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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