There are two options in life: greatness or mediocrity. But greatness seems so elusive, even so pompous. How do you call your work "great"? How do you even know or benchmark "greatness?". And can a small business achieve greatness or do you have to be a dominant player like Apple, Disney and Walmart. In this episode we get right to the root of greatness and how the book "Good to Great" by Jim Collins changed my life. But instead of the massive journey to greatness, this episode shows you a tiny path. A path most of us can manage with just a little bit of effort.

A life of mediocrity is hardly worth living. Here's the pathway to greatness.

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Useful Resources / To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/79 / / Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com / / Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza / / Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic

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Part 1: The Hedgehog Principle
Part 2: Preserving the Core + Stimulating Progress
Part 3: Big, Hairy Audacious Goal—The BHAG
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.

Useful Resources

5000bc: How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems
Why Happiness Eludes You: 3 Obstacles That We Need To Overcome
Find out: Do We Really Need To Start With Why?

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The  Transcript

“This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.”

Around the autumn of 1890, Daniel Burnham was given a project.

Burnham was an architect—an extremely well known architect—in Chicago. And he’d been given a job like no other. He was expected to turn a boggy square mile into what would be the spotlight of the world. He was put in charge of the World’s Columbian Exposition.

He just had one tiny problem—the Eiffel Tower.
On March 31, 1889, Paris had had it’s own Exposition. And it quickly surpassed the Washington Monument to become the then tallest man-made structure in the world. Burhnam had the unenviable job of surpassing the hoopla around the Eiffel Tower, but no one had a clue what to do.

“Make no little plans”, he said to his team of engineers, but they could come up with little to rival the magnificence of the Eiffel Tower. Of course there were proposals: a tower garlanded with rails to distant cities, another tower from whose top guests would be pushed off in chairs (pretty much like today’s bungee jumping). And Eiffel himself proposed an idea for the Chicago exposition—a bigger tower than the one in Paris.
How could the Chicago Exposition outshine the now most famous monument in the world—the Eiffel Tower? It seemed almost impossible to come up with something that would rival the French monument. An engineer called Ferris has the answer.

The ideas were going nowhere and the Chicagoans were pulling their hair out, when a 33 year old engineer from Pittsburgh came up with an idea: how about a huge revolving steel wheel? He came up with sketches, added additional specifications and then shared the idea with Burnham.

But Burnham was not impressed.
The slender rods of the wheel were too fragile. It would be madness to carry people to a height taller than the Statue of Liberty in such a fragile wheel. But Burnham wasn’t just dealing with any ol’ engineer. He was dealing with George Washington Gale Ferris Jr—who would forever be associated with the Ferris wheel. Ferris was so convinced his idea would work that he spent $25,000 of his own money, hired more engineers and recruited investors. And consider that $25,000 would be worth over $650,000 in today’s money.

Over a 100,000 parts went into the Ferris wheel. And an 89,320 pound axle had to be hoisted onto two towers 140 feet in the air. On June 21, 1893 when it was launched, it was a stunning success. As the exposition went through the next three week, more than 1.4 million paid 50 cents for a 20-minute ride.

George Washington Gale Ferris had literally reinvented the wheel.

The year we moved to New Zealand, I had to reinvent my own wheel. You see, I wasn’t in marketing. I had no plans of being in marketing. I was already an established cartoonist back in Mumbai, India and when I moved to New Zealand I pretty much expected to continue to draw cartoons. In fact I was so determined to take that cartoon career forward, that when we moved I had over 100 kilos worth of books shipped. These were no ordinary books. These were the books on graphic design and cartooning that I’d accumulated over the years. Plus, there were brochures. Before I left India, I had no idea what New Zealand held for me.

So I printed business cards—as you do
But also lavish four colour brochures, postcards and yes, stationery that I could use when I got to New Zealand. All of this material had to be shipped by air—not by sea—because I was in a big hurry to get going in this new country.

Yet, almost a year later, I had to reinvent what I was doing—and it was all because of one book.
That book, “Good to Great” has sold over 2.5 million hardcover copies. But more importantly, it was the catalyst in my own reinvention. In 2000 as I got on a plane back to India (I had to go back and tidy up things I’d left undone), I had loads of time to read the book and mull over the ideas. And as I’ve mentioned before in articles and podcasts, I realised that I would never reach my greatness in cartooning. To me, the pinnacle of cartooning was the comic strip, “Calvin and Hobbes” by Bill Watterson. If I couldn’t get up to those lofty heights, it wasn’t feeding my greatness appetite. And so I turned to something I was getting exceedingly good at doing—creating taglines for small businesses. Without realising it, I was wandering down the aisle of marketing. The book—and that 19 hour flight—it did it for me. It put me on my quest for what I’d consider my “greatness journey”.

But just as it set the benchmarks, it also raised a ton of questions.
Are there benchmarks to know that you’re moving from good to great? How do you know what you’re choosing will end up being great? With all the stories of greatness bouncing around Apple, Boeing, Disney and Walmart, how can a small business owner get to greatness, without becoming big and dominant?

Big questions—and it’s best to keep the answers simple. Deep, yet simple.
Let’s take a trip and explore the three core elements required to get your own Ferris wheel going—even when the odds seem stacked against you.

The three elements we’ll cover are:

The Hedgehog Principle
Preserving the Core + Stimulating Progress
Big, Hairy Audacious Goal—The BHAG.

Avis—the car rental company—was pretty much in the doldrums.

Back in 1961, it was losing $3.2 million a year and there seemed to be no way to beat the domination of their biggest rival—Hertz. And the two companies had been at each others throats since the mid-1940s, when Air Force officer, Warren Avis created a niche out of thin air. As he travelled around, Warren Avis  realized that most car companies were downtown—not a very convenient place to get a car if you just flew into a city. Business travel was growing steadily and many executives would touch down, rent a car, drive to their meetings and drop the car back at the airport on the very same day.

Hertz was not impressed
They continued to run their rental car business downtown, as if Avis didn’t exist. Yet, over time, they found Avis gobbling up chunks of their business. It seemed logical to simply replicate what Avis had done. With this move, Hertz signalled the start of the rivalry that exists to this day. But then, along came 1962 and an creative agency called Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB). The copywriter team of Paula Greene and Helmut Krone created an advertising campaign that would take Avis from losing $3.2 million to earning $1.2 million. What’s more, it would rock Hertz’ smugness to its very core.

From 1963 to 1966, Hertz smug look turned to paralysis
The market share percentage gap between the two car companies shrunk from 61-29 to 49-36. The “We’re only No.2. We try Harder” immediately captured the attention of the public. But why did this “We try harder” campaign really work? When we look at the Hedgehog Concept outlined in “Good to Great”, the answer is more than apparent.

The Hedgehog principle consists of three pertinent questions:
– What can you be the best in the world at?
– What drives your economic engine?
– What are you deeply passionate about?

Avis could easily answer those questions—but only once it had the new ad campaign going
It was the best in the world at “bending over backwards” to make car customers happy. After all it was only No.2, and couldn’t afford to rest on its laurels. This concept of “trying harder” got the entire company to indeed try harder. And yes, we all know how their bleeding balance sheet made a sharp U-turn into decent profitability. They got the “best in the world” covered, the “economic engine” was purring away. Only one thing remained—the passion. The “we try harder” might have been just a slogan, but it was a slogan that drove the passion—and if the slogan is right, it often does drive the passion! Avis ticked all the three boxes, and they were well on their way to scaring the heebie-jeebies out of Hertz.

Notice how money—or the economic engine—isn’t really the focus of greatness?
Money is important, that’s for sure. A company gasps and coughs it’s way into oblivion if it can’t fire up that economic engine. And yet, it’s more than clear that for most of us, at least, money is not the driving factor. All those website owners that show you how their income doubled and quintupled are still sitting on the same sofa; they’re still typing on that same yellowed keyboard. Yes, they may have doubled or quintupled the size of their house or boat, but when money becomes the only focus, there’s no time to enjoy the good stuff in life. Which is why the “best in the world” journey needs to start with what makes you deliriously happy. It’s the stuff that wakes you up and keeps you going, no matter what. Your work becomes your passion and the complete opposite of trying to outsource everything and doing as little as possible. Money helps enormously in getting you to your goal, but the passion and desire is what’s behind the wheel.

And this is where confusion comes bouncing through the door
When I quit my career in cartooning, I was doing very well indeed. I’d moved to New Zealand and despite being in a brand new market, the profit for the first year was $75,000. Picture me sitting at my computer, drawing cartoons, listening to music and then taking a nap and you get the idea. It wasn’t exactly like I was struggling to put food on the table. Still, the moment you decide you want to change things—the moment I decided I couldn’t beat “Calvin and Hobbes”, I was in trouble.

I’m good at a lot of things. I whizz my way around Photoshop, I can cook exceedingly well, you’ve probably seen my food and travel photos on Facebook—and you’re getting an idea of the looming problem, aren’t you? The moment you can do more than one thing, you’re not sure where to go. The journey to greatness seems to run right into a pool of quicksand.

So how do you get yourself out of this mess and back on track?
I’d decided I didn’t want to do cartooning—at least at that point in time—and I wanted to take this leap into marketing. I didn’t know much about marketing, but that minor detail wasn’t keeping me up at night. Still, I was in a fog—after all marketing is this big, nameless, faceless profession and I hadn’t a clue what the journey to greatness was going to look like, or whether one existed at all.

And that’s when I ran into a subset of marketing.

A subset is what starts the journey to greatness
My story was quite accidental—as yours may well be. I joined this networking group called BNI. We’d meet every Friday, enjoy breakfast and hand out referrals. And crucial as all this referral giving was to me at the time, one factor was even more pivotal to help me on my journey. BNI has this strange custom called “the dance”—as in “dancing with a partner”. In this so-called “dance”, you go across to visit another of the members. For instance, I might go and meet the real estate agent at her office. Or another week I might end up talking to the financial planner in the group.

Being new and enjoying this extroverted behaviour, I binged on the “dance”
I started meeting several members of the BNI group in relatively quick succession. They’d tell me what they did—often spending between 10-20 minutes explaining the details. Then I’d ponder over what they just said, and boil it down to a single line. In effect, I’d given them a tagline—a working tagline that would elicit curiosity and get their prospects interested.

The first time I encapsulated their 20 minute speech into a single line, I wasn’t aware of what I was doing.
Twenty or thirty tagline later, with everyone telling me how “great” I was at taglines, I decided to make that my entry point into marketing. I wasn’t going to be the best in the world at marketing—and no one can ever take such a title. But I could create a subset. And that’s because a subset is simpler than a well-laid out, world domination plan. Which means that you’re going to make a career out of teaching a program like InDesign, don’t take on every tool bar in the program. Just teach clients how to create an amazing e-book in under an hour.

The Hedgehog Concept

If you’re going to be the best in the world at WordPress sites, you’re headed for chaos.
But take on a subset and you could be the designer that gets clients to their destination in just three steps. Even the all-time greats in the history of mankind—take Michelangelo for instance—he made the statue of David his subset. He was headed towards the magnificence of the Sistine Chapel in time, but to start on that journey of greatness, he had to take on carving just the statue of David.

Once you deal with a subset, passion almost force-feeds you with energy
Avis found its passion once it had the subset of “trying harder” instead of the grand scheme of “trying to do everything”. I found my subset quite by accident while taking on taglines. And the moment you streamline your idea into one tiny bit, you’ll get enormous control over that bit—and the passion faucet will begin to flow. You’ll read more about the subset, practice it longer and harder and it will take over your life. Which effectively means you’re done with two elements of the Hedgehog principle all at once. You have your passion—thanks to your subset—and it’s put you well and truly on the road to personal and professional greatness.

That leaves just the looming question. Will it drive your economic engine? Will it pay the bills? And how soon?

I didn’t know the answer to that question of the economic engine
In fact, I did something very silly in my quest for “being the best in the world”. I quit cartooning—yup, just like that. One fine day, I decided I wasn’t going to do any cartoons. And then something extremely strange happened. No one called me for a cartoon project any more. Right until that moment I’d been filling that balance sheet with a decent profit, and suddenly I didn’t get a single call or e-mail for another cartoon project.

Be aware that I was drawing stuff for ad agencies, magazine covers, local councils and private clients. And yet, it stopped almost as if I had taken a full page ad in the newspaper that said, “Sean D’Souza doesn’t want to draw cartoons any more. Stop bugging him.”

My dream had come true, but I didn’t have a buffer.

The buffer isn’t just money
It’s also the buffer of knowledge and of confidence. Remember, I wasn’t a marketing guy, I was a cartoonist. That thought stays in your head and seriously undermines your confidence. Getting to the library, stacking up 30 books at a time was top priority. We’re talking about economic engines here, and knowledge plays a big role in how you get paid. Having the skills to run a business is what allows you to make that engine vroom. I had to teach myself how to write great articles, how to create compelling copy—and yes, how to speak. That buffer was important for my economic engine, but money played its role too.

I jumped right into marketing and out of a business
I’d spend a chunk of time beefing up on the learning and the skills. But I hadn’t considered the factor that everything takes time to turnaround. It was a rash move, and luckily Renuka had a decent job. That paid the bills, the mortgage and let me fumble forward toward this “greatest in the world” dream.

Um, Renuka also quit her job and joined Psychotactics a few months later, but that buffer was all we needed. We were now on a trajectory to align ourselves with the Hedgehog Principle. Like Michelangelo, we had to carve one David at a time. Like Avis, we had to “try harder” one car at a time. We were passionate about what we did. And the clients started to trickle in.

But the Hedgehog principle itself, isn’t enough
Jim Collins stresses a second more important factor. In fact, he considers this second factor to be the most important of all the material he’s written over the years. It’s called: Preserving the core AND stimulating progress.

Let’s find out just what this means for you and your small business.

Preserve the Core AND Stimulate Progress

Recently a client called Rosa wrote to us with a request.

“I would have preferred to read the series on Dartboard Pricing in ePub,” she said. She made it clear it was a request, not a demand. Which brings up a whole new set of problems for us at Psychotactics. Most business books are designed with text in mind and may contain a few graphics. Our books aren’t designed that way at all. They have dozens of cartoons and under every cartoon is a caption. In The Brain Audit alone there are almost 100 cartoons and corresponding captions. In a PDF, this layout is easy-peasy. Create the book in InDesign and export it as a PDF and it maintains its design integrity. Try to do the same thing for an ePub and it’s like stepping in poo.

It’s a tedious, frustrating process to get all the graphics to align the way they should
The easier way is to just make a quick excuse, apologies and move on. After all, it isn’t like 90% of our audience is asking for an ePub. It’s just a stray request, isn’t it? It’s simple to ignore the request and get on with the important task of doing whatever it is we do. But that’s where the problem lies, doesn’t it? We’ve ignored the concept of progress. Almost all of us today read on a tablet or our phones. I know I do, my wife does, even my mother in law who ranted and raved about computers—she now loves her iPad. And PDFs work on tablet devices and phones, but they’re super clunky.

Sadly that’s not the only problem
Jim Collins talks about two elements: preserving the core and stimulating progress. And he goes to great lengths to stress the AND in between both of them. So all of us have to stand back and ask ourselves: What’s our core? The core of Psychotactics has been the factor of “consumption”. Any one can create attraction and conversion. It’s super-hard to get clients to consume what they’ve bought from you. Books, courses, workshops—we spend hours, days and weeks trying to figure out how to achieve a skill.

The cartoons, the captions in the book—they’re not just a design concept. They’re placed there as memory hooks; as a method of summary. They need to be exactly where they are in the books and courses. We could remove them and easily create an ePub like most ePubs, but that would fit in with our core. Collins says it has to be an AND. We have to preserve the core AND stimulate progress.

This principle is clearly frustrating and pulls in opposite directions.
When you’re starting out, you don’t have any legacy issues in place. You create a business the way you want to shape it. And the core and the progress moves along nicely. It’s when you “grow up” that you have to worry about how all the past has to fit in with the future. The longer you’ve been in business, the greater the past, and the more the past has to merge with an ever changing future.

Take Nokia for instance
You can almost hear the sound of the Nokia ring, can’t you? In the early 2000s, all of us would have at one point in time run into, or owned a Nokia. Nokia was no slouch in realm of being super-progresssive. They were into paper, then electricity and bounced from there to rubber, galoshes and finally were the most dominant phone manufacturer on the planet. In the early 1990’s they had a clear and accurate vision of the future. They saw the coming of the cell phone, dumped all their businesses and stuck with the cell phone. And then, just for good measure, they invented the first smart phone. That amazing device you take photos with, use to find your way around and yes, make phone calls—Nokia was on the ball way back in 1996. They even built a prototype of an Internet-enabled phone at the end of the 90’s.

And then they got stuck in a loop
They failed to see the link between their core—which was to make really simple phones—and the future. The future was software. The core of their legacy was hardware. They spent millions of dollars turning out failure after failure. They believed so much in their hardware that they just couldn’t figure out the software issues. And down they went, ring and all, finally selling their company to Microsoft.

To go from good to great we have to ask ourselves
What’s the core of our business. What do we stand for? What will we never change, never compromise on—and yet how will we step into the future when it presents itself to us. Most of us rarely have a problem with core values. Once we’ve spent enough time in our business, we know what we stand for, but what we fail to prepare ourselves for is the oncoming storm. We keep doing things the way we’ve always done.

The worst three words we repeat over and over, when faced with change is: I know that, I know that, I know that.

I thought I knew a lot about podcasts
After all I’d rode the early wave of podcasts when Apple first introduced them. And then in 2008/09 we decided to pull the plug on the podcast. When clients—and one client in particular—kept asking me to create a podcast, I’d ignore the comment. As far as I was concerned, podcasts were a thing of the past. I wasn’t ready to listen and the years ticked away while we busied ourselves with the core of what we’d always done.

Today, the “Three Month Vacation” podcast is one of the biggest joys in my day
I love writing, I love presentations, but it’s the podcast that connects me to a medium I love. And in turn the podcast connects us to our clients in ways that not possible on paper, or through books. The podcast is the closest we come to an offline workshop. But I wasn’t interested in the “future”. As far as I was concerned, podcasts were the distant past. And today we know those thoughts, that strategy was wrong. We see the enormous number of clients who find the podcast, then sign up to the newsletter. At our offline workshops over 50% of the audience listens religiously to the podcast. The podcast fit in so nicely with our core. And was the medium of the future.

Even so, it’s not possible to chase every rainbow
Technology moves ahead at a blinding pace. You can’t play with every new phenomenon. Which is why we have to go back to the Hedgehog principle. What can you be the best in the world in? What are you deeply passionate about? What drives your economic engine? In the subset of podcasting, we achieve all three.

And this is what you’ll have to do as well. Find your core AND stimulate progress, with your eye always on the passion. The passion is what drives your business today and will continue to do so in the future. If you don’t wake up crazy with happiness, then you’re not headed towards greatness. It’s the reason I moved on from cartooning back in the early 2000s. I wasn’t waking up happy as a lark—and so I had to find something else.

Which, interestingly, takes us to our third element: The hairy, audacious goal—oh, it’s big too. That makes it the BHAG (pronounced: bee-hag).

The BHAG

Until the moment Greig Bebner set to work on his kitchen table with a glue gun and some kite material, the basic design of the modern umbrella hadn’t changed since 1928. They come in all sorts of colours, shapes and fancy gizmos, but the core elements of the umbrella are the same—and they don’t work. The moment a gust of wind comes along, you hear cursing, then more cursing and finally the umbrella being thrown on the pavement.

So Greg set about on a big, hairy, audacious goal—a BHAG.

He wanted an umbrella that would stand up to the crazy wind and rain on One Tree Hill.
Now if you’ve ever visited Auckland, New Zealand, you’re likely to have your hair tossed around wildly on a windy One Tree Hill day. It’s certainly no place to open an umbrella. Then to push that BHAG even further, he tested the Blunt at Force 12 (117 km/h) which is the maximum setting of the test wind tunnel. The umbrella stood up to the punishment with ease.

But why did the umbrella work so flawlessly?
It starts with the BHAG. It’s almost a Star Trek kind of goal—to go where no man gone before. It’s not a namby-pamby set of goals. It’s one overarching factor that scares the heebie-jeebies out of you as a business owner.
A windy day on One Tree Hill in the middle of a storm. That’s a good testing ground for an umbrella.

Sometimes this goal is restricted to your product, sometimes it’s a lot bigger.
Like Akio Morita, the co-founder and former chairman of Sony Corporation. He was working on a revolutionary product called the Walkman. Until the Walkman was introduced on July 1, 1979. Until the Walkman showed up, portable music players were non-existent. Even though the Walkman stuttered with disappointing sales in the first month, it went on to sell over 400 million units.

But Morita’s goal wasn’t just to sell a ton of Walkmans
His goal was a lot loftier. Before Sony introduced a ton of extremely sophisticated equipment, Japan was considered to be a backward country. It was associated with paper parasols and shoddy imitations. Akio Morita wanted to turn that perception around so that “Made in Japan” commanded respect and was associated with high quality. And he succeeded, with Sony at the forefront of his BHAG. In 2014, A Harris poll showed Sony was the No. 1 brand name among American consumers, ahead of American companies like General Electric and Coca-Cola.

At Psychotactics, we have a BHAG too
The goal is to get rid of information for information sake and replace it with skill, instead. We’re drowning in information, and yet every book, every course brings even more information to the table. But is that what we really want? Or do we want the skill instead. We want to write articles, create sales pages, be able to sell at higher prices. We want to learn to cook, draw, paint or acquire skills that make us look, feel and be smarter. A BHAG has to be hairy, audacious, and bigger than anyone thinks possible.

Starbucks had a BHAG too
It was to open up a new Starbucks cafe every single day of the year. But soon enough, Starbucks was running into trouble. Can you see why? It’s big, hairy and audacious to open up a Starbucks every single day, but does it inspire any passion? Does it feel like you’re somehow changing the world you live in, let alone the world around you?
The BHAG wasn’t to make Sony the star, but instead to make Japan and Japanese products top-notch once again.

Every business should have a BHAG.
Something that sits there in the corner challenging you to become better—not necessarily bigger—than you are. To create a Ferris Wheel or an Eiffel Tower. To create artworks of enduring magnificence as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt did. And the way to create that BHAG is to scare yourself. To know that everyone says there are things you’re not supposed to achieve. That these things are impossible.

And yet, you do it, because it’s the most inspiring thing to do!
Combined with the Hedgehog principle, preserving the core and stimulating progress, you have a system in place that can take your business from good to great. And even as you embark on this journey, you know that you will forever be on the road to making things better, not necessarily bigger, but always better.

Better—it’s a great place to be!

The action plan and summary coming in the next episode.

Click here to listen to part 2:  Good to Great: How To Escalate The Path To Greatness
http://www.psychotactics.com/path-to-greatness/

Storytelling has a lot of guidelines and rules. Yet, some of the critical elements slip under the radar. You don't realise storytelling elements and secrets that are hiding in plain sight. And storytellers can't always explain what they're doing?and so these elements of storytelling get left out. And yet, they're incredibly powerful. Like for instance, the concept of "anticipation" before the "problem". It's nowhere to be found? Unless of course you listen to this episode on how to tell riveting stories. Welcome to Goldilocks land!
http://www.psychotactics.com/three-elements-storytelling/

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In this episode Sean talks about how to create stories that are very powerful.

Part 1: How the ‘The Wall’ changes the pace of a story
Part 2: The power in using the ’The Reconnect’
Part 3: Why anticipation is so critical in storytelling
Earlier Recording: Right click and ‘save as’ to download this episode
Re-Release: Right click and ‘save as’ to download this episode

Useful Resources and Links

The Brain Audit: How to introduce your product in a language the customer understands
Read or listen to: How to double your writing speed
Special Bonus: How to design the pricing grid for your product

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This is The 3 Month Vacation, and I’m Sean D’Souza.

I was about 2 years old when I first had a bout of convulsions. It didn’t start up as convulsions. I was standing there on the balcony, looking out on the road, and then I fell off the stool that I was standing on. As the story goes, I ran to my mother. She noticed that I was having convulsions, and she panicked. Now, panic would be the wrong word to use because what she did next was bundled me in her arms and ran with me to the hospital.

To put you in the frame of mind of what India was when I was growing up, there were no phones or most people didn’t have phones. They didn’t have cars. You probably had a scooter if you were well off. That’s just how things were back then. What she had to do was run a distance of 2 kilometers, maybe 3 kilometers to get to the nearest hospital. When she got to the hospital, they wouldn’t admit me because I had meningitis and the hospital was not in the position to deal with cases of meningitis. Somehow, she managed to get them to admit me.

At that point in time, they asked for the mother. Now, my mother was very young at that point in time and they assumed that she was somehow the sister. They said, “No. No. No. You have to get the mother.” This is very odd in India because people tend to get married very early in India and yet they were insisting that they had to have the mother before they could go ahead with anything. There I was, not doing so well and the hospital authorities wouldn’t go ahead without dealing with the mother. Now, she convinced them but once they admitted me, there was one more problem. The doctor wasn’t so sure that I would survive the meningitis. He told my parents, and by that point, my father was there as well. He said, “I have to tell you this. Your son will either die or he’ll go mad.”

What you just heard was the story of my youth. The question is, why did you keep listening? Why did the story work? What is it that caused you to pay attention and not move away from the story?

In today’s episode, we’re going to cover storytelling elements: How to Avoid Boring Articles? The core of avoiding boring articles is to be able to tell stories, but stories are useful for presentations. They’re useful for books. They’re useful for webinars. They’re useful for pretty much everything. What happens is most of us load up our information with facts and figures, and those are very tiring but stories, they encapsulate everything. We’re going to learn how to create stories that are very powerful.

The 3 things we’re going to cover today are one, the wall; second, the reconnect; and third, the anticipation.

Part 1: The Wall

Let’s start off with the first one which is the wall. Every afternoon, every weekday, I go through the same routine. I pick up my niece from school. She’s now 11, that’s Marsha. We speak about stuff in the car. We do multiplication tables. Recently, we’ve been doing storytelling. I usually when I asked her, “Tell me of story about what happened in the weekend.” She goes, “Nothing.” Then I say, “What happened in class?” She goes, “Nothing.” This is the interesting part. You think that there’s nothing happening in your life, but there is a lot happening all the time. Then, we have to zero in onto one little thing and make it interesting, just about anything becomes interesting in the way you dealt it.

I said, “Tell me about your piano class on Saturday.” Her little face brightens up and the smile comes on, and she goes, “I didn’t practice before going to piano class on Saturday. Then when I got to the piano class, I was really afraid because I thought I would the play the piece really badly. But as it appears, I played quite well. In fact, I played it so well that the piano teacher said, ‘I’m going to put you on a more advanced piece.’ Of course, once she gave me the advanced piece, I couldn’t play it. She said, ‘No. No. No. No. No. You’re playing it in the wrong key.’ I should try to play in the right key, but it didn’t worked.”

The piano teacher gave her another chance. Of course, she was not playing the piece well, so they went back to the old piece, which is what she had practice. Marsha was quite happily playing her old piece, but playing it by ear, not reading the notes. Happy as a luck when she looked at the corner of the room and there was her mother. According to Marsha, her mother was glaring at her because Marsha hadn’t improved and she was back to square one. How could the day have been worse for Marsha?

Now, that was a really short story. Why would you hook in to the story? The reason the story works is because there were these little blips along the way, what we call the wall. What is the wall? The wall is … Think of it as like a heart monitor. The heart monitor, when it’s absolutely flat, will go “Beeeep.” There is no sound. Then when the heart is beating, it will “Dub dub, dub dub, dub dub.” There is this little spike that jumps in every now and then, and that creates a wall. That creates that fact that you know that your heart is actually working. This is what happens in storytelling. Most people tell a story in a very boring fashion. The reason why they tell that is because there story would just go from one end to the other without the spikes.

What were the spikes in Marsha’s story? The first spike was the fact that she was afraid she hadn’t practiced. That got your attention. Then she went on to a new problem, which is that she had to go there to the class and then play a new piece. Then when she couldn’t play that new piece, she ran into a whole bunch of problems. She was thrown back to the old piece, which was a good thing, at least, to Marsha’s eyes but bad thing in the mother’s eyes, which is why the mother was glaring at her from the corner of the room. Then as Marsha finished the story, she says, “How could the day get worse?” This is a perfect, little story just told from one end to the other with all of these little blips, these little blips, the other wall. The other wall that you have to climb across so you can get into the alley and there’s a wall there and you have to climb over that wall to get to the other side. This is what creates interest.

The wall can be an obstacle. It can be something funny. It can be something unusual. As long as it changes the pace of the story, it becomes the wall because you now have to get over that wall onto the other side before the story can continue. More stories don’t run that way. For instance, if we look at Marsha’s story, we could say, “We went to piano class. On the way, I almost slipped in a banana peel, but then I recovered because I wasn’t feeling so well. Anyway, I got to the class and I played my piece. Then, I played the second piece.” You can see where the story is going, but at one point in time, when she slipped in the banana peel, you got that spike in your head. Even though you might not have thought about it at the time, there was that spike and you see the spike everywhere.

What’s more important is the spike has been with you right since you heard your first story being read to you as a kid. If you look at something like Red Riding Hood, it’s a very simple story. The girl goes to her grandmother’s house and she’s got this bag of goodies that her mother has packed for the grandmother. What happens along the way? Red Riding Hood runs into the wolf. Before that, there was no problem at all. The forest was not that intimidating. She got flowers along the way. Then, along came the wolf. The wolf creates the spike in the story. Now, this is a wall that she has to get over. She has to solve that problem.

If you look at all the stories that you heard or have told your kids, you will find a consistency in this wall, this obstacle, which means that we have to create stories with these spikes, with these obstacles. Then, we have to climb over these obstacles or rather take the reader or the listener across the obstacle and then to the other side.

Here’s what I do with Marsha. I make her sit down with a sheet of paper. Then I get her to draw a line across. At the starting point, she has, say, maybe she’s going to piano class. The ending point is whatever happens at the end. In between, I get her to draw little dots or little spikes, whatever you want to call them, and she has to put in those obstacles. As soon as she puts in those obstacles, we fill in the rest later. The point is once you identify those obstacles, you are able to turn out far better stories because now what you’ve done is you have created that bounce, you have created an obstacle, you have created a wall, and of course, people have to then go over it.

When I started out this podcast, I started out with a story about meningitis. I didn’t spend time explaining to you how I was looking out of the window. I went straight into the bounce, straight into the wall. I had convulsions. I fell down. I then had to run to my mother. You have been thrown right in the middle of this bounce. Of course, the bounce didn’t stop until we got to the hospital because now you’re thinking, “Okay, things are going to get okay.” Then, we have another wall. They won’t admit me to the hospital. Then, we get over that wall. Now, they were asking for the mother because they don’t believe that my mother was the mother, that they thought that she was the sister. Then, when all of those problems have been resolved, the doctor says the chances are not good. What we have of these bounces all along the way, these walls all along the way, and you have to cross over, get over these walls to create a great story. This is just the first element of storytelling.

Part 2: The Reconnect

The second one is the concept called the reconnect. What is the reconnect? Right at the end of the previous section, which is when I was talking about the wall, I went right back to the story of meningitis. Immediately, your brain went from wherever it was right back to that original story. This is what storytellers use very effectively. They use the reconnect. They connect back to something they told you a while ago. It’s very powerful because that creates a bounce of its own. It takes you from where you are to where you used to be. If you’re to watch the movie Star Wars, there is this concept called the force. It’s used the force. Luke used the force. How many times does the word force show up in Star Wars? Apparently, more than 16 times. There you are in the cinema or watching the movie on a DVD or maybe on your computer, but you run into this concept of the force. Every time that reference to the force shows up and you don’t really notice it, but it just shows up, it takes you back to wherever you originally heard it or saw it.

Why is this reconnection so cool? The first thing is that often, it makes you feel very intelligent. The story is set up in a way that you know what is coming. When it does arrive, it makes you feel extremely intelligent. That’s what storytelling is about. It’s about making the reader feel a lot happier or a lot sadder, that they use to feel. You can feel that happiness or sadness as I edge into the meningitis story. You know what is coming next. You know how that story ended. It makes you feel very intelligent. It makes the reader or the listener feel very intelligent.

The second thing it does is it creates bounce. It bounces you back to wherever you were, and that creates that spike. It’s doing a dual job, but it does one more thing. It closes a loop. You can start off a story, and then knot in the story. Noticek what happened with my story. I can close that loop. I told you that the doctor said I would die or go mad. The loop wasn’t closed. What you can do is if you’re reconnecting at some point, you can close that loop. It’s very trendy to keep the loop open, but it drives people crazy.

This morning, I was on my walk and I was listening to an audio book about the brain. This author was talking about how he was at a David Attenborough conference. He was sitting there with someone else. They were having a discussion. Then he went into the discussion. About 20 minutes later, I’m going, “What did David Attenborough had to do with it?” He never closed that loop, and he will never close that loop. It will leave that gap in my brain, and that’s not a good thing. You want to create that disconnect, but then you want to reconnect later, you want to close that loop. That is the power of the reconnect.

Part 3: The Anticipation

With that, we go to the third part, where we talk about anticipation and why it’s so critical in storytelling. We were doing our workshop in Campbell, California around the year 2006. One of the participants stood up. She was going to tell her story. She told us that her mother was very, very beautiful. She also told us that her sister was a lot like her mother. She then went on to tell us how her father would take photographs, but photographs of the mother and the sister. Notice how we haven’t completed that story. We haven’t really told you what comes next, but the anticipation is killing because you know what comes next. This is the beauty of anticipation. You create anticipation knowing fully well that you’re not leaving any gaps, but that the client, the listener, your reader is filling in the story, that 10%.

This is what Anil Dharker told me when I was growing up and I was just starting out in my cartooning career. Anil was the editor of a newspaper called Mid-day. I was drawing cartoons for that newspaper. One day, he came up to me and he says, “Sean, you’re giving too much away. You need to get the customer, the reader to anticipate that 10%. You’re giving away 90% of the story, but you are getting them to anticipate the 10% because readers and listeners and clients are very intelligent. What you should do is leave out the bits. Don’t give the entire story.”

Now, when you think about the advice you’re getting here on this podcast, you think, “Wait a second, you just said not to leave out gaps.” Yes, you don’t leave out the gaps. You reconnect, but you don’t tell the entire story upfront either. We’re taking the example, you got the story about the meningitis. You’ve got the story about how I got admitted to hospital. What happened next, you don’t know the rest to that story. That gap hasn’t been closed and yet you’re intelligent enough to figure out that there was an ending and how that ending shows up, that we’ll find out.

The reason why we have anticipation is because it creates suspense, it creates unknowing suspense. When you say the boy got on the bus, he would never get off. What you’re doing is you’re going into the brain of the customer and they can see something bad unfolding. When I told you about that father that never took photographs of one of the daughters, you could see that insecurity building up. You could see that loneliness, that detachment. No one had to explain that you, but you can do this very simply by saying, “I woke up expecting it to be a great day.” Within those few words, you have already created anticipation. The reader knows, the listener knows that it’s not going to be a great day.

How is it going to unfold? These are the lines that you have to put in your speech, in your presentation, in your writing because when you put in these lines, they create that pause, they create that white space, they create that breathing space. It allows the reader to anticipate what’s going to happen next. How is it going to twist and turn? Into Marsha’s story, where she talks about just how she went to piano class, she could say, “I thought it was going to be a very bad day.” Immediately, your mind goes [whizzing 00:19:00] forward to, “Wait, she said bad day but she didn’t sound like it was going to be a bad day. Did it turn out to be a bad day or not?” When she got to the piano class and she was able to play, now you’re relaxing. Then she puts in the other spike, and she goes, “I played that piece really well.” That created another problem for me. You notice what’s happening, the anticipation is setting you up for that spike, the problem that comes next. For us, the anticipation, then the problem. The anticipation, then the problem.

Really this is what you have to do when you’re writing great stories. You have to get the reader in the framework, in that frame of mind so that they know that there is something going to change, something I was about to open the drawer when or I walked down the garden, expecting it to be a completely miserable day. It had been raining all morning. You know, even though you don’t know the story is going to unfold, you know that there is going to be a change. You’re creating anticipation. You’re creating that space for the reader and the listener to fill in the gaps in the head. That makes them again feel very intelligent. It also sets it up for that spike that we talked about in the first section.

Summary

What we’ve covered in today’s podcast has been 3 things. The first thing has been the wall. The wall creates those spikes. It creates that drama. It creates all of those blips that cause you to pay attention to the story. The second thing we looked at was the reconnect. How we start of something at the beginning; then somewhere in the middle, we connect; and then, we connect at the end, and there are these connections all over.

If you listen to Episode #54, you can hear all of these connects. Go back to Episode #54 and you can see all these reconnects, walls, and anticipation. Of course, that takes us to anticipation, which is that moment that tells you that something is going to change. It creates the suspense. It’s very, very powerful in storytelling. It’s this breathing space, this quiet just before the storm.

What’s the one thing that you can do today? The one thing that you can do today is go back to Episode #54 and listen to that episode because I listened to it just a few days ago. It has all of the stuff. Most of the podcast have it, but I just listened to Episode #54, so I know it’s there, so go back and listen to it. You will see that the wall, the reconnect and the anticipation is there. You’ll get a much better idea because you’ll be able to know in advance when that’s showing up.

I had mentioned that we were going to do some workshops in Nashville, Tennessee and in Amsterdam, which is in the Netherlands. We are still looking for a venue. If you know some venues, let us know. In the meantime, if you would like to sign up for a storytelling workshop, then just email me at sean@psychotactics.com. We will send you more details. It’s still work in progress. As you know, we still haven’t found venue, which is the first step. If you know something, let us know.

Storytelling is incredibly important. A lot of us leave out storytelling. We give facts and figures. This is why most books and presentation and webinars are so boring. The reason why you find the Brain Audit so interesting is the number of stories and analogies and examples, and then go back and read your copy of the Brain Audit or go to www.psychotactics.com/brainaudit and buy a copy, and you will see how critical it is to have these stories and how it reminds you of what you learned weeks, months, years after you learned it.

In the end, statistics don’t sell. The story, the emotion that’s built in within that story, and a story well told is what sells a product or a service. You go for this year and the years to come must be to tell better stories, not to give more information. That brings us to the end of this episode. If you’re in 5000bc and you’re a member, then, please go in and ask questions about storytelling and I’ll be more than happy to answer your questions. If you haven’t joined 5000bc, then get your copy of the Brain Audit first, read the stories and then join 5000bc.

You know how I started this episode with the doctor saying that I would die or go mad. I didn’t die. That’s me, Sean D’Souza from The 3 Month Vacation saying bye for now. Bye-bye.

Still reading?
When we try to tell stories, we get stuck. When we try to learn a new skill, we get stuck. So, how do you dramatically increase your rate of learning without getting stuck? Find out here—Accelerated Learning: How To Incredibly Speed Up Your Skill Acquisition: Episode 52

http://www.psychotactics.com/accelerated-learning-skill/

When your client picks up your report, can you guarantee they'll read it from start to finish? No matter how good the content, there are precise elements that cause a client to completely consume the report. This episode delves into three of the most important elements that makes your report stand out and more importantly, get read.

http://www.psychotactics.com/secret-getting-your-report-read/

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: What makes a report powerful?
Part 2: What are tiny increments?
Part 3: How to empower your reader
Earlier Recording: Right click and ‘save as’ to download this episode.
Re-Release: Right click and ‘save as’ to download this episode.

Useful Resources and Links

Dart Board Pricing: How To Increase Prices (Without Losing Customers)
The Headline Report: Why Headlines Fail
The 70% Principle: Why It Knocks Procrastination Out of the Ball Park

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Back in the year 2003  I wrote an article where you just had to take three steps to write a great headline. You could test the headline and you could find out in minutes that it worked for you, and it also got the attention of your customers. I wasn’t prepared for how popular that article would be. As we were looking at the statistics of the Psychotactics site, we saw that the article got picked up over and over again. Then we decided, let’s make this a report. Surprisingly, when I took that same article, which was just about 800 words, and I put it into a PDF and put some graphics and an introduction and some cartoons, it became close to a ten-page book. That is the headline report.

This is the interesting part.

The report was nothing more than an article. Can we all do the same? Can we just write an 800-word article, put it in a report, and make it powerful? Not quite. You have to understand why the report works. We’re going to break up that headline report here today on this podcast. You’ll see for yourself, there are three elements that make it work. Let’s explore those three elements.

What makes the report so powerful?

The key factor is not the elements but the overall concept. The overall concept is one of empowerment. We are so hung up on the concept of information that we forget what we really have to do as teachers. As teachers we have to empower. We know we’ve done our job correctly when the client is able to do exactly what we’re doing, and possibly even better. Frankly, when I was writing the headline report I wasn’t thinking of this. I wasn’t thinking of empowerment. I wasn’t thinking of the elements. But when you deconstruct the report you can see there are three very specific elements that make it that empowerment tool. The first of the elements is tiny increments. The second is the length. The third are the examples in the report. Let’s explore each one systematically. Let’s start off with the first one, which is the tiny increments.

What are tiny increments?

About a month ago I got myself some recording hardware. It has all these buttons and it’s very hard to figure out which button to press and when to press it. Of course you don’t want to look at the manual because that’s really badly written. Maybe you go online like I did and you go to YouTube. There are lots of tutorials on how to use it, but there is all this unboxing and then something else and something else. 35 minutes later, you have no clue what you’re supposed to do. Then I found a video that was only three minutes long. The video only covered turning on the device. Now, it was three minutes long. How much can you learn about turning on a device? It’s a little switch. But it was so cool. I could actually do it. It was a tiny increment.

You don’t have to put in a ton of information for people to be impressed.

You have to empower. At the end of the video, what could I do? I could turn on the device. So I go to the next video. In the next video, they cover a little bit again. This is the concept of tiny increments. When we’re teaching, we don’t understand that the client doesn’t get what we’re saying. Let’s say you’ve come to one of the Psychotactics workshops and we’re doing an experiment. We’re saying we’re going to take steps now. I say, “Okay, let’s take a step.” Then you watch the people in the room. What do they do? Almost everyone will take a step forward, but someone will take a step to the left, or someone will take a step to the right, or someone will take a step back. Now we have all these permutations where people are going off-tangent. If they just take one step, they just make one mistake, you can pull them back and then say, “What I meant was take a step to the left.” Now the whole group can go one step back, one step to the left, and now we’re on target.

When you have something that has a very tiny increment, the customer can only make a very small mistake.

You can spot the mistake and pull them back, or you can show them that mistake in your report and pull them back. When you have this wealth of information, all these buttons to press and all these things to do all at once, suddenly the customer is lost. When they’re lost, they’re intimidated, and intimidation doesn’t create a safe zone, and when you don’t create a safe zone then of course you don’t get empowerment.

The first factor you have to look at when you look at the headline report is this concept of tiny increments.

You only have to take a very tiny step to get from point A to point B. When you’ve taken that step, you can go from point B to point C. This is what struck me when I stepped into an Apple store many years ago. It’s one of the reasons why I bought an Apple even though I’d been using a PC for ages. When I got into the store, I just had to do one thing. That one thing led to the next thing, and that next thing led to the next thing. This is very cool. You see it on the iPad where you just have to press a little button, and that one thing leads to the next thing. This is the concept of tiny increments. You see this in the headline report. It’s what you’ve got to do in your report: just one little step.

Now this takes us to the second one, which is the concept of length.

Length really helps in empowerment. Every time I speak to someone about this podcast, I will say, “The podcast is only about 15 to 20 minutes long.” But what if were to say, “It’s only two to three hours long’? There would be a very clear difference. When you say 15 to 20 minutes long people think, “I could go for a little walk and I could listen to the podcast.” This principle of length is critical, especially when a customer doesn’t know you that well and you have to get your message across without going crazy on them. It has helped me when I was trying to work out that audio hardware. I just had to deal with three minutes, and then after that the next three minutes, and then the next three minutes. Every one of those three-minute capsules, they empowered me. They moved me forward. The headline report does this in a really fascinating way. It moves youforward. Within ten pages, you’re done. Now the question arises: Is that it? Is that all you could write about headlines? No, of course not. You could write 300 pages or 500 pages. There is a wealth of information in the world of headlines. But do you have to put in the report?

The core of empowerment is simply one of length.

When there is not too much of it, someone is able to consume it. Once they’re able to consume it, you have empowered them. You know that because you can get them to teach you what you’ve just taught them and they will do that spectacularly well. We take the first concept, which is tiny increments, and we take the second concept, which is length, and that leaves us with just the third one.

What is the third concept?

The third concept is simply one of examples and case studies. When you listen to this podcast, you got a whole bunch of examples about the recording device and how I had to fiddle with it. You also got the example of how the iPad worked, and of course my visit to the Apple store for the first time in 2008. Those were examples. Why were those examples there? They weren’t just random stuff. For one thing, the example lowers that intimidation factor.

Immediately you’re taken on a little side journey, a little detour.

That helps you to focus on the idea, but it also helps you understand the concept in greater detail. When you look at the headline report you’ll find that there is an example of how the headline is being built stage by stage. If all you had was a concept of how to write a headline without the example it would be so much more dreary and harder to achieve the same result. As a teacher, that’s your goal. Your goal is to empower. Examples empower. Case studies empower. Stories empower. Go down that path and put it in your report. Whether you’re reading The Brain Audit, or Pricing,or any book, you will find that we use this concept. That’s what clients read and go, “Wow, I should delve more into this stuff.” The biggest problem that we have is we know too much. We try to put all that too much into our reports, into our books, into our presentations. Does it empower? It’s easy to give information. A lot of people are giving a lot of information. It’s all stuff coming at you left, right, and center, and you don’t know where to go. Your client doesn’t know where to go either.

Have this little guiding light of empowerment and everything changes.

We started out with a report. We started out with just a little article, but that article had steps, and it went from one step to another to another. When it got into the report stage it was clearer because of the graphics, because of the layout. That’s how you should go about writing your report. Think about empowerment and think about the three things that we’ve covered today. The first thing that we covered today was tiny increments. Remember that even if you say take one step, people can steps in all directions, show you take very tiny steps. The second thing is one of length. A three-hour podcast, a 300-page report, very interesting but no one’s going to read it. You want to keep it simple. You want to keep it within ten or 12 pages. Finally, you want to reduce that intimidation factor. It’s very hard to understand the new concept. Having examples, having stories, having case studies, this really makes it easier for me to figure out what you’re saying.

Which brings us to the end of this podcast. What is the one thing that you can do?

I think the one thing that you should do is to just boil it down to three things. You’ve seen how this podcast just covers three elements. If I wanted to write a book on how to create a great report, I could write 200 pages. But this podcast, it’s a report. It’s just got three points, three simple points, and you’ve been empowered. I think you should do the same. Just jot down three points. I know there are 700 points on the topic. Just focus on three and you’ll have a report that someone actually consumes. Now isn’t that a novel idea?

What have we been doing in the past six weeks or so?

If you’ve been following this podcast, you know that we went off to Washington D.C. to have the information products workshop. It’s just 25-30 people in a room. Everyone gets to know each other. Everyone works with each other. It’s an amazing event. We don’t do the Psychotactics workshops very often, so if you ever get a chance to get to a Psychotactics workshop, you should come. It’s empowerment at its very best. You’ll see it at the workshop. From there we flew to Denver and I presented at the Opera House in Denver and lost my voice, got it back, struggled through the whole episode. My wife gave me an eight on ten. She has given me a -2 in the past, so I think I did a pretty good job. That comes down to practice and getting all your act together.

During the event, some things went wrong for speakers.

The video didn’t show up at the right time, or it didn’t sync with the audio. The way to solve this problem is to do all of the groundwork. I was there a few days in advance, getting over the tiredness factor, making sure that I knew the length of the stage, looking for any light distractions. Because when you’re on a stage a lot of lights hit you, especially on a stage of that size. You need to know where you need to stop before light hits you in the face and you can’t see a thing. You also need to speak to the audio and the video people, because they recommended stuff to me that ensured our whole presentation was absolutely flawless. There’s a lot of background stuff that you have to do, and that marks you out as a professional. I was completely hampered on stage there. I was sniffling and I could barely speak, but that eight on ten, that was because of all the groundwork that went before. As much as I would have liked to get full marks from my wife, at least I was able to struggle to an eight. You know it goes well because when you step out of the auditorium, people come up to you and go, “I’m going to make this fix today. I’m going to make this change today.” You have empowered them.

Once we finished with all of the work and the presentations, we went on to Sardinia.

We had a great time. Sardinia is this big island off Italy. You’ve probably heard of Sicily. If you look to the left, there is Sardinia. The food is absolutely stunning. We go on vacations because of the food. We really don’t care that much about the monuments. The food has to be good. We gorged a lot and we walked a lot of slopes. That’s how we keep our weight in check. Three weeks in Sardinia, a stopover in San Francisco, and now we’re back in New Zealand. I have to admit it’s been hard getting back to work, even though it’s been a week. This nasty cough that started in Washington D.C. followed me through Denver, through Sardinia, through San Francisco. It’s okay now but it’s been a long run. Nonetheless, it was worth doing the info products course in Washington D.C..

If you missed that, then I would strongly suggest that you get the home study.

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

The Three-Month Vacation, that's one of the things that make me really happy. But what else is required to keep that happiness level up? The key lies in identifying the obstacles. When we remove the obstacles, we know how to get to happiness. This may seem like a weird topic to take on, but check it out for yourself. Happiness isn't some weird pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It isn't some Internet marketer promising you endless clients. It's reachable, you know. So check it out.

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Useful Resources

Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com
Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic

Transcript:http://www.psychotactics.com/three-obstacles-to-happiness/

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When I was 8 years old the highlight of my week was “coconut water”.

On Saturdays, I’d go with my father to get all the provisions for the week. There was no drive to the supermarket ten times a week. Instead, once a week, we’d get on the train, then walk into a market filled with fresh vegetables, meat, fish and fruit. And in the middle of this market was a guy who sold coconuts—and coconut water.

Almost nothing brought a smile to my face as much as the thought of drinking coconut water on Saturdays. It was my moment of pure bliss.

And that, just that, is the secret of life

We go around trying to find the purpose of life, when the answer is right in front of us all the time. The purpose of life is to be “happy”.

Except I wasn’t entirely happy with just the coconut water

After we bought a ton of meat, fish and vegetables and headed back to the train station, we’d eat a potato snack dipped in a mixture of green mint chutney and tamarind sauce. Now that too, was my moment of bliss.

So wait, this happiness story is getting weird, isn’t it?

I mean here we are trying to establish happiness, and it seems we’re jumping from one point to another. And that’s exactly the point! No one thing makes us happy. For me, my current moments of bliss are the walk to the cafe with my wife, the coffee, let’s not forget the coffee. There’s also the time I spend with my nieces. My painting, my work, the music on my podcast, single malt whisky—and yes, the 3-Month vacations.

And yet, most of us never write down what makes us happy

So do it as an exercise. Get out a sheet of paper. Make the list. It won’t necessarily be a very long list. And the funny thing is that it will consist of rather mundane things like gardening, a walk on the beach—I even know someone who is super contented by ironing. Making the list enables us to know what we really want from life, so we can start heading in that direction.

Because frothing, right in front of us are the obstacles. They’re determined to reduce, even eliminate our happiness.

So what are these obstacles?

They are:
– Inefficiency
– Greed
– Self-doubt

Inefficiency? Really?

Yes, really! Though you’d never expect to see inefficiency in a happiness list, it’s the No.1 killer of happiness. That’s because if you were to look at your list again, you’d find that everything that makes you happy, also takes time.

Time that you’re spending being inefficient

Look at the software you’re using. How efficient are you at it? Let’s take for example the “Three Month Vacation” podcast that I create. Well, the podcast recording itself is just 15-17 minutes. And I can usually do it in one take. But each podcast is matched to music—often as many as eight different pieces of music (you have to listen to it, to believe it). And all this music, and production, and editing—well, it takes 3 hours.

So the question that arises is just this: How do you save 10 minutes?

Just 10 minutes in a three-hour exercise, adds up to 20 a week—about bout 100 a month. Which totals up to 1200 a year. That’s 20 hours of happiness deprivation and for what? For inefficiency? That’s a stupid, yes stupid, way to go about things isn’t it?

But we do it routinely—we stay inefficient

We know that one of the best ways to get clients is to write a book, or a booklet. To create information that draws clients to you, instead of you chasing after them. And we know that the book can’t just be “written”. It needs structure. But no, no, no, no and no. We just sit down and write the book. And many, many hours later, we’re not sure why we’re struggling so much with the book. Or why a client is even going to read it. And we’re stepping deeper in the doo-doo of inefficiency.

So what are we to do?

Well, we have a list of what makes us happy, right? How about a list of the things we do; the software we use; the books, video, audio we have to create? How about a list—and not a very long list, that enables us to see where we can get more efficient? Instead of slogging for a year over a book, would there be a way to write it using structure? That alone could shave off 10 months of twirling round and round.

If you’re using a piece of software, how about learning just two shortcuts a week? Just two a week! See how that brings inefficiency down to its knees, two shortcuts at a time. Yes, inefficiency is a big problem, but greed isn’t far behind is it? Let’s examine greed, shall we?

So what’s the big deal with greed?

I think greed is good. Whenever I’m greedy, I’ve almost never felt bad. I’m pretty happy when stuffing my face with one more helping of biryani (that’s a rich, rice dish) or another heap of maccha ice-cream. So greed itself isn’t a problem.

But it sure can get in the way

That’s because it takes time to wash off the greed. Too much ice-cream, too much wanting this and that—it all takes time. Because I now have to balance out that greed and atone for it in some way. I have to walk more, exercise more, work more. It doesn’t make sense, does it?

Yet we have all the dollar signs in our face

We have marketers that show us how much they earn. This month I earned x. no of dollars. The month after, I earned so much more.

Oh, look a dip in income!

That’s not good. Let’s work twice as much to obliterate that dip. And so we follow along like idiots expecting that the dollars will show us the way.

And they do. Without the dollars we’re just spinning our wheels.

But there’s a point of enough. Again, this comes down to a definition, perhaps even a list. What’s your enough? Do you know? Even though I love my nieces dearly, I do have a point of enough. Coconut water? Even an 8-year old could tell you what was enough. And yes, the dollars. Do we really have to keep doubling them? Are we working for the joy of working, or are we slaves to the smile of our bank managers?

Greed is nice in small bursts, but terrible as a strategy

We pay the price and it becomes a form of inefficiency—and the second barrier to our happiness. Which slides us into the third big hurdle, which is just as surprising. Namely, self-doubt.

Self doubt is a big rocking chair, isn’t it?

You know the concept of a rocking chair, don’t you? It gives you the feeling of movement, but it goes nowhere. Self-doubt is like that, doing cartwheels in the velodrome of our brain.

But run into a person who’s always second-guessing themselves, and you realise that you can’t do much about it. And it’s terribly inefficient, this self-doubt. It fills your brain with a load of nonsense that keeps you from being happy. And there’s nothing much you can do it about it, because the damage isn’t new. It’s something that has been part of you for a good chunk of your life.

So learn to say thank you.

That’s it. The inefficiency comes from the fact that someone won’t like your article, your book, your painting, your garden, the muffins you just baked , etc. And if you just assume that you’re at the point of “thank you,” you’ve saved yourself a lot of grief. Because if you’re saying “thank you,” it means you just got complimented on something. Even just the thought of saying thanks is making you smile right now, isn’t it?

Now you no longer have to apologise, or back track. The thank you is your way out of the mess, every single time.

The secret of life is in knowing what you want—what you really want

It’s the inefficiencies, the greed and the self-doubt that get in our way. Can we save 10 minutes of inefficiency? Can we define our “enough” so we can earn what we want, but then stop? Can we get off the rocking chair by envisioning the “thank you” that is to follow?

Just recognising the barriers and getting out of their way, that’s the goal, isn’t it?

The secret of being happy isn’t as hard as it seems.
Well, it can be.

Right at this moment I can’t decide: coconut water or coffee?

Still reading? Have a look at—How To Slow Down—And Why It’s Critical: Episode 17
http://www.psychotactics.com/to-slow-down/

Is the 10,000 hours principle true? And if it's true, what are your chances of success? And what are the biggest flaw? How do you take the concept of Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 Hours story (He took it from a K.Anders Ericsson study) and reduce the number of hours? Is talent really attainable in fewer hours? 

http://www.psychotactics.com/expertise-fewer-10000-hours/

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Hi. This is Sean D’Souza from Psychotactics.com, and you are listening to the Three-Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn’t some magic trick about working less. Instead, it’s about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. Have you ever watched a 16-year-old go for a driving test? They probably practice for two or three off and on, and then after that, they drive. Now, imagine they changed the rules of the driving test. Imagine they said that you needed 10,000 hours to drive. How many of us would be on the roads today?

Several years ago, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called “Outliers”.

Within that book, there was this concept of 10,000 hours, and the concept was very simple. It said that if you wanted to be exceedingly good at something, you needed to spend at least 10,000 hours. As you can quite quickly calculate, that’s about 10 years of very had work or 5 years of extremely hard work.

The interesting thing about 10,000-hour principle is that two sets of people jump on it, the people that had already put in their 10,000 hours in something and those who hadn’t; but what if you hadn’t?

What if you hadn’t put in those 10,000 hours? Were you doomed to be always untalented?

Understanding this concept of the 10,000 hours is very important, especially if you want to take vacations. You have to get very skilled at a lot of things very quickly. If you don’t understand the concept, then you struggle for no reason at all.

In today’s episode of the Three-Month Vacation, we’re going to cover three things.

The first is, why is the 10,000 hours true?
The second, what are the biggest flaws in the 10,000 hours?
The third is, how do you go about shortening that process, so that you just do maybe a thousand hours?

Let’s start out with the concept of why the 10,000 hours is absolutely true.

Now, nothing is absolutely true, but the 10,000-hour principle works for a simple reason. That is we don’t know that we’re making mistakes. If you take a guitarist, say someone like John Mayer, or Eric Clapton, or B.B. King, and you look at how long they spent with their guitar, they probably spent an excessive 10,000 hours.

When you’re starting out and when you’re playing that guitar, you don’t really know what mistakes you’re making, and you don’t really care. You’re there just to play the guitar, and this is what a lot of artists do. This is what a lot of writers do. They spend enormous amounts of hours just fooling around, just playing the guitar, just drawing a cartoon, just writing something, and they make mistakes. They make a lot of mistakes, but the problem is they don’t know that they’re making a mistake.

Take for instance my own life. When I started drawing cartoons, I was probably just out of school, and I was drawing cartoons that are pretty flat. One day, my friend, Howard, he said, “Well, there’s something wrong with your drawing.” I said, “What’s wrong?” He couldn’t explain, but he said, “They’re really flat.” It was then I realized that I wasn’t using perspective. Until that moment, I didn’t realize. I’ve been drawing for hundreds, maybe thousands of hours, but I didn’t realize I was making a mistake.

Several years later, I started doing commercial projects, and someone mentioned that my lines were too weak. Lines are too weak? What do you mean by lines are too weak? They couldn’t explain, but I had to do my own research, and then I found that great artists have this variation in their life to take and attend. This is what most musicians, artists, painters, people who are talented at anything that you think are talented at something, they’ve spent thousands of hours just making mistakes. If you take the mistakes out of the equation, we don’t have 10,000 hours. We have a thousand hours, maybe less.

If you go strictly by the rulebook, you can fly a commercial aircraft after 1,500 hours. Now, admittedly, you’re not going to get a job for 1,500 hours, but you can fly it. You can fly one of those big jets after having done just 1,500 hours. This is true for cartooning as well. This is true for writing. It’s easy to say that it’s true, but the proof or the footing is in the eating, so we decided to prove the point.

In 2010, we started a course that we knew for sure no one or very few people to do, and that is to draw cartoons. People into the course is saying, “Well, I can’t draw a straight line.” The ironic thing is that to be a cartoonist, you don’t have to draw a straight line. You have to draw wobbly lines all over the place. Nonetheless, within 6 months, those people that joined the course and stayed for those 6 months were drawing so well that people were commissioning work from them. They were asking them, “Are you a professional cartoonist?”

It’s amazing because when you think about it, these are all business owners. They probably have an hour a day, five day a week. That makes it about 25 hours in a month. In 6 months, that’s 150 hours. Within just 150 hours, they changed the perception of someone looking at them. Suddenly, to the outside world, these guys were cartoonists since they were little.

It doesn’t take 150 hours to learn to drive a car, and that’s because there are fewer moving parts as it were. There are moving parts with cartooning. You have to learn perspective, and thick and thin, and background, foreground. Lots of things. Lots of little, little things that make a great painting, and the same applies for writing, and the same applies for any language that you’re learning. There are lots of these moving parts.

The difference between a guitarist that just picks up a guitar and plays, and this person who’s learning how to draw cartoons or write, they are running into mistakes, and those mistakes are being picked up very quickly and fixed. Yes, the 10,000 hours work, but they don’t work when the mistakes can be picked up very quickly and fixed. This is the reason why pilots don’t crash planes every day. It’s because they sit in a simulator, and the simulator picks up those mistakes, and it enables you to fix those mistakes. Yes, the 10,000 hours works, but only if you don’t know what mistakes you’re making.

When you’re younger, there is no pressure to earn money, or win any competition, or do anything, so you’re allowed to make those mistakes, and then fix them in your own time. This is why it takes 10,000 hours to get to that level of mastery. While this brings us to the end of the first part, we have to explore the second part which is, why does the flaw exist? Why don’t we pick up these mistakes?

The biggest reason why we don’t pick up the mistakes is very simple.

As we grow up, we’re not supposed to make mistakes. We’re supposed to get things right. When you do a test, nobody says, “Hey, you have to get 30% of your test wrong.” You’re expected to get it all right. Once you have this situation where there is pressure to always get things right, then we have a real problem. People will routinely tell you, you should make mistakes. Then, you can learn from your mistakes, but you’re not allowed to make mistakes, so it becomes a catch when you do situation.

When we sit down to write a book or a report, or we sit down to write an article, or we sit down to draw, or we sit down to learn Photoshop, we run into this situation where we are not making enough mistakes, and not being able to pick them up quickly, and not being able to fix them. The only way out of this problem is to have a system where you can make mistakes, and so this is what we do on the headline course, for instance.

There is one week where you learn how to write the headlines and another week where you write the wrong headlines, and you would say, “What’s the deal?” Why should you learn to write the wrong headlines? Think about it for a second. It’s the same thing that pilots go through. They go through a simulator exercise where the plane is crashing. They have to learn to identify the mistake because mistakes are not apparent. The mistakes have to be highlighted. You have to run through the mistakes, and that’s when the speed increases.

The reason why we struggle and think that everyone else is talented is because somehow, they’ve had time to get to those mistakes and fix those mistakes, and we don’t have that time. As we grow up, we have more responsibilities, and we have more activity, and we have more things that we have to do. Getting straight to the mistakes and fixing those mistakes is what makes it powerful.

If you look at talent as something that is inborn, you will struggle all your life because it means you can never have it; but if you look at talent as a reduction of errors or reduction of mistakes, then you realise that you just have to find the mistakes and eliminate them, or at least reduce them, and you have talent. The flow exist in the system that doesn’t allow you to make mistakes, and this takes us to the third part of this episode which is how to get there quickly.

There are three elements to get to a talent very quickly.

The first is the teacher, the second is the system, and the third is the group. If we start up with the teacher, then the teacher must have a method, and that method should be about creating safety. If you’re intimidated, it is much harder to do anything because you’re scared all the time, so the teacher must be able to create a safe zone for you.

They must have the second element which is the system, and the system must take you through tiny increments. When you say tiny increments, they need to be very small moves like one inch today, one inch tomorrow. Very, very small moves. The reason for that is, supposing you were given a big move to make and say I said, “Move a few steps,” well, you can move three steps left, three steps right, three steps forward or backward. Now, you have to come back three whole steps. Instead, if you make a very small move which is one step, you only have to move one step back, and this is not usually the case.

If any of you have done a photography class, you know exactly what I mean. In that one class, they will talk about exposure, and F-stops, and aperture, and everything; and then, you’re completely confused. You’re not able to take one step, and so you go back to your auto-mode. Most photographers will tell you, “You shouldn’t be on auto-mode. You should be in manual mode. That’s the way to be. You should know your camera like your left hand or your right hand.”

Wait a second. Did you actually take one step at a time when you were teaching? Because even when you take a single step, you can be sure that at least a good section of your students have got it wrong, and now you have to bring them back. You have to bring them back to parity, and then take them one step forward. That’s not how training is built. Training is not built by these tiny little increments. Books are not written with these tiny increments. There’s chapter after chapter, after chapter. Of course, we get lost, and so then we think we’re not talented where in fact, the system is at fault.

There aren’t enough opportunities to make the mistake for the mistake to be detected, and then for you to rectify that mistake. The way to fix this flaw is to learn in a group. The reason why a group setting is so powerful is because the traditional way of testing someone is really bad. Remember when you were in school, and everyone did their test, and you got some things wrong, and somebody else got some things wrong; but eventually, nobody got to see what the other person got wrong.

You’d do your assignment, and you’d hand it to the teacher, and she’d mark it and give it back to you, and only you could see what you got wrong; but if the entire group could see what you got wrong, they could learn from your mistake and you could learn from their mistakes. This is the fundamental flaw in most training. We’re not allowed to see everybody else’s work, but when you see other people’s work, you can learn from their work.

It seems quite obvious when someone tells you this that you could learn from other people, but that’s not how the system is built, and this is why it takes 10,000 hours to reach anywhere or 10,000 hours to reach that level of mastery. People are not stupid. People are very, very intelligent. People have the ability to acquire talent. People have the ability to reduce their errors; but often, it’s the teacher, the system, and the group, or the lack of group that lets them down. If you believe that someone else is more talented that you at cooking, at drawing, at painting, at writing, the reason is you haven’t figured out the mistakes and removed them. Once you do that, you have talent.

Let’s summarize what we’ve learned so far.

The first thing we covered today is the whole concept of the 10,000 hours, and was it true? We found out yes, it is true. It takes a long time because we don’t know the mistakes. If we don’t know the mistakes, then we make them, and we don’t realise we’re making those mistakes. The second thing we covered was the flaw that exist, and that is people tell you to make mistakes, but no one gives you the chance to make the mistakes. There is no system emplaced. There is no whole week of, “Let’s make these mistakes, so that we can learn from them.”

This takes us to the third part which is you have to have a teacher, you have to have a system, and you have to have a group. When you have these three elements, the teacher will work out the tiny increments and move you forward. The system will be not just how to, but how not to. Finally, the group will expose the errors of another 20 people; so now, you’re able to look at 20 errors, and at least learn from them, and possibly not make those errors in the future. The exposure to errors, that is the critical part of talent. Talent is simply a reduction of errors.

What’s the one thing that you can do today? Probably, the best thing that you can do for yourself is to stop looking at how to. Start looking at courses, and training, and systems that talk about how not to because unless they have both the how-to and the how-not-to component, you’re going to make errors that you don’t even realise you’re making, and then you get stuck. In the moment you get stuck, you think, “Well, this is not for me. I’m not good at this. I’m not talented;” and it’s not that at all.

When the system is built with mistakes as part of the assignments, that’s when you know that you’re in the right path, and that’s when you know what you can quickly acquire that talent. Talent acquisition is really cool because you can now do the very same thing in half the time or a lot of the time. Of course, this gives you more scope to do other stuff, achieve more stuff, and go on vacation.

If you have any questions then email us at sean@psychotactics.com. You’ll find this on the website or sean@5000bc.com.

Also, I’m giving away something free that is a report on outwitting resistance.
If you’ve ever been stuck because you don’t know how to battle resistance, there’s this really cool report, and it’s free—How to Win the Resistance Game.

http://www.psychotactics.com/free/resistance-game/