finally there was downtime. All five of these forces jostled for space, and every one of them was incredibly important.

Let’s take a look at all five of them by listing them out, to begin with.

1) Learning by doing
2) Learning by learning
3) Revenue generation/client retention
4) Passion projects
5) Downtime

The first force of business: Learning by doing

Stop for a moment and think of something that kills 842,000 people a year.
That’s a whopping 2,300 people per day. You didn’t think of water, did you?

Water isn’t supposed to kill. It’s meant to give life. And yet it runs around day after day, year after year like a mutant Jack the Ripper. No one, it seems, is interested enough to stop this killer. No one, except Dean Kamen.

“We could empty half of all the beds in all the hospitals in the world by just giving people clean water”, says Kamen.

And Kamen is the one person who’s uniquely placed to take up this challenge. In Manchester, New Hampshire, where he lives and works, he’s known for the invention of the Segway, Ibot Transporter – a six-wheeled robotic “mobility system” that can climb stairs, traverse sandy and rocky terrain, and raise its user to eye-level with a standing person. Kamen has over 440 patents to his name, but it’s clean water that got his attention.

Which is why he set about creating the “Stirling engine”.

The “Stirling Engine” is so amazing, it can generate clean, drinkable water even from water contaminated with mud, even bacteria-filled human faeces. For most people, creating products of such grand simplicity would be an insurmountable barrier, but Kamen’s team at his firm, DEKA, soon came up with a working machine. A machine that only needed the power of a hair dryer. And if necessary, it could even work on fuel sources such as cow dung.

The product was ready; the challenge was met. It was then that Kamen ran into his first major hurdle

For fifteen years Kamen struggled to get his “Stirling Machines” mass-produced and distributed around the world. And yet all he met with was polite smiles and closed doors. The World Bank, the UN, the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and many other governmental agencies, and NGO’s—they all realised the problem but couldn’t help.

Too many of these organisations were not set up to help mass manufacture or distribute Kamen’s machine to the poorest parts of the world, where they are most needed.

This is our first challenge in business: We need to learn by doing

At Psychotactics I’ve conducted the Article Writing Course since 2006. It’s called the toughest writing course in the world, and for a good reason. For three months clients have to slog to get to the finish line and be able to write an article in between 60-90 minutes. For me, the workload is magnified several times over.

Every day, I have to look at 25 assignments and lots of questions relating to the assignment. The course itself generates no fewer than 600 articles, all of which have to be read and evaluated. It’s not just the toughest course for the clients; it’s also a mind-bending course for me as the trainer.

So why do it?

The course isn’t cheap at $3000 or more, but it’s not the revenue that’s the biggest driver. It’s easy enough to create one, even two products that would generate a far greater profit, without all the associated hard work. The answer is in the “doing”.

By teaching that course time after time, for the past ten years, you learn things that you couldn’t know or experience by just writing a home study course. Every course brings up brand new challenges all of which have to be tackled.

It’s the problems that create enormous spikes in learning. The secrets of teaching and learning are revealed frustratingly slowly, as I push myself yet into another iteration of the course. Without doing, I’d have no learning, no way to overcome the barriers.

Kamen’s 15-year learning journey to deliver clean water ended in an interesting place too

While the UN or NGOs don’t head out into the tiny villages, there’s one organisation that has found penetration in the smallest pockets. No matter where you go on the planet, you can get yourself a bottle of Coca-Cola. In exchange for a redesign of their age-old dispensing machines, Kamen teamed up with Coke to take the Stirling machines to the far edges of the planet. That’s not as if to say there weren’t more challenges in getting the device to work. Nonetheless, all of these issues can only be overcome by doing.

It’s the reason why you need to blog.
It’s the reason why some of us create podcasts.
It’s the reason why we keep doing stuff even when at times it’s plainly disheartening to go on.

It’s in the doing that we learn the lessons

The reason why so many people fail is because you have to persist for a while before the oceans part and you can walk through to the other side. It’s not like Dean Kamen isn’t well-connected. He’s directly in touch with prominent organisations, US presidents and well-known figures. Even so, it’s taken him a solid 15 years to find any traction. Many of us, swayed by the “double your results tomorrow” bandwagon feel like we’re losers when things don’t happen overnight.

At Psychotactics we’ve had to learn by doing

We’ve held workshops in New Zealand, in the US, in Amsterdam, in the UK. Every workshop is a super-challenge. Why not sit back and just conduct an online course instead? Why not just do the simplest thing possible?

The answer is in doing. You learn most when you push your boundaries. All of this earth-shaking work takes energy and time. A single workshop takes a month of preparation, a month of travel and a month of re-entry time. It's all learning by doing. You can’t make big leaps in your work, and you can’t stand out in the way you’d want to, by taking tiny steps all the time.

It’s these big steps that also cause the greatest chaos

If you were on the Article Writing Course in 2016, it would have been just a course. But if you were part of the alumni doing the course, you might have been slightly horrified. The entire course had changed. Assignments that were usually in Week 11 showed up in Week 4. Whole systems that were used in earlier courses were just dropped and replaced by quite another system. Was the new system tested? Of course not.

It's what learning by doing is often about. When you make significant changes, there’s no way to know how something will work right away. You’re supposed to improvise, and it pushes you to the limit.

Learning by doing easily sucks up the most time in a business

Dean Kamen is a multimillionaire. He flies to work by helicopter every day and has earned enough fame and money never to have to work again. He took on the challenge of proving that clean water could indeed reach the poorest. The only way he could achieve all of this activity was by putting himself on the sword and keeping at it. It’s the core of what drives the business: doing stuff even when the odds are against you.

It’s where you learn the most.

But that’s only one form of learning. There’s also the relatively less strenuous form of learning that can suck up a lot of time. And that’s learning by learning.

Why is Australia hot?
Why is Antarctica cold?

The greatest change in my life in the past 3 ½ years has been my niece, Marsha’s, questions. Renuka and I mentor her, but once she’s done with Renuka’s part of the syllabus, I take over. We sit on the floor near the sofa, chomping cheese, carrots and almonds. And Marsha has questions, lots of questions. In the process, I’ve learned a lot about clouds, countries and their capitals, geology, biology and history.

I learned the Antarctica and Australia were once connected

That they had the same endless forests of Glossopteris. And that with the drifting of continents, Australia moved north. This created space for the Southern Ocean. As Australia floated away, the ocean currents had no landmass barriers. They started spinning around the continent of Australia at an increasingly rapid speed. So quickly did it spin, that the mild climate of Antarctica started to freeze over around 17 million years ago.

Second Force: This is learning by learning and is the second force of business

It’s the one thing that we don’t always have time for. It’s easier to keep doing what we’re doing instead of learning a new skill. Having to dig into the freezing over of Antarctica or how some software program works, can suck up a lot of time. Then there are all those books that we buy that need to be read; all those podcasts that have to be heard; all those courses that have to be looked into.

This year, in particular, I dropped the ball on reading

I benchmark my learning based on where I am with my New Yorker magazine and National Geographic reading. Usually, a New Yorker won’t last more than a few days, and the same goes for National Geographic.

It means I am reading at optimum pace and learning not only through magazines but also have time to read books—a lot of books. Instead, this year, I’ve been behind on New Yorker almost all year. I’ve still got to go through at least four months worth of National Geographic. Somehow it seems, I’ve not allocated enough time for this activity as I did in previous years. I got so tied up with the doing, with the courses, etc. that the learning dropped precipitously.

One of the core forces of business involves learning by learning

To be exceedingly smart at what you do, the learning needs to consist of reading, audio (even if you’re not a big fan), video and learning programs. All of this learning is mind boggling and can be exhausting at times. It's one of the most vital forces of business.

It’s what keeps you on top of things in a way that Facebook or listening to yet another debate about the political madness can never do for you. There is, of course, the downside for this type of learning. I see people who read book after book but never do anything. They always hope to do something, plan to do it, even, but never do. They spend a lot of time in learning from books, audio and video but never doing.

To progress, you need both forms of learning to move together in progression

No matter what the barriers, you need to keep doing. Failure will come, and failure will go, and you’ll learn from it and move ahead. It’s also important to keep your focus on the learning through books, audio and video. I know I slipped in the books department. I am aware that audio has never been a problem, but audio books are not the same as reading a book.

The forces of business pull in all directions. While we’re learning by doing and by learning, we still have to earn a living and keep clients coming back.

Third Force: Revenue generation/client retention

When I just started out Psychotactics, I first heard the definition of the word, “client”.

According to Webster’s Dictionary, the definition of client was: one who comes under your care, protection and guidance. For a lot of people this definition rings true. They want their customers to be like their child. They want to care, protect and guide. And yet, you can do too much.

Back in 2006, I started a year long training called the Protégé Course

It covered a lot of disciplines from copywriting, PR, information products etc. And that class alone was generating about $150,000 a year. But by 2008, I’d stopped that course. There were two reasons. The first reason was I felt I was covering too much material in a single year.

Going through the Protégé course was like having to learn five languages a year. But the secondary reason for stopping the course was simply that I wasn’t able to pay as much attention to the rest of the clients.

You’ve seen this in a classroom

A teacher has her favourite students and they get most of the attention and the others are left behind a bit. In a business, focusing a lot on some clients and not on the others is a bad idea. You have to work on the care, protect and guide as many clients as possible. And do it to the best of your ability. It’s only when we worked this out that we realised we could do just fine with a fewer number of clients.

Psychotactics gets about 90% of its revenue from about 500 clients

But it’s always a big balancing act. You have to have time to help clients through their issues, but no matter what you do, there’s always the brutal fact that some of them will leave. When I started 5000bc, I thought that clients would stay forever.

And many stayed for as long as 10 years, which is longer than forever on the Internet. But eventually clients will leave. You’re then faced with a nice big black hole if you haven’t been working on getting new clients.

And this bugged me a lot

Most people are happier getting new clients and then leaving them to their own devices. I’m happier not having to worry about new clients and would be exhilarated if everyone stuck around forever. However, that’s not how things work. Which is why your third big force in your business is dual-fold. It’s to keep clients and to get new clients at the same time.

We’ve tried a lot of stuff along the way

We gave YouTube a shot, started podcasts, then stopped it. And restarted again. We’ve never done much, if any, SEO. No advertising or publicity. But what’s worked for us has been a steady stream of clients from search engines, from a bit of guest blogging and finally, just creating products that no one else wants to create.

In the end, a few activities have made the biggest difference. I know the 80/20 group of people may pop up here, but it’s not been 80/20 at all. It’s just been that we’ve been more comfortable in some areas e.g. podcasting or e-mail, and persisted. Over the years, that persistence and subtle changes in strategy have worked for us.

But this third force of business takes a lot of time

To care, protect and guide your clients takes up a ton of time. And then, in your “free time” you’ve got to go out and get new clients. We’ve been in the business of marketing since 2000. I thought it would get easier over time. It doesn’t. You have to allocate a good amount of time to just keep client and get clients as well. Your strategy is going to depend on what you do.

I do have one quick tip about this point of getting new clients, though

Once you find what you do, do a lot of it. If you decide to write books on Amazon, write lots of books. If you decide to do guitar videos, do a ton of them. And this is because once clients find you and like you, they binge on your work. If they don’t find a lot of your work, they go elsewhere. Which is why you have to decide what you want to do and go for it. There’s no right or wrong strategy.

When we started our podcasts (or rather restarted it) back in 2014, we had no idea if it would work

But we got going all the same. For a good two years, the download figures stayed more or less the same. We got almost no e-mail from clients. Our reviews on iTunes barely made it past 100 reviews. Still, the sales of products kept going up steadily, month after month. And then for some unknown reason the downloads increased by 20%, then up to 25%. Having all these podcasts; all this information; it’s helped us do both things simultaneously. Get and keep the clients.

This getting and keeping—it’s a force of business. You have to allocate time for it as well. And it can distract you and me away from something we actually love. That something is our “passion projects”.

Let’s find out why in Part 2: Why The Five Forces of Business Can be Tamed

Articles can be mundane or enthralling. But what makes an article stand out? The short answer is enthusiasm. Yet, it's not easy to know how to create enthusiasm in an article, is it? In this podcast, we learn how to step through the three phases that makes your article pack a rollicking amount of enthusiasm.

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Read the article online: 
#152: How To Write Enthusiastically and Avoid The Dull Article
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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: Why you need to outline and how to keep it fresh
Part 2: Why you need to feel very strongly about the issue RIGHT NOW.
Part 3: Why you need to be able to deviate from your script a bit and make it messy.

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What is the definition of sales?

There's are probably a lot of definitions, but back in the year 2003 or so, Canadian-born American motivational public speaker and author, Brian Tracy came to New Zealand. I loved Brian's work and got to know him personally. One of the things I really liked was his definition of sales. “Sales is a transfer of enthusiasm from one person to another”.

A transfer of enthusiasm.

Wow! I always thought of sales as something grimy

Something you were forced to do to get your product or service in front of a client. With this definition, Brian changed the way I looked at sales. What he couldn't have known is that he didn't just change my perception of sales, but of communication itself. If selling could be enhanced through enthusiasm, then so could writing. Instead of just putting words on paper, an article could come alive with enthusiasm.

There's just one problem, isn't there?

How do you write enthusiastically? Are there stages or steps to follow? Not surprisingly, the stages aren't something you're unfamiliar with. The steps to enthusiastic writing are seemingly so obvious that it's easy to miss them.

Writing can get really grimy without the power of enthusiasm. It's time to find out what makes your words sing, isn't it? Let's take a look at the three steps you're going to need to put that zing in your words.

1: You need an outline. And the outline needs to be fresh.
2: You need to feel very strongly about the issue RIGHT NOW.
3: You need to be able to deviate from your script a bit and make it messy.

1: How to write enthusiastically: The “fresh” outline

The week my mother in law came to stay with us, I had to throw out all my spices.

Most people think that cooking is the act of getting ingredients together in a pot or vessel. But we also know that ingredients matter. The fresher the ingredients, the tastier the food. What we seem to forget are the spices. Like many others, I bought bottles of spices and they sat in the pantry for weeks, even months on end. My mother in law was appalled at the lack of freshness. She got me to bin the entire lot and start with a fresh lot.

An outline is a lot like stale spices

Whether you're outlining a big project, like a book, or a relatively smaller project, like an article, you're still dealing with the factor of freshness. If the outline is a week old, it's already getting relatively stale. If it's older, you're likely to be struggling to find out what you outlined in the first instance.

The reason I outline is because it saves me time

I'm not exactly the kind of person that loves to outline. The reason why I do so is because I know it gives me structure and it saves me an enormous amount of time. Even so, there's the curse called “excessive outlining”.

In my desire to create a truckload of content, I'll head to the cafe and outline five or ten articles. If I get down to writing those articles within a week or two, maybe even three, I'd be fine. But as you can tell, it's practically impossible to write so many articles in such a short time span.

Which means that the outline starts to get stale

I get newer ideas along the way, and add to the mountain of outlines and the longer I wait, the more the earlier outlines seem to fade into oblivion. I will look at the outlines; I know they're important, but they're not fresh anymore.

Like those spices in my kitchen cabinet, I can throw them in the dish, but they won't enhance the dish at all. Which is why you need to get an idea, outline it, and then get started with your writing.

If you need to re-outline the material along the way, that's perfectly fine, but the outline must be relatively fresh at all times. The longer you wait, the more you have to battle with what you were really thinking about. And battle takes up a lot of energy, which means that you're less likely to write with any sort of enthusiasm.

Consider that outlines don't vary too much

An outline for an article will tend to have a pretty straightforward construction.

First Fifty Words (Opening of article)
What?
Why?
How?
Other questions
Objections
Examples
End of article

So if you had an article on “How to buy earphones”

First Fifty Words
What to look for?
Why is it important?
How to avoid the noise in earphone marketing
What else to consider when buying earphones
Objections
Examples
End of article

That article outline isn't going to change a lot six months or even six years from now, is it?

You can still write a great article or create a chapter in a book about it.  It makes no sense to say that six years from now you will shy away from writing the article. But this is where the weirdness kicks in.

Intellectually you know you can write the article, but when it comes down to writing it, the fact that you wrote the outline a while ago will prevent you from getting too far ahead. You'll somehow want to write another article—any article—and avoid the one that's stale.

When you're going through so much avoidance it's hard to be enthusiastic

Fresh outlines are like fresh spices.
You shouldn't wait too long.
You need to outline and write as quickly as possible.

I will outline on one day and by the next day or two, I'm writing

But why not write on the day itself? You could, of course, but more often than not it's better to keep a bit of space between the outline and the material you're about to write.

Why? Because the outline allows your brain to let the thoughts percolate. A day later your article is likely to be far superior because you've been thinking about the contents as the hours tick by. An outline, a fresh outline, is crucial to get that enthusiasm in your writing, but it's not enough.

The second most important factor is feeling strongly about the issue right now.

2: Feeling Strongly About The Issue Right Now

My friend Cher taught me an important lesson on the day of my father in law's funeral.

When someone close to you dies, most people are uncomfortable around you. They know you're grieving and they feel your pain. It's at this point that almost everyone makes the same statement.

They say something like: “If you need anything, please let me know”. Cher did something entirely different. She baked a whole bunch of muffins, brought them over, stayed for a short while and then left.

I feel strongly about that issue right now

I feel that so many people tend to use words, not actions. That if we were all like Cher, we wouldn't be asking “what can we do?” Instead, we'd be doing something for our friends, our relatives or even that stranger that we may never meet again.

When you feel strongly about an issue, you need to write about it as quickly as you can. Right at the top of my agenda is to write an article about how we need to:

1) Not ask what we should do, but do something instead.
2) Not wait to tell someone how they changed our lives, but be specific about how they did it.
3) Avoid grumbles and demonstrate persistence, instead

We feel strongly about issues all the time

We may have just run into a problem and the issue is top of mind. Or we may have been the recipient of a great wave of generosity. But you don't always need to be prodded by happy and sad moments.

You could have just heard a podcast and that could have ignited a fire within you. Or in the case of this article, a client may ask you a question that you feel needs to be answered in detail.

There are lots of things that rev up the engines of your brain and the more strongly you feel about these issues right now, the more likely you are to write with a greater amount of enthusiasm.

Yet, doesn't this “feeling” lead directly to the outlining process?

Yes it does. The feeling comes right before the outline. Once you feel the surge, you then get down to outline. However, in many cases, a surge may break the rule of outlining.

Take for instance, when you see something on Facebook or in a forum. There's a discussion going and you need to get an important point across. In such a scenario, outlining may slow down the process and the moment of passion passes.

Instead you need to capture the enthusiasm while it's still fresh. What you tend to write in that moment may be remarkably more lucid than anything that's outlined and planned.

Writing while the “iron is hot” is not an excuse to avoid the outlining process

Outlining is smart because it saves time. Writing an answer quickly is just a way of getting your thoughts out quickly and keeping that fire alive. It's a shoddy excuse if you just want to avoid outlining.

Yet it does feed the flames of your outline. I tend to write quickly, if needed, but then I will create an outline and fit the information into that outline. Later, probably the day after, I will write the article or the chapter in the book.

Enthusiasm doesn't come easily

Yet it does strike from time to time and if you don't go through the process of writing down your thoughts and fashioning them, your writing won't necessarily be dull.

A lot of writing is done by sitting down and just working your way through a project. Yet, that sparkle that comes from frustration, desperation or inspiration comes and goes in quick bursts. Learning to capture those shiny bits in your article is what a great writer does.

All of this outlining and striking when the iron is hot is about structure. It's about discipline. Yet, enthusiasm often shows up when you least expect it. It's at this point that we need to learn to trust the diversion. Let's find out how deviating from the script is a good idea to create a high level of enthusiasm.

3: You need to be able to deviate from your script a bit and make it messy.

When does a concept become a coconut?

When you run into your computer's auto-correct, that's when. Like the other day when I was writing an answer in the forum in 5000bc. I fully intended to use the word “concept”, but as you do, my fingers went on their own journey. And as I typed something that was clearly garbled, the auto-correct suggested “coconut” as a replacement. This is the messiness, the unexpected factor that leads to enthusiasm.

It's not unlike the “I have a dream” speech by Martin Luther King Jr.

In the book, “Messy”, author, Tim Harford talks about how Martin Luther King Jr valued preparation. By the age of five he was learning Bible passages by heart. By fourteen his dedication to detailed research, outlining and re-outlining was paying off as he won a prize in a public speaking contest.

This attention to sticking to a script paid off time and time again when he started preaching, then later as he snapped up an oratory prize in college, and finally helped him get his job as a minister.

Every sermon started out on yellow lined paper as an idea on Tuesday, would be researched and re-drafted many times during the week, before he delivered it on Sunday. He lavished well over 15 hours a week learning every sermon by heart, just so that he never had to refer to his notes.

Yet the one speech that was the most memorable of all wasn't rehearsed

It was an improvisation. Even though he went through his prepared text for most of the speech, as he came to the end, he started to improvise.

At that moment, Mahalia Jackson shouted: “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” And then he was off, giving one of the most memorable speeches, that seemed to take a life of its own.

In the world of scriptwriting it's known that scripts take a life of their own

Often writers are astounded to find that the character in the script dictating the series of events. Just like “autocorrect” on your computer, the character decides what to do next.

This concept of the character taking over sounds really odd, until you speak to writers who express how the words on the page seem to come alive in a way that is hard to imagine.

To create enthusiasm in your writing, you need to follow trust the diversion

The outline is crucial, there's not a shred of doubt about that fact. The outline lets you stay within the parameters, but an outline can also be the launching pad for enthusiasm of a monumental scale. Suddenly the words are flowing out of you in a way you can't imagine.

The result is something you're not anticipating, and yet it's extremely pleasing when you get to the finish point. Make no mistake: the results are random when you're first starting out. Martin Luther King Jr. was no average speaker.

Writers, singers, jazz players, sports people—they're not rank amateurs. They've got a bit of practice under their belt and it's only at that point that the improvisation kicks in.

Which isn't to say you should wait until you're a great writer, just to improvise

No one is a great writer. Everyone is still learning their craft and the best way to get started down this path of improvisation is to simply go down the road when you hear “improv” calling you. The enthusiasm you feel for the subject matter will present itself in a way that you don't or can't expect.

Even in the very early stages, you should break free and let the text take over. Unburdened by typos and grammatical errors. Unfettered by whether what you're writing makes sense or not. Writing in a way that a cartoonist doodles, without a care in the world.

I had to learn these lessons of breaking free as well

Take for instance the script of the podcast. When I first started doing the podcast back in late 2014, I'd have a very rough outline, but no script. I'd stick to the points but all of the thoughts had to be improvised as I went along.

By mid-2015, I not only outlined the podcast in great detail, but started reading it off the computer screen and then off a teleprompter on my iPhone called Promptsmart. I thought I was doing a great job until someone suggested I could do better. That comment via e-mail got me thinking about what I'd learned about the diversion; about how letting go was a smart strategy.

And so that's what I did. I still have the outline. I still script and follow the script, but from time to time in the podcast, I'll let the diversion take over. This diversion perks me up when I'm bumping down the side road, but also gives a ton of energy when I get back on track with the script.

It's odd, this advice—even contrary.

And yet we know it to be true. To get enthusiasm you have to doodle, do some fair work, then go back to doodling again. It's what makes for great work, and brings immense power to your words.

Next Step: Find out—Why You Need to Have “Tension and Release” To Create Drama in Article Writing.

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How do you find a good coach?

We've all done courses that have been a waste of time, money and energy. Yet, finding a great coach isn't easy, is it? There doesn't seem to be any way to know in advance how good (or bad) a coach will be.

Or is there? There are a few benchmarks that make the difference between average and special coaches. And strangely, your first point of due diligence is located right on the sales page in the testimonial section.

In this episode Sean talks about

Factor 1: Look for the “End Point” in the testimonials
Factor 2: Why you need to focus on the next play
Factor 3: The Rollercoaster Design Training System

Read it online: Unusual Methods to Find Outstanding Coaches

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I wanted 200 gm of coffee. The Russian behind the counter was only willing to sell me 50 gm.

My idea of a great coffee, was instant coffee, Nescafé to be precise. At which point I was introduced to New Zealand's amazing coffee culture. To improve my coffee taste buds, I first  moved to a slightly fancier brand; a Dutch barista-style coffee called Moccona.

It consisted of coffee granules in a reasonably sized jar. However, that wasn't enough. My journey to becoming a coffee-snob involved buying a pack of pre-roasted coffee called Gravity. Shortly after, I ran into the Russian.

The Russian ran a boutique roasting company not far from my house

When I needed coffee, I'd go over and order about 200 gm (about 7 ounces). Until the day he decided not to sell me that quantity. He was only willing to sell me 50 grams (about 2 ounces). “You live close by,” he said. “What's the point of buying coffee and letting it oxidise for the whole week? When you're out of coffee, you come back and take the next 50 gm.”

A good coach is like my Russian coffee “dealer”.

Good coaches know that you can't consume massive amounts at one go, and so they slow you down so that you get a far deeper, richer experience. Over the years, I've had the luxury of having good coaches. Coaches that take speed up your progress. And there are also the bad coaches, who in their own way, teach you what good coaching is all about.

In this series, we'll take a look at how you pick a good coach that moves you forward on the journey from a “Nescafé” to a delicious “brew of excellent coffee”.

In this series, we'll cover three factors that will help you spot good coaches.

Factor 1: Look for the “End Point” in the testimonials
Factor 2: Focus on the next play
Factor 3: Rollercoaster design

Factor 1: Look for the “End Point” in the testimonials

If the sky is filled with cirrus clouds, what will the next 24 hours bring?

Cirrus clouds are those feather-like clouds you see high up in the sky.

In fact they're so high up at 20,000 feet that they're composed exclusively of ice-crystals. But here's an interesting fact: if you see a sky filled with cirrus clouds, you'll get rain and cooler, if not cold weather within the following 24 hours.

What's fascinating about this fact is that almost all of us have seen those fairy-like cirrus clouds, because they can cover up to 30% of the Earth's atmosphere at a time. Even so, we've missed the obvious—that rain and cold soon follows.

Missing the obvious is something we tend to do a lot when trying to find the right coach—or even the right course to attend—online or offline. And that obvious fact is in the most obvious place of all, in the testimonials. Almost every coach or coaching system will have testimonials, and it's through scanning the testimonials that you're likely to find a lot of incredibly valuable information.

But what does a mere testimonial reveal?

Here are just some of the things you should look out for in the testimonials. Let's say you joined a class to learn to make sushi. When you finish the class, what would you expect to be able to do? Silly question, isn't it? Almost all of us would “want to make sushi”.

That's why we joined the class, and that would be the end point, wouldn't it? Which means that as you scanned through the testimonials, you should see row upon row of words talking about how the attendees were able to make flawless sushi. In fact, we'd be a little concerned if we didn't see testimonials with a clear end result.

Yet when we sign up for courses, we don't bother to check the fine print of the testimonials

Let's say the course makes some bombastic claim like how you can treble your client list in 60 days. Now we know what to look for in the testimonials, don't we? The testimonials should talk about how everyone (yes, everyone) saw a 300% jump in client growth.

Instead, you rarely see any talk about 300% growth. Most of the testimonials seem to talk about the amazing quality of the videos, about the stunning modules in the course or how the person conducting the course is a great teacher. Almost none of the clients talk about the fact that their list numbers have gone up 300% or more. And if such a testimonial does sneak in, it's probably just one of the many testimonials that seem to say little or nothing.

The reality is that every client should reach a clear “End Point”

If you're about to sign up with a coach, your goal is not vague, is it? Which is why if you run into a coaching program, whether it be offline or online, ask to see the testimonials or reviews. Peer carefully through them and you'll find the first clue to locating a coach that's focused on results instead of just another barrage of information and blah-blah.

But that's just one of the points to look for, in a good coach. The second is “the focus on the next play”. What's the next play all about?

Factor 2: Focusing on the “next play”

Think of a GPS for a moment and you'll get an idea of how a coach tends to work.

A GPS knows your starting point, and knows where you need to go. Yet, at all times, the GPS is tracking where you are. It's focused on your current situation and the the traffic that's building up or easing around you.

Good coaches are like walking-talking GPSs themselves

They are focused on the next turn, not something that is going to come down the road. They have that end point in mind, but right now the only thing that matters is the next left or right turn; the next play.

One of my earliest coaches in New Zealand was Doug Hitchcock

Doug was a coach who focused on the next play. He got me to do my goal setting and I wrote down half a million goals. Doug was the one who pulled me back and got me to get the tiny bit done, then the next and the next. “Keep to just three goals”, he'd say and then he'd get me to work on the first one.

This concept of focusing on the next play is what I use today almost 17 years later. When I write an article, it's not about the article, it's about the stages of the article. First the idea, then the outline, bit by bit, play by play. When I look at projects that I haven't finished, it's because I didn't pay attention to Doug—and every brilliant coach's simple advice—focus on the next play.

When looking for a coach look for someone who has a GPS-like functionality

And to be like a GPS, that coach can't have too many clients. If you're considering a course where you can't see the number of likely participants, you're probably signing up for just another dose of information. A good coach is likely to have a fixed number of clients, not an endless number.

You can't watch the next play of a client if you have 500, 200 or even 50 clients. That's just too much activity for a coach to handle and it's almost certain that many clients will simply slip through the net and not do as well as they hoped to do so.

There's a difference between a rally and true coaching

You wouldn't send your kid to a class with 200 other students—let alone 50 students. So why sign up for a coaching program like that yourself? If your goal is to hide among the other students, then it's a good strategy. However, if you want to dramatically move forward, find yourself a coach who can help you focus on your very next move.

In my early twenties, a good friend of mine taught me to do the dance called the “jive”

I wanted desperately to go out and dance well. My parents are great dancers, but that wasn't helping me at all on the dance floor.

So great was my desperation that I joined a dance class, but I was just one of many at the class. Many sessions and months later I was no better than before. I have come to realise that the same story plays itself out for the all the classes where I failed. Whether it’s photography classes, the Spanish class, watercolours—pretty much every class where I hadn't learned skills was simply because I didn’t do my due diligence.

In every situation, I was crammed in with others and the only goal of the coach was to get to the “End Point”. In every situation, the end point wasn't a clearly defined scenario, but merely a point where the class term ended.

It's not like no attention was given to us at all, but it's impossible for a trainer to do what Doug Hitchcock did. Or to get the same level of support that Phelps got from Bob Bowman.

Like a GPS, every turn is just as important as the final destination. And good coaches, pay close attention to these points. Even so, a great coach has one more trick up his or her sleeve. It's the system of “rollercoaster design”.

Factor 3: Rollercoaster Design of Training

My first tour of New York was done at a screaming pace.

I was with my friend, Mark Levy, Author of “Accidental Genius”. Mark is a great guy, but he also wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything in New York. We set out early that morning from New Jersey and went through New York at breakneck speed.

I guess I remember the day so very clearly even though it was back in 2004 because it was all go-go-go. A frenzied tour through a city, with no stops, is sometimes the way to go when you want to see all the sights and have little time. However, when you're looking for a coach, one of the main factors to watch for is what can be called the “roller coaster” learning design.

So what is the roller coaster design?

Even if you've never been on a roller coaster, you know somewhat how it operates. It sets off gingerly, then takes you up slowly and then throws you into a few screaming loops. What's important in roller coaster design is that there's a time to scream and a time to get your breath back. A coach should have “rollercoaster” modules in place when designing a training regime as well.

Almost any skill acquisition will have really tough sections

Which is why a coach must draw out the sequence of the course in advance. The coach or trainer must intersperse tough tasks throughout the training, but always go back to the easy wins. That way the person being coached doesn't feel like they're on the scream machine all the time.

Too much screaming is terrible for learning, but then so is too easy learning. If there isn't a scream session, the roller coaster is not much of a roller coaster. And while not one of us wants to battle it out through a course, there are going to be tougher sections in any sort of training. Sections the coach needs to figure out well in advance.

But it's not enough to have the roller coaster alone

The training system needs to have some sort of breathing space as well. Let's say you're learning to write articles. The course may start out nice and easy but then run into some difficult concept. Concepts that may need more time, understanding and practice.

Is there any leeway in the system or does the coach just barrel through? Is there room for an additional amount of practice? Can the coach take the participants on a detour for a while before getting back to the syllabus again?

Most training rarely has any breathing space. Instead, it's just like the NY tour. The coach takes the clients at breakneck speed across from one point to another.

And this need for getting mindlessly to the other point has real ramifications

You find that people drop out at a high rate simply because they can't cope with the intensity. However, the impact has far greater implications than just dropping out of a course or training. If you drop out of enough Spanish classes, for example, you tend to get the erroneous idea that you were never meant to learn Spanish.

Which is when the “give up” sign flashes madly in your rearview mirror. Granted, just putting in the roller coaster design isn't going to solve every problem. Clients can still go off track for many reasons, but having breathing space in terms of “easy assignments” as well as just “breathing space” to catch up, is critical.

Which brings us to a crucial juncture about how to do our investigations about coaches

It's easy enough to look at the testimonials for any coach. Almost every website will tend to have a string of testimonials that allow you to do your own due diligence. A quick look through the testimonials will clearly tell you whether there's an end point in place.

But how do you find out about whether the coach has a next play or some sort of roller coaster design in place? Unfortunately, there's only one way to tell, and that way is to call or email some of the people who you see in the list of testimonials.

The best way would be to e-mail them first, then get on the call and ask questions about how the course is conducted. Remember that what works for them won't necessarily work for you. If they became rich, famous or acquired skill, it doesn't mean you'll be bestowed with the same shower of goodness.

Which is why you should stick to the questions that involve the structure of the training. The structure is what shows you whether this is just a random run of endless information from start to finish, or instead, a well-thought out, well-executed course.

Finding a coach isn't easy.

Finding a great coach is a lot harder. However, in a rush to grow our business or improve our skill, it's easy to avoid doing the appropriate amount of due diligence. Or we may simply not know what to look for in a good coach. Many elements mark a good coach, but the easiest way of all is to get to the website and look for the testimonials. Then once you're there, read between the lines and the story of the coach will reveal itself to you.

One more thing: don't be afraid to bail out

I once went for a community college photography class. No, I didn't do any due diligence. I figured it was just $200 or so for the tuition and I failed to do my homework. In the first session itself, the trainer went off on a tangent. He talked endlessly about his family, and we learned almost nothing about photography. I didn't go back again. My brother in law also signed up for the course with me.

There wasn't any way to get a refund, so he continued to go for the rest of the sessions

As it turned out, they were all a waste of time. Trainers tend to show their colours very early. Sloppy coaches are sloppy right from the very start.

It's a good idea to bail out very quickly and to spend the time doing something else. Even with all the due diligence, you can make an error of judgment. However, once you've figured out your mistake, get out there quickly and use the time to learn something more constructive instead.

Next Step: Have a look at—Good to Great: How To Take Your Small Business To Greatness

 

 

The biggest problem with article writing is the exhaustion factor. It's write, delete, write, delete and the endless cycle goes on. So how do you go about article writing? Can you really write articles and not get exhausted? In this series you get to see how I went from getting really frustrated, to writing 800 word articles and then 4000 word articles. What's the secret to such an enormous output? And how do you do it without getting exhausted? Let's find out how spacing the writing and the timer play an incredibly important role in writing.

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).

Envy isn't something we talk about, or even to 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.

The leap may seem physical, but it's mostly mental. In your head you don't know if it's the right time to jump into being an entrepreneur. What about the mortgage, the family and the bills? And how do you deal with the fear? How do you stay steadfast to your vision? And what about focus? These are the questions that spin in your head over and over again. This episode isn't an answer to your question. No one can answer the questions, but you. However, it helps you understand how to keep true to your vision, how to keep your focus in a distracted world. And then, how to take that leap.

Trying to come up with a suitable name for your book or info-product seems like a nightmare. What if you're wrong? What if the name isn't well received? However, there's a way to make your book really stand out. And guess what? It's not the title that matters. It's the sub-title. Find out why we've been tackling things the wrong way and how to get a superb name for your book or information product/course before the day is done.

Most of us know of the concept of the "guardian angel". They come into our lives and they take care of us. The "kicking angel" is quite different. The angel shows up just to push us over the edge and then he/she disappears from our lives. How do we know when we're being kicked? And what "kicks" do we pay attention to and what do we ignore?

Can you really double your sales of a product you've created a while ago?

And why are satellite products so very useful to clients and profitable to your info-product business? In this episode we look at info-products as we'd look at a piece of software like Photoshop.

Find out the magic that already exists within your info-product and why you don't have to keep crazily searching for newer clients all the time.

Read it online: Double Your Sales With Versions and Satellite Products

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Most people have never heard of the Knoll brothers, but they've certainly heard of the program the brothers invented.

That program was Photoshop

Developed initially in 1987 by Thomas and John Knoll, it wasn't the sophisticated program like the modern version. Back then it wasn't called Photoshop, but was named “Image-Pro”. It was only when the Knoll brothers decided to sell the program in 1988 that they changed the name to Photoshop.

As the story goes, no one was really interested in the program, except for Adobe. Adobe saw the potential and purchased all the wholesale rights, and by 1990 the first version of Photoshop was released. Today, Photoshop has gone through thousands of changes and 27 versions.

Every time a version appeared on the market, two sets of customers bought the product: new clients and existing ones. And in that version history is a lesson for almost all of our information products.

Photoshop is no doubt, built by its programmers, but who comes up with endless suggestions for the improvement of the program? A large portion comes from the users themselves. And who buys the newer version of Photoshop? Once again, it's the existing users of the program. Today, Adobe has a subscription model in place, where all upgrades are automatic, but for at least 20+ years, the newer versions of the product were purchased by existing users.

A similar concept can be used to sell your own info-products

It's not common in the information products world to think of books, videos or courses as they do in the software world. Most information product creators write a book or create a course and it stays in its original format. Yet your target profile is always looking for an improvement.

At Psychotactics, we create newer versions of info-products as often as we possibly can. As you're probably aware, the Article Writing Course is now in Version 2.0. So is the First Fifty Words course and The Brain Audit has seen many versions since we first released it in back in 2002.

Bear in mind that not all courses or info-products need constant revision, but instead of simply dashing madly into yet another information product, you might want to take a look at how versions will help sell info-products to an existing, as well as new audience.

Listening to the target profile can also help you create more in-depth versions of your products

Take the Article Writing Course for instance. It's an extremely comprehensive course and clients love it—they really do. At first the course existed as a standalone, but the target profile—or clients, in this case—kept asking for in-depth sub-courses.

For instance, writing headlines is already covered in the Article Writing Course, but now we also have a separate eight-week headline course. The opening of the article, or the First Fifty Words as we call it, is also part of the Article Writing Course, but it's also a separate 8-week intensive course. What you're learning from the above example is that even when you have like what seems to be a complete info-product, clients are more than happy to buy in-depth versions of the components of the products.

To make this clearer, let's break up the Article Writing Course into components

– Headlines
– First Fifty Words
– Connectors
– Subheads
– Sandwiching
– Objections
– And so on.

When you look at the list above, every component could possibly become a separate and more detailed information product or course. Some might be shorter, or take up fewer pages in a book, but they all have the propensity to break off from the mother ship called the “Article Writing Course” and become satellites of their own.

And clients tend to want more of the same good stuff you're putting out. If you go deeper into the satellite info-products, clients are more than happy to buy into your offering. We know this to be true because of what we see at Psychotactics. A client will do the headlines course and then do the Article Writing Course and possibly the First Fifty Words course.

Or they may start with the Article Writing Course and then move to the headlines course. The satellite courses don't cannibalise the main course. And this concept applies to any sort of info-products whether audio, video or text.

And you know this to be true because of the music industry

At some point, we've all bought music in some shape or form. Some of us may have had the pleasure of buying cassette tapes, CDs, DVDs and then signed up to Spotify, Pandora or Apple Music. The fact that we already have access to all the music we need doesn't stop us from listening to it on the radio or YouTube, for that matter.

If the musician rolls into town, we're reasonably likely to pony up anywhere between $100-$500 for concert tickets. In short, all versions and satellite versions work and the client—your target profile—wants you to create updated or at least deeper content on the very same topic.

The target profile is a great boon for a business

If you have a target audience, you can't really do much. If you have some persona stuff, again you're just stabbing at some made up stuff. However, the moment you have a real client in front of you, you are able to learn so much more, because a real client speaks, complains, gives feedback and yes, buys your info-products. Even so, a target profile can be a distraction as we've learned on this target profile trip.

So let's summarise what we've learned so far:

What have we learned so far?

The Knoll brothers: John and Thomas Knoll. We learned they invented Photoshop. But besides that very important point, we also learned:

1) How to create an information product and why you need to leave the target profile out of it

There are times when you might want to include the target profile, but that product might end up like a lot of me-too products on the shelf. To go rogue, you might need to sit down all by yourself and create an information product that is based on how you see the client getting from A to B.

To put this fact into perspective, think about Photoshop itself. No target profile created that program. Instead the Knoll Brothers worked out what was needed to get clients from A-B and off they went into generating that awesome piece of software.

The Photoshop me-too products were largely constrained by the boundaries of Photoshop itself. In short, the me-too were more a sort of target profile driven info-product, while Photoshop itself was a creator's dream.

The target profile is not completely excluded from the creation-process, though. Once you've gone through the early stages and have your content past the early drafts, the target profile becomes extremely useful. I tend to send the draft to the target profile to get their feedback. There's almost something that I have left out, things I've not explained, examples that need more detail, etc. And the target profile will give me that very pertinent (and often, persistent) feedback.

However, the target profile does play a role in pre-selling the info-product.

2) The target profile and the pre-sell

While you shouldn't really get the target profile involved in the early stages of creating the info-product, you should get that client in very early in the landing page/pre-sell process. The reason why the target profile is invaluable in the pre-sell stage, is because you get to know what motivates the client and the main problem they're facing.

Once you have the biggest problem clear, you can create your sales page to tackle that issue. The target profile interview becomes utterly invaluable when you're in the sales/pre-sell phase. To understand more about how the target profile plays a role, pick up your copy of The Brain Audit and read the chapter on target profile yet again.

3) Finally, the target profile plays a significant role in in a version or satellite product creation

Users usually want a sort of upgrade. They'll ask you to fix this and that in your info-product. Most info-product creators nod glibly and do nothing. They simply don't bother to create a newer version of the info-product.

Admittedly not all products need an upgrade, and any sort of update can be as much, if not more work than the existing product. Even so, you're able to sell an upgraded product to existing as well as newer clients.

The other aspect is the creation of satellite info-products

Just because you have a complete and detailed info-product, doesn't mean your target profile won't hanker after even greater detail. This is when you create a satellite info-product. The Article Writing Course has satellite courses, and even The Brain Audit has satellite products.

In short, the user is asking you to create info-products that help them understand your information differently or in an intermediate format. Paying attention to the target profile makes for loyal clients and substantial profits from an existing clientele. Instead of scrambling all over the place to get new clients all the time, you can use this concept of satellites products and versions to run an extremely profitable business.

The target profile is crucial. Or not.
It depends on the activity and the stages of your info-products.

What’s the one thing you can do today? There’s no one thing. This is all about stages.

1. Write the product you want to write to help the customer get from point A to point B.

2. Once finished, have a target profile review it for feedback. Make changes.

3. Interview target profile to help create a sales page:
– Find out the problems they're having and use those problems in the sales page.
– Find out their solution, objections, testimonials, risk reversal and uniqueness. Use on the sales page.

Next Step: If you missed the first part of this series, here is the link:  Info-product Creation Part 1: When to Leave The Clients Out (And When to Include Them In)

When creating an information product is the client important?

It might seem that a client is extremely important when creating an information product. After all, you're getting them to tell you exactly what she needs. However, more often than not, this method is a recipe for disaster. Even so, the client is extremely useful in another phase.

So when do you include the client? And when do you leave her out? Let's find out in this two part series on info-product creation.

Read online: Info-product Creation Part 1: When to Leave The Clients Out

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: How to create an information product and when you need the target profile
Part 2: How to go about pre-selling your  book
Part 3: How to use the target profile to create info product versions

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Did you ever wonder why evergreen trees don't shed their leaves even in freezing winter?

The moment autumn rolls along, most trees in temperate and boreal zones shed their leaves. Every tree has chemical light receptors—phytochrome and cryptochrome. These light receptors can sense a loss of light. Which is precisely when deciduous and broadleaf trees shed their leaves. However, the evergreen trees hang on to their leaves even in the dead of winter, because their foliage is coated with a wax. This wax helps fob off the cold. Plus their cells bear an anti-freeze sort of chemical that enable it to avoid it having to drop its leaves.

When creating an information product, we have to mimic trees

Sometimes it's best to drop the client out of the creation of the product, because they're likely to get in the way. At other times we have to make sure we hold onto them like the evergreen tree does with all its leaves. But when do you get the client involved? And when do you drop them?

In this series we'll look at the client—who we call the target profile.

We'll have a closer look at three core elements:

– When to leave the client out
– When to bring the client in—and specially when pre-selling the info-product
– Why the target profile plays an important role in creating versions or additional satellite products.

Let's start with the first one.

1) How to create an information product and why you need to leave the target profile out of it

What's the worst way to cook a great dinner?

Let's assume you ask the guests to drum up a list of their favourite meals. Were you to go down this path of asking guests for their recommendations, you'd quickly get swamped with a mishmash of dishes.

Dal makhani, fried chicken, broccoli, couscous—just about any dish would show up on the request list. And that's no way to cook a dinner, Instead a better way is to have an overall view of what the clients need—and then completely avoid asking them for any advice while you're prepping dinner.

A similar process plays itself out when you're creating an info-product

Many years ago when I sat down to write an info-product on membership sites. My idea was simple: I pre-sold the book on membership sites. I then asked clients to give me the topics they wanted me to cover.

As you'd expect, I got a list of questions that seemed to go on forever. While at first it seems like topics given by clients are a goldmine, the requests turned out to be incredibly debilitating. As you'd expect, I was unsure where to start or how to go ahead.

When creating information products, leave your client out of the planning stage completely.

The goal of the information product—a great information product—is to get a client from Point A to Point B and to enjoy the ride in the process. Think of yourself as a GPS. The GPS has access to a tonne of information, but do you see that information on screen?

Instead, what the GPS does is show you only what's valid for your journey. And should there be delays along a route, that very same GPS may take you down a longer route, but eventually get you to the destination as quickly as possible.

Take for instance the series called ‘Black Belt Presentations'

The goal of the book series isn't just to create presentations. Instead it helps you create presentations that the entire audience can recall, and repeat, long after you've finished speaking.

When creating this series, I had to think of the three elements that would help get the client to achieve this level of simplicity and elegance. Yet, if I were to ask clients what they wanted to see in a series on presentations, I'd have got a massive list. So I did what you should now do. You should play GPS. What three steps can the client take to get to the desired end point?

Three steps? What if you have seventeen?

Well, cut it down to three. With the ‘Black Belt Presentations' series, the focus was on slide design, structure of the presentation itself and finally crowd control. With just three big steps, you should be able to take the client from one point to another. And just for good measure, let's take another example.

Let's say you're writing about how to take good photographs. Surely there are a dozen things you can cover, but you focus on just three. Maybe it's not even three broad topics, but subtopics instead. So instead of exposure, ISO and aperture, maybe you could focus on just three aspects of aperture, instead.

At this point in your product creation, you should have little or no input from your client

All the outlines, the drafts and more drafts should be done all by your lonesome self. It's only when you get to the next stage and write down all of the information in a book that the client should take a look.

It's akin to cooking a dish and then giving someone to taste it. If you're creating a video or audio, however, this method of recording might be a waste of time and energy, which is why the movies use storyboards. At the storyboard stage, clients can see how it's all playing out because it's a more polished, finished version of your idea.

I tend to have written material ready first, long before I create any audio or video

With written material, it's easier to move things around a bit, should you need to do so. At this stage, I'll tend to get a lot of suggestions and feedback by clients. Even so, it's important to restrict the feedback to just 2-3 clients. If you notice, I didn't say “editors”, and said “clients” instead.

The reason why you should choose “clients” is because they've paid or are likely to pay for the product. They are invested in what your final output will look like and they'll be quick to tell you what's confusing. At this stage, if they make suggestions or additions, it's not terribly hard to implement their recommendations as well.

Finally, I'd go to the editor

The editor brings the ultimate level of finesse to an info-product. That editor is likely to look through the grammar, remove inconsistencies and get your product up to a very high standard.

So if we were to go back to the analogy of the dinner, you're the chef, the clients are the tasters (and recommenders) and the editor is person who makes sure the plating is just right. When you have all of these three elements in place, what you truly have is a great dinner—or in your case, a great information product.

Bon Appétit!

Let's move to the next element.

2) The role the target profile interview plays in regards to pre-selling the book—and how to go about it

My mother hates eggplant.

I didn't know that. I thought she loved it, considering the number of times we were forced to eat it when we were kids. And then, when I was all grown up, I finally took a great liking to it, only to find that my mother always hated it. To me that was one of the biggest surprises of my life.

It's the kind of surprise you're likely to get if you don't do a target profileinterview.

When selling a book, a course, a workshop—or any kind of info-product, it's easy to believe that our perception was right all along. We resolutely sit down and battle our way through the headline and the body copy on our landing page.

We think we know the problem well, have the right solution and we're all ready to sell to the client. Except it's a bit like selling a yummy eggplant dish to my mother. It would have saved all of us a lot of grief if we did some research, wouldn't it?

As soon as you hear the term “research” it's easy to think of Google Adwords and Facebook

However, in most cases such drama is totally unnecessary. When creating an information product, we've done almost zero research. We simply create the product that we want to create and then link it to an existing problem. For instance, if you look at the Article Writing Course, it's about writing, but the problem is about “getting clients to call you”. Now that's the bit of research you should be doing.

And this research involves talking to a single client, who we fondly call the “target profile”. The target profile will tell you exactly what's wrong with your offering, almost every single time. Which means you can tweak, but mostly have to rewrite the entire page, look at all the objections, redo the uniqueness. The target profile interview is likely to turn your world upside down, and it's all for a good cause.

When you pre-sell the course, you'll realise that the target profile interview is critical

You don't necessarily need the target profile when you're creating the contents of the book (except when you've already written it), but you will need the target profile at the very start of the sales, pre-sell process. Without the target profile, you're just guessing that they love “eggplant” when in fact their favourite dish is quite something else. Doing the interview with the target profile becomes super paramount. There's just one tiny problem: how do you do the interview?

The interview is designed to primarily sniff out the problem of the client

Let's say your product—your information product—is about “how to grow 1000 tomatoes in a 3 x 3 foot area”. It might seem like the problem is obvious, right? The problem is either that your crop of tomatoes has been too tiny in the past, or that you don't have enough space to grow tomatoes. Yet, that's not necessarily the way the client sees things. Maybe their problem is completely different.

Maybe their problem is that their tomato crops have been constantly attacked by white flies. Which is why the main problem is going to need tweaking. If you don't solve the “white flies problem”, you may not be able to sell your product.

Waitasecond, doesn't this change the entire information product?

Let's say your information product was about how to plant, grow and harvest tomatoes, wouldn't the “white flies” be a diversion? Didn't we just agree that then client should not be involved in the creation of the info-product?

We did indeed, but it's more than likely that the “white flies” issue is just a side show that can be easily tackled in the info-product. Yet, because the client sees it as the biggest issue, it's hard for that client to focus on anything else. And it's the target profile interview that reveals the fact that the client sees the main problem differently from you.

In almost every situation your perception of the problem will be different from the client

Which is why you need to make sure you choose the client with a relative degree of care. Over the years we've found the best target profile to be someone who's got two qualities:

Quality 1: They're eager to buy—because they have a genuine problem.
Quality 2: They're able to pay.

Let's take an example of a real example to show you how these two elements work together

I don't know if you're aware, but I've had the most terrible internet connection for the longest time. So bad, in fact, that it was impossible to make a Skype call as my voice would get garbled after 5 minutes.

So bad that a 100 mb file would take over 25 hours, if it got to the server in the first place. About three days ago, we got our turn to get high speed fibre. And how do they sell the fibre to me? They talk about Netflix and downloading stuff. But even in my darkest hours of throttled bandwidth, we were able to watch Netflix without too much drama.

What really scared me was how slowly my backups were moving up to the cloud

I'd have at least five backups off-line, but having one super-fast backup online was imperative. When offered 100 Mbps, 200 Mbps or 1 Gig, which one do you think I've chosen? However, because the smart copywriter selling the offer didn't bother to check, he will never know why most clients are choosing the lower speeds.

The company would continue to sell fibre connections, but be not hitting the right hot buttons, even when they have the above two conditions of a) the client need the problem solved and b)having the ability to pay.

The target profile interview itself follows a route of discovery

You follow the path of The Brain Audit. The Brain Audit has seven elements and since you already have the target profile, you have six of the elements to go through. You start with the problem, then move to the solution, and work your way through objections, testimonials, risk reversal and uniqueness.

At all times, the clients are filling in the gaps for you. You're simply interviewing them and finding out what's on their mind. In short, they're telling you what you'd need to do to get them to buy the product. The ISP can do the same with me. What's even better is that the client will tell you all of their issues, and even if you don't put it in the headline of your sales page, you can still cover the issues in the features and benefits and then further down in the bullet points.

Easily the most important reason for the target profile interview is the emotion in the language.

When you sit down at your computer and write, you often write words that are dry and devoid of emotion. When a client describes the problem, there's a completely different set of emotions that are hard, if not impossible to replicate. Which is why the target profile interview becomes crucial for pre-sell and for any ongoing sales.

But why not involve the target profile from the beginning of the content creation? You could do the interview first and use that interview as a roadmap for the contents of the product (as well as the sales page copy)?

This answer is ridiculously difficult to answer.

Here's why. Let's say you have a target profile. And let's say they have a bunch of issues. Now if your goal is to simply answer those questions and thus create a book, video or audio, you're on the right path. Many books are written around a brief that involves you simply answering the client's questions. This isn't to say that the info-product needs to be boring.

Take for example an info-product I'm creating on the topic of “how to create an e-book using InDesign”

Around 2013, I had already created a version of this info-product and it sold remarkably well. Since then InDesign has gotten a bit better and while the principles remain the same, I thought of upgrading the product. Which is why I started working with a client on this very topic. In effect he was asking questions and I was building the product around his problems and needs.

However, merely answering a question isn't always the way to go

Take for instance the Website Masterclass we did way back in 2006. The live workshop and the course itself was about websites, but the angle we took was hinged around “religion”. It was about how “religions” are built and this includes religions such as Harley Davidson, or sports such as cricket or football.

The metaphor of religion was superimposed on how to build a website. And it was an extremely powerful metaphor for most, if not all the attendees. They understood the concept and the underlying principles and that the website was just a medium to express themselves.

Involving a client in the process can be both useful as well as tiresome

Instead of creating something using your own parameters and creativity, there's a great likelihood of getting stuck to a fixed format dictated by the needs of the client. Often enough, customers are only helpful if the info-product is something they're thinking about and need. However, if the info-product isn't something they're thinking about, it's impossible to get the client to participate.

Take the issue of an info-product like the First Fifty Words, for example

When you start writing an article, you need to get off to a brilliant start. However, that's the point where a lot of writers get horribly stuck. Let's say you ask a client to participate in creating a product. What are they likely to say?

They're likely to give you the problem—which in their case is that they struggle to write the First Fifty Words. The problem is not something they can decipher, and so any input from the client is only possible once you put the information together and get them to review the course.

In my experience, both the types of info-products can exist side by side

However, to create really info-product that's a lot different from what everyone else is creating, you'd have to think of your own method of solving a problem. I tend to avoid any target profile input at the start.

I can't say I'm completely deaf to a target profile's comments, but by and large I go off to create what I think is important to get to the end point. A road map with the target profile might seem to be good, but it might lead you down the path that everyone else is taking. If you want to get a little off tangent (in a good way), my advice is to avoid the target profile until much later in the process.

Knowing the client and the language of the client is critical.

It's what helps us to talk to, and sell to clients in their own words. And they're happy when you take the trouble to find out what's important to them.

Next Step: Element 3: Info-product Creation Part 2: Double Your Sales With Versions and Satellite Products

When you create your business, product  or service uniqueness, do you need to test it?

Incredible as it seems there's little point in doing any testing at all.

In this episode you'll find out why testing is practically impossible and how instead of wasting time on research, you should follow three steps to make sure your uniqueness occupies a permanent part of your client's brain.

In this episode Sean talks about

Step 1: You have to consistently get the word out.
Step 2: You have to state the position of the competition.
Step 3: You have to state your own position.

Read it online: How to Effectively Test Your Uniqueness

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When you have settled on your uniqueness, how can you test it?

What is likely to happen to a woman's bikini, when she's surfing?
“If you're a woman, surfing with a bikini was slightly out of the question.You'd be out in the waves, walk out of the water and literally you've lost your bottoms,” said the business owner, Anna Jerstrom. So Jerstrom decided to create sexy, bright bikinis. And the uniqueness? Bikinis that stay on, no matter how rough the surf. And with this single-minded pursuit, investment banker, Anna Jerstrom started a business called Calavera.

Wouldn't she need to test the uniqueness before she began?

In almost every case, testing a uniqueness is completely unnecessary. One of the biggest reasons why you shouldn't be bothered with testing a uniqueness is because you're unlikely to have any competition.

Let's take the uniqueness of Calavera, for example. Why did Jerstrom start the company? Surely she should have been able to find some bikinis that didn't slide off in the surf. Even with the power of the Internet at her disposal, she was still running into dead ends. It means that there will be hundreds, if not thousands of customers who are also finding it hard to get a decent product.

That line of thought may not sound reasonable to you, but let's look at the alternative, shall we?

Let's say you decide to sell a product. Maybe it's an information product that's based on presentations. When you look on Amazon.com, you're likely to find at least 5,000 books on presentations. Do you really want to go through every sales page trying to find out what's unique about the presentation product?

Clients don't care about doing such extensive research either. They just want to show up to your business whether online or offline, and they want you to explicitly tell them why you are different from the rest of the competition. Whether you have a product, training or a service, your uniqueness doesn't need testing, simply because it's impossible to do a test.

But there's another good reason why you shouldn't bother to test

The biggest reason why you should just go ahead and run your uniqueness is because the competition is lazy or confused, or both. Most companies are clearly at sea when asked what makes them unique. If you have a uniqueness factor in place, that puts you way ahead of your competitors. However, there's also another reason why you can go ahead quite happily.

Even if your competition has a uniqueness, it's not much use unless they use it on a frequent basis

A uniqueness itself is not enough for clients to remember what is being said. Volvo is known for their safe cars because they ran endless ads about safety. Dominos made a billion dollars selling pizza because of their “30 minutes or it's free” slogan. Think for a second about your competitors right now. Can you quickly bring up their uniqueness?

It's not enough to have a uniqueness, you have to do so much more

In fact you have to take three steps to make sure the uniqueness does its job properly.

Step 1: You have to consistently get the word out.
Step 2: You have to state the position of the competition.
Step 3: You have to state your own position.

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Let's go through the steps—To Getting Your Uniqueness Recognised

Step 1: Get the word out

This means a uniqueness can't just sit around. It has to be repeated in some form or the other, over and over again. If you've listened to the “Three Month Vacation” podcast, for example, when I talk about 5000bc, I will repeat the same thing almost ad nauseam. I will say, “5000bc is a place where introverts meet because they feel safe”.

The same message will be sent out in articles, in books—in just about every medium possible. And the message never changes much, if at all. Keeping that message consistent is what is critical. If you keep changing the message simply because you're bored of it, you've lost more than half the uniqueness battle. You want to make sure you get the uniqueness as simple as possible and then continue to mention it everywhere.

When you consider that you may have more than one product or service, you have to pick your battles

For instance, the uniqueness of Psychotactics is “tiny increments”. But often the overall company uniqueness is of little value to the client, because they are more focused on the product or service, instead. However, at Psychotactics, we have many products, so I pick the uniqueness depending on the medium.

On the podcast, I will consistently end with the uniqueness of 5000bc

However, while I'm explaining something in the podcast or in an article, I will make sure to talk about the uniqueness of Psychotactics courses and how they're not just information, but about skill (see, I did it again). You don't want to bring up the uniqueness of every single product or service. You want to make sure you have a few entry points.

For us at Psychotactics, those entry points that need to be stressed are The Brain Audit, 5000bc and the courses. It's not like the rest of the products and services don't matter. They do, but the uniqueness of those products and services are on the sales page or sales pitch itself.

It's important to have your doorways

Just rattling off a dozen uniquenesses for a dozen products doesn't get any message across to clients. Pick two or three of your services or products—or if you like, the uniqueness of your company. And then keep hammering them home in pre-selected areas of your marketing.

But that's only the first part of making sure your uniqueness is heard. To make sure you get the point across, you have to state the position of the competition.

Step 2: Stating the position of the competition

Ever noticed how shiny Harley Davidson bikes tend to be? The reason for their shiny nature is probably the diligence of the bike owner, but equally, it's how the bike has been positioned in the Harley owner's mind. Harley owners have been known to truck their bikes across and then ride them locally.

After all, the bikes have to be in pristine condition at all times. The BMW bike owners, on the other hand, seem to favour the dust and dirt, pushing their bikes across all sorts of punishing conditions.

Even if the above description of BMW vs. Harley is not 100% accurate, it demonstrates the difference

And uniqueness is a point of difference. To make sure you get the point of difference across, you need to have the competition clearly in your sights. If you have a million-dollar promotion budget, you can continue to mention your slogan, but if you're a small business, you tend to get very few chances. Which is why it's important to bring the competition when you're describing your own point of uniqueness.

So first, you have to pick your “enemy.”

The enemy may not be a company. It could be a way of doing things. So when I say, “other courses give you a money back guarantee, but no guarantee of skill”, I'm not taking on anyone in particular. I'm simply taking on an aspect of online courses. If you were to say, “other yoga classes have a lot of yoga routines, but don't necessarily pay attention to what can injure you long after you've left the yoga class.” Or to take a third example involving microphones: Other microphones pick up unwanted noise and reflections, in a bad-sounding, untreated room.”

Once you've defined the enemy's characteristics you know what you're battling against

No doubt the enemy will have many flaws, but your job is to pick one. Uniqueness is about “one thing”, and the moment you pick the opponent's flaw, you can easily position yourself against them. Which takes us to the third step, doesn't it?

Step 3: You have to state your own position

Your position is the exact opposite of the flaw you've picked.
If they work too slowly, you work quickly.
If they give you 200 pages of information, you give only the ten pages needed.
If they sell ripe bananas, you sell them green, so they don't ripen too quickly.

With the Calavera bikinis, Anna Jerstrom's enemy was “the terribly fitting bikinis”, and her position was “bikinis that stay on, no matter how rough the surf.” You can pick up anything off your desk and ask yourself why you use that particular product. And the same goes for any service as well. Or company for that matter.

When I give a presentation, for example, I want to stand out from the rest of the presenters, so I talk about how businesses make a gazillion dollars, but we make more than enough, and we take three months off every year, not working, but completely on vacation. When you state the competitor's position and contrast it with yours, you can see the lights going off in the prospect's brain.

Which brings us to that testing bit again: how do you know if your uniqueness is truly unique?

It's the nodding of the head. When you state your uniqueness, the clients tend to see the difference between your competitor and you. And you get this smile, this slight nod of the head. You know you've struck a chord with the client. Oh, and there's the echo.

When you ask the client what you do, they should be able to echo your words perfectly

Listen for the echo. Are they missing out important bits? If they are, your uniqueness may not be as simple as you think and you'll need to edit it a bit. If they're totally off tangent, then you haven't made your point as precise as it could be. If you run into your client a month or six months from now and they can echo your uniqueness perfectly, then you've got a uniqueness that has resonated with them, and it's truly a point of difference.

Finally, a lot of uniqueness comes about when you're not expecting it

That line about how our courses are different from every other online course wasn't something I figured out while sitting down and going through this exercise. I probably said it in response to a question on an interview or when trying to explain what makes our courses different. Over times, I made sure to bring it up often so that it got a bit of an edge.

A lot of your uniqueness is going to pop up when you least expect it, so make sure you write it down when you hear yourself saying something interesting about your product or service. Nonetheless, as a starting point, defining the enemy is a very crucial exercise. It's only when you define the enemy that you can clarify your own position in a memorable manner.

To get your uniqueness really charging down the road you need to consider all three points:

Step 1: You have to consistently get the word out.
Step 2: You have to state the position of the competition.
Step 3: You have to state your own position.

And that's how the uniqueness fits—just like a Calavera bikini.

Oh, one more thing: Calavera closed down its business in 2017. They decided they wanted to do something different and after a good five years of running the business, they decided to shut shop.

P.S. What would it be like to stand out from the competition in a way that customers choose you over everyone else?

And what if you were to raise your prices, and they still kept coming? Have you ever wondered what it might feel like to not be me-too?
Here are six goodies on uniqueness
Free Goodie No. 1: Uniqueness: Why We Get It Wrong
Free Goodie No .2: Getting to Uniqueness Part One and Two
Free Goodie No. 3: Uniqueness: The Importance of the Mundane and the Seemingly Uninteresting.
Free Goodie No. 4: Uniqueness mistakes and how to avoid them-video
Free Goodie No. 5: Uniqueness: The Difference (and Resemblance) Between Uniqueness and the Other Red Bags
Free Goodie No. 6: Uniqueness: Do You Need To Carve Out a Uniqueness For ‘Every’ Product or Service?
Get the goodies here: How to get to your uniqueness

How do you position your products and services?

Finding your uniqueness is incredibly difficult, yet some companies do it consistently well. How do you learn from their ability to position their products and services?

Also, do you really need a uniqueness for every business product and service? The answer is “yes” and this episode will reveal why that's the case.

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

In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: How do you go about finding uniqueness for your business/product/service?
Part 2: Do different products/services need their own uniquenesses?
Part 3: When you have settled on your uniqueness, how can you test it?

 

Read in online: How To Quickly Create Your Uniqueness

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A patch of grass, is a patch of grass, is a patch of grass, right?

Take for instance the patch of grass near the volcano, Ol Doinyo Lengai in Tanzania

Every year around February, the wildebeest calves are born, all at the same time. If you look at where the calves seem to graze, it's on one patch of grass—while completely ignoring the rest of the think.

This particular grass, which stretches for miles, has nine times the phosphorus and five times the calcium as the next patch. The enriched grass nourishes the young calves and gets them healthy for the great migration that is to follow. In other words, you could easily call this grass unique, right?

In business we rarely have this luxury of inbuilt uniqueness

Instead we have to go out and find our uniqueness, or create one. And this is where we seem to run into a lot of trouble. When we look at our products or services, they seem remarkably similar to what the competition is offering.

We too could do with a bit of phosphorus and calcium in our offerings, we believe. Contrary to what we think, we all have an incredibly powerful ability to distinguish ourselves from any competitors.

Yet, the moment we decide to work on our uniqueness, we paint ourselves into a corner

We don't know if we're supposed to find a uniqueness or create one. The pressure builds until we convince ourselves that the exercise of uniqueness is much too tedious, and it's better to use our energy in other areas of marketing and sales. Even as we're veering away from uniqueness, we realise that we pick products and services precisely for their uniqueness. Running away from the issue isn't going to help us move ahead. We have to turn and face it head on.

And here's how you do it. Let's cover three elements:

How do you go about finding uniqueness for your business/product/service?
Do different products/services need their own uniquenesses?
When you have settled on your uniqueness, how can you test it?

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Element 1: How do you go about finding uniqueness for your business/product/service?

Back in 2003, we started a little membership site called 5000bc.

It wasn't meant to be a membership site, but so many clients wanted to discuss business issues that it made sense to have a site. At first, it had almost no content, and I spent a good few weeks putting in a dozen articles or so. It was the early 2000's, remember? I was able to get in touch with almost anyone on e-mail and get their permission to use their content. So I contacted billionaire, Mark Cuban, best-selling author and speaker, Wayne Dyer and other such personalities. And so, 5000bc began on its journey.

But 5000bc had no clearly-defined uniqueness

When you're starting out a business, it's hard just to figure out what you're doing. You're trying so hard to find yourself that finding the uniqueness for a product or service seems implausible, if not impossible. Nonetheless, over the years, as 5000bc grew, we went through the process of interior design. We'd add something here, something there and soon it became quite distinct in itself. Even so, we couldn't figure out what was unique.

This is the part where you turn to the outside world

We sent out a bunch of e-mails to clients and time, and time again they'd come up with the same response. They'd say something like this—and this is an actual quote: My favourite part about 5000bc is the character of the community. From knowing that you will personally answer my questions to knowing I can post my own answers without getting ridiculed is really nice.

I'm just getting started, but once my business is rolling, I will certainly pay it back to the community. I've never seen anyone put anyone else down in the Cave.

But then they might add something like this

I also like the depth of content. Before I came to 5000bc, I was very confused about the direction I want to go in for starting my business.  Ever since joining 5000bc, and reading the content I've been getting a lot of clarity and confidence.  I'm no longer running in circles, but moving towards my goals.  I really appreciated the members sharing tips and comments on my post about “getting rid of negative thoughts”.

I also like that people hold you accountable to what you have entered in Taking Action Forum.

See the problem yet?

In that answer, there are several points, and seemingly none of them co-relate with each other. Let's go over them in bullet form:
– The character of the community (you can ask questions without getting ridiculed.
– The depth of the content that gives me confidence and clarity.
– Being held accountable.

But if a single e-mail gets three points, we already have three tangents, don't we?

If we were to poll everyone the list would be pretty exhaustive. We'd get a list that's akin to this:
– Kind, helpful community
– Restricted membership
– The philosophy ensures helpfulness

– Vanishing reports on various topics that may not be found elsewhere.
– The critique lounge
– The common language of The Brain Audit.

– The that me, Sean, is always around sometimes 15-20 times a day.
– That a question asked by clients may end up with a series of articles written especially for that client.

The list goes on and on and the longer the list, the bigger the uniqueness headache

Which is when you randomly pick one element from the list. In the case of 5000bc, enough clients mentioned that they sign up for a membership site and the owners of the site are never around. They just dump information but aren't around to clarify any queries and any such clarification has to be done at an additional price. We took that information—the fact that I'm around and answer the questions—as the uniqueness.

If that seemed like a logical uniqueness, it's not

The Vanishing Reports, for one, are extremely well-regarded. Clients consistently like the Vanishing Reports because they consider them to be yummy bites of knowledge, focused on a single topic. As a result, they don't overwhelm you, and as a member, you get it free of cost, until they disappear. Or you could take the fact that the philosophy of the community ensures that there's no trolling, no pitching of their own business, and introverts—especially introverts—feel very safe when asking questions.

Any of the elements in the list above could easily become the unique factor of 5000bc. And yet, the way to go about choosing a uniqueness is to only pick one—any one. And once you've picked you to need to elaborate why that uniqueness is so vital. It's the elaboration that makes it unique, not necessarily the element itself. Without the elaboration, nothing is unique, or rather everything is unique.

I call this concept the “Attenborough Effect.”

The “Attenborough Effect.”

A forest contains thousands of species of plants, animals and insects. To try and cover them all is plainly a waste of time. Which is why naturalist and TV presenter, David Attenborough, does something dramatic. In one particular video, he falls to the floor and focuses on a single plant: the Venus Fly Trap. The act of dropping to the forest floor is a moment of pure drama, but that's not what you should be getting your attention. Instead, notice that he's ignored all the rest of the plants, animals and insects.

All of them, but the Venus Fly Trap.

This is what I call the Attenborough Effect and it's also the lesson as to how you need to choose your own uniqueness

Your current business may do many things well, but trying to cover your own “forest floor” is a waste of time. Clients can't pay attention to many points at the same time. Even two points are far too many as you noticed when we used the 5000bc example. You couldn't have “helpful community” and “Vanishing Reports” at the same time.

A choice has to be made and while it may appear to you like the choice was very precise, it only seems that way because of the way in which it is presented. Walking around in the forest, the Venus Fly Trap may never get your attention, but by focusing the camera on one—to the exclusion of everything else—is how uniqueness is created.

However, all of this assumes that you already have a business, a product or service

And that's a dangerous assumption to make for a specific reason. All of us, without exception, will have new products or services in future. And as we'll learn in the second section of this piece, every one of the products or services will need their own uniqueness. So how are we to create a uniqueness when we don't have the luxury of hindsight? The way forward is to create your uniqueness. The question that arises is “how do you do that?” How do you pick your uniqueness?

The answer lies in a concept we've covered many times before called a “superpower”

Let's say you're conducting a workshop to learn how to acquire “X-Ray vision”. When the clients walk into the room, what are they expecting to learn? And when they leave? The obvious answer is “X-Ray vision”, isn't it? Let's assume 5000bc didn't have Vanishing Reports. Wait, we're not assuming, are we, because 5000bc didn't have Vanishing Reports.

When we started out, we looked at other websites and there was no concept like Vanishing Reports. So we just invented it. However, let's say everyone suddenly decides to create Vanishing Reports. What are you going to do in such a situation?

You add a little bit of extra description to your offering.

Maybe your vanishing reports are “just 10 pages long.”
Maybe they're 50 pages, in-depth reports.
Maybe they're full of cartoons which are fun to read.
Maybe the report is not just a report but a stage by stage how-to document.

You see what's happening here?

You're deciding in advance what superpower you want to bestow upon your client. You are deciding you want to give them X-Ray vision, or vanishing reports, or specially organised groups. You can simply decide what you want to focus on and then go right ahead and invent your uniqueness. Every feature you see in a new phone model, new software, new product or service is merely an invention.

When sitting down to create your product or service, you will need to do some brainstorming

What features and benefits will it have? And the moment you make the list, you have a choice. Simply pick something that's interesting and elaborate upon it. If you've noticed, that's the second time, or possibly the third that the term “elaborate” has been brought up. We'll cover more about “elaboration” and what to elaborate as we work our way through this piece.

For now, either pick something like David Attenborough, or invent something you'd like to see in your product or service. And that will get the ball rolling. That is your first step on the road to creating uniqueness for your products and services.

Element 2: Does Every Product or Service Need Its Own Uniqueness?

When you look at any family on the planet, what you're actually seeing is an example of products and services

Let's take the eldest child. And let's suggest his uniqueness is that he's calm. Let's paint the second child as having a wild nature. The third may well have an inquisitive nature. If the family were to extend almost endlessly, every child in that family would have a different character, attribute or what we'd call uniqueness.

Therefore something similar applies to your family of products and services too. Yes, your company may have a unique character, but it's equally important for every product or service to have a uniqueness as well.

Let’s take an example. Let’s examine The Brain Audit, for instance.

Did The Brain Audit always have a uniqueness?

No, it didn’t. When we started, we had no uniqueness at all. Luckily we got over 800 testimonials, and that became the uniqueness. Now admittedly, once you have 800 testimonials, your product should stand out quite a bit, shouldn't it? And yes, the product will stand out, provided the format doesn't change in any way.

But The Brain Audit went from Version 1.0 to 2.0—and then to Version 3.2

And this is where the problem lies. If a customer has bought Version 1.0, why bother buying Version 2.0? Or for that matter Version 3.2.? And what if we were to bring out Version 4.0?

It's where uniqueness comes waltzing right through the door.  Many, if not most of our clients have bought several versions of The Brain Audit. And the reason is simple: They can see why version differs from the next. And this difference is simply a factor of uniqueness.

When you define the uniqueness, you automatically get clients interested. And not just existing customers, but new ones as well.

It’s more than likely that the new clients haven't run into The Brain Audit

So for them the uniqueness is pitched against other books of a similar nature. Why should they spend their hard-earned money on this product vs. some other marketing-based product?

And that’s not all…

Let’s say we did put out a version of The Brain Audit on Amazon.com. And that price is just $9.99. And the product on the Psychotactics website is $119. What causes the client to buy the $119 version? Once again we have the uniqueness come into play. If a client gets a lot more on our website vs. what’s available on Amazon. Then there’s a point of difference.

When a thick, luscious layer of uniqueness is applied, price and reluctance retreat quickly

But you can’t just depend on the client to figure all of this out. So you have to clearly define the uniqueness. You have to be able to tell the difference between an iPhone 4 and an iPhone 4s. The Brain Audit Version 2.0 and The Brain Audit Version 3.2. The Amazon offering and the website offering. Because in reality, every product or every offering needs to really stand out from the “hoi-polloi” even if the “hoi-polloi” is just a different version of your very own product or service.

In short, every product and service needs a uniqueness

Just like a family member, every product or service is different. And even if you have the very same product, but in different formats or versions, you're still going to have to differentiate it so that clients know why they should buy one product over the other.

And this takes us to the third point- When you have settled on your uniqueness, how can you test it?

Element 3: When you have settled on your uniqueness, how can you test it?

 

Information product sales don't always increase with promotions alone

Often they increase by giving away content that you could easily sell.

But shouldn't you stick to giving away tiny reports? What if you were told to give away a big product instead? Would that reap any rewards?

Find out in this episode on giving as a strategy.

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: Small value giveaway
Part 2: Big value giveaway
Part 3: How to structure the giveaway and how often

Click to read online: https://www.psychotactics.com/giveaways-increase-sales/

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n South Africa, there's a flower that only one insect can access.

Orphium flowers don't contain nectar. Instead, they provide bees with pollen. Yet, not every insect can access the pollen. If you look closely at an orphium flower, you'll find the stamens are twisted and this, in turn, prevents the pollen from being stolen by visiting insects. Only one insect has access to the pollen in the Orphium flower. That insect is the female carpenter bee.

When she approaches the Orphium flower, her flapping wings make a particular buzzing sound. Yet that sound won't make a difference to the flower. The stamens remain locked. At which point the bee changes the beat of her wings creating what we'd call the C note. That simple act gets the flower to seemingly unlock and shower the bee with pollen.

In our business, we often seem to be like the other insects.

We don't appear to be able to hit that C note and unlock greater products sales. Yet just like the wing beat of the carpenter bee, you can achieve a consistent level of success. So what's that note that you have to hit? And how often?

Let's find out:

1) Small value giveaway
2) Big value giveaway
3) How to structure the giveaway and how often

1) Why Small Value Giveaways or Products Work

If you were a rooster, would you be able to crow at any time?

You'd think so, wouldn't you? After all, it seems like roosters cock-a-doodle-doo at any given time. In the journal, Scientific Reports, a study showed that roosters crow in order of seniority. First, the top ranking rooster initiates the crowing, followed by subordinates, all in descending order of social rank.

In fact, when the top ranking rooster is removed from the group, the second-ranking rooster initiates the crowing. At all times the social rank has to be adhered to maintain the hierarchy.

Fortunately, such a hierarchy doesn't have to maintained when trying to increase product sales. You can start off with a small value giveaway.

So what's a small or low-value giveaway?

When you get to the website at Psychotactics.com, you're likely to have run into a giveaway called the “Headline Report”. It's why headlines fail, and how to avoid that failure. To date, over 55,000 copies of that report have been downloaded.

That report isn't a top-ranking, highly complex document. Back in the early 2000s, when we first launched a pre-Psychotactics site, I wrote an article about headlines, which turned out to be very popular.

And by this point you're probably thinking, “Ah, it's a report, there's nothing new about a report.”

You'd be right if you thought that way because the report itself doesn't do much. However, if you take a report that gets a client from Point A to Point B as quickly as possible, then that report becomes pretty magical.

Which is what the Headline Report does. In under 10 minutes and in about as many pages, it takes you from not being very confident with headlines to getting a pretty good understanding of the working and the implementation of the headline.

All over the Psychotactics website there are tiny reports of this nature

They're all small value giveaways, but they do one thing and do it well. They get you from A to B in a big hurry. The hurry part is important because people are swamped with information. If you're able to create change quickly, they're more likely to decide to take the next step and implement what you've shown them.

Once they implement, they're hooked. I remember a client who came to our workshop, spent $3000 for himself and his wife, purely based on the strength of the report.

But it's not just reports that matter; videos or audio can do the same task

Last week I listened to a podcast about a book by Tim Harford. To date, I've read one book and am in the process of going through the other. The podcast isn't high value, is it? It's free, but the same concept of the podcast can be used on your site. The short video, the short audio, the tiny report, even a string of slides that explain a concept. Your starting point should usually be an appetiser, not a full meal.

At Psychotactics we have appetisers all around the place

It might be an excerpt of a book or some reports that are extremely useful. They all serve to get clients to show up, then sign up on a consistent basis. In fact, our goal—and pay close attention—is to have a report that's suited to every type of article. It's a pretty extensive exercise but think about it.

If you're reading an article on resistance, what would you prefer a report on? Resistance, or overcoming resistance, right? The same concept would apply to any page of your website. Which means that if you bundle up even a few of your best Point A to Point B articles, you should be able to have a few reports ready in a few weeks, at best a few months.

The low-value giveaways don't need to be restricted to just the giveaway on your front page

They can be all sorts of little audios, videos, or any information that is of value to the client. And they cut through the hierarchy. We all believe that clients need to read our book or attend a workshop. No, they don't. They just need a tiny bit of stuff that they can consume.

So why is this consumption bit so very important?

When a client can finish and implement something, they usually come back for more. Which is why it then pays to have not just free, but also low-value products. When you look at Psychotactics, you'll notice that we sell The Brain Audit for $9.99.

There are also other products that have a lower value and are priced at $29 or $39. They're not exactly cheap, but when compared with some of the $3000 products they do come across as lower value. In fact, if you look closer, we even have a button that says, “products under $50”. Clients want to test the waters without too much of a risk. When they find value—and by value I mean they can implement everything smoothly and elegantly—they come back for more.

Nonetheless, free or lower value products are not the only way to go. Which is why you need to have something of high value to give away. Give away? Yes, give away. Let's look at how the high-value products work as well.

2) Let's look at how the high-value products work as well. Big Value Giveaway

Did you know that the modern seat belt was invented by an aviation engineer who worked on ejector seats?

In 1959, it's not like cars didn't have seat belts—they did. But the seat belts were two-point waist restraints, which in car crashes, harmed rather than helped the driver and passengers. Which is when Volvo engineer, Nils Bohlin stepped up to the plate and invented the three-point seat belt—the kind we use today. It was such a remarkable safety feature that Volvo would have made a big pile of money on patents alone.

Instead, Volvo gave it away.

We often believe that we should sell high-value products

However, you may find, as we did, that giving away high-value products can be an incredibly powerful way to build trust and get repeat clients.

On the Psychotactics website is a product called The Brain Alchemy Masterclass which is priced around $2300. The product shows you the core of how to start and build your business, and it's easy enough to get to the sales page and buy the product. Yet, from time to time we give away the product to the entire list.

Another product is the Website Masterclass

This product digs deep into not just websites, but the psychology of what creates “religions” to work. In doing so, it takes you on the magic carpet through the major world religions, Harley Davidson, Football and other such “religions”.

You realise why some marketers never have to put crazy countdown clocks or dump pop-ups on their website. That without any fuss or hoopla you can create a business where clients buy because their trust in you is infinite. Would you hold onto such a product? And yet, a few years ago, we gave it away to those who were members of 5000bc—and no, there was no catch involved.

Giving away a big product seems to be a foolhardy exercise

Why give something away when you can sell it? We've found that giving away a chunk of what we have has been beneficial for our business. At Psychotactics, we have over 20 products, and when we give away big chunks, we've found it builds an enormous amount of goodwill, which, believe it or not, turns to greater sales.

Bear in mind that while this article is clearly suggesting that you should use this giveaway as a strategy, our goal was not originally to garner a greater profit. Our goal was to give back since we'd already received so much. And this goal was stated way back in 2004, when the company was just over a year old. Even so, you'd be happy to know that giving away stuff you can sell, does lead to a substantial growth in profits.

In The Brain Alchemy Masterclass, we cover the early version of The Brain Audit

Yet, the moment clients go through the course, they end up buying the new version of The Brain Audit. And they also buy The Brain Audit workshop. They then join 5000bc, our membership site and end up on online courses.

Consider that a Psychotactics course is quite expensive compared with most marketing courses out there. And if you're doing an online, live, guided course, you are promised skill, but no money back guarantee. So what causes clients to sign up in a tearing hurry? Why do the courses fill up in less than an hour? One of the big reasons is the big giveaway.

But what if you don't have any big products?

No one starts off their business with big products, and yet in time you'll be likely to do a series of videos, or possibly a workshop that you record. Maybe you'll do a bunch of seminars on a particular topic. It's likely you don't have that product in place right now, and even when you get to it, you might not be that keen to give it away.

We had waited at least six years before we gave away our product and another three before we gave away the next. You have to be comfortable with giving away a big chunk of product. Nonetheless, bear in mind that the marketplace gets noisier and crazier by the minute and your best bet is to get clients to trust your work earlier than later. The sooner you can give away a big product, the better. It might even be a good idea to create a big product just to give it away.

If you giveaway big products, will clients ever want to pay?

I have an e-mail software that I use to keep my inbox down to zero. It's called Spark (and it's for the Mac). I've used a lot of software to maintain my inbox because unlike most people; I don't outsource e-mails. And right now Spark does an excellent job. There's just one problem. All the e-mail software I've had before has not been free.

It hasn't been expensive, but they've charged me between $20-$40 overall. This one is a pure giveaway. That makes me really nervous because you can't run a business without charging for it. I'm hoping they can take some money off me as soon as possible.

It may sound bizarre to you, but not all clients are not over eager to get free stuff all the time

There are those who will take endlessly, but there are enough clients who want to pay. If you create good info-products, you will always have clients who'll pay good money to get whatever you put out. Take the case of all the free information you see around you on a daily basis. You'll see entire videos on YouTube, or run into books that are priced at a tiny fee, or even free. A book, by the way, is a big info-product. The book or video then directs you to higher priced info-products or consulting.

Which brings up the next question: Should you structure the giveaway? If so, how? And how often should you give something away? Let's find out in the next section.

3) How to structure the giveaway

Have you walked into a store where some of the goods are locked up and not accessible to customers?

Many years ago, we used to do workshops in Campbell, California—primarily it's because that's where Renuka's sister used to live. And while we were in the U.S. it was always a good idea to do some shopping.

On one of the shopping trips, I wanted to buy a rainproof jacket. Not just any old jacket, but something that would keep me super dry on days when it was super-wet. The logical choice for this outdoor gear was REI, the outdoor gear store. And guess where my prized rain jacket was to be found?

Yes, you probably guessed correctly

It was in a glass case, which happened to be locked. The brand I was looking for, Arcteryx, had a high price tag and there it was, sitting where it could be seen, but not touched. And that's approximately how you need to treat your own big value giveaways. It needs to have a barrier between you and the client, wherever possible and there's a good reason why.

The reason? It's easier to sell something expensive than to give it away free of charge

Think about it for a second. Let's say someone drove up to your house, knocked on your door and gave you the keys to a brand new car. What's your reaction? You should be jumping for joy, but this person who just gave you the car is a stranger.

There's absolutely no reason to trust his generosity. Instead of dancing around the room, you're trying to shut the door in his face, aren't you? Without setting up the barrier and anticipation, even a big give-away will fall flat on its face.

At Psychotactics we go through a routine as though we're selling a high-value product

Yes, the product is still free, but that doesn't mean you don't put up the barriers. When we give away a high-value product, we make the client go through a series of actions. This might involve going on a waiting list, then spreading out the sequence of e-mails so that the product is delivered in stages.

And for some giveaways, we've even got members to pitch in and help out with the work. In short, you shouldn't just dole out your high-value product and should take all the care and effort to treat it like a high-end product. It means a lot of work on your part. Lists to set up, e-mails to write—yup, no one said this would be easy. But when you go through the trouble of running a campaign for a “free” product, the client is in a better position to perceive the value.

What you also need to know is that low-value products can have the same intensity of drama

Just because it's not a high-end info-product, doesn't mean you can't roll it out to the sound of drums and bugles. Let's say I were writing a small report on “how to write perfect headlines every time”, there are two options.

You could get the report right away, without any fuss, or you could sign up in anticipation for the information when it is finally released. Which isn't to say that all small value giveaways need to have pomp. Some of them can just be given away, just as you'd do with a YouTube video or an article.

Even so, most of the items on our site have barriers

To get to a specific type of audio or video or report, you have to sign up. This, in turn, enables us to send more goodies to the client or to inform them about related products or services. If you can't get in touch with a client or can't remind them to buy something, there's a likelihood your info-products will sell, but having those contact details and the permission enables you to keep in touch on a fairly constant basis.

Finally, it's the strength of your info-product that really matters

Many clients will use different e-mail addresses and may not see the follow-up e-mails you send. Which is why your info-product itself, whether big or small, has to deliver the goods. It's not always sales, sales and more sales that matter. In many, if not most cases, generosity matters to an even greater extent. Be generous, and kind, and you'll find that clients are very responsive as well.

Oh and be selective in your giving

We give away products from time to time, not all the time. Once or twice a year, or even longer is a good strategy for a large product. For smaller products, it's going to depend on the type of info-product. I'll give away a report at the end of a podcast or maybe something embedded in the middle of an article or right at the end of the article. In short, even when we're giving away something, we're making sure clients invest in reading, watching or listening before finding the treasure.

Giving is a good feeling.

Do it with passion, but also with structure and you'll get rewards.
Best of all, it will lower risk and increase info-product sales. It's a really warm and fuzzy way to run a business, isn't it?

Next Up: Why Free Products Need To Be Better Than Paid Products or Services

Giving away outstanding content is the magic behind what attracts—and keeps clients?When you're giving away bonuses, it's easy to believe you don't need to give away your best product or service. This podcast episode takes an opposite stance. You need to put your best stuff out in front—free. Yes, give away the goodies, no matter whether you're in information products or content marketing; services or running a workshop.

 

How do you maintain a high productivity level when switching tasks?

How do you get the brain and body to handle the transition?

And how do you manage the transitions with a minimum amount of fuss?

Read online: https://www.psychotactics.com/high-productivity/

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

I was asked in e-mail:

I am curious to know, since you do so many tasks in a day, how do you deal with context switching? I can do a task for 60 minutes, but doing something different immediately, requires some time for the brain and the body to handle the transition. How do you manage these transitions?

The approximate formula is:

High Intensity > BREAK > Low Intensity

Notice how it goes?

High, BREAK, Low.
Then BREAK > High > BREAK > Low.

When you first see the switching formula, it seems like it's just a transition from high to low.

But as you can tell from the emphasis above, the break is pretty critical. If you just go from high to low or even low to high, the brain doesn't get time to recover. And recovery is what's important when you want to keep your attention and focus.

Without recovery you get a factor of tiredness, that may also spiral downwards to exhaustion

But with recovery, your brain and body get a chance to relax and come back to take on the next battle. It's at this point that the high to low bit also matters. Taking on high-intensity tasks one after the other just wears you out and having the high to low allows your brain to make a decent transition—and relax even more after you've had the break.

But how long are the breaks?

The breaks depend on the time of day. During the day, while at work the breaks are short. However, at around lunch time, it might be about 30 minutes or more. At tea time I will take another 30 minutes. It seems like a lot of down-time, but that's the reason why you can achieve more.
A simple alarm or timer that does a countdown enables you to take that break. But there are days when I'll ignore that timer (as we all do) and that's the day when I get more tired. Instead, at the point of the timer going off, I can give my brain and body a break. I lie on the floor (yes, on the floor) and have two books to rest my head in a semi-supine position. Look it up.

It sounds totally bizarre that taking time off gets you to achieve more, but that's precisely the crux of higher productivity

The more you work, the longer stretches you work for, the less productive you're likely to be. And of course, the more tired you'll get. If you're younger, you may brush this off, because you seem to have boundless energy, but in tests, young tennis players were matched against each other, and the top players were always the ones who recovered better. The recovery period forms the core—if that were not obvious by now already.

And it helps in switching tasks as well.

My day starts with high intensity. I will either be writing a book, or be answering questions on a course, or in 5000bc. A lot of these activities involve not just reading, but analysis and giving precise direction. It's mentally draining and after 90 minutes or so (with rest periods in between), I'll go for a walk. That's a longer break. When I get back, I will make breakfast and watch some comedy on YouTube (while cooking up some yummy dosas).

Then it's time to paint for a while. That's all high to break, and now it's time to get back to low intensity, which would involve something like e-mail or something that doesn't require a tonne of resources. The day moves on from there to writing scripts for the podcast and answering 5000bc posts, before it's time for lunch and another break. The day is filled with breaks, high and low-intensity tasks, which enable me to write, draw, and do many other tasks like recording podcasts or doing interviews, etc.

To be productive pay attention to the formula and do the semi-supine.

If you don't have a great floor, get a yoga mat and relax on the ground. The more you fight your brain and body the harder it is to switch. It also doesn't allow you to reach your highest productivity level.

And that, in a nutshell, is how to go about your day.

Next Step: Read—How High and Low Tasks Apply To Projects (How To Be Productive And Not Burn Out)

Even if you have the best business idea in the world, analysis-paralysis can stop you in your tracks

You feel frozen, not sure what to do. So you research. Then you do some more research and educate yourself even more. But that doesn't get you very far, does it? Even famous people like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo would get stuck in this mode, just like you. But they still went on to create great art.

So how do you create great “art” as well? Find out and beat the analysis-paralysis once and for all.

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: Two ways to validate your business idea
Part 2: What makes a viable product? And how do you validate it?
Part 3: How to deal with analysis paralysis?

Click here to read online: https://www.psychotactics.com/validating-business-idea/

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How do you go about validating your business idea to give yourself the best chance of success?

Can you think of a TV series that's generated over US$ 3.1 billion so far?

If you answered, Seinfeld, you're perfectly right. Except for one little fact. Seinfeld almost didn't get off the ground. As author Adam Grant mentions in his book, “Originals”, two entertainers got together to create a 90-minute special. Despite their abilities, they couldn't find enough material to fill the 90-minute special, and so they decided to create a half-hour weekly TV show. And that's precisely where all the trouble began.

The TV Network folks looked at the script and thought it was terrible

Undeterred, they went on to create the pilot for the series. A hundred viewers dissected the strengths and weaknesses of the show. The majority of the test audience decided they wouldn't watch such a show. But a test audience in one city may hate the show and others may love it, which is why the pilot got screened at four diverse cities. Six hundred people in all saw the show, and the results were dismal.

They all thought it wasn't something they'd ever watch again. And at that point, Seinfeld should have simply died. And it might have if it wasn't for one network executive who doggedly campaigned for them to make and air four more episodes. The drama didn't stop there, and Seinfeld lurched back and forth, always threatening to tip itself into oblivion.

Johannes Sebastian Bach is considered to be one of classical's virtuosos

He wrote over a thousand pieces of music in his lifetime. Not far behind was Beethoven and Bach who composed 650 and 600 pieces respectively. And yet, despite their voluminous body of work, they were as unsure as you and me about what would work and what wouldn't. Beethoven, for instance, trashed the final movement of his most celebrated work in the Fifth Symphony. Only later did he decide to put it back. Could he not tell right from the start that it was an amazing part of the musical piece?

Throughout history, experts have failed to spot the superstars. J.K. Rowling, the Beatles, Elvis Presley. History has hundreds of examples of bad calls, and it's not as though the crowd does better. Despite what you hear about the wisdom of crowds, the crowds are pretty hopeless at it as well. Which is why Seinfeld's early episodes got panned so badly.

1) If everyone is guessing, how would you ever be able to validate an idea?

There are two ways to validate an idea, and they're both reasonably bizarre.

—The first way is not to do any testing with audiences at all. Instead, there's another group that can help you with greater accuracy.
—The second way is to create whatever you jolly well please, but then link it to an existing problem.

Let's start with the first point and figure out which group tends to be more accurate than others

When we sit down to create a product or service, we instantly realise that we're not alone. If you're in marketing, there are thousands, if not tens of thousands of books on marketing. If you're in health, fitness, nutrition, programming, illustrations—it doesn't matter what you pick—it's all been covered. It's at this point we feel the need to stand out and fit it as well.

There's a reason why we need to fit in

If we go too far away from what everyone else is doing, it might just not be viable. Novelty is hard to cope with because we don't know what to make of it. If you ask an expert, they don't see the world the way you do. Back in the early 2000s as we started an earlier version of Psychotactics, there were already solidly entrenched marketers such as Jay Abraham, Dan Kennedy and Brian Tracy.

They were well-established in the field of seminars, delivered their content through massive bookbinders and cassette tapes. If all of these methods of delivery sound archaic to you, it's only because you're looking back in time. Almost no marketer wanted to explore the Internet. It's the very entrenchment that causes you to see something new as a novelty. It's a blind spot. If you were to ask the experts or the audience, you still wouldn't get the validation you seek.

But there's another group that seems to understand the novelty factor a lot better

They're called “fellow creators”. Fellow creators in the very same field have a sense of what's going to work, long before the audience or the experts do. When peers evaluate each other, they are twice as accurate as anyone else. When Justin Berg, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior, studied circus acts he found the ones who best predicted whether a video would be liked, shared or funded were when peers evaluated each other.

As a cartoonist, I know this to be true

When one cartoonist sees another great cartoon, the instant reaction is: “I wish I'd thought of that joke”. The same concept applies across industries. Comedians look to their fellow comedians for approval. One of the greatest tribute you can get isn't from an audience or experts, but from a group—yes a group—of fellow cartoonists.

Cartoonists who have the same calibre or even higher. Peer judgments—when evaluated in groups—are more reliable because they see the very same idea through different eyes. So the first thing you've got to do is seek out peers; people who are in the same field and approximately with a similar mindset.

Yet, that's just one way to handle validation

The other way is not to validate at all but to create what you pretty well please but then match it up to the existing problem. Let's take a company like Tesla. What product are they making? If you think of the cars they're producing, you'll be likely to say: They are building electric cars. Electric cars aren't a new thing. They existed long before the gasoline car and still failed repeatedly.

But apparently CEO, Elon Musk doesn't care about the failure because he's not building “electric” cars.

If you pay close attention to Musk, you'll notice he harps a lot about the speed. It accelerates from 0-60 in 3.2 seconds. You see the problem, don't you?

He's not drumming the “save the planet” message, is he? Instead, he's building the car of his dreams, and tackling the problem of speed. And if you happen to sit in a Tesla, notice what the owner tends to drool about—yes, speed. Which tells you that if you build a product, they will not come. But if you link the product to an existing problem, you can instantly attract attention.

If we were to go back to the much-used case study of Domino's Pizza, you'd notice the same thread of creating what the owner wants. They just wanted to create a pizza, using their own method. Is that a feasible or viable way of succeeding?

Of course not. But marry it to a problem and see what happens. The problem was: the client was hungry and hence the pizza needed to get to the customer's place as soon as possible.

You're likely to have read this or heard it before at Psychotactics, but the product on “The Secret life of Testimonials” isn't exactly what you're thinking about, are you? It's got over a hundred pages, but it's a product I wanted to write about. And so I did. But where's the problem?

We found, quite by chance, that better testimonials get us better clients. Clients that respect our work pay in advance, etc. And so the problem is “crappy clients”.

You see what's happening when you launch a product?

You're trying to make the product or service fantastic, and so it should be. The Tesla, Dominos Pizza or the Secret Life of Testimonials has to be a solid product. But that's not enough. What if it doesn't sell? It won't sell if you simply talk about the obvious. In every instance, whether it be the first car, the first plane, the first trip into space—they're all beyond the imagination of the audience. However, the moment you link it to an existing problem, you immediately get their attention.

2) What makes a viable product? And how do you validate it?

If you're into testing, find a group of your peers. Your peers are big fans of the profession. A  group of chefs, evaluating your work individually, are more likely to know more accurately which dish will be a hit than just a group of diners frequenting the restaurant.

However, if you care two hoots about testing, go right ahead and create your product or service and then link it to an existing problem. When clients get excited about the problem, you know you have a winner.

One last word about how this validation bit works

For years I've wanted to write a book about “how to teach more effectively”, and it's called “Teacher vs. Preacher”. But who's interested in such a book? I've done an informal evaluation with others who teach online. Those who do courses, workshops, webinars, etc.

This group are likely to be clients, but they're primarily a group of teachers that really care about their students. They don't just want to sell a course or home study version of their product. They want their clients to be able to get the skill.

They love to sell out their courses, but their bigger focus is to be able to transfer the skill to their students.

And when I bring up “Teacher vs. Preacher”, they love the idea. So on one front, that's validation. But what if I wanted to write the book anyway? In such a scenario, I'll write but then connect it to the problem that we at Psychotactics solve so well.

Though our courses are higher priced than most on the Internet, we can sell them out faster than practically anyone else I know. A $3000 course sells out in less than 30 minutes, and with a single e-mail, while other marketers take weeks of endless e-mails, affiliates and joint ventures just to get any traction. That's the problem the book solves, doesn't it?

Validation can come from two fronts: peers or problem.
Try both if you need to be doubly sure.

But we're still stuck with the concept of analysis-paralysis. How do we get over that major hurdle?

3) How to deal with analysis paralysis?

What trigger played a significant role in human evolution?

If we go back three million years ago to our early ancestors, Australopithecus, we find them to be more like a chimpanzee. Its brain volume is a bare 400cc. If we were to fast forward to 1.8 million years ago, suddenly there's an abundance of hominine species, including Homo erectus. And the brain size is double of Australopithecus.

If we move further to 800,000 years ago, we get Home heidelbergensis and another remarkable growth in brain size from 800cc to 1200cc. And finally, 200,000 years ago, we find a skull called Omo 2, and it has a brain size of approximately 1500cc, which is remarkably close to the brain size we have today.

But what caused those changes in brain sizes?

Each one of those brain sizes occurred when the Earth was at its most elliptical and the climate was horribly harsh and changing. Rivers dried up; food was scarce, temperatures rose and fell in rapid succession. Human evolution is considered to have a direct line to volatile do-or-die situations.

Good times, on the other hand, don't seem to lend themselves to rapid change

Think about your situation on a daily basis. As long as you have enough food in the pantry, it seems perfectly reasonable to lounge on the sofa. The moment you're out of food, there's no analysis-paralysis. In fact, even dwindling supplies causes you to act with increasing focus and rapidity. While there are many reasons why we get into a rut of analysis-paralysis, the biggest reason for the rut is the glut or excess.

So what does this excess look like in real life?

Let's say you walked into an ice-cream parlour and you have to choose between two flavours: mango and strawberry. How long did you take to make that decision?

If we wanted to add confusion, we simply have to add excess. Let's add 18 flavours to that list. Now you have twenty flavours to choose from, and you go, at least partially, into analysis-paralysis. You want the coffee flavour and the mango at the same time. You can't decide whether they are suitable, and so back and forth you go.

In reality, you're going through a series of rejections

To get to your unique flavour, you have to, theoretically, reject 19 flavours to pick one. A similar set of phenomena plays itself out when you're trying to achieve a goal.

You've been told it's important to learn about Facebook advertising, that e-mail is important, storytelling is critical and so on. It's normal to jump from one thing to the other like flavours of ice-cream.

What you really need is a lack of choice

People who get things done are not hampered because they create situations where they can't do everything. They are forced to do just a few things, with usually one thing as the big focus. And if you want to get out of paralysis-analysis, here are three elements you need to consider. They are:

a) Drafts
b) Information
c) Deadline

a) Let's start with drafts

Michael Lewis is a relatively unknown name as authors go, but his projects are well known because they're quickly transformed into Hollywood blockbusters. “Moneyball”, “The Big Short” and the “Blind Side” are reasonably well known. When interviewed about the struggle involved in writing,

Michael gets slightly philosophical. “The writing isn't a problem,” he says. “Instead, it's the drafts that require work”. Lewis talks about the multiple numbers of drafts he has to make to get a project going. And in layman's terms, that's simply an outline.

Yes, the very same outline most people hated to do when in school, and still avoid doing whether it involves writing an article, creating a product or giving a presentation. It's one of the biggest hurdles that get in our way time and time again.

An outline has stages of clarification. When we first begin the draft, we are grasping at straws. With every following outline, the brain has a chance to get a greater level of clarity. Three, four, six, eight—it doesn't matter how many drafts you create, as long as you create drafts.

Drafts seem like such an odd idea when you're dealing with analysis-paralysis

When we think of it as a grocery list, it's easier to understand the concept. Show up at the supermarket randomly, and you either end up buying stuff you don't need or end up totally confused about what you have to buy. But a little prep work goes a long way. When you consider a grocery list, it's a reasonably uncomplex set of items. An article, a project, a book—they're so much more complicated and we merrily walk into these projects without going through a bunch of drafts.

J.K. Rowling had zillions of drafts for Harry Potter. Michael Lewis pretty much works his way forward through drafts.

Pixar, Disney—every animation company will create storyboard after storyboard. The reason why professionals work their way through drafts is for one simple reason. When you start a project, your brain has random sets of ideas. Without the drafts, it's easy to get stuck, and no one; not you or me likes being in that situation. So we move along to something else easier to cope with. And the failure looms large, resulting in almost certain analysis-paralysis.

But drafts are only one of the elements we have to deal with when working on a project. The second super-duper favourite has got to be the lack of information.

Let's look at information, shall we?

b) How information plays a role in analysis-paralysis

Back in 2009, I re-wrote Version 3 of the book, The Brain Audit.

It should have been an easy task, shouldn't it? After all, I'd been through hundreds of examples of clients using The Brain Audit. I'd also spent years refining the concepts over and over again as I implemented them in my own business.

But even as I'm describing the trouble of writing Version 3, you get a feeling of déjà vu, don't you? And it's because most of us have experienced this struggle of having to explain the same thing in a different way. We know too much. We have the curse of knowledge, and it's slowing us down considerably.

Knowing too much means you feel the need to stuff everything into your information

Let's take The Brain Audit itself as an example. The book is pretty comprehensive all by itself. However, if you look at the chapters (and there are about seven main chapters), every one of those chapters can be a book all by itself.

How do we know this to be true? Let's take the chapter on uniqueness. We've conducted a three-day workshop on uniqueness alone with separate audio and notes. If we were to choose the topic of testimonials, we have 100+ pages on testimonials in a product called “The Secret Life of Testimonials”. Any of those chapters in The Brain Audit could be expanded into 100-150 pages each. In reality, The Brain Audit could easily be a 1000 page book.

As a writer there's too much information floating in your head

If you were to take any topic, be it photography or karate or any topic you're familiar with,  you'd find a consistent problem to nail down what you're going to cover. I remember taking on an esoteric topic like feedback, and that generated well over ten chapters.

The more info-product you have in your head, the more you're going to get derailed. Which is why it's a good practice to write down all your ideas, and then just choose three of them. Which three? It doesn't matter. Any three will do. Any three will connect. All of the three are valuable to clients, but more importantly for you, as the creator.

Most software is bloated; most books are loaded with information we can't use. If we just had three topics to focus on, we could get going as creators, and the client would be happy.

A vague topic like feedback can be a monster in itself. But really, can we pick any three? Try it yourself, and you'll see you can match any three together. And just in case you think I wrote this up right now, I didn't. I made this mind map back in early 2016, and because I didn't pick three, I've still not started. The irony is not lost on me.

However, what if you're just starting out?

Back around 2008, a client of mine wrote his first book. In it, he put everything he knew, which wasn't a lot. He was exhausted by the time he finished the book, but he was also scared. He felt he'd given his all and there was nothing left in him.

When I wrote The Brain Audit back in 2002, I felt the same way. I couldn't manage more than 16-20 pages (and that included fillers and cartoons). Today, you can see I have the problem in reverse. If I were to write The Brain Audit like it should be written, I'd struggle to keep it to fewer than 1000 pages.

All of us believe that we either have too much in our heads or too little

But there's also a third factor that comes into play. Take, for instance, the series on pricing called “Dartboard Pricing”. It shows you why people pick your product over others, how to construct the pricing model and get 15% more, as well as the sequential pricing structure. In short, it's a very solid (and entertaining) series that pretty much guarantees you'll get higher prices than whatever you're charging today.

When I sat down to write the book, I wasn't sure it needed to be written. If you head to a search engine and type in the terms “Psychotactics” and “pricing”, you'll get enough content to fill up at least a day of reading and listening.

What else could I write, I wondered

Information stops us in our tracks on multiple fronts. We know too much, seemingly know too little, or we've given away so much that we feel another book or course won't make a difference. Incredibly it does make a massive difference. I could sell the Dartboard Pricing series as it is, and do a webinar series and clients would sign up. If I did a workshop in your city, you're likely to attend.

How do we know this to be true?

Because when I was presenting The Brain Audit workshop in Washington DC for the first time, many years ago, I was going through the same fear-ridden routine.

Most of the attendees in the room had not only read The Brain Audit, but many of them had read Version 1, Version 2 and Version 3. What else could I bring to the table? There's always a new angle, new examples, new insight that you as a creator don't even realise you're putting forth. Even if you've published a lot of the information before, the audience receives it from quite another angle.

To get going, you must start with drafts

Write down all the ideas in draft after draft. Even so, that draft must have a deadline by which you start writing. When you write, put everything down into three categories.

What can you fit in those three categories? You'll see how we've done this on the Dartboard Pricing page and also the ‘Black Belt Presentations' page.

Those topics, like any topic, are vast and the only way I know of getting them down to size is to pick three topics and write about them. If I need to write more, I can just write three more later. Or you can expand the topics all by themselves as we have done with The Brain Audit, where topics like uniqueness or testimonial now have their own books or courses.

Easily the biggest thing that stops us in our tracks is that the information already exists. Either we have put the information out there, or someone else has, and no one really needs our product or service. As alluring as this fact may appear to us, it's patently false. There are many ways to present the very same product or service and clients want to find out all the possible ways.

But even if we were to conquer our fear of drafts and information, we still have one great hurdle to conquer. A barrier called “deadlines”.

c) Why External Deadlines Reduce Paralysis-Analysis

Imagine gong to the supermarket with a list.

Yet it's not a typical list. That list has about 150-200 items which you'll need to purchase. Notice the fact that you're not doing anything overly dramatic. All you're doing is picking the item from the shelf and putting it in your shopping cart. Even so, as you get deeper into the list, there's this overpowering urge to quit the task and do something else.

A decent sized project usually has about 150-200 embedded tasksWe start off most projects with a fair bit of gusto, pretty much like picking items off the shelf. Then for no particular reason, we seem to lose momentum, and we get distracted. The more distraction we run into, the more we seek to do some more research. We somehow feel if we do our homework, things will get better. And they rarely do.

The only consistent way to get things done is to adopt the mindset of a programmer

Any programmer on a project knows there's a date to ship the software. Will the software have bugs? Almost certainly it will have a fair number of bugs. A programmer has little choice. They've promised the software will be ready on a particular date and so it launches more or less on time.

But this deadline isn't restricted to programmers alone

You get to your destination, because planes, trains and buses are mostly based on a non-negotiable deadline. The Olympics don't start one week later than planned. And even those 200 things you had to get off the shelves needed to be put there by someone who was following an external plan.

If you make internal plans, paralysis analysis is the default setting

When I first started out writing articles for Psychotactics, I hated writing with a passion. It would take me two days and would involve an enormous time and energy. However, I'd promised that I'd deliver the article on a twice-monthly basis and so I had to finish the job. I'd battle through the process, hating every fifth word with a passion, but the job would get done.

Almost all of us start off a project with a lot of excitement and then struggle to get to the finish line

When we have nothing to lose, we fill our days with something else. The only way anything can done is to have this external deadline in place. Most of the time it involves a cash transaction. When you sell a course, you have to show up and conduct the course.

When you promise to deliver software you'd better be shipping on the day itself or clients will be on your tail. Is all of this a source of constant pressure? Sure it is, but then great work is usually not done with a lot of leisure in hand.

The advice being given to you isn't particularly new.

You already know that a project is going to have 200 sub-tasks. You have to work out the tasks and go at them with gusto. You also know that if you keep the project to yourself, nothing is going to happen.

Very few people have the ability to finish anything if there isn't a fixed deadline, often with a penalty if the job doesn't get done. And whatever you're shipping is going to have bugs. You can fix those bugs later.

There's just one tiny note

We often underestimate the time we need. We take on too much and we struggle. Over the years, I've had to learn that making space is an important part of getting things done. If you're constantly battling all sorts of deadlines, you're running out of energy on a monumental scale. Without space, you have no recovery period. So I create space and set an external headline. And things get done.

Too simple?

Well just as a parting thought, Michelangelo didn't want to paint the Sistine Chapel. Neither did Leonardo da Vinci wanted to paint the Last Supper. They were made to do it. That's why we have these works of art. Now get your work of art finished.
Epilogue: The Segway Syndrome

One of the most spectacular failures of modern times has been the Segway.

In a world that longs for non-polluting transportation systems, the Segway seemed like the perfect answer to our travel woes. It moved swiftly, quietly and after a bit of practice, was easy to handle.

Even so, Segway sales barely got off the ground and have stayed relatively stagnant

If it's evident that the Segway solves a problem, why should it have failed? Sometimes the problem lies not in the product or service itself, but in the distribution or infrastructure, instead. Take for instance the electric car. In 2017, a Tesla now has the ability to go 335 miles on a single charge (compare that with a gas-burning-fuel car that can only do 300).

That, to many people is the infrastructure part that needs to be taken care of. Superchargers have to be built so that they quickly replace gas stations and these super-chargers need to sit near cafes or stores, or in a parking lot. Without all of these elements in place, the car itself becomes redundant.

The Segway struggled for many reasons, including its high price

However, even if you did own a Segway, you couldn't use it on the road or on the pavement. Without setting all the infrastructure and paperwork in place, it was doomed to failure. And this brings us to an important point: creating a factor of destruction.

When we try to validate an idea, we head in one direction

We list all the reasons why the idea, product or service can and should succeed. But we rarely, if ever, create conditions for failure. If you're about to do a copywriting course, what can you do to cause the course to fail?

What infrastructure would you need to remove so that the course crashes and burns? If you're starting up a website business, what would you need to have in place so that clients show interest but don't do any work with you? These are the elements we have to consider before we put our product or services into the marketplace.

Ideas are super fragile

The creator of the product or service may waffle between fear and reason when in fact everyone who launches a product is fearful. Everyone, without exception, feels the same uncertainty. Then we have the issue of validating the product or service, which for the most part is impossible.

However, your peers review can help and it's a powerful form of feedback. Later, when the product launches, clients will tell you what you need to fix. Instead of pretending like the problems don't exist, we need to roll up our sleeves and fix the problems.

Finally there's the issue of analysis, and yes, paralysis. Those that do endless research and wait for the right moment, almost always fail. Instead you need to set a deadline, get your product or service into the market and fix the glitches later. Preselling the product or service ensures that you keep to a deadline and don't wait forever.

The great works of genius in science, maths, language, arts of business weren't fully formed. They were mostly half-baked and got better as they went along. You may decide to start later, when things are perfect.

It's a decision that almost never has a good ending!

Summary:

Imagine if you invented a set of tyres and they were ridiculed. They called them pudding tyres”. Would you go ahead? Now you can because of the information we've covered so far. So what did we cover?

-How to distinguish between your own voice of fear, and voice of reason
-How to go about validating your idea to give yourself the best chance of success
-Tips for getting over analysis paralysis

Next Up: How to Make the Mental Leap From a Job into Entrepreneurship

You don't know if it's the right time to jump into being an entrepreneur. What about the mortgage, the family and the bills? And how do you deal with the fear? How do you stay steadfast to your vision? And what about focus? These questions spin in your head over and over again.

Click here to: Understand how to keep true to your vision, stay focus in a distracted world and when to take the leap.

How do you know whether your business idea is good or bad?

Is there a system of validation for your info-products, courses and workshops, or do you just go with the wisdom of the crowds? This episode shows you exactly what causes one business idea to fail and the other one to succeed.

This series is about the validation of your business ideas. We will explore what  is important when you’re about to embark on a new business idea.

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: How to distinguish between your own voice of fear, and voice of reason
Part 2: Good ideas can't be left on the bench; they need to be consumed right away
Part 3: The big picture is usually the biggest problem

Click here to read online: https://www.psychotactics.com/validate-idea/

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Imagine if you invented a set of tyres and they were ridiculed.

That is precisely what happened to a vet from Belfast, Ireland. This vet, named John Boyd Dunlop, watched with a bit of angst as his son, Johnnie, as he bounced madly while riding on a bike on a cobblestone street. The solid rubber tyres were clearly not suitable and he set about inventing the first commercially viable pneumatic tyres.

But then they made fun of him. They called the pneumatics, “pudding tyres”.

What would you do if you were in Dunlop’s place?

We know that Dunlop didn’t give up. He didn’t give into the ridicule, but partnered instead with Irish industrialist W. H. Du Cros to create the Dunlop tyre factory both in Ireland and across the world. But what if Dunlop backed away? What if he wasn’t so sure if his invention would be a success?

This series is about the validation of ideas. And in three parts we explore three chunky bits that are important when you’re about to embark on a “pudding sort of idea”.

And here’s what we’ll cover:
-How to distinguish between your own voice of fear, and voice of reason
-How to go about validating your idea to give yourself the best chance of success
-Tips for getting over analysis paralysis

Part 1: How do you distinguish between your own voice of fear, and voice of reason?

If you buy really well-made bread, it goes through a cycle.

At first, it's delicious. It's likely to be crusty on the outside, soft on the inside. But keep it on your kitchen bench for a few days, and it starts to get hard. In a week, it's likely to get rock-hard and possibly get mouldy. The question to ask yourself at this point is: Did you buy bad bread?

And the answer is self-evident

The bread wasn't bad, was it? But if you take the best loaf of bread, made by the most dedicated baker, and you keep it outside for days, you're going to get an almost identical result. This is true for good ideas as well. No matter how great your idea happens to be at the start, the hardness will set in and so will the fungi.

Good ideas can't be left on the bench; they need to be consumed right away

However, this is where things start to go horribly wrong; only we feel like it's going just right. The way things unfold is through testing, research and working out if the market needs our product. Once we've gone around the research block many times, we then wonder if we have anything new to bring to the table. And as we're doing all of this evaluation, the market marches on. The more we research, the more we get stuck in your own trap to the point where the only thing we can do, is to scout for yet another idea. Fear takes over, and we don't know what to do next.

But why are we fearful in the first place?

We're fearful because we can't see the big picture. When you look at most business owners, they don't look confused and composed. They seem to have all these projects going; they appear to be attending events, speaking, turning out courses and books. In short, they seem to have everything well under control. You, on the other hand, aren't able to see so far into the distance, let alone figure out a way to get there. And this lack of the ability to see way into that future, plus the ongoing intimidation from seemingly successful people, puts you in a position of great angst.

The big picture is usually the biggest problem

Entrepreneurs who succeed rarely see the big picture. They're not entirely clueless, either. They know where they want to go, but it's still, at best, a hazy view of the future. What they tend to look at closely is what's in front of them. To understand the analogy, think of yourself in a car. Let's say you have to drive from Auckland to Wellington, a route of almost 8 hours of hard driving. Do you know what Wellington looks like at this moment? It would hardly hassle you because you're focused on the road right in front of you. Your only piece of research is a sort of GPS system that will more or less ensure you don't get lost along the way.

But wait, you already have your GPS system

You did the research; you read the books, you know how to move forward, so why are you still stuck? If we were to go back to the road analogy, you wouldn't be stuck. And that's because you're not figuring out whether you'll have a puncture 24 km from now. You're not worried that there's other competition; other cars on the road. What you're entirely focused on is the road right in front of you. If you get tired or confused, you stop for a break. If you get hungry, a meal does the trick. All along the way, you're just looking at what's in front of you.

Which is completely the opposite of what you expect when you're getting started with a project

A project somehow needs to have all your ducks lined up in a row, or you simply drive around in circles. But what if there were a way to break up a project into smaller bits? When we think of a business or project let's drop the big, seven-silly-figure plan, shall we? Let's just focus on two core elements. The first point is where we're going to get our clients. The second is where we're going to get them to spend their time.

So where do we get our clients?

If you just build a website, no one will come. Despite being online and having a rock-solid reputation, almost no one comes to our website out of the blue. Instead, they come from somewhere else. When we first started our business, that somewhere else was a portal called “Marketingprofs.com”. We'd publish an article at the portal and clients would head to our website after reading the article. When we'd go to a local, tiny event, and speak for about 30 minutes, prospects would turn into clients and buy an e-book, and then a small percentage would sign up for consulting.

In every instance, what you're doing isn't this big, long range planning. All you're doing is this tiny task.

Successful entrepreneurs are like successful comedians

You only get to see the final one or two-hour show, but you never get to see all the small parts along the way. Comedians painstakingly put forward their jokes, only to see many fall flat. Some make the cut, and they go into the final show. Entrepreneurs do something similar. They make a move here, a move there and they keep going forward. By the time you see that fancy course appearing on Facebook or on their websites, they've made dozens, possibly hundreds of little moves to get to that point. And then, if they're good, as in really good, they keep working on their plans and refining it to the sharpest possible degree.

The road right in front of you isn't that scary

When you consider the entire journey, the possibility of a breakdown, deteriorating weather, and crazy drivers, suddenly it seems like a pretty good idea to put some tea on the boil and stay home. But with every experience you have of staying home, you create a whole new layer of fear. After a while, it seems totally impossible to go ahead with any plan and research and further learning seems to be the only consolation prize.

Let me tell you a personal story I've told many times before

I know how to create an ePub file. How do I know this? Because I've been through many hours of practice. When ePub first came out many years ago, I was keen to learn it, and so I followed the tutorial and made an ePub file. But it was a dummy file because I didn't want it to be anything a client would hold. When InDesign started to dig deeper into ePub, I went through tutorial after tutorial, in version after version of ePub and InDesign. To this day, I haven't created a single Psychotactics document in ePub.

You can see the problem, can't you?

I'm trying to create this perfect book, this perfect product. Instead of simply planning out a simple ePub, I'm looking at the big picture, and it's stifling me. All the information and all the research isn't helping at all. The ePub project is many years old, and it's like a loaf of bread that's been sitting there the whole time. You can barely believe your eyes when you read this information, can you? You'd think, what's the problem with a measly epub file? Why can't you just give it a shot? Who cares if it turns out right or wrong?

Same question is headed your way

Who cares if the idea is right or wrong?
How about taking on this tiny project and conquering the fear?

And if it fails, you'll figure out a way to fix it. But if you don't start, you know that idea will get harder by the minute.

Next Up: How do you go about validating your idea to give yourself the best chance of success?

 

 

How does tolerance play a role in small business?

It might not seem like tolerance is the root for success, but if you dig deeper, you'll find that small businesses struggle without the core concepts of tolerance.

So how does tolerance play a part in something like a successful artwork, or music, or the next product or course you produce? Let's find out in this podcast.

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: The Tolerance for Success and Failure
Part 2: The Tolerance to Learn
Part 3: The Tolerance for the Long Haul

Read it online: https://www.psychotactics.com/lack-tolerance-effect/

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In September 2013, Renuka and I were headed to Cape Town, South Africa.

Whenever we leave, we always ask our nieces, Marsha and Keira what they'd like as gifts. Keira was pretty clear about her gift. “Bring me an elephant”, she said emphatically. Now Keira was just four at the time, and an elephant seemed like a pretty plausible gift.

She wasn't taking no for an answer, even when we told her that the elephant might not fit in her house. But then I brought up a point that stopped her cold in her tracks. After she had heard what I had to say, she wasn't keen on the elephant anymore.

So what did I tell her?

I said, the elephant is a big animal and all animals poo. The larger the animal, the greater the volume of poo.

Keira didn't need much convincing

She wanted nothing to do with the elephant or the poo for that matter. And this is the battle we have to deal with every single day. We all want our businesses to grow bigger than ever before. What we don't always think of, is poo.

The bigger the business, the bigger the poo

And in business terms, you could call the poo, tolerance. You need an enormous amount of tolerance to keep the business going. Which is why people struggle so much when they get into a business. They don't see the factor of tolerance needed to keep the business going.

Let's look at the factor of tolerance in three shades, shall we?

—The Tolerance for Success and Failure
—The Tolerance to Learn
—The Tolerance for the Long Haul

Part 1: The Tolerance for Success and Failure

In August 2015, a musical made its debut on Broadway

It wasn't just any old musical. A few months earlier in February of that year, the off-Broadway engagement was totally sold out. And in 2016 itself, it received 16 Tony nominations and won 11.

That musical goes by the name of Hamilton; a hip-hop musical is about the life of American founding father Alexander Hamilton and the American Revolution. And the musical's producer, Jeffrey Seller is passionate about the need for tolerance.

“People don't have the tolerance”, says Seller who's seen more than his share of failures. “The tolerance for anxiety, fear, bewilderment and pain.

In the book “Originals” by Adam Grant, there's a list of high profile failure

You're likely to have heard about William Shakespeare's work in plays such as Macbeth, King Lear and Othello. But it's normal when you fail to recognise names of plays such as Timon of Athens or All's Well That Ends Well. Those two in particular rank among the worst of his plays and have been considered to be completely underbaked. But that's not unusual, is it? A writer does bad work and then produces better work as time goes on.

What's interesting about these plays is that he produced them in the same five-year window as some of his best plays. Shakespeare is known for his amazing plays, but most people fail to realise that he turned out a grinding 37 plays and 154 sonnets. His tolerance for getting into the heart of failure and getting out of it, was, as it turns out, consistent with any other successful person.

Hamilton basks in incredible success today, but its producer Jeffrey Seller clearly defines success through the eyes of failure.

Success feels good. Success is in its own way easy. It’s easy on my stomach and in my heart. It is also true that failure; the feelings that failure evokes are so much worse than the positive feelings that success evokes. I’ve heard of tennis players who say, “I never feel as good winning as badly I feel when I’m losing.”

“You can't cherry pick”

We must not cherry-pick because it will never get it right. If I lose money in one show and then say, “Oh, I better not do it in the next,” I’m going to be in big trouble if the next one’s the hit. I’ll give you an example. I did an Opera on Broadway in 2002.

We did La Bohème on Broadway in Italian. It was a beautiful production conceived and directed by the filmmaker Baz Luhrmann. I had persuaded this group of Korean investors who I’ve done some other business with, to invest a whopping million dollars. They lose 900 of the million. I asked them to invest in this little show with puppets called Avenue Q. They passed.

Avenue Q goes on to make over $30 million of profit for all of its investors. They cherry-picked. They used the fear that losing money in La bohème generated to guide their next decision.

Picasso didn't cherry pick

We look at Picasso's greatest paintings but what we don't see is the sheer volume that's almost too well hidden. By the time he died in 1973, Pablo Picasso has done over 1800 paintings, 1200 sculptures, 2800 ceramics and a staggering 12,000 drawings. Only fifteen or sixteen of Leonardo da Vinci's paintings are said to exist, yet in his surviving notebooks alone, we have a staggering 7000 detailed drawings.

It's called elephant poo.

If you want to get the elephant you get the poo as well. And success, the success so many of us crave, is just a tonne of fighting through a mountain range of poo. In reality, success is far less frequent that failure. “The tolerance for anxiety, fear, bewilderment and pain.

But what's really happening when we get into this failure zone?

What's happening is we're rooting out the mistakes. Talent, or success, is just a reduction of errors. Mozart is known for a few great works, but he barrelled through 600 of them before his death. Beethoven was no slouch either, producing over 650 in his lifetime. Mahatma Gandhi tried an endless number of ways to get the British out of India when he finally hit upon the “Salt March” in 1930 that would set the momentum for Indian Independence.

The tolerance for fear is the greatest one them all. But it doesn't stop there. We need the tolerance to learn and learn progressively.

Part 2: The Tolerance to Learn

I know, you're probably laughing at me because this system sounds so ridiculous

And it may or may not be ridiculous. It's hard to measure what you can remember, but after years of trying to speed things up, I realised one important fact. I need to slow down. I need to have a higher tolerance for learning.

So what is a higher tolerance for learning?

In my opinion, it's a method of slowing down, rather than speeding up. When I get a book to read, I rarely ever read the book. I'll read a bit, and then dig in my Moleskine bag for my pen and Moleskine diary (yes, I am a Moleskine nut). And then I'll make notes or mind maps.

Not every book makes the cut, but when I get a good book, like “Originals” by Adam Grant, I'll read the book, listen to the audio version, make notes and then write articles and possibly do a podcast too. So why go through all of this trouble? It's the opposite of the TV dinner.

It's like a chef that lavishes time and effort to get a meal ready for dinner. It allows me to get to the very core of what's being stated in the book. Or at least that's what I think.

My memory is like a sieve, sometimes

I remember going back to listen to an audio book after many years. I knew I'd listened to it because it was on my Audible app. I did remember some of the material, but even so, it was like a brand new book. I understood the book at such a great depth, and it astounded me that I hadn't figured out what the author was saying in my earlier reading.

This level of tolerance for reading is not common because it seems so very trendy to say you read many books. To this day if you go to the About Us page on the Psychotactics website, you'll see how I proudly mention that I read 100 books a year. Well, that's hardly possible now, at this slow pace, is it?

Don't get me wrong; I crave books

Just like someone longing for a great meal, I look at all the books I've missed, and there's a definite sense of regret. Even so, it's important to have a tolerance for slow learning. And with slow learning, it's also important to cross-pollinate your learning (which in turn makes it seem even slower). This cross-pollination means you're reading a series of books that often have little resemblance to each other.

At this moment, I'm reading “The Man Who Knew Infinity” a book about Srinivas Ramanujan (we'll get to know him better in the next section). There's a book by Adam Grant about “Originals”. And a book specifically about the David statue sculpted by Michelangelo. While poring through these books at a snail's pace, I'll watch videos about thermohaline currents and ponder over the information I get about high and low entropy in the universe.

All of this learning takes a mind-boggling amount of time

It's easy to feel you always need to be in a hurry. You still could be voracious in your learning. I listen to podcasts and audio almost all the time, while on the move. I'll read when I can, but reading requires you to be focused on what you're doing. And then there's the writing, endless amounts of writing about what I'm learning.

This is what I'd say is the tolerance for learning

To slow down, not speed up. However it's not necessarily about doing less, but instead, abut going deeper into the information and cross pollinating it in a way that makes you far more creative; far more open to seeing things in a way that others simply can't see.

But why go so far?

So many people take the easiest way possible. They say they have no time to read. If you ask them to listen to audio, they say they can't remember anything. And that's not the point of learning. Education comes in layers. I can't remember a lot of what I learn in audio, but if I don't listen to audio, I will miss out on about 300-450 hours of education in a single year (that's because I go for a walk every day and listen to audio).

The tolerance for learning has to be high. Speed is not the answer.
Speed reading is more like a TV dinner—a quick, yet deeply unsatisfying experience. Slow down and absorb the information and that's what leads you to a greater level of understanding and success.

Tolerance to failure is critical.
Tolerance to learning is also extremely vital.
But we still have one factor of tolerance that's needed: the tolerance for the long haul.

Part 3: The tolerance for the long haul

If you could buy Google for US$1.6 million, would you buy it?

Google in April 2017, was worth $560 billion. But back in 1997, Google was still a dream in CEO, Larry Page's brain. While at Stanford University, he created a search engine called BackRub. He tried to sell that search engine to another search engine company called Excite. But Excite's primary investor made a counter offer of $750,000. And Larry Page thought BackRub was worth a lot more. The short story is that today, 20 years later, Google is the most valuable company in the world.

A story that contrasts completely with what you're likely to run into on the Internet.

About a month ago, an ad on Facebook caught my interest. This person was promising you could get hundreds of clients signing up to an e-mail list, per day. And usually that kind of bombastic language just bores me to pieces, but on this morning, I was playing around with my watercolours, and it seemed like a fun idea to sit through this webinar.

The pitch was predictable

The story was about how he struggled to make any income at all. And the rags to riches story went nothing to several hundred million dollars. And before we know it, this person is hobnobbing with big shots including Sir Richard Branson. So why am I giving you the run down of this webinar? I'll tell you why. It's because the webinar talks about hard work as the enemy. How we all work hard and how it never changes our life. And how this person's seemingly magic system will change everything. What he continues to suggest is that you can get the elephant—without the poo.

And that's the reality we know is untrue

But we're often so sick and tired of being tethered to a job, or even feeling like we should be doing so much better in business, that we take the bait. We reject the tolerance for the long haul. We hope somehow there is a magic pill that will solve our troubles. Larry Page almost took that pill back in 1997. He had his reasons, of course, but it's the long haul that has gotten Google to where it is today.

So why is the tolerance for the long haul so critical for success?

The answer is encapsulated in a single word: drudgery. Let's say you are nuts about coffee. You know the beans, you're over obsessed over the roasting process, and you dream of opening a cafe for coffee-snobs. For the first fifty or hundred days, you're probably running on the aroma of the coffee alone, but then one day you feel like sleeping in. Now imagine your client showing up to the cafe only to find closed doors.

Every business has days of drudgery

You may adore your work, and should, but there are days when you simply don't feel like going to work. And ideally someone should and will step in to help, but the core of the issue is that no matter whether you're Google or that guy selling pipe dream webinars, it's all hard work and there are days of pure drudgery.

Days that you'll get over if you take a break. But if you don't have tolerance for the long run, you'll give up. You'll give up that podcast series you started; you'll give up on the blog posts, you'll give up when hardly anyone turns up to your workshop because you think you've failed.

Our membership site at 5000bc started in 2003

I've personally written 49,945 posts so far. Divide that by the number of years we've been running the site, and that's around 3,500 posts per year. It includes answers to clients, articles in response to questions, etc. With the courses, I've also finished over 50,000 posts. Add the podcasts, the books, all the workshops, etc. and you have a long list of stuff that needs to be done, and which I'm happy doing.

But if you think the work stops, it doesn't

William Shakespeare, Pablo Picasso, Hamilton's producer, Jeffrey Seller, Mahatma Gandhi, Leonardo da Vinci—they all realised that they're in the long game. That if you think you're just going to get into a business and the business will run itself, well, that's like buying into a webinar and paying a small fortune to get a magic pill. A magic pill that for the most part, is unlikely to work because it too will involve work.

Which is why you need to get involved in something you love

I love what I do. I love writing; I love making podcasts. I adore answering thousands of posts in the courses and in 5000bc. I didn't get into this business to simply walk away. I will take my weekends off, and I will take three months off every year. That's my way to get rid of the drudgery factor and come back fresh and rested. But I know that I—and you—we both need a tolerance factor for the long haul.

As Keira learned at the tender age of four, you can have your elephant, but it comes with poo. The bigger the elephant the greater the poo. If you want to build a business get the poo tray out because you're going to need the tolerance for failure, learning and most importantly the long haul.

How do you Get Smart (And Stay Smart)?

Many of us believe that smartness comes from learning the skills in our own field. And yet, that's only partially true. We can never be as smart as we want to be, if we only have tunnel vision. So how do we move beyond? Click here to find out: How to find the time to do all of this learning? 

"I wasted too much time getting angry".

So said world-famous tennis champion, John McEnroe. McEnroe and arch-rival, Jimmy Connors had similar temperaments on the court. Both were easily provoked. Yet both of them managed to get to the No.1 ranking in the world for many years consecutively.

Yet McEnroe was gone from the tennis scene by the age of 34. Connors, on the other hand, was still around at the highest level, even at the age of 40.

So what happened?

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: Work-Rest Ratios
Part 2: What Depletes Energy
Part 3: The Power of a Backup Battery

Read online: https://www.psychotactics.com/increase-energy/

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Performance psychologist Jim Loehr was on a particularly difficult mission.

He wanted to understand what kept the world's top competitors head and shoulders above their competition. He watched hundreds of hours watching live games and followed up by poring through taped matches. Despite the rigour he put into this research, he ran right into a brick wall.

He noticed that during points, high calibre players appeared to be remarkably similar to each other. There seemed to be little or no difference in the way they went about their game.

Then Loehr looked closer and began to look at what players did in between points. That's when he had his Eureka moment.

The best players, it seems, had consciously or subconsciously built up a routine.

As they headed back, they had a type of walk; they held their heads and shoulders in a certain way. And most importantly, their breathing seemed to slow down. These players were playing their shot and then, amazingly, going through a recovery method while getting ready for the next shot.

To dig deeper, Loehr hooked up the top players to EKG telemetry and was able to monitor their heart rates. To his astonishment, he found their heart rates dropping by as much as twenty beats per minute, in between points. Lesser ranked players seemed to have no recovery routine at all.

As Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz write in their book: The Power of Full Engagement, the key to being super-productive is to have enormous amounts of energy.

To drive home this point, they give the example of two players of relatively equal talent and fitness.

The players have given it their all as the match has progressed, but as the game reaches the third hour, who's going to be less fatigued? Who's going to get more angry and frustrated? Who's going to push his heart rate even higher resulting in muscular tension and drop in concentration? The one who has been recovering in between points is clearly far ahead because he's got far more energy.

When you think of energy, nothing quite fits the analogy like an electric car.

A petrol-driven car is a car with no fear. You can put $5 worth of fuel in it, and sure enough, you will find a petrol station along the way when you need one. At least at this point in time, in most countries, you can't do expect the same level of topping up for an electric car.

To get to your destination, and back, an electric car requires the driver to move forward without sudden acceleration. Brakes are applied only in an absolute emergency and most slowing down involves a generous amount of anticipation. In short, the electric car has a fixed battery and few, if any, charges along the way. If you manage your drive well, the car even recharges even while moving ahead.

An electric car and Loehr's research align almost perfectly.

Energy needs to be used to propel us forward, but we have to make sure we not only recharge, but also avoid energy depletion. Which is why it's a good idea to look at three core elements of energy so that we too can ditch time management and work on energy management, instead.

Here's what we'll cover:

1- Work-Rest Ratios
2- What Depletes Energy
3- A Backup Battery

1) Work-Rest Ratios

1972 was a scary year for Southwest Airlines.

They had been battling it out on the ground for years, just to get the right to fly. But right alongside their legal battles, there loomed a threat that was promising to put them out of business. They were haemorrhaging on cash and in order to pay the bills, they had to sell one of their four planes.

However, Bill Franklin, former Vice President of Ground Operations and others in Southwest made a bold calculation

They came to the conclusion that three planes could to the work of four. There was just one tiny problem to overcome. The planes had to be in and out of the gates in 10 minutes. Getting a plane cleaned, restocked and refuelled is a precision-driven task that often requires a solid hour.

Southwest had little or no option. They were either going to keep the planes in the air, or they'd go out of business. Years later, author, Kevin Frieberg, author of the book, “Nuts!”, was quoted as saying, “Aeroplanes only make money in the air”.

This kind of go, go, go machine-driven attitude is what we seem to apply to humans as well.

Many of us see ourselves as the product of hard work; of having little or no turnaround time; of always being in the air. Internet marketers boast how they're spending time working at the beach, usually in their underwear. And all of this talk about being able to be always connected, always at work, always putting down rest as if it were a disease—this is what causes us to feel constantly tired. What we need are work-rest ratios.

This factor of work-rest ratios isn't news to you, is it?

It shouldn't be, and yet we ignore it as though we have fuel-driven engines. We fail to see every day has to have a prescribed amount of work, then real rest. Every week has five days of work, and then two days off. Every quarter needs a break; every year needs many breaks. And though not all of us can, at this point, do a three-month long vacation, almost all of us can work with just the day.

It's so blindingly obvious that even reading this information seems bizarre

Yet, look around you, and you find that almost no one but the kids are bouncing around like crazy. Well, those kids aren't watching TV until late at night, are they? They aren't scrolling through their devices endlessly either.

They're doing what performance coaches advise their clients. A good night's sleep—yes, the most obvious thing of all—is what we seem to ignore on a consistent basis just because we don't wind down before bed time. Is it any wonder that we seem to be tired all the time?

So what's the quickest thing you can do, and do today?

Be like a kid. Figure out a bedtime for yourself, then wind down. That alone, this obvious task, is what causes you to have a lot more energy the next day. If for instance, we sleep just half an hour later every night, we've deprived ourselves of a good 3 ½ hours every week, and this accumulates over time.

Weekends or even half the weekend is what we should mark out to rest and recover, but we're always busy doing stuff. If you speak to someone they say that “the stuff needs to be done”.

But there's a downside to being constantly like a plane in the air

You're compromising your performance. As you clock in more hours, you take more time to do the very same task, and there's a greater chance of errors. What's weird about sleep is that the more rested you are, the better you sleep. Think about the times when you're agitated, and it's clear that the sleep was just as disturbed. So without going round and round, we need to understand a simple philosophy.

Get the work-rest ratio consistent, most of the time

In the book, The Power of Full Engagement, the authors talk about how there are times when you have to break away from the work-rest ratios. Sometimes we have to build capacity, and we have to increase our stress level. But even when you increase that stress, it needs to be followed by adequate recovery. You need to do both: push beyond limits sometimes and then to have enough recovery.

But work-rest ratios are not enough. There's something more, something even deeper. And that is to explore what depletes energy in the first place. Let's take a hard look at energy depletion.

2) The Energy Depletion View

It's Wednesday morning here in New Zealand as I write this piece. But this Wednesday isn't like last Wednesday, or the Wednesday before last.

That's because on all those previous Wednesdays

I didn't have the pressure of having to write the script, and then record the podcast. However, this week I've fallen behind and the pressure is building up. The more I delay, the more my mind is focused on the task of writing and then recording the podcast.

Energy depletion isn't something that's immediately apparent

It's all around us. Let's say you have to cook a dish. What does the professional chef do? She makes sure there's a sequence in place. No professional chef does what we often tend to do.

In one morning, we are likely to get the recipe, buy the ingredients, chop and prepare the ingredients and then begin to cook the meal. What we've done is gone through Stage 1, Stage 2, Stage 3, and so on. By the time we're ready to cook, we're already tired. That's not how a professional chef works. Every stage is separate so that the chef is at their highest possible energy for each stage.

Here's how I used to write an article back in the year 2001 or so I'd start with the idea, do little or no outlining. Then I'd write, but what I was doing was editing. I'd go a line forward and two lines back.

Eventually, after a brutal two days or so, I'd be done with the article. However, even after all that struggle, I didn't know if I had a good article or not. What's more important is that I'd be exhausted and dread having to write another article in the following week.

When I look at the way I'd create sales pages, write articles, cook, paint—all my activities were amazingly well-designed to create energy-depletion. Today, my methods are radically different. Take for instance the dish I prepared this morning. I soaked it last night, chopped the ingredients early this morning and about 10:45 am, I darted back home and cooked the dish.

Writing an article—this article for instance—involves a similar method of using stages.

I've got a bunch of Post-It stickers on the wall that all have topics that I want to write about. When I'm ready to take on the topic, I go to the cafe or park bench and outline the article.

I'll then split the article into three parts and write the article over three days, taking a day to cover each section. If the task isn't broken up, the energy required to go from one end to the other is often too great. You can expend the energy, but then it takes enormous time to recover.

Completing tasks is only one form of energy depletion

People and situations also play an incredibly important role in depleting energy. Take for instance a workshop we had in California back in 2006. One of the clients was terribly demanding, and we were still new in the business. We bent over backwards to make this customer happy, and I guess she was, but we were so drained at the end of the day. It's a good thing they have giant Margaritas in California because I needed more than one to feel like a human again.

The same applies to situations

We go for a walk and sometimes a car will pull out of the driveway, leaving just a little gap behind for us to traverse back onto the footpath. I'll go behind the car, and then glare back at the driver. See what's happening? It's all a depletion of energy. That small incident can rattle me for the next 10-20 minutes. Put in a few of these seemingly small events in a day, and it's not hard to see why we can be super-drained by the end of the day.

Being constantly distracted is also an energy depletion factor

No one is allowed to be bored any more. If you're bored for about 3 seconds, you reach for your phone to surf the Internet or look at what's on Facebook. Yet this behaviour is remarkably different from the way my parents (and possibly your parents) use the Internet.

My father goes online to look for something, to check the weather, but it's always a specific task. His phone isn't a distraction device. Instead it's a tool, like a hammer. You reach for it when you need it. Always going online and endlessly searching for something to allieviate our boredom is another factor of constant energy depletion.

The key to understanding energy is to see what depletes our energy

It's easy to see where these negative energy fields exist in our daily lives. A job we hate; a person that drives us crazy; a course that's going nowhere; a friend or relative that puts us down; a lousy call to the bank, endless surfing—it's all draining. And there are some energy fields that are hard to avoid.

So how do you cope when you know you're bound to run into energy-depletion zones every single day? What you need is a reserve battery pack and here's how you get one.

3) The Backup Battery

Imagine writing a complete article and finding it's vanished into thin air.

Granted it takes me just about 45-60 minutes to write an article, but this one was longer. It would take me at least an hour and half, maybe two to get the job done. The first instinct is not to re-create, but to go on a hunt. And that's exactly what I did. I searched high and low using all the tools at my disposal, but 25 minutes later I had nothing.

Right before that moment of seeming despair I loaded my backup battery

For 30 minutes every morning I meditate, simply because of the returns I get from meditation. At first, meditation was just something to try out. However, when you go through a day from 4 am and you're still energised at 9 pm, eyebrows need to be raised. Meditation is my backup battery. I don't know how it works, all I know is it just does. If you could stop your day for 30 minutes and get several hours of renewed energy later in the day, would you do it?

Think about time management vs. energy management for a few seconds

We are all focused on time, but at 5 pm you're pooped. You have time, but you have no energy. Now imagine having energy as you go through the day, then through the evening, and even late at night. It sounds so bizarre that I didn't believe it. I once heard the comedian, Jerry Seinfeld saying approximately the same in an interview, but I thought it was not possible. Maybe he doesn't spend long hours like me, I thought. Well, I was wrong, not once but twice over.

The second and possibly better reason for meditation is the capacity to deal with energy-draining situations.

Feel like screaming at the traffic? Angry at some new law the council has passed? Clients driving you crazy? Suddenly you're able to see all these people, events and situations as a bystander. It almost feels like it's not something that affects you, but is happening to someone else, instead. Instead of grumbling, getting mad and clearly draining your energy, you have a feeling of going with the flow.

Remember that article I lost?

I did my best to search for it, but instead of getting upset, I went about it in a calm and composed manner. Even though my problem wasn't solved, I simply went about some other activity. Then, today, while searching for something else, I found my article (about the same time as I was about to re-write it from the ground up). If all of this sounds like gobbledegook, then believe me, I thought it was too.

However, I believe in results too

And if the supposed-gobbledegook is going to help recharge my batteries and more importantly, keep me from draining them, then that's exactly what I need. Hence the meditation every day for 30 minutes. And if you're wondering where you're going to get 30 minutes from, remember the concept of the electric car (because it's remarkably similar to your phone). When you charge a device for 30 minutes, it lasts longer, but even a short 10-15 minute charge is still a charge.

But charge it for zero minutes and you get zero.

The backup battery should be some sort of cola

It really should be some sort of tequila shot or mixed in a cup of coffee. And yet it's just boring ol' meditation. The kind of stuff they've done for thousands of years. So, are you going to charge your battery with a longer, or even shorter charge?

This takes us to the summary where we'll look at the three aspects of energy.
Summary

“I wasted too much time getting angry”.

So said world-famous tennis champion, John McEnroe. McEnroe and arch-rival, Jimmy Connors had similar temperaments on the court. Both were easily provoked. Yet both of them managed to get to the No.1 ranking in the world for many years consecutively. Both of them also won Grand Slams.

What's interesting about this story is that Connors was considered to be the lesser player. It was more than apparent that McEnroe had a flair that helped him win even when he was fuming and screaming.

Yet McEnroe was gone from the tennis scene by the age of 34. Connors, on the other hand, was still around at the highest level, even at the age of 40. It's not hard to see what's happening, is it? Energy starts to escape at the very moment you rant and rave. It might seem like you're disrupting your opponent, but by McEnroe's admission, he did better when his temper was in control.

From an energy perspective, we need to look at three core elements.

1) Work-Rest Ratios 

Without the rest, we simply drain our batteries until our system can't handle it any more The more we work, the more we have to rest. When you rest, you come back fresher and more eager to do far better work. At Psychotactics, we take breaks whenever we possibly can. Through the day, on weekends, and then after 12 weeks of work, a month off. You may not be able to take a chunky three months off at this stage but rest and work beckon you. If you want to do better work, you have to have more rest. It's that simple.

2) The second—and more important point—is monitoring what depletes our energy

Losing our cool takes up a huge tonne of energy right through the day. Things invariably go wrong; chaos is almost hovering around us all the time. In the face of constant and overbearing trouble, how do we avoid depletion of energy? There's also a depletion that comes from the lack of stages. Without stages, we take on too much, and we're invariably tired as we move through the sequence. A little spacing out of stages, whether you're writing a book, an article or just cooking dinner, is what's needed to keep your energy at high levels.

3) Finally, we need a backup battery, and that battery is meditation

If you have 12 minutes, that's 12 minutes of backup in place. If you have 30 minutes, so much the better. But maybe 12 minutes will counter 12 minutes of chaos—and the net effect is that you're not losing energy. You're stable, calm and happy. Life takes you on a diversion, and instead of getting mad and upset, you go along like a child, glad to be part of the adventure.

We live in a world hostile to rest. We trust coffee more than meditation as a pick me up. We lose energy all the time and aren't sure how to get it back.

Well, now you know.

NEXT STEP: How To Get Smart (And Stay Smart)
Many of us believe that smartness comes from learning the skills in our own field. And yet, that's only partially true. We can never be as smart as we want to be, if we only have tunnel vision. So how do we move beyond? And how do we find the time to do all of this learning?Amazingly it all comes from limits.Find out more here—How to learn.

In a small business, strategy and tactics often go wrong.

Yet all you hear about is success, success and how someone made it big.

This episode is about some bad judgment calls and also about plain pomposity.
It's taught us to be better marketers and better people.

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

In this episode Sean talks about

Story No.1—The Internet Marketing Conference Fiasco of 2003
Story No.2—A Mess In Wellington: Why Extreme Personalisation is Not A Good Idea 
Summary: How our minus two learning has helped us

To read this podcast online: 
https://www.psychotactics.com/psychotactics-mistakes/

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I remember one of the early events in my speaking career

Renuka was sitting in the audience. When I finished my speech, I came back to my seat and asked her how she found the speech. I gave you a minus two, she said.

Speaking hasn't been easy for me, and I struggled a lot not knowing what to say when in front of an audience

Luckily, almost at the start of my career, I ran into Eugene Moreau and his 13-Box Speaking system. The 13-Box system was so honed, it was like having a Samurai sword at your disposal. Except, it's not much use having a Samurai sword and not going through “sword practice”.

To get my practice in speaking to a high degree of professionalism, I'd speak everywhere I could. And when I mean, speak everywhere, these weren't at fancy events. I'd speak at the Rotary club, some places where people would meet to network and even at association meetings. In my mind, it was pretty clear that if I didn't get the practice, I wouldn't become a confident speaker.

And I knew I'd reached a good level when I was paid to speak at an event

It wasn't much. I think it was about $300 or $400, but hey, this was a paid gig. The only problem was that my so-called ability had gone to my head. In the first few years, I'd rehearse fifteen, sixteen times before getting in front of an audience.

This event, however, was different. The audience happened to be farmers—not professionals. They still had to sell their products, so they still needed a message like the one that's contained in The Brain Audit. But because they were farmers, I got a little pompous.

I practiced a couple of times, then my wife Renuka and I drove to the event

The signs were not good. Both Renuka and I had spent a restless night, and we had a long drive ahead of us. She kept asking me if I'd done my usual practice runs. I nodded, but I knew I'd taken some shortcuts. And on that day, when I went on stage, I was sleep-deprived and already a bit tired from the drive. Plus, as you can tell, I hadn't done my usual 15-16 practice runs.

Yes, I got a minus two.

This series is a little detour into the world of Psychotactics—and. About times when we got below par results

Some of the results were our fault, and some of them were just experiences we had along the way. In every instance, we learned a lesson, and it helped us move ahead in our business. Let's take a trip down memory lane, shall we? Let's look at some minus two experiences. Like the time back in 2004, I think, where I was a speaker at an Internet conference, and everyone was selling their products, but me.

Why did things go so wrong?

Story No:1—The Internet Marketing Conference Fiasco of 2003

I should have known better than heading to a particular Internet Marketing Conference in Australia.

It was what you'd call a pitch-fest.

Pitch-fests are given that name because the speaker tends to speak for a fixed amount of time, but then reserves at least a third of the given time to pitch their products or services. Think of speaker after speaker getting up on stage and selling like those folks you see on infomercials, and you get the idea.

I was not even part of the original speaker set up, but I was keen to be part of an international speaker group

Even though it was barely 2003, the speakers at the event had substantial lists, exceeding 50,000 subscribers. We, on the other hand, might have had fewer than 1500 people on our list. I watched as speaker after speaker got on stage and made a presentation. Then they'd make an offer, and there would often be a scramble to the rear of the room, where they were selling their products.

It was pretty early in my career, but I was pretty confident of my speaking skill by then

I'd done a bit of selling from the podium as well, and I thought I'd be going home with several thousands of dollars in sales. This dream of mine seemed more feasible when I compared myself to the person who did his presentation just before mine.

His presentation was more about how to run some software, than a real transfer of knowledge. And yet when he made his pitch, there was an almighty scramble to the end of the room. I was sure I could top that act, because my presentation was clearly better than his, and plus in my mind, I was a far superior speaker.

But even before I could get on stage, things went wrong

I was allocated just 45 minutes, and that included my presentation and my pitch. I figured the person introducing me would be done in about 3-4 minutes, but like an Emcee that won't shut up, he went on for a whole ten minutes, maybe longer.

Sure, he was saying good things about me, but I was losing a tonne of time in what I considered to be a pointless introduction. Anyway, I got on stage, did my presentation confidently and made my offer. It was the moment I'd been waiting for. I had dreams of the audience stomping over each other to get to the back of the room to buy my products.

You have a good idea of what happened next, right?

And you're right. Nothing much happened at all. About 15 people gingerly got up from their seats, and casually sauntered to the back of the room. Would they buy the product, I wondered? In my head, I was still doing the calculations.

Since we were selling the product for $100, I'd still make $1500 at the very least. However, maybe 9 of them decided to go ahead with their purchase. And you might think that's still a pretty good deal for a 30-minute presentation, right?

And yes it was a good deal, but not when you consider the expenses

To be part of this event, I had to fund my own travel costs. There was the flight to Australia which exceeded $500, the hotel room which also exceeded $500 for the duration of the event. And then there was food, transport to and from the airport and other incidental costs. Plus, the organisers wanted 50% of all sales to be passed on to them as a commission.

This was a -2 experience

I was out in the cold, and not feeling very good about myself. Any pity I have for myself is quickly tempered by the fact that there's a learning experience in every failure. I resolutely sat at the back of the room and watched what caused clients to scramble like crazy.

That event wasn't my first lesson in scarcity, but it certainly was the first one that was doused with so much defeat. It's the defeat that made me pay close attention to every single presenter. I stopped paying attention to the content of the presentation and instead paid attention to what they did instead. And I learned some very valuable lessons on that day.

But one mystery remained.

Remember the speaker who went before me?

He wasn't terribly good; his content was mostly technical. He made a pitch that involved scarcity just like everyone else. So why did he succeed when I did so miserably by comparison? I knew him well, so I went up and asked him what he thought was the big reason because I frankly couldn't see what caused the audience to rush to the back of the room.

And that's when I learned about the concept of the bonus. Now you're well aware of bonuses when you buy a product or service online, right? But I had bonuses too with my pitch. Why didn't the bonus work as well?

The key was the nature of the bonus

He was offering some software that would enhance their positions on Google rankings (yes, these were the good old days where a lot of crazy stuff worked). But that wasn't what people were so excited about. He had promised that the first 50 people would not only get the software, but he would install it on their servers, so they had to do nothing but run it.

Aha!

It wasn't the bonus. It was so much bigger and better than a mere bonus. And that's when I learned that you need to make the bonus more important than the product or the service itself. Why? Because when people decide to buy something, they've already made up their mind.

If you've decided to buy a fancy new computer, you already are in the frame of mind to buy it. But what if someone offered you a bonus? Like a nice box of chocolates if you bought the computer from them? The box of chocolates costs just $15; the computer $3000. What are you focused on? What if I told you that you could get the computer without the chocolate box? That's the power of the bonus. That's the lesson I learned from this -2 experience.

I lost on the monetary front.

But when I got back to Auckland, I had a plan in place. We re-looked at The Brain Audit page and made sure we had an irresistible bonus in place.

And the power of the bonus worked!

As a result of the “failure” in Australia, we sold more product than ever before. That embarrassment led to a profound learning experience, and to this day when creating a product or service, I think about the bonus long before I write the sales page for the product.

The bonus—that's what matters more than anything else. And it doesn't even have to be many bonuses. Just one compelling bonus is what makes the client decide they want your product or service right away.

But hey, this isn't about the good, success stuff. These are stories about where we messed up.

Time for Story No.2, don't you think?

Story No.2—A Mess In Wellington: Why Extreme Personalisation is Not A Good Idea

Only thrice have I gone blank on stage. Once was back in school when I was about 12 years old. The next time was the first time I made The Brain Audit presentation, but the third time was really odd. It was at a time when I was confident with my speaking and was being paid to speak as part of a series.

When I first started out in marketing, I read and heard stories of personalisation

One of these stories came from a veteran marketer, Dan Kennedy, who once spoke about how he showed up for a Mary Kay event. Mary Kay Inc. is a cosmetics giant and is famous for its bias to the colour, pink. Superstars—the salespeople who earn 0ver $18,000 in a four month period and build a team—are rewarded with a pink Cadillac.

Dan Kennedy, ever the showman, turned up for the Mary Kay event in pink

Pink suit, pink tie, pink patent leather shoes. Kennedy said he wore pink in order to sell more effectively at Mary Kay events and it clearly worked for him as he'd sell 40% more when dressed in pink. Unlike at the Internet conference, I was not selling anything at this event, but I saw no harm in trying to personalise my presentation.

Since I was working with brokers at an insurance company, I spent hours talking to my liaison at the head office. I then sought out and found examples of insurance-based problems and solutions. All of this research was my aim towards personalisation, and I didn't realise I was making a big mistake.

The first mistake was that it ramped up my nervousness a lot…

When you're making a presentation you're already on someone else's turf. I'd just made it a lot harder by over-tweaking my speech to include many insurance-based case-studies. Trying to force fit their case-studies in my presentation wasn't a mistake, but I didn't have any background of the case-studies. No sooner did I bring up the case-studies than I had people in the room say, “that didn't work” or raise objections to the case-study.

This threw me off guard

Instead of doing The Brain Audit presentation, which was all my own, my entire talk was intertwined with their case-studies. I was not prepared for any pushback from the audience, and yet the cat calls came at intervals.

However, once you're nervous, things start to spiral. I was plainly confused and slightly terrified on that stage. Finally, I just gave up and wrapped up as quickly as I could. What should have been an hour-long presentation was curtailed to a mere 30-minutes. Suddenly the emcee had a nasty problem of filling in half an hour of dead air, as there was no presenter in sight.

This was definitely a -2 moment

Renuka wasn't around to give me those low scores, and I had to self-evaluate my own performance. Why did things go so wrong? Was it Dan Kennedy's bad advice? Or was I at fault? What I failed to notice, and learned a lot later, was that presenters do tailor their presentations.

Kennedy would have worn that crazy, even slightly-ridiculous outfit, but his speech would have barely wavered at all. He might have had a few words here and there that talked about Mary Kay or the kind of business, but he would have scripted his script and nailed it down. The Mary Kay women knew their business; Dan didn't.

In my case, the insurance agents knew their business, and I clearly didn't. To give the audience examples that they could pull apart was a silly move. They knew I was an outsider and my attempt to endear myself to them was easily the worst move I could make.

So what's the learning we got from this experience?

Let's say we're selling a product like the info-products course. That course is designed to show you not just how to create an information product, but to create one that's so useful that clients come back to buy many info-products from you in the future.

Now let's say your current sales page is pretty generic. But then you're going to be introduced to 10,000 coaches. And now you don't want the page to be generic. You want it to speak to the coaches, don't you?

Think of the Dan Kennedy factor: He only wore pink, he didn't colour his text in pink.

If we were selling to an audience that was precisely coaching related, we could change the first paragraph to talk about coaching and the biggest problem facing a coach today. And how the information products would be likely to help that coach. But that's where it would stop. Once we went past the problem, the solution would be as it is on the Psychotactics page right now.

Which brings up an ethical problem doesn't it?

If the product is not specifically created for coaches, would it be right to give the idea that the product was designed for coaches? And that's not what the main problem on the sales page is doing. The solution is to get the info-products course because it helps you create info-products—plain and simple. But we relate better to signage or information that seems to call us, rather than the general public.

The product or course would still have to deliver the goods. It would still need to help coaches (or anyone else) create outstanding info-products. However, there would be a greater attraction factor if the audience felt it was aimed at them.

At Psychotactics, we don't ever appeal to a specific audience e.g. coaches. Instead, we use the concept of target profile, so the question of using this method would not arise on our sales pages. However, there may be several situations where you have to appeal to a specific audience. In such a scenario, make tiny changes at the top, and don't go changing everything else.

My stop at Wellington was pretty scary

I've mentioned in an article and podcast before how I was so petrified of the place that I was not keen to go back to that venue. But several years later it's exactly where I had to speak once again, and once again. And it was a paid speaking engagement, so I couldn't back out of it.

This time, however, I stuck to my original speech, got a rousing applause and didn't have to flee the auditorium in a hurry. I was able to turn my -2 experience into a plus 6 or 7, at the very least.

The third -2 experience was the mistake of tweaking the rules we have at Psychotactics

We have rules because we've run into a problem before and we're not keen to rep area the mistake. Even so, it seems ridiculous to hold on to rules forever. Sometimes we break our own rules.

Retribution follows shortly. This is the story of a workshop where we broke our rules, and things went south very quickly. In fact, there aren't one, but two stories that follow.

The Importance of Keeping to Your Rules

“I don't like the smell of the carpet”. That's the ultimatum we got from a client's wife.

You'd have quickly figured out we're not dealing with a customer, but his wife instead. But what does the wife have to do with the event? And what was the “carpet story” all about?

Rules are meant to be broken, but sometimes we bend over backwards too much, and we pay the price. We've had many such instances where we've sought to bend the rules; trouble has hit us thick and fast. Here are just two instances, where we allowed family members.

Back in the early days, we had a system called the Protégé system

From that Protégé group, we created an Inner Circle which consisted of just a few clients. So few of us, that I thought to myself no harm could come by including their wives or partners.(Just as a matter of clarification: Back then all the clients in our Inner Circle were male, which is why I mentioned wives or partners). Anyway, on with the story.

And that's when our trouble began

We'd booked an intimate boardroom, seeing we were so few. But as the wife of this participant walked in, she stormed right out. “I don't like the smell of new carpet”, she said. I'm not sure what the problem was, or if she was allergic to the smell of new carpet, but we were to start our session, and we were in a fix. She demanded another room, and there was none to be had at the hotel. So she took her grievance to the reception and started berating the staff.

If there's one thing I've learned in life, it's this: When you want to get on a flight, you don't scream at ground staff. And this was no exception. She was yelling at the people who were most likely to help her and help us.

As her screaming got louder, we were forced to step in and take over. As we found out later she'd inadvertently been screaming at the General Manager of the hotel as well. The GM was quite unassuming. You'd never expect that she was the GM because she was low-key and looked more like an employee. And this screaming was aimed at her as well until we decided to take matters into our hands.

With a lot of pleading and apologising, we managed to get another room

The room was super-large, more like a disused meeting room. We were so few of us in the room, and it made the entire proceedings so very un-cozy. However, our little nemesis didn't stop there. When I'd bring up a point in the presentation, she'd object.

She hadn't read The Brain Audit; she hadn't gone through the notes. We thought it was a good idea to have the partners and wives come along, but it was evident she had no context, so she interrupted and argued her way through the day.

At most events and workshops, most clients hang around the meeting room

Unlike other events where people leave shortly after, you'll find that we stick around, and so do most of the clients. We may be around for a good hour or more after we're done, but in this case, we were out of the room like a bolt of lightning. We made our way to our room just to recover our energy and then an hour later to the bar where we inhaled some gigantic margaritas.

But did we learn our lesson?

Apparently not. The lesson was not to allow anyone who wasn't part of the group. Anyone who hadn't read the notes in advance (and we send notes a month in advance) or hasn't read The Brain Audit is not welcome at our events. But there was a pleading tone in the e-mail we got just the day before the event.

Apparently, our client was visiting California with his daughter, a teenager. He asked if we could accommodate her at the back of the room. She'd be very quiet, he said. She would just sit there and not participate, he said.

I don't know why I didn't see the signs

Think of yourself as a teenager. Would you sit through a workshop on Website Strategy for three whole days for no reason? It became evident that there was an ulterior motive, but we only realised it later when going through previous correspondence with this client.

He'd earlier asked us if he could book two seats at the event but finally booked just one. WE didn't think about it at the time. Clients ask all sorts of questions, and we answer, and no one really dwells on such issues. But as the workshop unfolded, so did the chaos.

She didn't participate in the workshop discussions, but in a Psychotactics workshop we have group activities

That's when she'd tow along with her father, which seemed fine at first. Soon enough other clients started complaining. She was butting in, in the discussions, the clients told us. She'd start going off on a tangent, and then her father would defend her, causing a very unprofessional situation in the discussion.

I had to tell the client that his daughter couldn't be in the room or attend any of the sessions

This made him mad. He couldn't see why she wasn't able to attend. It didn't seem to occur to him that she wasn't part of the group, or hadn't even paid for the seat. It was a messy moment and one that we could have avoided. It created a whole bunch of frustration that none of us needed. And while it wasn't exactly a minus two moment, it sure created a bleak, nasty situation.

So what's the learning?

The main learning is never to allow anyone who doesn't have the credentials. In the case of all workshops and courses, those credentials are the purchase of The Brain Audit. If the client hasn't read or listened to The Brain Audit, they're not welcome.

However, at a different level, we needed to stop being overly kind and letting in anyone—wives, husbands, kids or anyone who wasn't required to be at the event. No matter how much pleading is done, this rule is now unshakeable.

And that's how our minus two learning has helped us

In every instance, we've learned more from the bad times than the good. That speaking engagement at the farmer's conference taught me not to wing it and be prepared, even over-prepared. The event in Australia seemed to be a fiasco, but it was a valuable training ground for me, once I started paying attention to what was happening around me.

The event in Wellington, with the insurance agents, taught me never to over-personalise anything. Over-personalisation puts you squarely in the region where you're not the expert. You already have your speech ready, and it's best to do a sprinkling of personalisation and then keep to the original script.

Finally, it was and is important to have our benchmarks when it comes to attendees, whether at events or courses. Making an exception doesn't always lead to chaos, but why bother inviting confusion in the room? Our job is to ensure our clients get the best experience ever and go home with skill. By restricting who's in the room, we end up with a better result every single time.

And then we can enjoy our margaritas. We don't have to guzzle them after an energy-draining day! But these minus two events are only part of the picture.

 

How do you dramatically increase your rate of learning?

And why do we get stuck when we're trying to learn a new skill? Strangely the concept of boxes comes into play. We move from beginner to average—and then we spin in that middle box, never moving to expert level.
So how do we move to expert level? And how can we do that without instruction?

Listen or read about:  Not just how to learn, but how to teach as well.

 

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When you sit down to write a book you and I can waste a lot of time, if we don't take time to outline

But what are the elements involved in outlining? And how can we make sure we don't make any silly mistakes?

If you're about to write a book or plan to be an author sometime later, this information is for you. But even if you've already published books, you'll be amazed at how this information speeds up your process and gets better results.

In this episode Sean talks about

Element 1: How many points do you cover in your book outline?
Element 2: Why deconstruction is important.
Element 3: Understanding the purpose of the book.

Read online: Outlining Your Book: The Three Crucial Steps

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Around the start of 2010, I was very upset with myself.

I'd pre-sold a workshop and as I always do, the notes for the workshop are sent to the attendees a whole month in advance. Since the workshop was being held earlier in the year, I had been thinking about the notes right through my summer break in late December and early January.

Uniqueness is a pretty difficult topic and I needed to find a way to ensure that everyone—without exception—got the concept of uniqueness and was able to implement it. The only problem with writing the notes, was that it seemed like the notes were going to be at least 200 pages long.

200 pages is like a security blanket for a writer

In the mind of a writer, the chunky volume of notes seem to suggest you have something important to say. And yet my wife Renuka isn't a big fan of a ton of notes. “Why can't you write fewer pages?” she asked me as we were sitting at the cafe. “Why can't you get the same point across, so I don't have to read so much?”

A pointed question like this is truly frustrating for me because I know it's easier to fill a book with a ton of information. But a book, or notes in this case, need to be Spartan. They only need to have enough pages; just enough knowledge for the client to get a result. They don't need to be padded or filled with words no one needs. And this meant I had to go back to my outline several times.

When writing a book, the most difficult task isn't the writing

Distilling the ideas down to simplicity is what gets in the way. I have to force myself to leave the office, sit at the cafe for hours at a time, with no Internet connection. Monday's draft gives way to Wednesday's, and will be supplanted by Friday's draft. Sometimes it can take a month of drafts to get my thoughts together.

Except it was already January. The clock was ticking closer to my deadline. I had to make sure I had the book going. Which is why you, and I, we both need an outline.

So how do you outline a book?
What method should you use?
What if you can't write a lot and can only manage a few pages? Should you give up?

Let's explore three elements of book outlining to get us on our way:

Element 1: Why you should ideally cover just three points.
Element 2: Why deconstruction is important to get you going
Element 3: Understanding the purpose of the book.

---

Element 1: How many points do you cover in your book outline?

When you think of a topic like “presentations”, what comes to mind?

Let's make a list, shall we?
– Creativity
– Crafting stories
– Simplicity
– Delivery
– Audience connection
– Engagement
– Displaying Data
– Creating Movement
– Time Keeping

Those points above represent a tiny list. If you were to look through the books on Amazon.com alone, you'd find at least fifty, possibly a hundred, even two hundred and ten topics on the singular topic of presentations. It's at this time that a novice or unthinking writer decides to do it all. He or she decides to cram as many items as possible into a single book, just to make sure nothing is missed.

Take watercolours, for instance

Back in 2010, I was pretty hopeless at watercolours when the painting bug struck me. How hopeless is hopeless? I painted for three months faithfully following the instructions of my teacher, Ted. After three months, the area had an auction of the artwork. My painting came up on the auction block.

The auctioneer started at $30. No takers

$20? Wait, auctions are supposed to go up, not down.

But there was the painting at $10, and still no buyers in sight. Now that you'll have to agree is a hopeless situation. Anyway, to avoid such a high level of embarrassment in the future, I decided to take watercolours a lot more seriously.

I tramped down to the library and came back armed with at least a dozen books on the subject matter. As I opened book after book, a similar scenario unfolded. Every book seemed to feel the need to cover all the possible topics under the broad umbrella of watercolour.

This is the kind of mistake you want to avoid as a writer

The journey to outlining a book or just about anything—a book, an article, even the weather report—is better served by working three elements; three main topics and then digging deep into the sub-strata of every one of those topics. Ironically, though, you have to start with the entire mess. 

You have to begin your journey by being reasonably crazy and listing everything. Which means you've got to roll out two steps.

Step 1: List all the points you can think of
Step 2: Choose three points

Take for example the topic of “pricing”

If you were to gaze deep into the crystal ball of pricing, you'd be sure to run into dozens of topics and angles. Covering every possible scenario, even at the brainstorming stage should drive you crazy. Well, let it drive you crazy. Writing a book needs to start with a brainstorm, long before you get to the outlining stage.

So let your imagination go on that rodeo as you list everything you could cover. 

An exhaustive list is not a bad thing. It demonstrates how much you know and how much you can cover in the future. However, once you're done with that list, it's time to pick the three elements that will go into your book. You have to wiggle your way into Step 2 and choose three points.

The problem with Step 2 is deciding which points to choose

You'd probably think it's crazy to choose any random points, but that's usually what I do. Take the “Black Belt Presentations” book for example. I didn't set out to write a series of books on the structure of a presentation or webinar. 

I set out to write a single book. And when we look at the huge list we can muster from a single visit to Amazon; I decided to simply choose the three elements that I considered to be important.

And so we had:
1: Controlling the visual aspect (how to create stunning slides)
2: Controlling the structure of the presentation (how to build the presentation with amazing flow)
3: Controlling the audience (why a great presentation can be ruined if you're not prepared for the reality of an audience).

————————

When outlining, take on the role of a GPS. Sure there are a thousand points to cover, but it's easy to get lost. Instead, cover just a few points, ideally no more than three main points.
——————-

Were there more topics to cover?

Sure there were. Would I cover it? Maybe in another book, a series of podcasts, articles, etc. But as a writer, creator, weather reporter, you can't really go digging into every single cloud or that spotty bit of sunshine. You have to make a decision to drop stuff. 
To take a simple analogy, think of a sculptor. Or rather a dozen sculptors all with similar blocks of marble.

The job of the sculptor is to remove the bits that don't matter so that you can reveal the sculpture that does matter. Yet, when you look at the finished work of a dozen artists, you'll notice they all end up with different types of sculpture. 

Given the same topic, e.g. presentations, you have to get rid of all the sub-topics you can't possibly cover and stick with just three.

Three? Not four? Or five?

I've got “The Paradox of Choice” by Barry Schwartz sitting on my desk. First written in 2004, it's gathered a bit of dust, but when I open the Table of Contents, what holds 250-odd-pages of the book together? It's the topics—four, not three.

1: When we choose
2: Why we choose
3: How we suffer
4: What we can do.

And nestled under those four categories are what Schwartz needs to say. Even though you can clearly spot ten, wait, eleven chapters and one prologue, they're still magnificently constrained by the limitations of four topics.

When you look at The Brain Audit, you don't quite see that in the Table of Contents, do you?

The Brain Audit is split up quite clearly into seven chapters. And yet there's an overlying structure to the book. The first three chapters are about attraction. They're solely dedicated to getting the client's attention. 

The next four chapters are all about risk. It's what causes the client to back away, to get all hesitant, even though they seem to be so interested in your product or service.

But what if you don't have such clarity of vision?

How are you supposed to know that one topic will seamlessly fit into another? The reality is that you don't need any such seamless fit at all. Three random topics can fit together. To demonstrate this, um, magic trick, let's take that list we created above. Let's first randomly take the first three topics.

– Creativity
– Crafting stories
– Simplicity

The three topics work together, don't they? So let's take the next lot.

– Delivery
– Audience connection
– Engagement

That works too, doesn't it? Let's move to the third lot.

– Displaying Data
– Creating Movement
– Time Keeping

You may feel that timekeeping may not require an entire chapter. And if that's the way you feel, then simply get rid of the topic, and slide in one that makes you feel more comfortable.

For example:
– Displaying Data
– Creating Movement
– Audience connection

Writing a book may seem like a daunting and reasonably frustrating experience

An enormous amount of frustration bellows forth from the need to cover everything in sight. Instead, if you were to cover three topics, almost any three topics, you could seamlessly stitch them together to create a fantastic outline.

You still have to do a fair bit of work to get the book written, but the battle is won or lost at outline stage. Train your outline to sit, beg and play dead, and you've already vaporised away the first—and biggest headache of all.

This takes us to the second bit where you outline the personality of your book

To get on this fascinating trip of structuring the personality of your book, you have to dig into a whole bunch of books you love. It's time to use the power of deconstruction to get going.

Let's deconstruct.

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Element 2: Deconstruction—How To Systematically Outline A Book (So You Can Get It Off The Ground)

Imagine you're the emperor in a far eastern land.

And your son, Kintsukuroi (pron: khintz-ku-roi) is about to go through the ceremony of investiture. The bowl is the most important symbol of this rank being given to the young prince.

And yet, the king opens his cabinet to find the magnificent bowl broken into a hundred pieces. Broken hearted at the wanton destruction of this incredible piece of art, the emperor retires to his private chambers to share his sorrow with his son.

The night passes quietly, but in the morning there's a huge commotion.

The cabinet of treasures has been broken into and not only have the pieces of the bowl disappeared but also the bejewelled crown for the prince, which was to be used for the investiture ceremony. What's worse is the thief was seen running towards the prince's quarters. Could the guards break down the door? Why was there smoke coming out of the prince's quarters?

The mystery was solved the next day when the bowl reappeared, whole again, but glistening with veins of gold where the cracks had been. And the prince appeared at his investiture ceremony later in the day. Except he had a thinner crown, depleted of much of its gold.

Kintsukuroi means ‘to repair with gold’ in Japanese, and is the art of repairing pottery with gold and understanding that the piece is the more beautiful for having been broken.

When creating the outline of a book you have to deliberately break, or deconstruct the work of others, so that you can engage in Kintsukuroi, and reconstruct your own book in a way that's far superior.

And that's exactly what I did back in 2002 when I first started writing the earliest version of The Brain Audit

I was brand new in marketing and writing just 16 pages of The Brain Audit took me well over a week. Even the introduction derailed me quite a bit. So I turned to a book I loved a great deal called “Don't Make Me Think” by Steve Krug. 

His introduction seemed to be so un-stuffy, so well put together. And he had a ton of graphics in his book. Right then and there I decided my book would have a similar tone of voice and style.

When outlining your book, it's easy to get caught up in the construction of your own words and pages. And yet, it's pretty important to go through at least six-eight books that you love, if only to understand the underlying structure.

Take for instance most of the Psychotactics books or courses

There's a structure to the book that you may have noticed, but not necessarily paid great attention to.

– It starts off with an introduction.
– The introduction is followed by three main topics.
– Every topic goes deep into the sub-topics.

And as you wander though the pages of the book, you'll run into cartoons, captions, stories, examples, fly out boxes, summaries, a food recipe—and so on. 

This is the underlying structure that makes the book so easy to read.

It's the powerhouse that pushes you forward, making sure you get to the last page. Compare this with a book that has no summaries, no visuals, no captions and examples that are always harping about ginormous companies like Amazon and Apple.

You get the idea, don't you? When you deconstruct a few of your favourite books, you get a wish list of what you'd like the reader to experience in your own books, don't you?

You've gone through the act of Kintsukuroi

The books you looked at were already quite impressive by your own reckoning. That's the reason why you chose them in the first place. But then after you've broken them apart, you get to reconstruct them in a way that's more beautiful and more suited to you than ever before.

And this structural break and remaking process is what helps you put your information under a structural format that you can keep and evolve over the years. When you're outlining a book, it's easier to put pieces of content where there's already a category or space. It's a lot less intimidating when you know what needs to go where in the book structure.

Structural inspiration comes from many places

I love the music of Sting, and in one particular concert he talked briefly about the inspiration behind several of his songs. For instance, did you know that “Englishman in New York” is not Sting singing about himself? In the video it appears as though the song is about Sting, an Englishman, but in reality the song is about famed gay author Quentin Crisp and his experiences as an outcast.

When I first heard that little bit of information, I was quite tickled. And so I decided to add a little story about how we “wrote our books”. Since then the structure of a Psychotactics course or product has included “the making of this book” that includes photos and a little story.

But if I copy the structure, won't it look similar?

Did you know that my introduction and illustrations were influenced by “Don't Make Me Think?” Of course not, and even now if you were to hold The Brain Audit and Steve Krug's book side by side, you're unlikely to find too much of a resemblance. 

The key isn't to make an identical copy.

Remember the procedure? You're breaking first, then reattaching it together. There's a bit of additional input going into the structure. Whether the structure comes from you or from another source, it all helps to create that Kintsukuroi moment. Construction after deconstruction.

This is the kind of deconstruction you want for your book as well

You could see it as a sort of template for all books you create in future. What makes it truly beautiful is that the act of breaking up the structure of other books ends up with a stunning new creation. It's truly Kintsukuroi and helps create a powerful outline structure.

We worked our way through creating just three topics, deconstructed and reconstructed the structure of our book, but finally it's down to purpose. Why are you writing the book? Is it just to put words on paper, or is there some other reason?

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Element 3: Purpose

Usually from December 20th to Jan 20th every year, I take a summer break.

The days consist of no e-mail, endless episodes of detective series on Netflix, biographies and beer. Eventually, December gives way to January and New Zealand (and I) wake up from our month long vacation.

To ease myself back into work mode, I start reading business books. And this year started out with an outstanding book called “The Content Trap” by Bharat Anand. Just leafing through the introduction takes you well past 30 pages and yet every moment of the introduction is gripping.

But what is Bharat Anand's purpose?

This is the question most writers need to ask themselves before sitting down to outline their books. Is the book meant to create consulting? Are you expecting to improve your profile? Would you hope to do a speaking tour as a result of your book becoming a bestseller? Would companies hire you to solve their problems? And would it involve big business or small firms?

In the case of the “Content Trap”, my perception was that the book was aimed at bigger companies

The examples within the book were amazing, but there they were: Amazon, the Scandinavian newspaper publisher Schibsted, The New York Times, the sports marketing giant IMG and Harvard Business School's own content management system.

These examples leave me and most other readers in a sort of trap of our own. We have all these utterly outstanding examples, but all of them are companies that are high and mighty. Even if we were to admire the sheer depth of the learning, how would someone like you or me put this information to use?

And this is where the purpose comes right in

You need to be clear about why you're writing the book. In Anand's case, he's got a great idea and scintillating data to back up his concept, but it falls apart at the seams because there's no way to use it.

Could it be that the book is designed to give potential clients an idea of what's possible? Could it be that they then call the author in for extensive consulting? Many books are written with the goal of getting consulting in mind. Could this be one of them?

When I sat down to write an outline, I wasn't always clear about the goal

The early years saw me create sparse outlines and fill content into the early books. This was my way of battling my seeming insecurity. I didn't see myself as a marketing person and saw myself as a cartoonist.

The more pages I had in a book, I convinced myself, the less I had to worry about refunds.

It doesn't help when some early buyers, and we're going back to 2003 or so, said they were returning the books because there were too few pages. 

Back then, most of the world was still walking into bookstores and stepping out with $20 hardback books. And there we were, selling a PDF for $67 that consisted of fewer than 20 pages. Hence the need to “fix the book” by adding a tonne of material that may or may not have been needed.

Today, when I outline the book, the main goal is to get a precise result

If you buy the book on presentations, you could be woken up at 3 am and still be able to put together a very compelling presentation from the ground up. If you spent your hard earned money on the information products course, you'd find an incredibly well thought out template on how to create info-products.

Whether it's photography, article writing or landing pages, the goal is well-defined before I start to write. And this is something you should do. It seems like such a tiny, inconsequential part of the outlining process and yet it's crucial.

What's the end point when the book comes out?

Is it to get you more consulting?
Is it to get you more fame?
Is it to create a permanent source of income and nothing else?

Knowing the end point makes a difference to the examples you give and how you structure your book. The end in mind, it's sometimes called. Knowing where you're going. It applies to everything in life, but especially when you're outlining a book.

Once you know exactly where you're going, you can focus your energy better than ever before.

The Three Elements Needed When Outlining Your Book are:

Element 1: Why you should ideally cover just three points.
Element 2: Why deconstruction is important to get you going
Element 3: Understanding the purpose of the book.

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P.S. Since the end of January 2017, Google has been marking sites without HTTPS as non secure. This means that your clients may be driven away from your site. To make sure that clients don't leave your site you have to have HTTPS.
We use StressLessWeb.com (this not an affiliate link) for all our websites, and recently they did a seamless job of moving our sites from 'http' to 'https'. Don't ask me how they do it, but everything worked perfectly after they moved us to 'https'. So, if you are not sure if your website is safe or not read more here.

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Why do some landing pages work while others fail? The core of a landing page lies in picking a target profile. Yet, it's incredibly easy to mix up a target profile with a target audience. And worse still, the concept of persona comes into play. How do we find our way out of this mess? Presenting the target profile mistakes we make and how to get around them quickly and efficiently. 

In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: Target Profile Blind Spot
Part 2: Person vs. Persona
Part 3: Target Profile Questions

To read it online: https://www.psychotactics.com/landing-pages-fail/

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In Mexico, there's a beach that goes by the name of Rosarito.

The rocks on that beach made advertising executive, Gary Dahl over 6 million dollars back in 1976.

Those rocks were a smooth stone that was soon better known as Pet Rock. These rocks were marketed as if they were live pets. They had their own cardboard boxes, straw and breathing holes for the “animal”. People buying the Pet Rock knew fully well what they were buying. And yet they went along with the gag. They leafed through the 32-page official training manual, which included instructions on how to care for the rock. You could, it joked, teach the rock to “sit” and “stay” but “roll over” or “shake hands” was a little harder to explain.

What was important back then and what's just as important right now is that people knew it was a gag; a dummy. They knew they were buying something that couldn't really do much for them. And they went along with the joke. When it comes to marketing or selling our products and services, we often don't realise we're dealing with a dummy.

We think we're doing the right thing when choosing an audience.

In the book, The Brain Audit, there's a whole chapter on why this premise of target audience leads you off the path and into dummy land. And yet the one thing we've heard over and over again is the concept of target audience. It's our Pet Rock moment.

We are stuck with something that seems fun and exciting, but won't do anything but “play dead”.

This episode takes on the issue of target profile and why it's so important for your landing page. Thousands of clients have read the book, The Brain Audit, and yet I see so many of them mixing up the concept of target profile and target audience. So how do we separate the two once and forever?

In this article, we cover three parts (as always).

– The blind spot with target profile (and why we keep repeating the same mistake).
– We go deeper into the concept of the “dummy” as we examine person vs. persona.
– Finally, we'll take a look at some of the questions to ask in target profile interview.

Let's start with the blind spot, shall we? Why do we keep making the same mistake over and over again?

Part 1: The blind spot with target profile

I remember when I took my first driving test in Auckland, New Zealand.

I drove a manual, what you'd probably call a stick shift back then. As part of my test, I was asked by the testing officer to go down a hill. Immediately, I put the gear into neutral and coasted downhill.

You know what happened next, don't you?

As exhilarating as it can be to race down hill at top speed, you shouldn't ever put a car in neutral and when heading downhill. There are a whole bunch of things that can go wrong.  But that downhill drive was my blind spot. I had done it so many times before, that I didn't see that it would not only cause a problem, but would get me a nice big F (as in Failed) against my test.

Most of us make the same mistake when we get down to working with our target profile

When asked about our target profile, we get drawn into the error of describing a target audience. And this mistake is reasonable because almost every marketing book or course talks mostly about target audience. It suggests that we should look for a bunch of people. E.g. people who are afraid of making presentations, or teacher, or people who want to be coaches. It talks about targeting huge groups of people all at once. While this is a great starting point, it's only the starting point.

An audience won't get you very far

You may not be focusing on an audience, but instead on a type of person. So instead of ‘people who are afraid of making presentations', you think of a fictional person. And you say: “Ok, let's call him Chris.” And then you go on to rattle off the factor of how this fictional person named Chris may end up being terrified of presentations. And you think you're on the right track at this point.

But a testing instructor would still fail you

And this is because you're still not paying attention to that blind spot. When we use the term, target profile, it's not an audience, and it's not a ‘let's call him Chris.' Because if you say let's call him Chris, you're saying the following:

Chris is a fictional person. Kinda like a real person, but not a real person.
He kinda lives in a real house. But not in a real house, but in a fictional house.
And he lives in a real city, but not really.
And his dog. Well, he used to be real.
His girlfriend. She could be Lady Gaga or Ellen DeGeneres (well, it's fictional, so who cares?)
He eats fictional hamburgers, and he can chomp through seven hundred at one go, right after he has fifty-three shots of tequila.

You see the difference between real and fictional?

Because the Chris I used to know wasn’t fictional. He lived about 20 minutes from my place. He was a genius at computers. He didn't drink water, only wine and milk. He was grumpy as hell and yet extremely helpful. And if I wanted to go out with Chris for lunch, I know that I'd have to deal with his grumpiness. I'd know exactly what he'd want. And the Chris I used to know wasn't interested in making presentations at all.

But I do know Christina

Christina isn't a big fan of making presentations. She would rather bake two-dozen cakes and have kittens, than speak. And we're not even talking about the hard task of ‘presentations'. We're talking about just standing up at a networking meeting and speaking for one measly minute. Christina knows it's critical for her business. She knows she's in a safe space with friends all around her, but she can't overcome the wave of panic that starts the night before.

She prepares like crazy, but it's the same thing over and over again. She can't sleep well. The drive to the event is an ordeal. She looks at all those people at the networking meeting, so cool and relaxed, and wonders if she can ever be like them. And then, when she's done, she feels like somehow she could do a better job. She's happy to go back to the office, turn off the phone, recharge—and just do what she's good at doing—instead of doing these crazy presentations. But now, she has to make a presentation. And she's terrified…

Now that's the emotion and drama you get with a real person. But there's more

Fictional people can't tell you when you're going on —or off-target with your message.
An audience can try to get a message to you, but everything gets lost in the din.

The only way you can get to a target profile is to have a real person. Just like that testing instructor in the car with me. If he were fictional, I would have passed the driving test. I'd also be likely to win $50 million in the lottery on the very same day. But instead, I failed. I learned from my mistake; spotted my big blind spot.

And today I'm your driving instructor. Instead of coasting downhill and putting others and us in danger, let's keep the car in gear.  Let's use the concept of the target profile as it was meant to be used, shall we?

Let's explore the questions you're going to need when conducting a real client interview.

Which is when we run into our second problem. More often than not, we run into a concept of persona. We are told we don't need to focus on a real person, but we can easily base our marketing on a character. It's almost like a fiction novel. We make up the character as we go.

Except what we end up with, is a little Frankenstein. A Frankenstein with random body parts all stitched together. That's the difference between a person and persona. And we're about to find out why a person—a real person matters a lot more than persona.

2) Persona vs. person (Why a person matters more)

When my niece Marsha was eight, she wanted a dog for her eighth birthday. Then her parents realised that someone had to walk the dog, come rain or shine. There would be many trips to the vet, they figured. And the dog would need to be trained, so there wasn't poo all over the carpet.

Marsha got a toy dog instead. It barked and you could pull it around. And it sounded like a real dog.

But it was a dummy

And that's the problem with persona. Persona is when you assume the role of another person.  You try to walk in that person's shoes. And your shoe size is 10, but that person wears a size 13. You might assume things will be fine and you'll somehow manage. But you don't and you can't. Because while we all can try to imagine what that person is going through, we can only imagine.

In short, we get dummy text, dummy words and dummy emotions from dummies. To get real text, real words and real emotions we have to go to a real person. Not real people, one person. Because a real person won't have “dummy thoughts” or dummy words.

So what do dummy words resemble?

Dummy words looks like they were written by you and me sitting in our office, looking at a computer screen. We churn out words that are stifled and boring. Or worse, we may copy headlines like “Who else wants to…blah, blah, blah, blah” and slap it into our headline on the landing page.

That's not how a target profile speaks

A target profile speaks from a place of real emotion. I remember sitting at a workshop early in the Psychotactics timeline, and explaining my website issues to someone. This is what I said: “I feel trapped with my website. Every little change I have to make, I have to go back to the developer. And then I have to wait, because he's busy, or asleep or something. I feel like I'm at his mercy all the time. And it's a crappy feeling.

I want to be able to have more control over my own website, do my own things and yes, I can understand bits and pieces that need to be added. But for the most part I want the control. I want to be like the person that can drive, instead of being driven.

Feel that raw emotion? Well, with persona-based writing you have to make all that stuff up…

For instance, let's take the Nobis Hotel. They have a persona-based website, by their own admission. Here's what it reads like: The personas are frequent travellers who are sick of sterile chain hotels and want something different. They make their own decisions on where to stay using the web and social media. Buyers want upscale luxury but in a modern style, not the old-world traditional style.

And how does their landing page reveal those problems?

Nobis Hotel is an independent, 201-room first class, luxury hotel in Stockholm, Sweden occupying a prime spot on Norrmalmstorg square, the single most central and attractive location in the downtown area. Nobis Hotel is a new centre stage of Sweden's Royal Capital, defining our own personal sense of Stockholm hotel luxury.

It calls itself modern, elegant and extremely comfortable, but also ethically sound, warm and moderate. It says it provides their guests with true value for their money in a stylish and pleasant setting designed by award-winning architects.

Does that sound like a real person speaking?

A person talks in plain language. He or she has real emotions and real frustrations. And it makes it super-easy for you to take their exact words and put it down on your sales landing page or home page, or any page for that matter.

It's the emotion and the wording that attracts your audience

Yes, audience. Because even though you start out with one person, that one person's voice attracts others just like her. So if your target profile is Rita, all the ‘Ritas' of the world are attracted to that message. And so you get a consistent audience. An audience that identifies with that one big problem. And wants to solve that one big problem. So instead of trying to juggle with different personality types and multiple problems, you solve a single problem.

And it's all being handed to you on a platter. No thinking, no research, no fiddling with key words—and it still works for you. My niece Marsha is much older now, but even as a child she clearly knew the difference between a real dog and a dummy one.

When you're dealing with target profile, you have to deal with someone real. Otherwise, you just have a dummy.

3) Questions to ask in a target profile interview

The worst problem with a target profile interview is really not knowing where to start.

And logically, we believe there must be some way to have a set of questions. And so we create a bunch of questions. But in reality, those questions don't always work. The target profile interview doesn't always follow a path. Suddenly, you're wondering whether it's a good idea to have the interview at all.

It is.
Even if you botch it up, a target profile interview is an amazing experience.

But how do you create the questions?

Well you don't. What you're looking to do is get a bunch of components together instead. I know, I know. It sounds technical. But here's what you're seeking to get:

1) The list of problems. Yup, all the problems that the customer faces when dealing with a product or service like yours.
2) Their biggest problem.
3) Why is it their main problem?
4) What are the consequences of the problem not being solved?
5) Their second biggest problem.
6) Why is it a problem?
7) What are the consequences of the problem not being solved?
8) What are their main objections to buying a product or service—even when they think it more or less meets their needs?
9) What would cause them to give a testimonial?
10) What do they see as a significant risk factor? Are there more than one risk factors? Can they describe it?
11) What would make the product unique (in their eyes?)

So can you ask other questions?

Sure you can. But these set of questions enable you to get a tonne of information that can almost literally be slapped right onto your sales page, or in some cases, even your home page. Of course, there's some re-engineering to do, but for the most part, you have all the stuff you've been looking for. All the bags of The Brain Audit get covered in one fell swoop.

So why bother with this interview at all?

Because in many cases, you'll find that the client's problems are not what you anticipated. There you are in your cubbyhole, imagining stuff, but the client often doesn't feel that way at all. And there's more, of course. You get to hear the client's exact words. Their terminology. Their emotions come surging through in the conversation. And for the first time, ever you can feel the pain.

But what if you've already felt the pain?

Many of us start up businesses because it seemed like a good idea. But often you start up a business because you feel the pain as well. So for instance, I felt the pain of being a cartoonist that was always on call. I wanted to have my vacations—and not just vacations, but substantial vacations. And so yes, I started out trying to help myself. So yeah, I know that pain. I can go back and feel that pain.

Not really

If you've ever had a big injury or operation, you'll know what I mean. The pain at the point in time is unbearable. Several weeks later, the memory of the pain is there, but not quite there. After a few years, it's almost impossible to recreate that pain. The target profile has no such problem. They're in the emergency ward right now. They feel the torrent of pain and know what they'd like to see as the solution. They understand why they're not keen to take the risk and will tell you so.

And that's what a target profile interview does

Yes, it does sound dramatic, but a target profile can change your world and how you create your landing page and market to your audience.

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When Kathy Sierra sat down to write her book on JAVA, it wasn't supposed to be a bestseller.

They had incredible odds with over 16,000 other books on JAVA already on Amazon. And yet they cut through the noise? How did they do it? They didn't pull the stunt that many Internet marketers do. Instead they focused on how people read and why they get to the finish line. The more the readers got to the end of the book, the more popular the book became in programming circles.
Read more: The Unlikely Bestseller (And Why It Sold 2 Million Copies)

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Frankenstein's Laboratory by Beef Chavez (audio sourced from "Scar Stuff Blog"). Licensed under Creative Commons "Attributions 3"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_nzKeFbsk0

 

Why do great inventors, business people, and a ton of smart people have in common?

They have many traits, but one specific trait is the ability to crack a problem. When everyone else has given up, these people are able to figure out what no one has done before.

How do they do it?   This article shows you how to increase your learning speed by using deconstruction. It shows you how to crack puzzles that seemed too difficult by others.'

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: Where to start your learning journey
Part 2: How to find learning patterns when there's no one to help you
Part 3: How to stack the layers and accelerate your learning

To read it online: https://www.psychotactics.com/speed-learning/

 

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How to deconstruct complex topics (and accelerate your learning)

What can a single video on YouTube contain?

If you were to look at just six minutes of a NASA video, it might put you off ocean currents forever. In exactly six minutes, the contents of the video contain some of the following:

◦ Atmospheric circulation
◦ Wave formation
◦ Thermohaline circulation
◦ Upwelling and nutrient distribution
◦ Dead zones
◦ Sea surface height
◦ Shifting rain patterns
◦ Population density

That's only the partial list of what's included in the video, and it hits you with rapid succession

If you're confused, you ought to be, because the video is approximately how we approach most topics. A topic, any topic, is incredibly complex. However, the complexity can be quickly deconstructed.

That is to say; you can learn a skill or teach someone a skill reasonably rapidly if you're able to break apart the concepts into smaller bits? The question is: where do you begin? What does deconstruction involve? And how do you know you're going about deconstruction the right way?

To understand deconstruction we need to look at three elements:

– Where to start your journey
– How to find patterns when there's no one to help you
– How to stack the layers as you go forward

So where do we start our journey?

Deconstruction always starts with a choice. But what do you choose? Let's find out.

Part 1: Where to start your journey of deconstruction

A tonne of gold costs about $64.3 million in today's prices.

Indians are reputed to own 22,000 tonnes of gold. That's a staggering $1 trillion dollars in gold in a single country. Gold bars and coins are almost alway bought at festivals when buying gold is said to bring luck to the buyers. But the real obsession for gold stems from wedding jewellery. Weddings alone account for 50% of the demand every year.

And in South Mumbai, if you wanted to buy gold, you'd head to a particular area called Sonapur.

“Sona” is the Hindi word for gold and in Sonapur, you'd see dozens of gold merchant stores crammed back to back in a specific area. Now bear in mind that Mumbai is a big city that spans 603.4 square kilometres. Yet, someone looking for jewellery, and particularly gold jewellery would know exactly where to go.

We have no such specifics when we're dealing with a vast and complex topic

Should we start with wave formation or thermohaline circulation? Upwelling, dead zones or nutrient distribution? Or should we wander right into sea surface height, instead? It's clear that we need to start somewhere and the best way to get started is to pick subject matter at random.

Random? Surely that doesn't seem to be a systematic way to go about deconstruction

Let's pick “dead zones” from our list above, shall we? It's a pretty random pick considering how much material the six-minute video covers. However, as we dig into the topic, one thing becomes very clear. It's easier to dig deeper into “dead zones” and see how they occur.  In under a minute, this video talks about how we get to mass extinction by focusing on a single topic.

Deconstruction becomes clearer when we move into areas we're more familiar with

Let's take a sales page or landing page, for instance. A landing page has headlines, subheads, first paragraphs, problems, solutions, objections, uniqueness, bullets—the list goes on and on. To be intimidated by such a vast amount of moderately unfamiliar information is difficult to cope with. So we go into “random mode”.

We pick something—anything—so that we can get going. Let's ignore the vast majority of the page, and head for the bullets, instead.

What do you notice when you look at the bullets below?

– How to assemble all the elements a customer needs to see to buy
– Why template based construction is key to pain-free landing pages
– Why “How to, how, and why” are your best friends in bullet points
– How to use sequence graphics to keep your reader on the page
– Why Bonuses need graphics for maximum impact
– How to write bullets that sell even if you can’t write
– How to avoid ineffective graphics
– How to construct power testimonials even for a new product
– Why FAQs are the place for “fussy” objections
– Why the target profile is central to growing your tribe

paDidn't find a pattern?

Well, let's look at it another way, shall we?

– How to assemble all the elements a customer needs to see to buy
– How to use sequence graphics to keep your reader on the page
– How to write bullets that sell even if you can’t write
– How to avoid ineffective graphics
– How to construct power testimonials even for a new product

– Why FAQs are the place for “fussy” objections
– Why Bonuses need graphics for maximum impact
– Why template based construction is key to pain-free landing pages
– Why “How to, how, and why” are your best friends in bullet points- Why the target profile is central to growing your tribe

You noticed the HOW and WHY this time around, didn't you?

If you're looking at the entire landing page, you're unlikely to notice the pattern even if someone helpfully placed it in the HOW and WHY format. You'd be focusing on too large an area, and it's close to impossible to deconstruct your subject matter when the area is too vast. Instead, you need to look at all the components available and choose just a tiny area, just like Sonapur, where the gold jewellery is sold. If the entire map of Mumbai were your sales page, Sonapur would represent the “bullets”.

When I was learning badminton many years ago, my coach taught me how to win points consistently

My badminton days are a bit of history now, not so much because I'm getting older, but more so because I'm one of those crazy people you see on the court. You know the type, don't you? They lunge at everything. And all of that lunging and diving just to win the point ended up with a tonne of muscle pulls and strains. Being the super-competitive person I am, I hired a coach to help me win points without having to lunge about so much.

But you see the problem looming, don't you?

Where do you start? The coach started randomly, getting me to focus on the grip. You can try it yourself, even if you don't have a handy badminton racket around. Squeeze your fingers together as if gripping a racket, while moving your hand forward.

Immediately there's a tension in the shot causing the shuttlecock to go back faster over the net. Avoid the squeeze and attempt to hit the same shot, and the shuttlecock goes a lot slower, thus dropping short of the opponent. By focusing on a subtle component of the entire game, the coach was able to get me to practice the grip, and that alone helped me win a few extra points in every match.

Every topic has multiple layers that make up the whole

The reason why we get confused and are unable to decipher, let alone master the topic is that we try and take on the entire 604 square kilometres of real estate instead of focusing on a single area. But what if you focus on a single area, but still can't see the pattern?

What if there's no coach around to show you the grip? No one around to helpfully move the bullets around and demonstrate how HOW and WHY play a pretty significant role in bullet construction? How do you go about seeing the pattern yourself?

Part 2: How to find patterns when there's no one to help you

How do you pronounce S-A-K-E?

If you said “Sah-kay” you're right.

If on the other hand, you said “sah-key”, you've failed to see the pattern. In almost every phonetic language the letter “e” creates an “eh” sound. So when you read the word “karaoke”, you don't say, “carry-oh-key”, but “kara-oh-keh” instead.

Once someone points out the pattern, it's easy to correctly pronounce words in phonetic languages such as Maori, Spanish or Japanese. But what if no one reveals the pattern? In such a scenario, you'd miss the sound of “eh” and instead use “e”, instead. How do you find patterns when there's no one else to help you?

Let's try it now.

How do you say K-A-R-A-T-E?
And how about S-H-I-I-T-A-K-E?

You have it down pat, don't you? Kara-teh and Shee-ta-keh.

And no matter how many Japanese words you ran into from now on, you'd know that the “e” is all about “eh”. This tiny bit of information may make sense by itself, but it's when you see the profusion of the words that have “e”, that you realise how many words you're likely to pronounce incorrectly.

What you might not have noticed is that you've worked out the pattern

For deconstruction, the first phase involves taking a tiny piece of the pie, as it were and focus on that piece. However, unless someone points out the pattern, you may not see it right away. The moment you take many examples of that very same pattern, you start to get a clear understanding.

If we go back to the landing page example, for instance, you might not see the HOW and WHY so clearly on one landing page. After all, there are many ways to write bullets and copywriters take care to see they intersperse different types of bullets in an entire set.

Even so, if you were to go from one landing page to another, and keep at it, you'd see a pattern in an incredibly short period. Try it yourself. Go to about 5-7 landing pages on the Psychotactics site alone, and you'll start to see the pattern of HOW and WHY wherever bullets appear.

But there's an additional bonus in going through many examples

Once a pattern registers, you are likely to see other patterns as well. For instance, a bullet can be written in a very simple way, or it can be embellished to go a bit further. Let's take an example.

How to prepare the room before the presentation

How to prepare the room before the presentation (even if it's already been set up earlier).
How to prepare the room before the presentation (and make sure nothing goes wrong).

We added two other elements in the bullets and you'd notice if you went through a whole set of them

We emboldened those bullets with “and” or “even”. As you go through an entire set of bullets, page after page of nothing but bullets, the secrets of bullets reveal themselves to you. It's approximately how you go about deconstructing just about anything, even when there's no precedence.

For instance, during James Hutton's time, the world was thought to have a fixed creation date

Apparently on Saturday, October 22, 4004 BC, the world was created, or so it was taught around the time of James Hutton. Hutton is called the “father of modern geology” because he came up with the fundamental understanding of geology as we know it today. Hutton was curious about how the earth was formed. The religious texts of the day were pretty clear.

The earth was 6000 years old according to Archbishop James Ussher of Ireland. And that was that—no further discussion was allowed on the topic. Hutton wasn't exactly convinced and he set about his journey of deconstruction.

Hutton's moment of discovery came indirectly because of his whisky and his women

In 1747, Hutton was a young medical graduate, who got drunk and the ladies got too much of his attention. He managed to get his lover Miss Eddington pregnant. The scandal that erupted saw her being rushed off to London to give birth.

Hutton's family too needed to limit the damage to their reputation and he was forced to leave Edinburgh and go off to a small family farm in Slighhouses, Southern Scotland.

It was there that he saw the top soil run off and go downstream

If the land were always going to be eroded, there would be no topsoil and crops couldn't be grown; which in turn would cause people to starve over time. Hutton couldn't buy that the earth would be stripped away to nothing. Working in isolation, he rejected the world view at the time and needed to figure out how new land was formed.

And then on his form his great idea about “how new land could be created.”

Hutton's examples were cliffs. Around his farm were dozens, hundreds of cliffs. In the exposed parts of the cliffs, he'd have noticed the bands of rocks, laid down like layers one on top of the other, and at different times.

He'd figured out how rock was formed like no known person had done before his time. Sedimentary rock that's taught in school these days was revolutionary back in Hutton's time. How did he do it? He looked at example after example until the rock gave away its secrets.

Surely you and I could look at rock all day and the only result would be a big headache at the end of the day

But let's stop to think about deconstruction for a second. You could take apart quite a few things in your house or office today. Over time, and with a little bit of persistence, you'd work out how it was built. The more examples you deconstruct using the very same, or similar product, the more likely you'd be to recognise its structure.

While it may seem that some people are incredibly intelligent at deconstructing and reconstructing concepts, they're probably just as bright as you. The brain works solely through pattern-recognition. If you find enough examples to work with them, and you get working on those examples, the ideas reveal themselves to you over time.

There's no doubt a bit of luck involved

Luck plays as big, if not a larger role than hard work, but to deconstruct just about anything you need time and persistence. And lots and lots of examples. It's hard to believe that you, me, anyone of us can deconstruct, but you can look through historical or even modern times and find not tens of thousands, even millions of examples of people who achieve many deconstruction goals every single year.

Nothing is quite as good as a good teacher

A teacher's job is to reduce the learning curve and make you smart, smarter than the teacher himself. Even so, you can be your own teacher if you start with Phase one and isolate a tiny part of the big puzzle. When you get to Phase two, you'd need lots of examples, possibly hundreds, before a pattern clearly starts to emerge.

Sake, karate, karaoke. That's a pattern.

Writing bullets. That too is a pattern. Figuring out how the Earth regenerates itself, yes that is a pattern as well. Which then takes us to our last phase: reconstruction. Or how to stack the layers as you go forward.

Let's find out how it's done.

Part 3: How to stack the layers going forward

In late October 2016, I gave a presentation at the WeArePodcast conference.

The presentation wasn't about how to grow your audience or monetise your podcast. Instead, the presentation was about the elements of telling a story. For weeks before the event, I struggled with the presentation, and the reason I was so conflicted was due to the length of the presentation.

I had just 30 minutes or so to get the point across.

How do you take a lifetime of storytelling and encapsulate it in a 30-minute module?

You don't. When you deconstruct or reconstruct, the goal should be exactly the same. It's always meant to take a tiny piece of the information you have on hand and then go deep. I happened to talk about the elements of a story in that presentation, but if I were making a presentation on how a dead zone shows up in the ocean, I'd use the very same principle. And that's what you should do too as well.

Instead of taking on the entire subject matter, take on a tiny slice

If you were presenting about dead zones in the ocean floor, you'd probably cover three elements.

1: The ocean conveyor belt
2: The role of cold water currents and warm water currents
3: How dead zones occur

Granted, this is a tiny part of what you're likely to know about thermohaline circulation and the ocean conveyor belt, but it's enough. And how do you know it's enough? There's a precise benchmark to know when you're overcooking your information. That benchmark is the ability of the audience or readers to recall the information.

If you overdose them with information, they'll recall parts of it, but not all

Information that's just re-constructed just right usually allows the client to remember the entire sequence without too much prodding. And covering just three points, even when you have a thousand to cover is usually a good way to go about things.

Three points force you to constrain yourself and go deep into your content. For instance, many podcasts on the Three Month Vacation covers about 4000-5000 words, yet they only cover three points. This article might go well into 4000-5000 words, but it only covers three points. It's likely that the person reading this information may not be able to recall the three points instantly, but give them a summary and it all comes flooding back.

And that's how you know your reconstruct is goody-yum-yum

At Psychotactics, we do this reconstruct at our workshops. Take for instance the workshop we had on Landing Pages in Queenstown, New Zealand. It was a three-day workshop, and on the very last day, I got the group to summarise what they had learned. If you've done a solid job, you'll see their eyes, not the top of their heads.

No one will be looking down at their notes scrambling to remember what was taught. Instead, they'll be looking right at you, reassembling the information just the way it was given to them. This technique is also easy to use when making a presentation to a live audience. You can have 200, 500 or a 1000 people in the audience going through the sequence of what you've just taught them. And that's the real feedback—when the audience can remember it all.

So do you remember what you just learned?
Let's see. What did we cover?

Summary:

– Where to start your journey of deconstruction
– How to find patterns when there's no one to help you
– How to stack the layers as you go forward

The journey needs to start with a small slice. Instead of taking on a big topic, go down to one tiny part. Want to take apart the car? How about holding back a little and then taking apart just the wheel, instead? If you have someone to help you; a teacher; a guide, then that speeds up the learning process.

But what if you have no one?

What if you're like James Hutton and you're faced with the prospect of doing something no one has done before? In such a case, and in every case, really, you should be looking at a tonne of examples.

Examples help you understand the same problem, see the same patterns from many angles. You may or may not hit the jackpot of how to write bullets on a landing page, but if you look at dozens of examples of bullets, you'll find the so-called secret will reveal itself to you.

Finally, when it comes back to the reconstruct, it's just as important to realise that you have to be a bit stingy with your topics. Instead of covering half a dozen topics, just cover three main topics and go really deep.

You know you're not overdoing the information because the audience can easily recall what you've told them without needing to look at their notes. Even 4000-5000 words later, the reader or listener should be able to remember the points you've covered and pass them on to someone else without too much of a problem.

And that is the short and exciting journey of deconstruction.

Now it's time for some sake, eh?
 
Do you know: Focus can cause a massive blindspot in our business.
So what's the option? Surely it can't be distraction? Actually it's a mix of both that's required. Using the concept of “spinning plates”, you can avoid the blind spot of success and the mindlessness of distraction. How Success Causes A Blind Spot And Creates A Rip Van Winkle Effect

https://www.psychotactics.com/how-success-causes-blind-spot/

The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere

This is an elaboration/review of the book by Pico Iyer.

How do you slow down?  What do you mean by going nowhere? And how can we slow down with our busy business and family life?

Sean says, ” I still have the same day I used to have before. But somehow it's different. Now, I have more time.”

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: The Passage To Nowhere
Part 2: The Charting of Stillness
Part 3: The Internet Sabbath

To read it online: https://www.psychotactics.com/losing-momentum/

 

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4 am is the most difficult part of my day.

And it's not for the reason you might be thinking. It's not difficult because it's so early in the morning. For me it's quite the opposite. For close to 20 years I've been rising at 4, sometimes a bit earlier, without the need of an alarm. The sound and feel of 4 am is embedded in my system and I instinctively know when to wake up.

Which is where the problem begins.

Within seconds of waking up, I'm completely awake

I feel as though my brain is a train leaving the station, and I, as the train driver need to keep up. Five minutes later, I've walked out of the door, across to the office next door and I'm already at work. At this time of the day, and without the need of any coffee or tea, I can start to write a book, work on a presentation or take on the endless flow of e-mail.

So how do I slow down?

That was the question I asked myself as we slid into our December break. We're all so alert, so full of this persistent need to work, to learn, to keep going at high speed. How do we slow down without losing momentum? And if we were to slow down, where would we get the time to slow down? This last question seems to cut right to the core. That we have no time to do what's most important to us. Which is why I started first listening to, then reading a book I'd bought almost two years ago.

Yes, the irony wasn't lost on me. It took two years to get to the book, but as December rolled along I listened to it once, then a second time, before getting a physical copy from the library.

The name of the book? The Art of Stillness: Adventures In Going Nowhere.

A book by writer, traveller, Pico Iyer. And let me tell you my short journey about going nowhere in a hurry.

We'll look at three elements of the book, and it's a very tiny book, spanning just 74 pages. When listening to it on audio, I think I was done with listening to it in a few hours. Even so, less is more. That's the agenda of the book and the lesson I learned.

Here are the three things we'll cover:

– The Passage To Nowhere
– The Charting of Stillness
– The Internet Sabbath

Part 1: The Passage To Nowhere

Sitting still is a way of falling in love with the word and everything around it.

That's an interesting thought, isn't it? And within three pages of “The Passage to Nowhere”, author Pico Iyer makes you want to slow down, but not just feel like you're getting off the motorway, but instead coming to a complete standstill. A stillness so unusual that if you close your eyes, you can hear the computer gurgle, feel the caress of the breeze, even your heartbeat seems so much louder.

Iyer, despite the Indian sounding name, was born in Oxford, England in 1957

By the time he's twenty-nine, he's got an office on the 25th floor in midtown Manhattan; an apartment on Park Avenue and 20th Street and a job that most writers only dream about. He covers apartheid in South Africa, the People Power Revolution in the Philippines, the chaos that enveloped India during prime minister Indira Gandhi's assassination. He wrote extensively for Time Magazine and took long vacations in exotic parts of the globe. The very thought of going nowhere was an incredibly alien concept.

And yet the constant excitement has a finite boundary

If you listen closely enough to life, it speaks to you in a whisper. Pico Iyer found that he couldn't hear that whisper. He was racing about so much that he never had a chance to see where he was going, or truly enjoy what he was doing. He never had a chance to check if he was truly happy.

Writers have a funny way of going to their core

Some hit the bottle, others write endlessly. Iyer decided to retreat to Kyoto. Now I don't know if you've ever been to Kyoto, but it's one of the most amazing cities in the world. There is a richness in the palaces and temples of Tokyo that's hard to imagine, let alone replicate. Iyer decided to leave behind his dream life and spend a year in a small, single room on the backstreets of Kyoto. He craved a sense of stillness.

In the early part of his book he talks about how not so long ago, our greatest luxury was access to information. There was no such thing as too many books because a book was savoured. Information was a slow drug. Today it's the freedom from information that we seek. The chance to be still is what Iyer calls the “ultimate prize”.

“I'm not a member of any church, and I don't subscribe to any creed; I've never been a member of any meditation or yoga group,” say Iyer. And by the time I had hit this paragraph, it struck me that

I was in a remarkably similar position; we all are, in fact. We're all rushing around, slightly overwhelmed at the amount of information we have to process and implement. We're not necessarily a member of any meditation or yoga group and yet there's this obvious desire to slow down until Pico Iyer takes it one step lower. We need to be still; go nowhere.

The chapter on “The Passage to Nowhere” clarifies the issue

It's not about sitting at home and never going anywhere. Travelling opens up our minds, often makes us better, more interesting people. Stillness isn't about a location. You can sit in the middle of a Mumbai street, cars honking and be perfectly at peace, though admittedly the goal isn't about how far you travel but how alive you are.

Stillness it seems is the ultimate adventure; one I'd been on, but certainly not on a daily basis.

So as we slid into summer in this part of the world, I took my chance. In December, Auckland goes to sleep. Around the 20th of December, all the Christmas parties are done, kisses exchanged, and the city goes into hibernation. And it's not just Auckland. The entire country goes into an enforced vacation until mid, even late January. It was my chance to go on a trip I'd never gone before.

I started to meditate

I tried sitting in a Lotus position on the floor. I can do it quite easily as I sit on the floor most days at some point or the other. But I didn't feel comfortable sitting for long periods of time. My next try was sleeping on the floor, and despite the warmth of the season, I felt a bit chilly. So I climbed into bed, pulled the duvet over and that was my Goldilocks moment. I soon discovered that trips require a bit of planning. I scoured iTunes for suitable meditation music until I found the one that suited me best. I wanted to see what this trip to nowhere was all about.

Stillness like anything in life requires momentum

When I first tried to clear my mind, the momentum of the day cluttered it with thoughts of an even higher frequency. I might be sitting and doing nothing, and have no perceptible thought in my head. The moment I meditate, the thoughts, random thoughts burst through trying to shout over one another in an attempt to get my attention. But then the momentum dies down around the 30-minute mark. By the 45-minute mark, it becomes addictive, this meditation stuff.

And that's what takes us to the second part of this review: The Charting of Stillness. In this section, he talks about his friend and songwriter, the late Leonard Cohen. He also talks about Matthieu Ricard, a Frenchman who was called “the happiest man in the world.” What made this Frenchman so euphoric? Let's find out in the next part.

Part 2: The Charting of Stillness

When you look at Matthieu Ricard, you don't see a molecular biologist. Because even if you and I have not a clue about what a molecular biologist looks like, Matthieu Ricard doesn't look the part. And that's because he's wearing the robes of a monk, and has this endearing smile.

The University of Wisconsin was deeply interested in that smile

They attached 256 electrodes to the skulls of hundreds of volunteers and put them all through a 3 ½ hour continuous functional MRI scan. The researchers were searching for positive emotions at first. In later experiments they looked at areas of compassion, the ability to control emotional responses and interestingly, the ability to process information. The subjects were similar in most respects, except some had engaged in ongoing stillness, while others had not.

There was a marked difference between those who'd practiced the art of stillness vs those who hadn't

Those who'd gone through stillness for about 10,000 hours had achieved a sense of happiness that was beyond any records in neurological records.

Their happiness factor was literally, quite off the charts. And Matthieu Ricard explains that happiness is a muscle. That like a muscle it can be developed. His philosophy is based on how Buddhists explain the nature of the mind. And you don't have to be a Buddhist to understand the concepts of the blue sky.

If there are clouds, there is blue sky behind them. All you need is patience to sit still and the blue shows up again.

This blue sky analogy was interesting

Don't get me wrong. A blue sky is, at least to me, the most boring kind of sky. I love clouds, all kinds of clouds. My niece Marsha are even members of the cloud appreciation society. So the analogy kind of bugs me, because I think all clouds, without exception, are incredibly stunning. Even so, the analogy of the blue sky is pretty solid. We lead a life based on our terms, travel places I want to go.

Even our websites aren't built with some keywords in mind or driven by client's demands. We do the things that most interest us instead of being governed by what competition does. Still, there are clouds. Clouds of irritation, envy. They roll in quietly going from a nice, fluffy cumulus to a menacing cumulonimbus.

Theoretically, I want them to put those 256 electrodes on my head and I want them to find happiness, compassion, no desire to react to emotional triggers and the ability to process information in an unusual way. It was a journey I was willing to take. As I meditate under that duvet, I start off all busy in my brain and then I get on the road to stillness. There are days when I don't quite feel like leaving the room and heading to work, it's that addictive; that cool.

And yet there's the obvious objection, isn't there?

Who has time to stand still, or lie still. To me, at least 30-45 minutes was an intrusion. While on vacation it's fine, because I truly do nothing, we're now back to work and that's a chunky 45 minutes out of the day. There's so much to do. How are we supposed to tackle yet another slice of the day slipping away for yet another activity?

This takes us to the third part: The Secular Sabbath as it's called in the book, but which I've changed a bit to the “internet sabbath”.

Part 3: The Internet Sabbath

What happens if you don't check your e-mails one day?

The elves come in, check your e-mails and your inbox is clear the next day, right? We know the price of not being on top of things.

Pico Iyer takes time to talk about the sabbath, but he stresses he's not stepping foot into any religion. Instead he talks about a secular sabbath. About a day every week, when you completely free yourself of work. And incredibly, you get off checking stuff on the Internet.

All this talk of meditation and taking time off gets some people a little upset

Iyer talks about the time he was on a live radio show. The woman calling in was clearly upset. “It's all very well for a male travel writer in Santa Barbara to talk about taking the day off,” she said. “But what about me? I'm a moth trying to start a small business, and I don't have the luxury of meditating for two hours a day.”

Two hours is clearly an exaggeration on the caller's part but the point is clear

We don't have time to meditate and we don't have time to stop checking e-mails and the internet. Yet it's precisely the people who are most under pressure that need to give themselves a break. Iyer suggests the poor, overburdened mother could ask her husband, her mother or a friend to look after the kids for thirty minutes a day. That would bring back a touch of freshness and delight to share with her kids and her business.

As you hear Iyer's words, it's still hard to accept that you can just walk away from the day

I struggled with weekends. My 4 am wake up time doesn't respect weekends and until late 2015 I'd be at work on Saturday and Sunday. “I'm only here for a little while”, I'd say to myself, but I'd often be doing something or the other until 9 or 10 am. On the weekends I was supposedly spending 10 whole hours at work. Whether it was productive work or not is completely debatable and here's why.

One weekend, my niece Keira came over and I was lying on the sofa. She said, “Seanny's always tired”. That was my moment of clarity. The weekends weren't helping me at all. So I stopped coming to work on the weekends. We have courses on

Psychotactics and their Friday assignment is my Saturday. For many years I'd say, “I need to check the assignment on the day itself.” Instead, I just told clients that if they finished their assignment by my Friday evening, I'd check it. If not, I'd be back on Monday. I expected pushback from clients. To my surprise I got none.

Many in Silicon Valley observe an Internet sabbath every week

All devices are turned off from say, Friday night to Monday. Kevin Kelly, is a spokesperson for new technologies and the founding father of Wired Magazine. Kevin takes off on month-long trips without a computer so as to get rooted in the non virtual world. “I want to remember who I am”, he says.

Even so, Kevin Kelly's methods seem a bit far fetched. Instead you can simply turn off your Internet connection for a day. My wife, Renuka and I go for a walk every day for an hour and a half. We try and get about 10,000-15,000 steps a day.

On Sundays however, we don't take the “workday walking route”

Instead we find another route and take a physical book or a diary in which to write or draw. I try and avoid the iPad or any kind of device that will get me back on the Internet. It's a constant challenge but it's completely invigorating. The simple act of putting the phone off and turning it on, 24 or even 48 hours later doesn't increase your workload by much. However, it does dramatically improve your ability to be more calm, more resilient in life.

What's been the result of all of this meditation and calmness?

Like Iyer, I stayed away from meditation for all these years. I convinced myself that my mind was blank enough when going for a walk or painting. And truly it was.

But conscious meditation is different for me. It almost always brings a rush of thoughts; of things that need to be done. Renuka tells me I'm sleeping better and my breathing is less shallow. Instead of reacting to events, I seem to let them pass like clouds, expecting that blue sky will show up shortly.

But easily the biggest change has been the morning train. Remember the train that starts in my brain and races out of the station at 4 am? Well, it doesn't do that any more. I now wake up, meditate and then go to work.

I still have the same day I used to have before. But somehow it's different. Now, I have more time.

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Resistance seems like an overbearing force in our lives

We want to achieve a lot, but as soon as we get started, resistance kicks in. But did you know there are ways around resistance?
Resistance loves a loner. If you're working alone, you're just setting yourself for an encounter with resistance. Resistance loves to play the game of winner. We need to put resistance in second place. Here's how to go about the task of winning the resistance game.

Part 2 of how working with a partner can be both an upside as well as a downside. How do you cope? How do you take it to a whole new level, without all the drama that goes with partnerships? Find out how to run a two-engine business instead of depending on flying alone. 

How easy is it to work with your spouse or partner? What are the upsides and downsides? These are questions that are asked all the time and there's a good way to know if you're going to work well together. Here's Part 1 of a series of 2 episodes. 

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https://www.psychotactics.com/insider-story-psychotactics/

Everyone loves a fabulous year, but the best years for us are those that aren't terribly great. We learn more, and go through a revolution in such "difficult" years. That was 2016 for me. Life took me on diversions I hadn't expected and to me that became the most interesting element of all. Now I look forward to the diversion. Find out how you can be calm even when life takes you off route. And how the off route can be the one thing you look forward to time and time again. 

In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: Why Goals Are Not Enough (And Why Pacing Matters)
Part 2: Time Management vs. Energy Management
Part 3: Dealing With Seemingly Closed Doors

 To read it online: https://www.psychotactics.com/power-diversion/

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In February 2016, I took a rather interesting vow.

I vowed to stop grumbling.

Now let's get one thing straight: we all grumble. Some do more than others, but I'm one of those people who are easily disappointed, and so I'm relatively more prone to grumbling. Why I decided to stop grumbling, I'm not sure, but I know it led me down an interesting path. Instead of spending all my time trying to figure out what was wrong with the situation, it often led me to analyse why I was in that situation in the first place.

And that leads me right into what I learned in 2016. I learned why goals are not enough (and why pacing matters). I've always been clued into the fact that time management is not as powerful as energy management. And 2016 was when I had some solid, practical applications for this concept of time vs. energy.

I also realised that closed doors open, if you're willing to persist. However, at the top of the list of my learning was “the importance of the diversion”. This message resonated stronger within me than anything else.

Let's find out how and why the diversion mattered.

In July 2016, we decided to go to Goa, India.

India, as amazing as it is in terms of beauty, food and culture is not quite a vacation for me. My parents live in Goa, which by itself used to calm and peaceful, but now seems like any other part of India, noisy and chaotic.

What makes the visit slightly worse is the location of my parent's house

My parents live in a tiny two-bedroom cottage, but it's located at a junction. If you've visited India, you know that horns on vehicles are meant to be used whenever possible. Cars, buses, motorcycles—they all honk while on the move, but almost always honk when at a junction, just to warn others of their approach. You see the problem, don't you? My parents are used to the traffic, as well as the honking, but the sounds of India drive me a little crazy.

To make sure we were suitably removed from that chaos, we decided to rent our own cottage

This cottage was about 15 kilometres (about 7 miles) from my parent's place and supposedly a lot quieter. You know how you're not supposed to trust things you see on the Internet, right? Well, we didn't. I got a cousin of mine to check out the place and get back to me. “It's by a narrow road,” she said, “and not particularly noisy. There's a bit of traffic, but it's not too bad.” Going by this assessment, we decided to rent the cottage.

When got to Goa and the cottage was amazing

It had a superb lounge area, superb art on the wall, decent food nearby, two large bedrooms and was perfect in every way but one: the sound of traffic. Apparently the road was narrow and seemingly devoid of traffic, but it also happened to be the route to an industrial estate. This meant that when traffic rolled, it was the sound of enormous trucks rolling by.

Normally this would be enough reason to grumble

We'd done all our due diligence and there we were in a situation not a lot better than before. Yet this location proved to the starting point of a completely different type of vacation. Normally on vacations we eat, drink and rest a lot. Instead we ended up at an Ayurvedic centre (quite by chance) and were instructed to stay on a diet, with no alcohol and we could only sleep at night.

At night we were often woken up by the barking of stray dogs, so we'd wake up early the next day for the Ayurvedic treatment, yet quite tired. In short, what seemed to be a vacation was not a vacation at all. We got back to Auckland more tired than when we left and could barely function for the first two weeks.

Yet, this was my biggest learning: the role of the diversion

We weren't supposed to end up in this cottage. We weren't supposed to be at that Ayurveda centre. We were supposed to eat, drink and make merry. Yet it was the most life-changing vacation we've ever had. Both Renuka and I found that the diversion helped us tremendously with our health. Once we were done, my blood pressure which was soaring, was almost back to normal and my cholesterol levels were the best they'd been in past seven years.

Our food changed

If you look at the photos on Facebook, and I post food photos almost every day, you'll notice a marked difference in the food we ate from July onwards. We didn't consciously move towards vegetarian food, but meat is a rarity these days. I'm the biggest fan of bread and yet I've been making dosas (a fermented version of rice and dal) since we got back. All of this has had a massive impact. And the story of our trip to India is just an example of how 2016 has helped me focus on the diversion.

Before 2016, I'd be more driven to getting to the goal

Anything that took me away from the goal was a needless irritation. I'd do almost anything to get back on track and to avoid the diversion. The sight of a “diversion” sign would get me needlessly upset. Yet at the end of 2016, I tend to revel in the diversion. If things are not going my way, I tend to find the importance of that diversion.

Don't get me wrong: I don't believe in destiny

I used to believe in it, and it's fine if you believe in it, but I don't. I don't believe that things happen for a reason either. I believe that things happen, and we put a reason to it. This diversion angle isn't about life unfolding to a plan. Instead, I see it more as a sense of calm as things go awry.

That instead of grumbling and getting upset, it's about enjoying the diversions. I know this to be true because not all diversions end with lower cholesterol and happy stories. Some diversion are just a royal pain, but when you're ready to accept the diversion for what it is, you're a bit like a walking Buddha, accepting things for what they are.

I'm still very goal oriented

I still believe in the concept of getting things done, yet I'm less paranoid about the diversion. To me that's been the biggest learning of 2016. I think I didn't do as well as I expected with the grumbling goal. I could have done better. I've grumbled less than I usually do, but more than I would have liked.

What I do know is that diversions don't faze me as much as they used to. To quote a Jack Johnson song: Swim like a jellyfish, rhythm is nothing; you go with the flow, you don't stop.

That jellyfish lesson; the lesson about diversions and learning from the diversion—that's my first lesson. The second was even more ironic. You know that at Psychotactics we talk about the “Three Month Vacation”, right? Well, in 2016, we didn't take our three month vacation as we should have. And it really impacted our work. Let's find out how.

Part 1: Why Goals Are Not Enough (And Why Pacing Matters)

The Article Writing Course at Psychotactics is called the “Toughest Writing Course in the World”. When you make a statement like that, most people assume the course is tough for the person doing the course. Admittedly it's very tough for the student because you have to get from a point of struggle, to being able to write a very good article in less than 90 minutes.

Yet for me it's a bigger struggle

A course with just 25 participants generates between 10,000-15,000 posts in just 3 months. All of those comments, assignments and questions have to be answered. Plus there's no such thing as “rolling out last year's course”. Between 10-20% of the course changes every year (and has done so since it first ran in 2006).

However, this year I decided to do something that would put even more pressure on me. I decided to create Version 2.0 of the Article Writing Course. It's not like the earlier version was a dud, but like everything in life, a course needs an upgrade.

Under perfect circumstances, the notes would be rewritten well in advance

However, when doing a Psychotactics course, I like to gauge the reactions of the clients. Where do they proceed quickly? Where do they get stuck? And so at least for this course, I decided to write new assignments and notes while the course was in progress.

No matter how good you are at writing or creating courses, it's incredibly hard work. Which is why we have the “Three Month Vacation” in place. We work for 12 weeks, then we take a month off. Then another 12 weeks and then another month off.

In 2016, we didn't stick to our well-oiled routine

The “twelve week on, four weeks off” has been the primary reason why we achieve our goals. It allows us to work, then rest and come back with a full charge. The vacation in India, while great for our health and diet, left us more tired than before. And then we did a half-baked vacation to Australia in October.

Instead of taking the entire month off, we tried a two week break, and a work trip at the tail end of the journey. Technically a two-week trip is as good as a month, but having work at the tail end means I never quite relax as much as I should.

And this was my second learning

That though there are diversions, it's important as far as possible to stick have a solid pacing. The routine is what's most efficient, which is why it's called a routine. When we stray away from this pace of work and downtime, we are straying away from what's most efficient.

By the end of the year I was quite drained

I've managed to do as much as the previous years, probably even more. Yet, it's important not to be so very tired as you head into a break. And yet I could see myself yanking myself to work at 5 am (instead of 4). I could feel the tiredness in my bones simply because we hadn't stuck to the pacing. Taking weekends off was a great move and it helped me to get back to Mondays with a bounce in my step, but even the vacations mattered. What also mattered was how we structured the vacations.

The diversion concept is easy to spot, but how does this pacing apply to you?

We often work through the year, expecting that work itself will get us to where we want to be. Yet, it's been proven time and time again that downtime is where the brain really works. A tired brain simply does not function to its highest capacity. A brain is like a modern jetliner. It needs to fly, but then it needs to get down onto the tarmac and refuel before it gets back into the air.

A jetliner's greatest value is not when it's on the tarmac, but when it's in the air. Yet, without the downtime and the maintenance, that plane will crash to the ground. It's the routine that keeps that plane in high performance mode at all times.

It's one thing to have goals.

It's one thing to say that it's important to have vacations and weekends. Yet, it's quite another thing to structure that downtime. That in 2016, we failed to structure all of our downtime in the way we normally do. And that the month off from December to Jan will do its thing. Even so, the breaks should be better planned and executed. The goals are one thing, and the pacing is quite another.

That was Lesson No.2. And with a little planning (and some diversions) we'll have more pacing in 2017, so that we go to the break still quite relaxed and not quite so tired. All of this talk about pacing is really a pre-cursor for energy management, isn't it? I've always suspected there's something fundamentally wrong with time management and this year it came home to roost. Energy management is far superior to time management. This was my third lesson for the year.

Part 2: Time Management vs. Energy Management

You wouldn't think chefs would solve a productivity problem, would you?

And that's just what stuck with me when I was watching a Netflix's episode called “Chef's Table”. What struck me was the difference between my method of cooking and theirs. Now I may get the ingredients in advance, but usually I'm looking at the recipe just before I cook. Then I'll assemble all the spices, the veggies etc. and start the cooking process. While that cooking is in progress, a whole bunch of utensils get dirty and have to be washed. I'll then finish the cooking, and then it's time for the plating.

The chefs don't operate like me

The ingredients are bought in advance, they're chopped in advance, they're located right where they should be when the chef is ready to cook. What struck me is that a professional cooking system had a remarkable similarity to the way I write. I will write topics on one day, outline on the second day, expand on the third, edit on the fourth, and in the case of the podcast, record on the fifth.

It seems like a long process, but the actual writing doesn't take time when I split it all into tiny bits spread over five-six days. If I tried to do it all at once, even a single break in the chain drains my energy and I waste twice or thrice the time.

I know you've heard me write and talk about this energy issue before, but to me it was crucial especially when teaching difficult courses like the Article Writing Course. In the past the emphasis on the course was to turn out dozens of articles. Yet, that often exhausted the participants and more importantly by the end of the course they weren't able to write within 90 minutes.

Some still took 3 hours, some even longer. And if you slog so hard, it's easy to get exhausted and even have dropouts. Now our dropout rate is often restricted to just one or two participants, but even so, I'm responsible for their success. If I'm the teacher, I can't afford to have dropouts simply because they're getting exhausted.

Which is why energy became such a big issue for me in 2016

I started to design my life around energy, not time. Any task was almost always split up into parts—like a chef sequence. Incredibly enough the first day of the sequence involved nothing but planning. Planning all the things I had to do was just day one. And in the courses, that's what clients spent their first day doing as well.

They planned what they were going to write about. This simple shift in energy vs. time management makes a world of a difference both for me, as teacher, writer, trainer, as well as for the learner. Instead of being bludgeoned by having to do it all at one go, the clients were able to learn better. I in turn was able to achieve more and do so consistently.

Overall the year was draining

I struggled when I returned from India; didn't have quite the break I expected in October in Australia and technically I should have achieved a lot less. Yet, when I look back at 2016, the only place where I struggled was in when reading books. I didn't get too much reading when it came to books, but otherwise I was able to get through a quite tough year to my satisfaction. Of course I'll never be satisfied. I still want to do twice as much, or thrice as much.

I'm fascinated with a lot of things: cooking, drawing, painting, software, dancing, teaching. The list goes on and on. And to maintain a high proficiency you need to be like a chef. I need to be like a chef. We both need to do the prep work well in advance.

Time management is still interesting to me, but it's energy management that really got my attention. Which takes us to the final point: dealing with seemingly closed doors.

Part 3: Dealing With Seemingly Closed Doors

Every day I pick up my niece Marsha from school.

And every day we avoid the mad rush of school girls and exit from the gate on the far side. We have no problem with this gate on most days, until we ran into a certain Friday. We could see the problem unfolding from a distance.

First there was a motorcyclist trying to get the gate to open. Then a woman stepped out from her car and ran into a similar problem. By the time we got to the gate, it seemed like there was a lock on it. If so, we'd have to retrace our steps and go back at least 150 metres to the other gate.

It was a boiling hot day, and I'm no fan of the sun

So I decided to fiddle with the gate. As it turned out, it wasn't locked after all. There was a lock on the gate giving everyone the impression that it was locked, but the gate was merely jammed. A bit of a tug in the right manner and it rolled to the right as it should.

To me this was part of my learning for 2016 mainly in my personal life

For much of 2016, Renuka was having a lot of trouble with her allergies and partly with breathing at night. On the trip to India, she went through the Ayurvedic treatment that helped her reduce the nodules that were blocking her breathing. We thought with treatment the problem of breathing well would improve—and it did. Even so, we couldn't shake the problem of her allergies.

Around 2008 or 2009 she'd gone to an allergy clinic

Without any medicine or fuss, they managed to get rid of her allergy in 24 hours. Instead of sneezing endlessly, using nose sprays or taking over the counter medication, she went from achoo, to being a normal person. Before she got to the allergy clinic her nose would get all clogged, her sinuses would flare and her eyes would get all red. She watched dozens of videos on YouTube and tried to self-medicate. The sinus issue and allergy would back down for a short while and then come right back.

So what's the point of this story?

We thought the allergy gate was closed. She'd been to the clinic several years ago, was free of the allergies. Now that they were back, would there be any point in going back? Instead of treating that gates as locked, she went back. And within 24 hours her allergies were gone and have stayed gone for the last few months. What I'm trying to say here is simple.

Through 2016, I ran into friends I thought I'd lost forever. I just had to dig further and deeper to find them and we were reunited. Most of the things I thought were doomed were just stuck on pause. When I worked my way through them, sometimes months later, they seem to magically open gates I thought were permanently locked.

I really wondered if I should add this fourth point of “never giving up” in this piece

It seems so very trite. So mundane. Yet, the story of Renuka's allergies, plus being able to find a long-lost friend was a matter of pure chance after giving up. It's not like I hadn't tried before. I did try. But then after a lot of persistence, I gave up. What this message is all about is to try again, a lot later.

That gate at Marsha's school seemed locked to everyone. And yet it needed nudging. Who knows? Maybe the motorcyclist and the driver of the car loosened it just enough for me to yank it free. It's a lesson that you have to keep going long after everyone else (and possibly even you) have given up.

And that was my 2016 in a nutshell.

 

Epilogue

We are already in 2017. Last night I had my zero-gravity dream again.

It's a recurring dream where I simply spread my hands wide and I'm able to beat gravity. Like an astronaut that tumbles and flies in zero gravity, I'm usually in a room, floating to the ceiling. Occasionally I'll go outside. Probably even show off a bit by doing double or triple flips. No one in the room seems to be surprised by my ability, but even in my dream I'm trying to prove that it's not a dream.

Except I didn't have this dream for all of 2016 (as far as I can remember).

Was 2016 a bit rough? Monetarily it was like all other years. We made thrice as much as we need and that's more than enough. Our subscriber rate went through the roof, climbing 200% and then 500% or more. And no we didn't do anything dramatic. No advertising or joint ventures or anything of the sort. No hoopla launches.

Though we did sail through a second year of podcasting and I believe that made the difference. Clients continue to listen and learn a lot from the podcasts. And if you haven't already noticed, they're almost little booklets by themselves if you were to print them out. Almost every podcast is about 4000 words and covers just a deeper look into a subset of a topic.

Even so, I felt a bit unsettled by 2016.

Now after a whole month of rest, I'm ready to take on 2017, doing better stuff, not just more stuff. And I have my cue. I am flying; I'm in zero gravity. La, la, I'm on the ceiling again. Catch me if you can!

Sometimes life takes you down a diversion.
And you end up exactly where you need to be.
Read more about: What I Learned On My Unusual Vacation

Many of us believe that smartness comes from learning the skills in our own field. And yet, that's only partially true. We can never be as smart as we want to be, if we only have tunnel vision. So how do we move beyond? And how do we find the time to do all of this learning? Amazingly it all comes from limits. Find out more in this episode.

In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: Learning all you can in your own field
Part 2: Learning all you can in an area where you have no expertise
Part 3: Working with limits

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Last month I got an invitation from a group asking me to dinner.

The dinner it seems was a group of startups. They wanted to spend the evening with Renuka and I and have a conversation about how to get started and to keep that momentum going.

What they wanted most of all was the promise of the “Three Month Vacation.” Yes, they were start ups, but what would it take for them to get going and then not spiral out of control. What would it take for them to become successful without being sucked into the mantra of “more, more and even more.”

The answer to their question was relatively short

But as I chugged on my mojito, I got another question that people tend to ask all the time. The question: how do you get really smart? Is there a shortcut? And how do you stay smart? That's what I would like to cover in this piece.

In my opinion, there are two ways to get smart—and one tool to make sure you get there efficiently.

The three elements we'll cover are:

– Learning all you can in your own field
– Learning all you can in an area where you have no expertise
– Working with limits

I wasn't always a copywriter. I didn't always write sales pages or articles.

While I was in university, I decided to earn some money by selling my cartoons to newspapers. A newspaper called the “Indian Post” had just started up in Mumbai, and I was encouraged to meet the features editor, Reena Kamath. Reena, or “Chips” as she was called, was this incredibly kind and educated person.

I was, in my own head a cartoonist, but not a very confident one. What Chips did was to give me enough confidence to push my art a lot more. She encouraged me to learn how to cartoon even better, so much so that I soon published my work in other magazines and newspapers.

By the time I was headed to graduation day, I had two daily comic strips in two big newspapers.

All of this confidence didn't mean a thing when I joined an advertising agency

“Yes, you're really good at cartoons,” said the creative director at the Leo Burnett agency, “but you realise that advertising and cartooning are completely different, right?”

Once again I was back in newbie land. I didn't know enough to get going in the world of copywriting. Fortunately for me, I was given the honorary title of junior copywriter, a small stipend and left alone to do pretty much anything I wanted.

Which is when I found the agency library

If you're in advertising, you'll fondly remember these massively thick books called the “One Show.” These doorstepping books contained hundreds of real-world advertising.

And so began my education in the world of advertising. Which brings us to the first point in this article: learning all you can in your own field.

The very concept of learning everything is, as you know, impossible

Yet, what choice do we have? Everything seems to rush along madly and just to keep on top of things is quite a task. But do we have a choice? Back when I was in the Leo Burnett agency, the library was enough to keep me busy for months on end, and today we have more in a folder of our computer than we had back then.

Armed with little choice, here's what I do

I read as much as I can. I'll plough through as many books as possible. Right now I have eight books sitting on my desk and at least four-five unread on the Kindle.

There are months when I'm reduced to reading books at a snail's pace, so I find it smarter to read magazines articles instead. However, my secret weapon is audio. If I'm standing in a queue at the supermarket, I'll be listening to audio. I go for walks every morning and chomp through an hour of audio.

Even while I'm making breakfast, I'll be listening to a podcast in one earbud. I'll tell you why. On the road, while walking, it's easier to focus on the podcast.

However, when I get home, my wife Renuka will suddenly pop in from the garden and want to give me some news. When I have both earbuds in, it feels a bit like “I'm busy, don't disturb me” and so I have just a single earbud on whenever I want to keep listening, without completely tuning out the world.

Does this mean you have to be learning all the time?

No, it doesn't. You can listen to music, watch videos that go nowhere or simply bounce back into Facebook. Even so, one of the key elements that make people smart is that they don't believe in inborn smartness.

The greatest champions on the planet aren't great because they were born that way. The gold medalists keep pushing themselves long after the silver medalist has gone home for the day.

I was pretty hopeless at cartoons

If you've seen my cartoons, you might not believe me, but I've seen some of the work coming out of the Psychotactics cartooning course. I can tell you quite categorically that even while drawing for the newspapers back in Mumbai, I wasn't as good at some of the work I've seen on the course.

So what makes a person better? It's constant learning. I was an aspiring copywriter, an aspiring marketer, an aspiring-everything you can think of. And this is the first piece of advice I gave the start ups.

What makes you great at your skill isn't some bolt of lightning coming down from the heavens. What makes you stand out is being super-knowledgeable in your field. Learning the pros and the cons of your profession instead of fluffing around trying to impress everyone else.

Is it obvious advice?

Sure it is. Everyone knows that you need to learn a lot in your own field. However, making the most of your time is where it counts. If you can read a transcript while standing in a queue at your supermarket, make sure you do just that. If you can make dosas for breakfast while reading a transcript, then go right ahead.

If on the other hand, you find you're struggling to keep up with your learning, add a bit of audio in your life. You don't have to remember everything you hear and I frankly don't. I have to put down the learning into an Evernote file so that I don't forget. To be brilliant, you have to find the ways t do things that seem impossible.

But do you have to pay attention to everything?

No, you don't. You want to get rid of the braggarts. The people who put those dollar signs on their site to entice you. Those people who make you feel like your subscriber list is so puny and how they're sending tens of thousands of subscribers through their funnels.

Even in the world of everything, you've got to pay attention to the people that fit your life and your philosophy. Which means that having a ear bud in your ear all the time may not suit you at all.

You may well be happy with learning a lot less so that you can be who you are. Even so, remember that the learning is non-negotiable. Do whatever it takes to learn a ton of stuff in your field, and you'll find that's what clients pay for.

Incredibly, tunnel vision learning won't get you as far as you could go. For that, you need to diverge and learn about areas where you have no expertise.

Part 2: Why You Need To Learn In Areas Where You Have No Expertise (And Have No Intention of Having Any Expertise).

In July 2013, I went through a life-changing experience.

My niece Marsha wasn't doing too well at school and as usual, everyone blames the student. I'm not a fan of that school of thought. I don't believe in bad students; I believe the responsibility of the student lies with the teacher.

It's one thing to make a statement and quite another to work through the problem. In this case, my goal was to make Marsha as good as, or better than any of the students in her year.

What I hadn't counted on was the fact that she was going to give me the lesson of my life

Before I started working with Marsha, I knew a lot about copywriting, about marketing etc. What I didn't know didn't bother me because I was in that tunnel focus trying to learn more about the things that affected my business.

When Marsha came along, she brought a thousand questions along with her. How are clouds formed? What are the names of all the types of clouds? Why can we see Venus so clearly at night? These questions led me down a road from which I have never recovered.

Do you know how Prussian Blue got into Hokusai's painting of the “Great Wave off Kanagawa”?

How does Google predict the common cold with astonishing accuracy? Why do wildebeest feast on one area of grass while ignoring the other? And what role does the volcano Oldoinyo lengai play in this epic migration? What are cyanobacteria? Why do geologists find the “boring billion” years not boring at all?

These questions have nothing to do with your business

Sitting down with Marsha—and we always sit down on the ground—near the sofa, taught me so much about the world around me. Then it went a bit further. My ability to write became better.

My ability to tell stories and do podcasts improved radically. In a short period of three years, I realised that I was a walking dummy. I knew a lot about the world of marketing and business but precious little else.

Creativity is the ability to connect two disconnected situations or objects together

As a cartoonist, as a comedian or artist, this something you learn quickly or you're doomed to failure. You can't just go around connecting the dots on your sheet of paper. The dots have to join from another sheet or even no sheet at all. To be creative means stepping into a world that's not your own.

When we look at hundreds of inventions, we see this creative streak of the disconnect showing up time and time again. Velcro, the rubber tyre, popsicles, microwave ovens, Post-it even matches were the result of random accidents.

Being smart involves knowing the world around you

History, geography, culture, geology—it all makes a huge difference to your work. Instead of just showing up in Egypt and losing yourself in the Pyramids, you might well notice that almost every block on the Giza pyramid has marine creatures.

There also happen to be sea creatures at the top of Mt.Everest. While this random stuff may seem to make no sense in isolation, you can quickly map the sequence of how things unfold.

Over time you get far more confidence and your brain becomes somewhat like a walking Internet

You realise you can see “shallow oceans” and “tectonic plate movements” where others just see “blocks of stone” at Giza. If that's all you could see and experience it would be fabulous. For me it's amazing to look up at a sunny sky and know, based on the number of cirrus clouds that it's going to get cold and rainy in 24 hours.

Just the confidence it brings you, knowing the world around you is fabulous, but it also brings connections to your work in ways you can't imagine until you start to learn about things that are widely divergent from your business.

The question is: Where do you get all of this information?

It's always been in books and magazines, of course. The New Yorker magazine has almost always jumped madly from malaria to construction; automation to the Suez Canal; The Beatles to Vermeer. And today they continue to do so like so many other magazines that cover a range of extremely interesting topics.

Equally, though are books that you can get on Amazon. Books that explore the concepts of meditation, puppet masters, alongside the Masai. Books and magazines are only part of the mix and you can learn from podcasts of every kind.

I listen to the New Yorker Hour of course, which tackles anything from Venezuela's crisis to a fascinating interview with Bruce Springsteen.

To be single minded in your pursuit of knowledge in your own field is a good idea

However, it's when you step out that you learn a lot more, become more confident and almost always make a connection that leads to a better life. You can almost guarantee that learning more in your field makes for some sort of advancement you can measure.

It's much harder to justify the time spent learning about volcanoes, clouds, Ayurveda and wildebeest. In fact, other than just random facts, it seems like a complete waste of time.

I'd advise you to go down the track of the randomness, even when your work-related learning already demands more time than you have.

To become smart, you need to learn. You need to implement

And sticking to the work-related stuff is already quite a task. Putting on the additional burden of learning stuff that's not remotely related to you may seem crazy, but I'd say take it on.

Which brings us to the most pertinent question of all: where do you find the time? Sure it's a great idea to learn about your work and about the world around us, but where's the time? And this was the most persistent question of all at the dinner. The answer is remarkably simple and leads right into the three-month vacation.

Part 3: Working with limits: the real secret to becoming smart

Imagine you had four months to write a book

Do you think given four months, you'd write the book in three months? This was the question we had to ask ourselves when we started Psychotactics back in August 2002. We were keen to run our business in a way that we had control over the business instead of the other way around. How could we take so much time off and still make our business successful? The answer, it seems, was so simple that it was hard to believe.

Put limits on your schedule—that's it

The most frequently asked question I get is: how do you manage to take three months off in a year? The answer is: we assume our year is nine months long. Yes, read that again: we assume our year is nine months long. Now imagine you've finally started up a business or let's assume you've been in business for a while. How long is your year?

The concept of limits is what makes you smart

If you look around the Internet today, you get two sets of people. People who seem to be working like maniacs to keep doubling their income or those who are supposedly living the Internet lifestyle but still check e-mail, do work at the beach etc while on vacation.

To each their own, I suppose, but hear me out. What makes your brain smart is downtime. Having time to rest allows all that connected and unconnected stuff come together. The brain works best when it's at rest. The way to give the brain a rest is to enforce limits.

Imagine you have only 90 minutes to write an article. What can you do in those 90 minutes?

Imagine you have only a limited number of ingredients in your pantry. How do you whip up a delicious meal?

And imagine you have only 9 months in a year. How do you finish all your work (and a lot more sometimes) without working every single day of the year? If you put limits on yourself, you start to become a lot smarter.

These limits don't have to stop at learning

Today we had a couple of people come around to give us new garbage stickers. The Auckland council is testing some sort of garbage system and as part of the trial we had to buy $20 worth of stickers that would last about 2 months.

When these guys came along to give us new stickers, we still had the same original bunch. In over two months we hadn't needed to use the garbage bin at all.

How's that possible, you say? Same as the three-month vacation, isn't it?

You think a three-month vacation would be impossible but we've done it almost year after year since 2004. The garbage situation takes a little planning. We take our own cloth bags everywhere. We take a container box when we dine out for takeaways (you may call it food to go).

We refuse all coffee in paper cups and have our own glass/plastic cups or we use the ceramic cups at the cafe. We don't take straws, plastic bags and will not buy stupid cucumbers wrapped in cling wrap. Ergo, little or no garbage. The rest of the stuff goes in the compost bin. Impossible? Of course not.

The key is to have a mind that imposes limits

If you really want to change your world, you have to believe you really have no time. Instead of a seven day week, make it a five day week and refuse to work on weekends.

Instead of a 12 month year, nine months should do nicely. Instead of trying to double your income all the time like some senseless woodpecker, try fixing your income to one that allows for tax, savings and a comfortable life.

Smarts come from limits

They also come from learning: both learning in the areas of expertise and totally outside the expertise range. The vast flow of humanity just amble along without really putting in the effort to make their work smarter—or even their breaks smart.

And so it goes, year in and year out without too much of change. It's easy to do average work and just be a hero on the Internet (or even off the Internet) today. It takes a smarter mind to do something really outstanding.

So what's the one thing you can do today?

Limits. Put limits on the world you live in and you'll see how you might never have much use for that massive garbage can. You may also be able to do almost all, if not more work in just 9 months of the year. You may be able to write, draw, sing and dance in a fixed time frame. And then you might have a much better life. A much smarter life.

All of this discussion came from that dinner with those startups. They set down the path of work; we went off tangent into this topic which was totally disconnected. And we could have stayed all night, but we had to leave. We had limits.

Try it. Get smarter in less time. And yes, start working towards a nine-month year.

You've told yourself you shouldn't be a perfectionist.

Yet time and time again you head back to getting things done—perfectly. And in the process you  get nothing done.
Find out :How To Smother Perfectionism With A Timer

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Did you know that landing pages fail almost at the headline stage?

We’re all told to create landing pages. So why do they fail?

The answer, it seems, can be found at any international airport. When planes land, they don’t land all at once. They land one at a time. Yet on a landing page, we scrunch the issues together. We throw everything at the page. That’s a mistake. And this episode tells you why it’s a mistake and how to fix it.

Click here to read: How To Write A Sales Page
https://www.psychotactics.com/writing-sales-pages/

It might seem like perseverance is a good thing. We've been told to persist in the face of odds. Yet, there are times when you should stop.

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

Find out why perseverance can be a real pain, and when it can be a blessing.

Click here to read: Why Persevere Even When Failure is Certain
https://www.psychotactics.com/why-persevere-fails/

Resistance seems like an overbearing force in our lives

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

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

Click here to read: How To Beat The Resistance Game
https://www.psychotactics.com/resistance-detests-groups/

There are two options in life: greatness or mediocrity. But greatness seems so elusive, even so pompous. How do you call your work “great”?
How do you even know or benchmark “greatness?”.

And can a small business achieve greatness or do you have to be a dominant player like Apple, Disney and Walmart?

Click here to read: Good to Great
https://www.psychotactics.com/good-to-great/