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.